The Cover:
The Taj Mahal
The message of the Taj Mahal is a message about
Enlightenment, about the Enlightenment of the whole body. The Taj
Mahal is a burial place, but its message is Life. The secret of
Enlightenment is resurrection, the incarnation of love, and freedom
from death.
“The spiritual problem of Shah Jahan, the Mogul
Emperor of India who built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his favorite
wife, is the mortality of the loved one. All the conditions for our
ultimate Realization are present in the form of our relations, but
they are confounded by mortality. Having discovered that the loved
one is mortal, you must commit yourself heroically to the service of
his or her immortality. You can love what is dying, but you can only
be in love with what is already Transcendental. The
process of your loving is confounded until you overcome death, not
philosophically, but bodily, through bodily and Transcendental
Enlightenment.
“The Enlightened man reveals his Enlightenment
through bodily signs. Like the Taj Mahal, the body of the Enlightened
man is a perfect balance between the decending and ascending forces
of manifest existence. Photographs of the Taj Mahal generally do not
convey this perfect balance, because they confine the image within a
frame. But when the Taj Mahal is viewed in the undefined space of
which it is the center, it is one of the most perfectly balanced
visual perceptions in the world. The two forces, descending and
ascending, are perfectly equal.
“The Taj Mahal is a description of the whole body.
The body in its Enlightenment, the body when it is beautiful in
Truth, is a perfect balance between what descends and what ascends.
When there is too much attention to what is descended and only
physical, or too much attention to what is ascended and only psychic,
such imbalance yields mortality and delusion. Only the harmony is
immortal, and conducive to Illumination. In our Enlightenment we
represent that Illumined harmony in our physical form, like the Taj
Mahal. When the whole body is Enlightened, we glorify that Divine
harmony in our bodily life itself, and also in our sexual intimacy,
which is thus always the dance of such harmony.”