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 I - iv. The Unsettling

The link between a sense of shifting from being-in-the-world to being-in-being can be linked by tantra to sexual desire. It is not that sexual desire is an end in itself but its intensity is available as a tool. It unsettles our being-in-the-world.

It is the engagement and use of desire in the action involved in sex that, in turn, makes use of this intensity. It creates a physical unsettling of being that, once it has detached itself from the material object of desire relocates itself in a state of being.

The energetic process of relocation is the grounding of the state of being. Detachment may need to be explained in its relation to this shift from being-in-the-world to a state of (perceived if momentary) being-in-being.

The point here is that the desire to own or possess the object of desire is removed and the dominant sentiment is one of love and respect in the first instance (the point at which we are encouraged to stop by Western morality).

However, shifting beyond this separating out of desire from possession towards regard for the other (a watching over rather than an incorporation of the other), a further stage is one of love that moves beyond the personal into an intense state of what can only be described as individuation.

The maintenance of a stance that is defined by the relation to the other (first a dominance and then as a form of compassion or empathy, albeit that this is egoistically defined as such by the person feeling the feeling) is now replaced by an autonomous stance beyond the other.

Here, the encounter is no longer external but internal, beyond all necessary connection withe the world (or so it is perceived). When speaking of 'duality' as the state prior to the experience of love, what is being spoken of is 'choice', making conscious decisions to do this or to do that.

The autonomous stance beyond this contains no necessity for choice. In getting as close to raw existence as possible, the existential necessity for choice goes into temporary abeyance. There is no analytical process in which the world is there and we are here observing the world.

The moment of 'ekstasis' is a moment of synthesis. The drive for pleasure, erotic attraction, finds itself held briefly not in pleasure but in a state unlike it, beyond it, isolated from the world and all relations with the world, a world in itself and for itself - the state of maximal love.

The total body experience of orgasm under these conditions goes beyond desire (which is logical since the experience overwhelms the impetus to a thing by becoming the thing) and 'purifies thought'. Purification is perhaps not the right word because of its value-laden connotation.

The experience is also seen as 'calming' thought. What all this really means is that the body has taken over and made thinking redundant and, for the moment, unimportant. Thinking is stilled and the perception is created of simply being in a state of being.

This is why the Buddhist might see the particular type of orgasm involved here as a liberation from the bondage of desire. This is not necessarily how a Western mind sees or needs to see this same phenomenon.

In the modern West, the desire - instead of being seen as problematic and as bondage or pain - might equally be seen as means to an end or as a tool, the ends being an orgasmic 'higher' state. The means is not the end. It is inferior to the end. A distinction is certainly drawn from those who see means as ends.

The means in themselves are matters of (relative) indifference, not bad as in the Judaeo-Christian or Buddhist myths but also not intrinsically good as in the more crass forms of Western hedonism, left hand thinking or post-modernism. Experiencing means is distinctive from experiencing (or believing one is experiencing) ends.

In fact, the experience of ends is nothing of the kind - just a higher means. The crisis lies in the final meaning have no observable ends - so that cause and effect and the flow of one willed means to another eventually leads to the 'bliss' of a momentary 'no-thing', certainly no discernable being.

This particular means, this momentary no-thing, can become an ends to all intents and purposes - functionally there is nowhere else to go unless one creates an ends out if the experience which, of course, by being created, becomes not an ends but a new means to some other end.

The analysis within tantra sees the intense state of 'bliss' as seeded or embedded within the 'agitation' that is desire. The agitation of the self contains the potential for this state of enhanced sense of being but the being is just 'more apparent being' rather than the way to any final being.

This apparent being still functions as means, especially when it is labelled, codified, analysed or explained. The apparent being that emerges from the means to being (that is, desire) is still not being in itself which is unattainable.

The being at the end of the way of means still leaves a mystery behind it as to the exact nature of its being and of the being behind the apparent being to which it, in turn, points the way as an object that was no more than the ends of desire.

This 'lack' is what has disturbed humanity so that it has had to turn back on itself and give this lack the meaning of meaning itself - as 'presumed end'. All philosophy seems to be a play on this lack, the attempt to give it a substance it cannot have.

But there is no there there which is why the final means (that presents itself as the lie of the ends) is so central to the illusion of the spiritual.

The loss of all in the sexual act is thus one of the closest opportunities we may ever get to the state of being that no longer appears to contain its means - albeit brief, apparently divine and apparently animal.

The body and its materiality is thus not an impediment to self-realisation (though the self is always evaded in these spiritual disciplines, nothing is experienced or evaluated except through the self) but the means. Its biochemistry and its interpretation of sense-impressions are what enables the experience.

The mind may go on to construct or invent a narrative of 'transcendence' where the orgasmic experience takes a person 'beyond himself or herself' but it is merely an impression drawn from what is already available to hand within the brain.

Any illusion involved lies not in this or the world being illusory but in the invention of another world to describe the ineffable. The ineffable exists because ... well, it is ineffable, impossible to communicate ... but ineffability is never necessarily not an attribute of materiality only of a failure of language and communication.

Indeed, this should be the reason to be cautious about all spiritual (that is, non-material) claims for the experience, precisely because the incommunicability and soleness of it all are more likely to be a function of the loss of evolved linguistic forms back into the animalistic and material than forward into the language-bound world of the imagination.

It is not a case of going beyond language but of losing language and, so, if we have to start using the language of divinity (in itself, a collapse forward into effability simply by the use of the term), then the only conclusion to make is that the divine lies not out there but inside - in our 'brute' animal nature.

It is not that we progress through the orgasmic to a higher level but rather that we return cyclically to our animal aspect and an animal aspect at that of an extremely primitive type before returning to being human, very possibly but not certainly transformed.

It is our descent into the clear business of experience without thought that works the trick, rewiring the brain, and not being drawn upwards into some light waved before us by God or the Universe.

If we are connected with all other persons in this, it is because we are connected with our roots as matter and not as part of an invented mystery, pretty and comforting though that may be.

In short, the apparent merging of subject and object is not the merging of the human with the divine but of the conscious human (still the subject) with the animal within (the objective representation of all matter is the matter in which we are embedded as a consciousness).

Nor is orgasm the only possible means of attaining a re-connection to the biological substrate of the self (this substrate as the divine once the language of the divine is stripped away, a fact-on-the-ground which all 'spiritual' traditions seek to evade).

There are a number of transgressional and excitable acts that can do the same but it is the best not in terms of its consequences (which may be problematic if no thought has been given to the purpose of the act) but in terms of its integrity in relation to the material animalistic core of personal being.

Sex is second only to survival and ahead of death as central to being.

Tantra II - The Self & the World

Everything that we consider in the world involves a consideration of the relationship between the thing that has evolved into a consciousness embedded within a body (the subject-self) and all the other things that are the case in the world (the object-others). Although,

• the sexual relations between the subject-self and object-others is one of the most intense of experiences that can be recalled (since death cannot be recalled) and,
• the idea of a subject-self relating to another subject-self an illusion, and
• a relationship between one object-other and another object-other or an object-other 'thinking' in relation to the subject-self are both impossible (since the object-other has no consciousness except as a subject-self regarding another subject-self as object-other), 

... any possible relationship between the subject-self and the object-other is of equal potential importance as the sexual act.

Sex is not privileged in this respect. It is the intensity of the relation that is the issue here and not either the subject-self in itself nor the object-other in itself or a valuation of relations without taking into account this intensity. (The interpenetration of subject self and object-other is extensible far beyond sexuality into any possible relation between consciousness and the world)

It is simply that the sexual drive is most likely to be one of great intensity for biological reasons and so most available, at hand, for use, restricted only by social considerations. Only the active relation between the two (from subject-self to object-others) can have meaning or power, power and meaning being intimately related in their relation to the relation between subject-self and object-other.

However, the quality of the relation (implying a valuation by the subject-self) now bears consideration because it can be simple contact (even a fleeting awareness or lack of awareness that nevertheless enters into the occult subconscious or into an unconscious from which it may later be recovered) or it can be increasingly 'intimate' to point of a sense of 'merging' with an object-other.

The ultimate stage of sexual subject-self/object-other relations is defined by its intimacy. This is not some fluffy snuggle but a radical engagement in the relation between the two. It is radical intimacy that creates the 'frisson' that is misinterpreted as the eternal or the absolute when it is (in fact) an intense engagement with the contingent and the momentary.

The only absolute involved is the discovery that there is no absolute and that the illusion of the absolute is the proof of the contingent and the momentary. An awakening, an enlightenment, an aufklarung, that declines to embrace this instantiation of Heraclitean flux is an evasion and so no enlightenment at all. The power of the experience lies not in the illusion of the absolute but in the ability to extend moments and join separate moments to each other in order to create a consciousness-changing experience that can be experienced also and simultaneously as detachment.

The continual flow between subject-self and object-other of moments experienced by the subject-self in a direct contest with the brute fact of the object-other, a dialectic of relationships, is the experience that is then merged into a whole - this is the point at which there is the clear danger of a wrong interpretation of this as the universal or the absolute.

Without the dynamic flux of pulsing relations being sub-consciously perceived as instants unified by the occult will, there is nothing there but an illusion, a shallow simulacrum of the real which lies not in the object-other but in the transformative effect of the dialectic of the relationship between subject-self and object-other.

We can go further - the subject-self is an object-other to itself unless and until it enters into this process of intimate engagement with the relation between itself as subject-self and itself as object-other. The transformation requires that the dynamic between subject-self and the external object-other is an analogue and trigger for a transformative relation between subject-self and the subject-self as object-other of the period before the act of intimacy.

It is the realisation of one's own objectification by oneself, the only objectification that actually matters, that is at stake. As object-other and subject-self dissolve in the relationship between them so the subject-self and the subject-self as object-other to itself both dissolve into each other. The intimacy uses the active set of relations in the world (subject-self/object-other externally) to trigger an internal set of relations that is transformative - unless, of course, the entire externally directed experience is dissipated in an absurd belief in the absolute and the universal.

The collapse of subject/object dualism is an occult act within one's own consciousness, a consciousness which, nevertheless, remains (because it can be no other way) alienated from the world. The question perhaps then arises of the 'meaning' of the ambrosia that emanates from the 'friction' between subject and object in the sexual act.

This is always the emanation from the female - the object in the cultic practice - that is, the fluids created by erotic pleasure and expressed as some form of ejaculate. We can take this analogically or literally.

Literally, the female ejaculate is a proof of pleasure and engagement of vastly greater import than the male ejaculate which, of course, in the traditional form of cultic practice, is actually not expended. The Taoist version has the male ejaculate drawn back into the body and the tantric has the female ejaculate 'imbibed'.

Analogically, it might be seen as the emanation from the object-other - that which exists outside the subject-self - entering into and transforming the subject-self. It is a physicalisation of what might be called spiritual but is (to be in conformity with our own theme) the analogical expression of the felt acquisition of the other as transformative tool in relation to the subject-self.

Interestingly, at his point, Abhinavagupta [Yogasamcara] refers to the union of fire and moon in a context where fire is specifically the subject and moon is translated as the 'known' with the idea of the sun as 'knowledge' or 'what is known about the known'. You would think that what is known and the state of knowing what is known ['knowledge'] are logically the same thing but the differentiation is there and must mean that the mental state of knowing about the known is different from the thing known - wholly counter-intuitive to our way of thinking. This thing the 'known' is in a state of relationship or exchange with the subject and the 'known' is 'known' through the sexual dynamic.

The 'ambrosia' (or 'cum' and related juices) is what can be 'known' about the 'known' (the ambiguity about this is that the tantric is claiming full knowledge in this whereas we disagree and suggest that the 'known' is only a taking of part of this thing which remains essentially unknown). In any case, what is felt to be known or experienced to be known is analogically represented by the physicality of female juices of which, of course, there are, not so mysteriously, more than one.

The symbolism has what is known being known by the subject through action that transmutes the bodily organs into secretions that represent the orgasmic experience of the transcendent ... though we might better say the transcendent experience arising from the orgasmic. This is sexual heat, a lighting up and a shaking off of time itself.

To bring this (literally) down to earth, the flow of felt energy derives from the fact of matter, the fact of the matter, through the medium of the perceiving self, flowing back into the world of matter through the perceiving subject as a re-perception of the world as something transformed.

The underlying nature of matter has not changed (and so this is not magick in the Western sense) but, in the changed perception of matter, the function of matter to the subject changes, its meaning. Thus, matter is, in fact, transformed to the degree that what is perceived about matter is to be regarded as matter to all intents and purposes (since the perceiving self is not a detached scientist or analyst but someone who lives in the world in time as really existing experience).

As far as the subject-self is concerned, the world has changed. This is a process that, in being wholly a-social, transforms the relationship between the perceiving subject and the other, the social context of the other and the perceived materiality underpinning the social that underpins both other and subject-self. It is potentially total with only the base substrate of matter and being itself unchanged.

It is a shift of position or stance from looking away from the sun into the shadows of a cave and towards the sun and away from the cave. The sexual transformation of the body is thus a sexual transformation of the social and so of the material in its use-value to self, other and society. Sexual intercourse transforms the social and the social transforms the material (techne).

This is what we have to hold on to - that the material body of the subject-self in converging mindlessly with another material body in an exchange of energetics and fluids transforms perception and, since the world is a world defined by perception, so changes the world. Which helps us understand why sexuality is so threatening to the meanings used to maintain social order.

The central thing to remember here is that we are engaged in a process rather than a thing. Something is expressed outwards, in bodily fluids, but something is also consequently and relatedly, but still mysteriously to the experiencing subject, being absorbed back into the subject-self - not the material fluids which are an epiphenomenon but something ineffable: 'the swan of dazzling whiteness drinks the world and says with immense joy: I am That."

The satisfaction of the self arises from awareness of the thing that emerges from the process, illusory to the world and real to the self, which is the no-self. And the most powerful of such experiences may be required only once to transform a relationship to the world. The insight is an antinomian one. It is also not one for 'swingers' or repetitive or addicted sexual animals. Once it is realised that the illusion of the universal is a pragmatic reality in experience and in that quality is no longer an illusion, we are engaged in a profound paradox that permits the holding of a contradiction in logic as a truth regardless of logic.

The insight is then applied to the world in general - the self in the world has become beyond good and evil in its knowledge of the world and it makes the necessary choices from then on rather than have those choices thrust upon it. This is the knowledge that was forbidden Man by God in the myth and which auctoritas has, ever since, been trying to contain and evade.

There is another aspect of this which goes against the essentially socialised nature of formal religion - it is that the impulse is towards the 'self' as something really existing and with a core of creative being. Post-modern philosophy often likes to deny the self - in a perfect expression of the death instinct - but it is tenacious precisely because it hangs on in the face of an inevitable unavoidable death.

The universe is created not externally (at this moment of orgasm of which we speak) but from within and then outwards. Each consciously developed orgasm is a creation of the subject-self's universe, a sort of Big Bang, although it dissolves quickly enough back into its origin. Briefly, a new universe, unlike this one, was created and destroyed, leaving a residue of itself to change the old.

Experiential subjectivity is precisely what makes all this possible. Objective analysis of an internal condition can never, in itself, create an existential change in one's condition. Experiential subjectivity is embedded in the body which cannot be the 'other' for objective analysis under such conditions of experience.

This thing, the body, in which one is embedded, may be 'correctly analysed' objectively speaking but this correct analysis cannot change the body directly - the body can only be changed by the subsequent application of technology. The body in its relationship to the world can, however, be transformed by experience within the subject-self and so the world, in which the body is embedded, can be changed.

This suggess both a transhumanist truth (the body changed by technology) and a sexual-socialist truth (the world changed by experience). The final albeit pseudo-harmonious state is when the subject-self and the world are recalibrated. The world is 'renovated' by experience. The world before and after the experience are objectively the same thing but subjectively are 'worlds apart'.

Tantra IV – i The Kulamarga or Esoteric Way: The Preconditions

And now we move on to more difficult territory because, instead of discussing the theory, we have to look at the practice of the esoteric way in Tantra – of enlightenment through sexual practice – which is regarded by most Western eyes as either exploitative (because of the social conditions of the time) or cold-hearted (because of the ‘attitude’ into which the person enters the process).

The charge of ‘exploitation’ should not be dismissed. It is axiomatic in the modern world (and an axiom we accept without qualification) that sexual practices should always be between fully informed consenting adults. In fact, it turns out that the partners in the esoteric way are expected to be both consenting and fully informed but more of that in a moment.

It is a more complex point whether a hired sexual partner can be a fully informed consenting adult but we would argue that this is so in any society that is reasonably free and where the hiring is in a free market where the adults make free choices in this respect. In the original tradition, the instructors of the cult were women either as ‘dream creatures’ (goddesses) or as mistresses trained in the arts (who no doubt had to be paid something if only to eat). These were selected by the adept much as one might select a psychotherapist or piano teacher and there are similarities in the functional relationship between them.

Caste and looks are specifically deemed to be irrelevant and there is a certain element of submission to the teacher – this sense of submission to the superior wisdom of the female teacher somewhat offsets any suggestion of exploitation although many modern women would consider the ‘muse complex’ to be just another variant of patriarchy and who is to say that they are not entirely wrong. Obviously, this traditional mentality is to all intents and purposes dead in the world and modern attempts to revive ‘sacred prostitution’ (apart from the fact that such practitioners are likely to be flung into jail by an increasingly socially conservative European politicians or in sexually miserabilist American communities) do not really ring true.

Some, though not all, feminists would disagree with the ethics of all this but that is another argument where I come down on the side of the liberty of the individual and against the imposition of external moral standards where no coercion is involved,. Let us leave it there: the divide between authoritarian liberalism and libertarianism of any type, left or right, is absolute and can be fought out on the revolutionary barricades at the right time but not here.

The modern equivalent to Tantric practice is either going to be the ‘dream teaching’ (essentially accessing the unconscious through masturbatory techniques well understood by modern Western magickal practitioners) or the extremely difficult business of finding a like-minded partner who can strip away the guilt and shame of sexual practice, of which more in a moment. But let us not let these practical matters get in the way of pursuing our theme – the translation of Indian possibility into Western possibility. Modern Westerners can try to mock up the original conditions for sexual Tantra but that is probably why it has degenerated into sky-dancing couples counselling or an excuse for free love jollies amongst the Californian middle classes. The reality is that a revival that is not private fantasy depends on something we are very far from in the West – an egalitarian and ‘heroic’ attitude to sexuality that is based on men and women both ‘getting’ the philosophical underpinnings of this posting that we have published earlier.

So, let us move on to the allegation of almost sociopathic ‘cold-heartedness’ in dealing with sexual relations. Here we are on sure ground but only if we strip away the Western assumption that sexuality is always to be contained within complex societal and emotional bonds, a legacy of the Judaeo-Christian communitarian tradition. This is not to deny societal and emotional bonds freely entered into but it is to raise questions of why these bonds should be totalitarian in effect and why sexual expression must always be associated with a convergence of ends (traditionally marriage and love) and not be seen as an effective tool for entering into the Self and pulling out what is necessary for further development.

Indeed, strip away the local social conditions and language as we have been trying to do throughout this series and the general message of tantra would seem to be permit this possibility although we also see the same possibilities for change in artistic expression, playfulness, magical expression and solitude - and this list is by no means exhaustive. I have done by best to forewarn the Western liberal and traditionalist that we are not moving into comfortable territory. I can do no more.

The tradition itself hedges itself around with negatives – the practice is not orgiastic in the sense of a seeking for pleasure, nor is it about creating material new life. It is highly disciplined and termed ‘heroic’, in an almost Nietzschean sense, as a means of self creation, of self realisation. Of course, the tradition positions this as an identification with the divine (Shiva) which we do not. We take the process at its word – and refer you back to the theory – as the ‘realisation of the essence of the Self’ but where, existentially, we know the essence of the Self will be a transformative invention of the Self. In a manner of speaking, we have ended up here with a sort of anti-Tantra, subverting its very meaning in relation to the absolute in order to return it to a consideration of its relationship to the means that are required to meet its claimed end, the knowing of subject-selves through their relationship to object-others.

The ‘heroic’ aspects of the original practice still apply however. First, the final resolution is wholly dependent on a process referred to in the tradition as the raising of the serpent Kundalini. Again, taking away alien analogical traditional terminology, what this means is that the body turns in on itself and centres itself on itself from base to peak so that it is integrated with the final sexual union as a whole. The aim is a flow upwards and a form of balance prior to ekstasis. The control of perception and thoughts has to be undertaken without anxieties, doubts or any external guilt or shame and that, in itself, is massively difficult for anyone today and possibly has always been so. It is a total shedding of past societal and familial norms in order to effect the transformation. In this, I would suggest, lies much of the liberatory effect. This includes, especially difficult for the modern Western mind, a total detachment from the partner and from the intent to pleasure and a redirection inwards ‘selfishly’ of attention. Since ‘selfishness’, like ‘cheating’ or ’hypocrisy’, are absolutely core cultural ‘bads’ in Western thought, we can see the challenge immediately – how does one possibly become (albeit momentarily in the context of a whole life and without any suggestion that one acts selfishly in the world outside the practice) ‘selfish’ even for a moment without guilt or shame.

For some, this will be impossible while the habitual sociopath is excluded from the game by their inability to reflect on their own self in precisely these terms. No wonder that the tradition suggests that there are few who could even attempt this and even fewer who would succeed. The idea is that, even in the most highly excitable of circumstances surrounded by multiple sources of stimulation (so solitude as such or quiet are not required as in many ritual conditions), the practitioner can withdraw completely from the actual excitation and replace it with a very different sort of inward ‘bliss’, one of self-realisation.

Let us return to the partner – and I am aware that I am working within a heterosexual paradigm here although there is no reason why it cannot be a homosexual or even polyamorous or bisexual relationship – which is assumed to be male although the more I consider this, the more I see no reason for not reversing sexual roles so that the primary partner is a strong and heroic woman. The only reason it should not be is not biological but cultural and there is no cultural condition that is not reversible through the exercise of human will. The issue is the desire of men and women to reverse and play with historic roles and not their ability to do so.

The process starts with an expression of respect for the other, the giver of the conditions for enlightenment. Although she/he is to be treated in a detached way at the moment of ‘bliss’ as tool of bliss, the person who gives this service of inestimable value is honoured and respected from the very beginning. They are appreciated in the most fundamental way. It goes without saying that the honour and respect (and implicit gratitude) continue after the event as much as before – there is no mistreatment of women or misogyny here unless you are one of those sour old crones who invest the sexual act itself with misogynistic meaning and, of course, both parties are consenting and highly informed. There is no heroism or success in performing acts in secret on unwitting lovers.

Against the norms of much formal religion in traditionalist cultures, the ‘other’ (more specifically the female here) is not degrading man through encouraging his desires simply by the fact of her existing. The opportunity to provide pleasure is presented as an act of high worth that can lead to liberation. Of course, we must not get confused here – the original model is still traditionalist with women assigned societal roles (as are men) but the roles are honoured and not just taken for granted. Personally, I am not sure this is much of an improvement because the roles still de-limit both men and women in a caste society but the retention or jettisoning of traditionalist societal roles in itself has no real effect on the process we are writing about.

And what of the person seeking enlightenment? Well, the character attributes are pretty tough to meet – there is an awareness of oneself (‘interiority’), of course, and we have mentioned the need to abandon societal norms of guilt and shame and be ‘heroic’ against them but he/she must also be devoid (at least at the time of search) of strong passions and allegiances and must be bodily balanced.

Of course, this posting breaks the golden rule which is secrecy. The original operations of the cult were probably secret because they were antinomian and disruptive but, equally, we can take at face value that the system (apart from wanting perhaps not to see a ‘closed shop’ opened up and professional standards deteriorate) was available only to those who had dealt with many of the issues of guilt, shame, passion and detachment by the time they reached the ‘yogini’ and had come to some sort of positive philosophy of life whose nearest Western analogy is probably that of Nietzsche. This drive to existential self-realisation is apparent in the work required as a pre-condition for the more esoteric (in social terms) practices.

There is at this point an important caveat, one familiar from Nietzsche – this is not a Stirnerite breaking away from all restraint as an autonomous individual. This is heroism but not adventurism. What this means is a reiteration that the person seeking enlightenment is going to have to do two things that are self-restraints: ‘purification’ (an essentialist term which I do not like but which can be reinterpreted as existential commitment); and ‘humility’ (a Judaeo-Christian term which we should also not like but which simply means, not abasement before a mysterious God or authority, but an acceptance that, where it matters, we depend on another person entirely).

Part of the critique of ‘adventurism’ is a critique of those who mistake the intense kundalini experience – perhaps also the exceptional orgasm created through meditative concentration or just good sex – with the critically different self-enlightenment being spoken of in cultic practice. There are warnings of what might happen (a descent into hell) without right preparation but I think we can pass these by.

Now, after all the preparations and constraints and warnings, the ‘siddha’ and the ‘yogini’ are to meet (perhaps with other such adepts) and this is cast in terms much like those we have reviewed philosophically – as sources of energy (yogini) to be transferred to their object-others (the ‘siddha’) in order to effect (in our view, momentary and illusory but still profound) merger of both so that object-others become subject-selves together – at least, as they perceive their situation.

Tantra IV - iv Group Transcendence

The original tantric communities in India would gather socially in what have reasonably been considered to be group sexual events. The theory was that what was done with sex between two could be multiplied in terms of transcendence not so much through a multiplication of partners as through the spontaneity of a random partner found within a much larger set of potential partners.

The nearest we have in the West to this is the 'swinger party' and perhaps the occasional outburst of cultic behaviour in new age contexts but the former does not even pretend to be engaged in anything other than hedonistic pleasure and the latter, being cultic and rejectionist entirely of the prevailing culture (rather than an elaboration of it), is not really analogous with historic tantric practice, although perhaps we should not be wholly dismissive of its attempts to be true to the original source.

This group sexual behaviour is highly problematic in most of the modern world, not only because it seems to counter all moral understanding that is not based only on hedonism or on a prior social or counter-cultural rebellion but because we simply cannot reproduce the total cultural model that might have permitted it as 'natural'. There is simply no cultural space for it any more. Even if a group of swingers decided to explore transcendence or a group of cultic rebels decided to leave the margin and openly advocate (which it is unlikely the tantrics had to do) a re-envisioning of society to normalise their practices by engaging with it politically, economically, culturally and socially as citizens, the results are likely to be unsatisfactory to the participants. It might be argued that parts of Northern California have reached that libertarian state but not elsewhere.

Group sexual transcendence is thus likely to be treated with horror and disgust by many but, more damaging in fact to the proponents, by utter lack of comprehension and indifference. It simply does not fit into the mental maps of post-Christian and post-Marxist world views and into a range of models related to personal safety (because of disease transmission), family (because of the carefully calibrated links between sexuality and emotional bonding), gender relations (where, though polyamory might be accepted, and swinging accepted as a pleasurable pursuit for those inclined, neither is the norm) and attitudes to spirituality (where few can see any possible connection between group sexual behaviour and the 'higher purposes' assumed to be central to all expressions of 'spirit').

At least some of those constraints work heavily against spontaneity - modern cultists heavily ritualise their behaviours in the direction of 'feelings' and responsibility to the other in a way that works entirely against the spontaneity of the original model. Thus, in our general exploration how tantric thought can be managed away from the gobbledygook use of an ancient language out of context and into our world where it might be, if not 'normalised', found acceptable and functional, we finally come up against a cultural barrier that no amount of intellectual engagement is likely to breach. Even where the cultural barrier appears to be broken, we find the spontaneity without the transcendence (swinging) and the attempt at transcendence without the spontaneity (cultic practice) but never or rarely the association of transcendence with sexual spontaneity in quite the way the tantrics appear to have managed things.

This is not that the ancient culture found such methods acceptable but that those who engaged in such methods could still work within the language and assumptions of that culture. Today, anyone reproducing those methods would be working so completely against the language and assumptions of their culture that they would have to self-marginalise themselves in ways that would destroy the sole point of the exercise ... power over oneself in order to function better in the world as given.The matter thus has to be closed at this point as part of the project started in April 2014. Nevertheless, it might be useful to go back to try and see how the tantrics themselves might have projected their practice into the modern world. The exercise in radical cultural difference will tell us something about our own limitations and constraints without diminishing the strengths that make us generally resistant to communitarian-traditional modes of sexuality.

The idea was precisely that the rituals were not primarily hedonistic but were designed to create a state of ekstasis where all the participants reflected each other 'in harmonious union'. Indeed, the best analogy in the West is with nothing sexual at all but with the dance party where young people in particular become ecstatically lost in the music and the movement. This may result in sexual encounters that are transcendent but that is more luck than judgment. A lot of people may go along hoping to 'score' but there is very little consciously directed at the transcendent results of sex rather than the sex itself.

Perhaps this means that all we need to do is shift the emphasis culturally from sex to dance. The tantric ritual was essentially about sex with the emotional excitation of the partners being mutual in a classically magical sense. The perception of shared pleasure created something greater than the parts and the obvious element is that these people had no inhibitions whatsoever - another reason why it would be almost impossible to repeat this model in the West outside its neurotic-cultic or hedonistic-materialist contexts. Even the dance party model sees the drink and the drugs as removing inhibition under conditions were the participants often wish to be in denial about their own subsequent decisions, seeking excuses to disinhibit and giving the option of disclaiming subsequent responsibility if it all goes wrong, whereas the tantric community is seeking aids actively designed to disinhibit as a willed act.

The festivals are, of course, more than about sex - dance and song are specifically understood to assist in making the community lose its aspect of being a lot of individuals and become one as a community. Again, we have analogues in dance parties, football games, shared public events, remembrance services - when a shared emotion of sadness appears in a group of people at the end of 'Les Miserables', this same phenomenon is taking place: a sense of loss of self into the whole or perhaps the whole simply sharing one part of the self. Whatever is involved here is antipathetic to the individualism of most of the preceding postings where the participants are concerned with self-transcendence as persons known to each other, who respect each other and who intend that precise set of acts. In the community case, transcendence requires a loss of self into the community and, in an age when congregational religion is declining, this immediately makes many of us in the modern world nervous after the experience of watching the rallies at Nuremburg or the great May Day Parades at the high point of Sovietism.

Tantric communities were small communities of people who all knew and trusted one another and so there must have been some basic respect - another argument against their usefulness in the modern world since how many of us actually know and trust many outside our own family and closest friends (if even they) often scattered geographically across the world. Certainly the ones we most trust are not going to be the ones who are suitable for this sort of thing. Modern intimacy and geographical proximity are pretty well disconnected outside the family and the family is a no-go area sexually (or certainly should be in all societies). That tantric world is gone and, given its exploitation of minors and women and extreme poverty and caste difference, few would want it to return - even the sociopaths would want it returned only if they could be guaranteed their position in the ruling elite.

The key point for these communities was that they identified with the entire event, its sights, sounds, smells, tastes, movements. The individuals were happy to lose themselves in the whole. The community event allowed the elimination of barriers to action such as envy or jealousy (we can see where this is heading as inhibitions fall away). A charge is made that if any individual remains an individual separate from the loss of self in the whole, then they should be kept away because their very presence would act as a 'dampener' on the proceedings'. One supposes that this is why anthropologists with their quizzical and critical eye have not been encouraged to attend any surviving events. The secrecy that surrounds them is as much about not attracting those unable to lose themselves in the ritual aspects as concern at being 'brought to the attention of the authorities' (though both are likely to be important).

Flowers and perfumes are offered to a personification of the goddess - more devotion and offerings alien to the Western way of thought - but the smells are designed to affect desire as much as anything eaten or drunk or heard or seen or bathed in. We have a total sensual experience here that is not going to be reproduced in a draughty English village hall on a wet Thursday night. The rest is much as we have decribed in previous postings. There is no difference in essentials other than that, instead of engaging with one other, the 'adept' is engaging with a community and, if they cannot gear themselves up to loss of self in that community, then they should just do what they can do on their own. There is even room for transcendence never actually requiring any physical contact - the moment referred to in other postings might simply arrive from the total experience prior to anything sexual at all. This is not presented as the likely norm but certainly as a possibility.

The point is that the eventual sexual contact in a community setting of this sort assists the adept by being detached from the usual personal dynamics involved in relationships, mimicking the same detachment to be found with a female specialist. Both sexual partners simply disappear as entities in the world (albeit briefly) and it is the spontaneity of the contact that creates the ability to enter into a state of freedom and bliss. Of course, there is, as always, a weaker Western analogy, the complete lack of responsibility in an animalistically-driven one night stand and perhaps the tantric 'guff' is really no more than cover for this experience (allowing a little cynicism to intrude). But the erotic element stands - a social event involving maximal sensory stimulation creates the conditions for a dynamic erotic engagement that is spontaneous and that results in consciousness expansion. We will return to our main theme in the next posting as we draw closer to the tantric understanding of that brief moment of 'bliss'.

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.

Tantra V - ii The Role of the Duti

We now have to look at some of the detail of what is proposed in the 'secret' ceremonies of traditional Tantra and compare and contrast with what is possible or desirable today. The first and most culturally challenging aspect is the sharp difference in roles betwen the duti who performs the secret ritual and the wife of the brahman who takes part in mainstream Vedic ritual. This is the dualism that should perhaps cause pause for thought far more than the male/female dualism that so many LGBT neo-tantrists want to wish away in their more recent appropriation. This separation appears to be at the heart of a more general essentialist separation of women from women, crudely put in the Western tradition as the 'whore/madonna' model of what it is to be a woman. Often presented as a product of 'patriarchy', this almost certainly misrepresents what is going on. We have not only males coping with the female when female power is essentialised into separate spheres of duty and pleasure (and then, in Tantra, the latter is given its religious or spiritual form as means and justification) but an attempt to institutionalise these into different forms of essentialist female self-imagery in pre-modern and even modern culture.

Even today, we see this same bifurcation made by women (not men), under apparent conditions of freedom, into the 'good' feminist and the slut or, in reverse, the sex-positive feminist and the oppressive radical feminist. What is going on here? Merely the overlay of in-born or culturally developed authoritarian or socially conservative attitudes on the one hand and libertarian and socially expansive modes over and against gender difference. What was imposed in traditional society from above, creating the unhappiness of free spirits stuck in formal household ritual and those yearning for stability but stuck in the lifestyle of the outsider, is now a matter of personal choice (if you can escape the impositions of those immediately around you), yet the inherent personality differences remain because they are locked into our genetic variation. Instead of a sphere for the household and social conformity and a sphere for difference and autonomy, the post-modern world has opened up a brutal struggle in which authoritarians now strive to impose their vision on all regardless - this is the world of fascists, Islamists, radical feminists, late Marxists and 'Mumsies'.

Tantric traditionalism resolves this issue without any necessary equity and without real care for individual choice by accepting an open world of duty and authority and creating a secret world of self-discovery and exploration. This is where a modern reversal into that world as it actually existed is neither likely to be successful nor desirable. The modern world has created the totalitarian mode of thinking (where the traditionalist world permitted private life) and the impulse of the post-modern authoritarian is not towards traditionalism but towards totalitarianism. This challenge is a challenge to Tantric revivalism which absolutely depends if it is to be even remotely authentic not on itself being defined by external 'correct behaviour' (which is where neo-tantra often heads as it accommodates contemporary liberal mores) but by the existence of a private life 'that does not frighten the horses'.

We find a situation where (insofar as authority does not interfere unless certain boundaries are crossed) the existence of a strict rules-based society (which we do not have) almost demands a secret but not subversive alternative culture. This can exist today but not be truly subversive any more. Yet it can no longer exist safely in the long run because there is no defining authority which cannot be owned by either the authoritarians or libertarians against the other (because of the arrival of democracy) and where social rules are inchoate and 'up for grabs'. No alternative subversive culture can exist now without being in some sort of permanent dialectic with the constant rules-based assault on its margins. Subversive cultures are always trying to find their function on shifting sands. The Vedic housewife and the duti cannot live in harmony and balance today because they can evade each other and nor should they since there should be no reason why 'housewives' cannot participate in sexual exploration if they so will it or the modern duti not decide to find a partner and raise a family. This state of cultural flux is millions of cultural miles from the cultural stability and fixed personal statuses of traditional Tantra. The only way of reproducing the original situation is to create a cult and such a cult, precisely because it is not embedded in the greater society, is by definition not mimicing Tantra's essential quality at all - its logic as part of a total cultural system. The point is that Tantra was 'secret' but not outside the culture. Anything secret today is simply criminal or playing an unnecessary game.

We have not discussed the male part in all this since it is merely the mirror image of the female - that is, engaged in functionally essentialist roles where the Tantra only exists to allow the person to break free in order to develop their own selves in relation to the universe but where the method involves a re-essentialising of not only the practitioner but his (or theoretically her) partner. There are equivalent essentialist roles in our society but these are more likely to be embedded in the mind and only sustained rather than commanded by society. An unhappy LGBT person has a solution in that they can go to a big city and join an open and lively LGBT community (at least in the West if not in Russia or other socially less developed cultures) but an Indian Tantric who engages in 'secret ceremonies' (basically sexual) has still to go underground precisely and paradoxically because they were part of a total pre-modern culture - the clue is in the word 'secret'. Yes, modern swingers hide their identity for social reasons and many gay people never get around to telling their parents but it is possible not to hide and possible to tell for all except paedophiles and practitioners of bestiality. It is just a matter of wilful courage and not a war against the rest of humanity. The equivalent liberatory function to Tantra required today is not the sexual act itself but a psychological one of liberation from the dead weight of personal pasts on the one hand and from ideological theories based on faith or exploitation on the other. The first expresses itself in the psychotherapeutic movement and the second in exhausting political struggle between bands of activists working on a populist democracy with weak and malleable politicians. Neither situation existed in medieval India.

This casts more light on the antinomian and dramatic insistence that the secret rites are nothing without alcohol, meat and sex [the three Ms]. Indeed, at one point in the Tantraloka, we have the assertion that 'those who perform the sacrifice without the [usually forbidden] three MS, sources of bliss, also go to a dreadful hell' [Ch XXIX 99-100]. But, and this is an important caveat, only the virasadhaka (our 'heroic being') is in a fit shape to break the rules in order to by-pass the normal Vedic methods to attaining bliss. Yet we also have the statement in the Tantraloka just before the last that 'Enslaved beings who are deprived of the three Ms are deprived of bliss altogether'. This might well imply that even the accepted socially normative rituals are a waste of space and that only a tiny elite of antinomians can get to a state of bliss and presumably improve their reincarnation prospects. So, the lads who get smashed after a steak and chips and get laid on a Friday night in Cardiff are not going to get reincarnated well because they are not 'heroic beings' but neither is the bank clerk devoted to his wife and young family who sticks to the rules and takes the train home - only a curiously self-regarding elite group of magical practitioners who get smashed after a steak and chips and then get laid on a Friday night in self-created cultic circumstances will do so. Indeed, everyone is going to go to hell except these cultists, it would seem.

Back to the duti who has another quality that must be remarked upon - her devotion to the interest of the man, to the sadhaka. It is explicitly stated that 'her selection, therefore, should be irrespective of her beauty, caste, etcet.' [Ch. XXIX 101]. If we move aside this devotional aspect - though this is expressed in terms of identification with rather than worship per se - the picture of the duti is not unattractive: her superficial and social aspects are of no consequence but what is important is her vira, the same bold and 'virile' character of the man, the same lack of doubt and determination and the same wilfulness towards the end. Now the picture of the woman changes - she is not an excluded exploited woman (from the perspective of those commited to social duty) but an independent woman choosing to engage in sexual ritual. Once inside the closed secretive ritual circle, we find what we would recognise as something more modern, although I would prefer to see it as simply liberatory of the sort of person to be found in all times and in all societies and which only wealth and progress has enabled to come out into the open in recent centuries.

This will to be is the probable secret here and the will to be applies to both partners. Indeed, there is an argument that it is the male that is still stuck in the essentialist traditionalism that make him the organising principle and that it is the woman, equally active within the ceremony, that is the more liberated within what amounts to a cultically sanctioned safe haven. It is the male voice in the writing that sounds shrill and hysterical. The female voice may be silent but appears silent from strength and inwardness. For all the male chatter, it is she who is the active principle. Three types of duti are suggested, She who is divine, infusing the virile (boldness and power) into the male (an active principle). She who is initiated by a more advanced male into her own state beyond fear and doubt (a passive but learning version). And she who is a sahaja (a spiritual sister) where the potencies between male and female are experienced simultaneously (a principle of equality). There is nothing inherently exploitative in any of these - she is in command or she is learning or she is 'enjoying'. She is not a thing being used - at least in the theory.

The pushing away of the wife (and the proscriptions against incest and intimate friends) from this process is equally interesting because there is a deliberate attempt to distance the sexual ritual from a certain set of 'love' emotions - attachment, friendship, affection, responsibility - but without negating a consequent unattached rush of different unattached or even detached 'love-like' emotions from the act itself. There is a refinement here that is lacking in Western discourse where love is an either/or in which sexual engagement without the former set of emotions is almost automatically consigned into the category of animal rutting. The Tantric model is very different, enabling a wider palette of emotional (or is it biochemical?) engagement centred on the aim or intention of the act. Perhaps the second set of emotions are best described in terms of bliss under conditions of mutual and egalitarian respect without the necessity of other bonds. The texts go further by suggesting that the duti is selected precisely because there is no prior sexual desire involved and this is seen as part of the heroic act - which, of course, is totally counter-intuitive to all Western ways of thinking. The whole business is not even supposed to be 'enjoyable' in a conventional sense (that is as fulfilment of desire), but just a means, a trigger, to an end, the inwardness of knowing oneself (to put it into Greek terms) and establishing the degree to which one is focused on the ultimate end of 'heaven' (to put it into Christian). There is an energetics here that help define what is supposed to be felt and which takes us closer to the psycho-technology involved: what happens during sex in terms of stimulus on the male; the going deep within; the energetics of climax; the grounding that takes place; the orgasm itself; and the duti as energetic principle in herself. The sadhaka becomes drawn into his own internality, a biochemical response associated with the heart or with the sexual organs. From one of these perceived centres, the bliss emerges.