What Tantra Thinks:
Historical Background of Tantra
Modern Tantra, or sexual Yoga, seems to have begun something over 2000 years ago in India. It is certainly likely that modern Tantra, derives from earlier forms of worship. Older sources, if they exist, have been lost in the veil of time. There is some sketchy evidence that tantric rites might go back to the Mohenjo-Daro, Indus River Valley Civilization 2500 BCE. (Before Current Era) We find representations of the male and female sexual organs at these sites, a tradition that persists in India to the present day. As early as 200 BCE Tantric principles were being taught, and written about, perhaps passed down from earlier civilizations.
We do know that the Indo-European invasions of India around 1000 BCE (Before Current Era), brought great change to India as they did in Europe and the Middle East. This invasion lead to a merger of the dominant male Indo -European gods with the Mother Earth Goddesses of ancient India. Writing disappears for a while as these steppe barbarians absorb and transmute the culture and learning of India. By 800 BCE the classic Vedas (books) on proper ways of worship were beginning to be written. By 500 BCE., Hindu thinkers developed the concept of cosmic consciousness; all things composed of atoms of unchanging energy, ever changing in form. These writings of the Vedantic School gave birth to Yoga, various methods of meditation and included sexual meditation techniques.
But the Priest-Brahmins went on to develop a controlled, stratified society dependent on ritual, where everyone was defined by caste and only rebirth could move your position. The traditional Brahmin -priest philosophers took Hinduism and most of India on a path of suppressing emotion and sensation to attain enlightenment. The classic schools tend to deny human sexuality and separate men and women so they will not tempt one another. Instead they propose a time when sexuality is passed over for an ascetic chastity, which allows attunement to meditation and the divine. The highest goal of most of Indian philosophy is to became bramachara, denying the flesh, including sexuality in pursuit of the divine.
Tantric masters began a fundamental departure from this ascetic and priest-dominated societal and religious norm. We do not know the exact beginning dates but by around 600 CE, Tantrics publicly revolted from this view and took the opposite position, believing that the most powerful of human emotions, and sensation should not be denied but should be used to attain spiritual development. They are embodied in the classic conservation of Lord Shiva and his consort Shakti on about 100 methods of meditation and attainment of Nirvana through sexuality. During the 8th to 12th centuries CE, Tantra rose to its height as a well-developed system of thought and practice pervading sections Indian society.
Indians began writing books and treatises on sex and courtesans as early as the 4th century BCE. About 800 years later the scholar Vatsyayana compiles these works with his own views in the famous Kama Sutra, composed about 450 CE. It is a lengthy treatise on the many and varied aspect of lovemaking. It owes much of its material to the then famous tantric treatises and practices already prevalent at that time.
By the time the Kama Sutra was compiled India had been saturated with the idea of Hinduism. Hinduism was based on the Vedas, Holy books, the equivalent of the Christian Bible. They were originally a verbal creation by the light skinned Indo-European invaders who entered India around 1500 B.C.E. They enslaved the darker skinned indigenous peoples or forced them to the south. They then established four very distinct classes based on one’s color and work.
Numerous systematic encyclopedias of erotic methodology were developed like the Kamasutra, Rahasya Kalolini, Kokashastra, Anangaranga and the Rathrahasya . The best known, the Kamasutra, is interesting because it is a very readable book on the mechanics and psychology of sex.
It is important to note that it speaks continually of love in a society of arranged marriage. The Kamasutra, like Chinese love manuals, is quite detailed, enumerating for example five kinds of kisses, eight stages of oral intercourse and approximately 50 sexual positions. Numerous devices are detailed for heightening male and female pleasure. It is clear that Gupta society with its strong successful middle (merchant) class found sex to be both fun and utilitarian and little or no shame was evidenced. Sex was considered enjoyable, natural and need not be hidden at all.
In an age of male dominance it is very interesting that these books concentrate on and mandate the man’s responsibility toward his partner. The responsibility for enjoyable and correct sex is his. He is to act as the fountainhead of gentleness and consideration. His first thought must be to his partner’s pleasure and satisfaction. Pleasure and fulfillment are the right of every woman be she wife, courtesan or common prostitute. Because the nature of woman is considered to be sexual, true eroticism is her preserve. It is the man’s purpose to satisfy her. Once a woman’s initial modesty has passed she is depicted as the sexual leader. She is most often shown as the active love maker in erotic art. She eagerly seeks her body’s fulfillment and the mans job is to always promote the highest ecstasy to which she is capable . His own joy should derive from his ability to give her this gift as well as his own pleasure. Lovemaking was not a matter of simple knowledge of the positions and variations and being able to accomplish them in some order.
Love was an art like dancing or writhing, Good lovemaking demanded an artistic composition of variations designed to give the ultimate in pleasure and satisfaction.
During this period, art galleries of erotic paintings arose throughout India’s large cities. Famous courtesans called Apsarases, usually hosted gala public viewings at these galleries. Courtesans were considered to be representatives of the Goddess on earth and were supported by generous patrons. The art on the walls were sexual depictions of these famous courtesans with their most famous clients. Various positions of the Kama Sutra and Tantric ritual positions were unveiled for all to see, appreciate and practice. Indian society viewed sexuality as a normal glorious function to be used in the enhancement of life and spirituality.
Raja and trained courtesan enjoy advanced tantric position called autumn dog on back
Courtesans played a pivotal role in Indian society from the time of the Gupta 4th century C.E. to the British repression in the 1700’s C.E. A notable picture of the courtesan life is given in the Manimekbalai, written in the time of Vatsyayana. The Apsarases, commanded considerable fees and made generous donations to social and religious events. They built temples and ritual baths and probably contributed substantially to the great sexual temples like Khajuraho and Konorak. These temples were vast sanctuaries containing dance halls and theaters where plays of religions nature were performed. We know form European chronicles that these dances were licentious and provocative. The seemingly outlandish positions portrayed in sculpture and art are brought into more believable light when European chroniclers tell of the amazing agility and suppleness of theses temple dancers. Each temple possessed groups of hereditary professional Devadasis, dancers who performed for the gods and laymen. These dancer were schooled as sexual Tantric teachers to stimulate males for long illuminating sex.
Cities in this period were surrounded by pleasure gardens. They were decorated with flowering trees, pavilions and ponds. These were public pleasure gardens provided by the rulers, for the enjoyment of all.
Men and women of many classes could attend, to experience all the pleasures that life had to offer including lovemaking. The literature of the period contains many references to the joyful riotous noises that filled the city from these gardens as dusk descended. Inside the cities were brothels of highly trained courtesans and public houses with varying degrees of trained Apsarases. Many of these women were highly respected and well trained in all the sensual arts as were the ancient Greek Hetaera . The literature of the period tell us that all these houses had elaborate erotic wall paintings to titillate and stimulate. love, all acts of sensual nature were considered tributes to the god and goddess.
It should be noted here that like most ancient societies, sexuality was open and varied with none of the stigmas attached today. It would seem ancient societies tended toward bisexuality more than current societies. Lesbianism is often depicted and described down to the dominances played by certain females.
Male homosexuality played an integral part of life with various homosexual practices being described and depicted in detail. Transvestites played an important role and were invited to weddings and religious ceremonies as a symbol of good luck.
In Indian Tantra we see reference to masturbation as training for total merger with the god (man -fish symbolism). While Tantra concentrates 99 percent of its energies on male-female, yin-yang exercise we also see mentioned vaguely the idea of male/male intercourse as a path to the godhead (man-bird symbolism) .
BUDDHIST TANTRA
Buddhist Tantra begins to be recorded about 600 CE. It is a Tantra stressing long sustained intercourse with full retention of all energy. In the Hevajra Tantra we learn that male and female adepts would spend one year together practicing, then switch partners at the end of each year, for being Buddhist, no attachments could be formed. The classic position of Buddhist Tantra is the man sitting cross legged, his arms around the back of a woman who sits facing him, her legs around his waist, her arms holding him.
They are continually stimulated by intercourse, and filled with energy which is retained inside them without outlet. The Buddhist calls this Vajrayana, the thunderbolt. The most well known Buddhist mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum”, refers to this; Vajra, the male organ within the padme, Lotus-flower, denoting womanhood. Later groups developed this meditation into one using sexual energy and visualizing female sexuality or Taras (female Bodasativas). By avoiding a physical woman Buddhism came to avoid the attachment it feared, It is based on the Hindu meditation on the Kundalini, the energy serpent who rises through the chakras to illuminate the mediator.
Sex for males in the Western world concentrates on ejaculation-orgasm. Wilhelm Reich, an America pioneer in energy and negative ion work, was fond of saying that by energizing the entire body with intense breathing one can sensitize the entire body to a totally orgasmic plane of experience. Eastern schools of Tantra found this same transcendence through the use of physical sexual ritual. From ancient Indian origins Tantra spread to create Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist Tantra. In Tantric training, one extends sex by withholding orgasm for extended periods and thus entering a trance state or extreme bliss sometimes called smadhi. Smadhi may be defined as a blissful timeless and total dissolution of the ego.
Scholarly research shows clearly that totally suppressing the male orgasm is a foreign intrusion into Tantra, probably of Buddhist origin. The idea that a man’s fluids were limited and must be preserved arose in China under Taoist Tantra. They proceed to innumerate various methods whereby a man could retain his precious semen. They believed longevity and heath were related to retention of semen. This philosophy was so pervasive in China that it made a turnaround and came back to India via Buddhism. A large portion of tantric schools adopted this version of seminal miserliness.
Ecstasy is the focus of Tantra. Tantra believes that we should exist in a state of total awareness, a state of optimal awareness of environment and stimuli. This state is often symbolized in Tantra as a state of Cosmic Sexuality (Of union and Oneness with all that is). Tantra looks at the bulk of humankind and finds them asleep. It sees them walking in a dream, focused in a world of illusion rather than reality. Tantra looks at most people and finds them believing absurdities of religious mythology. Belief systems that endorse wishful thinking and non-provable assumptions (heaven, hell, devils, resurrection of the dead) are seen as weak and untenable. Tantra looks inside the self for reality. Tantra looks in the Now. It is up to us to create our heavens on the earth in the now rather than trusting in life after death.
Modern human creating a great dichotomy between self and everything else. Rather than thinking in terms of the oneness of life on the planet humankind depends on linear religious, scientific or social categories, which are in reality fractional, short sighted, disconnected and illusory These systems are not designed to perceive the whole and are extremely limiting to expanded perception. Our culture is therefore using an ancient survival lower circuit system to limit us to a linear separatist existence rather than adding simultaneous and unifying elements to our repertoire.
Humankind is thinking too small. We are destroying our air, our oceans, and our very sources of life.
While our biological and social heritage causes us to operate in small individual terms we destroy our own total environment through industrial waste, nuclear waste, no return bottles and plastics, insecticides and overpopulation. Humankind is apparently unable to put together a larger view, locked as it is in a primitive larval consciousness. If each individual, and each separate nation and religious system continues to destroy its part then soon the entire earth’s ecosystem will be damaged beyond repair.
Ours is a species that has survived by adaptation. The time has come to add new dimensions of consciousness to our repertoire so that we may think in larger holistic, inclusive terms. Our microcomputers need new programming, programs interrelating holistically to the web of life on the entire planet (and later the stars). We need programs to accelerate the evolutionary process so we may catch up and stay ahead of social evolution.
This type of programming has a long but secluded history; it is called Cosmic Consciousness. On this level one can function at enormous effectiveness because many of the blinders, both natural and cultural have been eliminated. Such a person has a tremendous spectrum of integral data and fine nuances, which render them a more, compete picture, which was not available on previous limited or closed circuits. A fully consciousness being is optimally perceptive, optimally wise, optimally effective
The purpose of Tantra and other esoteric schools is to help humankind arrive at this level of consciousness.
These meditative schools strive to provide methods by which each seeker can integrate additional bio-computer circuits allowing new levels of consciousness and effectiveness. Tantra is a system of very practical-pragmatic techniques designed to break through the survival and social patterns to other more advanced levels of reality.
Tantra equates man/woman with the entire cosmos. The universe stretching into infinity is the macrocosm; it contains everything and is without limit. Man, woman and everything within this world is an example of the Microcosm, the small world, reflecting the larger. The atom, which humankind once called the smallest particle is actually a tiny universe itself, electrons moving around a nucleus, like tiny planets around the sun. Recent evidence indicates that these particles are in turn made of still smaller particles stretching their way toward infinity.
As we move up from the atom to larger objects we can observe a shell like the nautilus with its obvious natural representation of the macrocosm. We find countless chambers, each smaller than he one before, stretching back in time, retracing growth states, toward that infinite moment when the nautilus was conceived from universal energies. Or we can look at a stone, a less explicit example. This stone is a microcosm expressing the all, because it is composed of atoms. They make up the stone yet they also make up the entire universe. The stone’s atoms are an integral part of the world, our solar system, and beyond.
Also the stone reflects the potential to be all things….within the entire universal complex. Those atoms, or more expressly, the energy they represent, in the form of matter, includes the potential to have been one of the atoms whose explosion created our universe, the potential to be free energy within the system, the potential to be matter in the form of a particle of chemical dirt absorbed to become part of a plant or any pother member of the animal kingdom and the potential to become coal or oil awaiting further change and return to free energy.
Each of these examples merely delineates the broad potentials the rock includes as a simple representative of the microcosm. Among the many potentials available is of course the potentiality of humanhood. For each human is also a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm. Humankind is a complex of atoms, forming a complete complex of cells. These in turn are grouped like a solar system of organs gathered around the energy sending heart. Each system in dependent and interrelate to the whole internal system just as humankind is dependent and interrelated to a larger external eco-system stretching to the sun and beyond.
This particular entity called human, holds some distinction because it has a rather well developed complex of cellular neural tissues we call a brain. This brain leads to mind, or consciousness, allowing this particular microcosm the possibility of comprehending and experiencing the macrocosm.
Humans can use this mind vehicle to either separate self from the whole or to be a total and understanding part of it. Most humans do not choose the former but have it thrust upon them along with mediocrity. A few consciously choose the later and so move toward the limits of human evolution on this plane. The human animal has survived so far on this planet because they have continued to expand to higher range of awareness. In a synopsis of tremendous simplification we see humankind move (in a period novel for its brevity) from food gatherer, to hunter-gatherer, to farmer, to city dweller, to industrialist; to harnesser of the atom. Humankind’s mental trips have been even more astounding, tremendously more complicated and difficult to chronicle simply. It is evident that humans have progressed on this planet by pushing survival mechanisms into conscious exploration and comprehension of environmental conditions.
Raja and trained courtesan accomplish extremely complicated and advanced tantric position called “ The Spider”