This paper discusses the practical aspects of yoga and meditation. It does so in order to elaborate how the para-normal or spiritual experiences caused by these practices imbue sacred Indian art with a magical potency. This potency arises from the revelation of the nature of the symbolic realm of the unconscious mind as well as the a priori structures of the mind-body complex that make thought and cognition possible. Since the earliest times, esotericism in India has allied itself with art. I say ‘allied’ rather than ‘expressed’ itself because esotericism used art both as a medium of spiritual re-portage as well as an aid to spiritual practice. Classical Indian art theory did not distinguish be-tween the purely aesthetic and the doctrinally significant. My focus shall be on how tantrism relates with art. I shall open the discussion by historically locating tantrism within Indian esotericism. I will then critically look at Indology’s engagement with it and what the implications of this engage-ment were for tantric practices on the ground. This constitutes a top-down discourse of the genesis of modern Indian aesthetics. I will then attempt to create a bottom-up discourse by looking at the mechanics of yoga-tantra and how it underlies the production of classical Indian religious art. I will end with a brief discussion of some interesting findings from neuroscientists analysing meditational practices.

While earlier scholars uncritically considered the vedic corpus to be the foundation of all in-dian esotericism, recent scholarship paints a rather different picture. The vedic culture was not monolithic, rather as we move from the Rik veda to the Atharva veda we see clear aspects of non-vedic religion being included into the corpus. This is a process that happened over several waves of migrations. Scholars such as Geoffrey Samuels and Patrick Olivelle describe the vedic religion as a ‘householder’ religion, founded primarily on the fire sacrifice and the soma ritual. The soma ritual provided the early rishis with the revelatory insights that enabled them to compose the vedic hymns. The non-vedic tradition was in contrast an ascetic tradition that moulded itself to shun the fire ritu-als of the householders. The earliest speculations on yoga were possibly carried out within a com-bined ascetic milieu wherein sectarian bounds were at least initially very loose. Over time the soma rituals were lost and the brahmins thus lost their connection to revelatory experience. However, they managed to hold on to social and political power because they became specialists in ritual magic, particularly relating to birth, death, marriage and kingship.

In India, during the early centuries of the first millennium of the current era, there began to come about secret societies consisting primarily of Buddhist and Saivite members that integrated yoga and ritual. These groups aimed to rediscover and advance the yogic underpinnings of ritual. Initially beginning as secret societies, between the 2nd and the 4th centuries CE, we see these soci-eties emerging publicly. Initiation into these societies (samaja) and families (kula) involved prac-tices that violated both the vows of the brahmanical householder and the ascetic. However, the pay-off for the transgression was that these paths offered liberation in a single lifetime. In the context of the spiritual technologies available at that time, that was an unimaginably radical claim. These prac-tices constitute the Tantra proper, and while the period until the 12th century CE is recognised as the epoch of Indian tantra, these practices continued to grow and develop new methods till rela-tively recently.

The first clearly recognisable Tantric master is Nagarjuna who composes the Guhyasamaja tantra (the structure of the secret society). This led to the Nava-Natha tradition of the 84 mahasid-dhas. The 84 Mahasiddhas or extremely-perfected ones were powerful saints who freed ritual and yoga from the closed enclaves of the brahmins and the ascetics. They gave initiations to household-ers, women and to the lower castes, all of whom were barred from spiritual knowledge in traditional society (unless they renounced society and joined ascetic orders). The tradition of the 84 mahasid-dhas is also called the Nava-Natha or the new natha tradition. The word nava disambiguates it from the older tradition of ascetic yoga of Adi-natha or the primordial natha. The world natha loosely means ‘lord’. What is most intriguing about the 84 mahasiddhas is that their names are found in the genealogical trees of Hindu as well as Buddhist tantric systems. Foremost among the 84 mahasid-dhas was Shambhunath or Swayambhunatha, the tantric guru of the renowned Kashmiri Saivaite tantric Abhinavagupta.

Swayambhunatha was also the one who first took the practices of tantra to Tibet, where he is recognised as Guru Rimpoche or Padmasambhava. Tantra survived in its purest form in Tibet as the land was geographically protected from the political vagaries of the mainland. In the Bengal region it survived because tantric Buddhism hid itself in form of the Sahajiya Vaishnavism and allied itself with the grassroots Bhakti movement. It now survives to this day in guise of the practice known as Baul.

A great break occurs within Indic religious traditions during the period of colonisation and the subsequent industrialisation of India as traditional social networks undergo a major upheaval. This period is marked particularly by a new kind of intellectual alliance that puts in place a new in-terpretation of Indian history and traditions. This alliance was embodied in the academic discipline of Indology. Indological scholars were Christian Europeans who mostly accessed the Sanskrit texts using Brahmin pundits to interpret and comment. The pundits highlighted those parts of the tradi-tion that reinforced their own authority and also those logical, philosophical or poetic speculations that would appeal to the Christian-scientific temperaments of the European colonialists. The Euro-pean scholars, on the other hand, were led by their Christian tendencies to emphasise prayer, repen-tance, faith and scripture as the definitive features of a religious tradition. The English-educated na-tive intelligentsia too mimicked these tendencies and reformers such as Rammohan Roy, Keshab Chandra Sen and Swami Vivekananda tried to re-mould ‘Hinduism’ into a more scientific-Christian mould. The result was that Vedanta (being monistic and thus compatible with Christianity) was up-held as the epitome of Hindu religiosity and Theravada Buddhism was upheld as the pure form of Buddhism ( s it had remained unchanged since the time of Buddha, something which appealed enor-mously to the Protestants), while on the other hand hatha-yoga and tantra were put down as vulgar abominations or conjurer’s tricks.

The Indian esoteric tradition, unlike Christianity, is not a text-based tradition. There are texts, and they hold considerable import and validity; however the tradition is founded on oral trans-mission of teachings (sadhana) and direct physical transfer of spiritual power from master to disci-ple (shaktipat). However, the Indological scholars not only reduced it to a textual tradition, they also sanitised the canon. Indian religion and esotericism, which were a vast, unmanageable and poten-tially dangerous terrain for any sane European mind, were restricted to the fairly manageable disci-pline of Indian philosophy. The European scholar quickly discovered that Indian esotericism con-sisted of strange and forbidden practices, and that engaging in them meant breaking taboos every step of the way. In contrast, Indian philosophy was safe because it circumscribed within it only logi-cal speculations. Everything outside of the circle of high-minded philosophy was branded as super-stition and rejected. This included those religious practices that actually had the ability for effecting spiritual (or physical for that matter) transmutation.

Indology by and large divided Indic esotericism into three major disciplinary fields; that of religious philosophy, sciences and magic. The texts on religion were held in the highest esteem by the Indologists and consisted primarily of brahmanical texts such as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagwad Gita, Manusmriti and other logical, philosophical or legal texts. Next in the hierarchy of Indological knowledge were the texts on sciences, relating to practical subjects such as medicine, architecture, the fine arts, aesthetic theory, musicological theory, craftsmanship, metallurgy etc. Fi-nally came the loathed part of the canon: magic, consisting of texts on astrology, hatha yoga, tantra, ritual, mantra-craft etc. So, while these disciplines were fundamentally un-divided in the pre-colo-nial context, colonial scholarship divides them into several segregated units.

The case of Ayurveda is telling. Traditionally an Ayurvedic practitioner had two major diag-nostic tools. The first was to take the patient’s pulse, and the second was to examine the astrological birth chart. Under the Indological impulse, Ayurveda was revived and made compatible with west-ern scientific medicine. This modernised Ayurveda retained the method of diagnosis through check-ing the pulse and even adopted newer tools such as the stethoscope, but diagnosis through astrologi-cal analysis just faded out of usage. The point here is not to examine the scientific status of astrol-ogy, but rather to say that these systems had once worked together as an integrated whole but now were separated from each other. The newer interpretations that were being produced in the colonial

context were changing the way these disciplines were practiced on the ground, and doing so with Victorian, Christian and secular biases.

The field of modern Indian art emerges around the same time. One of its foundational stones was laid by Indological scholarship, namely classical Indian aesthetics. The formulation of modern Indian art required one to bring Western ideas of secular modernity into conversation with certain ideas and concepts that were considered to be the essence of the ‘Indian’ tradition. To make an au-thentic (as opposed to imitative) Indian modernity, it was not sufficient to be modern: rather, West-ern ideas had to be integrated with a carefully selected body of work from India's own intellectual and cultural history. The use of Western ideas provided the Indian theorists with acceptance within the elite circuits of Western academia and the use of Indian ideas provided their imaginations with a desirable ‘authenticity’.

The native intelligentsia now embarked upon a scrutiny of the Indian tradition using West-ern tools of rationalism. Thus early pedagogues of modern Indian art were deeply interested in min-ing classical Indian poetics and aesthetics for suitable ideas. This group includes figures like E.B.Havell, Ananda.K.Koomaraswamy and also artists like Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose. The Indological secular modernist interpretation of rasa theory translated ‘rasa’ loosely as ‘juice’ and understood it simply as the out-flow of pleasurable emotions at the successful apprehen-sion of an art object. What was missed out from this formulation was that the classical discussion of rasa came from within an initiatory context and connected up with tantric practices of alchemical transmutation of the body. Since tantric practices, particularly sex rituals, were abhorrent in the eyes of the colonial masters as well as the educated upper-caste native intelligentsia, Indian aesthetics was formed into a discipline sanitised of all tantric influences. This was ironic considering the highly sexually charged iconic imagery that adorned so many religious and artistic archaeological remains. Post the sexual liberation in the West, sites like Khajuraho eventually went on to become global icons of sexual and erotic art. The sexual vocabulary of classical Indian art was a source of great embarrassment to the English-educated native intelligentsia and they constantly responded to it with an apologetic discourse that reduced it to philosophical abstraction.

At the same time, in close geographical proximity to where these re-interpretations were tak-ing place, there flourished a vernacular tradition that had a radically different understanding of rasa. This was the Sahajiya Vaishnav or the Baul tradition of rural Bengal. The ranks of this tradition were filled by women, widows, the low-caste, householders and other misfits. It is interesting to note that this is the same demographic in which early 1st millennial tantra had arisen. Since Baul was a vernacular low-caste tradition comprising a largely illiterate demographic, it escaped the greater transformative brunt of the colonial encounter. Bauls were also less visible to the Western-trained observers as they transmitted their practices through their songs. This largely oral vernacular tradition was largely ignored by the bibliophile Anglophone Indologists.

For the Baul, rasa is more than just an emotional category. It is also, and perhaps more im-portantly, an alchemical category. While they may appear to be different, the psyche and the body are not understood to be separate things: meaning that rasa refers not just to emotional enjoyment but also to the chemical and neurological basis of experience. So rasa is ‘juice’ but not just as a metaphor for emotional enjoyment , it is also the actual major bodily fluids: blood, cerebrospinal fluid, menstrual fluid, semen, urine and stool among others. Bauls utilise and manipulate these flu-ids to trigger states of samadhi or spiritual revelation. Tantra is a discipline wherein the chemical and neurological foundations of experience themselves are treated as the objects of experience and manipulated in order to achieve ultimate liberation. This ultimate liberation is a state of experience which is unconditioned by the five sense organs, mind, perspective in space time etc. Since it is un-conditioned, thus it is free. Yoga-tantra is thus the science and art of moving from a limited or con-ditioned state of experiencing reality to an unconditioned, unlimited state of experiencing reality.

With this background in view, let us now return to our discussion of tantrism and sacred art. The question we have to ask is: how is it possible for an aesthetic experience (repetition of a mantra, focussing on an deity image, reading a sacred text, listening to music, dancing etc.) to trig-ger a religious or spiritual experience? Indeed what is a spiritual experience? I shall endeavour to

answer these questions by explaining how, in spite of the Indologists’ uncomfortable formulations, the formal values of classical Indian art were in fact fundamentally determined by the mystical dis-ciplines of yoga and tantra. What I am here referring to as a ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ experience, the yogis and the tantrics would call ‘true cognition’. In contrast, the experience of waking everyday consciousness would be called ‘sensory cognition’1. Sacred art, then, is a specialised, coherently formed arrangement of sensory cognitions (brushed paint on surface, chiselled stone, etc etc) that if apprehended with one-pointed concentration can create what for the yogis is true or liberatory con-sciousness.

Simply put the tantric creed is this: yes, we are limited minds trapped inside fragile bodies with an expiry date, but there is a way to unify body, mind and spirit; the physical, the symbolic or archetypical and the Real (the Real being an absolute presence or an absolute absence). So there is creation and multiplicity and limit, but matter and spirit can be harmonised and be brought into unity or ‘yoga’ with each other. And this unity results in the limited individual ego dissolving into the absolute. This is the moment of liberation, nirvana etc. Achieving this is only possible through training in meditation, which is a physical and a mental discipline dealing entirely with the flow of energy and fluid through the nerves and channels in our bodies. The mind is made to rest at particu-lar points in the body, particular nerves or nerve plexuses. Through repetition, the mind’s tendency to scatter is countered, and one-pointed focus is developed in feeling the particular nerve which is being observed. It is important to highlight here the strengthening of will and intellect that occurs upon achieving the one-pointedness of mind and how it differs, qualitatively and profoundly, from everyday waking consciousness. The perfect analogy to illustrate how meditation changes will, awareness and intellect is how a magnifying glass concentrates sunlight into a point. Scattered, the light is warm; but, when it is focussed into a single point, it burns! The mind brought to one-pointed focus similarly burns through sensory perception into true or ‘spiritual’ cognition.

Before we can understand how mysticism imbues sacred art with magical ability and what the nature of this magical ability is, we must first discuss the method of meditation and how it is rooted in reality. First the body is stilled and the mind is moved away from discursive thought. Then attention is focussed on the internal movements of prana, loosely translatable as the ‘life-force’. In other words, instead of focussing on what is around us, we move our attention to what is on or un-der our skin. Now we are beginning to be aware of our own nervous and veinous systems, instead of merely using them to interact with the world. With practice, qualities such as lightness or heaviness, contraction or expansion, warmth or coldness will be observed in various parts of the body. Further, as we still the mind’s chatter through the strength of practice, we can observe a rhythmic pulsation all across our body. Since the heart beats fluid to all parts of the body, it is obvious that if we pay at-tention to it, we can feel this pulsation throughout the body and not exclusively in the heart or chest. It is further possible to focus attention and observe neural pulsation in focussed regions of the body like particular nerves or nerve plexuses. Once mind and pulsation is allied we can then add the breath to it. Rather, once the mind is settled on one place (such as the heart, navel, forehead, etc) the breath emerging and ending from the same bodily location can be clearly observed. In the medita-tive state, one’s sense of mental awareness, breath and pulsation are brought into union: this is yoga. The inhalation and exhalation of breath will occur according to the rhythm of the pulsation. Using the pulsation, the breath must be hooked onto a particular nerve or nerve plexus. Once this is achieved, a sense of beatitude emerges in the nerve where the meditation is being carried out, a sense of lightness is felt. A chakra, when meditated upon, feels like a swirling vortex made up of the energy of our nerves. A yogin then is slowly able to discern between the subtle differences in the frequencies of pulsation in the various parts of his/her body, and is also able to unite the whole body in one particular frequency.

If breath, mind and pulsation are all brought together, there emerges through practice an in-ward movement of the mind. Increasingly the amount of mental energy spent in perceiving outer

1 Yoga recognises four states of the mind: walking, dream, deep sleep and the final known as turiya. Turiya is a state of direct apprehension of the object of knowledge without the intermediation of the sense organs.

world decreases, while attention expended upon observing the inner function of vital or pranic en-ergy increases. If this happens then we must understand that the meditation is deepening. This means that the scattering and lethargic everyday mind is drawing inward and moving towards one-pointed concentration. The yogis and tantrics instruct us that with deepening of meditation, audi-tory, visual, olfactory etc phenomena can be experienced. In other cases there can be spontaneous uncontrollable song or dance. These are para-normal phenomena only in so far as they are not grounded in the ‘normal’ experience of phenomenal reality. Instead, these mystical or yogic experi-ences are grounded in the self-referential experience of the very sense organs that we use to appre-hend reality. What emerges when the mind is focussed on a nerve and not distracted by the desire for sense-object contact, is the natural frequency of the pulsation of a particular nerve. The yogis and tantrics followed this process to create maps of the human nervous system. Following the ner-vous circuits, they were able to internally master the way nerve-electricity flows within the neural networks. This allowed them to experience the phenomena of consciousness in all its levels. It al-lowed them to discover the point where the ego-mind dissolves into universal consciousness. The discipline of tantra creates new neural connections with the express purpose of resolving the mind-body duality. The ultimate experience of samadhi is to resolve back into the source of all creation. It is the experience of the source from which matter, energy and consciousness emerge. The tantrics call this place of creation and return as spanda, the sacred tremor. The word spanda comes from the root spand- which means to vibrate. Ultimate reality was understood to be voidness because it con-stantly alternates between existence and non-existence. The universal vibration breaks down into various sounds and resonances. These are the matrikas: the alphabet. The breaking down of the uni-versal frequency into the alphabet signals the moment of creation of multiplicity in the universe, which is why matrika could mean ‘letter/ alphabet’ but equally could mean ‘mother’.

This is a complex system and its intricacies are not within our scope right now. What we do need to know for current purposes is the process of transmission of spiritual knowledge and insight used by yoga and tantra. By studying their own neural pulsation, tantrics are able to harmonise their bodily pulsation with the cosmic pulsation and thereby are returned to the source of all creation: the void. Once one is in the state of shunyata or voidness, one sees, emerging as sparks from the void, the seed mantras. The seed mantras are nothing but the alphabet in the act of creating the microcos-mic universe of the human body. The vibrating frequencies of the nerves are what enable body and mind to act together. When the seed mantras are meditated upon, this vibration takes on the full an-thropomorphic form of the deity. The tantric deity is essentially a limited aspect of the voidness of the tantric’s own enlightened mind.

Once the tantric has moulded this mind-stuff into the form of the deity, the tantric and the deity become one. To worship Shiva, one must become Shiva, as the traditional injunction puts it. The final step in the cycle is to take this conscious agent and project it into an idol or a mandala. When this is done, the idol or mandala is said to be living. The masters then simply give their stu-dents the visual form in the shape of the idol or mandala and empower a connection with the deity’s living consciousness through the mantra and associated meditation. Since the guru has perfected the mantra (he has purified a particular nerve) when the disciple receives it, they are not merely receiv-ing a sequence of sounds or letters, but also the spiritual charge the guru has accumulated on that mantra. The result is that the master is able to recreate within the student the same meditative expe-riences through the mantra which they themselves had acquired through meditative insight on spanda. The guru leads the student to the deity through meditations on syllables and images and the the deity then leads the aspirant to the voidness.

The tantric masters studied spanda, they understood the natural frequencies of various nerves and experientially were able to locate the alphabet across the body. They found each place had its frequency, and these natural frequencies of the nerves were expressed as the thousands of gods and goddesses that according to myth are said to inhabit the body. They realised that since each frequency was composed of laya and taala, rhythm and meter, they could use them in art to create not just specific moods and emotions but also, with sufficient focus and repetition, trigger particular meditative experiences associated with particular deities or nerves. Tantric art, then is

structurally encoded to produce meditative experience. The initiate knows how to meditatively in-habit the particular nerve which the artwork is stimulating. The layperson does not understand the yogic method of meditating on the art, but still if he or she earnestly experiences it then still there would be an effect, though of a lower order of magnitude.

Laya and taala, or rhythm and meter, form the basis of practically all classical arts, such as painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, poetics as well as ritual. A meditative spanda can be created by recreating its frequency and amplitude and hence can be theoretically embedded into any object of sensory or aesthetic appreciation. We will here close the discussion around classical tantric meditation and art. Next let us look at tantra’s revival in the 20th century and how far the em-pirical sciences corroborate tantra’s claims.

Around the beginning of the 20th century there was another group of Westerners who en-gaged with India. This group had become dissatisfied with their post-enlightenment Christian think-ing. Disillusioned with the values of industrial modernity, they sought insights from traditions around the world including hatha-yoga and tantra. Beginning with the Romantics, this trend contin-ued with the theosophists and the occultists. These people were not primarily interested in the intel-lectual speculations of Vedanta nor were they only looking for new and exotic ideas in which to in-vest their belief and faith. Most importantly, they were looking for actual techniques of physical, psychological and spiritual healing and evolution. By and large, if a religious doctrine did not cause transmutation that was experientially verifiable, they saw little value in it. It was because of their ef-forts that tantric texts were translated and a new understanding of tantra developed. Scholars like William James, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became interested in the phenomena of religious ex-periences and states of mind. Another factor that led to the resurgence of tantra in the 20th century was the escape of Tibetan lamas from Chinese occupation and their seeking asylum in the West. Suddenly a whole plethora of ideas and practices that had been quarantined within closed enclaves exploded into the attention of an international audience. Subsequently, two historical events boosted the growing popularity of hatha-yoga’s physical postures. The first was the international physical culture movement around the World Wars and the second was the alternative culture movement in-cluding feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. The growing respect for mystical practices in the West meant that the empirical sciences too had to engage with and evaluate esotericism. Having emerged from the context of the 18th century Enlightenment wherein intellectual speculation had freed itself from centuries of church control, Western science was naturally suspicious of all appar-ently religious phenomena. By and large the empirical sciences followed a policy of dismissal, claiming mystical events to either be abnormal functioning of the brain or humours, or to simply be parlour tricks and deception.

The first scientific discipline to seriously study mystical phenomena was parapsychology in the early 20th century. However parapsychology was limited by technological constraints as well as the fact that it tended to focus attention on manifest paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, E.S.P. and associated psychic phenomena. Parapsychology amassed a substantial archive of paranormal events and proved without doubt that paranormal phenomena could occur under laboratory condi-tions. However, the ‘hard’ mathematical sciences criticised the conclusions the parapsychologists drew from their data as unsound. Furthermore, parapsychology’s lack of mathematical tools led to it being branded a ‘pseudoscience’. All this added to the belief that spiritual or mystical phenomena were essentially ‘false’.

While these accusations were partially justified, the summary dismissal of paranormal phe-nomena themselves was too hasty. These views begin to soften with advances in disciplines like quantum physics and neurology. I would here like to examine how neurology has begun to corrobo-rate some of the fundamental assertions of tantra. The Christian schoolmen and the Enlightenment philosophers such as Rene Descartes considered the mind and body to be separate, fundamentally different things. This was proven not to be the case when the early neurologists (particularly during World War II) observed that damage to specific parts of the brain resulted in the loss of specific be-havioural abilities (speech, movement, etc). This meant that the foundations of our psychological

structure were rooted in our brain anatomy. This corresponds to the tantric belief that body and mind are one and can be used to affect and transform each other.

In the 1990s two neurologists, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, began to conduct ex-periments with longtime practitioners of Buddhist meditation, particularly monks (again facilitated by the Tibetan exodus). In their research they linked meditational practices to increased or de-creased activity in specific regions of the brain such as the pre-frontal cortex and the parietal lobes. From their experiments they argue that the states of consciousness during meditation or samadhi corresponds to the alteration of specific brain states. Further they argue that religious experience is a rare but normal function of the brain and cannot be characterised as brain dysfunction or mental ill-ness. This validates the tantric belief that meditation and associated practices work on the neural system to enable the achievement of certain rare states of consciousness.

Newberg and D’Aquili plot the spectrum of the possible states of consciousness in their work. They designated as baseline reality the state where distinct objects are perceived with regular relationships between them. This is the state of waking consciousness when we have a strong sense of what is real, such as chairs, table, love, hate and we have a sense of them enduring over consider-able periods of time. When these objects or relationships vanish from all sensory detection then they are said to not exist anymore and this is verified through cross-subjective validation: when other people agree as to whether an object or relationship exists or not. D’Aquili and Newberg contrast the idea of baseline reality with what they call Absolute Unitary Being (AUB). The data for theoris-ing this was derived from studying cases of meditation, samadhi, religious ecstasy, near death expe-riences, out of body experiences etc. AUB is the state when the subject-object duality vanishes and the agent perceives no difference between itself and the rest of the universe. AUB is characterised by a hyper-lucid sense of reality, one that is compelling under all circumstances, but enduring for a far shorter time than the state of baseline reality. Even when the unitary state is over, there remains a strong sense of its underlying presence or possibility. While in baseline reality there is a strong cross-subjective verification as to the core values and details of objects, in AUB the details of the experiences vary while there is a high rate of cross-subjective verification of core values. The peo-ple experiencing baseline reality reported it to be real, however those people who had experienced both AUB and baseline reality claimed AUB to be hyper-lucid: more real than the waking world. D’Aquili and Newberg argue that it is impossible to scientifically determine which is more real: baseline reality or the various unitary states. Some argue that since unitary states are grounded in the anatomy of the brain, baseline reality must be the foundation of unitary states and hence should be seen as more real. D’Aquili and Newberg categorically dismiss such a position as ‘foolish reduc-tionism’. They say that since the apprehension of both baseline reality and unitary states can be re-duced to neural blips, it is therefore possible to argue the reverse to be the case too: that baseline re-ality is derived from unitary states. The subjective experience of unitary states as being more real than baseline reality cannot be proven through objective empirical science. D’Aquili and Newberg advocate the position that baseline reality and AUB are complementary rather than competing states of reality. While the hyper-reality of AUB validates the yogic understanding of samadhi as truth; it is the idea that baseline reality and AUB are complementary states of reality that particularly res-onates with the specifically tantric goal of liberation (AUB) within samsara (the world or baseline reality).

D’Aquili and Newberg also suggest that there is an aesthetic-religious continuum which is founded on the increasing activity of the holistic operator. The holistic operator is a group of neu-rons which allows us to perceive not singular objects, but objects as a collection, a whole as a gestalt. Therefore the holistic operator is also the neural system involved in having aesthetic experi-ences. In other words, the same group of neurons that are activated while having an aesthetic expe-rience are activated at a higher pitch while having unitary experiences. As we saw in the previous discussion of rasa theory, tantra believes that certain rhythms and meters are conducive to specific kinds of religious or meditative experiences, and in turn uses these rhythms and metres to encode meditative states within works of art. A possible mechanism for how the brain processes these works of art is provided by D’Aquili and Newberg’s study of the holistic operator. Their work also

provides scientific backing for the tantric practice of meditation on deity forms to achieve samadhi states. Further work on these lines may uncover more details on how this comes about.

In this paper I have argued for a bottom-up interpretation of classical Indian arts and aesthet-ics, rooting them in the practices of yoga and tantra and the experiences resulting from these prac-tices. Classical Indian art emerged from an initiatory context and contemporary Indian artists cannot sufficiently engage with these ideas unless they have access to states of mind that follow from initi-ation and practice. While at one time there was serious doubt and suspicion as to the validity and authenticity of these practices, several new scientific discoveries and concepts are re-imbuing the tantric traditions with validity. In such a situation one hopes that both the disciplines of art history and neurology increase their engagement with tantric ideas and practices.