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.
*****
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
