Tantra I - ii. The Theory of 'Kundalini' and Sexuality

According to the theory (we note at this point that the sources I am using represent only one branch of many tantric discourses, all within an almost totalitarian Vedic discourse), the gap between the transcendent experience and one's sexual being is unbridgeable so long as 'Kundalini' (the coiled snake at the base of one's body) is still, is unmoving.

In this vitalist vision of energy, the snake inside (a very culturally specific analogical model but one we all have by our very nature so that implicitly our snake is the same snake as all other snakes inside the bodies of all members of our species) must draw herself up through the body, empower the body and enable it to experience transcendence.

The proviso is that the adept must join 'mystical discrimination to renunciation' and this obscurity of terminology needs teasing out in subsequent postings if it can be at all. Is this culture-specific obscurantism or is it essential to the method? This is one of the mysteries in the case.

Any form of pleasure can provide a glimpse of the bliss of the transcendent. There is an ineffable sense of completion at the moment of satiation even if this is only a glimpse of what is possible and is probably very brief. The pleasure, however, is only ever a means to end.

Any set of sexual practices designed to reach this experiential end means the use of touch, passion and release. Pleasure must be climactic in order to attain that state of calm and continuous (in that moment and thereafter) 'bliss'. Desire flips over into something felt as transcendent and detached.