Tantra I - i. The Androgynous Nature of Being

I had been reading Lilian Silburn's 1983 account of Kundalini worship derived from the scriptures of Nondualistic Kashmiri Shaivism (as one does) and it occured to me that the five chapters in Part 3 on esoteric sexual practice were worth more thought. 

However, few are going to be interested in Sanskrit technical terminology and one should not perhaps assume that the altered state of consciousness that is said to arise here from sexual union is actually religious or 'spiritual' (whatever that may mean). 

I am more interested in what the Indian sages of the early middle ages were doing to get to that state and how repeatable it is rather than understanding how they thought about what they were doing. For the latter you are referred to the book.


I am going to minimise as absolutely as possible any contingent reference to the conditions of early medieval India and to Sanskrit as well as to assumptions about really existing gods (rather than of gods and goddesses as examples of analogical thinking to describe ineffable experience) and see what sort of guide to altered states we may have in these texts.

This text originally appeared on the Blog Position Reserved from which it has now been removed with no further editing. There are further thoughts on the general cultural issues raised in this work to be found there.

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In Vedic Culture, Shiva represents something like Existence but with consciousness so that the worship of Shiva is the worship of all Existence as Consciousness. The Esoteric Practices of Tantra are designed to enable the Person (the adept) to become one with Universal Consciousness. This has to be understood from the beginning – the sexual aspects are only the means to an end.

Since my experiment is about sexuality and not religion, I am going to cut the Gordian Knot and assume that though this is what Indians believed, it is not necessarily a true belief nor a belief that has to be necessarily true in order to see the link between certain types of sexual union and an altered state that might make one believe that one is integrated with some universal consciousness.

Nevertheless, the hermaphroditic representation of Shiva is important to what follows because it suggests that at the core of the sexual method of achieving union with Shiva lies something that is beyond male or female as a dualism.

Non-dualism means conscious absorption into a whole so, as we will see, there is an equality here between that which is associated with the male and that which is associated with the female. The 'oneness' (or rather the sense of 'oneness') is the altered state and equally achievable by male and female alike - and demonstrably so in altered state research [1].

Being male and female are just derivatives of being human in relation to Being itself. However, to grasp what Tantric thought was really working towards requires that, though we may take this as a starting point, the actual experience is very different, an extension of aspects of the orgasmic into a state of being of a different nature.

It is explicit that the male and the female involved in tantric sexual practice are equally interested in the ultimate aim of the exercise, a transformative altered state. As we must insist on repeating, sexual activity is a means to that end and not an end in itself.

Becoming 'whole' (although the ambition is considerable here) is interpreted for the participants as fusing male and female within themselves so that, as in alchemical thought which may be derivative of South Asian models, the union is hermaphroditic in its being beyond gender.

This capability to transcend attribute and accident (being male or female) belongs potentially to anyone. The process is cast in terms of going beyond 'duality' (in terms of 'spirit' and matter more than male and female per se).

The ambition, which I think mostly theoretical although perhaps these techniques did manage rare cases of absolute non-duality, is to make non-duality a permanent state of being, whereas perhaps a more immediate possibility is to use a particular experience of non-duality to 'rewire' the mind in its relationship to Being in a permanent and transformative way.

As we will see eventually, transgression is an important component of the processes involved. Sexual union is also presented as an inseparability (though of course the couple do separate physically afterwards).

During sexual union, the adepts experience absorption into 'Shiva' (the transcendental experience) through making use of the sexual union. The transcendental experience is one in which the adept is 'undifferentiated'.

At this point we should note that an awful lot of the earlier parts of Silburn’s excellent work are taken up not only with the attempt to theorise what is going on according to the understanding of the day (which now seems analogical but was clearly believed as a true representation of physiology at that time) but with attempts to describe what is indescribable - the precise nature of the transcendental experience.

This is why we are not interested in the first two parts of the book. We would soon get lost in an arcane description of the body and the vitalist principles said to be found within it and in mystical poetry that adds nothing to the actual experience of actual persons who may be desperate to communicate their experience but whose communications means little to anyone who has not experienced such things for themselves - even in an attenuated form.

The oneness arising out of duality (though we might as easily think of an experience of integration with Being out of the chaos of Being-in-the-World) can be sudden.

The technique behind the whole of tantra (not just its sexual aspects) is intended to make 'oneness' ordinary and ever-present so that any form of vitalist energy in any situation can be converted into this state. Sex is thus simply one form of energy that is available for such a conversion.

Note

[1] To give some sense of the nature of the altered state, one might look at 'spiritual' interpretations of the extended orgasm and the research in particular of Jenny Wade - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_orgasm

Tantra I - iv. The Unsettling

The link between a sense of shifting from being-in-the-world to being-in-being can be linked by tantra to sexual desire. It is not that sexual desire is an end in itself but its intensity is available as a tool. It unsettles our being-in-the-world.

It is the engagement and use of desire in the action involved in sex that, in turn, makes use of this intensity. It creates a physical unsettling of being that, once it has detached itself from the material object of desire relocates itself in a state of being.

The energetic process of relocation is the grounding of the state of being. Detachment may need to be explained in its relation to this shift from being-in-the-world to a state of (perceived if momentary) being-in-being.

The point here is that the desire to own or possess the object of desire is removed and the dominant sentiment is one of love and respect in the first instance (the point at which we are encouraged to stop by Western morality).

However, shifting beyond this separating out of desire from possession towards regard for the other (a watching over rather than an incorporation of the other), a further stage is one of love that moves beyond the personal into an intense state of what can only be described as individuation.

The maintenance of a stance that is defined by the relation to the other (first a dominance and then as a form of compassion or empathy, albeit that this is egoistically defined as such by the person feeling the feeling) is now replaced by an autonomous stance beyond the other.

Here, the encounter is no longer external but internal, beyond all necessary connection withe the world (or so it is perceived). When speaking of 'duality' as the state prior to the experience of love, what is being spoken of is 'choice', making conscious decisions to do this or to do that.

The autonomous stance beyond this contains no necessity for choice. In getting as close to raw existence as possible, the existential necessity for choice goes into temporary abeyance. There is no analytical process in which the world is there and we are here observing the world.

The moment of 'ekstasis' is a moment of synthesis. The drive for pleasure, erotic attraction, finds itself held briefly not in pleasure but in a state unlike it, beyond it, isolated from the world and all relations with the world, a world in itself and for itself - the state of maximal love.

The total body experience of orgasm under these conditions goes beyond desire (which is logical since the experience overwhelms the impetus to a thing by becoming the thing) and 'purifies thought'. Purification is perhaps not the right word because of its value-laden connotation.

The experience is also seen as 'calming' thought. What all this really means is that the body has taken over and made thinking redundant and, for the moment, unimportant. Thinking is stilled and the perception is created of simply being in a state of being.

This is why the Buddhist might see the particular type of orgasm involved here as a liberation from the bondage of desire. This is not necessarily how a Western mind sees or needs to see this same phenomenon.

In the modern West, the desire - instead of being seen as problematic and as bondage or pain - might equally be seen as means to an end or as a tool, the ends being an orgasmic 'higher' state. The means is not the end. It is inferior to the end. A distinction is certainly drawn from those who see means as ends.

The means in themselves are matters of (relative) indifference, not bad as in the Judaeo-Christian or Buddhist myths but also not intrinsically good as in the more crass forms of Western hedonism, left hand thinking or post-modernism. Experiencing means is distinctive from experiencing (or believing one is experiencing) ends.

In fact, the experience of ends is nothing of the kind - just a higher means. The crisis lies in the final meaning have no observable ends - so that cause and effect and the flow of one willed means to another eventually leads to the 'bliss' of a momentary 'no-thing', certainly no discernable being.

This particular means, this momentary no-thing, can become an ends to all intents and purposes - functionally there is nowhere else to go unless one creates an ends out if the experience which, of course, by being created, becomes not an ends but a new means to some other end.

The analysis within tantra sees the intense state of 'bliss' as seeded or embedded within the 'agitation' that is desire. The agitation of the self contains the potential for this state of enhanced sense of being but the being is just 'more apparent being' rather than the way to any final being.

This apparent being still functions as means, especially when it is labelled, codified, analysed or explained. The apparent being that emerges from the means to being (that is, desire) is still not being in itself which is unattainable.

The being at the end of the way of means still leaves a mystery behind it as to the exact nature of its being and of the being behind the apparent being to which it, in turn, points the way as an object that was no more than the ends of desire.

This 'lack' is what has disturbed humanity so that it has had to turn back on itself and give this lack the meaning of meaning itself - as 'presumed end'. All philosophy seems to be a play on this lack, the attempt to give it a substance it cannot have.

But there is no there there which is why the final means (that presents itself as the lie of the ends) is so central to the illusion of the spiritual.

The loss of all in the sexual act is thus one of the closest opportunities we may ever get to the state of being that no longer appears to contain its means - albeit brief, apparently divine and apparently animal.

The body and its materiality is thus not an impediment to self-realisation (though the self is always evaded in these spiritual disciplines, nothing is experienced or evaluated except through the self) but the means. Its biochemistry and its interpretation of sense-impressions are what enables the experience.

The mind may go on to construct or invent a narrative of 'transcendence' where the orgasmic experience takes a person 'beyond himself or herself' but it is merely an impression drawn from what is already available to hand within the brain.

Any illusion involved lies not in this or the world being illusory but in the invention of another world to describe the ineffable. The ineffable exists because ... well, it is ineffable, impossible to communicate ... but ineffability is never necessarily not an attribute of materiality only of a failure of language and communication.

Indeed, this should be the reason to be cautious about all spiritual (that is, non-material) claims for the experience, precisely because the incommunicability and soleness of it all are more likely to be a function of the loss of evolved linguistic forms back into the animalistic and material than forward into the language-bound world of the imagination.

It is not a case of going beyond language but of losing language and, so, if we have to start using the language of divinity (in itself, a collapse forward into effability simply by the use of the term), then the only conclusion to make is that the divine lies not out there but inside - in our 'brute' animal nature.

It is not that we progress through the orgasmic to a higher level but rather that we return cyclically to our animal aspect and an animal aspect at that of an extremely primitive type before returning to being human, very possibly but not certainly transformed.

It is our descent into the clear business of experience without thought that works the trick, rewiring the brain, and not being drawn upwards into some light waved before us by God or the Universe.

If we are connected with all other persons in this, it is because we are connected with our roots as matter and not as part of an invented mystery, pretty and comforting though that may be.

In short, the apparent merging of subject and object is not the merging of the human with the divine but of the conscious human (still the subject) with the animal within (the objective representation of all matter is the matter in which we are embedded as a consciousness).

Nor is orgasm the only possible means of attaining a re-connection to the biological substrate of the self (this substrate as the divine once the language of the divine is stripped away, a fact-on-the-ground which all 'spiritual' traditions seek to evade).

There are a number of transgressional and excitable acts that can do the same but it is the best not in terms of its consequences (which may be problematic if no thought has been given to the purpose of the act) but in terms of its integrity in relation to the material animalistic core of personal being.

Sex is second only to survival and ahead of death as central to being.