While being caressed, sweet princess, enter the caress as everlasting life.
- Love is the easiest natural door out of time: when the long-awaited beloved is actually present, the mind’s whole function (longing) becomes useless and stops, and for a few moments you are thrown back to your own center. The technique deliberately deepens that spontaneous glimpse into meditation rather than letting it pass as a fleeting shock.
- Instruction: do not stand apart as the lover — become the caress, become the kiss (not the kisser), dissolving the actor so completely into the act that you can say ‘Only love exists; I am not.’ While ‘I am’ persists you may be physically near but are spiritually poles apart, and it is not yet love.
- Marker: when love has truly engulfed you it is no longer ‘your’ love — love is circulating, love is seeing, love is moving to touch. The possessive ‘I/my’ has dissolved.
- Why ‘everlasting life,’ not ‘the present’: time is only past-and-future, a horizontal line; the present is not part of time but a vertical dimension of depth you drop into. Shiva avoids the word ‘present’ because it is still relative to time — love opens the eternal now (‘there shall be time no longer’).
- Positioning: tantra’s progression is sex to love to meditation — sex exploits the other as instrument; love is two partners moving together into another world; meditation is when even lover and beloved dissolve and only love flows. This sutra works the last step, love into meditation.
- Prerequisite: the energy must be allowed to keep flowering — sex into love, love into meditative light. Condemning or suppressing the seed cripples the flower; sex becomes ugly only because it is condemned, not in itself.
- From the Q&A — local vs. total: ordinary sex is ‘local,’ only the sex center engaged while the mind stands aside calculating; total entry is when every fiber of the body becomes love and the self-image drops (the ego cannot love — it needs a future, love exists only now). The mechanism is total acceptance with no ulterior motive: accepting the act ‘in order to’ transcend is the cunning mind again propping its self-image up in the future.
- From the Q&A — why totality is feared: you have never been so totally in the act that you forgot yourself; the mind keeps control to hold the act ‘local,’ afraid of what the unconscious might erupt into if you let go — this fear is the hidden reason people side with the moralizers. But only what is fully experienced can be transcended; what is suppressed or kept local never can.