Tantra V - v Subjective Objectification

When everything converges on the non-duality of the participants and the distinction between man and woman disappears, the Tantraloka [Chapter XXIX 145] uses very interesting descriptors of what is happening. It refers to " ... this 'thing' free from parts and divisions ... the full attainment of modeless Reality". The thing is an object. Experience has become an object. We are in the realm of objectification, bug bear of post-Marxist Western essentialism and the centre of a post-modern ideology of neurosis that stands against the acceptance here of objectification as central to the final act of the tantric experience.

Our own position on objectification as a necessary condition for human experience and of subjectification of experience as an objectification of existence is expressed in full elsewhere. What is interesting here is that objectification - the 'thing-ness' of experience once it has arisen out of a process and is experienced as fixed in space-time - is so eagerly embraced by Tantra. The thing, the object, that is experience is defined in these terms as an intimate and inexpressible experience not unlike the intimate and inexpressible experience involved in perceiving another person in terms of distant desire, that quality of objectification so disliked by the Kantian who seeks to regulate ethics as if Newtonian mechanics required an ethical bureaucracy to stand alongside it in order to construct a Western civilisation of imposed moral order on behalf of a disappearing God.

The mental model of Tantra is not existentialist - it persists in seeing external Reality (as perceived in the moment) as some Supreme Subject which, within the domain of the experience, is permeated by all things as a fact of the matter. In interpreting it as we are doing, we are turning it on its head so that the Supreme Subject is the experience, an experience which necessarily relies on the most ultimate form of objectification, that is, of all perceived Being as, momentarily, the Subject-Self. But it is in this embracing of the objectification of a moment of space-time as the ultimate expression of the Subject-Self (whether perceived from the stance of the invented universal or from within as a relationship of the individual to raw existence) that stands out as an ethical and philosophical challenge to all Western analytical thought processes.