Tantra IV - v What Is To Emerge

It will be clear by now that, in our effort to pull tantric thought away from its original context and into the modern world without falling into the essentialist trap of 're-spiritualising' it along what amount to New Age lines, we are going to lose as well as gain something. There seem to be three modes in which Tantra might be considered: in terms of itself as a traditionalist construct; in terms of its subsequent re-invention for the needs of a liberal bourgeois society wanting to recover sexual pleasure but not question itself; and in terms of any possibility of thieving what can be thieved from the traditional model in order to encourage a post-modern or trans-humanist liberation from traditionalism and bourgeois flim-flammery alike.

We have argued that the traditionalist model is irrecoverable even if we wanted to recover it. The social conditions in which it flourished are not only no longer existent but we would not want them to exist ever again - viz. material poverty, limited horizons and widespread abuse of persons. We have implied further that the rediscovery of Tantra in the modern West as a form of 'safe rebellion', little more than an excuse for sexual pleasure (which should need no excuse) sugar-coated in 'spiritual' meaning, is mere bad faith, jettisoning the admittedly irrecoverable liberatory aspects that treated sex as a means and not an end and making sex co-terminous with the ends which appear to be little more than a good feelings re-clothed as a 'spiritual experience'.

Our approach has been designed to accept the non-recoverability of the original intent and meaning and to expose the evasions of the cultural appropriation of Tantra by people in denial of the real purpose of transgression and so to replace it with a harsher but far more fruitful model where the sex returns to its function as a means and not an end. The end is redefined in a post-existentialist way as no longer requiring that the experience be traditionalist in any way whatsoever. On the contrary, Tantra is redefined as trans-humanist magic -  self transformation in which sex is only one of many non-rational ways of triggering the ability to slough off the logogram imposed on the biogram.

This means that we have to get to the point where Tantra has to be seen as a first stage rocket rather than the whole projectile. It is liberatory because it stands over and against Western reason and because it recognises something that has been dynamically suppressed and repressed in Western culture for complex cultural reasons. 'Weak' bourgeois tantra, far from liberating, merely changes the nature of our enslavement. Whereas traditionalist Tantra is private liberation in a slave society, neo-tantra is self-enslavement to essentialist spirituality in a potentially free society - what the evasive types of neo-tantra cannot deal with is that our society may not be free but not because we are suppressed (by social conditions) but repressed (by our own inability to challenge social conditions). The approach to Tantra proposed in these postings is designed to return to source, jettison the essentialist slave elements of traditionalism and recover the use of transgression and detachment as tools for actual personal liberation rather than using evasive tactics in order to avoid recognising the dead weight of the community on the human soul.

This means that we can return to the technique, shear it of its now redundant spirituality and concentrate only on its techne - the technology of personal liberation through transgression of which sex just happens to be the one to hand that is the most basic and 'natural' for many people. The writings of the sages can then be turned to with a critical eye not as representations of the truth but as allegorical or poetical means of describing something that is to be regarded pragmatically as a tool and not as a crutch for neurotic individuals. For example, the idea of a polarity of energy between two persons can be expressed as the two dots on the visarga.

We can speak in poetic terms of the quiescence, the perfect stillness of samadhi, the withdrawal into the 'appeased' self, as something that takes place in the quiet of immediate post-coital union, something that cannot be had with a rushed parting, or which can even be found in the quiet measures of the surging interaction between persons embedded in each other. Yet the actual experience is always without benefit of words.

The tantrics also help us understand what follows - what emerges. It is a 'startling', the act of freedom which does not lie in the loss of self in pleasure, but in the 'restart' of the self in the world without allegiances. filled with 'potentia', with no determined characteristic and without any immediate purpose. It is at this point that the restarted self is most vulnerable to new impressions or ideas and the handling of the 'emergence' (within the act as well as after it) is as vitally important as the preparation for the experience itself. The suggestion is that the male and the female have different modes for handling emergence.

The sexual act itself is a rhythmic flow of emergence and submergence without any link to the world beyond. The poetic likening that comes to mind is a sea of waves that surges with nothing but the sea to relate to. The pulse of the heart or of blood is another simile - systolic and diastolic. The pulses increase in intensity to what tantrics would say takes one to ultimate reality but what we would say is an alternate reality (since we cannot privilege the creations of the mind-body over the brute matter of existence).

The detail of what happens in the 'good sex' of tantra is little more than a description of ... good sex .... and perhaps a substitute manual of technique. The advice is wise. But the procedure and the story is really one of meaning - with what mind-set one enters into it, what mindfulness one can apply to it while in that state and what can be made of the experience when one emerges from it. The rumpy-pumpy of the sex is not the point. We differ from the other two forms of meaning (the traditionalist business of liberation from within given bounds and the application of essentialist fantasy in the bourgois model) only in offering a third meaning - the loss of a past self in the experience in order to create the potential for a new self. The sense of transcendence arising out of the experience after the immediate fact of the experience is the vehicle for change.