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.