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 ...