One Swami's perspective on Tantra**
by Rahasya
Teacher, Advait Tantra School.
Tantra is an entirely practical spiritual path. It’s all about methods, approaches, experiences. Not theories, theologies, dogmas. Tantra is a tool, a device to go beyond mind, into spiritual experience, into experiencing the divine.
There's far more to human sexuality than the procreative urge. Through sex, we can find our capacity for love as something real, not just a nice word for manipulation, domination and control. When we can love, our even higher capacity, compassion, can be awakened. Sex is probably the most direct route to the experiencing God that we have.
Essential to Tantric practice is awareness in sex. Awareness of the real experience, un-judged, unbound by conditionality. This is far beyond the abilities of anyone that has bought into the culture's views on sexuality.
Beliefs and mental attitudes that are against free erotic experience obstruct the usefulness of tantric practice. They poison the experience, plunging one into self-judgement instead of immersing one in bliss.
In the old, traditional schools, the answer to this trouble was to teach tantra only to those who’s meditation had gone deep. Those who were already close to the experience of Truth. These were the people who could practice tantra rightly, that could make the most of this most extraordinary phenomenon. For others, the traditional meditations would be at best wasted, at worst, seriously dangerous.
That applied to ancient Indian culture, which was not in general as sexually repressed as modern global culture. If the modern schools of tantra insisted on prospective students being clear of repression, of judgement, of sex-related trauma, tantra would already be extinct.
Modern schools of tantra therefore have had to embrace a therapeutic attitude, healing their students from the unfortunate cultural damage while introducing them, gradually, to the deeper lessons of sacred sexuality.
So why is our now global culture such an enemy of natural sexual expression, so opposed to the idea that profound spiritual experience is available through sexual meditation techniques?
At the most obvious level, there’s the view that sex is hard-wired into our body mind system. We’re mammals, and as we can see from the behaviour of mammals, there’s a huge amount of instinct involved in what is clearly a procreative process, driven by nature in a relentless quest to breed. This view has it that if the mind isn’t very controlled, very disciplined, if the sexuality isn’t powerfully repressed, the breeding drive will just take over the consciousness, and a man will become just a wild raping marauding animal.
This is the main justification for the view that there’s something inherently sinful, corrupting, addictive, compulsive, and destructive and otherwise evil in sex.
I remember lectures at school. “Sex Education” it was called. A more honest name would have been “Intensive anti-sex propaganda”.
Our culture (the dominant world culture) has taboos, even laws and other restrictions on the sexual conduct of the mutually consenting.
Mainstream religious and spiritual organisations teach that sex is sin. It’s excusable only for procreative purposes, or to bond (mutually addict) child-raising couples by restricting their sexual outlets to each other, and placing limitations on what is “acceptable” sexual practice even then.
Sacred sex doesn’t look like something realistic – doesn’t seem to be anything more than that animal breeding urge to break free of the culture’s restrictions, to indulge the breeding instincts.
We humans have significant differences from all other mammals. Our highly sensitive, deliciously responsive skin. Our huge brains. Our amazing lack of instinct. We have to learn to walk and learn all the other basic behaviours of survival. Even the instinct to suck fades by the second after we’re born. A baby that doesn’t get to a breast immediately, the moment it is born typically has feeding difficulties because it has to learn to suck. We are born with the need to learn just about everything. We don’t have hardwired pre-programmed reactions for almost all social situations. We even have to learn what facial expressions and gestures mean among the people around us. A New Yorker doesn't use the same gestures and mannerisms as a Thailander, or a Highlander. A cat doesn't have that problem, or a dog. They have instinct based communication. We don’t come with ready-made answers, we have to learn it all.
An analogy from the computer world: Animals run on ROM based routines (instinct). Built in responses for a wide range of situations, of stimuli. Fast, reliable, hard-wired. Fixed. Efficient. Not easily, or perhaps not at all editable or even adjustable if conditions change and they become inappropriate (e.g. lemmings, and recently 1 500 sheep in Turkey). Their CPU and RAM are minimal. Scant room for consciousness, for spontaneous responsiveness.
Humans have it all in software, flexible, intelligently responsive. Almost no ROM, except for the most basic functions and even these, including heartbeat, breathing, heat generation, digestion and sexual behaviour can be consciously controlled to an astounding degree. We therefore require a very powerful CPU and massive RAM.
We (OK, just the women) also don’t have visible oestrus – so it isn’t automatically obvious to us, at a distance, that a woman is available for breeding, and visible oestrous isn’t available as a cue, a trigger for our supposed instinctive breeding behaviour. In species that police breeding, e.g. wolves, nature doesn’t make it a 24/7/365 job. That would be seriously contra-survival - very time consuming.
The greatest sexual difference we have from animals is that we don’t use sex primarily to breed. The number of sexual encounters that a human has when there’s no possibility of pregnancy is huge compared to the rest of the animal world - OK, except some goats.
Our uniquely sensitive skins, almost total lack of instinct and huge brains set us apart from animals in a very significant way. We are designed to have a capacity for individual consciousness, deep intimacy and transcendent bliss.
Some psychologists and others disagree - they say it's obvious that we have instinct. A man or woman will be "naturally" upset by the partner making love to someone else. A brief study of other cultures is all that's required to expose this view as utter nonsense. What's "instinctive" for an isolated, or historical matriarchal community can be so extremely different from what's "instinctive" for a modern yuppie that it's clear these are actually learned behaviours.
Our sexual jealousy, desires, fears and attitudes are regulated by our minds, not instinct. There's no instinctive, procreative urge behind anal, oral or otherwise "kinky" sex. Unnatural and abusive environments like the military, public schooling, mainstream religions and nuclear families ensure that our sexuality and capacity for love is restricted and warped far from the natural.
Our media keeps this perversion going, supporting the twisted, illogical and unnatural "morality" of the culture by exposing "scandals" and demonising free sexuality. The culture's laws often restrict access to sexually explicit materials and criminalise some sexual conduct. In South Africa, a man can join the military, make a career of killing other humans, at age 16. He isn't legally allowed sex until 18. A movie with explicit, but gentle and loving sexuality gets a sterner age restriction than movies with explicit, extreme violence. Our culture is not on the side of loving, of bliss. It supports violent, perverse, ugly attitudes to sexuality in the name of morality.
Tantra and other traditions of sacred sexuality have traditionally operated covertly, secret orders of larger organisations, mystery schools and so on. Almost all religions, including Christianity, have had traditions of sacred sexuality, and, in secret, most still do.
General awareness of the divine potentials in sex is on the increase. That Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code book got published indicates the climate for the mystics, shamans, meditators and tantrikas is changing. Sure, the RCC has reacted, even gone to the extreme of promoting their chief suppressor of rediscovered scriptures to Pope, but they haven't been able to suppress the most important truths exposed in the book: The slaughter of Jesus' teaching lineage (followers of Mary and Thomas), the existence of sacred sexual practice in early Christianity, the suppression (enforced destruction) of the great majority of early Christian writings, the illegitimacy of the RCC's claim that it represents Jesus teachings, and the existence of probably more reliable records of Jesus' teachings than the official gospels.
I (and many others) believe that things are relaxing - that the mass of humanity is evolving.
In this "thaw", where articles on Tantra appear in Marie Claire, Oprah and other magazines, Tantra and related sacred sexual teachings are becoming more and more available.
For the first time in around 3000 years (in the Western world), there's the possibility of talking with people on a Tantric path, even experiencing the loving touch of a Dakini without having to join an order, do hundreds of ridiculous things to prove your loyalty (at least one tradition used to torture it's members quite harshly, to test them) for about ten years, before being allowed near the "mysteries".
Teachers of Tantra and Sacred Sexuality vary wildly in method, approach, the level they work at and their personal lifestyles. Most have a particular area of expertise (usually what they are working on in their own lives) and some have completed the path, gone where desire becomes a meaningless notion.
Sometimes one will recommend you work with another, if there's an aspect of his/her work that would particularly suit you. Sometimes, you have to discern this for yourself. The old days of having one Master, one directed path from start to finish are over. These days it's much more likely that you move from one teaching to another, intelligence, synchronicity and intuition being your guide. Different people need different experiences, and all seekers and potential Dakinis need different teachings as they move through different levels of experiencing.
With school members, practising Dakinis, and sometimes other teachers, friends of the school, I host Tantra evenings where I make chai, you get to meet whichever of my students are around at the time and other people interested in Tantra. We talk about things sacred-sexual. We're really practical people. All about method. How-to. Whether it's handling jealousy, overcoming a sexual addiction, getting past fantasy to the real, or the onset of your kundalini, we'll have practical suggestions, and often useful stuff to share from our own experiences in this work.
Some people don't want that "level of exposure", or just want to work on releasing repression and re-sensitising with a Dakini ( I use the term inclusively, Dakas too.) in private sessions.
Individual sessions work is very powerful and goes fast. What gets worked on is whatever stands between where you are now, and Bliss.
The sessions room is really like training wheels. When you've got the knack of riding, you're going to go places...
We're a close group, though we don't live together en commune. I'm very appreciative that those students of mine who've already awakened to their calling choose to keep close. The healing work they've done in the short time since we've gone public is a beautiful service in support of humanity. It's a great privilege to be a part of this work.
** The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of Whet Personal Products management or owners but aim to provide a broader perspective, education and understanding on the subject of sexuality in it's many forms.