The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP 131
fish leaping from water," that he may serve the aim of beings in a
body of form. This arising is instantaneous, and the practitioner
dwells in the knowledge body purified by its immersion in the Clear
Light.
We should emphasize here the feedback mechanism involved in
this contemplation. Both processes begin with the apprehension of
Emptiness, and this Emptiness is always the same; it is the apprehension
that differs. In the Process of Perfection, Emptiness is
approached by the practitioner as deity, and it is apprehended
"as it truly is" by a divine understanding. The magical powers of
the Process of Generation are here exercised in the coercion of
enlightenment itself: the tables of correspondences show the practitioner
his control of the Stages and the Paths, his fruition in the
Process of Perfection. The yogin manipulates the very steps of his
divine generation as simulacra for his ultimate attainment: he can
"gather in" his mantra body to the Clear Light because he possesses
it in its essence; he can arise from the Clear Light in his knowledge
body because of the magical analogies he controls. Thus the Process
of Perfection is possible only because the practitioner is a deity, and
a deity formed through a series of magically potent contemplative
events; thus the Process of Generation is a necessary prerequisite
for this final apprehension of the absolute truth. "Yogins who
desire the Process of Perfection," one text typically says, "must
build upon the foundation of the Process of Generation." 189
This feedback works through a yogin's entire contemplative
career. A beginner in solitary contemplation, no matter how precise
his intellectual training, sees Emptiness as a sort of vague blackness,
called up to swallow his ordinary awareness and labeled in
accordance with the intellectual categories of the monastic college.
From the realm of this Emptiness come the first halting visualizations
of himself as the deity; yet even these shadowy identifications
with the divine grant a magicar control (however weak) which brings
his final plunge with into Great Emptiness a little closer to true "nonobjectifiability."
With this greater apprehension he begins again:
each time he is more of a deity, and each time his coercion of the
divine understanding becomes more powerful. He moves closer to his
"natural flow," wherein he sees that an essence of Clear Light is the
basic nature of all events; he sees that he himself, as the deity, is the
Innate Union of the Clear Light and Emptiness. And by the time