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 - 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.