Ritual

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terrifying situations and atmospheres charged with powers that
can frighten the aspirant, such as midnight and cremation grounds,
were considered suitable for an explosion of psychic potential.
Another meditative occult practice is carried out with the aid of
five, or nine, human skulls and is called Pancha-mundi, or Navamundi,
asana. The adept sits in Padmasana (the lotus position) on
human skulls, a discipline necessary to help him confront and
purge from consciousness his own terror.
These confrontations are a source of renewal, and a doorway to
a new productive impulse which comes to the adept's aid with a
constructive view of the situation. They help to obliterate
distinctions between the objects of attraction and revulsion and
stress that all extremes, the individual's conscious and unconscious
self with its contradictions, the ostensibly positive and negative
aspects of existence, form an inseparable unity.
The views advanced by modern psychologists such as Jung, who
recognized the importance of a shock experience in order to face
the 'shadow self or the 'dark' side of the personality structure for a
total integration of the psyche, are in no way different in essence
from what the tantric adept aspires to achieve from these aweinspiring
rituals. In The Symbolic Quest Edward C. Whitmont
explains the jungian concept of the significance of confronting the
'shadow':
The confrontation of one's own evil can be a mortifying death-like
experience; but like death it points beyond the personal meaning of
existence. ... It [the shadow] represents the first stage toward meeting the
Self. There is, in fact, no access to the unconscious and to our own reality
but through the shadow. Only when we realize that part of ourselves
which we have not hitherto seen or preferred not to see can we proceed to
question and find the sources from which it feeds and the basis on which it
rests. Hence no progress or growth in analysis is possible until the shadow
is adequately confronted - and confronting means more than merely
knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing
ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we
are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality. 41
In the abstruse symbolism of tantras, the ten aspects or energies
of the Primal Sakti, or the ten objects of transcendental
knowledge, dasa-maha-vidyas, signifying the various degrees and
stages of existence, have a similar transformative function. The ten
Mahavidyas are (1) Kali, the power of time; (2) Tara, the potential
of re-creation; (3) Sodasi, the embodiment of the sixteen
modifications of desire; (4) Bhuvanesvari, substantial forces of the
material world; (5) Bhairavi, who multiplies herself in an infinity