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 V - iv Technique Reconsidered

The current series is not a series about technique but about the conditions for technique. The reader is referred not only to the historic tantric texts but to all texts and experiences in all traditions where the experience and 'transformation' are apparently effected. Our work is merely designed to encourage you to look at texts and listen to what people say but in a new critical light - as to claims by the experiencers but also as to negative claims about the reality of the experiences and the transformations.

In other words, there is no 'either/or' here - viz. either the experiences are valid and so the universal claims are valid or the universal claims are not valid and so the experiences are not valid. Instead we propose that the experiences can be wholly valid but have no implications for the universe but only implications for the experiencers and, at one remove, the invention of the universe by the social acceptance of the claims of the experiencer. Our position is that one should separate the individual psychological truth of experience from the use of these claims within social settings in what amounts to the struggle for power between and over consciousnesses.

This leads inevitably to the useful simplication that private spirituality is, if not 'good', not to be valued except in terms of the needs of the person experiencing whatever they are experiencing and the harms to others and religion, if not 'bad', then a social construct with no necessary relation to good and evil except in terms of social order, that is, the averaging out of social sentiments at best or the exertion of the will of the few over the many at worst. The exploitation of private spirituality by religion is thus a utilitarian exploitation that invents social good and evil for the sake of good order whereas private spirituality becomes 'judged' (insofar as anything can be judged) only by the harm it does in itself to its own subject-self and to those of others. The two models of good and evil frequently clash and, at their extremes, are totally incommensurate - the very essence of the story of Antigone but also the daily tragedy of hundreds of thousands of people caught between their own natures and the contingent historically-derived habits of the culture they happened to be born into.

Returning to technique, the Tantraloka avers that the experience of touch (central to sexual union and referred to as the 'central wheel') cannot be made useful until the other senses have been engaged (the 'minor wheels'). 'Wheels' are not to be thought of as the wheels of a wagon but as whorling vortices of energy that are probably not easily described and more easily intuited in terms of remembrance of experience. The inter-relationship of touch and the other senses could almost be called dialectical and the insight is that the senses essential to the experience become suspended at the moment of experience. They are necessary in order to trigger their own suspension at the moment of orgasm. This is almost certainly is at the root of the inability to explain in clear language what is taking place because communication requires the parsing down of sense experience into code, language, that approximates the experience but still only approximates. The sense experiences can be described by the determined analyst through analogy but the analogies used to describe the experience itself are tortuous, obscure and ultimately counter-productive. We are back to Wittgenstein's "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."

The contribution of the 'secret rite' to the experience is the emphasis on touch between persons as the 'central wheel' expressed in sexual union. The rite is secret because the idea challenges the prevailing (often regrettably necessary given the exploitation of the sexual in power relations in society) social model of a socially controlled sexuality. It might be argued that a personally controlled sexuality may be no improvement if it is not that of the free animal at play but there we have it - if the aim is either to create a spurious invention of the universal or to engineer (much as society engineers its highways) a transformative experience, then the matter cannot be left to chance but requires a technology. The poetics of Tantra is one of many different technologies to hand. It is Heidegger's hammer - a tool that is an extension of Dasein in relation to the world.

The Tantraloka describes the process in its own language thus: "Through this offering of their respective objects - smells, sounds, tastes, shapes, touches - there gushes a stream which causes Consciousness to overflow and ... reach at once a vibrant fervour, the intense agitation of virile potency being due to this plenitude." [137] The associated vibrations and the metaphor of the humming bee are obviously the orgasm which is here spiritualised into intense meaning. But we must emphasise that everything we have written about is not the technique but only a technique - shunned as dangerous by the social but less dangerous under the right conditions than so many other socially preferred forms of ekstasis. Why it should be regarded as so dangerous by the social is a deep matter that is not for this series.