33

A Tantric Path for the West?

Our desire to reap the benefits of an ancient practice cannot be the object of a deal with the absolute. It is possible that we do not so much long to experience the ecstasy, peace, or joy of the mystics as, more simply, we desire to reach a state of plenitude and depth in our relationships with the world and people.

If we make this our objective, which is not divested of greatness, we are tantrikas in the making because we will discover that the distance between these two objectives is nonexistent. As soon as presence to the world makes its home in us, we undergo a profound transformation that affects our whole being, body and mind. The breath will relax and find ease and plenitude; the body will let go, relax, and open itself to life; our senses will regain their marvelous functionings and serve as steedlike messengers to help us cross the dreary plains of absence. The motivation—as simple as it is essential—to escape from routine, from the cyclical aspect of our unhappiness and errors, which renew and prolong our suffering and our disillusioned attitude, is enough to send us gliding toward the experience of an immensely rich inner life.

The West is well armed for success. It knows well the devastation caused by everything about which the Orient can only dream. In a certain sense, we are lucky to have exhausted many of our dreams and to have returned, in a way, to square one. Because of this, we have the opportunity to procure for ourselves the most profound that life can offer us, on the condition that we break ourselves of our habits as consumers.

Tantrism is a marvelous approach to life, perfectly adapted to Westerners made weary by centuries of dogmatism, beliefs, and subjugations of all kinds. Our longing for freedom has been stripped of illusions. We are ready to stop trusting religious or sectarian institutions, which abound in the merciless struggle for power. We are ready to make ourselves heard on all playing fields in order to bring in the dawn of individual consciousness, which alone can eventually develop a collective consciousness. We have arrived at the individual maturity that can transform our quest into reality.

Finding a path stripped of all the marks of religious or sectarian fanaticism is possible. Allowing this path to be involved in each moment of our lives is also possible. All we need to do is reunite in one single body—ours—the divine, the temple, and the worshiper.

Through light and playful work, it is relatively easy to slip from general lack of consciousness to short stretches of presence, which little by little will give us the desire to continue in this direction.

When little islands of presence cut into our moments of absence, we start to taste the difference in pleasure that presence brings us. When practice mixes with pleasure, we are not far from being definitively lost to the cause of automatism.

Tantric practice is extremely creative. It is based, in the beginning, solely on the unhindered discovery of presence according to individual longing. As is written in stanza 74 of the Vijnanabhairava Tantra: “Wherever you find satisfaction, the very essence of bliss will be revealed to you if you remain in this place without mental wavering.”⁵⁴ This linking of our everyday experiences within society to the divine, “the very essence of bliss,” is one of Tantrism’s great creations. No devaluing of everyday experience comes to set up a dichotomy between, on the one hand, the human being and his daily life and, on the other, his spiritual longings. Nothing is trivial anymore; everything rises to the sacred on the condition that our relaxed and easeful attention be such that there is no more mental wavering. This is the heart of the question. There cannot be both presence and cogitation.

Life is to be seized in its first moment of unfolding, in the luminous presence of buddhi, the intelligence that is beyond the hindrances of rumination, opposition, choice, differentiating judgment. If this tapping into reality brings us the serenity we are striving for, it is simply because mental silence opens to spontaneity, grace, fluidity, and joy. If the Tantric masters like to define themselves as sahajiyas, “spontaneous, awakened beings,” it is that they have left behind all conceptual limitations of the pure and the impure, of the sacred and the profane. Everything is tremoring vibration and, in becoming sacredly tremoring beings, they open their heart to life.

This tremoring is accessible to us; it is not a yogic ideal. The Spandakarika, “the chant of tremoring sacred vibration,” one of the most beautiful and most profound Shaivist texts, says: “Tremoring Sacred Vibration, the very site of creation and return, is devoid of all limitation because its nature is devoid of form.”⁵⁵

This absence of fixation is the very site of the spatiality that we can regain in a sudden impulse toward the depths of the Self. For this, let us jump with both feet into our daily life, let us allow consciousness to emerge naturally and replace absence. These few seconds of consciousness that we will give to our life—thirty, fifty, a hundred times a day—are the door to bliss.

At the beginning of my practice with Devi, I had trouble thinking that things were how she presented them to me, close and absolute. I thought she was simplifying my work for me in order to lead me to a later stage of greater depth. This is the marvel of the Tantric practice, which right from the beginning recognizes in its practitioners their capacity to understand the most far-reaching of the teachings and which, in the presentation of these teachings, conceals nothing. Everything is told at the start. There is no progressive quest. The masters have always taken care that they could be understood by everyone, without book knowledge being a condition or requirement. These masters talk above all to the people around them, who are from all levels of society. They recognize no social, cultural, ethnic, or gender differences. Their teaching makes access to the philosophical texts optional. They are above all living examples of what they preach and happily, willingly, give the key to their realization: naked attention to reality.

What a practitioner of the Tantric path quickly feels, and sometimes the very first day, is that the benefit or reward—the state of joy, space, and freedom—is not subsequent to the practice of awareness. It is, on the contrary, an integral part of it. All I have to do is be present to any aspect of my inner life or to any event—it does not matter which—and I am right then and there in communication with what the teachings promise: openness, relaxation, ease, joy, love.

Everything is unceasingly within our reach. All we have to do is to reach out a hand and touch life profoundly. Each time this contact occurs, we come into a state of vibration and tremoring, we go beyond form, we penetrate to the heart of things, and we put our own heart into a state of vibration.

This continual vibration gives the extreme impression of being alive and in communication with all that is within our reach. The senses come out of their torpor; they stop waiting for exceptional circumstances to come along and wake them up. They find childhood again, adolescence, where the world unendingly sustains their capacity to vibrate. It is this deep and palpitating life that all those on the path of spontaneity know.

The main obstacle that the West will come up against is that what is presented as Tantra in our industrial societies is often an ersatz version in which all the basic principles have been twisted or distorted to fit with our most superficial longings for enjoyment, for orgasm. If we were to believe the newsmagazines, Tantra is “instant bliss”; a confused mix of 1960s therapies and spirituality with a light, Eastern scent. What we are fundamentally is not a perception, and it is therefore impossible to find through drugs, sexuality, or any sect or religion. It is not about undoing or disconnecting the intellect. Frustration affects only those who live in intention. This stimulation to try to do, to want to free the Self from thought and other childishness stems from a lack of orientation. In this approach we learn quickly to live in intimacy with the Self. This requires us to become familiar with respect. Just as you respect your environment in all its expressions, in this same way you respect your own limitations, the characteristics of your psyche, and those of your body. Here there are no fantasies of transformation, of becoming this or that, of arriving at such and such a psychic or physical result: You note things about how you function, about your intellect, about your affectivity. When you listen without intention, through pure love of listening, a clarity occurs, a space is created, you start to breathe. The rest follows organically. Respect, love of its expression: this is the Door.

Writes Éric Baret:

As for finding an answer in Tantrism, we must not dream. The ritualistic practices, evoked by Kashmiri or other kinds of Tantrism, are reserved for those whose thoughtsensory-processes are already highly purified. All caricatures of practices of this order, aiming basically for an exploration of sexuality, to reap further benefits from it, can only happen in a psychological, psychopathic setting. Sexuality and its emotional ramifications concern only the profane world.⁵⁶

The advantage is that today—thanks to the work of such pioneers as Lilian Silburn, Ajit Mookerjee, Arthur Avalon, Swami Lakshmanjoo, Alain Daniélou, and Swami Muktananda, who have been taken up again by a new generation of seekers, some of whom are clearly informed practitioners such as Navjivan Rastogi, Mark Dyczkowski, Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega, and Éric Baret—we have access to the authentic spirit of Tantra.

We can turn toward Tibetan Tantrism, Hindu Tantrism, Kashmiri Tantrism, Japanese Tantrism, Balinese Tantrism, or Chinese Tantrism. Tantric traditions such as those of the Naths are still very much alive today in Nepal, Assam, Bengal, and even the West. The Kashmiri masters who have fled their civil-war-troubled region have escaped to big cities like Delhi, Jamu, and Benares, or to Nepal. Some have remained in their hermitages in lost valleys.

The manner in which the Tantric masters teach is as original as their doctrine. They affirm that there is no fundamental difference between master and student, because consciousness is everywhere. It is enough to burn off the fog that keeps consciousness from manifesting itself. Their method of working is one long face-to-face: two individuals revealing themselves in total inner nakedness. Each master therefore can only teach a limited number of students so that this personal and individual contact can take place frequently. The greatest masters have hardly more than twenty or thirty serious disciples. They live with their family; a few students often stay with them or in the immediate vicinity. None of them has been tempted to develop a teaching that could directly reach hundreds or thousands of people, because the whole Tantric “flavor” would be lost in such an undertaking.

There is immense closeness between Tantric masters and their students. Interactions are devoid of anything ceremonial—which could bring to light illusory differences. The Tantric masters do not promote worship of personality. They have direct and simple relationships; they present themselves as they are, without giving rise to idealization. Love, no deference, no fixed attitude: This is what transforms aspirants of this most informal of paths. The student liberates herself by seeing herself just as she is—that is, naturally liberated, in the mirror that the master holds up to her. If we have the good fortune to be allergic to submission, to forms, to dogmas, to beliefs, to infallibility, to the idea of forming an artificial family isolated from society, and if we desire above all to live life deeply, perfectly integrated in society, then Tantra has something marvelous to offer to us. But Tantra requires a maturity, an independence, and a willingness not to conform. This is no doubt why so few people enter onto this path. As Lalla sings:

When differentiating mind is lulled and sleeps,
The Kundalini awakens!

The five senses’ source gushes forth forever.
The water of unceasing presence to the world
Is sweet, and I offer it to Shiva.
The unending sacred tremoring of consciousness
Is the supreme state.⁵⁷