We Are Always Creating Reality
Aroopa → Rooparoopa → Roopa: The Tantric Map of Manifestation. What the ancient teachings have to say about energy, vibration, thought and subjective reality.
Hi All, First, an invitation. Next week, I’ll be one of the presenters at the Exploring Tantra Summit 2025 — a 5-day online gathering (October 20–24) dedicated to living, breathing, and embodying classical non-dual Tantra. It’s completely free to attend. As you know, Tantra isn’t just about ideas or insights. It’s about how we actually live — how we bring awareness into our relationships, our challenges, and our daily rhythms. This summit is one of the rare places where that integration is explored in depth. You’ll hear from 15 amazing teachers and friends sharing perspectives from classical Tantra, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (Vedic astrology), Yoga Nidra, and embodied yoga practices. Each session is designed to help you remember your wholeness and importantly, to carry these teachings into your life. I’ll be offering my own session on Relational Tantra: The Path of the Unarmored Heart, on how awakening happens in the space between us. In this session, I will explore practical relational Tantra—meeting emotion skillfully, attuning the body as an instrument of truth, and cultivating community that supports recognition. I’d love for you to be there with me. Even if you can’t make it live, you’ll receive replays of every session once you’re registered.
Second, while we are sold out of private rooms for our November Bhakti-Tantra retreat on Big Island of Hawai’i, we still have dormitory spaces and commuter spaces available. The retreat starts on November 9th, but if you come early, you can join Johnny Flowers for a mandala and altar workshop on the day of 8th, and Adam and friends will have a big celebration kirtan on the evening of the 8th. It’s a full joyful week of embodiment practice, gorgeous nature, inner work and community connection.
All love,
Christine Marie
We Are Always Creating Reality
Many people believe they live in a pre-existing world, and that reality is something “out there” that happens to them. But in the tantric view, sustained patterns of attention and belief don’t merely color our experience of the world. Consciousness creates the world we inhabit.
Today we’re exploring a key concept in Tantric cosmology: aroopa – rooparoopa – roopa. Roopa means “form.” Aroopa means “formless.” And rooparoopa is the subtle meeting place of the two. Together, they map the creative process by which pure awareness condenses into thought, emotion, circumstance, and the material events of our lives.
Aroopa: The Formless Source
Aroopa is consciousness before it takes any shape. It is the field of infinite potential, the vast open awareness from which all things arise. It is like the ocean before any wave forms, or what physics might call the quantum field of possibility.
In meditation, you can sense aroopa as the silent, spacious awareness beneath all thoughts and perceptions. It is the unconditioned ground that is never born and never dies.
Rooparoopa: The Vibrational Blueprint
From this formless ground, movement begins. Rooparoopa is the shimmering threshold where consciousness and form interpenetrate. Here, intention, belief, sustained attention, and emotional charge begin to organize the unconditioned into subtle patterns.
This is the realm of vibration, of tendency, of energetic blueprint. It is the mist before rain, the heat ripple before flame. In our lives, it shows up as the felt sense of a possibility, a recurring emotional signature, or the energetic qualities we perceive around a person or place.
Most of what we call “subconscious” lives here. It’s where the story is already being written, where it’s not yet visible, but taking shape.
Roopa: The Condensed Manifestation
Roopa is the world of form: the solidity of a body, the stability of a chair, the circumstances of your life. It is consciousness fully condensed, appearing as material and separate. Even here, the formless is present.
When we work only at the roopa level (trying to fix circumstances, rearrange external details, or force change) we are working downstream. The deeper creative process has already happened.
Meeting Reality Earlier in Its Arc
Before a circumstance solidifies into roopa, it exists as rooparoopa, a pattern, a tendency, a vibration. Before illness appears, there is a pattern of stress or ignoring the body. Before the argument erupts, there is subtle tension and unspoken assumption. Before financial crisis, there is a current of scarcity thinking and avoidance. Most people only notice reality once the wave has crashed. But when we become conscious at the rooparoopa level, we meet creation while it is still fluid. Here we can question a belief before it hardens into a decision, feel an emotion before it drives behavior, and shift our energetic relationship to a situation before reaction sets in.
This is conscious participation in manifestation. We are not trying to control reality. We are noticing how consciousness is already creating, and choosing which patterns to nourish and which to let dissolve back into formlessness.
Form Is Never Final
Another precept here is that everything that seems solid is, in truth, in flux… constantly arising from and returning to aroopa.
Your body appears solid, but its cells are replacing themselves constantly. The atoms that compose you are mostly empty space, structured by vibrational forces. Even the you from seven years ago is not the same organism that is reading these words now.
The same is true of your circumstances. The relationship you thought was forever ended. The career you once clung to shifted. The belief you held as absolute revealed itself as just one perspective. Form arises, stabilizes for a time, and dissolves — always.
Seeing this frees us from mistaking form for finality. We stop grasping at what is pleasant as if it could be frozen. We stop resisting what is difficult as if it were permanent. We stop confusing the shape of our lives with the essence of who we are.
This is not detachment. It is deeper participation. We engage fully with form while rooted in formlessness. We play the roles life offers while remembering they are costumes consciousness wears for a while.
Gaining Freedom from Unconscious Creation
We are always creating. The only question is whether we are creating consciously or unconsciously.
Unconscious creation looks like:
Repeating the same relationship dynamics because of unexamined beliefs about love or safety.
Manifesting the same financial patterns as our parents because we inherited their assumptions.
Remaining stuck because the situation fulfills a hidden payoff like victimhood or avoidance.
Reacting from triggers because we haven’t felt the deeper emotions beneath them.
At the rooparoopa level, these patterns can be seen before they crystallize into circumstance. And seeing is the beginning of freedom.
The paradox is this: the more deeply we rest in aroopa, in formless awareness, the more consciously we can participate in form. When we are fused with form, we are the pattern and cannot choose. When we rest as awareness, the pattern arises within us, and we have space to respond.
From that spaciousness, we can:
Feed life-giving patterns and starve destructive ones.
Allow old beliefs to dissolve without replacing them with new ones.
Feel the full charge of emotion without building a story around it.
Meet situations from fresh awareness rather than from habit.
This is conscious creation — not as a technique, but as a natural expression of what we are: the formless ground from which all form arises.
Thoughts as Training Ground
Thoughts reveal this process most directly, because they move quickly enough to observe the whole cycle:
At first, a thought is unmanifest — pure potential (aroopa).
Then it takes on a subtle vibration — an impulse or tendency (rooparoopa).
Finally, it crystallizes as a fully formed thought (roopa).
What holds true for thoughts holds true for worlds. Sustained patterns of attention at the rooparoopa level eventually condense into material circumstances. What we consistently hold in consciousness — consciously or unconsciously — becomes the texture of our lives.
Next: The Seeds Beneath the Patterns
Understanding aroopa–rooparoopa–roopa shows us how consciousness becomes circumstance. But it doesn’t yet explain why the same circumstances repeat themselves — why, even after glimpsing the formless ground, we still recreate the same suffering. For that, Tantra gives us another crucial teaching: vāsanā, the subtle residues of past experience that continue shaping the field at the rooparoopa level. Vāsanā is the scent of the past, still alive in the present — the seed that sponsors our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and the worlds they generate. In the next essay, we’ll turn toward this hidden architect. We’ll look at how vāsanā forms, how it scripts reality, and how tantric practice dissolves it at its source — transforming unconscious creation into conscious authorship of our lives.
The Shivalinga
The shivling in Shaivist cosmology is the perfect physical teaching of aroopa rooparoopa roopa.
The yoni (the circular base) represents aroopa—the formless, the womb of creation, the infinite potential from which all emerges. It is receptive, open, boundless.
The emergence of the linga from the yoni is rooparoopa—the exact moment where formless becomes form. The linga rises from the yoni without separation; it is simultaneously emerging and inseparable from its source. This is the subtle realm, the threshold, the creative tension between manifestation and void.
The linga itself (the upright pillar) is roopa—form fully manifested. Yet even in its apparent solidity, the linga remains rooted in and inseparable from the yoni. Form never leaves formlessness; it only appears to.
The shivalinga is worshipped as a unity, never separated. You cannot have the linga without the yoni. You cannot have form without formlessness. To worship the shivalinga is to recognize that every manifestation—including your own body, your own life—is the formless eternally birthing itself into form.
When you pour water or milk over the shivalinga in abhisheka (ritual bathing), you’re enacting the cycle: the fluid (consciousness) flows over form, dissolves the boundaries, returns everything to fluidity, to source. Aroopa → rooparoopa → roopa → aroopa. The stone itself teaches you that what appears solid is always returning to flow.
In temples, devotees circumambulate the shivalinga, walking around the form while keeping it at the center. We move through the world of forms (roopa) while remaining oriented to the formless center (aroopa). You participate in manifestation without forgetting the source.
The shivalinga is the teaching made visible. When you understand aroopa rooparoopa roopa, you see that your own body is a shivalinga. Your life circumstances are a shivalinga. Consciousness (yoni) eternally giving birth to form (linga), and form forever rooted in consciousness.
Adam performing Abisheka in Tiruvannamalia, TN, India, in January 2024.
*Note on shivalinga symbolism: Different tantric traditions interpret the shivalinga’s correspondence to aroopa-rooparoopa-roopa differently. Some teachings present the yoni as aroopa (formless) and the linga as roopa (form), as described above. Other traditions interpret the stone linga itself as rooparoopa—the subtle body or the interpenetrating realm—with the invisible/unmanifest Shiva as aroopa and the fully manifest world as roopa. Still others see the entire shivalinga unity as rooparoopa, the meeting place of consciousness and energy. The power of the shivalinga is that it holds all these interpretations simultaneously, refusing to be reduced to a single mapping. What remains constant across traditions: the shivalinga teaches the inseparability of formless and form, and the continuous creative process between them,
.Journal on Shivling and the resonance field.
