Tantra works with symbols and magic

If the Tantra is to be a quick path, it has to effect a radical transformation of your whole being, both conscious and unconscious. The Sutrayana addresses itself to both head and heart, but not so directly to the unconscious.

If you want to involve that level of yourself in the quest for Enlightenment, you have to communicate with it and win over its energies. What language can you use to do so? We could compare the human psyche to a great city like London or Rome.

On the surface it is full of the life and concerns of the twenty-first century, but those banks and office blocks have been erected over the rubble of previous buildings. We can dig down through various strata to earlier periods. Now we find a Roman villa, now a pagan temple, now a primitive earthwork fortification. Something similar can be seen in the development of the human psyche. We live our lives as more or less selfconscious, rational beings.

Yet the level of consciousness we have reached is the latest stage of a process going back over millennia. As far as we can tell, primitive man had little self-consciousness. He lived in a twilight, dream-like world, unable fully to differentiate between his inner and outer reality. It is as though, in the unconscious, we carry this racial memory. Our consciousness, too, has 'strata' - some of which are not rational at all. We become aware of them in dreams, and in other situations where archetypal contents well up into the light of consciousness.

To communicate with these deeper strata we have to speak their language. That language is the language of myth, symbol, and magic. Magic is the 'technology' that primitive man used to control his world. To transform our primitive depths we cannot give them lectures on impermanence and Sunyata, we have to resort to magic. The Tantra, then, borrowed magical rites from its ethnic context and turned them to its own purposes.

We can see this in sadhanas connected with the five Buddha families of the mandala . Aksobhya is associated with the poison of hatred, which he transmutes into wisdom. The Tantra does this by taking magical rituals of destruction and changing their aim. Instead of destroying rivals and enemies, the rites have been refined so that they now eradicate hatred and hindrances to gaining Enlightenment.

Ratnasambhava, the yellow Buddha associated with the earth, is connected with harvest magic - in fact with all rites of increase. The Tantric magician uses this magic to increase his or her energy, compassion, understanding of the Dharma, and so on.

Amitabha, the red Buddha of love, is naturally the patron of rites of fascination. Rather than practise these to compel a lover to return, the yogin or yogini causes all beings to fall in love with the Dharma. Vairocana - serene in the centre of the mandala - holds sway over rites of pacification. Again, it is the waves of negative emotion that his rites pacify.

Amoghasiddhi's all-performing wisdom allows him to be associated with success in all forms of magic, to gain the supreme siddhi, or magic power, of gaining Enlightenment. The Tantric adept is even referred to as a siddha - one who has attained magic powers.

These powers can be supernormal (such as levitation, telepathy, etc.) or involve the development of spiritual qualities. There is a well-known group of eighty-four (sometimes eighty-five) mahasiddhas (great Tantric adepts), who nourished in India from the eighth to twelfth centuries.

They form the beginning of a chain of human Tantric practitioners who have carried on the major forms of Tantric practice to this day. The lives of these eighty-four Indian men and women abound in episodes that demonstrate the magical power over natural phenomena that they have gained through Tantric practice.