Tricycle | Awake in the World

THE WORD "CHARNEL" derives from "carnal"—in or of the flesh. A charnel ground is a place where fleshly bodies are discarded after death, where vultures, jackals, ravens descend to feed upon the juicy raw meat, leaving bloodied severed limbs and bones strewn about. Heaps of bones pile up. The charnel ground is a cemetery, a highly visible boneyard. It is the ritual spot where tantric adepts perform the shamanic chod, or "cutting" practice (a meditation on one's own dismembered body) that initiates the practitioner into the mysteries of death and birth. From a psychological point of view, the charnel ground is that state of mind in which birth and death occur simultaneously. It is a mental process of hope and desperation. You can't ignore it. The realities of pain, sickness, grasping, death are demonstrated all the time.