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 II - The Self & the World

Everything that we consider in the world involves a consideration of the relationship between the thing that has evolved into a consciousness embedded within a body (the subject-self) and all the other things that are the case in the world (the object-others). Although,

• the sexual relations between the subject-self and object-others is one of the most intense of experiences that can be recalled (since death cannot be recalled) and,
• the idea of a subject-self relating to another subject-self an illusion, and
• a relationship between one object-other and another object-other or an object-other 'thinking' in relation to the subject-self are both impossible (since the object-other has no consciousness except as a subject-self regarding another subject-self as object-other), 

... any possible relationship between the subject-self and the object-other is of equal potential importance as the sexual act.

Sex is not privileged in this respect. It is the intensity of the relation that is the issue here and not either the subject-self in itself nor the object-other in itself or a valuation of relations without taking into account this intensity. (The interpenetration of subject self and object-other is extensible far beyond sexuality into any possible relation between consciousness and the world)

It is simply that the sexual drive is most likely to be one of great intensity for biological reasons and so most available, at hand, for use, restricted only by social considerations. Only the active relation between the two (from subject-self to object-others) can have meaning or power, power and meaning being intimately related in their relation to the relation between subject-self and object-other.

However, the quality of the relation (implying a valuation by the subject-self) now bears consideration because it can be simple contact (even a fleeting awareness or lack of awareness that nevertheless enters into the occult subconscious or into an unconscious from which it may later be recovered) or it can be increasingly 'intimate' to point of a sense of 'merging' with an object-other.

The ultimate stage of sexual subject-self/object-other relations is defined by its intimacy. This is not some fluffy snuggle but a radical engagement in the relation between the two. It is radical intimacy that creates the 'frisson' that is misinterpreted as the eternal or the absolute when it is (in fact) an intense engagement with the contingent and the momentary.

The only absolute involved is the discovery that there is no absolute and that the illusion of the absolute is the proof of the contingent and the momentary. An awakening, an enlightenment, an aufklarung, that declines to embrace this instantiation of Heraclitean flux is an evasion and so no enlightenment at all. The power of the experience lies not in the illusion of the absolute but in the ability to extend moments and join separate moments to each other in order to create a consciousness-changing experience that can be experienced also and simultaneously as detachment.

The continual flow between subject-self and object-other of moments experienced by the subject-self in a direct contest with the brute fact of the object-other, a dialectic of relationships, is the experience that is then merged into a whole - this is the point at which there is the clear danger of a wrong interpretation of this as the universal or the absolute.

Without the dynamic flux of pulsing relations being sub-consciously perceived as instants unified by the occult will, there is nothing there but an illusion, a shallow simulacrum of the real which lies not in the object-other but in the transformative effect of the dialectic of the relationship between subject-self and object-other.

We can go further - the subject-self is an object-other to itself unless and until it enters into this process of intimate engagement with the relation between itself as subject-self and itself as object-other. The transformation requires that the dynamic between subject-self and the external object-other is an analogue and trigger for a transformative relation between subject-self and the subject-self as object-other of the period before the act of intimacy.

It is the realisation of one's own objectification by oneself, the only objectification that actually matters, that is at stake. As object-other and subject-self dissolve in the relationship between them so the subject-self and the subject-self as object-other to itself both dissolve into each other. The intimacy uses the active set of relations in the world (subject-self/object-other externally) to trigger an internal set of relations that is transformative - unless, of course, the entire externally directed experience is dissipated in an absurd belief in the absolute and the universal.

The collapse of subject/object dualism is an occult act within one's own consciousness, a consciousness which, nevertheless, remains (because it can be no other way) alienated from the world. The question perhaps then arises of the 'meaning' of the ambrosia that emanates from the 'friction' between subject and object in the sexual act.

This is always the emanation from the female - the object in the cultic practice - that is, the fluids created by erotic pleasure and expressed as some form of ejaculate. We can take this analogically or literally.

Literally, the female ejaculate is a proof of pleasure and engagement of vastly greater import than the male ejaculate which, of course, in the traditional form of cultic practice, is actually not expended. The Taoist version has the male ejaculate drawn back into the body and the tantric has the female ejaculate 'imbibed'.

Analogically, it might be seen as the emanation from the object-other - that which exists outside the subject-self - entering into and transforming the subject-self. It is a physicalisation of what might be called spiritual but is (to be in conformity with our own theme) the analogical expression of the felt acquisition of the other as transformative tool in relation to the subject-self.

Interestingly, at his point, Abhinavagupta [Yogasamcara] refers to the union of fire and moon in a context where fire is specifically the subject and moon is translated as the 'known' with the idea of the sun as 'knowledge' or 'what is known about the known'. You would think that what is known and the state of knowing what is known ['knowledge'] are logically the same thing but the differentiation is there and must mean that the mental state of knowing about the known is different from the thing known - wholly counter-intuitive to our way of thinking. This thing the 'known' is in a state of relationship or exchange with the subject and the 'known' is 'known' through the sexual dynamic.

The 'ambrosia' (or 'cum' and related juices) is what can be 'known' about the 'known' (the ambiguity about this is that the tantric is claiming full knowledge in this whereas we disagree and suggest that the 'known' is only a taking of part of this thing which remains essentially unknown). In any case, what is felt to be known or experienced to be known is analogically represented by the physicality of female juices of which, of course, there are, not so mysteriously, more than one.

The symbolism has what is known being known by the subject through action that transmutes the bodily organs into secretions that represent the orgasmic experience of the transcendent ... though we might better say the transcendent experience arising from the orgasmic. This is sexual heat, a lighting up and a shaking off of time itself.

To bring this (literally) down to earth, the flow of felt energy derives from the fact of matter, the fact of the matter, through the medium of the perceiving self, flowing back into the world of matter through the perceiving subject as a re-perception of the world as something transformed.

The underlying nature of matter has not changed (and so this is not magick in the Western sense) but, in the changed perception of matter, the function of matter to the subject changes, its meaning. Thus, matter is, in fact, transformed to the degree that what is perceived about matter is to be regarded as matter to all intents and purposes (since the perceiving self is not a detached scientist or analyst but someone who lives in the world in time as really existing experience).

As far as the subject-self is concerned, the world has changed. This is a process that, in being wholly a-social, transforms the relationship between the perceiving subject and the other, the social context of the other and the perceived materiality underpinning the social that underpins both other and subject-self. It is potentially total with only the base substrate of matter and being itself unchanged.

It is a shift of position or stance from looking away from the sun into the shadows of a cave and towards the sun and away from the cave. The sexual transformation of the body is thus a sexual transformation of the social and so of the material in its use-value to self, other and society. Sexual intercourse transforms the social and the social transforms the material (techne).

This is what we have to hold on to - that the material body of the subject-self in converging mindlessly with another material body in an exchange of energetics and fluids transforms perception and, since the world is a world defined by perception, so changes the world. Which helps us understand why sexuality is so threatening to the meanings used to maintain social order.

The central thing to remember here is that we are engaged in a process rather than a thing. Something is expressed outwards, in bodily fluids, but something is also consequently and relatedly, but still mysteriously to the experiencing subject, being absorbed back into the subject-self - not the material fluids which are an epiphenomenon but something ineffable: 'the swan of dazzling whiteness drinks the world and says with immense joy: I am That."

The satisfaction of the self arises from awareness of the thing that emerges from the process, illusory to the world and real to the self, which is the no-self. And the most powerful of such experiences may be required only once to transform a relationship to the world. The insight is an antinomian one. It is also not one for 'swingers' or repetitive or addicted sexual animals. Once it is realised that the illusion of the universal is a pragmatic reality in experience and in that quality is no longer an illusion, we are engaged in a profound paradox that permits the holding of a contradiction in logic as a truth regardless of logic.

The insight is then applied to the world in general - the self in the world has become beyond good and evil in its knowledge of the world and it makes the necessary choices from then on rather than have those choices thrust upon it. This is the knowledge that was forbidden Man by God in the myth and which auctoritas has, ever since, been trying to contain and evade.

There is another aspect of this which goes against the essentially socialised nature of formal religion - it is that the impulse is towards the 'self' as something really existing and with a core of creative being. Post-modern philosophy often likes to deny the self - in a perfect expression of the death instinct - but it is tenacious precisely because it hangs on in the face of an inevitable unavoidable death.

The universe is created not externally (at this moment of orgasm of which we speak) but from within and then outwards. Each consciously developed orgasm is a creation of the subject-self's universe, a sort of Big Bang, although it dissolves quickly enough back into its origin. Briefly, a new universe, unlike this one, was created and destroyed, leaving a residue of itself to change the old.

Experiential subjectivity is precisely what makes all this possible. Objective analysis of an internal condition can never, in itself, create an existential change in one's condition. Experiential subjectivity is embedded in the body which cannot be the 'other' for objective analysis under such conditions of experience.

This thing, the body, in which one is embedded, may be 'correctly analysed' objectively speaking but this correct analysis cannot change the body directly - the body can only be changed by the subsequent application of technology. The body in its relationship to the world can, however, be transformed by experience within the subject-self and so the world, in which the body is embedded, can be changed.

This suggess both a transhumanist truth (the body changed by technology) and a sexual-socialist truth (the world changed by experience). The final albeit pseudo-harmonious state is when the subject-self and the world are recalibrated. The world is 'renovated' by experience. The world before and after the experience are objectively the same thing but subjectively are 'worlds apart'.