Tantra

[Guest guest]

Hello All:

 

I came across this information online today while researching the

connection between yoga and sexuality. I would be interested in

reading feedback on this article, and to hear from others on how this

relates, or doesn't relate, to a Shakta spiritual practice, or to a

Goddess-centered spiritual practice. Is this anti-embodiment, and/or

anti-sexuality? BTW more information on this topic, the writer, and

his organization, can be found at http://www.pranayama.org.

 

Regards,

Mary Ann

 

Tantra, Celibacy, and Sexuality: Is Tantra for Everyone?

 

Though organized religions have always served to classify and divide

human beings, especially by gender, the comprehensive science of

tantra displays its universality by revealing humanity's underlying

nature as whirling patterns of energy in physical bodies. No matter

how that pattern of energy manifests in a lifestyle or sexual

orientation, tantra does not discriminate or limit access to progress

in the mastery of sexual ambitions. An important aim of this work is

to show how tantra can be practiced with equal success by

heterosexual couples or same-sex couples.

 

It may surprise some readers to learn that homosexuality is only

about a century old. History has shown that men have been having sex

with other men for thousands of years, but one can find the

beginnings of male and female homosexual trends in society in the

generation before the turn of the last century. Before then, long-

term conjugal relationships between two people of the same sex were

not an option, at least not openly.

 

In the old world, a woman was often just someone to marry and have

children with. It was hardly necessary to fall in love with her. A

man's male friends, on the other hand, were taken far more seriously.

A man could become emotionally close to another man, though perhaps

not to a woman. The poetry of Rumi speaks to this historical verity.

Perhaps there weren't too many women falling in love with men either.

As the ideal of conjugal love between men and women developed, so too

did the idea of creating lasting male and female homosexual

relationships.

 

One may be hard-pressed to find any master of yoga that was a

homosexual, since the master, by definition, is nonsexual even as the

expansive self is beyond sexual ambitions. However, all human beings

that attain self-mastery do have to contend with sexual desire, and

it is certainly possible that one or many of those masters of yoga

have had to contend more with homosexual desire than heterosexual

desire. Yoga does not differentiate between one kind of sexual desire

and another. Yoga science is concerned only with the motions of

energy and consciousness. Since it matters not to the pranic currents

which gender one's sexual partner is, those who seek infinite

consciousness can take no refuge in the fact that their desires are

heterosexual.

 

Some religions, including Hinduism, Judaism, and Catholicism,

consider same-sex practices to be unholy abominations. To be sure,

religious texts decry such practices. But, strictly speaking, these

texts were not commenting on long-term homosexual relationships; they

were only speaking against sex between two people of the same gender

and usually two men. However, these texts also looked down upon

fornication, or sex between men and women outside of marriage. Only

marital sex between a man and a woman for the purpose of having a

child was generally acceptable. The practical conclusion is that they

looked down upon any sex where the man's seminal fluids were

uselessly wasted and did not produce progeny. Homosexuality would

always fall in this category.

 

While heterosexuals are at liberty to refrain from tantric practice

when children are the desired result of sexual union, all

homosexuality must be tantric. Indeed, any form of sex involving

ejaculation, except when children are the desired result of such a

union, is counterproductive to the goals of tantra even if it is

heterosexual.

 

A common fallacy promulgated by authorities on tantra is that

homosexuality and tantra are incompatible. Homosexual practices, they

argue, are unnatural because offspring cannot be produced from such

couplings; anything unnatural is not tantric. However, heterosexual

practices employing contraception--which, therefore, limit the

couple's ability to bear progeny--would, by that definition, be

equally unnatural. In fact, since tantra itself sidesteps the

ejaculation, tantra must then be viewed as unnatural by this

standard. We can therefore ignore this argument against

homosexuality.

 

Others believe that tantra between same-sex individuals is impossible

because they carry the same energy, the same charge, meaning they are

the same pole magnetically, both positively charged or both

negatively charged. The couple must be opposites, they argue, for

tantra to be effective. While it is true that partners must be

oppositely charged, two men or two women would not even be sexually

attracted to each other unless they were magnetically compatible. The

very presence of attraction implies that there are opposing poles

and, therefore, that tantra is possible.

 

The minor detail of what genitalia are attached to the bodies

involved in tantra hardly matters; it is the magnetism that is of

importance as this very argument against homosexuality insists. So

long as the energy, feeling, and mentality are in opposing poles,

thus creating attraction, tantra is possible. The idea of self alone,

of which the brain and body are but the visible extensions,

determines magnetism. The body-mind unit will respond to those pranic

currents of thoughts and feelings, and an attraction to another body-

mind will emerge. Whether the emerging tendency expresses an

attraction to a man or a woman is of no importance. So again, we can

ignore this argument against same-sex tantra.

 

Still others argue that the reason male homosexuality is unnatural is

that the male anus was never designed to be penetrated by the male

genitalia. However, one could counter that the male genitals were

never designed to penetrate the female anus either. But that does not

stop some heterosexual couples from having anal sex. Further, this

argument would imply that oral sex is natural. For example, according

to the Mahabharata oral sex is also considered to be a degenerate

practice. In our society, however, homosexuals and heterosexuals

alike are comfortable in engaging in it.

 

Those who truly understand the link between energy and consciousness

and the workings of the idea of an individualized self will make no

distinction between homosexual and heterosexual tendencies. Sexuality

unregulated will invariably be found to be spiritually debilitating

regardless of the manner in which it manifests itself. The homosexual

who practices tantra may be closer to Self-realization than the

heterosexual who engages in energy-depleting lusts. In short, tantra

between two people, regardless of the genders involved, is possible

so long as attraction is present.

 

The purpose of tantra is not to make sure practitioners are

heterosexual or remain heterosexual, or give heterosexuals a feeling

of superiority or spiritual safety because they were born

heterosexual. Indeed, the whole purpose of combining both individual

abstinence and coupled practices in one's life is to remove the very

roots of sexual magnetism that generate sexual attraction to any

other body, whether it be male or female. Stated another way, both

forms of tantra use the fire of attraction to remove sexual

ambitions. Therefore, it is unfair and untrue to say that attraction

between the same sex is any less natural than attraction between

opposite sexes. In yogic terms, they are equally natural yet not a

part of the larger self.

 

On the other hand, the intricate understanding of the fluctuations in

consciousness via the pathways of prana cannot be used by homosexuals

as a defense for homosexuality. If it could, such an understanding

could be used to defend heterosexuality as well. As yoga science

offers little defense for any sexuality, one must read the above as a

defense for the practice of tantra between homosexuals, not as a

defense for homosexuality or any sexuality. Yoga offers no defense

for sexuality because sexuality needs no defense.

 

Sexual desire is a natural impulse that is ultimately the fuel of

tantra. The defense of sex for its own sake shows ignorance of tantra

and yoga. Even lovers that are ignorant of tantra do not engage in

sex for its own sake but rather for what sex can do for them. Sex may

be a mode of expression and communication, a tool of control, a

manner in which to alter consciousness, a method to yield a

catharsis, a pleasure resort, a practice for securing a livelihood,

or the way in which we bear children, but it is never performed for

its own sake.

 

Some sexual practices have no tantric value. Masturbation is

spiritually debilitating as is afforded no redeeming value because it

easily becomes unregulated and does not have the advantage of a

partner's magnetic participation. It results in a self-absorbed

personality because it is a narrowing and isolating event instead of

an expansive one.

 

Similarly, abusing one's station in order to secure sex, even tantric

sex, is unacceptable. Teachers of all kinds must never select a

student as a tantra partner, and psychiatrists must never touch a

patient sexually. During the Iron Age so called tantra gurus had sex

with many of their disciples. However, they were not true gurus, and

they were awful examples of higher age tantra. Tantra shuns any abuse

of power, and any sex between partners who are not on equal standing,

especially where unwary female students might be projecting sanctity

onto a guru to compensate for a lack of their own self-worth,

constitutes an abuse of power.

 

Tantra secured through coercion, such as rape, is also inadmissible

and even impossible. Indeed, two willing partners may play the roles

of teacher and student, doctor and patient, rapist and victim,

siblings, etc., in order to satisfy and expunge such urgings, but

that is as far as tantra will go.

 

The contraindications of tantra practice are few. Anyone can practice

the basics of tantra. In fact, if you are able to practice a certain

technique, then you need not worry about any contraindications. That

is, the only contraindication is the lack of sexual stamina that

tantra requires. However, if you fall into this category, all is not

lost. Tantra realizes that it is the energy that normally feeds the

sexual drive that is sublimated and transmuted for use by yogis in

attaining spiritual liberation. Since that energy is crucial for

lasting health and happiness, tantra has devised several means of

regenerating the sexual impulse.

 

Sankara Saranam