Tantra V - i Technologies, Texts & Transgression

To this point, we have concentrated on the theory and sociology of Tantra and avoided the precise psycho-technology involved. Before doing so, we come up against the issue of secrecy. The teachings of Tantra are presented as a secret engagement between adepts and potential adepts. The writing down of the secrets is hedged around with caution. The tradition is fundamentally one of verbal and pragmatic transmission - above all, 'doing' much as meditative practices are a 'doing' guided by words that are better spoken than written down. Western culture, with an uneasy relationship with claimed authority and a love of the written, yearns for the verbal fixity of the text. Most awareness of what is going on here (including our own) is coming from texts which have moved through a temporal sequence - from texts to assist people who are also verbally and practically engaged in them to texts for a small minority searching for enlightenment, then through more widely available printed texts and on to mass and easy availability, if not online then through swift delivery of written texts via Amazon.

There are two issues here - why the secrecy and can any isolated written text help much when it comes to praxis? The secrecy cannot be pinned down to any one reason for it because we are throwing ourselves back once again into the alien world of pre-modern South Asian practice. The instinctive modern Western reaction is that the practices were antinomian to such an extent that secrecy was necessary out of fear of some moral police (which tells us more about Western fears and neuroses than past reality, although it is clear that Tantric practices were antinomian, disruptive and not to be presented as normal morality) or one which simply adopts the secrecy of initiation and hidden texts as a 'thrill', the sense of an exciting exclusive spiritual cult to which some Westerners feel that they too can have access. This latter is possibly another Western cultural bias that has individuals becoming cultic in order to avoid immersion into mass society and so find an implicit felt superiority through knowledge and some kind of paradoxical individuality. We have all met socially inadequate sub-Nietzschean traditionalists who whine about the 'herd'.

There may have been locally relevant elements of both these impulses - towards self-protection and towards a sense of specialness - but there may be other reasons (and I say 'may' because no one can know easily what is going on in the minds of people hundreds years ago in another language and in another place). One reason may be the dialectic between the property value of knowledge in a world of mostly illiterate and poorly educated people. Another might be the fact that written texts would always need to be verbally explained and could not be let loose on the world because there was no critical discourse outside the community that readily understood the terms and context. This is a world where as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Mughal Emperors could be both illiterate and connoisseurs of the arts and highly cultured. There would be, in the case of texts, a guardedness about meaning - the teaching was verbal and so subtle. The text would need to be protected in its availability (perfectly compatible with fears about the social consequences and possible 'crack downs') to those who could also either access the verbal teachings or who had had a verbal teaching but were at a distance and needed the top-up opinion of a guru that could be mastered from within a context of known meanings. What we have, therefore, are arguments and persuasions and tools and aide memoires rather than the sort of primary text that the West is used to in its manifestos and testaments.

This adds to our sense that we cannot truly know (because we cannot get access to the verbal and social context of text) what a text would mean to the person producing it and to those first reading it. By the time it reaches us, our understanding is a little negative - we can (thanks to scholars) understand sufficient context to get a pretty sound traditionalist understanding of what it probably meant and we can know what it could not mean because of human developments that took place later. Within that framework, the response becomes one of academic investigation (which should be taken seriously but which immediately detaches the text from its more immediate value as practical technology) or of appropriation for its use value - two ways of seeing that spin off rapidly in different directions, with compromises between the two merely making bad scholarship or adding layers of unnecessary obfuscation to the psycho-technological aspect. Our postings spin off in the anti-academic direction, treating the tradition as simply a possible first stage rocket to future exploration. Many people will be shocked or disturbed at this - though probably not academics who tend to be detached and relaxed about appropriations so long as they are free to point out that any appropriation is not what was being thought, used or done in (say) the fifteenth century in South Asia. All appropriations are likely to be absurd and the most absurd are probably those that claim to be closest to a world which no longer exists.

We have to return to what can be understood as the aim of Tantric practice which is a state of mind that South Asians would comprehend as a general aim in life, however precisely interpreted - nirvana. The Tantraloka of Abhinavagupta positions this as the Saivite nirvikalpa, a state of being (or rather a state that is indescribable and beyond being and non-being, beyond categories, notably without attachment and limitation). The philosophy behind the critique in my postings is to be found much earlier in our series. I will upset many by saying that there is a dash of hysteria in the South Asian holding on to this unknowable and indescribable state requiring a level of suspension of disbelief that we would associate with the theatre or a Peter Jackson film. Nevertheless, this state, whatever we think of it, is the aim of the praxis in the mind of the practitioner: this has to be respected. It is precisely why sexual practices are means and not an end and cannot be regarded as mere 'lewd' pleasure - the valuation here suddenly placing South Asian religion surprisingly into a mildly sex-negative position that should depress any thorough-going existentialist with a hedonistic bent. But strip away the cultural evaluation of sexuality in a resource-poor society concerned with maintaining right order (dharma) and concentrate on the experiential end and we get to a point where a transgressional attitude to dharma can be permitted for a higher 'spiritual' (we would say experiential) end. However, the transgression against conventional views of dharma are to be kept secret both because the higher end can only be understood in a learned context and probably, more pragmatically, trying to explain yourself to less well educated magistracies will be time-consuming and fraught with risk.

All cultures have a sort of basic mob aspect to them based on the construction of conformity as reality. Just as it is easier to keep things secret to avoid the simplifications of the mob so those who have to keep the mob under control are inclined to do stupid things in order to make life simpler for themselves. And if you do not think that this is not as embedded in our culture as in any other observe the parade of world leaders dropping everything to turn up in Paris a week or so ago to assuage the emotional hysteria of an inchoate mass with absolutely no interest in understanding why violence erupted on their soil instead of defining what happened within their own framework of sentimental prejudices. An analyst of the causes of terrorism who came up with data that might be inconvenient to those prejudices might be very happy to communicate his findings verbally or in secret papers rather than face the wrath of the tabloids. Our secret services may be the Tantrics de nos jours in this respect.

Tantric adepts are, within this context of nirvilkalpa, suggesting a fast-track to it that apparently obviates the need for chants and ritual practices (though this breaks down soon enough when the master wants his own ceremony). Abhinavagupta is explicit on this point about other peoples' rituals though [Tantraloka XXIX 2-3] and this too gives us a clue to the tactics of secrecy. In a society held together by millions of small habitual acts which are explicitly directed at maintaining social order and ensuring personal salvation, someone coming up with a fast-track route to stripping away the matrix and attaining personal transcendence without worrying about the wider social context is going to be problematic. This phenomenon is far from unique to South Asia. Again, we can see parallels today in the nervousness of people who detach themselves from our matrix and use language to redefine it in ways that are troubling to those who hold tightly on to habit, tradition and inherited institutional forms.

Abhinavagupta is offering a sort of vitalist response to the world that requires a single-minded and detached focus (which all sentimental types find profoundly disturbing). He goes further in casting the adept in heroic terms [vira] and giving a multiplicity of fast-track methods engaged with the world of which sexual relations between a couple is only one. The others are: in doing things in the world, 'in relation to a woman' (meaning by observing), in the body as body, through breath and through thinking. The observation of a woman is interesting because it suggests heightened experience through the aesthetics of erotic beauty, a heightening of experience that the evasive modern might associate with contemplating the anatomically incorrect Rokeby Venus instead of enjoying the pleasure of looking at a beautiful young woman, now universally condemned within our matrix as objectification. The Rokeby Venus was, of course, slashed by a suffragette in 1914.

The point is that all these engagements with materiality - observing is observing a thing and thinking is thinking about a thing - are contrasted with ritual which is presented as unnecessary. All that matters is what can be known (as means to the end) and the process of knowing. Though not stated, ritual habits and purifications are perhaps little more than evasions from a direct relationship with the world. This is an attitude of guardedness and fear, a non-heroic attitude towards the world, like the guardedness and fear in magickal banishings. The irrelevance of ritual and performance (other than the performative relationship to the immediate) is matched not merely to the irrelevance of cultural and social prohibition but goes much further - what is prohibited is prescribed. In that culture at that time, this would include meat, alcohol and sex. In our culture, this aspect of the case has to be interpreted by going back to the original advice and asking ourselves what ritual means today and what is prohibited in a culture which (as a liberal culture) appears to prohibit nothing very much. Let us take these two aspects of the case and explore them further.

We can re-interpret the ritual habits and purifications of the South Asian Middle Ages (still present in perhaps half our population in any case as more or less light allegiances to religious practice) as inherited habits and neurotic tics, most of which are harmless (like always sleeping on the same side of the bed) but some of which are serious blocks to becoming who we want to be. The question is what inherited way of being, doing and thinking works against us as persons and in favour of the world, meaning social order. This is a very personal question since it is not automatically so that a person need not be in perfect tune with a set social order - indeed, the authoritarian personality may crave such order in order to be who they are and may have no interest whatsoever in 'higher experiences'. But this should not be rocket science for those who are not authoritarian personalities and is not really about transgression at all. It is simply about making the inheritance that does not work for you a matter of irrelevance - if it does not work for you, do not do it.

The active flouting of prohibition is far more problematic because our culture has a much more evasive attitude towards what is prohibited. What is prohibited is far more likely to be rational and, bluntly, decent. The danger under such conditions is that there is a search for things that are disgusting to the majority simply because they are disgusting and against order and not because they fit some intent to remove a barrier to progress. In practice, the functional modern approach to the matter is probably not actively to seek out 'bad' things to do (which are mostly though not all bad for a reason related to harms to others) but to note what the social order seems to disapprove of without sanction of law or where the law has been moulded only by the sentiments of social order and seek these out for experimentation if they are to taste. The point about the prohibitions in the South Asian context is that they are all 'victimless crimes' in which behaviour is dictated to maintain order or intrude into private decision-making and autonomy rather than offer evidence-based protections. A Tantric who today decided that the prohibition against paedophilia is one that must be broken is utterly missing the point that the prescription about challenging prohibitions is a challenge to restrictive prohibitions that have no purpose other than to dictate terms by the social (the moral or religious law) to the individual in their search for meaning. The Tantric who buggers little boys is a paedophiliac first and a Tantric incidentally. Sexual exploitation may or may not have been endemic in South Asian society but the irony is that it was not forbidden in fact within the greater social order and so cannot be prescribed, while today we not only have a strong sense of informed consent as central to an autonomy of equal persons but we know the harm that it does to others. Harming others is not part of any prescription - even Anton LaVey's Satanists do not set out to harm others.

The prescribed transgressions today are thus not going to be eating meat, drinking alcohol and having sex because these are not prescribed against by the hegemonic moral order. The prescription here is not necessarily the Law (in terms of the magistracy) but the prescriptions made by religious leaders and moralists for others as claimed means of attaining some form of salvation. If anything the prescription is against some of the cant appearing on Thought for the Day. In our world, the prescriptions are more likely to be be the habits and customs of traditional religions, the expectations of others without regard to our own natures in schools, marriages and workplaces, the beliefs about the world imposed on us by the media and by political and intellectual elites and the codes of conduct that tie us to unsuitable people and boring dinner parties. The transgression lies not in sitting on corpses (though one gets the point of this in terms of understanding transience) but in doing what is desired (without harm to others) that goes against all these socially imposed obligations, not for the sake of being rebellious but in order to become vira, a heroic man (or, of course, today, the female or transgender equivalent). It may be transgressional simply not to break bread with boring people whose only subjects of conversation are mortgages and school fees.

Of course, all this liberatory attitude is soon obviated by a new prescription which is self-serving - the reverence for masters. This rather lets the cat out of the bag. Instead of liberating entirely from tradition, Abhinavagupta transfers the obligation from the outer world to himself and his way of seeing which is really no victory for the searcher. From this point, one is right to be suspicious of the ideology behind the teaching and to start critically investigating the underlying psycho-technology - in order to steal it from its new masters. There may, in the end, be nothing to it or it may be that there is something to it but it is only a first stage rocket that requires new engineering knowledge to be applied to it (you can thank the originating work of Von Braun but know that the things that get to Mars are the product of knowledge far greater than his) or you discover that the psycho-technology only works with the ideology and either go and find a new technology or re-adopt the ideology in its totality (the path of the more conservative Neo-Tantra). One really cannot know except through praxis with the question always in your mind as to whether it is worth the candle!

It is at this point we come to Abhinavagupta's account conduct of the 'secret rite' and, by the back door, ritual soon slips back in for the rather obvious reason that it is extremely hard to create the conditions for something important without having some prescriptions - unless you believe that gnosis or enlightenment (as some do and some have felt they have experienced) can come in a flash under any conditions. A place is selected, it is garlanded with perfumed flowers, the place is dedicated to and becomes identified with Shiva, the master is contemplated (ho, hum!), the kundalini ascends, there is even a fire ritual and so on and so on. But the core is that the initiated woman is brought and she and the adept have sex identifying with Shakti and Shiva. This is the first stage rocket that requires further engineering.