The Himalayan Institute just released a fascinating article about tantra in their magazine "Yoga + Joyful Living". It's about Mark Dyczkowski, an Oxford don, who "writes books illuminating the ancient teachings, lectures twice weekly to a bevy of eager students, and heads a project to rescue ancient texts from decay and destruction." Dyczkowski has spent four decades living, teaching, and practicing tantra in the heart of the Indian spiritual scene. He is a devotee of Swami Lakshmanjoo, a living exponent of Kashmir Shaivism.

A few lovely quotes form Dyczkowski:

"All that exists is divine consciousness. This universal divine consciousness creates all things. It becomes everything. It limits its infinite being through its own free will and withdraws into one of two polarities—subject and object. It does that simply for the joy, the immense creativity. An artist is an artist because he creates, and in India, Lord Shiva is worshipped as the supreme artist. The whole of creation is his marvelous artistic work."

"We’re not just playing clever philosophical games. If we understand the nature of perceiver and perceived, we deepen our understanding of the total reality, our ultimate supreme identity. Failing to do that we relapse into a condition of a limited individual state, in which we suffer all kinds of misery. Shiva and Shakti are the relationship between immanence and transcendence, between the individual and God, between God and the universe."

"Anything you look at involves a relationship between the doer and the doing, the seer and the seeing. That activity is perception. When you are done, you draw back and rest until another urge to perceive arises. If we understand how we perceive, then we can understand how universal consciousness happens. It is a cycling back and forth like a wave, a dynamism of polarities generating one out of the other and then dissolving into the other. When the total consciousness is at infinite rest, then all polarities come to an end. "

"The expansion of consciousness is first aroused in the body, then through the mind and intellect, and then into the higher levels of consciousness. It starts from the gross material level and expands up and out. Kundalini is a latent potency of awareness within physical material. It expands and develops, changes and progresses through body, intellect, and mind. We call this 'shakti rising.' "

"When you meditate, you watch how thoughts rise and fall away. You observe. You find the center between one thought and the next. Then thoughts slow down, and in between there is silence. This is how God-consciousness develops. Another approach is repeating a mantra, filling your thoughts with it, dissolving those thoughts, and becoming a stream of mantra that dissolves into silence. Thought gets cleaner and cleaner, and the full thought of God becomes pure and silent. There is pure awareness of God, and thought becomes without-thought. The highest thought, according to the Kashmiri Shaivist masters, is the thought that I am consciousness, pure infinite being. That I am that. In that thoughtless-thought there is the identification of the supreme Self with the individual self. The supreme Self is consciousness; the individual self is awareness. They are two aspects of the same reality—God reflecting on himself. God knows himself through our awareness. We have a choice. We can be aware of God or choose not to be. This is not as easy as switching a light on or off. If you decide to be aware of God you have to practice very hard and repeatedly."

http://www.himalayaninstitute.org/YogaPlus/Article.aspx?id=3422