Sky Space, translated by Christopher Wilkinson
The neuro linguistic programming of tantra is an absolute and totalising trip. Tantra reprogram your brain, reprogram your perceptions. If you are open to their causality, in connection with the continuity of everything and the non abstract manifestation that is language, they reach in like hypnosis and ramify through your neurons. This is their transparent magic. The causal mechanics of this text are a direct transmission, gear-boxed up to the spaces opened in Tibet in the 8th century (CE) and chain linked to the original teachings of Buddha. The effect is a direct concatenation with immediate physical results that have not changed. These results are static and immediate because they are not a temporal consequence: they are totalising and cybernetic, an instantaneous, everywhere located, event. The literal mechanic provided here is the Buddha ontology, timelessly rewriting the self’s totality, a displacement ungearing the small clock of your mind which reveals itself as only ever having been a distraction, ticking like the delusion of temporality itself. The original Buddha, as a man, pushed the button of this displacement/replacement two thousand six hundred years ago. And here we still are/ he is, as an enduring landscape revealed. Tantra are a reiterated burgeoning, a repetition that is the same and yet spontaneous, unbound by any obligation of reference apart from what is, in each modulation. Tantra are identified by their immediate outlandish immensity that is the simultaneity of statement and enactment. This text is endlessly and eminently quotable and memorable, its words, taken to heart and vision, reconfigure the high street as you walk down it and open the hinterlands of yourself and others into undivided continuity.
Christopher Wilkinson is prolific in the translation of the tantra of the Great Perfection and it feels like he copies them out with no personal intervention or disputational hang-ups. Perhaps this is why he is able to produce so much with such facility and felicity. He doesn’t get side-tracked pursuing textual interpolations or occasional contradictions, or attempting to resolve dialogic passages that feel like interventions or disputes in the text as it was copied and elaborated over generations. There are no footnotes or commentaries here. Commentary would be a diversion and not exemplary. Apart from these glitches of inheritance and tradition, it all runs smooth. Go with it.
There’s a lot of poetry in the text, and beauty to gawp at, astounded. But tantra are not descriptions of separate objects, of the way things are over there, variations on an extant, physical world other than yourself; they are a perceptual mechanic in the direct unveiling of reality and your continuity with it, an evacuation of both sides of the negating institution of selfhood, in your self and in things. Tantra unbolt and remove these essential cores of delusion. They provide bliss and guidance. I continue reading them as sustenance and fuel, chucking them onto the fire of my mind: they volatalize the self and ignite things. They are addictive, fetishistic, worshipful, miraculous in their revelations. And a structural support of vision until you can stand in a new perception unsupported, your world completely remade.