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.

Tantra V - ii The Role of the Duti

We now have to look at some of the detail of what is proposed in the 'secret' ceremonies of traditional Tantra and compare and contrast with what is possible or desirable today. The first and most culturally challenging aspect is the sharp difference in roles betwen the duti who performs the secret ritual and the wife of the brahman who takes part in mainstream Vedic ritual. This is the dualism that should perhaps cause pause for thought far more than the male/female dualism that so many LGBT neo-tantrists want to wish away in their more recent appropriation. This separation appears to be at the heart of a more general essentialist separation of women from women, crudely put in the Western tradition as the 'whore/madonna' model of what it is to be a woman. Often presented as a product of 'patriarchy', this almost certainly misrepresents what is going on. We have not only males coping with the female when female power is essentialised into separate spheres of duty and pleasure (and then, in Tantra, the latter is given its religious or spiritual form as means and justification) but an attempt to institutionalise these into different forms of essentialist female self-imagery in pre-modern and even modern culture.

Even today, we see this same bifurcation made by women (not men), under apparent conditions of freedom, into the 'good' feminist and the slut or, in reverse, the sex-positive feminist and the oppressive radical feminist. What is going on here? Merely the overlay of in-born or culturally developed authoritarian or socially conservative attitudes on the one hand and libertarian and socially expansive modes over and against gender difference. What was imposed in traditional society from above, creating the unhappiness of free spirits stuck in formal household ritual and those yearning for stability but stuck in the lifestyle of the outsider, is now a matter of personal choice (if you can escape the impositions of those immediately around you), yet the inherent personality differences remain because they are locked into our genetic variation. Instead of a sphere for the household and social conformity and a sphere for difference and autonomy, the post-modern world has opened up a brutal struggle in which authoritarians now strive to impose their vision on all regardless - this is the world of fascists, Islamists, radical feminists, late Marxists and 'Mumsies'.

Tantric traditionalism resolves this issue without any necessary equity and without real care for individual choice by accepting an open world of duty and authority and creating a secret world of self-discovery and exploration. This is where a modern reversal into that world as it actually existed is neither likely to be successful nor desirable. The modern world has created the totalitarian mode of thinking (where the traditionalist world permitted private life) and the impulse of the post-modern authoritarian is not towards traditionalism but towards totalitarianism. This challenge is a challenge to Tantric revivalism which absolutely depends if it is to be even remotely authentic not on itself being defined by external 'correct behaviour' (which is where neo-tantra often heads as it accommodates contemporary liberal mores) but by the existence of a private life 'that does not frighten the horses'.

We find a situation where (insofar as authority does not interfere unless certain boundaries are crossed) the existence of a strict rules-based society (which we do not have) almost demands a secret but not subversive alternative culture. This can exist today but not be truly subversive any more. Yet it can no longer exist safely in the long run because there is no defining authority which cannot be owned by either the authoritarians or libertarians against the other (because of the arrival of democracy) and where social rules are inchoate and 'up for grabs'. No alternative subversive culture can exist now without being in some sort of permanent dialectic with the constant rules-based assault on its margins. Subversive cultures are always trying to find their function on shifting sands. The Vedic housewife and the duti cannot live in harmony and balance today because they can evade each other and nor should they since there should be no reason why 'housewives' cannot participate in sexual exploration if they so will it or the modern duti not decide to find a partner and raise a family. This state of cultural flux is millions of cultural miles from the cultural stability and fixed personal statuses of traditional Tantra. The only way of reproducing the original situation is to create a cult and such a cult, precisely because it is not embedded in the greater society, is by definition not mimicing Tantra's essential quality at all - its logic as part of a total cultural system. The point is that Tantra was 'secret' but not outside the culture. Anything secret today is simply criminal or playing an unnecessary game.

We have not discussed the male part in all this since it is merely the mirror image of the female - that is, engaged in functionally essentialist roles where the Tantra only exists to allow the person to break free in order to develop their own selves in relation to the universe but where the method involves a re-essentialising of not only the practitioner but his (or theoretically her) partner. There are equivalent essentialist roles in our society but these are more likely to be embedded in the mind and only sustained rather than commanded by society. An unhappy LGBT person has a solution in that they can go to a big city and join an open and lively LGBT community (at least in the West if not in Russia or other socially less developed cultures) but an Indian Tantric who engages in 'secret ceremonies' (basically sexual) has still to go underground precisely and paradoxically because they were part of a total pre-modern culture - the clue is in the word 'secret'. Yes, modern swingers hide their identity for social reasons and many gay people never get around to telling their parents but it is possible not to hide and possible to tell for all except paedophiles and practitioners of bestiality. It is just a matter of wilful courage and not a war against the rest of humanity. The equivalent liberatory function to Tantra required today is not the sexual act itself but a psychological one of liberation from the dead weight of personal pasts on the one hand and from ideological theories based on faith or exploitation on the other. The first expresses itself in the psychotherapeutic movement and the second in exhausting political struggle between bands of activists working on a populist democracy with weak and malleable politicians. Neither situation existed in medieval India.

This casts more light on the antinomian and dramatic insistence that the secret rites are nothing without alcohol, meat and sex [the three Ms]. Indeed, at one point in the Tantraloka, we have the assertion that 'those who perform the sacrifice without the [usually forbidden] three MS, sources of bliss, also go to a dreadful hell' [Ch XXIX 99-100]. But, and this is an important caveat, only the virasadhaka (our 'heroic being') is in a fit shape to break the rules in order to by-pass the normal Vedic methods to attaining bliss. Yet we also have the statement in the Tantraloka just before the last that 'Enslaved beings who are deprived of the three Ms are deprived of bliss altogether'. This might well imply that even the accepted socially normative rituals are a waste of space and that only a tiny elite of antinomians can get to a state of bliss and presumably improve their reincarnation prospects. So, the lads who get smashed after a steak and chips and get laid on a Friday night in Cardiff are not going to get reincarnated well because they are not 'heroic beings' but neither is the bank clerk devoted to his wife and young family who sticks to the rules and takes the train home - only a curiously self-regarding elite group of magical practitioners who get smashed after a steak and chips and then get laid on a Friday night in self-created cultic circumstances will do so. Indeed, everyone is going to go to hell except these cultists, it would seem.

Back to the duti who has another quality that must be remarked upon - her devotion to the interest of the man, to the sadhaka. It is explicitly stated that 'her selection, therefore, should be irrespective of her beauty, caste, etcet.' [Ch. XXIX 101]. If we move aside this devotional aspect - though this is expressed in terms of identification with rather than worship per se - the picture of the duti is not unattractive: her superficial and social aspects are of no consequence but what is important is her vira, the same bold and 'virile' character of the man, the same lack of doubt and determination and the same wilfulness towards the end. Now the picture of the woman changes - she is not an excluded exploited woman (from the perspective of those commited to social duty) but an independent woman choosing to engage in sexual ritual. Once inside the closed secretive ritual circle, we find what we would recognise as something more modern, although I would prefer to see it as simply liberatory of the sort of person to be found in all times and in all societies and which only wealth and progress has enabled to come out into the open in recent centuries.

This will to be is the probable secret here and the will to be applies to both partners. Indeed, there is an argument that it is the male that is still stuck in the essentialist traditionalism that make him the organising principle and that it is the woman, equally active within the ceremony, that is the more liberated within what amounts to a cultically sanctioned safe haven. It is the male voice in the writing that sounds shrill and hysterical. The female voice may be silent but appears silent from strength and inwardness. For all the male chatter, it is she who is the active principle. Three types of duti are suggested, She who is divine, infusing the virile (boldness and power) into the male (an active principle). She who is initiated by a more advanced male into her own state beyond fear and doubt (a passive but learning version). And she who is a sahaja (a spiritual sister) where the potencies between male and female are experienced simultaneously (a principle of equality). There is nothing inherently exploitative in any of these - she is in command or she is learning or she is 'enjoying'. She is not a thing being used - at least in the theory.

The pushing away of the wife (and the proscriptions against incest and intimate friends) from this process is equally interesting because there is a deliberate attempt to distance the sexual ritual from a certain set of 'love' emotions - attachment, friendship, affection, responsibility - but without negating a consequent unattached rush of different unattached or even detached 'love-like' emotions from the act itself. There is a refinement here that is lacking in Western discourse where love is an either/or in which sexual engagement without the former set of emotions is almost automatically consigned into the category of animal rutting. The Tantric model is very different, enabling a wider palette of emotional (or is it biochemical?) engagement centred on the aim or intention of the act. Perhaps the second set of emotions are best described in terms of bliss under conditions of mutual and egalitarian respect without the necessity of other bonds. The texts go further by suggesting that the duti is selected precisely because there is no prior sexual desire involved and this is seen as part of the heroic act - which, of course, is totally counter-intuitive to all Western ways of thinking. The whole business is not even supposed to be 'enjoyable' in a conventional sense (that is as fulfilment of desire), but just a means, a trigger, to an end, the inwardness of knowing oneself (to put it into Greek terms) and establishing the degree to which one is focused on the ultimate end of 'heaven' (to put it into Christian). There is an energetics here that help define what is supposed to be felt and which takes us closer to the psycho-technology involved: what happens during sex in terms of stimulus on the male; the going deep within; the energetics of climax; the grounding that takes place; the orgasm itself; and the duti as energetic principle in herself. The sadhaka becomes drawn into his own internality, a biochemical response associated with the heart or with the sexual organs. From one of these perceived centres, the bliss emerges.