Tantric Philosophy Lessons
Tantra - The Promise - Advaita Maria Bach
Some people believe that tantra is a spiritual excuse to have group sex. Others think that it's purely about sexual techniques. Many people believe that "it takes two to tantra" and that anyway it's really exotic and nothing for normal people. So there are many beliefs around tantra, which is funny, since tantra is all about practice and has little to do with believing. Devotees of tantra enthuse about cosmic bliss and the cosmic orgasm, vibrating ecstasy, vital streams of life energy, and sexual union that lasts hours. The really provocative aspects of tantra are the following:
1) There is no Good and Evil. That would be a dualism and to see the world in this dualistic way splits a human's soul and fills him with superfluous and burdensome feelings of guilt, in turn distancing him from the divine. Tantra says that the only thing there is is energy, which can be blocked or free-flowing. The divine is present in everything – in the material world and the ethereal: there is nothing outside of the divine – even my mistakes are part of the process. Even uncomfortable or shocking experiences with other people are a reflection of my inner self and can show me suppressed aspects of my self.
2) Sexual energy is sacred, since this energy conceives and gives birth to life. It's the task of everyone on a tantric path to deal with this energy consciously in their everyday life. The chances to celebrate it in a sacred way within rituals are among the high points in a tantric's life.
In this sense, everything is sacred, since nothing exists outside of the Great Unity - not even destructive energies or the things that are seen as unworthy, such as waste and excrement. So we see that the body is sacred, a completely different viewpoint to the Christian one, which contrasts the "weak fles" with the "strong spirit". For tantrics, the body is the temple of the soul, a mystery – the female part of creation.
3) Tantra is not a philosophy: it considers itself to be a science. It doesn't offer concepts to be discussed: it offers experiences that can be had by anyone who practices the endless variety of tantric exercises. These experiences lead to a growing integration of the inner contradictions, which then leads to an experience of the unity that is the one and only truth.
4) There are no prohibitions forbidding a particular nutrition, the consumption of stimulants, or sex. However, there are commandments with regard to spiritual praxis.
Tantra trusts each individual and leaves a lot to his or her discretion; if someone learns to stick to prohibitions, this might mean he is very obedient, but it doesn't necessarily mean he is ecstatic. Ecstasy is the love of life and worship of the goddess. Nonetheless, tantra is very familiar with the restlessness of the human spirit and knows that an alignment is necessary in order to reach states of concentration, profoundness and meditation.
The tantric also knows about the ego: the ego which is afraid of intimacy, hangs for dear life onto the mind, fears dissolution, won't let oceanic love happen, constantly erects barriers, and is generally an obstacle on the path to the mystical experience.
Further to point 1):
Let's have a look at the first aspect listed above: there is no good and evil. Doesn't that claim give rise to all sorts of fears that without prohibitions, such as the Ten Commandments, we would give free reign to terrible actions and ideas? Tantra assumes that its practitioners worship everything living and school their consciousnesses with this as they seek love. If this is so, then it excludes the possibility that they would consider murder or suicide to be justified. Take a terrible, recent example. The destruction of the World Trade Center as a symbol, of capitalism shows the Americans that there are people who find the dollar imperialism and world dominance of international capital to be immensely repulsive. Not one politician has taken this reflective tone - even though there are people, including Americans, who think this way. Some people are asking themselves how such an inhuman hate could come into being. The politicians have a simple and obvious explanation: we are the good ones, the free world, they are the evil ones, the murderers. We have to defend the good with violence. The world is black and white and the spiral of violence will continue - how can this serve a peaceful coexistence on Earth? The basic energetic laws show us that this is impossible. The nation that has been attacked is not looking at its own shadows: the violence on its own streets, Vietnam, or the fanaticism in its own history such as the McCarthy era, the racism against coloureds, the Ku-Klux-Klan … or even the violence that comes from the pursuit of Mammon.
But let's consider another aspect, which has been discriminated against and called evil or sinful in the name of religion: sexuality. As a tantra teacher with more than twenty years experience I can tell you a thing or two about how suppressed energy degenerates and, under certain conditions, wreaks terrible havoc. Something originally good, a gift from Mother Nature for everyone, has been repressed in the name of God, declared a sin, discriminated against and damned. People's souls are still burdened with feelings of guilt, many people are sexually traumatised, many women still don’t know what an orgasm is, men suffer from erection disorders and impotence - many people never experience what a fully developed sexuality means.
As my friend Andro said (a tantra teacher from Berlin and author of many tantra books): "Human lust is lame, and a lame person first has to be taught how to walk". Since every human is born a sexual being and can’t do anything about this biological fact, it's the most monstrous sin that a religion can commit to make people feel ashamed of this and disgusted with their own body – suppressing their sexual impulses and cutting off their lust.
Even though the media seem to wave a different picture in front of our faces, the truth is that most people are anything but sexually liberated. In our culture at least, the liberalisation has just about scratched the surface; in the depths lurk the old patterns of self-damnation and strangling of the lust for life. The consequence is a life led with one foot on the brake - a life on the back burner.
Another consequence is the separation of love from her sister, lust. Separated from lust, love became a high ideal in whose name freedom has been gagged so long that hardly anyone knows that love, lust and freedom are kith and kin, existing together. If you cut out lust, you castrate the life energy. If you cut out life energy you're attacking love, which is a flower in the garden of life. And how can the soul breathe without freedom? Here we’re talking about issues such as monogamy and polygamy, the good old romantic love, love to oneself, and how freedom and commitment can co-exist.
And so we slowly come to the second aspect that I mentioned above: sexuality is not only normal - it's sacred. That means it is healing for the integrity of men and women. Here tantra shows us the way to a liberating perspective: we can recognise our own sacredness without having to cut out any part of ourselves. Everything - everything - can be a gateway to the recognitions of our inner, creative energy: an intensive dive into lust can liberate us from the chains of the mind, soak our being in the longing for merging, tear down the walls of the ego, and make us aware that we are part of a greater whole. We arose out of lust; lust is recorded in every cell of our body since the moment when our father’s sperm cell met our mother's egg cell. Since I first heard tantra's teachings when I was 32 years old, I've been filled with a deep gratitude and feel relieved of the separation into one spiritual and one physical being: I'm a mindbodysoul in one piece.
And this is the liberating message for the modern human: you are fine just as you are- in fact you're divine. In order to recognise your own original nature and experience the true connection back to your origin, just dive into the flow of sacred life energy and you'll discover that life can be a dance! You are not born a sinner, life is not a vale of tears: create yourself a garden which you and your loved ones can live in in freedom. It is not divinely ordained that you go through life as an inhibited, envious sourpuss. Open your body up to all the sensations it is capable of, open your heart to love and worship the divine in everyone, and open your spirit to the eternal, so that you can take part in the mystery of life.
There's also a good message for women: Shakti, the female aspect, is the dynamic power in the universe! After all, the origin of tantra is considered to lay in the matriarchal cultures on the banks of the Indus some 5000 years ago.
Here's a tantric creation myth:
Shiva (the male universal aspect) was resting in nothing, perfectly content, beyond any desire, without form - resting in the oceanic consciousness. Then Parvathi appeared out of the depths, his female self, the Original Shakti, the female power. She wanted Shiva as her mate and shot love-arrows at him. Nonetheless, for eons he wouldn't let himself be disturbed. Parvathi practiced her tantric disciplines in order to beguile the Master of the Universe: she needed a lot of patience. But she couldn’t stop seducing him with her love and in the end he gave in: Creation was waiting to materialise. As they united, beings flowed into their bodies and the dance of Creation began: the Universe was born. With birth, there was also death, becoming and decaying - the wheels of life began to turn...
In order that men and women remember the origins of their life, Shiva gave them the sacred rituals. In the ritual of sexual union, man and woman can remember that they are two poles of one unity; This union as experience of unity makes the sexual act a form of prayer, in which the transpersonal is hidden within the personal. Within a ritual, the people are transformed into gods: this assumes that the participants can leave their hate, shame, fear, disgust and arrogance at the door - after an appropriate preparation and cleansing - at least for the duration of the ritual.
Reading these lines, the reader, who undoubtedly has some life experience, may ask themself: How can I fulfil such a task? Tantra is a path for life and it has many different facets and aspects. If someone really wants to transform themself, they will go through painful processes to achieve this: letting go of old concepts and traumas which are recorded in their flesh and bones as well as in their psyche, and confrontations with suppressed and unintegrated parts of their personality.
Tantra also has playful and lighter aspects where tears become laughter, tenderness and intimacy, and where unimaginable dimensions of experience open up. Life contains all sorts of opposites within itself: in tantra these are always understood to be polarities, and in this way, tantra considers itself to be a science of humans.
Our senses are the open gates through which we can take in the beauty of the world, our loved ones and nature: the transforming tones of music and the sensitive feelings of the body are all gifts from the goddess- gifts that show us the way to her. Sensual experiences are not obstacles on the path to the spiritual experience, they are a reason for gratitude. This shouldn’t be read as excluding "extra-sensory" or meditative experiences beyond the realm of the five senses- it includes them. For in the end, in tantra there is no "inner" and "outer": it is assumed that mediation refines the sensory experience and also that the reverse is true - a sensual, or sexual, experience is also a meditation.
Here I would like to quote Shiva's companion Devi (which simply means something like "goddess") from the "Book of Secrets" - one of the most important tantric works. It comprises 11 Sutras (short verses), each of which portrays a mediation technique. The goddess is sitting in union with Shiva and asks him:
O Shiva, what is your reality?
What is this delight-filled universe?
What is the seed made of?
Who centres the universal wheel?
What is this life beyond pervading forms?
Lead me into the wholeness beyond parts,
beyond space and time, names and descriptions?
Let me know this fully and without doubts!
In answer to these questions, Shiva offers 112 techniques she can use to find the answers for herself: they are ways of meditation, since the answer can only be the mystical experience - the experience of unity!
Now I come to the fourth, and last, point which I mentioned above:
Tantrics challenge their followers to do things which go against the social code of their time and culture. An example is the consumption of meat. The background to this is that all Hindus are strict vegetarians, so this exhortation to eat meat played a completely different role than it would in today's pluralistic society where everybody simply chooses the lifestyle he or she wants. Today, you can eat meat or you can eat purely plant-based products - neither of these choices takes a huge amount of conviction.
The real meaning of such a challenge was to provoke the followers to see conditioning for what it is: created by humans, handed down socially, and with a significance that is only relative, and not absolute.
The issue of recognising how deep your own conditioning is thanks to the value system you were handed down from society and from your parents, which you then internalised, is an issue which never ends and concerns every individual. To be precise, you can only begin to be an individual after you've gained the insight as to how many of your own feelings and thoughts you adopted from others!
It's for this reason that I also call my school "Tantra for Rebels". Part of my work concentrates on this issue: rebels in this sense are not political activists, but people who are prepared to live "against the grain". Although this is much easier than in the past, most people have inner constraints that are much more pronounced than you would think or than in the picture painted by today's media.
An example would be the conditioning against the consumption of intoxicating substances. Cannabis indica has always been part of Shiva's gift to humanity and in northern India, historically the origin of tantra, it has been consumed for thousands of years, and not only by tantrics. The tantric scriptures also refer to "soma": we still don't really know exactly which substance they meant. But in any case, the texts always refer to a very conscious, carefully dosed use of these ingredients.
Another peculiarity of the tantrics was their practice of engaging in sexual union with members of other castes: this was strictly against the social system! The reader may live in a society without such a rigid caste system, but she would do well to ask herself to what extent her choice of sexual partner nevertheless always falls within her own social class.
Freedom is freedom from inner constraints!
For example, to behave in a way "people would not disapprove of" is very unfree, even if it's only how you "officially" behave, and especially when it comes to your sexual behaviour. Bourgeois double standards don't fit into a tantric consciousness. As far as tantra is concerned, you can live out every sexual inclination you may have, as long as this is done consciously: heterosexual, bisexual, polygamy, monogamy, homosexual or even ascetic for a while. The important thing is absolute respect for every partner - it doesn't matter if he or she also practices tantra - and above all, respect for yourself. As long as sexual activity is not an unconscious consumption, degrading your partner to the status of an object, then it's OK. Degradation can also occur alone: for example, if you masturbate accompanied by feelings of guilt, too hastily, simply to relieve tension, then this is not tantric self-love!
Lastly, I'd like to point out to the reader that the tantra as practiced in the West is classified as "neo-tantra", since many modern bodywork, dance or breathing techniques have found their way into the seminars. This is perfectly legitimate, as long as the relevant techniques contribute to body consciousness, suppleness and flexibility. Myself, I apply bioenergetics, as developed by Wilhelm Reich, whose character analysis and definition of "orgastic potency" led to a theory of genital blockage that has remained consistent and to practical exercises that help to remove these blockages.
In general there is also a lot of confusion surrounding the issue of tantra, which is manipulated and exploited by the media. And there are many teachers who are not competent, since the title "tantra teacher" is not protected by law or any organisation. And there are so-called tantra groups in which no traditional tantra can be found, not even nakedness, let alone sexual union, and at the other extreme, there are tantra services to be found at the edge of the red light district. Sometimes it is just about "the ethereal side", sometimes it's "tittle-tattle tantra" - so super soft that it is unrecognisable - or "cuddle tantra", and sometimes there are "tantra" services that are barely disguised prostitution. As far as tantra trainers and teachers go, there are serious teachers with decades of experience, competent newcomers, and those who know nothing but have the audacity to offer their own courses after taking part in a weekend course somewhere else.
So, if you want to take part in a tantra course for the first time, you'd be well advised to find out as much as you can beforehand!
Physical fitness, more beauty, more erotic finesse, an increase in your self-confidence, becoming more attractive, increased ability to concentrate, but also the ability to let go, to relax - these are all the "side-effects" of a good tantric process!
Advaita Maria Bach, Wiesbaden, 28th Sept, 2001. First published in MASSIV magazine, Switzerland.
Website: http://www.advita-tantra.de