Tantra V - iii Power

We promised at the very beginning of this series not to take the Sanskrit form for the psycho-technical substance of tantric thought. While we have been critical of cultural appropriation and resistant to the idea that we can ever truly understand what it meant to be a Tantric in medieval South Asia, we hold to the idea of Tantra's value as a suggestive insight into psychic technologies of practical value today.

One frequent metaphor in the South Asian tradition is that of the wheel, an image that seems to have fascinated the South Asian mind. But the description of the wheel in the Tantraloka is not the endlessy circulating wheel of reincarnation and eternal recurrence but something wholy counter-intuitive: "... the wheel expands, is satisfied, breaks, and has the power to act." [Ch. XXIX 107). This is no wagon wheel. The cakra or chakra is not the turning thing but the process of turning and so the sense of a vortex or whirlpool. Things now start to make sense - the process is one of spiralling outwards, dissipation and collapse and the collapse of the thing into process becomes the collapse of the process into power or potentiation - like nuclear fission. A mental rigidity based on things in the world is replaced with a flow-ering, a flowering. The final point is the loss of the thing but in processual terms - that is, not the thing itself is lost but the desire to possess the thing or be the thing, an ending of the moving towards thing-ness in favour of a moving away from thing-ness.

The Tantric insight is only to see that abstract reasoning cannot give us the process. Reasoning is a thing-ness state by its very nature, categorising, analysing, abstracting and owning. It is sensual instinctive experience that helps to break the rational logjam - perfumes perhaps, colours, sound or sensual touch. The satiation of the secondary 'wheels' (cakras) - expanding through satiation to collapse and then power - is the pathway to the satiation of the primary 'wheel' (cakra), the one that either expands consciousness (in one reading) or transforms personality (in another). Sexual pleasure is merely the most sophisticated and advanced form of sensory satiation. The point is that the satiation of the senses leads to the satiation of the whole.

The Sanskrit descriptions of the kundalini rising are no more than poetic attempts to describe the ineffable, not mere orgasm but transcendence through more than orgasm. Everything is vibration and risings and bubblings ... the actuality of what is partially felt when listening to Tristan and Isolde's Liebestod in the right receptive situation. The ineffable moment when the world and the self and the self that is oneself and the self that is the other are all one - or, as we prefer to say here, feel as one. The 'are' and the 'feel' are co-terminous which, of course, is precisely how the world does not work. This is not the world. This is an aspect of the world (a thesis) that becomes a new world (an antithesis) before collapsing back into the old world but where the perceiving subject has become different in his or her relationship to the world - and so, because the world is what we perceive it to be, a new world (a synthesis) is created regardless.

Nothing is guaranteed but if this works as it should, all things being equal, and the persons are of the right type (in terms of personality) then the insight and reinvention of the Self takes place. The Tantric, of course, interprets this in terms of magical thinking - universal consciousness, reality of subjectivity and an abstract bliss - but we do not have to interpret it in this way at all. We can part company here from Tantra. We have stolen its technology as Prometheus stole fire from the gods and move forward on our own account without the need for medieval gods and monsters. It is the psycho-technology that matters - the effective integration of all sense experience above and beyond the object from which the sense experience derives itself. We seek here not to remove the magic but only the magical thinking about the magic. All magic is about power and this is a technique for the acquisition of power, potentia in its most profound sense.