 Welcome to my Tantric Winter Meditation Journey. Lord, I would introduce you to my own personal Tantra Vidya journey today because my journey, the beginning of my Tantra Vidya journey was a very difficult one. So when I started, my Guru had told me two things. My Guru, by the way, is a little old woman who is anywhere between 50 and 100 years of age. After all these years, I still haven't worked out exactly how old she is. She lives in the Kumau Hills, about a four-hour journey from Nenital. I call her Binama and I love her dearly, but she still frightens me. After all these years, I'm petrified of her. When I started with her, she told me a couple of things. The first one was about how to acquire knowledge. In Tantra, we have three ways that we acquire knowledge. One is through public means like books or lectures like this. The second one is the secret knowledge which only your Guru can give to you. And in Binama's tradition, they whisper it into your ear through a hollow bamboo. And the third and the most important one is what you learn from your own experience. So where you take the teachings of your Guru and you practice them and you understand for yourself what it does to you and how it makes you feel. Because as they say, you can't borrow enlightenment. Now, I had a real problem with this because I wanted to study Tantra. I didn't want to practice it. But in Tantra, the rule is that if you are not going to participate in the ritual in every part of the ritual, then you're not allowed to perform the ritual. So that was a huge obstacle for me to overcome because some things I couldn't physically do and some things I didn't want to do. The second thing she said was that I had to learn how to break down the boundaries of my mind which sounds very simple but it really isn't. You see in Tantra as in any other philosophy, the aim is to achieve God to get beyond this veil of illusion to the ultimate truth behind. The difference is in Tantra we believe that all of creation is connected. Everything is one. God created everything. Hence to achieve God you have to understand everything which means that there is no difference between good knowledge and bad knowledge or what is pure and what is if pure or what is right or what is wrong. It is all connected. Tantra is a philosophy that encompasses everything which basically means that whatever you believe is correct but equally something that is the exact opposite of it is also correct. Now for me this was really hard to come to grips with because I could understand perspectives that were slightly different to mine but the exact opposite of what I believed, it was just very hard for me to accept that that was also valid and justified. Binamar tried very hard to explain to me how exact opposites are actually the same thing. It's the whole concept of non-duality of Advaita that opposites are like two inverted triangles coming together that one thing flows into the other but as I said it was just really hard for me to come to grips with. So I actually left my Tantra Vidya journey twice before finally coming back and settling into it. I wanted to tell you this because it's not going to be easy. Learning everything through self-experience, it's long, it's hard, it's time consuming and breaking all those boundaries that have always defined your mind. It's next to impossible. So it's definitely not easy but it is necessary. Life has changed drastically and if we are to survive, if we are to do well we also have to change drastically. We have to drop all of those boundaries that have defined our thinking up to now. The Tantric Meditations can definitely guide you, they can help you but that first decision to make that change has to come from you. Remember to like, comment, subscribe. See you in the next one.