Traditions

Laura is a Shakta-Tantra teacher and author of “Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power.”

Constantina is a scholar of Tantra and university professor.

Whence this creation has arisen
– perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – 
the One who looks down on it, 
in the highest heaven, only He knows 
or perhaps even He does not know.

Reflections on the Hindu connections of George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars Universe.

Pure consciousness is ever effulgent and never changing.

The paradox of the Zen kōan resists in a significantly different way what Emmanuel Levinas identifies as the totalizing “way of the same.” Zen Buddhism provides a critical insight into faciality that goes beyond Levinas’s fundamentally anthropocentric view and undercuts his refusal of “paganism,” thereby providing the ground for a deeper realization of the ethical relationship between humans and animals. The question at hand is whether there exists a fundamental experience of the “original face” of the animal, which is possible only by way of a direct face-to-face encounter.

The category of Agni related items includes everything of a hot, fiery, dry, or parching type,
while Soma-related items are moist, nourishing, soothing, and cooling. Items so classified range from medicinal herbs to mountain ranges to the seasons of the year.

Many students of yoga, especially those undergoing yoga teacher training, are introduced to the Yoga Sutras. It is commonly believed that this text, composed by Patanjali between 200 BCE and 200 AD, represent the culmination of the ancient yoga tradition’s spiritual quest. These so-called Classical Yoga teachings, most scholars believe, are the confluence of a long and complex development that emerged from yoga’s archaic beginnings in the Vedas about 3000 years earlier.