Tantra V - i Technologies, Texts & Transgression

To this point, we have concentrated on the theory and sociology of Tantra and avoided the precise psycho-technology involved. Before doing so, we come up against the issue of secrecy. The teachings of Tantra are presented as a secret engagement between adepts and potential adepts. The writing down of the secrets is hedged around with caution. The tradition is fundamentally one of verbal and pragmatic transmission - above all, 'doing' much as meditative practices are a 'doing' guided by words that are better spoken than written down. Western culture, with an uneasy relationship with claimed authority and a love of the written, yearns for the verbal fixity of the text. Most awareness of what is going on here (including our own) is coming from texts which have moved through a temporal sequence - from texts to assist people who are also verbally and practically engaged in them to texts for a small minority searching for enlightenment, then through more widely available printed texts and on to mass and easy availability, if not online then through swift delivery of written texts via Amazon.

There are two issues here - why the secrecy and can any isolated written text help much when it comes to praxis? The secrecy cannot be pinned down to any one reason for it because we are throwing ourselves back once again into the alien world of pre-modern South Asian practice. The instinctive modern Western reaction is that the practices were antinomian to such an extent that secrecy was necessary out of fear of some moral police (which tells us more about Western fears and neuroses than past reality, although it is clear that Tantric practices were antinomian, disruptive and not to be presented as normal morality) or one which simply adopts the secrecy of initiation and hidden texts as a 'thrill', the sense of an exciting exclusive spiritual cult to which some Westerners feel that they too can have access. This latter is possibly another Western cultural bias that has individuals becoming cultic in order to avoid immersion into mass society and so find an implicit felt superiority through knowledge and some kind of paradoxical individuality. We have all met socially inadequate sub-Nietzschean traditionalists who whine about the 'herd'.

There may have been locally relevant elements of both these impulses - towards self-protection and towards a sense of specialness - but there may be other reasons (and I say 'may' because no one can know easily what is going on in the minds of people hundreds years ago in another language and in another place). One reason may be the dialectic between the property value of knowledge in a world of mostly illiterate and poorly educated people. Another might be the fact that written texts would always need to be verbally explained and could not be let loose on the world because there was no critical discourse outside the community that readily understood the terms and context. This is a world where as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Mughal Emperors could be both illiterate and connoisseurs of the arts and highly cultured. There would be, in the case of texts, a guardedness about meaning - the teaching was verbal and so subtle. The text would need to be protected in its availability (perfectly compatible with fears about the social consequences and possible 'crack downs') to those who could also either access the verbal teachings or who had had a verbal teaching but were at a distance and needed the top-up opinion of a guru that could be mastered from within a context of known meanings. What we have, therefore, are arguments and persuasions and tools and aide memoires rather than the sort of primary text that the West is used to in its manifestos and testaments.

This adds to our sense that we cannot truly know (because we cannot get access to the verbal and social context of text) what a text would mean to the person producing it and to those first reading it. By the time it reaches us, our understanding is a little negative - we can (thanks to scholars) understand sufficient context to get a pretty sound traditionalist understanding of what it probably meant and we can know what it could not mean because of human developments that took place later. Within that framework, the response becomes one of academic investigation (which should be taken seriously but which immediately detaches the text from its more immediate value as practical technology) or of appropriation for its use value - two ways of seeing that spin off rapidly in different directions, with compromises between the two merely making bad scholarship or adding layers of unnecessary obfuscation to the psycho-technological aspect. Our postings spin off in the anti-academic direction, treating the tradition as simply a possible first stage rocket to future exploration. Many people will be shocked or disturbed at this - though probably not academics who tend to be detached and relaxed about appropriations so long as they are free to point out that any appropriation is not what was being thought, used or done in (say) the fifteenth century in South Asia. All appropriations are likely to be absurd and the most absurd are probably those that claim to be closest to a world which no longer exists.

We have to return to what can be understood as the aim of Tantric practice which is a state of mind that South Asians would comprehend as a general aim in life, however precisely interpreted - nirvana. The Tantraloka of Abhinavagupta positions this as the Saivite nirvikalpa, a state of being (or rather a state that is indescribable and beyond being and non-being, beyond categories, notably without attachment and limitation). The philosophy behind the critique in my postings is to be found much earlier in our series. I will upset many by saying that there is a dash of hysteria in the South Asian holding on to this unknowable and indescribable state requiring a level of suspension of disbelief that we would associate with the theatre or a Peter Jackson film. Nevertheless, this state, whatever we think of it, is the aim of the praxis in the mind of the practitioner: this has to be respected. It is precisely why sexual practices are means and not an end and cannot be regarded as mere 'lewd' pleasure - the valuation here suddenly placing South Asian religion surprisingly into a mildly sex-negative position that should depress any thorough-going existentialist with a hedonistic bent. But strip away the cultural evaluation of sexuality in a resource-poor society concerned with maintaining right order (dharma) and concentrate on the experiential end and we get to a point where a transgressional attitude to dharma can be permitted for a higher 'spiritual' (we would say experiential) end. However, the transgression against conventional views of dharma are to be kept secret both because the higher end can only be understood in a learned context and probably, more pragmatically, trying to explain yourself to less well educated magistracies will be time-consuming and fraught with risk.

All cultures have a sort of basic mob aspect to them based on the construction of conformity as reality. Just as it is easier to keep things secret to avoid the simplifications of the mob so those who have to keep the mob under control are inclined to do stupid things in order to make life simpler for themselves. And if you do not think that this is not as embedded in our culture as in any other observe the parade of world leaders dropping everything to turn up in Paris a week or so ago to assuage the emotional hysteria of an inchoate mass with absolutely no interest in understanding why violence erupted on their soil instead of defining what happened within their own framework of sentimental prejudices. An analyst of the causes of terrorism who came up with data that might be inconvenient to those prejudices might be very happy to communicate his findings verbally or in secret papers rather than face the wrath of the tabloids. Our secret services may be the Tantrics de nos jours in this respect.

Tantric adepts are, within this context of nirvilkalpa, suggesting a fast-track to it that apparently obviates the need for chants and ritual practices (though this breaks down soon enough when the master wants his own ceremony). Abhinavagupta is explicit on this point about other peoples' rituals though [Tantraloka XXIX 2-3] and this too gives us a clue to the tactics of secrecy. In a society held together by millions of small habitual acts which are explicitly directed at maintaining social order and ensuring personal salvation, someone coming up with a fast-track route to stripping away the matrix and attaining personal transcendence without worrying about the wider social context is going to be problematic. This phenomenon is far from unique to South Asia. Again, we can see parallels today in the nervousness of people who detach themselves from our matrix and use language to redefine it in ways that are troubling to those who hold tightly on to habit, tradition and inherited institutional forms.

Abhinavagupta is offering a sort of vitalist response to the world that requires a single-minded and detached focus (which all sentimental types find profoundly disturbing). He goes further in casting the adept in heroic terms [vira] and giving a multiplicity of fast-track methods engaged with the world of which sexual relations between a couple is only one. The others are: in doing things in the world, 'in relation to a woman' (meaning by observing), in the body as body, through breath and through thinking. The observation of a woman is interesting because it suggests heightened experience through the aesthetics of erotic beauty, a heightening of experience that the evasive modern might associate with contemplating the anatomically incorrect Rokeby Venus instead of enjoying the pleasure of looking at a beautiful young woman, now universally condemned within our matrix as objectification. The Rokeby Venus was, of course, slashed by a suffragette in 1914.

The point is that all these engagements with materiality - observing is observing a thing and thinking is thinking about a thing - are contrasted with ritual which is presented as unnecessary. All that matters is what can be known (as means to the end) and the process of knowing. Though not stated, ritual habits and purifications are perhaps little more than evasions from a direct relationship with the world. This is an attitude of guardedness and fear, a non-heroic attitude towards the world, like the guardedness and fear in magickal banishings. The irrelevance of ritual and performance (other than the performative relationship to the immediate) is matched not merely to the irrelevance of cultural and social prohibition but goes much further - what is prohibited is prescribed. In that culture at that time, this would include meat, alcohol and sex. In our culture, this aspect of the case has to be interpreted by going back to the original advice and asking ourselves what ritual means today and what is prohibited in a culture which (as a liberal culture) appears to prohibit nothing very much. Let us take these two aspects of the case and explore them further.

We can re-interpret the ritual habits and purifications of the South Asian Middle Ages (still present in perhaps half our population in any case as more or less light allegiances to religious practice) as inherited habits and neurotic tics, most of which are harmless (like always sleeping on the same side of the bed) but some of which are serious blocks to becoming who we want to be. The question is what inherited way of being, doing and thinking works against us as persons and in favour of the world, meaning social order. This is a very personal question since it is not automatically so that a person need not be in perfect tune with a set social order - indeed, the authoritarian personality may crave such order in order to be who they are and may have no interest whatsoever in 'higher experiences'. But this should not be rocket science for those who are not authoritarian personalities and is not really about transgression at all. It is simply about making the inheritance that does not work for you a matter of irrelevance - if it does not work for you, do not do it.

The active flouting of prohibition is far more problematic because our culture has a much more evasive attitude towards what is prohibited. What is prohibited is far more likely to be rational and, bluntly, decent. The danger under such conditions is that there is a search for things that are disgusting to the majority simply because they are disgusting and against order and not because they fit some intent to remove a barrier to progress. In practice, the functional modern approach to the matter is probably not actively to seek out 'bad' things to do (which are mostly though not all bad for a reason related to harms to others) but to note what the social order seems to disapprove of without sanction of law or where the law has been moulded only by the sentiments of social order and seek these out for experimentation if they are to taste. The point about the prohibitions in the South Asian context is that they are all 'victimless crimes' in which behaviour is dictated to maintain order or intrude into private decision-making and autonomy rather than offer evidence-based protections. A Tantric who today decided that the prohibition against paedophilia is one that must be broken is utterly missing the point that the prescription about challenging prohibitions is a challenge to restrictive prohibitions that have no purpose other than to dictate terms by the social (the moral or religious law) to the individual in their search for meaning. The Tantric who buggers little boys is a paedophiliac first and a Tantric incidentally. Sexual exploitation may or may not have been endemic in South Asian society but the irony is that it was not forbidden in fact within the greater social order and so cannot be prescribed, while today we not only have a strong sense of informed consent as central to an autonomy of equal persons but we know the harm that it does to others. Harming others is not part of any prescription - even Anton LaVey's Satanists do not set out to harm others.

The prescribed transgressions today are thus not going to be eating meat, drinking alcohol and having sex because these are not prescribed against by the hegemonic moral order. The prescription here is not necessarily the Law (in terms of the magistracy) but the prescriptions made by religious leaders and moralists for others as claimed means of attaining some form of salvation. If anything the prescription is against some of the cant appearing on Thought for the Day. In our world, the prescriptions are more likely to be be the habits and customs of traditional religions, the expectations of others without regard to our own natures in schools, marriages and workplaces, the beliefs about the world imposed on us by the media and by political and intellectual elites and the codes of conduct that tie us to unsuitable people and boring dinner parties. The transgression lies not in sitting on corpses (though one gets the point of this in terms of understanding transience) but in doing what is desired (without harm to others) that goes against all these socially imposed obligations, not for the sake of being rebellious but in order to become vira, a heroic man (or, of course, today, the female or transgender equivalent). It may be transgressional simply not to break bread with boring people whose only subjects of conversation are mortgages and school fees.

Of course, all this liberatory attitude is soon obviated by a new prescription which is self-serving - the reverence for masters. This rather lets the cat out of the bag. Instead of liberating entirely from tradition, Abhinavagupta transfers the obligation from the outer world to himself and his way of seeing which is really no victory for the searcher. From this point, one is right to be suspicious of the ideology behind the teaching and to start critically investigating the underlying psycho-technology - in order to steal it from its new masters. There may, in the end, be nothing to it or it may be that there is something to it but it is only a first stage rocket that requires new engineering knowledge to be applied to it (you can thank the originating work of Von Braun but know that the things that get to Mars are the product of knowledge far greater than his) or you discover that the psycho-technology only works with the ideology and either go and find a new technology or re-adopt the ideology in its totality (the path of the more conservative Neo-Tantra). One really cannot know except through praxis with the question always in your mind as to whether it is worth the candle!

It is at this point we come to Abhinavagupta's account conduct of the 'secret rite' and, by the back door, ritual soon slips back in for the rather obvious reason that it is extremely hard to create the conditions for something important without having some prescriptions - unless you believe that gnosis or enlightenment (as some do and some have felt they have experienced) can come in a flash under any conditions. A place is selected, it is garlanded with perfumed flowers, the place is dedicated to and becomes identified with Shiva, the master is contemplated (ho, hum!), the kundalini ascends, there is even a fire ritual and so on and so on. But the core is that the initiated woman is brought and she and the adept have sex identifying with Shakti and Shiva. This is the first stage rocket that requires further engineering.

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.

Tantra V - iii Power

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

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

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

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

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