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.

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'.

Tantra III – Poetics & Technique

We have said all there is to say on this matter about philosophy. What we have said may be contentious but we make no apology for this. Perhaps all we may speak of now is poetry or technique.

The poetic element is never expressed in the same way twice by the poet. The listener is getting his or her experience at second-hand, an analogue of life, in each repetition of a particular poetic phrase, an opportunity for reflection perhaps or for remembrance or for the illusion of the experience but not the experience itself. Words are never the experience, only an experience of words or a remembrance.

As for technique, then, like all arts and skills, there is practice and preferred ways (the burden of tradition and science alike) but also creativity and new solutions to simple problems. Some things must be done but they do not need to be done is exactly the same way or with exactly the same result each time. There is an aesthetic to final experience as there is to the final work of a skilled artisan.

The peculiar technique of the tantric way is expressed in the poetic image of the rising kundalini and of an attachment that remains impersonal throughout. We know that this detachment is hardest of all things for the traditional Western mind to contemplate - it seems cold, hard and without love but nothing could be further from the truth. It is compassionate and non-acquisitive of the other.

The detachment in awareness here is precisely of the sensations that rise through the body from below to above. The matter is not easily done. The detachment includes a forgetting in the process of one’s own sense of self, of gender, of body, of being - of everything but the experience.

The sexual act is an evocation from within the body, very specifically from within the channel in which intercourse takes place. The poetics of vibration are important here. The body in its relation to Being can ‘hum’ with life and experience. The participant is fully aware of everything and yet lost in the illusory dissolution of the sense of subject-self in the ground of Being, briefly vital.

Here is a technique to contemplate. The participant divides his body-mind into ten inward spaces each connected to the other. He thinks on the awakening of the ‘serpent’ in the lower part of the body and ‘hums’ with deep concentration on it, drawing the serpent up the line of the body from space to space to the very top.

The process integrates each space into the whole. The whole is the full inter-connection of the ten inward spaces, all drawn by the ‘hum’ of vitality into a sense of the subject-self as whole. This wholeness, this interconnectedness of body and mind and detachment from the other and from the social, creates the sovereign person and so freedom – a freedom based on a detached love.

This freedom based on love is the energy of will, the choosing of the vital and the vitality of choosing. The final stage is the unification of all into the will under whose final command each part of the body (each inner space perhaps), each part of the social and each part of the material universe can be observed to perform its specific integral function with detachment.

The final stage is no longer a ‘hum’ but the awareness of the beating heart without which there is no body-mind to experience anything. The detached awareness of the singular beating heart of the one person who can feel it from within is constructed from the ‘hum’ of self-creation, detached from all else in the world.

And, from this detached self-creation comes a return to the world as a world of things, also like the thing perceiving its relation to these things in the world, each to be regarded with both awe and detachment just as one regards oneself with awe and detachment.