Two

Tantric
Philosophy

As stated previously, I cringe when I hear expressions such as “Tantra says … ,” “According to Tantra …, ” and others of the like. Tantric philosophy and ideas have evolved for thousands of years. No single individual, group, workshop, or book speaks for all of Tantra.

One of the major ways to look at Tantra is in two divisions: the Vama Marg (reversed or left-hand path) and Dakshina Marg (right-hand path). In the West, the right-hand path of occultism is often seen as representing a magickal path of good and moving toward the Divine. The left-hand path is seen as evil. This may be due to the Latin origin of the word for left, sinister, which means both “left” and “unlucky.” The word sinister, in modern English, has come (by way of Old French and Middle English) to mean “to hint at or portend evil.”

In Tantric traditions, however, the definitions of the terms are much different. One description of Tantra is that it leads to the Divine by the same means that lead others to spiritual evil. Thus, Tantra has been called the “path of the fall.” What takes others from the spiritual path leads the Tantric to the godhead. In order to do this, some Tantrics will spiritualize taboo acts and then practice them, freeing the practitioner from preconceived notions or limiting beliefs and showing that anything can be made spiritual. This breaking of taboos is practiced symbolically by some Tantrics who follow the Dakshina Marg (right-hand path) and literally by those who follow the Vama Marg (left-hand path).

As explained in the previous chapter, neither Vama Marg (the system mythically traced to Schambhala-La) nor Dakshina Marg (the system mythically traced to Agarthi-La) should be viewed as superior to the other. Indeed, some traditional books point to the notion that the practice of Dakshina Marg Tantra is necessary before a practitioner can move on to the practices of the Vama Marg, while others claim that the opposite is true.

Even so, there are still many differences between the practitioners of these two divisions of Tantra. Nobody can speak for both or describe them in the same breath.

Here is another example of divisions of traditional Tantra. I had the honor of being initiated into (and later receiving the right to initiate into) a tradition of Tantra known as the Adinath tradition. This tradition is one of nine traditions that are part of what is known as the Navanath lineage. Even so, there are vast differences between the nine divisions. The Adinaths, for example, seem to follow and represent what is commonly thought of as Vama Marg. The Pagal Naths, or “crazy lords,” another subsect of the Navanath tradition, are known for doing odd behaviors in public as an attempt to awaken people from their everyday consciousness. In this they are more focused on methods similar to some of those taught by the Armenian-Greek mystic and spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff {c. 1866–1949) than on what we commonly think of as Vama Marg Tantra.

Here we have two sects that come from the same lineage, but that are so different that nobody can describe all of their beliefs as a single system. What I am describing in Modern Tantra is one particular system. It will agree with the beliefs of many Vama Marg Tantrics, but not all of them. Similarly, many Neo-Tantrics will agree with some of what is presented here, but perhaps not all of it. As you become more involved with any particular Tantric path, you may find some differences and some similarities. Therefore, please do not take what I am presenting here as laws written in stone. Rather, they are based on my initiations, my personal study, my personal work, my work with various groups, and comments from students. As they write on the Internet, “YMMV” (Your Mileage May Vary).

The Wheel of Time

Most mystical traditions believe in reincarnation. This is found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, mystical Judaism (the Kabalah), Spiritualism, Shamanism, Theosophy, Wicca, and even some early sects of Christianity. Part of this results from just looking at the universe. Seeds turn into plants. The plants bloom, go to seed, and die. Much later, the seeds from the plants come back to life. Both wild and domesticated animals are born, mature, and die, only to have females give (re)birth to new life. There is a universal pattern of birth, life, death, a pause, and seeming rebirth. If this happens for plants and beasts, why not humans, too?

If we reincarnate, perhaps endlessly, we must be struck by a series of questions. How long has the universe existed? What is the mechanism for reincarnation? Why do we even incarnate?

The Yugas

The Tantric view of time is that the universe is constantly going through cycles. These form a mammoth kalpa, or Day of Brahma, that takes 4,320,000,000 years before repeating. Each kalpa is subdivided into fourteen manvantaras (age of Manu1). Each one of these is divided into seventy-one mahayugas (great age). A mahayuga lasts about 4,320,000 years. A mahayuga is divided into four yugas.

The first part of each mahayuga is known as Satya Yuga. This is seen as a golden age of righteousness that lasted 1,728,000 years. During this period, people were free of evil and hate. They had very long lives of up to 100,000 years and were physically beautiful, incredibly strong, and so tall (about 30–38 feet) that they were called giants.

The second yuga, beginning at the end of the first, was the silver age called the Treta Yuga. Righteousness decreased among the people by one-fourth, so it is also known as the ¾ Yuga. Strength, beauty, and longevity also decreased. Now the average lifespan of a human was “only” 10,000 years. This period lasted for 1,296,000 years. The Treta Yuga marked the introduction of religious rites and ceremonies, replacing individual spirituality.

The third yuga is called Dvapara. Righteousness was decreased by half from the Satya Yuga. Evil and good were now about equal. Beauty, strength, and longevity decreased. People only lived to be about 1,000 years old. This period lasted for about 864,000 years.

The fourth yuga is that of Kali, darkness. It is said to have begun at midnight between the 17th and 18th of February 3120 BCE, and it will last for 432,000 years. This age is characterized by viciousness, weakness, and disease. Human life will only last 100–120 years. People will only be 5'–6'3" tall.

Today, in the Kali Yuga, we have the most unrighteous of times. According to the Mahanirvana Tantra, written hundreds of years ago, in this age people will earn respect simply by owning things and will tell lie after lie to become successful. Sex will be the only way people will be able to enjoy life, and people will confuse the outer trappings of religion with true spirituality. That description of our age, made hundreds of years ago, sounds accurate to me.

The ideal spiritual texts for the first yuga are the Vedas. These are the famed books of sacred Hindu knowledge. There are three primary ones, the Rig Veda, the Yajurveda, and the Samaveda. Although the Vedas are also appropriate for spiritual guidance during the second yuga, it is believed to be more difficult to practice the techniques described therein. The spiritual texts for the third yuga are the Puranas, a group of post-Vedas spiritual books, and during this period the Vedas are no longer good for accomplishing spiritual goals. Finally, the ideal spiritual texts for the current age, the Kali Yuga, are the Tantras.

Tantrics see this world as being wonderful. If this is the least righteous of all the ages, how can this be?

Life Is Wonderful

In many spiritual and religious traditions, life on Earth is seen as horrible and vile. The goal is to learn to ignore the physical world as much as possible. In some Christianity traditions, believers are told to be in this world but not of this world, and even that Satan is the god of this world. In many sects of Buddhism and Hinduism, life is seen as a way to experience pain and suffering repeatedly through multiple lifetimes until we can get off the wheel of rebirth and no longer incarnate. Indeed, those who no longer need to incarnate on our horrible planet but do so in order to help others are known as Bodhisattvas and are due great honors.

And who can disagree with such an attitude? Children all over the world suffer with horrendous diseases. They labor long hours for pennies a day. Wars and “disputes” kill tens of thousands of people during “good” years. People are locked for years in prisons for minor crimes, while those who destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people are rewarded or see no punishment at all. We pay taxes to corrupt politicians. We buy insurance, betting against our own health and safety. As our bodies age, they become infirm and we lose not only the appearance of youth but also the abilities of youth. And then we may suffer the indignities of long, lingering pains leading to death—if criminals do not kill us first. If we are lucky enough to have a long and relatively healthy life, we will certainly lose friends and loved ones to illness, accident, and time. We are fated to be alone, scorned by youth and perhaps hidden in a “home” until we die. Living in this world can perhaps be summed up best by the bumper sticker “Life sucks and then you die.” Death is called a “release” from the sorrow and woe of living.

How could anyone disagree? Life is harsh and painful. Let me share a bit of my life. I watched my father die when I was six. My mother immediately had a nervous breakdown. My grandparents died from slow, lingering, painful diseases. My brother was a victim of serious diseases and had to experience several major surgeries and amputations before suffering a painful death. Another close relative, a former competitor in cross-country running, developed a disease that put him on crutches or in a wheelchair. My good friend Scott Cunningham died of a frightening and lingering disease on the day my parents sold the home in which I grew up. These two events occurred on my birthday in 1993. A few years ago, my mother had a sudden brain hemorrhage and died without my having a chance to say, “I love you. Goodbye.” My brother-in-law died of a lingering disease. On January 17, 2000, I came down with Bell’s palsy, a disease that temporarily paralyzed the left half of my face. Two weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, I died and was brought back to life by some excellent doctors and paramedics. Even so, I now have a chronic disease that may eventually cripple me, blind me, or result in the amputation of my legs. One might ask, “Don, why don’t you just give up? The pain and suffering in this life is just too great. All is but sorrow and woe.”2

But to many Tantrics, including myself, all of life is beautiful. Our universe is wonderful, exhilarating, the ideal place to live, love, learn, and spiritually evolve.

So are Tantrics blind to the reality around us? How can Tantrics love this world when there is so much pain and suffering?

Tantrics are not blind. In fact, we are just the opposite. Instead of seeing the world as random happenings pushing us back and forth and over which we have no control, Tantrics see an underlying reality of beauty, peace, love, and enlightenment. The question we must ask, then, is why doesn’t everyone see this inner reality?

Maya, Kleshas, and Vidya

The answer is that we are blessed and cursed by the goddess Maya. Behind what we call reality—the physical world—is the true reality: the spiritual world of pure energy in motion (vibration). But the goddess Maya dances and plays with the energies and finer matter of the inner reality, creating what forms our common, physical, consensus reality. One of the differences between Tantrics and non-Tantrics is that Tantrics see through the maya, the illusion, while non-Tantrics are caught up in the intoxicating beauty of her dance.

The reason most people see the world as terrible and filled with pain is because the dance of Maya disguises our ability to see the beauty of the real, spiritual world. Maya manifests in our lives in the form of five types of “pains” (kleshas), or blockages, that prevent us from seeing how wonderful life is and keep us from evolving spiritually.

I contend that the basis of all the kleshas, what prevents us from seeing through the maya, is avidya, ignorance, or the lack of knowledge (vidya). Vidya also means such things as, science, philosophy, logic, and metaphysics. Some say it includes the knowledge of soul or of spiritual truth. One legend even describes a pill called vidya. This pill, when swallowed, allows you to ascend to heaven. Metaphorically, taking the pill vidya (gaining knowledge) will let you see that heaven truly is here on Earth. Suffering with a lack of knowledge, avidya, keeps us blinded by maya and seeing the world as a terrible place. By overcoming the klesha of avidya, we can discover the real beauty of the universe. More on this as we examine all five kleshas.

The Five Kleshas

False Ego (Asmita)

The first klesha to look at is the false ego, asmita (“ah-smee-tuh”). Today, virtually all psychological
literature makes it clear that having a strong ego is important to maturation and individuality. The false ego, however, is a misinterpretation of who we are, a misinterpretation we accept as fact. It is composed of false beliefs about ourselves and our relationship with the universe.

This false ego entices us to see “reality” as the link between ourselves and the world of maya. It allows us to see our higher self as being nothing more than our lower self. It allows us to believe, as the bumper sticker says, that “whoever dies with the most toys wins.” In fact, maya is an illusion. Although our higher self and our lower self are parts of a unitary being, they are not the same. Due to reincarnation, the number of toys we have is irrelevant and does not matter. What matters is how we evolve spiritually.

One of the major beliefs of the false ego is the notion that we all have free will. Actually, we each only have the potential for free will. We are constantly battered by unconscious whims and desires that influence and control us. Psychotherapists around the world are kept busy by people attempting to discover the nature and source of the unconscious motivations that limit and control them. Not only do these unconscious motivations control us mentally, they also often control us physically. Many ailments that prevent us from performing various actions are rooted in our unconscious minds. In some cases, such as with agoraphobia (a fear of public or open places that can become so severe that panic attacks result, preventing a person from leaving home), the control of the unconscious over our actions is clear. How can we have free will if our unconscious does not let us go out the door?

In my case, the effects of my subconscious on my body were a bit more subtle. When I was young, I developed severe allergies to pollens, along with what is called “athletic asthma.” This stopped me from enjoying what I used to do daily—run and play in the overgrown fields and hills near my home. Sometimes I would do so anyway (the natural Tantric within me), and more than once I had to be rushed to the hospital to receive a shot of adrenaline so I could breathe instead of struggle for breath through fluid-filled wheezes.

As is the case with many youthful asthma and allergy patients, I eventually outgrew it. But as it ended, my mind/body played another trick on me. The skin on the fingers of my right hand started to dry, scale, and flake off. Sometimes the scaling was so deep that I would bleed. It was very painful. It was as if my body was trying to stop me from doing the things I enjoyed—playing music and writing. Sometimes when I would play keyboards in a band at a club, I would get so involved in the playing that I would totally ignore the pain (again, a very Tantric thing to do). At the end of the set, I would look down in the club’s dim light and see that the white keys were streaked in black—they were covered with my blood!

My mother took me to an expensive dermatologist. He took skin scrapings. I was diagnosed as suffering from eczema or contact dermatitis; he didn’t know which. I was treated with creams, ointments, drugs, and ultraviolet light. At night I had to put the ointments on my hand, cover it with a cotton glove, and cover the mess with a plastic bag. The skin problem would go in cycles of getting better and worse, but it didn’t go away.

Then I turned to one of my skills—speaking—to make a living. My hand started to heal, but I developed a small, nagging cough, making regular speaking difficult.

Until I was about thirty-five, my body was fighting me. How could I have free will when something was causing all of these problems? Treating the individual problem was simply not working. I had to find the cause and treat it.

My mother, as a result of a casual conversation, revealed what I now believe was the real cause of these issues. I had misremembered my own history. I had thought that my asthma and allergies developed about a year after my father’s death. To my surprise, my mother informed me that this was incorrect. In fact, my first allergy attack occurred one week after the death of my father. In a flash of insight, I realized that for three decades my childhood feelings of sorrow, abandonment, loss, lack of understanding, etc., had controlled me. It was not until I understood what had happened that I stopped having outbreaks of coughing or eczema.

By discovering what was controlling me, but finding out what was part of my deepest self, I moved one step closer to true free will. Part of the process of Tantric work is discovering those parts of our unconscious that control us and then discharging (through understanding and physical, mental, and spiritual work) the power they have over us. Thinking we are in control when we are not is part of our false ego and is based on a lack of information about the reality of who we are.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand this klesha, the false ego, is to compare what we think of ourselves with what our friends and loved ones think of us. On a scale of 1–10, are we friendly, loving, caring, generous, silly, ill-tempered, dogmatic, wise, clever, etc.? Where your answers about yourself do not match those of people who know you well is where your false ego is ruling and possibly misleading you. The wider the disparity (you rate yourself a 10, while people who know you rate you a 1), the more your false ego is in control.

Ignorance (Avidya)

The second klesha to examine is ignorance, avidya (“ah-vihd-yuh”). Ignorance is different from stupidity. A simplistic description is that an ignorant person doesn’t know that one plus one equals two, while a stupid person may know that one plus one equals two but doesn’t know that one penny plus one penny equals two cents.

Ignorance itself isn’t bad. We can study, learn, and work to overcome ignorance. It is our self-
centered refusal to recognize our ignorance that prevents us from understanding the universe and our place in it. This prevents us from understanding the energetic nature of the universe and how it is hidden from us by maya. Ignorance lets us think love and possession are the same thing. It equates religion with spirituality. It prevents us from becoming enlightened.

For thousands of years, people in India have studied the nature of the body. One of the things they have discovered is that there are various energies that pervade the body, follow paths within the body, and pool to form vortices of power. As long as we are ignorant of these, we cannot help ourselves heal, energize, and become enlightened.

If you do not know that you need medical care, how will you get that care? You won’t request it. If offered, you won’t take it. Refusal to end ignorance is stupidity, and such stupidity can cost you your life. Ignorance, however, can lead to knowledge when you realize that in some area you are ignorant. If you want a job in computers and are ignorant of how they work, you know you must get an education in the field. One of the things I like to tell students is:

The realization of ignorance
is the beginning of wisdom.

People who know they are ignorant can do something about it. People who are ignorant can change. Change is much more difficult for people
who are stupid and do not accept the reality of their ignorance. Such people are unlikely to change. A five-year-old who is ignorant of how to read, but wants to learn, is wonderful to work with. A twenty-year-old who is ignorant of how to read, and refuses to take the time to learn (due to egotism, not caring, etc.), is justly called stupid. I love working with ignorant people. I do not like being with stupid ones. I suppose that is a personal klesha (repulsion) I need to work on.

In Modern Tantra there are five traditional types of ignorance:

1. Ignorance of the value of your time and the refusal to take advantage of opportunities offered you.
2. Ignorance of your true inner self and the refusal to do the work necessary to discover your inner nature.
3. Ignorance of believing you are only a physical body and nothing more.
4. Ignorance of living in a state of anger for short or long periods, as anger only harms you (mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually) and takes you away from a spiritual path.
5. Ignorance of assuming that life ends at physical death and that the essence of who and what you are does not continue.

As I wrote, I believe that ignorance is the source of all the kleshas, the key to the blockages that keep you from succeeding in any aspect of your life. It allows you to become distracted from your path by everything from politics to TV, from the pursuit of worldly wealth to an unrealistic assessment of what is, and is not, important.

Repulsion (Dvesha)

The next klesha we will look at is repulsion, dvesha. To explain the idea of repulsion, let’s examine scents. For a second, think of the most repulsive scent possible. What happens to you when you smell it? Does it make you gag? Does it make you want to run away? Do you actually move away from a repulsive scent?

I find the smell of vomit repulsive. Just a whiff and I start to gag and feel a desire to vomit myself. And frankly, I hate the feeling of having to vomit. I hate actually vomiting even more. (I would add that in India, regurgitation for the purpose of purification is not an uncommon practice. I have a long way to go before I master that technique!)

But if we look at this a bit deeper, we will discover something quite interesting. There is absolutely nothing wrong or awful about the scent of vomit. Rather, something in my past allows it to trigger something physiological in me. There is nothing wrong with the smell; it’s just a smell. But for some reason I have made it a horrible experience.

To generalize this, we could use this expression:

Nothing is horrible in itself
save that we make it so.

This, of course, is a version of a speech in Hamlet where he says, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.” Indeed, our taking of something that is neither good nor bad and making it so horrible that it physically bothers us can be like a prison keeping us from freedom and happiness.

Many people find snakes or bugs repulsive. There is no reason to do so. Most snakes and bugs are benign to humans; in fact, they are helpful to the ecology. They are not horrible. They are neither good nor bad. They simply are. We put qualities on them that we consider horrible and repulsive. Some sects of traditional Tantrics in India have members who live among the rotting corpses, bones, and ashes of cremation grounds in order to prove that nothing is horrible in itself. Some go so far as to have sex with the corpses.

I do not advise anyone to attempt this because of sanitary issues and because here in the US (and probably in most countries) it is against the law. But the idea remains the same: if you are repulsed by anything, find out the reason why and overcome it. This may not be easy. Examining one’s motivations is not often direct or simple. Sometimes it is emotionally painful. However, perhaps the easiest way to deal with repulsion is to concentrate on that which repulses you and see what emotions it brings up. Free-associate based on those emotions. Allow your mind to move from association to association, even if they do not seem related to the original item. You may be surprised to discover the real source of the repulsion. Hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming can also help you break the links between neutral stimuli and unwanted responses to those stimuli.

I’m not suggesting you should actually do something that repulses you. You do not have to practice something or try it even once in order to overcome a repulsion to it. All you have to do is mentally think about it, see what is the nature of the repulsion you have toward it, and work with that cause until the repulsion to that smell, idea, practice, etc., is gone.

Years ago, I experimented with this concept while I was studying music at the University of California, San Diego. There is a musical interval known as a tritone (an augmented fourth)3. This was considered so discordant that in Western music, until the end of the Renaissance, it was nicknamed diabolus in musica, the “devil in music.” For a class, I wrote a piece of music I named “Tritonus.” It consisted of harmonies and melodic lines based around the tritone interval. After several minutes, you became used to the sound, and to the listeners’ ears it was no longer discordant. As a musical joke, the end of the piece resolved into a common, very harmonious major chord. But because the piece focused so strongly on the tritone interval, the listeners’ ears became used to its disharmony, and that normally sonorous final chord sounded discordant and out of place. I succeeded, through repetition, in making something that normally sounded bad sound good, and something we so often consider musically good to sound bad. I had ended one repulsion and started another. Nothing is horrible in itself save that we make it so.

There are other cases where practice can help us overcome repulsions. Here is an example that is sometimes used by comedians. A man and woman have a long session of passionate sexual activity. During their lovemaking they lick and kiss virtually every part of each other. Before they go to sleep, he says, “Honey, can I use your toothbrush?”

“Eww,” she responds. “That’s disgusting.”

They have just kissed and licked each other’s most intimate parts. They have kissed deeply, what is popularly called “sharing spit.” But she finds the thought of them sharing a toothbrush repulsive. It seems odd, yet many people feel this way. Perhaps you’ve experienced this.

Passionate, open-mouthed kissing, the “sharing spit” just described, is popular among many people. But the notion of sharing the saliva of another person in a different context is often considered repulsive. This repulsion can be overcome by consciously sharing saliva with a partner by passing it back and forth while kissing.

Another fluid some are repulsed by is sperm. People can begin to overcome this repulsion by smearing the sperm on their bodies (see my Modern Sex Magick or Modern Magick for ways of doing this to create magickal talismans). Because oral sex is now common (remember, it was a taboo for many people barely sixty years ago, and many people still do not practice this form of sexuality), many women are familiar with the taste and texture of sperm. Many, if not most, heterosexual men, however, find the thought of having sperm in their mouths repulsive. This can be overcome by a woman kissing a man after she has given him oral sex where he has ejaculated into her mouth and she either swallows or spits out the ejaculate. At first, he will only get some of the flavor of his sperm. Later, she can keep some of it in her mouth and pass it to him during the kiss (a popular current urban slang term for this practice is snowballing).

Similar practices can be done with women’s lubricative and ejaculatory fluids and, yes, even menstrual blood. In the West, those who practice the consumption of bodily fluids for spiritual purposes usually transform these substances through the use of heat, primarily by cooking. However, it is usually safe for a person to drink his or her own urine (urine is sterile). There is a long tradition of this in India, practiced by no less than Mahatma Gandhi and his followers at his ashrams (religious communities). He was known to greet people in the morning, saying, “How is your urine today?” I have a booklet on this technique that refers to consumption of one’s urine as Rasa Tantra.

Does that practice sound horrible? Remember that nothing is horrible in itself save that we make it so.

Retention (Raga)

The next klesha we will look at is retention, raga (“rah-guh”). This is the experience of being attached to any physical thing. What happens is this: You experience something and it sets up a response in you. That response may be that you like the way something looks, smells, sounds, feels, tastes, etc. As a result of this positive response, you try to repeat the experience. It is this desire to repeat the experience that is attachment, or retention. We may try to buy, own, or possess this object of desire. This object may be a car, a book, a painting, a person, or any other thing.

This attachment to something or many things bogs us down, controls us, and prevents us from being free. Here, once again, is an example from my life.

Years ago, before the change from vinyl records to compact discs, I had a huge collection of large 331⁄3 rpm albums and 45 rpm singles. Some were rare “picture discs” (they had images or photos embedded into the vinyl). Others were made on softer vinyl that improved the sound quality by holding more sound information, but they would wear out more quickly than other records. Still others were rare albums imported from England or Japan. Some items in my collection were quite unusual. For example, I had a copy of the original 45 rpm single of the Rolling Stones performing a song that had been written by the Beatles’ Lennon and McCartney, “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

Because my records were valuable, I took excellent care of them. I purchased special protective inserts that I put the albums in before returning them to their cardboard sleeves. I also kept the original paper inserts because having them increased the value of the albums. Then, to protect the outer sleeves of the albums, I bought special plastic holders for them. I made sure that I always kept the albums vertical because laying them flat was supposed to damage them. I would rarely play the albums made of softer vinyl so they wouldn’t wear out.

And then I lost my job. Suddenly I needed some extra money. The only things I had of value at that time and that I could quickly and easily sell were the albums. Oh, how it hurt to have to pick out the ones I could bear to sell! Eventually I had no choice. I had to sell almost all of them.

As I sold them, something unexpected happened. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. I came to the conclusion that I did not own the records, they owned me! I treated them in special ways. I cared for them as if they were children. I was a slave to what I saw as their needs.

As I sold each album, I felt lighter, freer. They no longer possessed me. I was becoming free. No longer was I attached to them. I still have a lot of CDs, but I never had the attachment to them that I had with the records.

In India, there is a tradition among the orthodox Hindus of getting rid of attachments by becoming a renunciant. A monk practicing renunciation is entitled to only a bowl for begging, a change of clothes, and the right to sit under the shade of a tree. By having nothing, the renunciant is supposed to get rid of attachment to the world. He is supposed to become free and spiritual.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. In fact, I hazard to guess that it doesn’t work that way for most renunciants. Giving up tangible things is only the physical trapping of renunciation. Just because you don’t own something doesn’t mean it won’t possess you. Have you ever really wanted something you didn’t already have? A particular car? Tickets to a concert? A certain lifestyle? Then you have attachments to it even though you do not have it. And because of avidya, ignorance, you may be attached to something even though you are not consciously aware of the attachment.

You do not have to get rid of your possessions, as I did with my record collection, to free yourself from attachment. All you need to do is develop the attitude of non-attachment. This will bring you freedom of thought, word, and deed. You can raise a family and own a home, car, and TV and still be the master of yourself and the things you own. Keep them? Lose them? It doesn’t matter because you are detached and free.

As a result of non-attachment, you become unaffected in the face of the trials and tribulations of life. After all, what are these difficulties save the play of maya in your life? When you get caught up in daily difficulties (maya), you cannot see the greater reality. The more you are attached to this world, the less you can see into the greater, real world. Get rid of your mental attachments to your few physical things and become open to the greater universe, with its many billions of things.

This brings us to a Tantric view of love and romance. As mentioned in the previous chapter, love is an energy. It pervades the universe. You can tap into it and dwell in it. You can share it with others. True love multiplies; it never subtracts. The more you experience it, the more there is.

If you are like most people, either you loved or, if she is still alive, you love your mother. Because you love her, you want her to be happy and healthy and have interesting experiences. The same is probably true of the way you feel about your father, your friends, brothers and sisters, and other relatives.

But when it comes to boyfriends and girlfriends, wives and husbands, the situation changes. “You are mine,” says the so-called romantic. Is this really good? Is this not treating the person you most passionately love as if he or she were a tube of toothpaste, a set of tires, or a record album? Is it really love or merely a desire to possess?

“I saw you flirting at that party,” says the angry lover. But why is he upset? The flirting made her happy. She didn’t leave and go home with the person she was flirting with. Why does the lover feel angry? The answer is that he is afraid someone might take away his “possession.”

And that is true. She might leave him. But she might leave him whether she flirts or not. His attachment to her is like that of a person who owns an automobile. You have to protect it because somebody might steal it. Or they might just scratch it.

But a lover or spouse is not a car. The other person chooses to be with you or not be with you. Trying to control a person and limit his or her freedom seems to be just the opposite of what you would do if you really loved that person.

Let’s take it one step further. If you want your lover to be happy and have wonderful experiences, why limit him or her from having sex with another person? Are you afraid that your lover will find somebody who is better sexually than you are? That can happen whether you allow it or not. In most cases, people come together for more than sex. They find some sort of fulfillment with that person of which sex is only a part. Would your car drive off with another person because that person is a better driver? If your lover leaves you for a better lover, then there was actually very little keeping you together anyway. And perhaps it would help you to see your ignorance about sex and allow you to start learning to be a better lover!

What I am presenting here is the notion of love and non-attachment. You can have both. Then, when you find a real love, you will come together out of true love, not out of a desire to possess that which cannot be possessed. You both will choose to be together rather than demand obedience and attachment. You both will be free to grow and your love will only enhance that, growing as you grow. You can consciously choose to have one partner rather than being terrified that you must only have one partner out of fear of losing that partner. Love does not require jealousy or fear.

Clinging to Life (Jivitvasajya)

The last klesha we will examine is clinging to life, jivitvasajya (“jih-veet-vuh-sahj-yuh”). I think it is fair to say that most people want a long, quality-
filled life. But there is one thing that is undeniable. Our physical bodies, due either to accident, age, or illness, will eventually cease to function. This is yet another thing that unites all humans: sooner or later, our bodies will die.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a long life. For example, getting exercise on a daily basis and having good nutrition will help us live longer, healthier lives. Having regular sex and moving the energy within us helps to keep us young, healthy, and energetically vibrant. All of these things are good.

But there are people who think that doing all or some of these things will help them live much longer lives. Some people will exercise for hours every day. They may get up early, go to a gym and exercise, go to work, jog at lunch, exercise at the gym after work, and then go to sleep. Why? To live a longer and healthier life. Unfortunately, with all that exercising they may have no time to actually live that life! They are so busy trying to avoid death and illness that they are kept from the world (like an ill person) and have no life (like a dead person).

I am not saying that such people should stop exercising. But it is important to realize that no matter how much you exercise, no matter your nutrition choices, one day your body will die. That means every hour you exercise is time spent away from your family, time spent away from your friends, time spent away from appreciating nature and music and art, time spent away from following a spiritual path. If given the choice of going to a museum with someone you love or spending a couple of hours at the gym in the hope of extending your life a few moments, which would you choose? I know the decision I would make.

Let’s look at another situation. A person lives in a city and is afraid to come out of his house because ten years ago, during a nearby robbery, a person was killed. By staying inside, this person believes he is avoiding the possibility of being killed in a robbery. This person also avoids the possibility that a car will jump the curb and smash into him, killing him. But for all practical purposes, by hiding in his house to cling to life, by not experiencing the world, he may as well be dead. This clinging to life prevents him from living.

Now, I am not implying that people should take stupid chances! Walking on the edge of the roof of a fifteen-story building with no safety equipment is stupid. Driving while impaired by lack of sleep, alcohol, drugs, or focusing on texting is dumb. Always making poor food choices and not taking care of your health is not wise. We should protect ourselves by wearing safety equipment, avoid things that impair our judgment while driving, and do things for our health. But fearing death so much that we won’t go out of our door because of something that happened ten years ago or because a car might leap the curb is foolish. Could something bad happen? Yes. But when the chances of it happening are so slim, there is no reason to let our unreasonable beliefs and fears control us.

Frankly, something like that could have happened to me. I still remember the first day I passed the test and received my driver’s license. That evening I begged my parents to let me borrow the family car and, for the very first time, go out driving on my own. It was pouring rain in a rare Southern California thunderstorm. I was so excited that I talked them into it with wonderful teenage logic: “I have to learn to drive under these conditions sometime. Why not now?”

So there I was, driving slowly in the heavy rain. At times it was coming down so hard I could not see more than a foot or two beyond my front bumper. My lights reflected back off a curtain of falling water.

Most teenagers see themselves as immortal. They do not conceive of their own death. I was one of them. But the amount of rain was much more than I was used to. I started driving slowly back home.

I got to the top of the Charnock Avenue hill near my home when it happened. The entire car flashed with a bluish-white light and the engine stopped. Aliens? I don’t think so. I believe I was hit by lightning. I was saved because an automobile is an ideal safety structure from exterior electricity.

Rather than this making me terrified of driving in storms, it made me feel more secure. Your chance of being hit by lightning, depending upon the source you read, is about 3,000,000 to 1. By being hit by lightning, I had just improved my odds incredibly against ever getting hit by lightning again. (The annual number of people in the US who get hit by lightning, depending upon the source, is listed as ranging between 41 and 300.)

If it is your desire to follow a Tantric way of life, I urge you to self-analyze and determine if some of your actions are based on clinging to life to such an extent that your beliefs and actions are no longer reasonable. If so, you might want to consider ways to overcome this klesha. Remember, all of our bodies will die. It makes sense to take care of ourselves so we can live long, healthy lives. But clinging to life so strongly that we end up avoiding experiencing life is not wise at all.

Karma

While the Tantric attitude that this is a wonderful world and a wonderful life may now be a bit more understandable, it’s still important to accept the fact that we have experiences we describe as pain and suffering. There are wars with massive death and destruction. Innocent children suffer from terrible diseases and abuse from those who should show them love. Even if we can accept that these things happen in our world, at one time or another we have to ask ourselves a simple question: Why?

Why does the person who cheats
in business go unpunished?

Why are non-combatants
killed and maimed in wars?

Why do infants suffer
from horrible diseases?

The answer to such questions in most Western traditions is most frequently a non-answer: “We don’t know.” “It just happens.” “It’s God’s will.” “That’s the way the world works.” “They’ll be rewarded/punished in heaven/hell for what has happened to them and for what they’ve done here on Earth.” The last type of response does imply there will be some cosmic retribution or reward, but as to causes for these things … well, it’s just chance, coincidence, or bad luck. And that’s not an answer at all.

In the past few years, there has been an upturn in awareness of what has been called “wealth consciousness,” or the “law of attraction.” Simply put, this law states that what you think about and act upon you draw to yourself. If you focus on poverty, you draw poverty to you. If you focus on wealth, you draw wealth. The truth, however, is that if you’re poor, then sitting in a corner and thinking about wealth isn’t going to help pay your rent. You have to do something! But what? Obviously, what you have been doing isn’t working. What lessons are there in the poverty you’re suffering? Once you learn what’s wrong, you can discover how to move toward wealth. In other words, instead of viewing your poverty as a curse or punishment, you can see it as something educational. You don’t like it; therefore, instead of dwelling on it, you need to figure how best to end it. If you learn the lessons of poverty, you can move toward wealth. And that type of learning is the basic idea of karma.

(The following information is based on an article I wrote for the Llewellyn Encyclopedia, www.llewellynencyclopedia.com, and is used by permission.)

Many people use the term karma without truly understanding what it means. “It’s my karma to be poor,” they say. Or instead of “poor,” they say “ill” or “lonely.” In doing this, they make karma appear to be the same as what is usually called “fate.” It is not. In fact, the original notion of karma is quite the opposite of fate.

The term karma simply means “action.” There is nothing in the definition that indicates fate. In a spiritual context, it means that everything you do will cause a reaction. If you do something good, you will receive something good. If you do something bad, something bad will happen to you.

There are two important aspects of this definition. First, it means there are no “lords of karma” watching over the process. There is no one to judge you. Further, it means that your intent plays no part in the working of karma. Whether you planned to harm someone or it was an accident, if you harm someone there will be a karmic result. Yes, even if it was an unintended action, you are still responsible for it. This is similar to the concept that if you drop a pebble in a quiet body of water, waves will appear from where you dropped the rock. It does not matter whether you intended to drop it or why you dropped it.

Second, with karma, the reaction to your action need not be instantaneous. I’m sure you have seen someone who has acted poorly and seemed to profit from those actions. The response to an action may take weeks, months, years, or even several lifetimes.

Types of Karma

1. Sanchita
2. Parabdha
3. Agami
4. Kriyamana

Traditionally, there are three types of karma. First, there is sanchita karma. This is the collected karma from all of your past lifetimes. Some people consider parabdha karma—that portion of sanchita karma you are working on in this lifetime—to be a fourth type of karma, but I consider it an aspect of sanchita karma.

The second type is called agami karma. This is the karma you have created in your current life. It differs from parabdha karma in that you are not working on it (that is, trying to work it off), you are just acquiring it. The third type is called kriyamana karma. It is the karma you create and work off immediately, popularly known as “instant karma.” For example, park your car illegally and you get a ticket.

Working Off Karma

The key to understanding karma is the concept of “working it off.” Through self-study, introspection, and other means such as divination and hypnotic past-life regression, we can discover the actions that caused our karma and how to overcome it and never face it again. Karma, then, can be seen as the great teacher. When you face something negative caused by karma, the goal is not to make you suffer; it is not to punish you. Rather, it is to awaken you and tell you that for your own sake you need to change. Indeed, the goal of karma is to make us better, more caring, more loving, more spiritual people.

Once you discover the cause of your karma, the means of working it off can become quite self-evident. Are you poor? What can you learn and put into practice from your poverty? Are you in ill health? What can you learn about life as a result of the illness, and how can you share this information with others?

There are other means of working off karma, including charity, performing rituals, and even reciting certain magickal words hundreds of thousands of times. Some of these will be covered later. However, the most common way to deal with unwanted effects of karma is to learn the lesson that karma wants you to have and act on that information, often doing the opposite of what initially caused the karma. There is no good or bad karma, there is just karma. How we interpret it makes it seem good or bad. What we do about it makes it important.

The Gunas

As mentioned previously, it is believed by some authorities that the Druids, or their progenitors, came to Europe from India. Certainly the Druids did more than simply lead spiritual rites and guide the people. They had beliefs they introduced that had not been seen in Europe previously. They didn’t just amplify, they brought in new things.

One of these things they brought was a focus on concepts associated with the number three. Indeed, many of the teachings of Druidism came in the form of the famous Druid Triads. Where did these come from? Is it possible the threefold focus came from India? I don’t know, nor do I claim it as a fact. But the triadic format that is found in many systems—the Tao yin-yang of China, the pillars of the Kabalistic Tree of Life, and even the part of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) known as dialecticism (also called the Hegelian dialectic or the thesis-antithesis-synthesis theory)—may have its roots in ancient Tantric concepts, including that of the three gunas (see illustration).

The Three Gunas

It is true that we hear a lot of the word Trinity in Christianity. However, it was unknown to the original Christians of the last part of the first century. The word Trinity was coined by Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220 CE), but not exactly in the same way as is accepted today. The current idea of the Trinity in Christianity was fought over until the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, and it took longer than that to filter down to the churches and believers. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia (volume IV, p. 295), “[O]ne should not speak about Trinitarianism in the New Testament without serious qualification.” The volume further states that the orthodox version of the Trinity was “the product of 3 centuries of doctrinal development,” and only became part Christianity “in the last quadrant of the 4th century.”

Here in the West, which is so heavily influenced by Christianity, we are far more likely to speak in terms of dualities: good and evil, up and down, left and right, happy and sad, and so on. This is more along the lines of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who heavily influenced Christianity and saw the universe in opposites, such as the physical world (which he described in his work Physics) and the non-physical world (which he described in Metaphysics).

The frequent use of triadic concepts certainly may have originated with the ancient Tantrics. The archetype of this is found in the three gunas, or tendencies, which are energies that drive things in nature: rajas, tamas, and sattva.

Rajas is the guna of action and dynamism. The more of this tendency you possess, the more you are driven to act on things. It gives you the desire to acquire new things and the fear of losing that which you have. The combination of desire and fear leads you to act. Rajas deals with moving energy, including light. It is the nature of change.

Tamas is the guna of inertia, inaction, and dullness. Dullness can relate to concepts of darkness and ignorance. There is nothing wrong with rest, but a person (or animal or thing) who has a great deal of tamas is too inactive, heavy, and unmoving. Tamas resists change.

Sattva is the guna of balance and order. A person with this tendency is calm but alert. Thus, sattva is a balancing of the tendencies of rajas and tamas. It is the tendency toward harmony.

The concept of the three gunas is used in understanding yourself and your actions. It can be used in the preparation of food and in the layout of your home. It can help you understand your physiology and help determine the best healing methods for individuals, etc.

A person who has an athletic build and is energetic, who perhaps plays a lot of sports, is rajavic. Such a person is an adrenaline junkie and may enjoy excitement and risky behavior. A tamasic person is slow, heavy, and thoughtful—or lazy. Think in terms of a river: a narrow one is rajavic and moves quickly and is easily turned. A large one is tamasic and moves slowly but is difficult to turn.

Being rajavic or tamasic is neither good nor bad; it simply is. If you are starting a business, you might look for people who are rajavic in nature to get it moving quickly. They would also be able to change direction quickly in order to confront and overcome new challenges. But once it’s going and your business is beginning to become successful, you might look to hire tamasic people, who, once started, are difficult to stop or change.

In chemistry, there is a concept known as “dynamic equilibrium.” This is an ever-changing balance. This, perhaps, is a good description of a person who is sattvic. Such a person can easily exhibit more or fewer of the qualities of rajas or tamas. A person who is sattvic tends to be thinner and, perhaps, “airy.” The archetype of the hatha yoga practitioner, especially to Westerners, is someone like this. How else can you get into those pretzel-like positions? In reality, however, it is health and flexibility that allow ease in achieving hatha yoga asanas (positions). A slender, inflexible person has difficulty achieving asanas, too.

Need more energy or want your passions excited? Eat foods that are rajavic. These are foods that are sour, dry, hot, bitter, or salty. Eating fast is also rajavic. Have too much energy? Eat foods that are tamasic, such as onions, meat, overripe foods, or garlic. Drinking alcoholic beverages and smoking tobacco are also tamasic, as is overeating and heavy foods such as potatoes and starches, things that might slow you down. Sattvic foods calm and purify the mind, balancing the rajavic and tamasic energies within you, and they help create an even flow of energy. Such foods generally have a sweet taste and include dairy products, honey, whole grain cereals and breads, fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, and legumes.

It might seem that sticking to sattvic foods is ideal. Indeed, a sattvic diet is often recommended for practitioners of hatha yoga, which is so familiar to Westerners. But if you’re filled with the energy of the rajas guna, it might be better to counterbalance with a tamasic diet before switching to sattvic foods. Likewise, if you’re very tamasic, a rajavic diet might be better before switching to sattvic foods.

Of course, nobody is purely based in one guna, so understanding the gunas as they go through you, combined with knowing the gunic nature of any particular food, is more valuable. Similarly, no food is purely of any one guna. For example, a ripe orange will have some areas that have tiny amounts of rot, even if your eyes can’t see it. Thus, although a ripe orange is basically sattvic, it also has some elements of tamasic energy. Be sure to do more research on foods and their energies and consult with a medical doctor or licensed dietician before changing your diet.

In a person, the effect of the three gunas constantly evolves. If you look at the triangular diagram of the gunas shown in this book, you can see their relationship. Rajas and tamas, when joined, becomes sattva. Sattva and rajas result in tamas. Sattva and tamas result in rajas.

The Five Elements (Tattvas)

The gunas are tendencies or qualities that are found in nature. However, everything in the universe also has certain physical qualities. From the divine universal energy, or prana, evolved the five elements, or tattvas, which, in combination, form everything in the universe and through which the gunas function (see illustration). These five “elements” are not the same as the elements found on the periodic table of elements, as shown on the chart that hangs in high school science classes. Rather, they are the coalescence of five forces found in the physical world. In our modern world, it might be more accurate to call them elementary forces, but I’ll call them elements to follow tradition.

Akasha

Akasha is the Sanskrit term for spirit, ether, (sometimes spelled aether), or space. It could be called the “source element,” as all of the other elements come out of the energy of akasha. Visually, this tattva is represented by an egg shape, sometimes described as an oval, that is colored indigo (in the color spectrum, indigo is between blue and violet). Traditionally, akasha is associated with sound and the sense of hearing. If you look at chapter One, you’ll see that this makes perfect sense, as according to the creation myth, it was vibration or sound that was the source of everything. A tool used to represent akasha is the bell, which is frequently used in Tantric rituals. Alternatively, a trumpet or horn made from a large conch shell is used. These items, as well as those listed for the other elements, are described in more detail in chapter Seven. Some people have related akasha to cosmic radiation. It has the quality of space, into which all things manifest.

Meditation on the tattva symbol of akasha is very easy. Make a copy of the tattva (see the illustration for an example), and after preparing yourself with banishing and purifications (either those of your choice or ones described later in this book), simply stare at the image. Allow yourself to mentally “fall into” the indigo egg, or perhaps imagine yourself walking through it as if it were a doorway, and simply allow it to take you where it will. Meditation on the akasha tattva is wonderful for strengthening your link to the Divine. Including it as a focus for magickal rituals is good for bringing things together, including people, plans, and prospects for the future.

Vayu

Vayu, the tattva of air or wind, is said to evolve out of akasha. Visually, it is represented by a blue circle. If akasha is the unlimited space of the universe, then vayu fills that space with its powerful energy. It is associated with the sense of touch. Its tool is the dagger, which cuts through the air and also cuts through the kleshas that block us from achieving all our goals, including those that are oriented toward moving ahead on the physical plane and those oriented toward advancing spiritually. It introduces the quality of movement or locomotion into the space of akasha.

Meditation on the vayu tattva symbol, using the technique just described for akasha, can help you obtain clarity of mind and purpose. It can help you attain inspiration and is great for overcoming mental blocks and the inability to find a way out of current situations. It’s also great for triggering new beginnings.

Tejas

Tejas, the tattva of fire (or, on a more cosmic level, solar energy), comes next. Visually, it is represented by a red triangle with a single point down. It is related to light and color as well as the sense of sight. Tejas introduces the quality of expansion to the universe. Fire applied to anything causes it to expand. A tool used to represent tejas is a lamp. Traditionally, this is a lamp filled with purified butter known as ghee. Instructions for making ghee are in chapter Seven.

Another form of lamp uses small chunks of pure camphor burning in small wells or indentations. Of course, you could also use a candle or any other type of lamp.

Meditating on this symbol (as described for akasha) is great for helping you develop passion for something, as well as anything to do with passion, including sexuality. It’s also good for increasing energy and for personal transformation. If you feel like you’re lacking courage, meditate on this symbol.

Apas

Apas is the tattva of water. Just as water is the natural opposite of fire, apas is the opposite energy of tejas. Therefore, it is the energy of contraction or gravitation. In contrast to the sharp points of the fire tattva, the tattvic symbol for apas is a lunar silver crescent, appearing like a bowl. Its representative tool is a container of water. It can be a bowl or chalice. Traditionally, the special vase used for this is a lota bowl. Ganga jal, the water traditionally used in the lota, is taken from the Ganges River.

Meditating on the apas tattva symbol is an ideal way to obtain answers for all questions of the emotions, romance, and the heart. It can help give you insights into what is going on in your unconscious mind and help you clarify issues dealing with the unconscious. It can help you learn to live with change and help with emotions such as love, caring, and compassion. It can give you hope and help you overcome fear. It may also help you have more vivid dreams, as well as remember your dreams better and interpret their meaning with greater clarity.

The Tantric Elements (Tattvas)

Prithivi

Prithivi is the tattva of the element of earth and represents both magnetic and geomagnetic energy. It is symbolized by a simple yellow square. It is described as being the opposite of akasha. Akasha gives room for locomotion, while prithivi resists it. It is the solidity and weightiness that we conceive of when we think of a mountain or giant rock. It is associated with smell, and its tool is incense. Frequently, a small handful of incense sticks will be used during rituals, filling the air with earthy scents.

The mystical diagrams known as yantras frequently have an outer square, showing how the energies of the image are kept within it. This square should remind you of prithivi.

Meditating on the yellow square symbolic of prithivi will help you with all things on our earthly, physical plane. It’s good for money and finances, home and security, and giving a concrete reality to anything you are working to achieve.

There is far more to the tattvas than can be described here. There are also some alternative tattvic systems. An advancement on the use of the symbols is to superimpose one over the other. Thus you can have apas of prithivi, or water of earth, and tejas of akasha, or fire of spirit. Reversing which symbol is superimposed on the other—prithivi of apas, or earth of water, for example—will give a different effect and different results when used in meditation or magick.

The concept of the tattvas and the tattvic tides, described in the next section, is little known and little used in the West. It was introduced to Western occultists primarily in the book Nature’s Finer Forces by Rama Prasad, originally published in 1894. The leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn considered the concepts so valuable that in the same year they introduced a brief version of the information from Prasad’s book as part of their teachings.

However, one of the things I would like to stress again is that Tantra is not just about theory, philosophy, and spiritual concepts. While you can certainly learn a lot about Tantra from books, the true essence of Tantra is experiential. Don’t just think about it. Try out the suggested meditations. Try working with the tattvas. If you are currently involved in Western forms of magick, try incorporating the tattvic tides into your regular work.

One of the things I like to say when I give workshops is that you shouldn’t just take my word for anything. Instead, I encourage you to try it out. Work with it. See how using something I’m sharing changes your life for the better. Experiment. Play. Have fun. Do. The original concepts of Tantra didn’t come from a book. They were the results of fearless experimenters traversing the unknown. Luckily, today there are people who have done the work and already tried these things out. The trailblazers have already made a path for you. But thinking about the path won’t get you to the end. Only taking a chance and walking down that path will get you to your goals.

Tattvic Tides

Using the tattvas in magick can be very powerful. It can help enhance any ritual you do. But the tattvas are not simply external things or a set of symbols. They are composed of very real energies. Each of us has a set of energetic cycles that we go through. The most famous of these are the cycles known as circadian rhythms that we go through daily. They affect us mentally, emotionally, spiritually, biologically, hormonally, physiologically, and more. There are also cycles that last much longer, such as women’s menstrual cycles. The studies of these cycles are known as chronobiology.

The energies of the tattvas, similar to the energies in a human, go through fairly rapid cycles. These cycles are known as the tattvic tides.

The cycle of these tides begins at dawn every day. First, the energy of akasha (spirit) fills the universe. Doing magick for anything associated with spirit for the first twenty-four minutes following dawn, while that tattvic tide of akasha is “in course,” will enhance the magick. This is also a perfect time to do any sort of devotional practice to the gods.

After the first twenty-four minutes, the tides change and the power of vayu (air) is in course and becomes the strongest. This is the time to do magick associated with this element. Following vayu comes tejas (fire), apas (water), and prithivi (earth). Each of the tides lasts twenty-four minutes, so one entire cycle lasts for two hours. This is repeated twelve times during the day. The chart shown here gives you an example of how this works for the first half of a day when dawn occurs at 5:00 AM.

Naturally, the times and tides of this chart would continue for another six cycles until the following morning. This chart would need to be adjusted according to the time of sunrise locally for you. Readers familiar with the planetary hours, such as described in Modern Magick, will note that since the tattvic tides are based only on dawn and the five elements (and not on sunrise, sunset, and the planets), the computations are much easier.

Time	Tattva	Time	Tattva	Time	Tattva
5:00–5:24	Akasha	9:00–9:24	Akasha	1:00–1:24	Akasha
5:24–5:48	Vayu	9:24–9:48	Vayu	1:24–1:48	Vayu
5:48–6:12	Tejas	9:48–10:12	Tejas	1:48–2:12	Tejas
6:12–6:36	Apas	10:12–10:36	Apas	2:12–2:36	Apas
6:36–7:00	Prithivi	10:36–11:00	Prithivi	2:36–3:00	Prithivi
7:00–7:24	Akasha	11:00–11:24	Akasha	3:00–3:23	Akasha
7:24–7:48	Vayu	11:24–11:48	Vayu	3:24–3:48	Vayu
7:48–8:12	Tejas	11:48–12:12	Tejas	3:48–4:12	Tejas
8:12–8:36	Apas	12:12–12:36	Apas	4:12–4:36	Apas
8:36–9:00	Prithivi	12:36–1:00	Prithivi	4:36–5:00	Prithivi

The Tattvic Tides (Akasha = Spirit, Vayu = Air, Tejas = Fire, Apas = Water, Prithivi = Earth)

The Path of the Fall

One of what might be the most amazing and totally original aspects of Tantric philosophy is the way you find a path to the Divine. In most spiritual traditions, you are expected to become more and more godlike. If your religion says, “Do not eat a certain food,” you don’t eat that food. If your faith tells you, “Do not listen to non-religious music or dance,” you are considered more spiritual if you don’t listen to non-religious music and don’t dance.

With Tantra, it is understood that everything in the universe is a manifestation of the Divine. Therefore, everything is sacred.

But we each have our own taboos. Tantra is not the primary spiritual practice for most people, and therefore there is a process of unlearning beliefs you currently possess. In some spiritual systems, drinking alcohol is forbidden. To many practitioners of that tradition, drinking becomes a personal taboo. Such taboos, however, actually have the effect of keeping you away from finding the sacred in the activity of drinking. Therefore, breaking taboos is a powerful way to find the spiritual in everything and free yourself from past limiting beliefs. In those traditions that allow the use of alcohol, drinking to excess is usually forbidden. Breaking this taboo—getting drunk as part of spirituality—is a part of some Tantrics’ spiritual practice. But as you may imagine, simply breaking taboos doesn’t help you find or travel a highway to the Source.

The goal is to see the Divine in what is forbidden. Therefore, by experiencing what is forbidden, you are experiencing the Divine. It’s not simply drinking the forbidden wine that makes a difference. It’s not getting drunk that makes a difference. Rather, it’s making that wine sacred through various rituals and then partaking of the sacrament. Similarly, simply having sex with someone who is not your spouse doesn’t make you a Tantric. Tantra is not about cheating on a partner. Before participating in a Tantric ritual that might involve sex with someone who is not your regular partner—what is normally considered a banned behavior—you and your spouse (or regular partner) should be open about what you are doing. Make sure both of you are okay with this. Then the new partner is made sacred; s/he is honored as a manifestation of the God/dess and is even worshiped as such. Your sex with this person becomes sacred, open, and honest rather than something sordid and merely cheating. As you can imagine, some Tantrics do not have regular partners in order to avoid potential difficulties, while others limit their work, by choice, to their current partner.

As mentioned earlier, because of this breaking of taboos, Tantra has been called the “path of the fall.” By that, it is meant that if, through ritual, you make sacred those beliefs and behaviors that most people think would take you away from what is spiritual, those beliefs become holy and those acts become spiritual and sacred.

Other than finding the spiritual in all things, there is another, very practical use of breaking taboos—one that could literally save your life. Let’s imagine a person who has a behavior that threatens his or her existence, perhaps alcoholism or excessive gambling. Nobody simply does these things. Rather, there is some unconscious reason or reasons that drive the person. Often it is because the individual is unhappy and looking for something. And sometimes this emptiness leads to such behaviors because the person is seeking the transcendent—underlying all of our wants and needs is often a desire to find the Divine.

So what a Tantric who has an unwanted behavior might do is seek to find the Divine within the unwanted behavior. With every drink, you are drinking the Goddess. With every roll of the dice, you are touching the God. Surprisingly, after a relatively short time, the mind begins to realize that what you’ve been searching for isn’t the drink or the dice, but the Divine that is in them. Attachment to the behaviors fades while devotion to the Divine takes over.

Another way of describing this process is by calling Tantra the “path of reversal.” The profane is reversed and becomes the spiritual. In Tantric sexuality, there is a secondary meaning to this concept of reversal.

In most non-Tantric sexual activity, the men usually have a single, explosive, genitally focused, combined orgasm and ejaculation. Women may have a single orgasm or multiple ones that are also explosive and genitally focused. For both, the result is generally nothing more than a quick release of tension and the very brief experience of pleasure.

With Tantric techniques (some of which will be described later), instead of an explosive orgasm/ejaculation, the man can experience just the reverse: an implosive, full-body, singular orgasm or multiple orgasms. He may or may not ejaculate, and rather than be limited to a few minutes of frantic friction, there are extended periods of sexual activity and pleasurable sensations that lead to transcending ordinary experience. The woman Tantric can also experience such orgasms with similar results, as well as have copious ejaculations that have a sweetness indicating the production of the mysterious spiritual substance known to Neo-Tantrics as amrita.

However, the real purpose of Tantric sexual practices is not merely to enhance pleasure or simply to produce amrita. Rather, it is to change the focus from the physical to the spiritual. It is to find the Divine in your partner, yourself, and the sexual activity. The increased and extended pleasure is just a wonderful collateral benefit.

If mere sexual activity or rituals that include sexual activity made us spiritual, most adults would be enlightened. Of course, the evidence of our experience shows that this is certainly not true. So what exactly is it that changes sexual activity into something spiritual? What is it that can turn drinking or gambling into a realization of the Divine? The answer is found in becoming aware of (or manifesting), increasing, and directing the universal spiritual life force that flows through the universe and through each of us. Learning how to do this is an important practical aspect of Tantric sexuality. Yes, it can be done through visualization and breathwork, but that can take many months or years of practice. Tantric sexual practices can help you achieve this much more quickly. This will be discussed later.

Return to the Natural

So why go through all of these meditations and practices? It is because of karma, the kleshas, and our conditioning that we are no longer able to see the true beauty of the world. The philosophy behind the techniques described so far has the ultimate goal of returning you to where you should have been all along. We should be able to find joy in life naturally. We should be able to be naturally spontaneous in our devotions, our practices, and our lives. But most of us are far removed from the natural way our bodies and minds are meant to be. Most of us aren’t Tantrics because we have lost the natural way.

In Sanskrit, the word sahaja (“sah-hah-dja”) means “spontaneity” or “being natural.” It’s a state of being joyful in life, part of which includes seeing all things as being divine.

Are you joyful in life? Joyful is not the same as happy. Joyfulness is an approach to life that sees the beauty and the Divine everywhere and in everything. The sahaja experience can be overwhelming and enlightening. It is part of traditional Tantra and a state of complete freedom and peace.

One of my teachers, Dadaji, compared the concept of sahaja to that of the naturalness of a tree. Trees don’t need to be told how to grow. They don’t need rules to learn to spread out their roots and branch out with thousands of leaves. But we have forgotten our “primordial perfection.” The meditations, exercises, and practices described in this book can help lead us back to this state of naturalness where meditations, exercises, and practices are no longer needed but are performed when desired.

Traditional Tantra is a path of naturalness, a path that can help bring out the true you, a path of sahaja.

What Will You Get from This Book?

The traditional Tantra described here is not merely a varied set of practices. It is not intended that you should pick and choose which techniques to follow (although if that is what you want to do, go ahead).

The idea is that if you practice the techniques, meditations, rituals, etc., described here, you will eventually reach a state of sahaja. If you hadn’t already guessed, there is more to traditional Tantra than just naturalness.

When you achieve sahaja and have knowledge of magick, when you see the Divine in everything—including yourself—and can change what you don’t like to meet your desires and wishes, then you are truly a traditional Tantric. You have a connection to the Divine, you know who you really are, and you have the power to make changes in your life. Does this sound like anything you may have heard of before?

If you follow or are familiar with Thelema, the system of the followers of Aleister Crowley, you will see similarities to the concept of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel leading to the basic rule of Thelema: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Discover who you really are and do whatever you need to do in order to manifest it. “Do that, and no other shall say nay.”

The ancient Sanskrit term that corresponds to this is Svecchachara (“S’vek-cha-kar-uh”), which means “the path of doing one’s own will.” With the techniques, meditations, and rituals of traditional Tantra, you can follow this path, a path of perfect freedom, joy, naturalness, spontaneity, and personal responsibility.

Traditional Tantra is not directly related to Thelema, and certainly precedes it. However, it is in harmony with many Thelemic concepts, and there are traditional Tantrics who are also Thelemites. Perhaps it would be appropriate to say that traditional Tantra includes precepts that are pre-Crowleyan Thelema.

Some of you reading this may recognize a similarity to the Wiccan Rede:

Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill,
An it harm none, do what ye will.

This is the original version of the Rede from 1964, written by Doreen Valiente (and probably taken from Aleister Crowley either directly or by way of Gerald Gardner). There is at least a fifty-year tradition that stresses the “harm none” aspect of the Rede. But that is not the way of Tantra.

An example of the difficulty of harming none is given in the very non-Wiccan book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach. In it, the teacher/messiah, Donald Shimoda, tells the student, Richard, that he is free to do whatever he wants. Richard replies by saying that’s true as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. Later, from the bushes, a very dramatic vampire, complete with cape and Lugosi-esque accent, begs Richard to let him bite him and get some blood. Richard refuses, even though the vampire tells him of the great pain he’ll experience without blood. Shimoda points out that Richard has done harm to the vampire in order to protect himself. Carrying this out, he tells Richard that he is free to do whatever he wants.

Silver RavenWolf, in her book Solitary Witch, deals with this problem by saying that you have to balance things for the greater good. So it would be okay to do harm if by not doing it you would allow greater harm. This redefines the concept of “harm none” and is acceptable by her many fans. I would point out that this is somewhat similar to the Jewish idea that you are supposed to follow the 613 commandments given in the Jewish Bible, but you are also commanded to break any of them if it will save a life or improve health.

This concept of breaking rules and doing something deemed bad or transgressive in order to achieve a greater good is not the way of Tantra, either.

The Tantric concept of Svecchachara indicates that you are free to do whatever you want. There’s no need for equivocation, “weasel words,” redefinition, or explanation. There’s no need for any guesswork (what, for instance, is the “greater good”?). However, Svecchachara makes very clear that you are responsible for whatever you do. First you have to learn what you really want to do by eliminating the kleshas in your life and the maya they create. Then do what you want. That’s unlimited freedom. But you are completely responsible for what you do. Freedom and responsibility are a basis for the philosophy of traditional Tantra.

1. Manu is an archetypal figure similar in mythic function to the Jewish Adam. He is the forefather of all humanity and in some traditions is seen as the person who instituted religious practices. Like Noah, he was saved from a great flood. The deity who saved him was Vishnu or Brahma.

2. I have not given up. All the symptoms of Bell’s palsy ended, and I have no sign of the disease. When I left the hospital after dying, I was injecting large amounts of two different types of insulin daily under the skin of my legs or stomach. Due to ritual work, visualization, nutritional patterns, exercise, and the good wishes and energy of friends and loved ones, that was quickly brought down to only thirty units of one type of insulin. For years now, I have no longer needed to inject insulin. Instead, I take a tiny pill once a day. I anticipate a time when I will need no drugs for my diabetes and look forward to an eventual cure or total remission.

3. The sound of the augmented fourth is heard in the first two notes of the song “Maria” from the musical West Side Story. The third note resolves the tritone to a more sonorous pitch.

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