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terrifying situations and atmospheres charged with powers that<br />
can frighten the aspirant, such as midnight and cremation grounds,<br />
were considered suitable for an explosion of psychic potential.<br />
Another meditative occult practice is carried out with the aid of<br />
five, or nine, human skulls and is called Pancha-mundi, or Navamundi,<br />
asana. The adept sits in Padmasana (the lotus position) on<br />
human skulls, a discipline necessary to help him confront and<br />
purge from consciousness his own terror.<br />
These confrontations are a source of renewal, and a doorway to<br />
a new productive impulse which comes to the adept's aid with a<br />
constructive view of the situation. They help to obliterate<br />
distinctions between the objects of attraction and revulsion and<br />
stress that all extremes, the individual's conscious and unconscious<br />
self with its contradictions, the ostensibly positive and negative<br />
aspects of existence, form an inseparable unity.<br />
The views advanced by modern psychologists such as Jung, who<br />
recognized the importance of a shock experience in order to face<br />
the 'shadow self or the 'dark' side of the personality structure for a<br />
total integration of the psyche, are in no way different in essence<br />
from what the tantric adept aspires to achieve from these aweinspiring<br />
rituals. In The Symbolic Quest Edward C. Whitmont<br />
explains the jungian concept of the significance of confronting the<br />
'shadow':<br />
The confrontation of one's own evil can be a mortifying death-like<br />
experience; but like death it points beyond the personal meaning of<br />
existence. ... It [the shadow] represents the first stage toward meeting the<br />
Self. There is, in fact, no access to the unconscious and to our own reality<br />
but through the shadow. Only when we realize that part of ourselves<br />
which we have not hitherto seen or preferred not to see can we proceed to<br />
question and find the sources from which it feeds and the basis on which it<br />
rests. Hence no progress or growth in analysis is possible until the shadow<br />
is adequately confronted - and confronting means more than merely<br />
knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing<br />
ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we<br />
are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality. 41<br />
In the abstruse symbolism of tantras, the ten aspects or energies<br />
of the Primal Sakti, or the ten objects of transcendental<br />
knowledge, dasa-maha-vidyas, signifying the various degrees and<br />
stages of existence, have a similar transformative function. The ten<br />
Mahavidyas are (1) Kali, the power of time; (2) Tara, the potential<br />
of re-creation; (3) Sodasi, the embodiment of the sixteen<br />
modifications of desire; (4) Bhuvanesvari, substantial forces of the<br />
material world; (5) Bhairavi, who multiplies herself in an infinity