Tantra I - i. The Androgynous Nature of Being

I had been reading Lilian Silburn's 1983 account of Kundalini worship derived from the scriptures of Nondualistic Kashmiri Shaivism (as one does) and it occured to me that the five chapters in Part 3 on esoteric sexual practice were worth more thought. 

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.

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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

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.

Tantra V - iii Power

We promised at the very beginning of this series not to take the Sanskrit form for the psycho-technical substance of tantric thought. While we have been critical of cultural appropriation and resistant to the idea that we can ever truly understand what it meant to be a Tantric in medieval South Asia, we hold to the idea of Tantra's value as a suggestive insight into psychic technologies of practical value today.

One frequent metaphor in the South Asian tradition is that of the wheel, an image that seems to have fascinated the South Asian mind. But the description of the wheel in the Tantraloka is not the endlessy circulating wheel of reincarnation and eternal recurrence but something wholy counter-intuitive: "... the wheel expands, is satisfied, breaks, and has the power to act." [Ch. XXIX 107). This is no wagon wheel. The cakra or chakra is not the turning thing but the process of turning and so the sense of a vortex or whirlpool. Things now start to make sense - the process is one of spiralling outwards, dissipation and collapse and the collapse of the thing into process becomes the collapse of the process into power or potentiation - like nuclear fission. A mental rigidity based on things in the world is replaced with a flow-ering, a flowering. The final point is the loss of the thing but in processual terms - that is, not the thing itself is lost but the desire to possess the thing or be the thing, an ending of the moving towards thing-ness in favour of a moving away from thing-ness.

The Tantric insight is only to see that abstract reasoning cannot give us the process. Reasoning is a thing-ness state by its very nature, categorising, analysing, abstracting and owning. It is sensual instinctive experience that helps to break the rational logjam - perfumes perhaps, colours, sound or sensual touch. The satiation of the secondary 'wheels' (cakras) - expanding through satiation to collapse and then power - is the pathway to the satiation of the primary 'wheel' (cakra), the one that either expands consciousness (in one reading) or transforms personality (in another). Sexual pleasure is merely the most sophisticated and advanced form of sensory satiation. The point is that the satiation of the senses leads to the satiation of the whole.

The Sanskrit descriptions of the kundalini rising are no more than poetic attempts to describe the ineffable, not mere orgasm but transcendence through more than orgasm. Everything is vibration and risings and bubblings ... the actuality of what is partially felt when listening to Tristan and Isolde's Liebestod in the right receptive situation. The ineffable moment when the world and the self and the self that is oneself and the self that is the other are all one - or, as we prefer to say here, feel as one. The 'are' and the 'feel' are co-terminous which, of course, is precisely how the world does not work. This is not the world. This is an aspect of the world (a thesis) that becomes a new world (an antithesis) before collapsing back into the old world but where the perceiving subject has become different in his or her relationship to the world - and so, because the world is what we perceive it to be, a new world (a synthesis) is created regardless.

Nothing is guaranteed but if this works as it should, all things being equal, and the persons are of the right type (in terms of personality) then the insight and reinvention of the Self takes place. The Tantric, of course, interprets this in terms of magical thinking - universal consciousness, reality of subjectivity and an abstract bliss - but we do not have to interpret it in this way at all. We can part company here from Tantra. We have stolen its technology as Prometheus stole fire from the gods and move forward on our own account without the need for medieval gods and monsters. It is the psycho-technology that matters - the effective integration of all sense experience above and beyond the object from which the sense experience derives itself. We seek here not to remove the magic but only the magical thinking about the magic. All magic is about power and this is a technique for the acquisition of power, potentia in its most profound sense.