Daniel Odier > Quotes

“How to be in harmony with the cosmos? It seems that certain preliminaries are indispensable: Rid yourself of all beliefs; leave metaphysics to the sectarians of the absurd; understand that hope is fear gone bad; confront reality directly; stop upholding the romantic dream of realization; forget sentimental neurosis; play with your own limits; look at your confusion; confront life without the bric-a-brac of the religious and the spiritual—without, for all that, becoming a narrow-minded materialist who would make a new God out of rationalism; dare to be alone; do not oppose Essence against reality; give yourself over to the pleasures of pure subjectivity; understand that everything is real; and finally, one day, know exhilarating silence.”
― Daniel Odier, Yoga Spandakarika: The Sacred Texts at the Origins of Tantra

“D. T. Suzuki, the eminent scholar of Zen Buddhism, one day made this sarcastic comment on the Christian tradition to his friends, American mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychoanalyst Carl Jung: “Nature against Man, Man against Nature; God against Man, Man against God; God against Nature, Nature against God; very funny religion!”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“it is no longer a question of cutting off the senses, desires, and passions; on the contrary, it is a question of mounting these high-spirited, steedlike messengers in full consciousness so that they may carry us rapidly to a continuous presence to the world.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“Everything that we abandon in the false dream of conforming to a system is precisely what will subsequently come along and block our path.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“The quest for this simple bliss, free from dogmas and religious beliefs, from submission to a priesthood, and from the hope of being sanctified by others, is the object of each person’s search.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“All that is proscribed, all that is upheld, the yogas based on such limbs as the control of breath or other things, all that is false.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“In an era where the word communication reigns, where an unlimited mass of information can be accessed within a few seconds, we complain about having lost contact with our body and with other human beings. We suffer from extreme solitude, we suffer from no longer touching each other, we suffer from the “virtualization” of our feelings, the expression of our emotions, and our sensorality.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“We cannot do a greater good to another human being than to accord him our naked awareness, devoid of all plan.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“The senses come out of their torpor; they stop waiting for exceptional circumstances to come along and wake them up. They find childhood again, adolescence, where the world unendingly sustains their capacity to vibrate. It is this deep and palpitating life that all those on the path of spontaneity know.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“The sage is thus capable of acting with lightning-bolt speed, because dualistic thought no longer paralyzes him. His acts are instantaneous and carriers of light; this is what is called nonaction.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“One day, I asked her what distinction she made between the Tantric Shivaic teaching, which sees consciousness as the receptacle of the universe, and Tantric Buddhism, which rejects consciousness as an illusory form. It was the debate between the Self and the Selfless that had mobilized great energies and had been the subject of polemics and councils, and grounds for mutual condemnation and rivalry”
― Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love

“unless we fall into the nets of the sects, increasingly hidden yet existing everywhere to channel our dreams of the absolute into a sad alienation from our fundamental freedom.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“If we have the good fortune to be allergic to submission, to forms, to dogmas, to beliefs, to infallibility, to the idea of forming an artificial family isolated from society, and if we desire above all to live life deeply, perfectly integrated in society, then Tantra has something marvelous to offer to us. But Tantra requires a maturity, an independence, and a willingness not to conform.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“the Lankavatara Sutra transmitted by Bodhidharma, declared: “There is not a trace of the absolute outside of reality.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“The body immediately confers perfection, that is, certainty with regard to the true nature of things . . . thanks to the contact with the power of the Self,” says Abhinavagupta.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“Mystical ecstasy is just this sudden explosion of the small me, which recognizes the divine Self. Everything gathered up in the consciousness is then projected into the infinite, and one can cry out in joy because in this moment all the beauty of the world becomes part of the Self.”
― Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love

“the adept must seize things in their very first tremorings, before differentiating thought intervenes. It is at this instant that the difference is made between a hedonist, whose worldly search is tied to the ego, and the tantrika, who is in search of the most profound spontaneity”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“Listen to the mantra. . . . Only when you've heard it without a pause for three days and three nights will you be able to say it. To chant a mantra before having heard it is to arrive at death before being born”
― Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love

“With disillusioned smiles, we allow our young people to tempt or try out their passion, desire, and sensorality, knowing that one day they will be like us, weary and well behaved out of obligation.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“When myriad experiences leave no trace, how great!
To practice like this is liberation.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“Each day, according to your sensitivity and your mood, choose to enter into total communication with the objects of your desire or, more simply, with the states that spontaneously present themselves and that harbor the power to bring you a kind of satisfaction you no doubt underestimate”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“And the intelligence, or the mind, loses its uniqueness and becomes absorbed in social games, which diminish it even as the opposite illusion is created. It's this raw material that's truly divine because it's in harmony with the universe. No one cuts the stars. No one designs the forms of the rivers; they flow by themselves. The tantrika is like a river that never stops flowing in the divine because the divine never stops flowing in it."In making these offerings, in receiving this initiation, you gain access to the knowledge of your own divine substance, and you open yourself to the Tantric experience of time no longer passing. Your meditation will be easier. The illusion of believing that time can be parceled out will appear to you in all its absurdity, and you will taste the nectar of undivided time."Initiation also involves a rupture with the myths of the specific society in which you live, establishing a profound and unconditional tie with all human beings and with all that has previously seemed inanimate to you. Initiation releases you from taboos and social, dietary, and sexual prohibitions, and more importantly, the prohibitions linked to ideas and thought. I”
― Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love

“There is neither transcendence nor purification.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“The different Tantric schools, however, completely reject all formalism, dogmatism, puritanism, eviction of women, and existence of castes. They place the spiritual and mystical path in the social context by abolishing all differences between people.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“We are not here to waste time with the expression of rigid forms. It is direct, simple, and without protocol. If fundamentally there is no difference, this must be apparent in actuality.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“Authentic masters and charlatans daily rub elbows;”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“mahamudra is: Too close to be recognized, Too deep to grasp, Too easy to believe, Too amazing to be understood intellectually. Those are the four obstacles that prevent its recognition.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“Nothing is fixed; she gets hooked by, hooks onto, nothing.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“integrating the whole of the desires and the passions with the quest is also a difficult path, because this path demands total clarity about what you really are, with no reference to what you would like to be.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

“The classic trilogy—sex, power, money—requires a great deal of determination, a great deal of energy from its adepts. You have to be ready to suffer until the time comes when you have become desensitized. If this force becomes conscious of itself, of its real and deep desire, it will realize that these three passions are only masks, merely distorted translations of a deeper need, the need to be loved and recognized.”
― Daniel Odier, Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening