The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP 85
. . . when the "centre" fails to hold [writes LaingJ, neither selfexperience
nor body-experience can retain identity, integrity,
cohesiveness, or vitality, and the individual becomes precipitated
into a condition the end result of which we suggested could best
be described as a state of "chaotic nonentity."
The yogin, indeed, undergoes a tremendous alteration in "selfexperience"
and "body-experience"; he alters appearances to gain a
divine body and a divine ego, yet he is always under the hold of a
controlling "centre." But to the contemplatively unprepared, to
those not impelled by the impetus of avowed moral purpose, the
very power of the mind over reality is a naked helplessness, as the
body disintegrates before the devouring imagination:
The anchored mind
screwed into me
by the sky's
psycho-lascivious
thrust
is the one that imagines
all temptations
all desires
all inhibitions
—Antonin Artaud, Artaud le Momo U9
In such an altered state of awareness, perception becomes nonempirical;
hard reality softens and dissolves, to become, in Adrienne
Rich's words, "trenchant in motion as an eel, solid as a cabbagehead."
To many psychologists, this is the result of a confusion of
categories: 120
One of Bychowski's patients, when asked where her husband was,
answered that he was on the wedding picture. Here the realm of
reality and the realm of representation are not kept apart. The
facility of the schizophrenic in separating the realms of reality and
imagination is notoriously impaired. Contrary to so-called normal
thinking, which has to keep within the same realm or frame of
reference or universe of discourse, the thinking of the schizophrenic
is subject to little determining influence from the unitary
field.
Here the realms of reality and imagination are axiomatically
taken as separate fields, and here the psychologist and the yogin part
company. A Tibetan finds it a strange axiom to say that a public
reality is necessarily more real than a private one, or even to presume
a priori that there is a boundary between the two. Public reality is
as amenable to magical control as private reality; the basis for