Category: Articles

Tantra and Sex

04 Feb 2008

It won’t have escaped my readers’ attention that sex is a major commodity in the West. We’re literally bombarded by it in all shapes and sizes and from all angles.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy we have this freedom. Sex is a basic human drive. I’m not going to start getting bitchy and elitist about it. Its ubiquity does mean our neuroses are on public display; but that’s a good place to start talking. People, relationships and family are not better where less open norms apply.

Sex sells, and it sells tantra too. But what does tantra really have to say about it, if we dare to saw off the marketing branch we are sitting on? (Believe me, I am more than indifferent to that prospect). More importantly, what is in fact the effect of practising tantra on someone’s sex life?

The great American psychoanalyst and writer Robert Stoller, who devoted his life to studying eroticism in all its forms, argued that erotic excitement was linked to scripted behavior which allowed the user to balance fear and mastery and act out resolutions of early trauma. He believed this was a pervasive characterization of sexual behavior, both “normal” and “abnormal”. And where there are scripts, there are roles to play, and people willing to play them.

The cultural scripting of sexuality generates the sexual identities, patterns and artefacts that we see around us. In other words, these are not “natural”, however primary may be the underlying drive. This should not surprise us; what is “natural” in human behavior at all?

Scripting sexual behavior, though, has a number of obvious inconveniences. Firstly, the scripts are unilateral. You may find someone willing to star in your production, for reasons of their own, but they will not rewrite the script. You will remain in a relationship, perhaps, because you play some complementary role in their script, quite possibly unconsciously; it’s a trade off, but it isn’t nirvana. As people become mere instruments in the realization of your scripts, they are objectivized. This is not exactly a recipe for a psychologically healthy society.

Secondly, these scripts, if they do not become obsessive in nature, lose their power over time. And insofar as they are about power and revenge, which they usually are, they need new objects. As scripting replaces the primitive psychobiological sexual reaction, however, the latter is muted. Sexuality becomes identified with the script and the sexual experience becomes less and less satisfactory.

We all know, of course, that there is another story here (or at least I hope that most of us know, though I realize I should be more circumspect in this assertion). We remember love, falling in love, abandonment, enrapture, passion, folly. We remember it and, if we are women, we have probably scripted it too (it is very easy to access those scripts to elicit sexual response from a woman, but it is a dark magic). This is very powerful and it can be so powerful that it is almost pure, at least for a while. In this sexual rapture, we are overwhelmed by the other. But after years together, we are not quite sure where it belongs; we seek refuge in technique, or in new scripts which aim to reproduce this passion but in fact have nothing in common with it.

A lot of people, and I am including popular writers on the subject, present tantra in such terms, especially tantra in relation to lovemaking; and even if it is not their intention, it is very easy for this to be the effect as the advice they dispense is received as prescriptive and technical – a mere user’s manual for human sexual response.

Tantra, however, is not another technique, it is not even compatible with technique and fantasy roleplay; it is about deprogramming these scripts so that real encounters can take place.
In this way, it undermines the ontological basis of sexuality as the vast majority of us have constructed it. And this demolition work is extremely frightening and dangerous. It is very unlikely it will make your sexual life any “better” unless it does so by reforging your psychic makeup from the bottom up, which might well not be what you intended. It may leave you disoriented, as old scripts have become inoperant but authenticity in relations remains elusive (for authenticity requires two). This is because it is a path to enlightenment, not another sedative, and the world is resistant to waking up from its sleep.

I want to warn you particularly about what tantra means if you are in a couple. When couples come to me, as they often do, believing that tantra might be a solution to their relationship problems (or just a nice add-on), they are wrong in almost every case, and even if it does work it will require perseverance, courage, understanding, and hard work over a long period. Tantra is a purely solitary path, from which richness in relationships is only a byproduct; it is not some kind of new age relationship therapy.

Tantra involves seeing and accepting what is there – what you feel, what the other feels. As you discover the self beneath the neuroses, it may lead you absolutely anywhere; in fact it would be statistically astonishing if it happened to lead you closer merely to your partner with all your wider relationship scripts intact. Jealousy, possessiveness, insecurity, fidelity, duty, image, all these scripts are logically slated for demolition too (in a humane, consensual, conscious and progressive manner of course – at least if you come to us; we know that these scripts hold important parts of your personality in place). If your current relationship, or indeed your very idea of relationship, is premised upon these scripts, it will not survive. So enter at your peril. If by writing this I have put you off, I will consider that I have done my duty.

Underneath, though, is, indeed, what (hopefully) was present at the outset: lust; love; transcendence. Awakened, descripted, it will not be mastered, channeled and controled; it will not fit any more into the boxes you made for it – if you try, you will cast it back into slumber. But awakened, it will at least be there. Getting there may be practically impossible, but if you feel the inescapable urge to seek this reality, an urge which dominates everything else, then you may just be better off when you arrive.

The Emotional Plague Stops Here.

28 Jan 2008

Whilst we may be uncomfortable with his endemic paranoia, pseudoscience and demagoguery – and I am with all three – today no reflective person interested in psychotherapeutic insights into sociology and philosophy would fundamentally disagree with Reich’s view that the state of society is significantly explained by the prevalence of repression of basic drives, nor fail to seek to dig deeper into how it is that, through feelings and emotions, power relationships come into being, trauma is induced and embedded in the body, and spontaneous self-expression is undermined.

Having come at this myself from a variety of angles, it seems to me that there starts to be the basis of an academic consensus in relation to these issues, which have been so unpalatable and remain so in popular and political discourse because scientific abstraction is so difficult to achieve in this contested arena. Reich himself, indeed, extended – understandably and with some justification but very unfortunately from the standpoint of getting his psychotherapeutic insights taken seriously – the notion of “emotional plague” from a concept to explain the diachronic and synchronic propagation of neurosis, to what he perceived as the unwillingness of his peers and of society to apply scientific standards to his own work of the same order of rigor as those they espoused elsewhere, and indeed to use every “dirty trick” in the book to discredit him. An extreme form, doubtless, with paranoiac overtones, of what Kuhn has described in relation to scientific paradigms more generally.

Whilst I share the view that the processes Reich termed “emotional plague” are indeed relevant to the state of society, I am not very concerned, myself, to thrust these notions into public debate, even if I am persuaded and concerned that my children will suffer immensely from being raised in an environment still largely scarred and polluted (possibly, indeed, increasingly so – I pronounce myself agnostic on this point) by the effects of the emotional plague. Indeed, my approach to the issue is absolutely solipsistic. You are free to call this an abdication. To my mind, however, social activism is the easy route, and many a half-truth has been thrust on society as a way of avoiding confronting, deeply, all that the full truth implies for the self; with frequently tragic results. Public debate on the issue will not help at all, or at least it will never be sufficient.

There’s a lot of fuzziness and opportunistic self-promotion in the spiritual marketplace which bears witness to, but at the same time obscures, the simple truths Reich referred to. Although they turn me off, such grandiose constructions do not, by their mere possibility or evocative hyperbole, render the truth other or inoperant, or dispense the seeker from further exploration. Thus we see in the spiritual tradition a fundamental identity between therapy and enlightenment, and between the destiny of the self and the destiny of society; and whilst a few drops of rain may not transform a desert, they may well sustain what life there is in it; and one day there may be more.

In Advaita Vedanta – the non-dual doctrines of Hinduism deriving from pre-Aryan traditions – it is recognized that “for the enlightened, all that exists is nothing but the Self”. Indeed, the moral basis of pure forms of Buddhism lies in this profound identity which links individual and collective salvation through mechanisms which are various and variously described, but in the end endogenous to the awakened state, and therefore of no special interest.

The extent to which the traumas of early childhood can be fully reversed in adulthood is, I think, a disputed matter. I am not necessarily optimistic about it; it seems to me today like a labor that could last forever, with no end in sight and only a constant stream of suffering as more and more hidden traumas bubble their way to the surface. And yet emotional healing is a necessary, imperative and moral path; the only moral path; the only path in fact, to which we are all more or less consciously called.

Let me be clear that I do not believe that our problems in the here and now come from past lives and will be repercuted in future ones. Reincarnation and karma are barbarisms; but they prefigure another truth which is much closer at hand. What I am in life, the type of moral entity I am, is determined diachronically by family precedent and synchronically by the type of society I have been brought up in; and of course these dimensions interplay and have done so since time immemorial. In my life, I play at the margin of these social processes and social revolution is impossible; but even a little light can dispel a multitude of darkness. And so I see that healing myself is what I can give to my children, the most important thing I can give them, maybe the only important thing. This is its meaning, this is its motivation, these are the “future lives” which I can influence. I am not having more fun than when I embarked on this journey, and I don’t know if I ever will; it doesn’t matter. Only they matter. What matters to me is that the emotional plague stops here; if I cannot rid myself of it, I will at least take it to the grave with me.

But there are moments of elation also, in the process of untangling the emotional determinism which wrecks our lives. It is a tremendous feeling of freedom to break through this layer, however episodically. In the lives of most of us, it is a discourse that rumbles on, unquestioned, scarcely perceived, from cradle to grave. But it is in fact not so difficult to break; even intellectual curiosity about what it is that links cause to effect in our emotional functioning is enough to start. When one is free of this, even just a little free, there is only laughter, and not cynical or nervous laughter, but true amusement. I find it genuinely funny in a way I cannot describe.

Let us recall the elements. This isn’t meant to be a complete account of something I’m sure I don’t fully understanding, just what’s needed to set the scene.

Sense-data provoke natural bodily reactions, like fear, lust, anger, and set in process mechanisms to deal appropriately with the situation thus anticipated. This is governed by the reptilian brain and the autonomic nervous system and thus not under conscious control. But the social animal that man is, disallows a part of these reactions; this also takes place not via dispassionate operation of the central cortex, but through the mechanism of emotions. Whilst emotions play a role in bonding and enabling communities to survive, however, they also become frozen in scripts which undermine feelings and natural drives in a way which is maladaptive and frequently acutely so. By this means, the natural response of the body to external stimuli typically comes to take on a habitual character whereby tensions are associated with surrogate and constant stimuli and become a state of being rather than an adaptive transient response. Sentiments like fear and guilt come to dominate our psychic makeup and are used by us in turn to prompt reactions which we find favourable to our interests. It is from this game that we need release – though we may seek the contrary, which is exactly what organized religion gives us…

We believe in and associate ourselves with our emotional scripts, not appreciating that they are not only socially constructed – like aesthetics – but socially conditioned also; whilst they may linger on in solitude, their origin is always in social events. But maladaptive emotional scripts are no more a necessary part of our personality to be held onto and cherished, than any bodily pathology.

To illustrate, a typical process of scripted emotional response may be as follows: stimulus (A innocently switches light on early in the morning, believing B to be awake); B’s reaction (fear; surprise); state of alert; realization that reaction was inappropriate to stimulus; recollection of (or rather subconscious association with) a pattern of similar events in the past, especially in early childhood, which were a source of emotional reactions designed to ward off annoying/malicious intent on the part of a parent, sibling etc.; subliminal transference of such assumed intent onto A; production of the associated emotional reaction; association on the part of A, in turn, of B’s reaction with similar prior events (unfair unpunishment in the absence of intent to harm); emotional counterreaction (anger, outrage, sense of injustice, sense of betrayal); defensive or hostile reaction by B to what is now perceived as or associated with a threat (fight, flight, freezing); situation spirals out of control…

Especially when A is a small child, this type of inappropriate reaction, repeated often, can easily generate trauma and a diminished sense of self. Let us assume now, however, that both B and A are mature and intelligent enough to grasp this sequence of events intellectually, and may also have some understanding of their own conditioning which predisposes them to this type of reaction, which, it must be said, is in one form or another totally commonplace and largely unquestioned; often accepted by adults though invariably upsetting to children.

Then one can start to dissociate the elements and observe them critically. In this way, the spiral is broken. More than this, however, the past events which are brought to life in this way can be processed and dealt with, rather than – as so often happens – repressed anew. In fact, the recollection of these past emotional injuries which happens outside conscious control is an opportunity to be seized. It rarely is, however, because doing so unleashes the full force of the earlier reaction to the traumatizing event, a reaction which is obviously disproportionate to the proximate cause and risks, therefore, further escalating the emotional spiral as reaction and counterreaction become a battlefield for control of the self. The healing process relies on replacing the scripted reaction by one which is appropriately supportive and recognizes the fact that the phenomena being experienced have their origin in something other than the precipitating stimulus, and, thus, do not bear on A’s appreciation of B or the converse.

Even when A and B perfectly understand under normal circumstances that they have a high appreciation of each other and each is happily anchored in their own identity, this dissociation is not easy and can only be progressive. The cumulative effect is, however, liberation from this conditioned reaction and its replacement by one which is more spontaneous, appropriate and joyful. By creating a space which is safe for A to completely enter into reliving and discharging the earlier experiences, B – even through a mechanism which is at its origin maladaptive – succeeds in allowing A to reprogram a part of his emotional armouring. And this is the process which, over time, can defeat the emotional plague; one individual at a time, one moment at a time, because, just as its physical counterpart a virus, the emotional plague infects only individuals; its effect on communities is no more than the arithmetic aggregation of individual infections through whatever contagious process is at work.

In fact, whilst understanding is seemingly helpful (and being of a very academic persuasion I am drawn to it), it is probably not even necessary. In tantra we learn to feel our bodies, to respect their reactions, their capacity to feel, to respond, to respect and honor even what is seemingly maladaptive, knowing that underneath its maladaptive character, which is social in nature and hence contingent, these reactions are in fact individually adaptive, carry a message and meaning, and can bear us to safer and more secure shores.

In the English language, we do not normally place a period at the end of a title. In this case, however, it is deliberate.

The Secret of Happiness

14 Nov 2007

I figured it out.
Be yourself.
Love yourself.
Stand up for yourself.
Be proud of yourself.
Enjoy yourself.
Rejoice in yourself.

And…
Don’t worry that this is going to piss people off immensely.
We are sacred creatures. All the shit is holy. There is nothing wrong.
Just play, oblivious of others. Connect to them from a connection to yourself, from your heart.
Dare to love.
Trust in the power of being yourself to bring you happiness. Don’t believe that your happiness depends on others. Noone’s happiness depends on others.

The woman named Iris
gave birth to the goddess
In her son who can’t say her name
Because of all the pain

I miss you, but I’m glad you’re gone
I want you but I’m not alone
I’m haunted by you But I’ll get you gone
if it takes me all my life long

Take back the pain you gave me
Take back what doesn’t belong to me
Take back the shame you gave me
Take back what doesn’t belong to me

I’m Irish, I’m English,
I’m Moslem, I’m Jewish,
I’m a girl, I’m a boy
And the goddess meant for me only joy
And real love requires you
give up those loves whom you
think you love best
Love puts you through the test
And only loyal love will bring me happiness

Take back the rage you gave me
Take back the hatred you gave me for me
Take back the anger that nearly killed me
Take back what doesn’t belong to me

Thanks Sinead.

The psychopathology of sexual response

18 Jul 2007

I have climbed another mountain.

Reich’s critique of Freud, though apparently unknown in mainstream discussion of the Freudian legacy to Western thought, is poignant. Freud made a pact with the devil: although he knew, he did not say; and as a result his theories are distorted ones, they are half-truths, packaged to take account of the world into which they were born. Although aware of the origins of neuroses in childhood sexual development, and how social conditioning removed spontaneous behavior, he nonetheless accepted that sexuality was dangerous and needed to be channeled into more socially “acceptable” forms of behavior. He called this “sublimation”, and for him, this was a natural stage of adult development. It was not a pathology.

Reich called his bluff. He stated that a fully satisfying genital sexual life and the absence of neuroses were two sides of the same coin. And although Reich has been rebuffed and ridiculed – and quite rightly when it came to his later attempts to create a theory of everything – his position has also deeply affected modern attitudes to sexuality in the West, whereby a woman is not quite normal unless she has three orgasms before breakfast.

But – with all respect to Reich – this focus on genitality is insane. It is just another artefact of the warped world into which both Freud’s and Reich’s theories were born.

Experiencing deep and full orgasmic pleasure does indeed characterize the natural state of man and woman. But it is a consequence of psychic health, a manifestation, it is not a recipe for achieving it or a cosmic status symbol.

In The Function of the Orgasm, Reich argued that orgasm serves to regulate bodily energies, essentially to release energies which otherwise would become stocked in the body and generate neuroses and psychosomatic phenomena.

Now, this is partly true, but it is not the end of the story.

Reich’s account of the orgasm appears to exclude that it may, itself, be used as a mechanism, perhaps even the most powerful mechanism, to rigidify the body and freeze neuroses into place. But a moment’s reflection suffices to see that this is how sexuality functions for many people. Such sexuality is labeled morbid and dismissed, it is not “real” and “healthy” sexuality and hence it is not what Reich is talking about. But this misses the point.

Now, I fully admit to being an amateur with only a limited background on these things, but I still think I’m on to something here. So here is my conjecture on the psychopathology of sexual response. Of course we now know much more than Reich or Freud ever could about the reality of human sexual behavior and it is time to retheorize psychotherapy based on this knowledge. Reich’s theories are based on a very crude metaphysics of bodily energy.

I believe that when our sense of self is under stress, the primary channel of psychosomatic repression is genital. Such repression may manifest itself in the sexual response – whether it is impotence or (exclusively in men of course) “premature” ejaculation. But it also manifests itself in sexual behavior, both direct behavior (what we are accustomed to calling “perversions”, though it is an obviously unsatisfactory term) and in sublimated behavior patterns such as violence, anger and so on, as well as in bodily phenomena playing a role in the ontogenesis of illness. The omnipresence of degraded genital sensitivity, in both sexes, which I have been able to observe in my own experience is ample indication that the primary locus of psychosomatic repression is the pelvic floor. I also believe that most therapists working in the Reichian tradition would agree with this and operate accordingly, but at an intellectual level, as a system, I am unconvinced that the Reichian account itself is complete or coherent.

A satisfying genital sexual life (as, presumably, self-reported) may even have nothing to do with the maintenance of mental health, it may, once again, simply be a manifestation of a satisfying emotional life, which is the primary cause of partial neurotic resolution, and indeed this seems rather more likely.

So the genitals are a battleground. On the one hand, the wounded sense of self directs energy against them and seeks release through them; on the other, reality intrudes by this channel too in the erotic response.

It is important to realize that what we are talking about here is “normal” sexuality, not (only) morbidity. In other words, it is the sexuality which Reich viewed as homomorphic to mental and physical health. Freud argued for sublimation, and Reich for dissipation of sexual drives. But the reality is that the sexual drive which Reich wished to dissipate through the orgasm, is itself stubbornly neurotic and the remedy Reich prescribed merely anchors this neurosis. If it does anything else, then that is merely by chance. It is entirely possible that it is better to dissipate certain energies in this way than to channel and manifest them in available alternative ways, although I am not sure about this because the genitals are at the origin of many psychopathologies and the apparent release may therefore be only temporary – moreover, sex typically involves two people and this release may therefore be, and probably often is, at the expense of the other. In any case, this does not by itself determine that Reich has described healthy sexual behavior. Of course, Reich’s findings are indelibly influenced by the clinical context of his and Freud’s work, even if he went on to well understand, in his most important work on child psychology, the social generation of psychopathology which determined the passing on of neuroses from one generation to the next.

When we observe sexual neurosis, we have not merely to prescribe genital release as a means of managing it; we have to look, in full Reichian logic, at what is generating this neurosis. And what is generating it is the wounded sense of self. In order to heal this, we need to step out of this subjectivity and observe objectively.

Here, sexuality can help, but only if we let it. Instrumentalizing sexuality closes all possibility that it will awaken us. It is merely another manifestation of the defense mechanisms that the wounded self has mastered. Rather, we must seek to deinstrumentalize it, just to experience it, to allow it to surprise us, to ensure it is placed firmly outside of our control so that it may be a gateway to challenge our self-construction and make us confront the fact that reality is other. And this is not only true of sex; it is true of all sensory phenomena. They are either a way out or a way in; and we must make them a way in. When our constructed self, our psychophysical armor, is permanently exposed to contradiction and cannot escape, only then are we free of it and living authentically.

I recognize that some may find this account of sexuality too remote from their own experience. Given that real sexuality has a dual character as both affirmation and effacement of the self, how to enjoy it fully in the present moment and not at some irrealistic future date? Indeed, may not the self-affirmatory aspects of sexuality, and not only the self-effacing ones, have a true therapeutic or energy-management function and value, in addition to being fun? Yes. Certainly. I also reject an ascetic view according to which only sex according to the purest (imagined) tantric canon has any value. Sex is fun, and I revel in all its variety and the humanity of it (though I certainly do not condone actions which are unilateral and predatory). But this is a subject for another blog entry.

The antigeneric moment

21 Jun 2007

In an excellent article, “Digital music and subculture”, available at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_2/ebare/, Sean Ebare (no relation) discusses how emergent musical forms become labelled genres. “Without a genre label, a work exists in a limbo-like state… There the work is strange, marginally understood, and (according to most major label reps) marginally saleable at best”.

Apparently this limbo has been called, by another scholar, the “antigeneric moment”. It is “something of a collective identity crisis that calls for resolution, so that music fans can again make sense of their world”.

Which begs the question: why this obsessive human need to label things before we can understand them? Does the labelling help understanding, or hinder it?

The description of this state as “antigeneric” seems inappropriate to me. This state is described as an inherently unstable one which must resolve itself into one of genre or oblivion. As such, it is “pregeneric” or maybe “pre-non-generic”, but it is not “anti-generic”. On the contrary, it actively seeks its label, it is uncomfortable living without.

Tantra, however, shows us that we must live in this antigeneric moment, in a truly antigeneric moment, because the “sense” that we make of the world is a perpetual accretion of nonsense that only serves to distance us from experience. The transition to genre repudiates rather than resolves tension, it crystallizes irreal manifestations of experience by giving them a name and, in so doing, leads us away from non-duality.

What “is” tantra? The question cannot be answered without asserting what it is not. And by asserting what it is and what it is not, its meaning can only be lost. This is why, and the sense in which, tantra is anti-religion, tantra is anti-tantra. It is antigeneric and all attempts to pin it down, label it, authenticate and delimit it, can only lead away from what it is that we are talking about, something that we arbitrarily label tantra but not to differentiate it from non-tantra, simply to be able to talk at all.

Personally I have a particular aversion to relationship labels. They serve to characterize my relations neither in a positive nor a negative sense – they neither adequately capture what they mean to me, nor what they do not mean. They do, however, help many people to avoid listening to what I am saying or feeling what they are feeling. I cannot avoid using them, nor can I invent my own, nor maybe should I – as Barry Long says, we must live in this world with our masks, but they must not stick to our skin. Underneath the mask, though, is something else, something deeper and more beautiful, something that you are really looking for but do not perceive – the “antigeneric moment”.

Letter to an absent lover

30 May 2007

I found this on another website. In a time when society seems polarized between jealousy and alienation and meaningless frivolity, it offers another (and unarguably better) view of how men and women can relate to each other and to the world. I would like to dedicate this to the memory of the young lives insanely snuffed out on the Virginia Tech campus, and my heroic but unquenchable hope that the US might, one day soon, wake up to the inhumanity of fundamentalist religion and, in so doing, give birth to a new moral renaissance, drawing afresh on what is true and immutable in that nation’s founding values and in the impulses, joys and possibilities of youth which we are all, parents and patriarchs, solemnly charged to nurture and protect.

Hello my horny princess,

I think it is such a good thing that human beings are horny. Enjoy this lovely primal drive and energy.

I just wanted to tell you that, when I come, you can expect to experience love and acceptance on a new level, you will be so blinded by the sun that again you may wonder what the stars have to offer. But the stars have a lot to offer; this warm, womb-like darkness is also our ancestral home. Yin and yang are not in competition.

Be free and enjoy. Even if there is adventure, excitement and uncertainty, this is life, it is not an “experiment”. You are not testing how you will feel or whether society’s rules and expectations are or are not correct. i think you are rather exploring the beautiful, mysterious world around you and within you and my role is to make you feel safe so that you can only find flowers and not worry about thorns.

Right now you may have no perspective on this, you may not think or realize that you are on a journey, but very soon you will achieve this perspective and you will see a great panorama that you never imagined. We do not need to plan that journey, we just need to let it unfold.

I have never felt so in love with and connected to you as I do now. However, please don’t feel concerned if your own signal gets lost, if you are caught up in others and, in those moments, forget me. This is normal. In those moments, you must forget me, the forgetfulness is a condition of connection, not just to them, but also to me. I am them, they are me; there is no difference, you will see it.

These conflicting feelings make me feel alive, and that ecstasy outweighs all passing discomfort. Passing by this route with you purifies my soul and makes me able to love.

Darling, I want you to know that I know none of this from a book, I am not repeating any theory, I know it in my heart with a very deep conviction that is only possible when everything you experience just matches what you expect. In this way what I have found is not faith or belief, it is science and knowledge; you can test it and it fits.

Have a very lovely weekend, I hope you manage to get your work done, spend nice time with those important to you, enjoy your friends, admirers and lovers, find exquisite beauty in something tiny and overlooked, take pleasure in the mind and in the senses, and touch people’s lives with a little of the power with which you have touched mine.

Channeling

16 Apr 2007

As anyone who has dabbled in tantra will know, a major problem with it is that it makes you extremely sexually aroused (aka horny) but you are not supposed to dissipate that energy but to use it to achieve higher states of conscious. It sounds implausible, if not positively masochistic. And indeed, the least one can say is that it is somewhat easier said than done…

I’m sure there’s material for a book in this, and I’m certainly not qualified to write it, but the great thing about Web 2.0 is how unqualified people can still write stuff anyway and it is easier to click away from their web page than get rid of them in a bar, so here come my thoughts on that subject.

The objective of “channeling” the energy is easy to misunderstand. There is a huge difference between channeling and repressing, but many of the things we think are channeling are in fact just less obvious ways of repressing. Many people think they “channel” their sexual energy into family, or work, or creative arts, but this is nonsense. The only things I believe we can channel our sexual energy into are sex itself and reproduction, fully sensual love and personal development towards enlightenment. Anything else is just a possible expression of that channeling.

What do I mean by “fully sensual love”? I just use this clumsy pleonasm to emphasize that we are not talking about the kind of “love” that is in fact a repression. Tantric love is a love without limits, a love of all creation and an ecstasy of living. This love is fearless, self-confident and compassionate, playful and committed. It embraces all the senses and delights in all that is delightful. It comes to identify with the ecstasy in the Other and make that a part of its own dance of life. All of the chakras participate in this dance.

In fact, this channeling of sexual energy into tantric love is not a “channeling” at all, it is not something under conscious control and it is not directing energy in one direction rather than another, it is just allowing it to spill over, it is a second level of ecstasy, a making love to the universe, and it doesn’t really “solve” the “problem” but it just moves it onto another level where it is, indeed, not any more a problem. This is a stage in the journey to enlightenment, it is the very meaning of personal spiritual development. Thus, the channeling of sexual energy into love is not distinct from its channeling towards Samadhi, that is, the “non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the consciousness of the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object” (Diener et al.).

To achieve this, we often work with breathing exercises. The breathing exercises allow our whole body and being to resonate with sexual energy instead of being blocked. When sexual energy can flow freely in the body, it can also flow out of the body and into the surrounding cosmos, and this is realized, tantric love, it is a quality of being which is immediately apparent to those who come into contact with us. These and other exercises serve to correct imbalances which we have stocked in our bodies as a result of defensive ways we have found to deal with the frustrations and disappointments of life, and which hinder our self-realization, self-confidence and life in the world.

Channeling sexual energy into sex itself may be more deliberative and is certainly fun and advantageous. Rather than “channeling”, this should better be called “release”. I think that this is the best way to deal with an accumulation of sexual energy provided, of course, that certain conditions are met, such as the consent of the partner and the appropriate precautions. It is good to flirt, seduce and copulate, to be man and woman, to rejoice in this cosmic game and to take pleasure in its afterglow. When we know tantric sex, we may reject this kind of game and take the whole thing so seriously, believing sex must be a “meditation” while having no idea what “meditation” is (a subject for another blog entry!). I think this is wrong, this type of sex is a release, let it be what it is supposed to be and enjoy it. It will not bring you to nirvana but it may help you to manage the process of getting there, because a build-up of blocked sexual energy is also dangerous and we should not underestimate this.

When no appropriate sexual partner can be found (but do not give up too easily!), self-love through masturbation is also fine. Make it self-love in the realest, deepest way you can imagine and achieve. In this way, release and growth will go together – and this also applies to conventional sex.

However, sex does not necessarily have this character of “release” at all. At some point, release is unnecessary and unneeded because energy can flow unhindered. I believe that the physical phenomenon of ejaculation may still occur, without loss or with substantially reduced loss of energy, when we make love in the tantric way.

When Uspenskij first achieves a higher state of wakefulness, his reaction is to ask Gurdjieff how to get rid of it, because it becomes unbearable to him. This is what we typically do in a small, everyday way in our sexual behavior and indeed in our approach to life. To get rid of it is not without meaning, it is not a sin. But gradually, we must allow the ecstasy to remain with us so that it can transform us, and, transforming us, transform the world. The ecstasy and the agony are in the tension between the world as it is and the world as we experience it habitually; by embracing ecstasy, we live more and more in the world as it is, and there we find Samadhi.

So tantra is a return to the source and an affirmation of life, lived authentically. It has no esoteric practices or secrets, however much we may hunger for the mystery and mystification that we desire in order to shield us from the world as it is. It has only a eclectic toolbox of techniques, which are something quite different. In fact, these techniques are not “tantra” at all, they are just therapies for the conditions that hinder us from approaching reality and living life to the full. And tantric sex is not a technique, it is just the front door to ecstatic union which many mystics have achieved, in many spiritual traditions, by roundabout means. The essential unity of all spiritual traditions is close to a self-evidence when you have inwardly grasped the tantric message.

In accordance with this, there is no esoteric method of “channeling” sexual energy, there are just techniques to help bring it to full expression. However, it is very easy to inadvertently repress what you are supposed to be consciously embracing. Many people, including practitioners of tantra, do not understand that this is what they are doing. They have then the form, but none of the content. Only when you understand that tantra is not technique, just as words are not meaning and sex is not love, are you on the path to transcendence and joy.

Thoughts from the subway

25 March 2007

Tou lógou d’eóntos xunoû, zóousin hoi polloí hos idían éhontes frónisin

This fragment from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus introduces T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece poem Four Seasons, which I have lived with for more than 20 years and am always rediscovering. Heraclitus says that, since the Logos has become dry, the masses live as if they themselves had reason. However, the masses, without enlightenment or awakening, do not have reason, they are only, as Gurdjieff said, machines.

The Logos, or Word, acquired a multitude of metaphysical meanings and connotations in the spiritual world of the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean, a tradition to which the author of John’s gospel attaches himself and which he appropriates in describing the Messiah, the Son of God, as the Word. Hellenistic commentaries on the Hebrew creation myth identified the Word as the creative power of God in saying “let there be light”.

I don’t know – and I guess no-one does – how much of this later set of meanings can be read back into Heraclitus. But he may have had something like the Stoic concept of the Logos in mind, which is at once the ordering principle of the universe and the divine “spark” which gives humankind its potential for greatness.

The Logos in this sense corresponds to what the Chinese call Qi, the creative, sexual energy that pervades the universe and animates our human bodies, a concept with numerous parallels in many cultures. Between the play of the masculine and feminine principles, Yin and Yang, is the Qi which in fact unifies them.

For John, the Word was made flesh in the body of Jesus, son of Joseph; and for Paul, the coming of the Holy Spirit on the believers made them a part of an immanent new creation, “reborn”. But this metaphysics of division, like all metaphysics, distorts. To be reborn, you must first be born; and birth and rebirth cannot be different, they can only be the same. The Logos is present in all human beings, it is the reason of their birth and the energy which sustains them. But it has become dry. So it is replaced by a variety of heuristic existence strategies which we call reason, but which are inauthentic and not reasonable at all. This is the human condition.

This process of drying out starts very early and proceeds at different paces, but it is usually rapid and definitive. Like a plant denied water for too long, Gurdjieff argues that many people have already died, they are living dead. His message is austere and unpalatable, and it deeply shocks our humanist values. But I fear he is right.

Look around. The world is full of life, in every corner, in myriad ways, and on every level from the cellular to the cosmic. All creatures, all plants, even inanimate things live and rejoice in life. Only in the heart of man is death.

I have long been fascinated, riding the subway to work, by trying to glimpse others’ lives and reality. Even when we know someone very well, their inner reality is shrouded by an epistemological veil which we cannot look under. Of course we do not ask this question of an animal or a plant – somehow their essence is not in question, and we may look past it or ignore it, but, if we try, we can also delve deeply into it and understand it. We can be the plant or the animal, it is not very difficult. But to be someone else is almost impossible.

In the subway, we may wonder how the child becomes the adult and the adult descends into senility and despair. We know this is so, but still it is almost impossible to make a mental map of it. Eye contact is permitted only with children; we do not like others to penetrate our emptiness, nor can we bear to observe the emptiness of others, which mirrors our own. We shroud our faces with newspapers, or, if we can, avoid close proximity with others entirely. Thus we choose, whenever we can, modes of transport and modes of living and being which keep us away from confronting this terrifying social desert at the heart of metropolitan life.

To observe is to be engaged and to be engaged is to change; but observation is impossible without self-observation.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird : human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

T.S. Eliot observes that the pool is dry, so dry that it seems like it has not seen water for years or decades. Nonetheless, simple sunlight is ready to fill it. This brings about a rising of the Qi, of Kundalini, almost imperceptibly as it floats on the surface of the essential nature of life. The image of the lotus is not accidental: Eliot well knows the Sanskrit scriptures in which enlightenment is metaphorically compared to the opening of a thousand-petalled lotus. Enlightenment brings radiance to the complexion of the Buddha.

The pool is quickly filled, but as quickly emptied; the mere passing of a cloud before the sun is sufficient to dispel the moment of enlightenment, no longer to return. This moment of authenticity is as much as the human spirit is able to bear. We must immediately discard it. The bird has led us there, and now he bids us leave. He is the fickle voice of our conscience:

Du holdes Vöglein! Dich hört’ ich noch nie: bist du im Wald hier daheim? Verstünd’ ich sein süsses Stammeln! Gewiss sagt’ es mir was, vielleicht von der lieben Mutter?

For the first time in the forest, Siegfried hears the voice of the bird and sets about mimicking it on his horn. In doing so, he awakens the dragon which he must slay. This ancient, deathly dragon whose sole raison d’être is to guard a treasure of no use to him. And this dragon is, of course, Siegfried himself, he is of his own making. But the raw power of life, strength and youth, must overpower these monsters who keep us in thrall.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchantment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Eliot seeks the dance at the still point of the turning world. The dance which, through freedom from “practical desire”, from “action and suffering” and from “the inner and the outer compulsion”, leads us to enlightenment and allows us to fill the pool and to keep it full. The “enchantment” of past and future which we relate to our linear experience of life prevents us from living in the infinity of the present moment. But we are not to flee life, to reject its linearity, its seasons, its rise and fall, its contingency. Instead, Eliot says, we must embrace life because it is only by so doing that we can reach those sublime moments which bring us to infinity. Those moments we all have and remember, when we were really alive : those fleeting memories engraved on our psyches for ever in those rare moments when the clouds dissipated and the sun shone. And those moments, seemingly in time, are in fact eternal, as present now as then. This we also know – those moments are the rare glimpses of reality in the sea of our slumbering existence.

These, dear readers (if I have any), are just random starting points; I could have chosen any. All human experience is consistent and it all points in one direction. It does not matter where you start or what you do, what matters is only that you live your life consciously, what matters is only that you recognize what you know. Do not flee it. Do not be afraid of it. Listen to the bird and follow.

In light and love,
Sean

Feelings

15 Apr 2007

There are no right and wrong feelings
But there are conditioned, enslaved feelings and authentic, free ones.
All feelings, like all people, are to be accepted, respected, even loved;
But, like all people, not all feelings are to be believed and trusted.
Some feelings open a door into our hearts
Others just reflect confusion and chaos.
Cherish and rest with the first, and let the second come and go as the waves on the sea.
Don’t imagine that they belong to you or define who you are.
They are a backdrop to the theatre of life
But they are not its plot.