Tantra I - i. The Androgynous Nature of Being

I had been reading Lilian Silburn's 1983 account of Kundalini worship derived from the scriptures of Nondualistic Kashmiri Shaivism (as one does) and it occured to me that the five chapters in Part 3 on esoteric sexual practice were worth more thought. 

However, few are going to be interested in Sanskrit technical terminology and one should not perhaps assume that the altered state of consciousness that is said to arise here from sexual union is actually religious or 'spiritual' (whatever that may mean). 

I am more interested in what the Indian sages of the early middle ages were doing to get to that state and how repeatable it is rather than understanding how they thought about what they were doing. For the latter you are referred to the book.


I am going to minimise as absolutely as possible any contingent reference to the conditions of early medieval India and to Sanskrit as well as to assumptions about really existing gods (rather than of gods and goddesses as examples of analogical thinking to describe ineffable experience) and see what sort of guide to altered states we may have in these texts.

This text originally appeared on the Blog Position Reserved from which it has now been removed with no further editing. There are further thoughts on the general cultural issues raised in this work to be found there.

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In Vedic Culture, Shiva represents something like Existence but with consciousness so that the worship of Shiva is the worship of all Existence as Consciousness. The Esoteric Practices of Tantra are designed to enable the Person (the adept) to become one with Universal Consciousness. This has to be understood from the beginning – the sexual aspects are only the means to an end.

Since my experiment is about sexuality and not religion, I am going to cut the Gordian Knot and assume that though this is what Indians believed, it is not necessarily a true belief nor a belief that has to be necessarily true in order to see the link between certain types of sexual union and an altered state that might make one believe that one is integrated with some universal consciousness.

Nevertheless, the hermaphroditic representation of Shiva is important to what follows because it suggests that at the core of the sexual method of achieving union with Shiva lies something that is beyond male or female as a dualism.

Non-dualism means conscious absorption into a whole so, as we will see, there is an equality here between that which is associated with the male and that which is associated with the female. The 'oneness' (or rather the sense of 'oneness') is the altered state and equally achievable by male and female alike - and demonstrably so in altered state research [1].

Being male and female are just derivatives of being human in relation to Being itself. However, to grasp what Tantric thought was really working towards requires that, though we may take this as a starting point, the actual experience is very different, an extension of aspects of the orgasmic into a state of being of a different nature.

It is explicit that the male and the female involved in tantric sexual practice are equally interested in the ultimate aim of the exercise, a transformative altered state. As we must insist on repeating, sexual activity is a means to that end and not an end in itself.

Becoming 'whole' (although the ambition is considerable here) is interpreted for the participants as fusing male and female within themselves so that, as in alchemical thought which may be derivative of South Asian models, the union is hermaphroditic in its being beyond gender.

This capability to transcend attribute and accident (being male or female) belongs potentially to anyone. The process is cast in terms of going beyond 'duality' (in terms of 'spirit' and matter more than male and female per se).

The ambition, which I think mostly theoretical although perhaps these techniques did manage rare cases of absolute non-duality, is to make non-duality a permanent state of being, whereas perhaps a more immediate possibility is to use a particular experience of non-duality to 'rewire' the mind in its relationship to Being in a permanent and transformative way.

As we will see eventually, transgression is an important component of the processes involved. Sexual union is also presented as an inseparability (though of course the couple do separate physically afterwards).

During sexual union, the adepts experience absorption into 'Shiva' (the transcendental experience) through making use of the sexual union. The transcendental experience is one in which the adept is 'undifferentiated'.

At this point we should note that an awful lot of the earlier parts of Silburn’s excellent work are taken up not only with the attempt to theorise what is going on according to the understanding of the day (which now seems analogical but was clearly believed as a true representation of physiology at that time) but with attempts to describe what is indescribable - the precise nature of the transcendental experience.

This is why we are not interested in the first two parts of the book. We would soon get lost in an arcane description of the body and the vitalist principles said to be found within it and in mystical poetry that adds nothing to the actual experience of actual persons who may be desperate to communicate their experience but whose communications means little to anyone who has not experienced such things for themselves - even in an attenuated form.

The oneness arising out of duality (though we might as easily think of an experience of integration with Being out of the chaos of Being-in-the-World) can be sudden.

The technique behind the whole of tantra (not just its sexual aspects) is intended to make 'oneness' ordinary and ever-present so that any form of vitalist energy in any situation can be converted into this state. Sex is thus simply one form of energy that is available for such a conversion.

Note

[1] To give some sense of the nature of the altered state, one might look at 'spiritual' interpretations of the extended orgasm and the research in particular of Jenny Wade - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_orgasm

Tantra I - ii. The Theory of 'Kundalini' and Sexuality

According to the theory (we note at this point that the sources I am using represent only one branch of many tantric discourses, all within an almost totalitarian Vedic discourse), the gap between the transcendent experience and one's sexual being is unbridgeable so long as 'Kundalini' (the coiled snake at the base of one's body) is still, is unmoving.

In this vitalist vision of energy, the snake inside (a very culturally specific analogical model but one we all have by our very nature so that implicitly our snake is the same snake as all other snakes inside the bodies of all members of our species) must draw herself up through the body, empower the body and enable it to experience transcendence.

The proviso is that the adept must join 'mystical discrimination to renunciation' and this obscurity of terminology needs teasing out in subsequent postings if it can be at all. Is this culture-specific obscurantism or is it essential to the method? This is one of the mysteries in the case.

Any form of pleasure can provide a glimpse of the bliss of the transcendent. There is an ineffable sense of completion at the moment of satiation even if this is only a glimpse of what is possible and is probably very brief. The pleasure, however, is only ever a means to end.

Any set of sexual practices designed to reach this experiential end means the use of touch, passion and release. Pleasure must be climactic in order to attain that state of calm and continuous (in that moment and thereafter) 'bliss'. Desire flips over into something felt as transcendent and detached.

Tantra I - iii. Touch

Is touch the most important of the sense organs. What do we mean by touch in the context of our writings here? The tantric analysis would suggest that it relates directly to the energising of the body and enables the unification of everything within the body that will lead to the central experience.

It is interesting that tantric commentary will name most sensory phenomena as distractions - and the list suggests something of what is going on in the process of achieving an altered state: strange luminous dots, smells, tastes in the mouth and sounds.

Touch is not apparently mentioned although surely the references to tingling situations should be counted here and indeed a tingling sensation is common in the literature.

Nevertheless, perhaps for rhetorical effect, the idea is that all these other sensory perceptions are, indeed, distractions but touch is not.

Looking deeper, however, the idea of touch seems to be closer to our understanding of proprioception, the sense of the body being in space - or, to quote Wikipedia, the 'sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement'.

It could be argued that the re-location of the body from the world to a 'transcendent' state is precisely the loss of external sense perception and of awareness of one's self (interoception) into this neither/or state of sensing, driving the self forward from being-in-the-world into an altered state of presumed being-in-being.

It might be further argued that the training involved in tantric exercises is precisely designed to shift what science has claimed to be proprioception in this way. Or it might not.

Tantra I - iv. The Unsettling

The link between a sense of shifting from being-in-the-world to being-in-being can be linked by tantra to sexual desire. It is not that sexual desire is an end in itself but its intensity is available as a tool. It unsettles our being-in-the-world.

It is the engagement and use of desire in the action involved in sex that, in turn, makes use of this intensity. It creates a physical unsettling of being that, once it has detached itself from the material object of desire relocates itself in a state of being.

The energetic process of relocation is the grounding of the state of being. Detachment may need to be explained in its relation to this shift from being-in-the-world to a state of (perceived if momentary) being-in-being.

The point here is that the desire to own or possess the object of desire is removed and the dominant sentiment is one of love and respect in the first instance (the point at which we are encouraged to stop by Western morality).

However, shifting beyond this separating out of desire from possession towards regard for the other (a watching over rather than an incorporation of the other), a further stage is one of love that moves beyond the personal into an intense state of what can only be described as individuation.

The maintenance of a stance that is defined by the relation to the other (first a dominance and then as a form of compassion or empathy, albeit that this is egoistically defined as such by the person feeling the feeling) is now replaced by an autonomous stance beyond the other.

Here, the encounter is no longer external but internal, beyond all necessary connection withe the world (or so it is perceived). When speaking of 'duality' as the state prior to the experience of love, what is being spoken of is 'choice', making conscious decisions to do this or to do that.

The autonomous stance beyond this contains no necessity for choice. In getting as close to raw existence as possible, the existential necessity for choice goes into temporary abeyance. There is no analytical process in which the world is there and we are here observing the world.

The moment of 'ekstasis' is a moment of synthesis. The drive for pleasure, erotic attraction, finds itself held briefly not in pleasure but in a state unlike it, beyond it, isolated from the world and all relations with the world, a world in itself and for itself - the state of maximal love.

The total body experience of orgasm under these conditions goes beyond desire (which is logical since the experience overwhelms the impetus to a thing by becoming the thing) and 'purifies thought'. Purification is perhaps not the right word because of its value-laden connotation.

The experience is also seen as 'calming' thought. What all this really means is that the body has taken over and made thinking redundant and, for the moment, unimportant. Thinking is stilled and the perception is created of simply being in a state of being.

This is why the Buddhist might see the particular type of orgasm involved here as a liberation from the bondage of desire. This is not necessarily how a Western mind sees or needs to see this same phenomenon.

In the modern West, the desire - instead of being seen as problematic and as bondage or pain - might equally be seen as means to an end or as a tool, the ends being an orgasmic 'higher' state. The means is not the end. It is inferior to the end. A distinction is certainly drawn from those who see means as ends.

The means in themselves are matters of (relative) indifference, not bad as in the Judaeo-Christian or Buddhist myths but also not intrinsically good as in the more crass forms of Western hedonism, left hand thinking or post-modernism. Experiencing means is distinctive from experiencing (or believing one is experiencing) ends.

In fact, the experience of ends is nothing of the kind - just a higher means. The crisis lies in the final meaning have no observable ends - so that cause and effect and the flow of one willed means to another eventually leads to the 'bliss' of a momentary 'no-thing', certainly no discernable being.

This particular means, this momentary no-thing, can become an ends to all intents and purposes - functionally there is nowhere else to go unless one creates an ends out if the experience which, of course, by being created, becomes not an ends but a new means to some other end.

The analysis within tantra sees the intense state of 'bliss' as seeded or embedded within the 'agitation' that is desire. The agitation of the self contains the potential for this state of enhanced sense of being but the being is just 'more apparent being' rather than the way to any final being.

This apparent being still functions as means, especially when it is labelled, codified, analysed or explained. The apparent being that emerges from the means to being (that is, desire) is still not being in itself which is unattainable.

The being at the end of the way of means still leaves a mystery behind it as to the exact nature of its being and of the being behind the apparent being to which it, in turn, points the way as an object that was no more than the ends of desire.

This 'lack' is what has disturbed humanity so that it has had to turn back on itself and give this lack the meaning of meaning itself - as 'presumed end'. All philosophy seems to be a play on this lack, the attempt to give it a substance it cannot have.

But there is no there there which is why the final means (that presents itself as the lie of the ends) is so central to the illusion of the spiritual.

The loss of all in the sexual act is thus one of the closest opportunities we may ever get to the state of being that no longer appears to contain its means - albeit brief, apparently divine and apparently animal.

The body and its materiality is thus not an impediment to self-realisation (though the self is always evaded in these spiritual disciplines, nothing is experienced or evaluated except through the self) but the means. Its biochemistry and its interpretation of sense-impressions are what enables the experience.

The mind may go on to construct or invent a narrative of 'transcendence' where the orgasmic experience takes a person 'beyond himself or herself' but it is merely an impression drawn from what is already available to hand within the brain.

Any illusion involved lies not in this or the world being illusory but in the invention of another world to describe the ineffable. The ineffable exists because ... well, it is ineffable, impossible to communicate ... but ineffability is never necessarily not an attribute of materiality only of a failure of language and communication.

Indeed, this should be the reason to be cautious about all spiritual (that is, non-material) claims for the experience, precisely because the incommunicability and soleness of it all are more likely to be a function of the loss of evolved linguistic forms back into the animalistic and material than forward into the language-bound world of the imagination.

It is not a case of going beyond language but of losing language and, so, if we have to start using the language of divinity (in itself, a collapse forward into effability simply by the use of the term), then the only conclusion to make is that the divine lies not out there but inside - in our 'brute' animal nature.

It is not that we progress through the orgasmic to a higher level but rather that we return cyclically to our animal aspect and an animal aspect at that of an extremely primitive type before returning to being human, very possibly but not certainly transformed.

It is our descent into the clear business of experience without thought that works the trick, rewiring the brain, and not being drawn upwards into some light waved before us by God or the Universe.

If we are connected with all other persons in this, it is because we are connected with our roots as matter and not as part of an invented mystery, pretty and comforting though that may be.

In short, the apparent merging of subject and object is not the merging of the human with the divine but of the conscious human (still the subject) with the animal within (the objective representation of all matter is the matter in which we are embedded as a consciousness).

Nor is orgasm the only possible means of attaining a re-connection to the biological substrate of the self (this substrate as the divine once the language of the divine is stripped away, a fact-on-the-ground which all 'spiritual' traditions seek to evade).

There are a number of transgressional and excitable acts that can do the same but it is the best not in terms of its consequences (which may be problematic if no thought has been given to the purpose of the act) but in terms of its integrity in relation to the material animalistic core of personal being.

Sex is second only to survival and ahead of death as central to being.

Tantra II - The Self & the World

Everything that we consider in the world involves a consideration of the relationship between the thing that has evolved into a consciousness embedded within a body (the subject-self) and all the other things that are the case in the world (the object-others). Although,

• the sexual relations between the subject-self and object-others is one of the most intense of experiences that can be recalled (since death cannot be recalled) and,
• the idea of a subject-self relating to another subject-self an illusion, and
• a relationship between one object-other and another object-other or an object-other 'thinking' in relation to the subject-self are both impossible (since the object-other has no consciousness except as a subject-self regarding another subject-self as object-other), 

... any possible relationship between the subject-self and the object-other is of equal potential importance as the sexual act.

Sex is not privileged in this respect. It is the intensity of the relation that is the issue here and not either the subject-self in itself nor the object-other in itself or a valuation of relations without taking into account this intensity. (The interpenetration of subject self and object-other is extensible far beyond sexuality into any possible relation between consciousness and the world)

It is simply that the sexual drive is most likely to be one of great intensity for biological reasons and so most available, at hand, for use, restricted only by social considerations. Only the active relation between the two (from subject-self to object-others) can have meaning or power, power and meaning being intimately related in their relation to the relation between subject-self and object-other.

However, the quality of the relation (implying a valuation by the subject-self) now bears consideration because it can be simple contact (even a fleeting awareness or lack of awareness that nevertheless enters into the occult subconscious or into an unconscious from which it may later be recovered) or it can be increasingly 'intimate' to point of a sense of 'merging' with an object-other.

The ultimate stage of sexual subject-self/object-other relations is defined by its intimacy. This is not some fluffy snuggle but a radical engagement in the relation between the two. It is radical intimacy that creates the 'frisson' that is misinterpreted as the eternal or the absolute when it is (in fact) an intense engagement with the contingent and the momentary.

The only absolute involved is the discovery that there is no absolute and that the illusion of the absolute is the proof of the contingent and the momentary. An awakening, an enlightenment, an aufklarung, that declines to embrace this instantiation of Heraclitean flux is an evasion and so no enlightenment at all. The power of the experience lies not in the illusion of the absolute but in the ability to extend moments and join separate moments to each other in order to create a consciousness-changing experience that can be experienced also and simultaneously as detachment.

The continual flow between subject-self and object-other of moments experienced by the subject-self in a direct contest with the brute fact of the object-other, a dialectic of relationships, is the experience that is then merged into a whole - this is the point at which there is the clear danger of a wrong interpretation of this as the universal or the absolute.

Without the dynamic flux of pulsing relations being sub-consciously perceived as instants unified by the occult will, there is nothing there but an illusion, a shallow simulacrum of the real which lies not in the object-other but in the transformative effect of the dialectic of the relationship between subject-self and object-other.

We can go further - the subject-self is an object-other to itself unless and until it enters into this process of intimate engagement with the relation between itself as subject-self and itself as object-other. The transformation requires that the dynamic between subject-self and the external object-other is an analogue and trigger for a transformative relation between subject-self and the subject-self as object-other of the period before the act of intimacy.

It is the realisation of one's own objectification by oneself, the only objectification that actually matters, that is at stake. As object-other and subject-self dissolve in the relationship between them so the subject-self and the subject-self as object-other to itself both dissolve into each other. The intimacy uses the active set of relations in the world (subject-self/object-other externally) to trigger an internal set of relations that is transformative - unless, of course, the entire externally directed experience is dissipated in an absurd belief in the absolute and the universal.

The collapse of subject/object dualism is an occult act within one's own consciousness, a consciousness which, nevertheless, remains (because it can be no other way) alienated from the world. The question perhaps then arises of the 'meaning' of the ambrosia that emanates from the 'friction' between subject and object in the sexual act.

This is always the emanation from the female - the object in the cultic practice - that is, the fluids created by erotic pleasure and expressed as some form of ejaculate. We can take this analogically or literally.

Literally, the female ejaculate is a proof of pleasure and engagement of vastly greater import than the male ejaculate which, of course, in the traditional form of cultic practice, is actually not expended. The Taoist version has the male ejaculate drawn back into the body and the tantric has the female ejaculate 'imbibed'.

Analogically, it might be seen as the emanation from the object-other - that which exists outside the subject-self - entering into and transforming the subject-self. It is a physicalisation of what might be called spiritual but is (to be in conformity with our own theme) the analogical expression of the felt acquisition of the other as transformative tool in relation to the subject-self.

Interestingly, at his point, Abhinavagupta [Yogasamcara] refers to the union of fire and moon in a context where fire is specifically the subject and moon is translated as the 'known' with the idea of the sun as 'knowledge' or 'what is known about the known'. You would think that what is known and the state of knowing what is known ['knowledge'] are logically the same thing but the differentiation is there and must mean that the mental state of knowing about the known is different from the thing known - wholly counter-intuitive to our way of thinking. This thing the 'known' is in a state of relationship or exchange with the subject and the 'known' is 'known' through the sexual dynamic.

The 'ambrosia' (or 'cum' and related juices) is what can be 'known' about the 'known' (the ambiguity about this is that the tantric is claiming full knowledge in this whereas we disagree and suggest that the 'known' is only a taking of part of this thing which remains essentially unknown). In any case, what is felt to be known or experienced to be known is analogically represented by the physicality of female juices of which, of course, there are, not so mysteriously, more than one.

The symbolism has what is known being known by the subject through action that transmutes the bodily organs into secretions that represent the orgasmic experience of the transcendent ... though we might better say the transcendent experience arising from the orgasmic. This is sexual heat, a lighting up and a shaking off of time itself.

To bring this (literally) down to earth, the flow of felt energy derives from the fact of matter, the fact of the matter, through the medium of the perceiving self, flowing back into the world of matter through the perceiving subject as a re-perception of the world as something transformed.

The underlying nature of matter has not changed (and so this is not magick in the Western sense) but, in the changed perception of matter, the function of matter to the subject changes, its meaning. Thus, matter is, in fact, transformed to the degree that what is perceived about matter is to be regarded as matter to all intents and purposes (since the perceiving self is not a detached scientist or analyst but someone who lives in the world in time as really existing experience).

As far as the subject-self is concerned, the world has changed. This is a process that, in being wholly a-social, transforms the relationship between the perceiving subject and the other, the social context of the other and the perceived materiality underpinning the social that underpins both other and subject-self. It is potentially total with only the base substrate of matter and being itself unchanged.

It is a shift of position or stance from looking away from the sun into the shadows of a cave and towards the sun and away from the cave. The sexual transformation of the body is thus a sexual transformation of the social and so of the material in its use-value to self, other and society. Sexual intercourse transforms the social and the social transforms the material (techne).

This is what we have to hold on to - that the material body of the subject-self in converging mindlessly with another material body in an exchange of energetics and fluids transforms perception and, since the world is a world defined by perception, so changes the world. Which helps us understand why sexuality is so threatening to the meanings used to maintain social order.

The central thing to remember here is that we are engaged in a process rather than a thing. Something is expressed outwards, in bodily fluids, but something is also consequently and relatedly, but still mysteriously to the experiencing subject, being absorbed back into the subject-self - not the material fluids which are an epiphenomenon but something ineffable: 'the swan of dazzling whiteness drinks the world and says with immense joy: I am That."

The satisfaction of the self arises from awareness of the thing that emerges from the process, illusory to the world and real to the self, which is the no-self. And the most powerful of such experiences may be required only once to transform a relationship to the world. The insight is an antinomian one. It is also not one for 'swingers' or repetitive or addicted sexual animals. Once it is realised that the illusion of the universal is a pragmatic reality in experience and in that quality is no longer an illusion, we are engaged in a profound paradox that permits the holding of a contradiction in logic as a truth regardless of logic.

The insight is then applied to the world in general - the self in the world has become beyond good and evil in its knowledge of the world and it makes the necessary choices from then on rather than have those choices thrust upon it. This is the knowledge that was forbidden Man by God in the myth and which auctoritas has, ever since, been trying to contain and evade.

There is another aspect of this which goes against the essentially socialised nature of formal religion - it is that the impulse is towards the 'self' as something really existing and with a core of creative being. Post-modern philosophy often likes to deny the self - in a perfect expression of the death instinct - but it is tenacious precisely because it hangs on in the face of an inevitable unavoidable death.

The universe is created not externally (at this moment of orgasm of which we speak) but from within and then outwards. Each consciously developed orgasm is a creation of the subject-self's universe, a sort of Big Bang, although it dissolves quickly enough back into its origin. Briefly, a new universe, unlike this one, was created and destroyed, leaving a residue of itself to change the old.

Experiential subjectivity is precisely what makes all this possible. Objective analysis of an internal condition can never, in itself, create an existential change in one's condition. Experiential subjectivity is embedded in the body which cannot be the 'other' for objective analysis under such conditions of experience.

This thing, the body, in which one is embedded, may be 'correctly analysed' objectively speaking but this correct analysis cannot change the body directly - the body can only be changed by the subsequent application of technology. The body in its relationship to the world can, however, be transformed by experience within the subject-self and so the world, in which the body is embedded, can be changed.

This suggess both a transhumanist truth (the body changed by technology) and a sexual-socialist truth (the world changed by experience). The final albeit pseudo-harmonious state is when the subject-self and the world are recalibrated. The world is 'renovated' by experience. The world before and after the experience are objectively the same thing but subjectively are 'worlds apart'.

Tantra III – Poetics & Technique

We have said all there is to say on this matter about philosophy. What we have said may be contentious but we make no apology for this. Perhaps all we may speak of now is poetry or technique.

The poetic element is never expressed in the same way twice by the poet. The listener is getting his or her experience at second-hand, an analogue of life, in each repetition of a particular poetic phrase, an opportunity for reflection perhaps or for remembrance or for the illusion of the experience but not the experience itself. Words are never the experience, only an experience of words or a remembrance.

As for technique, then, like all arts and skills, there is practice and preferred ways (the burden of tradition and science alike) but also creativity and new solutions to simple problems. Some things must be done but they do not need to be done is exactly the same way or with exactly the same result each time. There is an aesthetic to final experience as there is to the final work of a skilled artisan.

The peculiar technique of the tantric way is expressed in the poetic image of the rising kundalini and of an attachment that remains impersonal throughout. We know that this detachment is hardest of all things for the traditional Western mind to contemplate - it seems cold, hard and without love but nothing could be further from the truth. It is compassionate and non-acquisitive of the other.

The detachment in awareness here is precisely of the sensations that rise through the body from below to above. The matter is not easily done. The detachment includes a forgetting in the process of one’s own sense of self, of gender, of body, of being - of everything but the experience.

The sexual act is an evocation from within the body, very specifically from within the channel in which intercourse takes place. The poetics of vibration are important here. The body in its relation to Being can ‘hum’ with life and experience. The participant is fully aware of everything and yet lost in the illusory dissolution of the sense of subject-self in the ground of Being, briefly vital.

Here is a technique to contemplate. The participant divides his body-mind into ten inward spaces each connected to the other. He thinks on the awakening of the ‘serpent’ in the lower part of the body and ‘hums’ with deep concentration on it, drawing the serpent up the line of the body from space to space to the very top.

The process integrates each space into the whole. The whole is the full inter-connection of the ten inward spaces, all drawn by the ‘hum’ of vitality into a sense of the subject-self as whole. This wholeness, this interconnectedness of body and mind and detachment from the other and from the social, creates the sovereign person and so freedom – a freedom based on a detached love.

This freedom based on love is the energy of will, the choosing of the vital and the vitality of choosing. The final stage is the unification of all into the will under whose final command each part of the body (each inner space perhaps), each part of the social and each part of the material universe can be observed to perform its specific integral function with detachment.

The final stage is no longer a ‘hum’ but the awareness of the beating heart without which there is no body-mind to experience anything. The detached awareness of the singular beating heart of the one person who can feel it from within is constructed from the ‘hum’ of self-creation, detached from all else in the world.

And, from this detached self-creation comes a return to the world as a world of things, also like the thing perceiving its relation to these things in the world, each to be regarded with both awe and detachment just as one regards oneself with awe and detachment.

Tantra IV – i The Kulamarga or Esoteric Way: The Preconditions

And now we move on to more difficult territory because, instead of discussing the theory, we have to look at the practice of the esoteric way in Tantra – of enlightenment through sexual practice – which is regarded by most Western eyes as either exploitative (because of the social conditions of the time) or cold-hearted (because of the ‘attitude’ into which the person enters the process).

The charge of ‘exploitation’ should not be dismissed. It is axiomatic in the modern world (and an axiom we accept without qualification) that sexual practices should always be between fully informed consenting adults. In fact, it turns out that the partners in the esoteric way are expected to be both consenting and fully informed but more of that in a moment.

It is a more complex point whether a hired sexual partner can be a fully informed consenting adult but we would argue that this is so in any society that is reasonably free and where the hiring is in a free market where the adults make free choices in this respect. In the original tradition, the instructors of the cult were women either as ‘dream creatures’ (goddesses) or as mistresses trained in the arts (who no doubt had to be paid something if only to eat). These were selected by the adept much as one might select a psychotherapist or piano teacher and there are similarities in the functional relationship between them.

Caste and looks are specifically deemed to be irrelevant and there is a certain element of submission to the teacher – this sense of submission to the superior wisdom of the female teacher somewhat offsets any suggestion of exploitation although many modern women would consider the ‘muse complex’ to be just another variant of patriarchy and who is to say that they are not entirely wrong. Obviously, this traditional mentality is to all intents and purposes dead in the world and modern attempts to revive ‘sacred prostitution’ (apart from the fact that such practitioners are likely to be flung into jail by an increasingly socially conservative European politicians or in sexually miserabilist American communities) do not really ring true.

Some, though not all, feminists would disagree with the ethics of all this but that is another argument where I come down on the side of the liberty of the individual and against the imposition of external moral standards where no coercion is involved,. Let us leave it there: the divide between authoritarian liberalism and libertarianism of any type, left or right, is absolute and can be fought out on the revolutionary barricades at the right time but not here.

The modern equivalent to Tantric practice is either going to be the ‘dream teaching’ (essentially accessing the unconscious through masturbatory techniques well understood by modern Western magickal practitioners) or the extremely difficult business of finding a like-minded partner who can strip away the guilt and shame of sexual practice, of which more in a moment. But let us not let these practical matters get in the way of pursuing our theme – the translation of Indian possibility into Western possibility. Modern Westerners can try to mock up the original conditions for sexual Tantra but that is probably why it has degenerated into sky-dancing couples counselling or an excuse for free love jollies amongst the Californian middle classes. The reality is that a revival that is not private fantasy depends on something we are very far from in the West – an egalitarian and ‘heroic’ attitude to sexuality that is based on men and women both ‘getting’ the philosophical underpinnings of this posting that we have published earlier.

So, let us move on to the allegation of almost sociopathic ‘cold-heartedness’ in dealing with sexual relations. Here we are on sure ground but only if we strip away the Western assumption that sexuality is always to be contained within complex societal and emotional bonds, a legacy of the Judaeo-Christian communitarian tradition. This is not to deny societal and emotional bonds freely entered into but it is to raise questions of why these bonds should be totalitarian in effect and why sexual expression must always be associated with a convergence of ends (traditionally marriage and love) and not be seen as an effective tool for entering into the Self and pulling out what is necessary for further development.

Indeed, strip away the local social conditions and language as we have been trying to do throughout this series and the general message of tantra would seem to be permit this possibility although we also see the same possibilities for change in artistic expression, playfulness, magical expression and solitude - and this list is by no means exhaustive. I have done by best to forewarn the Western liberal and traditionalist that we are not moving into comfortable territory. I can do no more.

The tradition itself hedges itself around with negatives – the practice is not orgiastic in the sense of a seeking for pleasure, nor is it about creating material new life. It is highly disciplined and termed ‘heroic’, in an almost Nietzschean sense, as a means of self creation, of self realisation. Of course, the tradition positions this as an identification with the divine (Shiva) which we do not. We take the process at its word – and refer you back to the theory – as the ‘realisation of the essence of the Self’ but where, existentially, we know the essence of the Self will be a transformative invention of the Self. In a manner of speaking, we have ended up here with a sort of anti-Tantra, subverting its very meaning in relation to the absolute in order to return it to a consideration of its relationship to the means that are required to meet its claimed end, the knowing of subject-selves through their relationship to object-others.

The ‘heroic’ aspects of the original practice still apply however. First, the final resolution is wholly dependent on a process referred to in the tradition as the raising of the serpent Kundalini. Again, taking away alien analogical traditional terminology, what this means is that the body turns in on itself and centres itself on itself from base to peak so that it is integrated with the final sexual union as a whole. The aim is a flow upwards and a form of balance prior to ekstasis. The control of perception and thoughts has to be undertaken without anxieties, doubts or any external guilt or shame and that, in itself, is massively difficult for anyone today and possibly has always been so. It is a total shedding of past societal and familial norms in order to effect the transformation. In this, I would suggest, lies much of the liberatory effect. This includes, especially difficult for the modern Western mind, a total detachment from the partner and from the intent to pleasure and a redirection inwards ‘selfishly’ of attention. Since ‘selfishness’, like ‘cheating’ or ’hypocrisy’, are absolutely core cultural ‘bads’ in Western thought, we can see the challenge immediately – how does one possibly become (albeit momentarily in the context of a whole life and without any suggestion that one acts selfishly in the world outside the practice) ‘selfish’ even for a moment without guilt or shame.

For some, this will be impossible while the habitual sociopath is excluded from the game by their inability to reflect on their own self in precisely these terms. No wonder that the tradition suggests that there are few who could even attempt this and even fewer who would succeed. The idea is that, even in the most highly excitable of circumstances surrounded by multiple sources of stimulation (so solitude as such or quiet are not required as in many ritual conditions), the practitioner can withdraw completely from the actual excitation and replace it with a very different sort of inward ‘bliss’, one of self-realisation.

Let us return to the partner – and I am aware that I am working within a heterosexual paradigm here although there is no reason why it cannot be a homosexual or even polyamorous or bisexual relationship – which is assumed to be male although the more I consider this, the more I see no reason for not reversing sexual roles so that the primary partner is a strong and heroic woman. The only reason it should not be is not biological but cultural and there is no cultural condition that is not reversible through the exercise of human will. The issue is the desire of men and women to reverse and play with historic roles and not their ability to do so.

The process starts with an expression of respect for the other, the giver of the conditions for enlightenment. Although she/he is to be treated in a detached way at the moment of ‘bliss’ as tool of bliss, the person who gives this service of inestimable value is honoured and respected from the very beginning. They are appreciated in the most fundamental way. It goes without saying that the honour and respect (and implicit gratitude) continue after the event as much as before – there is no mistreatment of women or misogyny here unless you are one of those sour old crones who invest the sexual act itself with misogynistic meaning and, of course, both parties are consenting and highly informed. There is no heroism or success in performing acts in secret on unwitting lovers.

Against the norms of much formal religion in traditionalist cultures, the ‘other’ (more specifically the female here) is not degrading man through encouraging his desires simply by the fact of her existing. The opportunity to provide pleasure is presented as an act of high worth that can lead to liberation. Of course, we must not get confused here – the original model is still traditionalist with women assigned societal roles (as are men) but the roles are honoured and not just taken for granted. Personally, I am not sure this is much of an improvement because the roles still de-limit both men and women in a caste society but the retention or jettisoning of traditionalist societal roles in itself has no real effect on the process we are writing about.

And what of the person seeking enlightenment? Well, the character attributes are pretty tough to meet – there is an awareness of oneself (‘interiority’), of course, and we have mentioned the need to abandon societal norms of guilt and shame and be ‘heroic’ against them but he/she must also be devoid (at least at the time of search) of strong passions and allegiances and must be bodily balanced.

Of course, this posting breaks the golden rule which is secrecy. The original operations of the cult were probably secret because they were antinomian and disruptive but, equally, we can take at face value that the system (apart from wanting perhaps not to see a ‘closed shop’ opened up and professional standards deteriorate) was available only to those who had dealt with many of the issues of guilt, shame, passion and detachment by the time they reached the ‘yogini’ and had come to some sort of positive philosophy of life whose nearest Western analogy is probably that of Nietzsche. This drive to existential self-realisation is apparent in the work required as a pre-condition for the more esoteric (in social terms) practices.

There is at this point an important caveat, one familiar from Nietzsche – this is not a Stirnerite breaking away from all restraint as an autonomous individual. This is heroism but not adventurism. What this means is a reiteration that the person seeking enlightenment is going to have to do two things that are self-restraints: ‘purification’ (an essentialist term which I do not like but which can be reinterpreted as existential commitment); and ‘humility’ (a Judaeo-Christian term which we should also not like but which simply means, not abasement before a mysterious God or authority, but an acceptance that, where it matters, we depend on another person entirely).

Part of the critique of ‘adventurism’ is a critique of those who mistake the intense kundalini experience – perhaps also the exceptional orgasm created through meditative concentration or just good sex – with the critically different self-enlightenment being spoken of in cultic practice. There are warnings of what might happen (a descent into hell) without right preparation but I think we can pass these by.

Now, after all the preparations and constraints and warnings, the ‘siddha’ and the ‘yogini’ are to meet (perhaps with other such adepts) and this is cast in terms much like those we have reviewed philosophically – as sources of energy (yogini) to be transferred to their object-others (the ‘siddha’) in order to effect (in our view, momentary and illusory but still profound) merger of both so that object-others become subject-selves together – at least, as they perceive their situation.

Tantra IV - ii The Aim Restated

What is the aim of all this practice: everything that is mundane, time-bound and space-bound, underpinned by the drives that we recognise as sexual, is drawn from the world and becomes concentrated as an energy pinpointed in space-time.

The momentary intensity of this energy feels intense and pure, all constraints and anxieties disappear, one's capability for abandonment is understood - the intent is to have all the participants in a state of bliss. And if only one partner achieves this and the associated transformation and not the other or others, no matter - the achievement of the one will be reflected in the others and the situation, if not the persons, will be transformed.

None of this is easy especially as the whole process presumes a will to life and to abandonment, ekstasis. If the will to life is there, the transformation is possible. The orgasm is the change. It is all no more than the life force, the will to life itself to be found throughout existence. It is a state of freedom from the world but one that depends on a will to life beyond the mundane.

It is in the trembling and shudderings of the body at its central moment of emission and engagement that this will is expressed. This is why, rightly, the Tantrics analogise it as a connection with the 'primordial vibration', that which brings all things into existence, that is, the Big Bang in our modern scientific terminology. The individual transforms into the root brute force that is universal, beyond any sense of a material base.

Tantra IV - iii The Barrier To Be Surmounted

There is in all this an issue surrounding intensity ... that is, how to go about things without being unsure of the necessity of what is necessary. Doubt and scruple and excessive self-questioning weaken the energy levels required to proceed. It is anxiety that cripples the ability to move forward. Anything that removes anxiety and questioning thought, including, if necessary, substances and activities looked down upon by society in its mode of being 'healthy' and risk-free - red meat, alcohol and the sex act itself as symbols of all such pleasures and transgressions - is permissible.

The question is whether these pleasures rule you or you rule these pleasures. The pleasure is not the end but the means to distraction from the world. The pleasure is what is transmuted, as energy, into power. Transgression of what is 'given' is the path way to transmutation. The pleasure and the transgression (again, it has to be said, not for their own sake) enables the unconscious self to make itself manifest within the conscious thinking self, to allow us to dig down deep and pull out who we are away from social conditioning, imprinted patterns of behaviour and dark and deep inner fears from our past and that of our culture and so release our innate energy.

Doubt that we are less rather than more than what we are on the surface derives from our mistaking what we are with what society and our histories tells us what we are. To be beyond good and evil in this sense is not about doing good and doing harm but about being beyond tales of good and evil that are imposed on us without reason or justice by others. Removing these barriers allows us to fly free. A de-socialisation and de-historicisation of the self enables the self to transcend itself and recreate itself.

The process may require considerable courage. It requires free thought and critical thinking which is not the same as questioning thought - the critical thought is about the world whereas questioning thought is about ourselves. The issue is not what is wrong with me in relation to the world but what is the world in relation to me. Why do I do this or that thing that does me no good yet is a command by others? No historic text, custom or practice is sacred at such moments of criticism. All is up for grabs. All restraints created by the social act as barriers and not aids to self-realisation.

The final revelation is that all things are of equal significance and value until we give them significance and value - the valuation and signification by others is their valuation and signification but not ours. Dividing things into good and evil without consideration of their context and time, their contingency, is not an act against moral choices but an act for authentic moral choice in which one is personally engaged and for which one takes full personal responsibility. If we make the 'wrong' choice, then it is our choice and we must accept any revenge by the social with equanimity (terms like 'justice' becoming meaningless once we accept the world as it is in this way). We may have to bow down before it as something with superior force perhaps but not before it as 'truth'. It is our own perspective that is authentic and not the perspective that is necessary perhaps and certainly convenient for the maintenance of order in the world.

What is true is what is believed to be true in the mind and is only contingently more or less dysfunctional or functional in the world. Under normal every day conditions, we choose functionality or else we are self-destructive or insane but when we wish to access our own unconscious and become, then we have to choose only what is functional for ourselves and this may be dysfunctional to the world. We are not the world created around us, although we are products of it. Outside of ourselves, all things are to be regarded with equanimity as a total system without division. We are in that world and so part of that total system without division. However, our perceptions have been guided by evolution and society to see the parts for the whole and the exercise in which we are engaged here is not about seeing the totality (no single consciousness can do that) but to change our part for one more amenable to us, one which makes better sense of what we can see, stepping us up a notch in the evolutionary scale and placing ourselves in a better relation to the social whole not as submissive or dominant but as free and autonomous.

This is what is meant by detachment - seeing ourselves, those around us and society in a new light without guilt or shame and allowing ourselves to be seen by ourselves as self-integrated but also integrated with others and society in a new way with a studied indifference to unwarranted claims without any necessary loss of functionality. To achieve this in sexual matters increases a thousand-fold the opportunity to increase it in all matters because sexuality is undoubtedly, beyond death itself, the most dramatic and emotionally difficult of human activities. When the brute desire has gone, what remains - another desire or a transcending of desire and a detachment that may be unconditional love and compassion?  Or not ... 

Tantra IV - iv Group Transcendence

The original tantric communities in India would gather socially in what have reasonably been considered to be group sexual events. The theory was that what was done with sex between two could be multiplied in terms of transcendence not so much through a multiplication of partners as through the spontaneity of a random partner found within a much larger set of potential partners.

The nearest we have in the West to this is the 'swinger party' and perhaps the occasional outburst of cultic behaviour in new age contexts but the former does not even pretend to be engaged in anything other than hedonistic pleasure and the latter, being cultic and rejectionist entirely of the prevailing culture (rather than an elaboration of it), is not really analogous with historic tantric practice, although perhaps we should not be wholly dismissive of its attempts to be true to the original source.

This group sexual behaviour is highly problematic in most of the modern world, not only because it seems to counter all moral understanding that is not based only on hedonism or on a prior social or counter-cultural rebellion but because we simply cannot reproduce the total cultural model that might have permitted it as 'natural'. There is simply no cultural space for it any more. Even if a group of swingers decided to explore transcendence or a group of cultic rebels decided to leave the margin and openly advocate (which it is unlikely the tantrics had to do) a re-envisioning of society to normalise their practices by engaging with it politically, economically, culturally and socially as citizens, the results are likely to be unsatisfactory to the participants. It might be argued that parts of Northern California have reached that libertarian state but not elsewhere.

Group sexual transcendence is thus likely to be treated with horror and disgust by many but, more damaging in fact to the proponents, by utter lack of comprehension and indifference. It simply does not fit into the mental maps of post-Christian and post-Marxist world views and into a range of models related to personal safety (because of disease transmission), family (because of the carefully calibrated links between sexuality and emotional bonding), gender relations (where, though polyamory might be accepted, and swinging accepted as a pleasurable pursuit for those inclined, neither is the norm) and attitudes to spirituality (where few can see any possible connection between group sexual behaviour and the 'higher purposes' assumed to be central to all expressions of 'spirit').

At least some of those constraints work heavily against spontaneity - modern cultists heavily ritualise their behaviours in the direction of 'feelings' and responsibility to the other in a way that works entirely against the spontaneity of the original model. Thus, in our general exploration how tantric thought can be managed away from the gobbledygook use of an ancient language out of context and into our world where it might be, if not 'normalised', found acceptable and functional, we finally come up against a cultural barrier that no amount of intellectual engagement is likely to breach. Even where the cultural barrier appears to be broken, we find the spontaneity without the transcendence (swinging) and the attempt at transcendence without the spontaneity (cultic practice) but never or rarely the association of transcendence with sexual spontaneity in quite the way the tantrics appear to have managed things.

This is not that the ancient culture found such methods acceptable but that those who engaged in such methods could still work within the language and assumptions of that culture. Today, anyone reproducing those methods would be working so completely against the language and assumptions of their culture that they would have to self-marginalise themselves in ways that would destroy the sole point of the exercise ... power over oneself in order to function better in the world as given.The matter thus has to be closed at this point as part of the project started in April 2014. Nevertheless, it might be useful to go back to try and see how the tantrics themselves might have projected their practice into the modern world. The exercise in radical cultural difference will tell us something about our own limitations and constraints without diminishing the strengths that make us generally resistant to communitarian-traditional modes of sexuality.

The idea was precisely that the rituals were not primarily hedonistic but were designed to create a state of ekstasis where all the participants reflected each other 'in harmonious union'. Indeed, the best analogy in the West is with nothing sexual at all but with the dance party where young people in particular become ecstatically lost in the music and the movement. This may result in sexual encounters that are transcendent but that is more luck than judgment. A lot of people may go along hoping to 'score' but there is very little consciously directed at the transcendent results of sex rather than the sex itself.

Perhaps this means that all we need to do is shift the emphasis culturally from sex to dance. The tantric ritual was essentially about sex with the emotional excitation of the partners being mutual in a classically magical sense. The perception of shared pleasure created something greater than the parts and the obvious element is that these people had no inhibitions whatsoever - another reason why it would be almost impossible to repeat this model in the West outside its neurotic-cultic or hedonistic-materialist contexts. Even the dance party model sees the drink and the drugs as removing inhibition under conditions were the participants often wish to be in denial about their own subsequent decisions, seeking excuses to disinhibit and giving the option of disclaiming subsequent responsibility if it all goes wrong, whereas the tantric community is seeking aids actively designed to disinhibit as a willed act.

The festivals are, of course, more than about sex - dance and song are specifically understood to assist in making the community lose its aspect of being a lot of individuals and become one as a community. Again, we have analogues in dance parties, football games, shared public events, remembrance services - when a shared emotion of sadness appears in a group of people at the end of 'Les Miserables', this same phenomenon is taking place: a sense of loss of self into the whole or perhaps the whole simply sharing one part of the self. Whatever is involved here is antipathetic to the individualism of most of the preceding postings where the participants are concerned with self-transcendence as persons known to each other, who respect each other and who intend that precise set of acts. In the community case, transcendence requires a loss of self into the community and, in an age when congregational religion is declining, this immediately makes many of us in the modern world nervous after the experience of watching the rallies at Nuremburg or the great May Day Parades at the high point of Sovietism.

Tantric communities were small communities of people who all knew and trusted one another and so there must have been some basic respect - another argument against their usefulness in the modern world since how many of us actually know and trust many outside our own family and closest friends (if even they) often scattered geographically across the world. Certainly the ones we most trust are not going to be the ones who are suitable for this sort of thing. Modern intimacy and geographical proximity are pretty well disconnected outside the family and the family is a no-go area sexually (or certainly should be in all societies). That tantric world is gone and, given its exploitation of minors and women and extreme poverty and caste difference, few would want it to return - even the sociopaths would want it returned only if they could be guaranteed their position in the ruling elite.

The key point for these communities was that they identified with the entire event, its sights, sounds, smells, tastes, movements. The individuals were happy to lose themselves in the whole. The community event allowed the elimination of barriers to action such as envy or jealousy (we can see where this is heading as inhibitions fall away). A charge is made that if any individual remains an individual separate from the loss of self in the whole, then they should be kept away because their very presence would act as a 'dampener' on the proceedings'. One supposes that this is why anthropologists with their quizzical and critical eye have not been encouraged to attend any surviving events. The secrecy that surrounds them is as much about not attracting those unable to lose themselves in the ritual aspects as concern at being 'brought to the attention of the authorities' (though both are likely to be important).

Flowers and perfumes are offered to a personification of the goddess - more devotion and offerings alien to the Western way of thought - but the smells are designed to affect desire as much as anything eaten or drunk or heard or seen or bathed in. We have a total sensual experience here that is not going to be reproduced in a draughty English village hall on a wet Thursday night. The rest is much as we have decribed in previous postings. There is no difference in essentials other than that, instead of engaging with one other, the 'adept' is engaging with a community and, if they cannot gear themselves up to loss of self in that community, then they should just do what they can do on their own. There is even room for transcendence never actually requiring any physical contact - the moment referred to in other postings might simply arrive from the total experience prior to anything sexual at all. This is not presented as the likely norm but certainly as a possibility.

The point is that the eventual sexual contact in a community setting of this sort assists the adept by being detached from the usual personal dynamics involved in relationships, mimicking the same detachment to be found with a female specialist. Both sexual partners simply disappear as entities in the world (albeit briefly) and it is the spontaneity of the contact that creates the ability to enter into a state of freedom and bliss. Of course, there is, as always, a weaker Western analogy, the complete lack of responsibility in an animalistically-driven one night stand and perhaps the tantric 'guff' is really no more than cover for this experience (allowing a little cynicism to intrude). But the erotic element stands - a social event involving maximal sensory stimulation creates the conditions for a dynamic erotic engagement that is spontaneous and that results in consciousness expansion. We will return to our main theme in the next posting as we draw closer to the tantric understanding of that brief moment of 'bliss'.

Tantra IV - v What Is To Emerge

It will be clear by now that, in our effort to pull tantric thought away from its original context and into the modern world without falling into the essentialist trap of 're-spiritualising' it along what amount to New Age lines, we are going to lose as well as gain something. There seem to be three modes in which Tantra might be considered: in terms of itself as a traditionalist construct; in terms of its subsequent re-invention for the needs of a liberal bourgeois society wanting to recover sexual pleasure but not question itself; and in terms of any possibility of thieving what can be thieved from the traditional model in order to encourage a post-modern or trans-humanist liberation from traditionalism and bourgeois flim-flammery alike.

We have argued that the traditionalist model is irrecoverable even if we wanted to recover it. The social conditions in which it flourished are not only no longer existent but we would not want them to exist ever again - viz. material poverty, limited horizons and widespread abuse of persons. We have implied further that the rediscovery of Tantra in the modern West as a form of 'safe rebellion', little more than an excuse for sexual pleasure (which should need no excuse) sugar-coated in 'spiritual' meaning, is mere bad faith, jettisoning the admittedly irrecoverable liberatory aspects that treated sex as a means and not an end and making sex co-terminous with the ends which appear to be little more than a good feelings re-clothed as a 'spiritual experience'.

Our approach has been designed to accept the non-recoverability of the original intent and meaning and to expose the evasions of the cultural appropriation of Tantra by people in denial of the real purpose of transgression and so to replace it with a harsher but far more fruitful model where the sex returns to its function as a means and not an end. The end is redefined in a post-existentialist way as no longer requiring that the experience be traditionalist in any way whatsoever. On the contrary, Tantra is redefined as trans-humanist magic -  self transformation in which sex is only one of many non-rational ways of triggering the ability to slough off the logogram imposed on the biogram.

This means that we have to get to the point where Tantra has to be seen as a first stage rocket rather than the whole projectile. It is liberatory because it stands over and against Western reason and because it recognises something that has been dynamically suppressed and repressed in Western culture for complex cultural reasons. 'Weak' bourgeois tantra, far from liberating, merely changes the nature of our enslavement. Whereas traditionalist Tantra is private liberation in a slave society, neo-tantra is self-enslavement to essentialist spirituality in a potentially free society - what the evasive types of neo-tantra cannot deal with is that our society may not be free but not because we are suppressed (by social conditions) but repressed (by our own inability to challenge social conditions). The approach to Tantra proposed in these postings is designed to return to source, jettison the essentialist slave elements of traditionalism and recover the use of transgression and detachment as tools for actual personal liberation rather than using evasive tactics in order to avoid recognising the dead weight of the community on the human soul.

This means that we can return to the technique, shear it of its now redundant spirituality and concentrate only on its techne - the technology of personal liberation through transgression of which sex just happens to be the one to hand that is the most basic and 'natural' for many people. The writings of the sages can then be turned to with a critical eye not as representations of the truth but as allegorical or poetical means of describing something that is to be regarded pragmatically as a tool and not as a crutch for neurotic individuals. For example, the idea of a polarity of energy between two persons can be expressed as the two dots on the visarga.

We can speak in poetic terms of the quiescence, the perfect stillness of samadhi, the withdrawal into the 'appeased' self, as something that takes place in the quiet of immediate post-coital union, something that cannot be had with a rushed parting, or which can even be found in the quiet measures of the surging interaction between persons embedded in each other. Yet the actual experience is always without benefit of words.

The tantrics also help us understand what follows - what emerges. It is a 'startling', the act of freedom which does not lie in the loss of self in pleasure, but in the 'restart' of the self in the world without allegiances. filled with 'potentia', with no determined characteristic and without any immediate purpose. It is at this point that the restarted self is most vulnerable to new impressions or ideas and the handling of the 'emergence' (within the act as well as after it) is as vitally important as the preparation for the experience itself. The suggestion is that the male and the female have different modes for handling emergence.

The sexual act itself is a rhythmic flow of emergence and submergence without any link to the world beyond. The poetic likening that comes to mind is a sea of waves that surges with nothing but the sea to relate to. The pulse of the heart or of blood is another simile - systolic and diastolic. The pulses increase in intensity to what tantrics would say takes one to ultimate reality but what we would say is an alternate reality (since we cannot privilege the creations of the mind-body over the brute matter of existence).

The detail of what happens in the 'good sex' of tantra is little more than a description of ... good sex .... and perhaps a substitute manual of technique. The advice is wise. But the procedure and the story is really one of meaning - with what mind-set one enters into it, what mindfulness one can apply to it while in that state and what can be made of the experience when one emerges from it. The rumpy-pumpy of the sex is not the point. We differ from the other two forms of meaning (the traditionalist business of liberation from within given bounds and the application of essentialist fantasy in the bourgois model) only in offering a third meaning - the loss of a past self in the experience in order to create the potential for a new self. The sense of transcendence arising out of the experience after the immediate fact of the experience is the vehicle for change.

Tantra IV - vi Faith or Belief

It is at this point that we are faced with a choice - that of mysticism or that of realism. One withdraws inward, expands outward and experiences something that appears to fuse both. The experience is 'true' insofar as it is what it is - an experience.

The meaning of the experience or its 'reality' may be chosen to be as one wishes it to be - faith that the world is illusion and the experience to be a sign of a greater reality ... or belief that the experience is an illusory interpretation of the reality outside the self but one that may transform the hallucinating one's own world by changing his or her perception of its underlying reality.

If you choose the way of faith (the abandonment of reason), then there is no reason (literally) why you cannot re-appropriate the original language of the tantrics as you wish but if you choose the way of belief (that is, a way of seeing the world based on the most reasonable interpretation of the data being presented which may stand until the data changes), then the original language is that first stage rocket which is to be jettisoned. A new language has to be found or, to quote Wittgenstein, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen".

Tantra IV - vii Cakras & Reality

A remaining question is whether cakras (or chakras) are a 'real' phenomenon or not. By real, do we mean that they can be scientifically, that is experimentally, validated? In fact, this is non-question because no inner experience, experience of consciousness reflecting upon itself in real time, can be validated by experimental or scientific method. Even brain scans tell us nothing in this respect. The question can be re-cast as whether the experience of cakras or the tool of cakras for instrumental purposes is real for the participant as part of a methodology for transformation.

Under this different definition of the real, something is real enough if it is felt as sufficiently real by the participant. We may even enter a new zone of 'reality', one sitting between the individual's felt experience (which may be dysfunctionally insane) and the experimentally evidenced reality of science (which contains no intrinsic meaning in itself until it is made use of). In this 'middling area', reality is just what is socially or culturally accepted by many people or even all people at a particular time as a valid description of their experience or tool for change. The efficacy of human sacrifice becomes real at this level even though science would indicate its absurdity and the individual who stood against it be labelled as insane or criminal.

The degree to which a thing experienced as real diverges from the empirical evidence of the senses or as mediated by science is the degree to which we conventionally consider an idea as more or less absurd. We can now develop a matrix of competing realities regardless of these claims of absurdity. Along one axis is the degree to which a feeling or a tool accords not merely with scientific materiality but is functional with that reality - that is, it effects ends within that reality. Along another axis is the degree to which something is felt to be real and permits the person to function as an integral self. Another axis represents social reality. I must emphasise the continuum aspect and that personal functionality or dysfunctionaliy is not matched necessarily by social functionality or dysfunctionality. We soon find ourselves with an extended set of possible realities which overlap and meld into one another at the margins.

• A: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world in the world with no functionality social or personal
• B: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world but socially functional and personally functional
• C: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world and socially functional but not personally functional
• D: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world and personally functional but not socially functional
• E: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world with no functionality social or personal
• F: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world but socially and personally functional
• G: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world and personally functional but not socially functional
• H: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world and socially functional but not personally functional
• I: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world but with no functionality social or personal
• J: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world and are socially and personally functional
• K: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world and personally functional but not socially functional
• L: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world and socially functional but not personally functional.

There are two points to make here. The first is that functionality (the practical use value of the concept) is not the same as the truth value of a concept (except to people who find a use for truth values). The functionality arises out of personal happiness and security or desire or need or value or social commitment or order or value or whatever arises from within itself as society - or individual. The truth value of a concept (whether it stands up to scrutiny, reasonably speaking, as a description of the world) may also be irrelevant to functionality - a belief in fairies may be more functional to some anxious individuals and societies than bridge-building skills that are rooted in the laws of physics. There are facts about the world that impact not a jot on the world.

The reasonableness of a truth statement is important here because we need to withdraw from absolute scepticism in order to be able to say anything useful about a 'fact' and its relationship to functionality. A reasonably false statement about the world is that unicorns exist (though they may exist in the future through imaginative bio-engineering). A reasonably uncertain statement is that there is some kind of God who triggered the Big Bang - my belief that this is nonsense is just a belief so it becomes a reasonably uncertain idea. And a reasonably true statement is that a nuclear weapon can be created by the application of engineering in the context of demonstrable scientific laws.

Cakras are represented in the category of uncertain truths because, though they have no clear physical presence in the body, they are felt to be present by individuals, whether socially mediated or not, so the question quickly moves on to their social or individual functionality. The cakras are really a sub-set of other 'felt' uncertain truths - that of life force, vital energy, lines of energy transmission and so on. Vitalism is an uncertain truth that horrifies sceptical scientists and may reasonably be regarded as without scientific basis but it also represents a 'poetical' felt experience for many individuals with distinct functions (describing the otherwise indescribable sensations involved in the management of the body and as a tool for using the mind to manage perception and sensation in the process of individual transformation).

Whether it has a social functionality depends on the gaps left by other uncertainties - science may eliminate some or all uncertainties at some stage and remove the need for analogical thinking if it can effect the necessary transformations through rational acts based on reasonably true facts. Progress is largely about this process so the Taoist who imbibed mercury to extend his life into immortality was merely misguided a thousand years ago but would be an idiot today. Whether people who believe in cakras in a thousand years time will be classed as idiots is for the future but, today, an uncertain fact is a reasonable basis for human action where there are no reasonable facts and where there is a reasonable precautionary principle about possible harms (there appear to be no reasonably possible harms in relation to cakras other than the risk that radical believers in such matters might conceivably rely on the uncertain facts of the case not to go and see a doctor).

This is a long way around to saying that, whereas the cosmic consciousness feeling has been pointed out to be so uncertain as to be in danger of making the transforming individual dysfunctional in the world by offering an illusory explanation for experiences far more likely to be triggered by brain chemistry, our attitude to the cakras and vitalism as practical poetics should be different because they are not ends but means, the technology of transformation. This distinction between ends and means is critical. An illusory end will block transformation whereas any means that works, even if illusory or uncertain (so long as not demonstrably false or harmful) is real as 'technology' so long as the means do not slip into the status of being ends or become confused with the ends. This thinking is not so very distant from Chaos Magick admittedly but the point is that, in the condition of uncertainty where, in terms of the lack of reasonably true statements, and to quote Wittgenstein again, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen", then poetics, analogical thinking and myth become important as the sole means of ordering uncertainty functionally.

The problem is that, once this is accepted, the individual functionality of myth and poetry becomes ossified by neurotics into religion, that is, it becomes shifted from individual to social functionality. I would argue in the strongest possible terms that social functionality should be based as much as possible and at all times on reasonably true facts - against ideology and religion - and myth and poetics and analogical thinking be left to the creative minds of the individual, the artist, the magician and the story teller. Standing guard against the intrusion of myth, poetics into public administration is the absolute defensive duty of all free men, just as standing against the intrusion of the public sphere into private fantasy and transformation must be resisted by all means necessary. The line between them, of course, is the territory of politics and a bloody territory it is too, but secularism on the one hand and libertarianism on the other need to be ever-watchful against the demand of priests and ideologues that society should be such-and-such and of public administrators solving their failures by imposing order on the home and the individual. In this sense, the darkest day in human history was the association of Constantine the Great with the Catholic Church.

Now we can return to the cakra within the tantric tradition. Here the mythology has a central energy centre and secondary sensory centres. The secondary sensory centres open out to materiality, the world outside ourselves. Of course, they are material tools for dealing with materiality but that is not how they are 'felt' by consciousness. The central energy centre is the sleeping core of the person - one might analogise here in terms of soul or unconscious if one wished - and it is this core that has to be transformed into something new, effectively a new way of ordering the world in order to be more individually functional. There is tension here between the habits of the senses and the actual nature of the core,

An analogy is given of taste and fruit. The pleasure of tasting a fruit in itself is not intense enough to trigger access to the core of the person. However, an attitude of mind towards the fruit could (theoretically) enable insights into the core. The insights could trigger the experience of which we have been writing throughout this series. It might be useful now to see that though a fruit doing this may be unlikely, the sexual act is less so. The process is seen as a reversal by which the senses draw in the world as it is experienced as raw material for the inner experience whose energy surges back through the body and into those sense organs from whence 'it transforms the world', that is transforms our perception of the world and, therefore, the world. Poetics are associated with imagery and art and so we have the meeting of two triangles [yogini and siddha] at completion of the act. Tantra also describes the experience in ways we can all understand in terms of a perfect union that meets at the heart. In the 'real world', the actual heart, though affected, is far from central to the act of sexual union but it is what is 'felt' of the silent working elsewhere in the world - functionally, the felt experience in the heart speaks for the experience as a whole. This is not romanticism but felt experience and so real.

Tantra IV - viii Parenthood & Poetics

One aspect of tantra is easily forgotten, especially in its neo-tantra appropriation - that the whole business is not anti-procreative. Indeed, there is an emotional connection made between the 'divinity' of the experience (in essence, representing the incommunicability of the actual experience to third parties) and the force of the love that will imbue the creative act that is the creation of life. This unscientific view - purely sentimental but expressive of the very essence of a bonding between lovers who become parents and which then is transferred to the biological bond with a child - is part of the poetic essence of tantric discourse. It is easily comprehensible as an expression of otherwise inexpressible feelings that many lovers who become parents have felt.

It is this poetic aspect of tantra that we return to time and time again. It raises the old question of whether poetry is true and the obvious answer is yes and no. It is not true as a reliable communication about the material world and its manipulability nor about the functional relationships required to make society work, but it is 'true' as the best elliptical means of expressing something of the actuality (the truth) of sentiment or feeling. We come full circle here because the purpose of these postings was to get away from the Sanskrit gobbledygook and mindless appropriation of a lost traditionalist culture, often appropriated in order to have an excuse, in a weirdly tut-tutting culture, for good sex. And yet we should not fall into the fallacy of seeing tantra as only a technology of power (which is the core of the bulk of the analysis in earlier postings).

Once the traditionalist 'religious' superstructure has been removed and the 'technology' re-envisioned for our world, there remains a core of poetry to deal with at the heart of the experience - not so much the reality of the divine as the analogy of the divine to express the reality of the experience. This comes down to various sentimental (in a positive not negative use of the term) attitudes on the theme of love: love of existing (against the ascetic trend of the culture), love of oneself, love of the other and love of what is to be created. In this sense, it is far more impressive as a poetic tradition masquerading as a spirituality than the simple commands of the New Testament which lend themselves to authoritarian diktat - 'you will love or you will be damned, you low life bastard!' One is reminded of the nun who used to rap my father's knuckles with a ruler saying, 'Remember, Pendry, God is Love, God is Love!'

The myth of tantra would have a fully (potentially) divinised person necessarily to be born of the yogini. This is very interesting when you consider the social position of the yogini when compared to that of the traditional wife and mother in the average household. It is as if what is being said is that the divine child will always come from the highest state of appropriate transgression. There is a certain sentimental rightness about this, even though the final state of the child, his or her happiness and stability, is not going to come from the way he or she was produced but only from the way he or she is treated once he or she is in the world. The poetics are material and social nonsense but they are not emotional nonsense. They express intent, desire, hope and aspiration and, if taken seriously, increase the chances that the intent, desire, hope and aspiration will come to fruition. They are, in short, the epitome of magical thinking.

Tantra IV - ix Gender Difference and Initiation

One of the problems for moderns in dealing with Tantric thought is the clear and unequivocal gender bifurcation in the belief system - there are men and there are women and that is that. The contemporary liberal honed on LGBT complexities reacts with an act of denial and replaces one set of dual essentialisms with a rather daft multiplicity of them in order to create the opportunity for homosexual, bisexual or polymorphous neo-tantric fun and games. All that has happened is that something belonging to one culture has been expropriated and twisted out of recognition by another.

I am, in these postings, no different since I am suggesting that Tantric thought cannot but be twisted out of recognition simply because we cannot reproduce its original cultural conditions. Any attempt to do so is either a pastiche or a novelty masquerading as a tradition. So the question remains whether the homosexualisation of Tantra is a pastiche or a tolerable novelty. My suggestion is that it can be either but whatever it is, any essentialist interpretation misses the point of it all.

We have to step back and ask what it is we should be criticising - essentialism in itself (the way of the traditionalist because they knew nothing else) or the type of essentialism being offered. If the latter, we can happily just shuffle the identity cards and pretend that our way of thinking can be recast as a homosexual adventure in self-discovery and transformation which cannot be argued against given the incommensurate terms of that debate. However, another way of looking at this is by making two new and separate claims and seeing where that takes us.

The first claim is that there is a certain reality to a category of man and a category of woman and that the biochemical differences create an average fundamental difference but under conditions where no single person is ever perfectly essential man or woman. In other words, we have to imagine Bell Curves of approximate identity where most people most of the time fit into a general category but within which there are both limits - nearly all men can never be women - but also immense possibilities of variation - some men can think themselves to be women or be considered genuinely biologically hermaphroditic or behave as a category of men different from all other men. Thus, the essentialism of categories breaks down into something like a variety of contingent probabilities of being such and such rather than fixed identities. Logically, if it applies to the simplest and most obvious of categories (male and female) it then equally applies to every possible essential category applied to humanity by itself until everything breaks down again to the final unit of human being - the autonomous individual. There is no identity that is not potentially fluid within certain material constraints.

By the time we get to categories such as Jewish or English, we have categories that are chosen or that are accepted as habitually and which could be changed again in the blink of an eye by a simple act of will (noting that there will always be social consequences in doing so). Sexual identities are generally intermediate categories where the question is merely one of 'spiritual' technology - for example, can two gay men or two gay women reproduce the dynamic described elsewhere in our postings or not? It is not enough to assert ideologically that they can do because the belief system demands that they do. They must do so by the nature of things, by the nature of the technology. I have absolutely no idea (not being gay or at least being so heterosexual that whatever tendencies are there are of no experiental consequence) so I cannot say that they do or they do not but it is perfectly reasonable to be sceptical and not rely on acts of faith based on a belief system operating in either direction. The only way forward is to let gay people live their lives as they wish.

The second claim is that, although existentialist thought is not articulated in Tantra, it is reasonably arguable that Tantra represents a form of the existentialist impulse avant la lettre insofar as it represents an outlet for the same type of instinctive world view and personality preferences of those modern men and women who choose an existentialist path in their relationship to the world. It is as if Tantra is also a response to an inbuilt desire to have a direct relatively unmediated relationship to Being. Caught between an extremely essentialist traditional culture and a particular intuition about Reality, Tantra represents a compromise that permits sufficient existentialist sentiment within a dominant essentialist framework.

These two claims transform everything because the Tantric experience, instead of being shoe-horned by moderns into relevance for new identity applications, abandons those identities in favour of personal existential commitments. This gives us yet another possibility - that the roles prescribed in Tantra to men and women, the core polarity, could be reversed so that the function of the yogini might be gender-switched and everything written in previous postings be switched around accordingly. Any woman reading these posts could go back to the beginning and reinvent herself as her traditionalist opposite and any man could do the same. At this point, I have no way of saying that any of this is possible (rather than 'wished for') nor that gay Tantra is actually possible or impossible - one should remain agnostic - but only that both the proto-existential impetus within the tradition and the inherent 'queer' flexibility possible (within existent material and biochemical constraints on persons) suggests that very little should be ruled out of court.

There is a separate matter but one which can be said to replace a spatial relationship between mind-bodies with a temporal relationship between mind-bodies - the cult of initiation. This is essentially about lineage, a 'spiritual' version of the material blood-line that dominates traditionalist aristocratic thought. Think of Buddhist monks and nuns who claim to trace their practices to the first sermon of the Buddha to his followers and then of the medieval samurai who would declaim their lineage before offering one-to-one combat (these are not the mass battles of early modern Japan which we are used to seeing in a Kurosawa film) in order to ensure that they only fought and could be defeated by a social equal. The modern world has abandoned the importance of the blood line as essentialist nonsense and yet, in appropriating or even recreating new religions as initiatory religions, it has sought to retain the cult of initiation in pre-modern terms.

Initiation is, of course, presented as a sacral education. It derives from an age before the written word when teaching was both verbal and property. It is an anomaly in the age of the internet even if we can concede that some people do know things that others do not and that those who do not can learn by direct contact with those who do - preferably without the pre-modern flummery and huffing-puffing much loved by traditionalists. This temptation of those who know to protect their authority and value through the flummery persists today in some of the unnecessary ritual of the Western school system but at least this is a pale imitation of the authoritarian rote-learning and beatings that are protected by the mystical hog-wash of the past. Yet we must not throw out the baby with the bath water - some people do know things that cannot be put into writing. Or these people can provide context in verbal terms for written tests or icons. My postings must admit that they can only go so far in this respect. A dialogue, including one in a Facebook Group, between really existing persons is still as useful as ever. People who have spent a long time thinking about things and learning how to articulate them are going to find themselves mimicing the traditional attributes of the master or guru. It is for the pupil or searcher to remain critical of the 'master's' claims when the latter step over a line into mummery and pretence in order to retain authority.

In the sexual magic of Tantra, the master-pupil relationship or the process of initiation are potentially uncomfortable matters for our closed-in culture with its deeply neurotic attitude towards sexual relations between the experienced and the inexperienced, the teacher and the pupil, someone in power and someone less powerless. The entire modern Western model is based on a theory of exploitation that not merely assumes but demands equality and yet which does not seem to consider how the powerless can be made powerful unless there is some relationship of learning about things derived from the powerful or knowledgeable through doing as much as listening. We seem to have been presented with only two conditions - exploitation and perfect equality. Yet neither really serves humanity.

The exploitative conditions are clearly ones where one party (with power) uses the other as a tool for gratification but the egalitarian one leaves us with sets of inexperienced people learning by doing in an utter wasteful muddle that ends up in unsatisfactory social and personal relationships. The aim should be to get to the egalitarian situation through rapid learning. This could mean that an inexperienced person who engages themselves in the process of learning directly from the experienced or powerful will the sooner become more experienced or more powerful or equal to the 'master' or 'mistress' in a way that two equal liberal muddlers can never do. In the Tantric tradition, the ideal dynamic between guru and pupil is not one of exploitation but is one of love without possession, an unconditional love that need have no sexual expression at all. The trick is to call out those sociopaths who can speak the language of love but, in fact, engage in the practice of exploitation and that process of uncovering is part of the learning process, a learning process that must include an element of risk in order to be effective. What matters is a relationship of love that precludes exploitation but equally precludes muddling through.