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.