What is Tantric Practice?
What is Tantric Practice?
Barnaby B. Barratt, PhD, DHS
On tantric history
On tantric lifestyles
Acknowledgements and Appreciations
May all beings be happy and free;
May these writings contribute
to the happiness and freedom of all beings.
How to make best use of this book
The intent of this book is to offer a readily accessible and balanced answer to the question What is Tantric Practice? and so to clear up some of the many confusions surrounding the notion of tantra as it is being used today in North America, Europe, and elsewhere.
The question can be approached from a variety of angles, and could be answered in many ways and with different degrees of detail. So I would like to suggest that the manner in which you make use of this book can aptly be customized to suit your particular level of interest, your prior knowledge of tantra, and your preference for a practical approach, a philosophical approach, or an historical approach. In my mind there are at least five ways you might read this volume:
If you would like a quick answer to the question What is Tantric Practice? then I suggest you read Chapters 1, 2, 6, and perhaps 17 for good measure.
If you are considering embarking on tantric practice, perhaps even making it your spiritual path in life, then you will want at least to add Chapters 7 through 11, as well as Chapter 5 and Chapter 16. The first appendix is also written with you in mind.
III.   If you are skeptical about the spiritually esoteric notion that our human body contains subtle erotic energies, which do not conform to the objective picture of the bodys structures and functions as generated by western science, then I ask you to study (in addition to Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 17) Chapters 3 and 4. These Chapters are perhaps the most difficult to read because they attempt to specify “philosophically†the relation between the
divine and the mundane. These Chapters address a mode of embedded relatedness that is extremely difficult and ultimately impossible for our logical-analytic mind to grasp. We are intellectually attached to foundational assumptions that something either is or is not, that a phenomenon is either one way or the other, and that time is a linear, unidirectional flow, experienced only in the fullness of the present. These intellectual attachments sooner or later
obstruct our access to the reality of the divine. Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to honor your skeptical intellect, and yet demonstrate how this dimension of life that is spiritually esoteric may also be more profoundly and meaningfully real than the everyday world of appearances.
If you would like an historical answer to the question What is Tantric Practice? then Chapters 12 through 16 are written to satisfy this curiosity, and can be added to the basic reading of Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 17. The second and third appendices contribute additional historical details. Finally, I hope that there are some readers who will enjoy the entire book, and find benefit in its reading.
I have written this volume because, in the contemporary scene (in North America, in Europe, and elsewhere), the term tantra often merely implies a commitment to sexual practices that prolong pleasure, intensify orgasming, and promote styles of intimate relations that are more honoring, more emotionally engaged, and perhaps more spiritually grounded than might otherwise be the case.
As admirable as this commitment is, some people especially those with an interest in spiritual paths of Asian origin are becoming aware that tantra actually means more than this.
For example, it is well known that Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the XIV th Dalai Lama, is an abstinent monk, but less known is the fact that his spiritual practices are nonetheless tantric, as indeed, are all those who follow in his path.
What will be shown in this book is that all tantric spiritual practices are indeed erotic, but not necessarily sexual†in the conventional sense of the term sex. For tantric practitioners, the erotic entails the mobilization and alignment of our embodied spiritual energies toward the divine, and such spiritual practice may or may not involve sex in the usual sense.
As tantra becomes more widely known, we urgently need to appreciate something about spiritual practices that are erotic meaning that they lead us toward a union or an alignment of our subtle energies with the divine and which may or may not involve explicit sexual activity in the ordinary sense. To advance such an appreciation is one of the main intentions of this book. For there is much to be said about the ecstatic nature of these erotic spiritual practices meaning that they take us out of the conventional and stultifying construction of our egotism hus offering humanity powerful methods, which free us from our suffering by returning us to the Sacred Unity of Love.
The contemporary western world is understandably confused about the meaning of the tantric label. There has also been confusion in the lands of its origin the Indian subcontinent. Traditionally, the term has at least three different meanings relating to:
path of spiritual practices, and a way of living in meditation , that finds divinity within our embodiment as the abundant and exuberant flow of subtle sacred energies, and that taps into this flow with the intention of liberating ourselves from the structures that perpetuate human suffering.
body of literature called tantra that refer to any discipline by which knowledge, wisdom or intuition, are expanded, and that therefore may cover topics as seemingly diverse as psychology, medicine, botany, geology, astronomy and metaphysical philosophy as well as astrology, alchemy, and what many of us would consider magical procedures.
form of religious devotion, often mixed up with what is called Shaktism, which is the worship of female versions of deities (or female and male deities who are erotically conjoined), as anthropomorphic personifications of energetic principles that are found within the divinity of our human embodiment.
The three usages often overlap, but I believe it is helpful to parse them apart, so that we can understand the heart of tantric practice, and distinguish it from what is derivative, tangential, or even thoroughly distractive.
The focus of this work is on tantra as a spiritual practice that addresses the divinity of subtle energies that flow within, through, and all around, our human embodiment. The intent is not to offer any details or instructions as to how to practice tantric spiritual methods. Rather, the intent is to discuss the nature of tantric practice, so as to clear away misunderstandings, and thus to provide a confident orientation for anyone stepping onto the tantric path. A different sort of introduction to tantric philosophy is also available in my The Way of the BodyPrayerPath: Erotic Freedom and Spiritual Enlightenment (Xlibris, Philadelphia PA, 2004), which is a more personal vision of tantric possibilities.
It is my hope that this book will clarify your appreciation of tantra, that it will provide a useful answer to the question of its title. I also hope it will stir your interest in a spiritual practice that I have personally found to be the most challenging, yet precious and empowering, path toward authentic freedom and true joyfulness.
Santa Barbara, California Barnaby B. Barratt
Spring 2006 (also known as Bodhi Nataraj)
A look at tantric experience
Tantric practice is a sacred path of spiritual methods that awaken our awareness of the subtle energies that create the realities of this universe, and through this awakening, liberate us from the devices of our own psychospiritual imprisonment. In this essential sense,
Tantra is all about divine energy and spiritual awareness,
and tantric practice is a way of living in meditation.
Tantra is a spiritual path that invites us to explore deeply the mysteries of life and to free ourselves from suffering. Tantric practitioners know this path to be the spiritual-existential science that engages the reality of life as it truly is, here-and-now. It is because of this that tantric practice is sometimes described as a science which experiments with, and is founded in, our deepest experience of the creative-destructive lifeforce. Tantric practice experiments with our human experience of the lifeforce pervading all that is and is not, in the presence of our everyday lives.
On the tantric path, we find this experience of the lifeforce to be both human and divine. This discovery of the divine nature of our humanity is accessible to all of us through tantric practice. Such practice makes this discovery available to us precisely because its methods engage the sacred lifeforce not abstractly as cognitive beliefs or articles of faith about the divine, but rather concretely in the everyday context of the subtle energies that are our erotic embodiment.
That is, tantra accesses the deepest realities of our existence through the immediacy of what might be called our œsexual-spiritual being-in-the-world.†This is the sensuality of our embodiment. Tantric practice finds the deepest realities of our existence within this embodiment which is our body as the ground of all our lived experience, and as the conduit for sacred energy. In short,
Tantric practices of meditation engage the sacred energies of the lifeforce—
discovering them within ourselves as embodied human beings ”
and, by awakening our awareness to this divine calling within us,
these spiritual practices facilitate our liberation from suffering,
which is called our “enlightenment.
Tantra is the path of spiritual practices
that lead us into erotic union with the divine.
The intent of this book is to offer us a glimpse an intimation of and an invitation to the immense joy and freedom that tantric spiritual practice offers us. That is, it offers a glimpse of a deeper experiential and existential meaning that goes well beyond what can be adequately described in words. Let us begin by taking an “external†look at tantric experiences.
Tantric practice has many variants. Whether a particular tantric method works and plays with sexual-spiritual energies explicitly or implicitly is not as significant as the fact that all tantric experience addresses our awareness of these subtle sacred energies and grounds this awareness in our sensual experience that is, in the existential experience of our embodiment, the bodymind as we live in it and breathe through it. In my view and for the purposes of this bookâ s presentation tantra is the name for any and all spiritual practices that engage these subtle energies so as to cultivate ethically our awareness of them, finding them to be the divine potential that flows within, through and all around every human being. Consider the following five sketches.
A monk, who is trained in the Geluk tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (which is called vajrayana Buddhism), vows to follow the example of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and to abstain from genital pleasuring or intercourse. As part of his training, he will spend many disciplined hours contemplating images of the divine in order to align his inner energies with those intimated by the images he is
contemplating. If he attains the higher practices of what is sometimes called Anuttara Yoga Tantra, or the Supreme Yoga Tantra,†he will experience amazing movements of subtle energies within himself to the point where he becomes one with what in this tradition is known as the clear light mind.†That is, he will become one with Holy Spirit the awakened Buddhanature or Compassionate Witness
that lies naturally within every human being. As he practices, the energies he moves within himself are erotic for they are the same energies that we all glimpse when we experience a really wonderful orgasm. But this monk is not having sex†in the conventional sense of this term, and he never will. He is, however, practicing tantra, and he knows it.
A young woman spontaneously swims naked in the warmth of a Caribbean moonlit night. She relishes the sheer sensuality of the air on her skin, and the pleasures of the water cascading over her, smoothly supporting the fullness of her body. Slowly, she finds that she is “losing her mind.†Ripples of intense energy undulate through her body, as if her entire being were pulsating with a soft pervasive orgasming. Suddenly,
she feels as if she has dissolved, and she is at one with the moon and the stars. The vastness of the heavens is within her, and she is spread throughout the galaxy above and the watery depths below. There is an important sense in which this woman is initiating herself
onto the path of tantric experience. However, she may not recognize that this is what is happening to her, and regrettably she may never learn the tantric methods that facilitate this mode of experiencing. She may never learn how to move further into the spiritual opening or ethical awakening in which she has momentarily fallen.
A child jumps for joy at the exquisite beauty of a butterfly. In this moment of what some psychoanalysts have called jouissance, the child is at one with life itself, immersed solely in the enjoyment of the experience without conceptualization, without narratological context, without past and without future n love with the Love that is life itself, totally present.
An elderly couple begins to lovemake (let us suppose this is a heterosexual couple, although they could just as well be gay or lesbian). They bathe and massage each other tenderly. They join together in an hour of meditation, clearing their mind of all unnecessary preoccupations. Gradually, the
chatter that usually claims their attention subsides and disappears. They engage in a special ritual, in which each honors the divine light within the other and within the self. They caress each other slowly, deliciously, and extensively. Each feels entirely focused on the sensations that are flowing within and between their bodies. As they enjoy oral lovemaking, their mutual energy builds intensively.
It extends throughout their bodies, pervading the atmosphere around them, and rhythmically undulating through the air they breathe. Eventually, the woman invites his penis into her vagina. They move only softly, sufficient to maintain and expand the energies that are circulating within and between them. Their breathing coordinates, and becomes synchronized with this movement of subtle energies that is flowing within, between, and all around them.
They feel they are melting into each other, and dissolving into the universe itself. As they surrender into a prolonged orgasming, they lose the perception of any boundary between each other, or between themselves and the entire universe. They fall into an ecstatic flowing process of bliss. They are discovering tantric experience and indeed, they may or may not acknowledge that this is what they are doing but, regrettably, they probably do not know the methods by which such experimenting may be integrated into the routines of their everyday lives.
A Hindu yogi (sometimes called a sadhu or sadhvi lives in a cemetery next to the “charnel†grounds where bodies are cremated. He (or she) meditates there, attending to the way in which his thoughts and his sensations arise—insisting themselves upon his consciousness and then dissipate into the ether. He
lovemakes joyously with his partner his tantric consort in this place where death is everywhere apparent. He attends to the way in which life appears and then disappears every creation holding destruction within it, and every instance of destruction facilitating creativity. He becomes exquisitely aware of the “deathfulness that lives within life itself, and the way in which the liveliness of life blossoms from within the very processes of death. He experiences
the inherency by which a moment of destruction is required for every moment of creation, and in which every instance of creation will be destroyed. Facing immense physical and emotional hardship, he enjoys he “finds the joy in both life and death, both pleasure and pain. Practicing yoga, he becomes
enigmatically and extraordinarily aware of the way in which his own breath is merely a pulsation of the rhythm of all that is around him nd that this, indeed, is what his life most truly is, a mere pulsation in the diaphragm of the entire universe. He is practicing his tantric path, and he knows it. He is deliberately attending to his experiences toward his spiritual awakening.
Even glimpsed “externally†in this manner, it is surely evident that tantra offers us incredible opportunities to address the sensuality of our embodiment in a meditative way that expands our spiritual vision and insight to awaken or cultivate the spirituality of our experiential awareness, and to free ourselves from the obstacles to our inherent bliss.
An approach to tantric practice
Let us now take a more internal look at tantric experience. It can well be said that
Tantric processes awaken us to the way in which
the intense and personal realities of our presence in the world
align us with the infinite and supreme flow of the universe
which is that of the truthfulness of Love.
Loveis understood here not as the bonds of a positiveattachment between two or more people, but rather as the most profound and powerful vibration of spiritual energy that suffuses everything in the universe. As we will discuss throughout this book, tantric practice enables us to appreciate Love in this way as the Sacred Unity pervading the universe, conjoining all that is and is not.
It is in this sense that tantra opens our lives to Love. And it does so by freeing us from the encumbrance of repetitive and compulsive thinking, from the alleged necessity of faith, from futile efforts to return to imaginary pasts, or from stale promises about imaginary futures, and from our imprisonment within the dogma of our judgmentally chattering minds.
Appreciated in this manner, tantric practice can serve as a label for any spiritual practice that requires our courageous commitment to live life to its fullest in this present moment, to live on the edge of the raw beauty of our human experience, and to celebrate the sacred energies that create, destroy, and recreate this present universe by finding all these energies within the existential presence of our human embodiment.
Tantra is a spiritual practice that awakens us meditatively to the reality
of who we truly are, and of what life really is.
It invites us to dwell naturally, spiritually and ethically,
within the subtle desires of our embodiment,
and so to align ourselves with the Sacred Unity of Love.
If this statement is astounding or confusing, we can help ourselves by noticing at least three aspects of it.
Tantric practice is a universal spiritual path. It is not a religion. Its methods do not require our orthodox or fundamental subservience to a judgmental God. Rather, these methods invite us to live life as a spiritual and erotic experience and experiment in the here-and-now.
Let us briefly elaborate what it means to suggest that tantric practice is a spiritual path and not a religion. To be on the tantric path, no abstract comprehension is required, no subscription to a set of beliefs, and no leap of faith about some divine other†that is there-and-then, as contrasted with here-and-now in the present realities of our embodiment.
The former are the hallmarks of religious commitment, and not the constituents of tantric practice. In this sense—quite unlike the orthodoxy or fundamentalism of religious belief
tantra releases us from any need to think about, or subscribe to, anything that is not discoverable here-and-now, within the realities of our own immediate experience as living, breathing, laughing, dancing beings-in-the-world.
Many of us have already turned to organized religions and found, to our disappointment, that all too often their emedy for our suffering is an impossible return to the past, or the promise of something better in the future. This applies not only to the evangelical Christianity that seems predominant in the United States, but also to most fundamentalist orthodoxies in Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and other traditions.
All too often, such belief systems demand that we strive for a past-future that is better in terms of the criteria of our egotism more luxurious, totally safe, more comfortable, and definitely everlasting a heaven somewhere other than this earth. And this something better will be available to us only if we subscribe to a particular system of beliefs, and if we behave according to some moralizing ideology that is supposedly the price of our deserving
this eventual reward. Moreover, because God is conceptualized and narrated as an other that is somewhere there-and-then, these sorts of organized religion typically require that there be a clerical middle-man priest or pastor to interpret the dictates of this other to the faithful laity. In most organized religions, God is male and a strong advocate of patriarchal privilege, whose word is interpreted to the populace by clergy, who are usually also male.
It could be said that organized religions of this sort typically capitalize on the fearfulness of our egotism, exploiting its capacity for shame and guilt, telling us that whatever is present is bad, and reinforcing the chattering judgmentalism of our egotistic mind. It could also be said that, by the installation of clergy as middle-men, organized religions of this sort usually promote moralizing ideologies that support the specific interests of the ruling castes or classes, as well as the patriarchal system in general.
By contrast with such organized religions, the locus of spiritual practice is the individual’s relationship with the divine, and because tantric practice finds divinity within our human embodiment, no œmiddle-man is required to interpret the word of the other.
Against religion as the pursuit of something there-and-then, tantra invites spiritual experience that is grounded in the divine flow of the sensuality of our embodiment. Against this sort of tantric spiritual practice, religious faith tends to support our egotism s insistence that we should live anywhere except in the presence of our fullest experience of our own life here-and-now.
The blandishments of organized religion, the platitudes of its orthodox and fundamentalist underpinnings, have all too often left us longing for an authentically spiritual path. In this essential sense, much organized religion is effectively anti-spiritual.
Unlike the there-and-then†of organized religions,
tantra is existential and experiential;
inviting us to live ethically in an experimental adventure
that engages, erotically and ecstatically,
with what is really real and truly true,
within each of us individually.
Let us make a note here of what might be called the seven of tantra: Tantric practice is existential, experiential, ethical, experimental, and erotically-ecstatically engaging with life itself. Tantric spirituality involves methods of meditating with the body—it is always a practice, never a systematization of beliefs.
Tantric practice engages the subtle realities of sacred energy and is thus the royal road†to ending human suffering. Tantra is a mystical engagement with the realities of the lifeforce that vibrates and flows within us, through us, and all around us. This lifeforce is pervasively within, yet as if somehow besides and beyond, as well as all around, the apparent and conventional reality of things and thoughts.
As soon as we accept the tantric invitation to engage the reality of life as it truly is as soon as we begin to attend mindfully to the messages of our erotic embodiment we encounter at least a hint that life,†as it conventionally appears to us in all our conceptual and narratological discourse, may not be life as it truly is.
The only prerequisite to our stepping onto our tantric path is this openness to the possibility that there is a more profound reality to life than that of all the things commonly preoccupying us namely, all our identities, positions or stories, and all our strivings for comfort, credibility, fame and fortune. There is a more profound reality to life than anything that all the business and busyness of our egotism will allow us to know. There is a more profound reality than the phenomenal world of objects, attachments, and persons the world†within which we enact the drama of our ambitions and attachments, by constructing, revising and adapting all our judgments about what isâ and what should be.â€
To step onto the tantric path, we have at least to be a little open-minded to the possibility that this world, as we conventionally know it, is something of an illusion that partially conceals and yet somehow also reveals (in so far as it actually intimates to us) a more profound reality.
In Chapters Three and Four which are rather dense, philosophical chapters, that might be postponed or skipped by anyone who knows already the powerful experience of the subtle energies of our spiritual embodiment we will discuss the nature of this more profound reality, and suggest how this sacred universe of spiritual life is, in a crucial sense, more real than the reality of objects, attachments, and persons the ordinary world of things and thoughts.
At this juncture, let us briefly address the question: Given its esoteric nature, why would anyone bother with this spiritual life?
As with any spiritual practice, no one would be drawn toward tantra if they were fully happy with the mundane world as it appears to them. You have picked up this book, and you are drawn to tantra because, in our world as we have construed it, you and I are suffering.
Through the course of our life s journey thus far, perhaps you (like myself and all other tantric practitioners) have already had some strong hint that the preoccupations of this mundane world all our ambitions and attachments to objects, persons, and ideologies will not ultimately deliver happiness. Perhaps you have already found out that:
Our egotism s ambition to gain wealth, to accumulate material possessions, or to avoid the loss of anything to which we are attached, is never going to bring us happiness.
Our egotism strategies to achieve fame, to receive the attention or admiration of the masses, or at least to avoid reproach, scorn, persecution and disgrace, are never going to bring us happiness.
Our egotism extensive appetite for what it thinks of as love, for praise or validation from others, as well as its craving to be liked and respected or respectable, and to avoid blame, criticism, loneliness or isolation, is never going to bring us happiness.
Our egotisms insistent preoccupations with physical and emotional comfort, as well as its fantasies that it might evade decay, deterioration, and deat along with all its futile efforts to avert the inevitable pain and losses involved in the lived experience of life itself re never going to bring us happiness.
Perhaps your current situation is that you have pursued all these goals with greater or lesser degrees of success, and still found that material wealth, fame, praise, comfort, and even the attachments of what is commonly called love, do little or nothing to stave off the reality of our ubiquitous disease . The thrill of our egotism s successes in achieving what it craves comfort, credibility, fame and fortune always brings with it an intrinsic sense of lack, and the sense that whatever gratifications exist are only transitory. Everything that our egotism might tell us we can possess—our fortunes, our talents, and everything we hold most dear brings inherent frustration into our lives and will, in any event, sooner or later be lost.
Perhaps we find ourselves hugely successful in this mode of life, yet still aching for something more profound a more real and more effective way to live more fully, and to return to that which we desire the most the Sacred Unity of Love. The gratifications that our egotism has provided have left us numb, and in a certain sense, ever more alienated from the source of all that is really real.
Perhaps we sense that we have long since lost the intensity of our passion, the beautiful rawness of our human experience in the natural magnificence of this universe. Perhaps we sense that we have mortgaged ourselves for the achievement of false goals.
Or quite the reverse, perhaps we actually do know that we are anguished, wracked with grief and despair about the miserable state that we are in, and about the catastrophes of suffering that humans inflict upon themselves.
In any event, somehow either deep down or in our immediate awareness we are sad, frustrated with, or merely angry at, the futility of egotistic successes. We are frightened by the meaninglessness of a life organized around our egotism s inevitably futile attempts to avoid pain and loss.
We step onto the tantric path
because we are suffering in our life as we know it.
We are longing to find the genuine joy in life, to live life more fully.
We are longing to embark on our authentic spiritual journey.
Tantric practice is this spiritual journey,
for it engages the subtle energies of our personal embodiment,
and allows them to lead us to surrender ourselves
to the supreme flow of the universe,
which is the truthfulness of the Sacred Unity of Love.
The challenge of a journey is exactly what tantra offers us: A spiritual path grounded in our existential experimentation with the abundant flow of Holy Spirit that moves here-and-now within our erotic embodiment. The notion of Holy Spirit is, after all, just one way of pointing to the sacred energy by which we access the divine by which we align ourselves with the Sacred Unity of Love.
There are many other ways of speaking about this, and we will mention them later. The important point here is that, in this sense, tantra is any spiritual practice that engages the subtle realities of the sacred energy that calls from within us, through us, and all around us, and that aligns these embodied energies with Love.
Tantra is a high stakes spiritual practice, engaging every aspect of our lives. Tantra is not an easy route to happiness and freedom although it may be our only way out of suffering. Tantric practice is a high stakes adventure because, sooner or later, it challenges us to
release ourselves from the imprisonment of our egotism. This is n short why we must be skeptically cautious about currently prevalent tendencies, in the western world, to render “tantra†into some sort of show-business, or to reduce it to the admirable goal of having “hotter and more vibrant sexual partnerships.â€
There is a sense in which tantric practice is the “fast track to our spiritual awakening, but even so it is not an immediate solace in the face of our fear and trembling. If engaged seriously, tantra will not make our egotism feel good.†Far from it, our egotism mightily persistently and often sneakily resists authentically tantric practices precisely because they are its death knell.
Tantra invites us to trust exactly what our egotism, in its fundamental paranoia and grandiosity, cannot trust. It invites us to trust life itself, to trust the universe, and so to trust in the natural processes of our own ethical and spiritual awakening. It invites us to trust our own inner potential for spiritual awakening. Sooner or later, such trust entails the dissolution of our egotism, along with all its separatist and judgmental ideologies.
Tantra engages the reality of subtle energies
that lead us to surrender to the Sacred Unity of Love,
but in so doing, our egotism melts and dissolves.
Tantric practices cast us out of our preoccupations with conventional reality, out of the business and busyness of maintaining our worldly successes, and even out of the illusions of our attachments to the relationships that we ordinarily think of as love.†Such practices shake up the very foundations of our mundane sense of who or what we are.
Tantra leads us into a profound and infinite joyousness, but in a way that is awesomely challenging because, sooner or later, tantric practices bring into our awareness every painful experience that we have encoded in our embodiment. When we step onto the tantric path, we open our arms, our hearts, our genitals, and our entire body mind to life itself. If we imagine that this will merely bring joy immediately into our lives, we will find ourselves sorely mistaken.
Whenever our egotism imagines that we can select the pleasure and avert the pain of life, it will effectively have taken us off our spiritual path. And when our egotism imagines that spirituality means the avoidance of pleasure, it has also taken us off our spiritual path. Authentic tantric practice embraces life s pain, and transmutes it into enjoyment of the totality of life itself. Tantra opens us to the
full depth and intensity of our pain and loss, inviting us to live through these experiences in a way that ultimately liberates us from our suffering. Just as the potential for every joy in the universe can be discovered within our sacred body, so too can the possibility of every sorrow. The truthfulness of this is the discovery of tantric practice.
So tantra is not to be mistaken for our egotism s synthetic and superficial ideas about how to have fun.†It is not to be confused with a repertoire of feel good intimacies, nor even to the excellent project of having better sex. And it is not to be mistaken for anything remotely comforting to our egotism. Tantra is a seriously spiritual journey intent upon the relief of human suffering, but this is far from congenial to our egotism.
Tantra leads us into an erotic union a joyous, blissful, ecstatic union with the divine source of energies that are both within us and permeating the entire universe. But it is dangerous to all that seems initially to make sense,†and it is ultimately terrifying to our egotism. Tantric practice is the path of fire.
Apparent and otherwise realities
As we have already noted, to step onto the tantric path, we have at least to be a little open-minded to the possibility that this world, as we conventionally know it, is something of an illusion that partially conceals and yet somehow also reveals (in so far as it actually intimates to us) a more profound reality. To intellectually address the question What is tantric practice? we cannot avoid at least a brief, tentative and preliminary discussion of the nature of reality.
This will be the task of Chapters Three and Four. It is a challenging task because, from the standpoint of the logical analytic mindset the mindset that has dominated western thinking throughout the modern era tantric practice revolves around experiences with subtle energies that are esoteric, enigmatic and extraordinary. These spiritual energies are quite unlike the universe of things and
thoughts, and thus are difficult to appreciate for those who have not benefited from the power and profundity of tantric experience. It is easy for the logical analytic mindset to dismiss tantric experience as hocus pocus—and it is the intent of these Chapters to suggest the folly of such a dismissal.
What Lao-Tzu is alleged to have said about the Tao is true of our subtle spirituality, it is “nowhere to be found, yet it nourishes and completes all things. The subtle energies experienced through tantric practice are essentially un-nameable, un-discussable, invisible, immaterial and incomprehensible. Yet they are powerful, profound, and eternally real, and we are all able to open ourselves to experience the consequences of their momentum.
The ideas presented in this Chapter and the next may be difficult to comprehend, but their significance is potentially exciting. The mindset or episteme as some philosophers have called it that has dominated western thinking throughout the modern era is currently in the process of breaking down. New ways of appreciating reality are emerging postmodern impulses, deconstructive critical methods, and the
panorama of new sciences. These new ways challenge the foundations and limitations of logical analytic discourse and the conventionality of its mindset. In many ways, tantric experience that has been practiced for millennia is all about the very same complexities that postmodern thinking now rediscovers. In the following pages, we will try to describe how this might be.
Many cosmological visions and metaphysical philosophies, as well as epistemological and ontological deliberations, have been associated with tantric spiritual practice. Different lineages and traditions of tantra have generated various metaphysical formulations, as well as somewhat discrepant languages by which to try to convey spiritual discoveries that are founded in meditative practice.
However, we will do well to keep in mind that tantra is the spiritual practice of living in meditation. It is not a system of belief or ideology. The fact that many scholars have attempted to put insights gained through tantric practice into metaphysical or philosophical language does not mean that such intellectual productions are essential to our understanding of what tantra is. Indeed, we will also do
well to keep in mind that, in all such discussion, we merely point to realities that cannot be adequately conceptualized or narrated, but that ultimately need to be experienced through spiritual practice. Just as organized religion can easily become a detour and a distraction from spiritual practice, so too can the deliberations of philosophy obscure for us the meditative realities of tantric practice.
Tantra is spiritual, in that it addresses the experience of the ultimately esoteric reality of our being-in-the-world. It is mystical in that its practices address realities which dwell within, yet as if somehow besides and beyond, as well as all around, the conventional world of things and thoughts.
Some tantric adepts specifically within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition peak of tantric practice as discovering three embedded modes of reality, which are labeled gross, subtle, and extremely subtle. In many other traditions of tantric practice specifically the Hindu lineages adepts usually speak of only the gross and subtle modes of reality.
In brief, gross reality is the world of phenomenal appearances . It consists of the apparent and conventional world of things and thoughts, and it is the world manifested to us in the categorical or conceptual and narratological structures of our judgmental mind (which we might call our representational consciousness, or the chattering of our egotism).
Subtle reality is that of the esoteric lifeforce the sexual-spiritual energies which pervasively breathe and dance erotically within us, through us, and all around us. It is a reality that is immanifest owhere to be found in Lao-Tzu s words yet it can be spiritually
discerned and experienced. That is, through spiritual practice we can know this reality, even though unlike the gross reality of things and thought the subtleties of this spiritual reality cannot be proved logically or analytically, and they never become fully evident to us through the static representations of our judgmental and chattering mind.
When some adepts speak of a distinction between subtle and extremely subtle realities, that latter usually concerns the nature or transmission of consciousness through death which we will term the deathfulness of life itself. Unlike the world of gross reality where something either is or it is not, and is either present or absent in the world€ of spiritual energy, life and
death are not opposites. Rather, it is discovered that every instance of life inscribes the deathfulness of its being. The liveliness of life blossoms from within the very processes of death nd there is an inherency in which every moment of destruction is a moment of creation, and every instance of creation carries its own aspect of destructiveness.
To express this differently, when we examine the world of gross appearances things and thoughts we find them to be without inherent quality or substance. What appears to be the substantiality of things and thoughts implodes, and opens our consciousness to the Sacred Unity of Emptiness Compassion or Love that is the essence of all that is and is not, throughout and beyond what we conventionally comprehend as time and space.
The reality of the extremely subtle dimension is known through advanced tantric practice, and is scarcely within the scope of an introductory book such as this. In any event, mystics of all persuasions are adamant that this dimension is not discussable for it is a reality that is well beyond comprehension in words. So it will be touched on only indirectly in the course of this volume.
In this introduction, we will not delve too far into metaphysical complications, but rather will try to present some of the essential ideas in as accessible a manner as possible. We will limit our focus to the distinction that is crucial for our initiation into tantric practices. That is, the differing between the universe seen in terms of the phenomenal appearances of things or thoughts, and the universe glimpsed as the operation of deeply interconnected energies that comprise the Sacred Unity of all that is and is not. We will use the term “differing†here because, as will be shown, this is an otherwise or “different sort of difference.
Gross reality is the representational world of thing-formations and thought-
formations. Without spiritual practice that is, unless we awaken ourselves through living our lives in meditation we merely operate our existence, from cradle to grave, within the appearances of a conventional or mundane reality. This is our ross reality. The label is not necessarily intended to seem pejorative think of gross in the sense of the world as we ordinarily experience it.†Gross reality is the world as our consciousness represents it in everyday life. It is the world of things (such as chairs or oranges) and thoughts (such as I am interested in tantra or these ideas are hard to grasp).
Gross reality is the subject/object world of thing-formations and thought-
formations, as well as of all the transformations that may occur between them. We call them formations because they are synthetic events formed by our representational consciousness (the consciousness that perceives or imagines a chair, and that conceptualizes or narrates the condition of being interested in something).
This world consists not only of things such as planets, rocks and pebbles (of insects and birds, trees, benches, guns, social institutions and natural disasters), but also of all our thoughts or propositions about them, our attributed values and ideologies (this is mad, this is mathematically correct, this is rational, this is democratic, this is jealousy, this is affection, this is important).
Gross reality thus also includes our mundane “self. That is, it includes all the identities, positions and stories that the judgmentalism of our egotism maintains and refers to as me. This might include propositions concerning how this self has two arms and two legs, likes to laugh but is sometimes irritable, works as a healer, is a father and a lover, believes that politics is mischief and that patriotism damages our humanity, is fond of swimming in the ocean, and of eating mildly curried vegetable and so on.
In this manner, gross reality consists of things and thoughts, as enunciated by our cognitively discriminative, discursive, or judgmental mind our representational consciousness or the chattering mind of our egotism. It is the world portrayed in all our concepts and our stories, and it is a world that can be talked about and that makes sense to reasonable people.â€
As has already been suggested, if we look deeply and carefully into this world as it is presented to us in all our concepts and narratives, and all our identities, positions and stories, we begin to understand that far from being as solid and real as we commonly take it to be it is actually quite tenuous and, in a special sense, thoroughly deceptive or illusory.
Gross reality is illusory, and sometimes outright delusional. It appears to us as a world of things and thoughts represented as if they were separate and discretely solid entities or formations, which are judgmentally and hierarchically organized along a singular and linear arrow of time. Things and thoughts are accessible to us as representations and, in a sense, the world of representational formations is relatively static. Things and thoughts can change, because
one representation can be transformed into another. However, despite this capacity for change, phenomenal events remain somewhat static both because their representation establishes them in what might be called identitarian constructions. That is, our representational consciousness makes things appear statically identical with themselves as if A is always and that that! This is like a denial or disavowal of the fluid and dynamic nature of all things. The latter is a reality in which, by the time you have named A as A, it has actually become something different from this representation which is just that, a re- presentation.
In brief, our representational consciousness makes things appear as if they were temporally and spatially discrete, independent or autonomous. This illusion of substantiality is an appearance achieved by the compulsive repetitiousness of their representation (and, as we will shortly mention, by the way in which our representational consciousness then enunciates the transformation between representations as a narratological sequence).
In reality, nothing is temporally and spatially discrete, independent or autonomous. The gross reality of representations by means of its repetition compulsion merely fixes it to appear as such. For example, even with the abstract proposition that A is A, the identity is illusory, because the meaningfulness of “A is A actually depends on the corollary that A is not B, which is not etc. And again, by the time our representational consciousness has stipulated that “A is A, reality has actually already flowed into something different.
The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus is famous for his aphorism that you cannot step into the same river twic because the waters have already moved on. Reality is flux, and the sense of constancy and consistency provided by our representational consciousness is an illusion.
The edifice of representations constructed for our egotism never actually presents the real presence of our experience. Rather, every thought and thing is re- presented. The here-and-now of raw experience disappears within and behind the barrage of conceptual discourse about experience. Such discourse is not the present itself, but always refers to pasts and futures, which our egotism weaves into a storyline that merely appears dynamic. Representational thinking obeys an imperative to narrate everything within a regimented law and order.
To express this as simply as possible: In the representational consciousness of our judgmentally chattering mind our egotism the actual presence of what is “now†absents itself within a present that is merely represented in terms of past-futures. And the reality of a flowing presence of interconnected energies disappears within, or is obscured by, the edifice of concepts and narratives constructed by this representational consciousness.
The representational world this gross reality of things and thoughts as they appear to us s an edifice that only appears to make sense because our egotism incessantly and compulsively repeats it. It repeats these representations and contextualizes them within a narratological sequence of such repetitions. In sum, the reality inhabited by our egotism only appears as if it were solid and stable because the chatter of representational or judgmental consciousness the formulations and enunciations of all our discursive, conceptual and narratological, constructions compulsively and repetitively positions and repositions all its identities, attitudes and stories about what is what and what should be.
The semiotic world of our egotism hat is, the world of all that can be represented and thus seems significant to itâ is conjointly sustained by what was elsewhere discussed (in my 1993 book, Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse ) as its repetition compulsion and its narratological imperative.
and our sense of self within it,
is constructed to appear as if it were solid and stable
by means of the incessant representational or judgmental activity
(the positing and repositing of all our identities, positions, and stories)
that preoccupies the chattering mind of our egotism.
Our egotisms incessant conceptual and narratological activity effectively closes over, represses or conceals our experience of the rawness of the lifeforce itself the aliveness of spiritual life. This is the gross reality in which, without spiritual practice, we live out our lives, constructed and incessantly held in place by the tyranny of discriminatory cognition and discursive thinking. This is the world of all that is the case or more accurately, all that appears to be the case he world that can be talked about and that makes sense to reasonable people. It is a world that might be subjected to the dominance of our egotism, with its hollow claim to a self-made empire, but it is actually a world of illusion and delusion.
Subtle reality is the immanifest universe of divine energy that interconnects all that is and is not. Reality is not just the (non)existence of things and thoughts that appear illusorily as if they were static and separate entities or events. That is, reality is not just a set of entities and events organized hierarchically by the judgmentalism of a representational mind, which establishes everything within a discrete and linear timespace by incessantly referring the present to pasts and futures that can be re-presented. Contrary to these illusions of representational consciousness, reality is spiritualt is the flowing ever-presence of the interconnected energies of the lifeforce. But this spiritual reality actually seems to disappear within the edifice of concepts and narratives constructed by representational consciousness.
Through tantric practice through living in meditation we come to know a spiritual reality that the subject/object interpretation of experience through concepts and narratives can perhaps point toward, but cannot reach. That is, we come to know this subtle reality through spiritual awareness and processes of spiritual discernment, and not because it can be captured by our representational consciousness. The world of concepts and narratives is the conditioned, constrained, or imprisoned experience of our egotism s chattering mind and it is this judgmentalism of discriminative and discursive thinking that closes off our access to spiritual experience or, at best, points to spiritual reality only as the presencing of an alive absence within and beyond itself.
The subtlety of spiritual life exists
in a differing or otherwise “mode†of timespace
than that on which our
conceptual and narratological discourse operates.
Subtle energy, our spirituality, is the otherwise,
formless presence of aliveness as
interconnectedness, interdependence and impermanence.
These subtle energies are the flowing consciousness
of an otherwise reality that responds,
not to the ambitions of our egotism,
but to the attentions and intentions of spiritual awareness.
Â
These subtle energies of a dynamis that is otherwise than the world of gross reality have been given many different names: Prana, kundalini, Shaktis energy, light or spirit in tantric yoga, in the Taoist teachings ( ki in Japanese variants), ruach in the Hebrew tradition, Holy Spirit in subsequent traditions, Great Spirit in some indigenous cultures, and libidinality in psychoanalytic writings.
In my earlier book, Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse, I called this erotic energy the kinesis of desire. But we need to note that desire is to be understood in a way that radically differentiates it from the clinging, craving, or grasping of our egotismâ for as Lao-Tzu indicates, freed from craving and clinging, you realize the mystery; caught in craving and clinging, you see only the manifestations.
All these terminologies are various ways in which spiritual practitioners point to the lifeforce of cosmic energies or vibrations that immanifestly pervade all thing-formations and thought-formations (including all the identities, positions and stories, we think of as our elf ), and that are almost virtually evident as the breath of the spirit of life within us.
This is the lifeforce that moves, flows, pulses and undulates through us and all around us, as an inherent kinetic momentum that spells deathfulness in relation to the static representational formations of things and thoughts that preoccupy our egotism (with all its clinging, craving and grasping to fixate an enduring realityâ for itself).
We may note here that subtle energy is the formlessness of a presence that seamlessly interconnects all that is and is not. In a notion borrowed from Thich Nhat Hanh, as much as from quantum physics, perhaps this is well expressed as the interbeing of existence and non-existence, because the subtle energy of the lifeforce indeed courses through all being and non-being, in life and in death. Although not evident to representational consciousness, this subtle energy is the brio or liveliness of life itself the nonlinear interdependent complexity or chaos by which the universe operates.
Thus, our spiritual reality celebrates the impermanence of all that is and is not, and is a reality in which there is neither past nor future, but rather an all-pervasive and infinite presence.
Subtle energy is thus like a pervasive and absolute consciousness or mind that is present in all that is and is not, including the fixated thing-formations and thought-formations constructed by the representational mind. It cannot be manipulated by the transformations affected by our egotism, yet it can be accessed transmutively through the focused intentionality of our spiritual awareness.
There is a saying in tantric practice, prana goes wherever awareness goes,†meaning that the attention and the intention of spiritual awareness affects the course of the lifeforce that flows within us, through us, and all around us. Subtle energy responds to our spiritual awareness of it, but it is unmoved by the ambitions of our egotism. In this sense, subtle energy is the intentionality or consciousness of Holy Spirit, that moves and flows through all that is and is not.
Appearances suggest that reality is otherwise.†As soon as our awareness focuses on the reality of subtle energy, the imperatives of our egotism are undermined. The judgmental mind constructs its edifice of representations as if to reassure our egotism that its world is solid, stable and substantial. Our egotistic mind chatters as if to reassure itself that it really exists,†and even that it is imperialistically right, proper, true, and effective. The momentum of subtle energy subverts these pretensions.
The flowing spontaneity of our spiritual life unsettles and subverts, deconstructs and dissolves, the static formations of gross reality to which our egotism is addictively attached.
Subtle energy is the dynamic spiritual consciousness,
a flowing spontaneity of being and non-being,
which is the liveliness of life and death,
and which spells disaster for our egotism.
As we will discuss further in Chapter Four, the formations of gross reality depend on the energy of the subtle reality that they are themselves designed to conceal or repress. Yet, in a vital sense, the kinesis the â inner calling or silent voice of spiritual flowing, the spontaneity of the presence of subtle energies, deconstructs the edifice of the representational mind. Subtle energy courses within and through the chattering minds constructions unsettling, disrupting and dissolving their static, independent and autonomous appearance.
There is a profound sense in which the gross reality of the mundane world inhabited by our egotism is precisely designed to obstruct and block our awareness of the divine that is within our awareness of the subtle energies that comprise the Sacred Unity of Love.
Endnote: If you would like to read a different sort of presentation of the philosophical notions preoccupying this Chapter and the next, there is a parallel discussion of these issues, in which the relation between the aw and order of semiosis (gross reality) and the kinesis of desire (subtle reality) is discussed, in my Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse: Knowing and Being since Freuds Psychology (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1993).
4. On the immanifest nature of the divine
This Chapter addresses three complex but crucially significant issues that emerge from our preliminary discussion of the difference between the world of phenomenal appearances and the universe of divine energies:
The nature of the embedding of subtle reality such that it is in but not of the formations of gross reality, and such that the universe of divine energies animates our consciousness but cannot be captured within our representational discourse.
The way in which the momentum of divine energies necessarily threatens the security of our egotism, which is constructed by means of its efforts to obstruct or block the flow of our spirituality.
The way in which this dual-unity or nified duality of the mundane appearances and divine energies has been given mythematic expression notably in the imagery of the universe as created by Shakti and Shiva that can be a helpful guide to tantric practice.
In the brevity of this book, we can give each of these topics only brief consideration, but this preliminary orientation is necessary to understand the distinctive value of tantric spiritual practice. Obviously, these ideas are challenging and obscure especially to the representational system of logical and analytic thinking into which we, living in the modern era of western societies, have been acculturated.
However, let us keep in focus that we are discussing matters that are profoundly significant for our lives, even if they are esoteric, enigmatic and extraordinary. To borrow again from Lao-Tzus poetry about the Tao, it can be said that the words that point to the divinity of the lifeforce the Tao may seem monotonous and flavorless when you look for the lifeforce, there is nothing to see, except its manifestations when you listen for it, there is profound silence yet when you use it, it is inexhaustible nowhere to be found, it nourishes and completes all things.
The divine is n but not of the mundane world of appearances. It is easily within the capability of our representational consciousness to think that there might be an ther reality, somewhere different from the appearances of the universe around us. So it is not surprising that, in our more popular theologies, it is commonly said that there is a divine order that is other than the reality in which we live. It is sometimes also said that the mundane or profane world actually hides this reality of the divine from our sight. This is the usual notion of a wonderful place called heaven, which is definitely separate and different from this earth on which we suffer.
Religious clergy of all persuasions capitalize on this popular belief whenever they preach about God as if He rarely She is out there taking an interest in the business and busyness of the human world, and yet available to us on the condition that we elevate our gaze to the heavens, and conduct ourselves in a suitably pious manner. This may be a drastic oversimplification that is unfair to the theological complexities of major religious systems of belief, but it will serve to illustrate a crucial point about tantric practice.
It is well within the capability of our representational consciousness to think of the divine as some ther reality, different from that of the apparent world around us. It is easy for our representational consciousness to imagine heaven as somewhere other than here-and-now on earth. It is easy to imagine that the divine is different than and therefore separate from the mundane.
For example, conventional and orthodox (that is, non-tantric ) Hindus believe that brahman is different and separate from maya . The latter is the transforming and impermanent phenomenal world of appearances or dualistic subject/object forms, which are deceptive or illusory in that they hide the reality of the former. And the former is the imperishable, supreme, nondual, absolute or Godhead (a supreme consciousness or divine elf ).
Somewhat similarly, many hinayana and some mahayana Buddhists (by which I mean those who have not yet stepped onto the tantric or vajrayana path) readily speak of nirvana as different and separate from samsara . The latter is the gross reality of phenomenal appearances a world conditioned by hostility or hatred, grasping or greed, and delusion or ignorance. It is deceptive or illusory in that it hides the reality of the nirvana, which is the process and condition of liberation and illumination, free from suffering as the highest transcendent process of consciousness that is sacred Emptiness.
As we will discuss in Chapters Twelve through Fourteen, tantric practice is understood historically to have emerged from the Hindu-Buddhist (and Jain) traditions of religious belief. At least, tantric practice by this name emerged in this context. However, as we will discuss in Chapter Fifteen, there may be many tantric practices by other names coming from other traditions Taoism and Sufism being notable examples.
What is crucial to understand here is how tantra diverges from, and thus enriches, conventional and orthodox systems of belief, at least to the extent that they espouse the popular notion of one reality that is different and separate from an “other,†for which we hope and dream.
Unlike non-tantric Hindus, the meditation methods of tantric practitioners discover that brahman is different but not separate from maya. Unlike non-tantric Buddhists, tantric practitioners find that nirvana is different yet inseparable from samsara.
different sort of difference. Our representational consciousness has no difficulty thinking about the other that is, a state or condition that is different and separate from whatever is represented as present. However, our representational consciousness stumbles over the otherwise that is, a process different but not separate or different yet inseparable from the identitarian representation of the present.
To express this succinctly, representational consciousness cannot represent that which the law and order of the formation of its representations is designed to obstruct, block, or censor. Our conceptual and narratological discourse the discourse of our judgmental and chattering mind wards off the disruptive flow of this different sort of difference.
Yet this different sort of difference†is precisely what is discovered whenever tantric practice accesses the spiritual flow of our subtle energies, and cultivates our awareness or discernment of this momentum. This otherwise embedded process of unified duality or dual unity of difference in identity or identity in difference s the only way we can point to the nature of subtle reality as a flowing momentum that is in but not of the gross reality of thing-formations and thought-formations.
Of course, notions like unified duality and dual unity disrupt our representational consciousness attachment to the precepts of hat makes sense. Indeed, we might think of this sort of notion like a Zen koan, a paradox that evades any solution by rational or discursive comprehension. The notion thus takes us toward a transcendent understanding of reality, and unveils for us the limitations of the logical, analytic, conceptual and narratological domain. Perhaps, it is helpful here to recall Oshos teaching that truthfulness is always ttained in emptiness and is lost in words it is neither to be created nor proved, but only to be unveiled.
What is crucial to understand here is the way in which tantric spiritual practice discloses a reality that both is and is not; that is both either/or and neither/nor; and that thus defies our representational mind insistence that presence and absence are mutually exclusive. In this respect, tantric spiritual practice emerges from and radicalizes both Hindu and Buddhist belief systems that are antecedent to it, and that provided the historical context for this emergence.
In non-tantric Hinduism, brahman is designated the representational other of maya the absolute that is outside the relative and impermanent world of appearances. In non-tantric Buddhism, nirvana is often depicted as the other of samsara. Contrasted with these beliefs, the methods of tantric spiritual practice discover that the vitality of this divinity lies hidden as an “alive absencing within the presence of our embodiment. This subtle reality of erotic energies is otherwis than the formations of gross reality, but it is not, and cannot be, its representational other.
Gautama Buddhas Heart Sutra informs us that “all forms and events are nothing but emptiness, and emptiness is nowhere but in forms and events.†This has also been translated as “form is no other than emptiness, and emptiness is no other than form. That is, phenomenal appearances are empty and there is no emptiness or subtle mode of reality outside of that which appears to us in
thing-formations and thought-formations. The formations of gross reality depend on the emptiness of subtle energy that lies hidden within them, and the sacredness of subtle energy is nowhere to be found but hidden within the gross formations of things and thoughts. As the tantric adept, Saraha, sang, samsara and nirvana are not two they are otherwise different, but one.
The differing between phenomenal appearances and the reality of the lifeforce is quite unlike the distinctions we make between different sorts of things, such as tables and chairs, or the distinctions we make between different sorts of thoughts or abstract qualities, such as courage and foolhardiness or even “rationality†and irrationality. It is not a distinction that can itself be represented. It is, so to
speak, a difference of a different nature—such that it is tempting to appropriate the term diffeance from contemporary research in deconstruction to point to this different sort of difference.
Because spiritual life involves this otherwise embedded process that is concealed yet also somehow revealed as if by intimation, within the fixative formations of appearances it seems crucially important that we heed Gautama Buddhas warning not to mistake the finger that points toward the moon for the moon itself.
Reading and listening to words about spiritual practice cannot adequately describe the realities that are to be experienced through spiritual practice itself. Tantric practice cannot truly be taught as if it were an experience to be categorized in our heads. Rather, it has to be experienced with an open heart. So if we are open to entering the experience of tantric meditation, sooner or later we must relinquish our egotisms megalomanic dream of understanding everything, and being in charge as much as possible.
The otherwise as the divine threat to our egotism. It is our egotisms imperialist ambition to erase whatever is otherwise within itself. Our egotisms modus operandi is the denial, disavowal or repudiation of the spirit that it suppresses and represses within itself. Its megalomanic dream is to erase the deathfulness of the aliveness that lies hidden within the formations that comprise its world.
Our egotism’s world is the gross reality of appearances representations of things, of thoughts, and of the elfthat are repetitively and compulsively asserted, such that our egotism incessantly renders conceptualizations and storylines out of everything that it concedes exists. The purpose of the incessant productivity of enunciation (the repetition compulsion and the narratological imperative), and the goal of all our egotisms judgmental chatter, is as follows:
It is that our egotism can thereby reassure itself that it is real in the sense of solid, stable, and substantial and even so that it can reassure itself that it is itself right, proper, true, effective,†and indeed exclusively so. In its grandiosity, our egotism tells us that it could be the King that rules over the Empire of Realit asserting this rule by means of the alleged law and order of all its conceptual and narratological chatter if only it could be given enough time to construct representations of absolutely everything that is and ever could
Our egotism judges and chatters as if by doing so it could overcome
the deathfulness of its own being,
which is intimated by the voidness of all that it represents as present,
and by the abundance and exuberance of the lifeforce
that is hidden within its own edifice of appearances.
Yet the grandiose claims of our egotism always betray the lack inevitably inherent in its own constructions. As mentioned in Chapter Two, everything our egotism offers us, such as the thrill of getting what it wants (comfort, credibility, fame and fortune), and everything that our egotism tells us we might possess (our fortunes, our talents, and everything we hold most dear) always brings an intrinsic sense of lack, and invariably brings frustration, into our lives. And our egotisms uccesses are, in any event, unavoidably impermanent.
Our egotism is deceptive in that it tells us incessantly that it is not itself always castrated inadequate, insufficient, or lacking and yet it is. It tells us incessantly that it is the author of its own destiny, yet it never is. It tells us, repetitively and compulsively, that it is the creator of its own meaningfulness despite the reality that as we open ourselves to our spiritual life, we discover that what preoccupies our egotism is virtually meaningless. And it tells us that, if only it were given enough time, it could well reign forevermore despite the reality that deathfulness is all around it and hidden within its own constructions.
Our egotism forces us to live in a world of illusion and delusion. And the reality of spiritual practice that accesses and mobilizes the subtle erotic energies that flow within, and that cultivates our spiritual awareness or discernment of them, is profoundly threatening to all that our egotism holds dear, and to the foundations of its sense of security.
That there is an abundance and exuberance of the sacred lifeforce breathing, vibrating, moving, dancing, and resounding through the stale and stagnant formations and transformations of the representational world is a transmutive immanence against which our egotism establishes itself. The flow and pulsation of erotic energy that infiltrates as if in a momentum of contradictoriness the formations of our egotism threaten to deconstruct and dissolve its law and order. Our egotism is constructed precisely to obstruct and block this flow from its representational consciousness.
Whenever the sacred is intimated, our egotism glimpses the absurdity of its own grandeur and the hollowness of its own imperial ambitions. In such intimations, our egotism experiences a threefold intuition about all the entities that it has constructed as if they were discrete and separate. Even with its inherent character as the purveyor of illusions and delusions, our egotism is able to intuit: that the world of thing-formations and thought-formations that it inhabits is without solidity or substance; that what it takes to be its self is without solidity or substance; and that both its world and its self are instable and impermanent. In this moment of glimpsing what is really real , our egotism faces, and then falls into, the abyss.
In a certain sense, the imagery of the feminine Shakti and the masculine Shiva is a mythic polarity that points to the duality (or more precisely, the unity-in-duality) of different forces at work and play in the cosmos. These inextricably partnered consorts are deities that are found in many different forms throughout the mythematics of Hinduism, as well as in many Buddhist contexts specifically, the context of tantric Buddhism.
In some contexts, the mythematic separateness of a feminine and a masculine deity is convenient shorthand for the distinctiveness of energy and form.
For tantric practitioners, who discover the inseparability of the subtle flow of the lifeforce and the formations of appearances, the mythematic imagery of a feminine and masculine deity entwined in divine intercourse has special significance. This imagery, in which the lovemaking couple are erotically entwined face-to-face (in what is called yabyum ), hints at the unity-in-duality or difference-in-identity that is glimpsed orgasmically, and that expresses the embedded nature of subtle energies within the formations of appearances.
This mythematic is deployed with many variants and versions, as well as discrepancies and divergences. In addition, innumerable variations in the images and nomenclature of these deity personifications adds exorbitantly to the prevalent confusions. In general,
Shiva, the divine masculine principle,
is the form and structure of appearances,
that contains, and perhaps nurtures or celebrates,
the expansiveness and exuberance of Shakti,
the divine feminine principle,
that is the free-flow of creative-destructive energies.
However, even if we limit ourselves to examining the mythematics of traditional tantric practice and leave out any consideration of non-tantric Hindu and Buddhist myths ”complexities remain.
For example, in some cosmologies of Hindu tantra, Shiva is depicted as rather passive and unmoving, and Shakti is depicted as an inner active power. This accounts for the tantric aphorism, Shiva without Shakti is a corpse.†By contrast, in some cosmologies of Buddhist tantra, Shiva is depicted as somewhat more
active, manifesting upaya or skill (as in the skillful method of deconstructing the conceptual and narratological world of our egotistic judgmentalism), and Shakti is depicted as somewhat more passive, manifesting prajna or wisdom (as in the non-conceptual wisdom of an insight into the emptiness of the conceptual and narratological world of our egotistic judgmentalism).
Another divergence between Hindu and Buddhist tantra needs to be mentioned here, since it is related to the discrepant ways in which Shakti and Shiva are characterized. This concerns the characterization of what is otherwise than the gross reality of phenomenal appearances. In Hindu tantra, this is brahman (on an individual level, this is also called atman ), which is the imperishable, supreme, nondual, absolute or Godhead. This is characterized as a supreme consciousness or divine “Self.â€
By contrast, in Buddhist tantra, the reality otherwise than that of phenomenal appearances is described as Emptiness or shunyata. This is the voidness of the conceptual and narratological world of thing-formations and thought-formations. Through meditation, Buddhists realize that the world of frustration and suffering is empty, impermanent, and without any essence or self ( anatman ). And
the miraculous discovery that mahayana and vajrayana practitioners make through the spiritual practice of meditation which we will reiterate throughout this volume is that Emptiness is Compassion . They are one-and-the-same, for the Emptiness of subtle and extremely subtle realities is the Sacred Unity of Love.
To paraphrase Saraha, all those with chattering minds, deluded by judgmental thought, discuss emptiness and compassion as if they were two things. They are not. The truthfulness of the supreme flow of the universe, the Sacred Unity of Love or Compassion, is shunyata.
The debates between Hindu and Buddhist insights whether what the spiritual practice of meditation reveals is the transcendent Self of a supreme consciousness, or the absolute Unity of Emptiness that is Compassion or Love have persisted for centuries. Although
they might have implications for our daily meditation, my inclination is to suggest that unless we are advanced tantric practitioners ”we may well set aside these debates, and focus our attentions on the tantric methods by which our egotism may be invited to relinquish its addictive attachment to itself.
The imagery of Shakti and Shiva may or may not be beneficial in this task. In my opinion this is very much a matter of how this imagery is deployed in our daily spiritual work and play. For our purposes, we may wish to imagine how, inseparably together yet different, Shakti and Shivas erotic union brings about the existence and non-existence of all that is created and destroyed. Realizing, in their
humanity, the unity of their divinity, their engagement portrays the principle of spiritual enlightenment, embracing all that is and is not, dissolving all polarities and conflicting forces that are within us, and offering us ecstasy. As is celebrated in many tantric songs and poems shakti and Shiva are both alive within the embodiment and the being-in-the-world of each and every one of us, awaiting our intention to engage them in their spiritual workplay.
We may summarize this mythematic by suggesting that eternally entwined together Shakti and Shiva intimate respectively certain cosmic principles, which are as follows.
Shiva is masculine whereas Shakti is feminine.
Shiva is the form that contains Shaktis free-form or formless energies.
Shiva is static-transformative whereas Shakti is dynamic-kinetic and transmutive.
Shiva is about closure or manifestation whereas Shakti is openness or spaciousness of the immanifest.
Shiva stands for the law and order of concepts-narratives, for representational discourse, whereas Shakti is the subversive dancing of freely playful meaningfulness that defies and subverts the mechanisms of representation.
It must be added here that, in western tantric circles, there is much nonsense talked about masculine and eminine. Perhaps it needs to be reiterated that each and every individual has both Shakti and Shiva, both subtle energy and the formations that contain it (even by obstructing or blocking its free-flow), within his or her embodiment. As the tantric adept, Saraha, who lived around the beginning of the 9 th century c.e., is believed to have sung,
“Within my body are all the sacred places of the world,
and the most profound pilgrimage
I can ever make is within my own body.
This echoes the discovery celebrated in the Chandogya Upanishad, which was written sometime between 1200 and 400 b.c.e.,
“As large and potent as the universe outside,
even so large and potent is the universe within our being.
Within each of us are heaven and earth,
the sun and moon, lightning and all the myriad of stars.
Everything in the macrocosm is in this our microcosm.â€
So the device of imaging Shiva and Shakti as male and female is just that it is a device. We might even suggest that it is a pedagogic device that, if it distracts us from our spiritual practice, fails to serve its intended purpose. In the sense that is genuinely intended, Shakti and Shiva are inherent in every man and in every woman—and tantric practice is as much for gays and lesbians as it is for those whose orientation is heterosexual.
When we view an image of Shakti and Shiva as a man and woman embracing, it is well to remember that both aspects reside within the embodiment of every one of us. In our contemporary context, we might note here how this ancient tantric insight has been rediscovered by radical psychoanalysis and by postmodern trends in feminism and deconstruction. Masculine†and feminine†are potentials within each of us, and
the question is always how we engage them and align them. When tantric adepts practice sexual methods together for example, when heterosexual consorts engage ritually in sacred intercourse it is well to remember that both the man and the woman are in the process of aligning and re-aligning the Shakti and the Shiva that are aspects within both of them. The same is true of tantric methods engaged by two men or two women, or in other configurations. In this sense, tantric practice always transcends issues of orientation and gender.
Given the prevalence of some rather loose talk current in western tantric circles, perhaps it also needs to be emphasized here that there is really no such thing as masculine energy or feminine energy. At best, this terminology is shorthand for different ways in which
our representational consciousness categorizes the effects of subtle energy; at worst, it is profoundly misleading. Feminine and œmasculine are merely designations that our egotism uses to categorize different sorts of transformations or forces within itself. Energy is energy how our representational consciousness conceptualizes and narrates its effects is another matter.
The only real distinction of crucial significance to spiritual practice is whether energy is flowing freely or is, so to speak, stuck in our egotism.
If appreciated in the way it is intended, the mythematic imagery of Shakti and Shiva may be wonderful aids to tantric practice. For example, in Tibetan Buddhism, or vajrayana, and in other tantric traditions, visualization methods using mythic images of such deities are
central to the advanced practices of meditation. In such methods, practitioners progressively visualize melting into the deity. This process helps to clear away their egotism, as well as to awaken them to, and to allow the realization of, their inner Buddha nature or Compassionate Witness which is a way of pointing to the inner enlightened essence that lies within every human being.
We will mention such methods further as we come to discuss various approaches to tantric practice in more detail. Before we come to this discussion, however, we need to arrive at a somewhat more thorough definition of tantric practice.
Defining the ABCs of tantric practice
What is called “tantra†has many variants. At the beginning of this volume (in the pages on How to make best use of this book ), I suggested that the term tantra has at least three major traditional meanings: first, as a spiritual practice; second, as a literature covering diverse scientific topics; and third, as confused with Shaktism (which is a generic label for the worship of female deities). Throughout this endeavor bypassing the second and third meanings our interest is in tantra as a spiritual path.
Consequently, there is no need to explain why we are not surveying the innumerable texts that are called “tantras,†which were mostly written in the Indian subcontinent between the 5 th and 13 th centuries c.e. (hereafter all dates will refer to the common era, unless otherwise indicated).
However, it is perhaps helpful for us to preface a more thorough definition of tantric practice by briefly elaborating the distinction between tantric spirituality and Shaktism which is sometimes called tantrism. This can be very confusing, especially to those unfamiliar with Hindu culture, and also because, the two are indeed mixed up—tantric practitioners and devotees of feminine deities are somewhat overlapping groups, but they are not equivalent populations, for reasons that we need to make plain.
Tantric practice and the feminine:
If femininity is associated with freely playful meaningfulness if it suggests spaciousness, openness, kinesis, lascivious joy or blissful fecundity if it intimates the dancing liveliness and deathfulness of life itself, which liberates us from the stale strictures of patriarchal law and order, and which poetically defies all the rules and regulations of conceptual and narratological discourse if it embraces all that is and is not, with equanimity, compassion, appreciation, and grace then tantric practice indeed entails reverence for the feminine.
This reverence would definitely imply an attitude of devotion to the feminine within oneself, and it might or might not entail the meditative use of an image of a female deity in visualization practices designed to enhance the practitionerâ expansion into these qualities of the feminine.
Tantric spiritual practices have probably been known to humanity since the earliest civilizations, but they surfaced, became systematized, and were given this name, in India after the 5 th century. We will sketch this history briefly in Chapters Twelve through Fourteen (and in the Appendices II and III). For now, we need only note that worship of goddesses has probably characterized humanity since its earliest cultures. From this perspective, it is very understandable that there is a history in which tantric practice became somewhat enmeshed with—and subsequently confused with Shakti worship, with which it is, at least in some sense, deeply compatible.
However, I believe it is helpful and especially important to our current western situation, the culture of which has been inflected with patriarchal values and dominated by the somewhat masculinist religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that we keep the distinction between tantric practice and Shaktism clear. Tantric practice is not about faith or belief at least, in the sense that faith in this or that God or Goddess is impertinent to its practice. Moreover, in relation to the question of devotion to a version of the female deity, we need to keep in mind that
one can engage in tantric spiritual practice without necessarily having an image of a personified Goddess (or God), let alone creating rituals by which to worship her.
and one can engage in ritual or devotional acts of religious worship, addressed to a Goddess, without necessarily ever engaging in the authentic workplay of tantric spiritual practice to which we will shortly give a threefold definition.
For that matter, one can engage in tantric practice while also engaging in ritual or devotional acts of religious worship addressed to a personified male God. For example, there are within Hinduism several lineages of a Shiva-oriented or Shaivist tantrism. In terms of the beliefs espoused by their practitioners, these lineages demonstrate a trenchantly masculinist or patriarchal inflection as illustrated by the procedure of worshipping the divine phallus or Shiva lingam.
Yet we can surely understand how tantric practice and Shakti worship are indeed quite compatible. We can see how devotion to a personified image of Shakti would appeal to a tantric practitioner, and how tantric practice would not necessarily appeal at all, or even seem doctrinally relevant to a worshipper of a female God (if this deity were merely treated as an absolute that is external to the devotee).
The feminine is always revered in tantric cosmology (although Shiva-oriented or Shaivist tantrism†may be anomalous in this respect). Genuine tantric practice engages the subtle erotic-ecstatic energies that vibrate within us, and these energies are usually depicted as feminine rather than masculine. By contrast, the static and empty world of phenomenal appearances is usually seen as
masculine. Indeed, it can be argued that representational consciousness is endemically patriarchal. In so far as the semiotic systems, by which things and thoughts are represented, organize matters in a manner that is hierarchical, oriented to values of conquest or domination, and so forth, they inscribe the patriarchal ethos .
Devotion to the imagery of Shakti may well be helpful to practitioners on the tantric path. For example as mentioned earlier some tantric traditions, such as the Tibetan vajrayana, use visualization methods with deity imagery as an advanced meditation. In such methods, the practitioners inner spiritual resources are evoked and aligned by imagining melting into the image of the
deity, who is initially treated as if external and later realized as internal to the practitioner. Other tantric traditions use the chanting of devotional mantra with similar intentions of becoming one with the deity, as an externalized image of the practitioner
own spiritual being. Such processes may help to clear away the practitioners egotism and awaken his or her inherent divinity. Thus in these ways, while journeying on the tantric path, it may perhaps be helpful to project the characteristics of the divine feminine onto an image of a Goddess to whom one is devoted.
However, if this externalized image of divinity remains merely external and is not realized as the inner being of the practitioners own spirituality, devotion to deities becomes decidedly non-tantric, and a dangerous deterioration from spiritual practice into the promulgation of religious faith.
Approaching a definition of tantric spiritual practice as such:
We now arrive at the kernel of our endeavor, a definition of tantric spiritual practice per se. A few preparatory remarks may be helpful even at this juncture. Thus far in this work, we have emphasized several common features of spiritual methods on the tantric path. For example, we have emphasized that this path
is a universal spiritual practice and a quest for relief from suffering;
is not a matter of faith or belief in anything outside of our human experience, but rather is intrinsically non-theistic;
necessarily involves an experiential engagement with the deepest dimensions of our being-in-the-world;
discovers through its methods of experiencing life that these deepest dimensions of our being-in-the-world involve the esoteric reality of subtle energies that flow within, through, and all around the appearances of things and thoughts;
nd that these energies operate beyond life and death, and may be taken as revelatory of the Sacred Unity of Love.
In the course of our discussions thus far, we may also have noticed several specific characteristics of tantric practice such as
this practice claims to embrace things that are ordinarily and traditionally viewed as “bad†as much as it embraces things that are good,
this practice claims to embrace the deathfulness of life itself,
this practice claims to expand and enlighten consciousness,
this practice claims to celebrate the divine presence that it finds in all things
this practice claims to realign our alienated being-in-the-world and thus to heal our suffering.
In this way, we have perhaps already summarized some defining characteristics of tantric practice as follows.
Tantric practice cultivates our awareness of subtle energies
that are inherently erotic, ecstatic, and sacred;
in so doing, it frees us
from our imprisonment within the egotism
of our judgmentally chattering mind.
It is crucial to notice here that tantric practice is an affront to, and an assault on, our egotism. While I deliberately use strong language here, I do not mean that such an affront and assault if it is to fulfill its spiritual intent—can be undertaken in anything other than an affectionate and appreciative manner. However, it is essential to acknowledge that
Like any authentic spiritual practice,
tantra spells disaster for our egotism
and will always, sooner or later,
be mightily resisted by our egotism.
So let us be clear that, if an activity does not challenge us to release ourselves from our egotistic attachments, then it is not tantra.
This is why I have been rather fiercely adamant that tantra cannot be just about having more fun in our sexual partnerships. As worthy an aspiration as this is, if an activity is just about this, then it is not tantra. Moreover, genuine tantric practice cannot ever be involved in the lures of show-business. If tantra is being marketed as enabling us simply to “feel good in some gratifying way, whatever is being marketed is not genuinely tantric.
Tantric practice brings great joy into our lives. Indeed, in a sense it is all about finding enjoyment in finding the joy in life and in death. But this joyfulness is attained precisely because the futile ambitions of our egotism have been relinquished. Again, tantra spells disaster for our egotism. It offers us the profound enjoyment in life that is only attained by spiritual work and play. This is never merely a matter of enabling us to feel good.â€
The workplay of tantra comprises the path of fire. We will use the term, â workplay, because tantric practice is neither just work nor just play. In a certain sense, it is always both. Yet it also differs from what we normally mean by these words taken separately. Tantric practice mobilizes subtle energies precisely so that our egotism may be burned away, transmuted transgressed, deconstructed, devoured, consumed, dissolved, or evaporated in the sacred ether of Emptiness that is the Sacred Unity of Love.
The threefold definition of tantric spiritual practice:
Tantra has been described as the way of living in meditation, as well as the natural and ethical science and experience of the lifeforce.†This is perhaps an apt description of any spiritual path that honors the momentum of the lifeforce in the here-and-now, and that thereby honors all the energies of compassion, appreciation and grace that we know in our heart of hearts to be the essence the ethical and existential expression of life itself.
We have discussed how tantric practice is principally a matter of methods of spiritual workplay. We have seen how the tantric path is quite indifferent to matters of religious belief. Whether or not one believes is likely to be an egotistic distraction from the rigors of spiritual practice. But we have also seen that tantra founds itself on the precept that is the common core of all spiritual traditions throughout history and across every culture: Reality is not all that it appears to be, and there is another universe of spiritual impact and consequence for our lives.â€
However, whereas many traditions then proceed to teach that the spiritual universe is to be arrived at by faith or behavioral adherence to particular moralizing codes and ideologies, and that the spiritual universe is to be comprehended through scriptures and interpretive middle-men or clergy (who are usually male), tantric practice diverges radically on these points. Tantric practice discovers and insists that
The spiritual universe or divinity is accessible within the here-and-now of our human embodiment.
It is to be accessed not through faith or good conduct and does not require the teachings of clergy all of which are liable to be seductions of our egotistic mind.
It is to be discovered by each individual through spiritual methods that are existential, experiential, ethical, experimental, and erotically-ecstatically engaging with the impulses of our bodily life (what I called the seven E of tantric practice).
Tantra is a Sanskrit term for weaving and reweaving. It also means expansiveness and continuity as in our capacity to align, or create less discontinuity between, gross and subtle realities.
So we may consider tantric practice to be an experiential weaving and reweaving of our energies so as to realign them with the supreme flow of the universe, which is the Sacred Unity of Love.
Of course, Love, as we use the word here (with an upper case ), does not have anything to do with the attachments of our egotism the “loving†and hating that commonly go along with all the wanting, clinging, craving, grasping, possessing, demanding, lacking or gratifying feelings and actions that typically characterize our relationships.
Rather, Love means Emptiness (shunyata). Compassion or Emptiness is the absolute Sacred Unity of all that is and is not.
As mentioned previously, in more Hindu ways of talking about the discoveries of tantric meditation that is, as contrasted with more Buddhist ways of talking about these discoveries this absolute may be described as a transcendental consciousness or divine Self (brahman or atman).
Love as Emptiness intimates the unity of Compassion and what is sometimes called Voidness.†This is another way of pointing to the discovery in meditation that the gross reality of the apparent “self†and its world†has no solidity, no stability, and no substantiality, despite the illusions of our egotisms judgmental and chattering consciousness.
If tantric practice is an experiential weaving and reweaving of the subtle energies of our being-in-the-world so as to realign them with the sacred flow of the universe, then what defines and distinguishes a spiritual practice as tantric is a threefold principle of method.
Aspiritual practice is tantric,
if it always involves three methodical dimensions:
tantric practice challenges our egotism to its dissolution;
tantric practice attends to the subtle, sacred reality
that flows within us, through us, and all around us;
and tantric practice thereby aligns us with our ethical-spiritual awareness.
Thus the of tantric practice consists of three methodical principles, which can be said to be the necessary and sufficient components for the definition of tantric spirituality, and which are as follows:
is disrupting and dissolving our egotism;
is accessing and mobilizing our subtle energies;
is cultivating our ethical and spiritual awareness.
In actuality, these three dimensions of the method of spiritual workplay are inseparable, for reasons that will soon become clear. The specific processes and practices by which these three aspects may be engaged are many and variedas will be suggested in Chapters Seven, Eight and Nine. We will devote a chapter to each of these dimensions, which since they are really inseparable and are all to be found in every genuinely tantric practicewe will address in a sequence that is more or less arbitrary.
The essential point here the point that is being persistently asserted throughout this book is that, if a process or practice is authentically tantric, it will invariably and necessarily include all three dimensions or components in its method.
(A) Dissolving our egotism
The methodical principle of dissolving our egotism can be considered the deconditioning or deconstruction of our ordinary or conventional thinking about the self and its world the representational consciousness that is our judgmental and chattering mind. Our egotism consists of all the compulsively repetitious identities, positions and stories all the mental obstructions and somatic
blocks with which our judgmental and chattering mind usually preoccupies us. Tantric practice involves clearing away these mental obstructions and somatic blocks that suppress and repress the free-flowing kinesis of our divine energies that would otherwise move us, or allow us to fall, into our inherent bliss our inner Buddha nature or Compassionate Witness which is the process of living life to its fullest.
There are many ways the self-endowed prerogatives of our egotism can be challenged, disrupted, and invited to dissolve. That is, there are many ways we can begin to clear away mental obstructions and somatic blocks many ways in which tantric practice challenges our egotism into its dissolution, unsettling us, loosening us from our cultural conditioning, transgressing social mores, freeing our connective tissues to become light and supple, and releasing us from our repetitive and compulsive attachment to all our identities, positions and stories.
At this juncture, rather than discuss actual methods of meditation which we will go into a little further in Chapters Ten and Eleven we will explore the general methodical principle of disrupting and dissolving our egotism according to seven aspects.
Guilelessness. The intent of tantric practices is to eradicate the diseases of what might be called our normative narcissism our egotisms determination to assert that it exists, and that it is real, as well as right, proper, true and effective. In this context, it is always beneficial to keep foremost in our awareness that
Our egotism will strenuously, persistently, and cunningly resist
our stepping onto the tantric path in any serious way,
and our egotism will always make every effort
to deflect us, distract us, or derail us
from moving deeply and authentically into tantric spiritual practice.
Our egotism is very cunning. Even when we consciously believe ourselves to be committed to our tantric path, our egotism will be unconsciously determined to sabotage this dedication. The guile of our egotism is such that it can readily seduce us with the allure of spiritual practices that actually reinforce our egotism sometimes in a very sneakily successful manner.
Traditional religions and new age formulations offer many such lures. Any doctrine that promises us that our spiritual practice will enable us sooner or later to be safeguarded from physical or emotional challenges or discomforts, or even to live luxuriously forevermore, is suspect.
Any teaching that entices us with promises of special abilities and magical empowerments, or that aggrandizes us with the idea that we are uniquely endowed, cosmically consequential, or protected by angels and other products of our feverish imagination, is similarly suspect.
Traditional and contemporary cultures offer all sorts of seductions. The issue is not whether such promises will or will not be delivered whether the beguiling compliments that they imply are valid or not. Rather, the issue is that our responsiveness to their allure is in itself an unmitigated act of our egotism, and this ensures that any spiritual practice undertaken out of such motivations will be a dead-end.
This is what has been called spiritual materialism. It has at least three common versions. If our egotism undertakes spiritual practice because, by this means, it secretly hopes that
we will acquire wealth, accumulate possessions, or at the very least have a foolproof insurance policy against misfortune and material loss
we will achieve fame, accrue admiration and respect, or at the very least avoid loneliness, scorn or persecution
we will feel self-righteously superior to others, even if this superiority is attained because we appear more pious, suffer more for our beliefs and behaviors, or feel more humble than others then spiritual practice is not what is going to be undertaken. Rather, whatever
the appearances of our piritual practice, it will not genuinely move us onto our tantric path. If our egotism is going to be invited into its dissolution, tantric practice has to be guileless in these respects.
Fearlessness. As we have discussed, our representational consciousness incessantly judges and chatters as if it could thereby build over uppress and repress the flow of deathfulness that is within life itself. Our egotism compulsively repeats its concepts and narratives, as if it could thereby assure itself that it exists, that it is real and indeed right, proper, true and effective.
Our egotism is founded in fearfulness.
Without spiritual practice,
we are acutely and chronically afraid of death,
of physical pain (disease and decay),
of the emotional pain of social disapproval and isolation,
and of losses to our egotism of every size, shape and variety.
Tantric practice cultivates fearlessness as the way to invite our egotism to its dissolution. Many specific methods of tantric meditation are designed to facilitate processes wherein we face our fears such that we come to embrace the deathfulness of life, we no longer invest in futile efforts to avoid the pain and losses inherent in life itself, and we no longer preoccupy ourselves with what others think about us. Consider the following examples.
Tantric practitioners often live, meditate and lovemake, in cemeteries and cremation grounds. This is a way both of celebrating life even while fully facing the ubiquity of death, and thus of overcoming any fearfulness of the destructiveness that always accompanies the creativity of the lifeforce.
Tantric practitioners cultivate an attitude of indifference to the pursuit of physical or emotional comfort. They often live in relative isolation, sometimes in extreme poverty, and always in lifestyles characterized by simplicity. They tend to live fearlessly in the
present, not becoming overly preoccupied with matters of the past, nor with anticipating and planning for the future not dwelling in past pain or future fear, but living fully in the present. To live spontaneously in the present is to live without fear.
Tantric practitioners are often eccentric and invariably antinomian that is, they are not invested in, or preoccupied, by social rules, cultural regulations and moralizing ideologies. Indeed, on the tantric path, it is often the case that
transgression is a way to transcendence. Tantric practitioners break with the law and order of their culture. They disregard social niceties, and are indifferent to social approval. They act ethically, yet without regard for all the moralizing ideologies and
codes that merely function to support cultural law and order they typically transgress all the superfluous and often oppressive rules and regulations imposed by society. By so doing, tantric practitioners challenge their egotism at the foundations of its socialization.
One way to understand this transgressive aspect is that, since our egotism props itself up by means of its social relations, tantric practice takes away these props. Another way to understand this is that practicing fearlessness n the face of death, disease, decay, loss, or
physical and emotional discomfort requires that we do so without the solace of social endorsement. And a third way to understand the transgressions of tantra is that its practice is erotic, and sometimes explicitly and exultantly sexual (and sometimes even orgiastic), whereas civilization is endemically anti-sexual.
These are some of the reasons tantric practice is sometimes said to be an expression of “crazy wisdomâ€â€”and why such craziness is a significant way in which our egotism’s addictive attachment to its “self†and its “world†can be challenged by the wildness of tantric practice.
Shamelessness and Guiltlessness. Tantric practice is wild—spontaneous, free, natural, and socially transgressive. It is amoral, in the sense that it is indifferent to the moralizing ideologies and cultural codes whereby our egotism assures itself of its place in the social
nexus. Yet it is profoundly ethical, in the sense that it follows the natural rhythm of our spiritual awareness. As we use these terms in this book, the spiritual awareness and alignment of ethicality has virtually nothing to do with the morality of following social rules and regulations (this distinction will be elaborated shortly).
Tantric practice is also inherently erotic even when it does not use explicit sexual activity in its methods. Tantric practice gets us out of our heads and into the energies of our hearts, our genitals and our entire bodymind. Indeed, the tantric path is defined as spiritual practice founded in the erotic energies of life.
The tantric path celebrates the erotic energies of all life
and indeed it finds that
these erotic vibrations are Holy Spirit.
Living shamelessly and guiltlessly is intolerable to our egotism, which depends on these fearful affects or on our defiance of them to keep us socially secure. Embracing our erotic energies without shame or guilt challenges our egotism, which is mired in its own preoccupations with popularity and propriety. So the transgressive aspect of tantric practice applies especially to the religious and social mores of the cultural context inhabited by the practitioner.
For example, tantric practitioners live naked always figuratively and often literally. They expand and sensitize their awareness of the bodys sensuality of all its subtle flows of erotic energy. They may practice under conditions of sexual abstinence, but
free of shame and guilt about bodily impulses. Or they may practice under conditions of sexual indulgence with a single consort or with many but making their erotic delights a method of meditation.
However, since the genitals are the locus of so much shame and guilt, tantric practice frequently places a special emphasis not only on their acceptance, but indeed on their worship. For in tantric practice, it is recognized that the glories of our genitals are the altar for spiritual practice. Through meditations designed to liberate the practitioner from shame and guilt, the tantric path opens us to our embodiment and facilitates our ability to listen to its wisdom.
Tantric practice is a matter of celebrating life as it is and not as our egotism dictates it should be. So the methods of tantric meditation express an intention neither to cover up, nor to condemn, any aspect of life as it actually is and this includes the full range of our
sensual and sexual capacities. Embracing the sensuality of our embodiment is central to our capacity to live in tantric meditation. Many specific methods of tantric meditation are designed to facilitate processes wherein we liberate ourselves from shame and guilt—refusing to be tethered by these egotistic forces, which would otherwise inhibit us from the celebration of life itself.
Non-attachment. As we step onto the tantric path, we are asked nothing less than to give up who we think we are, and to give up who we think we want to be. Tantric practice invites our egotism to relinquish its addictive attachment to itself, as well as its ambitions and aspirations for itself (including any apparent wish to achieve “spiritual successâ€).
Non-attachment means that our egotism is invited
to give up its clinging and craving, grabbing and grasping
toward the world of phenomenal appearances;
that is, to give up its addictive attachment to its self and its world.
Non-attachment does not mean that the spiritual practitioner
becomes dispassionate or dissociated from life.
There is much misunderstanding about the spiritual practice of non-
attachment, as if it implies that the practitioner will no longer care about people or about the planet s if it implies that the practitioner will no longer experience his or her passions and emotions to the fullest, or as if it implies that the practitioner will enter into some sort of dissociative or schizoid state.
The authentic cultivation of non-attachment is precisely not about our withdrawal from caring. Rather, it is the prime way in which compassion, appreciation and grace, are fostered throughout our lives. The authentic cultivation of [[non-
attachment]] is about challenging our egotism to let go its ambitions, its goals of conquest and domination, all its impatient striving and obsessive struggling, its incessantly compulsive repetitions, its narratological imperative (its compulsion to make a story out of everything), and its seemingly endless judgmental chatter. This is the heart of meditation.
Non-judgmentalism. Our egotism asserts its reality by its incessant productivity of judgmental chatter. Steeped in and governed by implicit and explicit anxieties, our egotism representational consciousness is constantly preoccupied with discriminating and separating the world into
apparently discrete entities, deciding what is better than what, and thus constructing the world as hierarchies of thing-formations and thought-formations. Judgmentalism is thus the modus operandi of our egotism. On the tantric path, meditation practices serve to loosen our attachment to judgmentalism and all the chatter that it furnishes.
Tantric practice addresses life with equanimity and without judgmentalism,
aligning us naturally and ethically,
celebrating without discrimination, and embracing equally
what is considered goodâ and what is considered bad,
both the beautiful and the ugly,
both the pleasurable and the painful,
both what is considered superior and what is considered inferior.
This is undoubtedly the aspect of tantric practice that is most difficult for us to comprehend, and that is most resisted by our egotism. Unlike many systems of religious belief that prioritize judgment over compassion, tantric meditation discloses the way in which the Sacred Unity of Compassion comes both before and after, is more real than, and takes priority over, anything articulated by the judgmentalism of our representational consciousness.
This is very difficult to comprehend. Our egotism always insists that it should have the prerogative to discriminate and decide whether something is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, before we proceed to treat it with love, with hate, or with indifference. Challenged with the notion that openness and appreciation the ethos of Compassion carry a spiritual significance that judgmentalism never has, our egotism will moralize and suggest that such an attitude in life necessarily leads to a callous indifference toward matters that are conspicuously undesirable.
“Non-judgmentalism,†our moralizing egotism announces, “leads only to the apathetic acceptance of evil… bad things should be destroyed, good things should be upheld… if judgmentalism is not in charge, all manner of human iniquity and avoidable trauma will effectively be condoned.â€
Our egotism resists mightily the insight that niquity and trauma†are actually—one way or another always the products of its own judgmentalism. Rather than accept the truthfulness of this, our egotism would have us engage in its apparently endless efforts to deploy one judgment against
another, and to preoccupy ourselves with its incessant striving to arrive at better judgments which always means judgments that enable our egotism to assure itself that it is real, as well as right, proper, true and effective.â€
Relinquishing judgmentalism does not mean that the tantric practitioner ceases to care about people or about the planet far from it.
Rather, the tantric practitioner realizes through meditation that in life the suffering of pain and loss is unavoidable. Indeed it is our egotism’s grandiose fantasy that it might use its faculties to eradicate pain and loss that are actually unavoidable. The consequence of this fantasy is that our egotism actually increases the suffering associated with these life events.
Moreover, the tantric practitioner realizes through meditation that those events in life that could be avoided, yet involve so much human suffering, are all directly the result of our egotism. Here we might consider the trauma of warfare and violence, the tragedies of social institutions in which wealth lives alongside the hideous ravages of poverty, all the ecological
disasters caused by humans, and the maltreatment of some groups of humans by others in the name of sex, race, class, caste, physical and emotional condition, or chosen beliefs and lifestyles. Human egotism is surely the root cause of all of these.
Egotism clings to its judgmentalism as its sine qua non —and it is our attachment to this judgmentalism that the practice of meditation most powerfully serves to erode or evaporate. This confrontation with our vehement and vicious attachment to judgmentalism is at the heart of all genuinely tantric spiritual practice.
Non-attack. The seriousness with which tantric practice intends to disrupt the self-perpetuating ideology of our egotism, and invite its dissolution, cannot be overestimated. However, the process of this invitation is necessarily a gradual perseverant challenge, rather than an aggressive assault.
Spiritual practice is necessarily persistent and gentle
because, whenever it is placed under attack,
our egotism recoils
and then renders itself even more impervious to its spiritual calling.
This is the case even when
our egotism temporarily breaks downâ€
as a result of an aggressive assault;
and it is the case even when the ostensible purpose of the attack is
to free ourselves spiritually from our egotisms imprisonment.
In tantric practice, we do not fight with our egotism, because to fight with it only increases our egotisms resolve to persist even if sneakily. Fighting with it actually strengthens our egotism by giving it credence. Thus, if we fight with our egotism, we can guarantee that our egotism is going to win. As we will discuss in Chapter Ten, our spiritual practice can to express this colloquially apply heat to our egotism, but this is rather different than fighting head-to-head with it.
It is important to note this aspect of tantric practice because there are many spiritual techniques†that attempt to dismantle our egotism by aggressive assault. The results of such an assault, in the short term, may be an apparent weakening of our egotisms sense of certainty and
security. But this is deceptive. When it is traumatized in this manner, our egotism will invariably recoil and reassert itself in some reassembled and revised manner that is actually even more intractable than its previous edition. Our egotism only deconstructs itself and dissolves if invited to do so placed under attack, it will merely fight back.
Perseverant Practice and Presence. Our spiritual awakening may be a slow and gradual process or it may be a sudden enlightening of our consciousness. But the issue here is not how long it may take our egotism to dissipate and dissolve, but rather how our spiritual practice approaches the task of issuing this invitation.
Tantric practice is just that: it is practice. Meditation requires patient and persistent daily, and moment-by-moment, practice. Our practice must be strong, and we need to beware of the guile of our egotism because there is a sense in which the last thing our egotism wants is its own
dissolution. Although tantric practice is not an act of violence against our egotism, we cannot expect that our egotism will merely bid itself gently goodbye . Hence, tantric practice needs to be strong even in its gentleness, and the strength of its methods is its patience and persistence.
Tantric practice requires perseverance,
aiming at the patient practice of meditation
Only with this strength of our spiritual intention,
can our egotism be relinquished.
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Tantric practice is a method of spiritual awakening that has to persevere in every present moment. It requires that we live in the flow of our subtle erotic energies, living freely, simply, openly and spontaneously. To live in meditation means to live in the present moment, letting go all of the past (both in its traumatic and in its nostalgic aspects) and the future (both in its despairing and in
its hopeful aspects). Meditation invites us to release ourselves from our the judgmental self, to open ourselves to whatever arrives in the present moment, and to persevere patiently with this flowing momentum of what is. Tantric methods require us to be strong in these spiritual intentions.
Ultimately tantric practice requires nothing less than that our egotism relinquish its illusion of itself as real, along with its delusions of grandeur its addictive attachment to activities that are designed to prove deceptively to itself that it is real as well as right, proper, true, and effective. So if a spiritual practice is authentically tantric, it will necessarily shake our egotism to its foundations. This is how tantric practice is—as indicated in Chapter Two the path of fire.
