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.