Quote from Tantra
Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy
by Georg Feuerstein
Shambhala Publications, Boston, Massachusetts, 1998. 314 pp.
"Tantric ontology seeks to answer the question of how the One can become the Many, or how the ultimate Reality, which is singular, can give rise to the countless objects that we perceive through our senses. All liberation teachings provide some kind of answer to the riddle of creation, because in order to be liberated we must trace our way from the Many back to the One. In Advaita Vedanta, as articulated by the eighth-century teacher Shankara, the world of multiplicity is simply the product by the unenlightened mind. When the root ignorance is removed, the world reveals itself in its true nature, which is none other than the universal singular Being-Consciousness-Bliss (sac-cid-ananda). According to Shankara, the phenomenal world is not inexistent (because in the final analysis it is the eternal ultimate Reality); however, it is unreal (asat) because it appears as something other than what it truly is. To describe this curious condition the Vedantic sages often invoke the term maya, which signifies illusion. What is implied by this concept is, among other things, the idea that the transition from the One to the Many is not a genuine emanation but only an apparent evolution (vivarta).""Like Advaita Vedanta, most schools of Tantra also maintain that the ultimate Reality is singular. However, they tend toward the view that the Many actually and not merely apparently evolves out of the One (while still being contained within the One as the eternal back-drop of cosmic existence). They reject any metaphysics of illusionism. This emanationism is technically known as sat-karya-vada, which denotes that the effect (karya) is preexistent (sat) in the cause: the world could not come into existence if it did not already exist in potential form in the ultimate Being. . ."
Dear one, in the beginning [all] this was being only, singular, without a second. Some say that [all] this was nonbeing only, singular, without a second and that out of nonbeing being was produced."More than a millennium later, the Bhagavad-Gita (2.16a) followed up on this idea, expanding it as follows: Nonbeing (asat) does not come into being (bhava); being does not disappear (abhava). In any case, the importance of the Tantric emanationism lies not in the sphere of philosophy but in the realm of spiritual practice. For the existential categories serve the yogins or tantrikas as a map by which they are able to find their way out of the maze of multiplicity back to the simplicity of the nondual Reality." (pp. 66-67)
He said: But how indeed, dear one, could this be? How could being be produced from nonbeing? To be sure, dear one, in the beginning [all] this was being only, singular, without a second. -- Chandogya-Upanishad 6.2.1-2
-- quote submitted by Jennifer Knight
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