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Intercourse Of God And Goddess

 

 

The Divine Feminine

The Nature Of Nectar

Dakinis

The Nature Of Bliss

Spiral Progress on the Left-Hand Path

Wrathful Goddesses

Nangsa Obam

Blissful God And Goddess

 

 

 

 

Although at this point we have little idea what Spontaneous Great

Bliss feels like, several principles have been discovered. (1) Tantra

aims to give a powerful boost to spiritual practice by drawing upon

sexual arousal. (2) Arousal itself is taken as the object of

meditation. (3) Meditation employs the imaginal construct of the

subtle body to "distill" arousal into its emotional and imaginal

components and have them "condense" in the separate chakras. (4)

Retaining the arousal intensifies and transmutes it in two ways

designated by mysterious images: (a) Rising kundalini is said to melt

a drop of nectar which falls through the chakras bringing them joy

and heat. (b) The nectar itself is augmented when it

becomes "imprinted" with the vision of a blissful and precise orgy

taking place in "Indra's Heaven." (5) Spontaneous Great Bliss is

generated when the imprinted nectar is boosted with an internal

orgasm.

 

Gyatso's inner fire meditation very clearly expresses the essential

nature of yogic practice, the "de-conditioning" of the ego. [1] He

takes our attention away from the object that would naturally rivet

us in a mixture of terror and lust and has us focus on the emotion

itself, on the whole field of awareness that is occupied by that

trembling lust. Forget status, possession, and loss. That wanton

goddess is bound to leave you in ruins before she turns tail and

reduces you to a raving mad saint. Your attitudes about her are

illusory, but what she does to you is real. Pay attention to that,

for that is who you are.

 

Yoga -- whether it employs sexual practices or not and whether it is

to be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, or elsewhere -- is always

intent upon stopping the socially construed world. Miranda Shaw calls

Buddhism "a strategy for deconstructing the unenlightened ego," and

Tantric Buddhism "a means for men and women to deconstruct their

conventional selves together" (Shaw, 1994:203). This "deconstruction"

amounts to eliminating the distinction "between subject and object,

between I and not-I" (Evola, 1992: 17).

 

Gyatso, like all the other sources we have considered, finds sexual

arousal gives yoga an indispensable boost. Nothing reveals the mutual

implications of physiology and awareness better than sex. Nothing is

more effective at disorienting our ego and consensus assumptions than

a mixture of terror and desire. This is where we live. Start here.

Vimalananda is characteristically emphatic: "Rather than seek to

extirpate their emotions as Yogic practitioners do, Tantrics magnify

their emotions and transfer them entirely to a deity, a personified

cosmic force" (Svoboda, 1986: 14). Shaw quotes the Tibetan master,

Tsongkhapa (1357-1419): "Bliss is gathered by passion. Therefore,

unite profusely. One attains by virtue of being

passionate; otherwise, spiritual ecstasy will not arise" (Shaw, 1994:

169; Shaw's brackets). These texts make it clear that sexual arousal

is being employed as a tool that provides a huge boost of energy to

the deconstruction project.

 

The translator of Yeshe Tsogyel's adventures in eighth century Tibet,

Keith Dowman, says, "Strip yoga of its arcane terminology and there

is a simple meditation technique; stimulate desire and then use it as

the object of meditation and it becomes Awareness" (Dowman, 1984:

249). Here is how the tool is used. Once consensus reality has been

called into question by a strong arousal that sends us into erotic

trance, the practitioner of sexual yoga directs attention away from

merely bodily arousal to our erotic consciousness, our "desire." It

is natural and naive for us to attend to the individual who has

aroused us or to our bodily tension that seeks immediate release.

These disturbances in our consensus-world functioning distract us

from the proper object of meditation, our aroused consciousness. For

only meditating on what is effected in us through the arousal will

enable us to elevate mere human pleasure to "bliss." In tenth century

Kashmir, the man who described the feces-smeared Trighantika,

Abinavagupta, scorned that exalting brute for thinking there was

anything of truly transcendental power in sexual fluids and feces. He

directed Tantra's gaze inward -- away from material manifestations of

arousal -- to the consciousness itself that has been aroused (D. G.

White, 1996: 136-8). Abhinavagupta says:

 

[As to those] who have not increased their virile efficacy within and

do not leave any room to the pleasure of the God of love, they remain

like rocks when facing a beautiful maid and hearing her melodious

sound, deprived as they are of inebriation and bliss.

 

.. . . Lack of virility is lack of life, lack of the power to wonder

(Silburn, 1988: 161).

 

To counteract the male bias in Gyatso and Abhinavagupta, we might

consider the teachings of a female guru from eighth century Tibet,

Sahaja-yogini-cinta (Spontaneous Yogini Who is Like a Jewel). Her

very name includes the word spontaneous (sahaja), the essential

element in Spontaneous Great Bliss. Spontaneous Jewellike Yogini

teaches that "ecstasy is inseparable from embodiment and embodiment

is inseparable from gender" (Shaw, 1994: 183). "Spontaneous" bliss

depends upon gendered sexuality:

 

In order that one may realize one's inner state,

Which is spontaneous (sahaja), naturally pure, and nondual,

The inner self manifests here as man and woman.

One's own self, creative by nature,

Enacts reality through bodily expressions

(Shaw, 1994: 183).

 

Sahajayoginicinta was the daughter of a noble or merchant family,

possibly a court retainer, courtesan, or dancer, who had a Buddhist

education. At some point, however, she left high society to become

the consort of a low-caste pig farmer (Ibid., 191). She relinquished

the standards of consensus reality for a consort with whom she could

transform arousal into bliss. The text she composed, "Realization of

Reality through Its Bodily Expressions," was evidently taught to a

group of Tantric women who were by no means novices (Ibid., 193).

 

Like the jewel that is her namesake, the illustrious yogini has many

facets. She is a visionary revealer of Tantric teachings received in

a deep meditative state. She is a skilled rhetorician who dazzles her

audience with a sensuous and exuberant vision of Tantric sexuality.

She is a skilled homileticist who motivates her audience to religious

discipline, exhorting them that worldly pleasures are impermanent and

ultimately unsatisfying. She is a subtle philosopher who spins and

unravels the theoretical intricacies of her position. The women in

her audience were rewarded for their attendance at her discourse by a

striking and perhaps unique portrait of how a Buddha responds to

passion, expresses love and desire, and engages in the transcendental

pastime of erotic play (Shaw, 1994: 192-3).

 

Spontaneous Jewellike Yogini describes the standard practice of yogic

intercourse (maithuna) in which the male Buddha stands or sits

unmoving as the female Buddha wraps her limbs about his body, kissing

him "with a variety of kisses," and generating "intense bliss"

through her constant movement. They gently scratch one another to

prevent "drowsiness and ordinary passion." The goal is to

overcome "the subject-object dualism of ordinary experience

until "one ceases to know who is the other and what has happened to

oneself." They are "mindful only of pleasure" (Ibid., 186-7).

This "human pleasure" or "bodily bliss" is taken as the "support"

or "object" of meditation in order to elevate it out of the profane

realm of experience and bring it to the transcendent sphere:

 

Human pleasure, with its identifiable characteristics,

Is the very thing that,

When its characteristics are removed,

Turns into spiritual ecstasy,

Free from conceptual thought,

The very essence of self-arising wisdom

(Shaw, 1994: 188).

 

Spontaneous Jewellike Yogini reveals the essence of Gyatso's

practice. The sensual pleasure of sexuality and the spiritual goal of

sadhana are only apparently opposed. The spiritual object can be

reached through anything, but especially anything that arouses us and

leads us by erotic trance onto the subtle plane. "The senses no

longer desire to wander in the desolate cities created by hunger and

desire when they can be opulently entertained in palaces spun of

bliss and luminosity" (Shaw, 1994: 188).

 

Eight centuries later and thousands of miles to the West, Pico della

Mirandola arrived at a very similar conclusion, which he referred to

as the mors osculi ("death by kiss"). By "death," he meant "corporal

extinction" in a state of erotic trance that he called "intellectual

ecstasy." The partners' kiss enacts the ecstatic union by which they

pass beyond profane existence and attain spiritual realization

(Couliano, 1986: 57). There is another strange parallel between

Tibetan Buddhist spirituality and the Italian Renaissance. Pico

belonged to a tradition that employed imaginal mansions. The

discipline of constructing and maintaining a complex internal

building filled with rooms and passageways was used as an aid to

superior feats of memory. Every item to be remembered was placed in a

specific location within a specific room of the mansion so that the

practitioner had only to walk through the internal palace to

recollect whatever was desired. "Lustful images" in those rooms were

particularly efficacious (Couliano, 1986: 63). They gave an emotional

and physiological boost to memory. One could perhaps clothe the

lustful image with matters to be recalled at a moment's notice.

 

 

 

The Divine Feminine

 

Feminist scholar, Miranda Shaw (1994) gives us a Spontaneous

Jewellike Yogini who appears to agree in all essentials with Gyatso

and to articulate doctrines that are so typically human that similar

practices have been discovered in other cultures and at other times.

Shaw never reveals whether the great yogini employed the tubular

palace meditation. Perhaps she employed a simpler variant. For the

Tantric traditions are unshakable in their conviction that men and

women are opposing forces; and men have different needs than women.

We have already considered Eliade's observation that the naked woman,

when seen in a ritual context, embodies cosmic mystery. Hinduism

calls this Shakti, which is sometimes merely the name given to

Shiva's consort, or the consort of any god, in which case Shakti is

the god's power conceived as an other to which he must learn to

relate. Thus the male god's relationship to his Shakti is analogous

to our relationship with kundalini-shakti.

 

Shakti ("power") is the dynamic or creative principle of existence,

envisioned as being feminine. This concept is intended to explain how

the undifferentiated singular Reality can produce the

multidimensional cosmos with its infinite forms. The transcendental

static principle, personified as Shiva, is in itself incapable of

creation. As a popular doctrinal maxim has it: "Shiva without Shakti

is unable to effect anything." Shiva apart from shakti is likened to

a corpse. The Shiva-Purana (VII.2.2.10) resorts to this poetic

metaphor: "Just as the moon does not shine without moonlight, so

Shiva does not shine without [the principle] of shakti (Feuerstein,

1990).

 

Thus the male is unmoving and impotent without the dynamism of the

female. The male contemplates in stillness the dynamic female who

arouses him. Without her spontaneous activity, he is like a corpse

(shava). Without Shakti, Shiva is shava. On the ritual level this

mythic doctrine is enacted by the male practitioner's remaining

motionless while the woman moves with utter freedom. But the mythic

doctrine is based in physiology; for when the man is active, he more

readily arouses himself past the point of no return, precipitates an

ejaculation, and loses his ability to maintain his arousal. When he

takes the position of the unmoving Shiva and his consort moves freely

like Shakti, arousal is heightened while the danger of an ejaculatory

ending of the ritual intercourse is reduced. O'Flaherty (1973) makes

it clear through an immense collection of mythic texts that Shiva's

unmoving participation in intercourse with Shakti amounts to an

alternate expression of his role as the God of Yoga. Whether sitting

in a cremation ground smeared with ashes and meditating in isolation,

or engaged with his consort in semen-retaining intercourse for a

thousand years, the God of Sex and the God of Yoga are one and the

same.

 

In his history of Chinese sexology, Wile notes that in the late

alchemical texts male sexual energy, unlike that of the woman, is

unstable and can only be usefully aroused when "fused with feminine

essence" (Wile, 1992: 50). "Men must control both their passions and

naturally active ch'i, whereas women also must still their desires,

but stimulate their ch'i to overcome the natural stasis of yin [the

feminine principle] and release the yang [male] principle" (Ibid.,

50). This seems to agree completely with what we have understood

about carezza. The male has to control his unstable arousal so as not

to have it end prematurely in an "external" or "explosive" orgasm.

Although women, too, are subject to external orgasms that sap their

arousal and require a period of recuperation, women "implode" more

easily than men and enjoy a seemingly limitless capacity for multiple

orgasms. Control is necessary for women but more easily attained.

 

When the Chinese (and Indian) sexologists say that the woman has to

stimulate her ch'i -- the "life energy" that is likened to breath,

cosmic energy, and "the body's neurohormonal system" (Fischer-

Schreiber, 1989) -- they imply that arousal itself is the means of

consciousness-changing. Indeed, a series of internal orgasms not only

sustains arousal but increases it. [2] For while the male stills

himself like Shiva to gain control, the woman lets loose like Shakti.

Making the transition from spasm reflex to eros much more easily, the

intensity of the woman's erotic trance fans the fire of the man's

arousal and guides it in the direction of eros. Her Shakti

temperament, based in physiology but centered on the subtle plane,

inspires her partner and draws him along in her wake. Indeed a man's

progress in Tantra is marked by stages in his relationship with women

(Shaw, 1994: 43).

 

The woman's superior emotional aptitude and sensitivity to the subtle

realm is universally insisted upon. But in the Tantric tradition --

apparently the only one that permits them to function as gurus [3] --

women are acknowledged as specially equipped to lead the way. A

popular story in the Yoga Vashishtha describes how Queen Chudala

leads her husband to the highest states of awareness and back

again: "Sometimes as she traveled through the other universes that co-

exist with our own, she would see the women siddhas (perfected

masters) moving through the sky on the way to rendezvous with their

sage husbands" (Johnsen, 1994: 17). Not being bound by their

physiology in the same way as men, women pass back and forth easily

between the empirical world and the subtle plane.

 

Although Tantric literature offers only passing glimpses of women's

(and men's) magic powers, these reveal a religious landscape in which

women roamed freely and stepped lightly across the threshold between

the world of ordinary reality and the realm of magic wherein thoughts

are real, appearances are symbolic, and objects mirror the creative

capacities of the mind (Shaw, 1994: 80-1).

 

Vimalananda says this female superiority is a function of the woman's

closer relationship with her emotions which gives her a facility in

achieving emotional ecstasy (Svoboda, 1986: 238).

 

Very likely it is this female trait that underlies a theme Miranda

Shaw has identified. Men are required to honor and worship their

consorts as goddesses, while women are to accept this worship and

know that they themselves are divine (Shaw, 1994: 179). A number of

tales describe how men gradually learn to shift their awareness so as

to perceive the divinity residing in serving women, goat-herders, and

the like (Ibid., 43-4). Typically the man deconstructs his ego

through entering an erotic trance in which his partner's divinity is

unmistakable. His erotic trance gives him no choice but to worship

her. Few texts describe a woman worshipping the man; and those that

come close -- such as the story of Yeshe Tsogyel and Pema Heruka --

inevitably involve a man of higher attainment who serves as the

woman's guru. Kinsley (1997: 247) says that worship of the woman as

goddess is "persistent" in Tantra, and describes a ritual in which

the man gradually converts his flesh-and-blood partner into a cosmic

goddess.

 

Another physiological reality underlies these mystical doctrines.

With youth, the male's potency is at its height and he is able to

ejaculate several times a day -- perhaps three or four times in

succession with a recuperative interval of only ten to twenty

minutes. His youthful ability to retain his semen, however, is

generally quite limited. He may in fact be liable to premature

ejaculation. Meanwhile the young woman generally requires a fairly

lengthy period of arousal before being capable of orgasm. This

situation gradually changes, so that by middle age women are more

easily aroused and more capable of multiple orgasms. At the same

time, the man's arousal has slowed down, and he is less able to

ejaculate several times during a single episode of intercourse. [4]

Thus the practices of sexual yoga are more naturally employable by

middle-aged partners than by youthful ones. [5] Such changes in

physiological function correspond very well to the psychological

differences between what Jung calls the first and second "halves" of

life. He argues that in the first half of life, we are all required

to develop a strong and flexible ego that is capable of dealing

effectively with the empirical world. However, around the age of

forty the central concern of life shifts and it becomes necessary to

explore the spiritual dimensions of human existence. The merely

personal ego has to be transcended through developing a conscious

relationship to the self. [6]

 

This amounts to a Western formulation of the standard Hindu

expectation that after we have acquitted ourselves of the duties

of "householders," we should relinquish the concerns of the empirical

world in order to pursue spiritual advancement as sannyasins:

 

[The sannyasin is] one who has renounced the world and lives totally

without possessions solely for the realization of liberation

(moksha). The sannyasin's lack of possessions consists not only in

total material poverty but also in what Christian mysticism calls

the "poverty of spirit," that is, freedom from such dualistic notions

as good and evil, desire and repulsion, fear and greed (Fischer-

Schreiber, 1986).

 

Vimalananda says sannyas literally means "coma," and that sannyasins

are "comatose to the world" (Svoboda, 1997: 29). A pair of sexual

yogic partners are sannyasins insofar as they have renounced the

profane world as the center of their interest. But unlike the picture

of sannyasins we encounter in an introductory text on Hinduism, such

partners do not renounce sexuality altogether. What they renounce is

the propagation of children that would entangle them again in the

work of householders. They take up sexuality as the engine of

consciousness changing, learn carezza, and practice "amatory"

intercourse as a means of entering an erotic trance that leads them

to the subtle plane. Then, taking their aroused consciousness of the

subtle plane as the object of their meditation, they work to

transform bodily pleasure into bliss.

 

 

 

The Nature Of Nectar

 

Such is the foundation of all sexual yoga, including that of Gyatso.

But when Gyatso describes the attainment of Spontaneous Great Bliss,

he tells us that there are three stages in the work. The first is

what we have just considered: redirecting our focus from bodily

tension and excitement to aroused consciousness. With this move,

awareness occupies the center of our attention. The second stage

involves transforming this initial blissful awareness with "nectar";

and the third stage "imprints" the nectar with a vision of blissfully

coupled divinities. Gyatso employs vague and obscure images to

describe the second and third stages. It will now be our task to

examine these one by one, beginning with nectar.

 

The only dependable information Gyatso gives us concerning nectar is

(a) that it resides naturally in the crown chakra (sahasrara), and

(b) that it contributes a new experience of "joy" to the throat and

heart chakras and additional "heat" to the navel center. The crown

chakra, therefore, adds something perhaps ineffable that intensifies

and transmutes our experience of the other chakras. Since each chakra

represents a specific "level" of attainment in erotic trance, our

most reliable approach to understanding the nature of nectar will

begin with a differentiation of the several trance states.

 

If we consider the levels of trance in terms of how we see our

consort, we can distinguish first between profane consciousness and

erotic trance. In profane consciousness, when kundalini sleeps in the

muladhara, we may find our consort attractive, interesting, and fun

to be with. She or he is an exceptional individual but very much a

human personality and denizen of consensus reality. The large

transformation that occurs when kundalini awakens transforms our

consort into an earthly Venus or Adonis. Now we are in erotic trance

and dwelling on the subtle plane. But erotic trance is not a single

thing, for it manifests differently at each of the chakras. The

consort who arouses our navel chakra inspires terror in the face of

an ego-destroying adventure that we may not be up to. At the solar

plexus, we are no longer paralyzed in fear but have broken through to

an important vision of "essential" significance. What we know of our

own essential being is something to build upon; and our familiarity

with our partner's essential being gives our relationship stability.

At the level of the heart a much more sublime experience occurs, and

we experience ourselves and our partner as airy beings, bodies of

mist capable of thoroughly interpenetrating one another and becoming

one. At the throat center we perceive various dimensions of this

oneness and become able to conceptualize it for ourselves. This

capacity to think and articulate is now directed to "ethereal"

realities -- more basic, true, sublime, and lasting than those of the

empirical world.

 

Placing the brow chakra on an extension of the central channel,

Gyatso's tubular palace meditation takes us directly from the throat

to the crown. We can only think that the leap in level of erotic

trance between the throat and crown must be analogous to that between

the navel and heart -- a vast transformation. The alchemical notion

of nectar (amrita) in the crown chakra that is caused to drip

downward and affect one's whole being through the arousal of

kundalini is by no means unique to Tibet:

 

In the literature of hatha-yoga, the word amrita . . . refers to the

nectar of immortality that trickles down from an esoteric center in

the head and is wasted by ordinary mortals because they do not know

its secrets. The intrinsic connection between this nectar and

immortality is succinctly captured in the Kaula-Jnana-Nirnaya

(XIV.94), which poses this question: "How can there be immortality

(amaratva) without [the flowing of] the nectar [amrita]?"

 

.. . . The Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika (IV.53) states that the whole body

should be flooded with this ambrosia, which produces a superior body

endowed with enormous strength and vigor and which is free from

disease. This practice also prevents aging and bestows immortality as

well as the eight magical powers (Feuerstein, 1990).

 

In the epilogue to his book on medieval alchemy, D. G. White (1996)

describes his search for a living, practicing alchemist in India. He

had two possible near misses. One turned out to be a man who had died

twenty years before at the age of seventy-five -- by no means

immortal but remembered as having appeared no older than twenty-five

at his demise. The reality of nectar is taken seriously -- even

literally -- by many. White says that India is filled with stories

and rumors of "semen-headed yogis" (D. G. White, 1996: 483). For

semen is the usual source of nectar -- semen that has been raised by

kundalini to the cranial vault for transformation:

 

In her rise through the yogic cakras, the kundalini serpent is said

to dance with the yogin. And, at the end of her rise, it is the

yogin's own sexual fluid which, carried upward through her body, is

transformed into immortalizing nectar. As a conduit for the yogin's

semen, the female kundalini may be likened to the female sexual

organ; . . . (D. G. White, 1996: 309).

 

Gorakh (or Goraksha), whom we saw earlier as the disciple and savior

of his guru Matsyendra who had fallen into deathly sleep in the

Forest of Women's Thighs, was "one of the greatest masters of hatha-

yoga" (Feuerstein, 1990). Gorakh lived in the ninth or tenth century

and has left us several Tantric scriptures. His remarks about nectar

reflect the common mythological doctrine that nectar is produced by

the mating of the Sun of Shiva (semen rising from the blazing fire at

the navel) with Shakti, who resides in the Moon of the cranial vault.

The upturned mouth of the interior Sun in the navel chakra, "whose

essence is fire," hungers for the nectar dripping from the moon (D.

G. White, 1996: 482). In the Goraksa Sataka, Gorakh speaks "of a pool

(dhara) of lunar water in the cranial vault, which the yogin is to

drink, lest it fall into the sun in the lower abdomen" (D. G. White,

1996: 481). In another passage, jauntily translated by White, Gorakh

says:

 

Now that you've pierced [bedhya] the lotuses six,

Go and drink that nectar mix . . .

Semen is yoga, semen is what pleases;

Semen averts the sixty-four diseases.

The rare dude who pierces semen's mystery,

He's the creator, he's the divinity

(D. G. White, 1996: 320-1).

 

Here it is clear that the six chakras (lotuses) constitute a set and

that the crown chakra stands above them, not only in empirical space

through its placement at the top of the head, but also in

significance. The cranial vault is the place where semen, retained in

carezza and made to flow upward by the rising kundalini, is itself

transformed. On its way up to the crown, it effects real changes in

the lower six chakras; but these are nothing in comparison to what

nectar can accomplish. Nectar brings "immortality" -- makes us

the "divine creator" -- and introduces a host of secondary but

related changes such as strength, vigor, and immunity from disease.

No doubt many take this claim of immortality in a literal and

empirical sense. Certainly that old exaggerator, Vimalananda, seems

to do so when he says that his Bhairavi was able to appear as a

fifteen-year-old girl even though she was actually so old she had to

lift her eyelids with her fingers. She "had made herself immortal" by

ingesting mercury. D. G. White makes it clear that the "mercury"

which brings immortality is semen transformed through the "sulfur" of

menstrual blood: an alchemical procedure that may take place either

in the laboratory or in the body of the yogin-alchemist. The two

processes are parallel in all respects and symbolize one another.

 

Because there appear to be no historical figures who attained literal

immortality -- or lived even four hundred years -- we have to take

such stories symbolically. Real immortality means release from

samsara, the eternal round of birth, death, and rebirth. It means

leaving the empirical and profane world forever. It describes a state

of erotic trance. When kundalini has risen to the cranial vault and

either melted the drop of nectar or else brought the semen of Shiva

into union with Shakti's "pool" of sexual fluids, erotic trance

undergoes its most profound augmentation. Whether or not the yogin

actually feels or imagines a liquid dripping into his throat, the

activation of the crown chakra so transforms the nature of erotic

trance that Indians, Tibetans, and others have for centuries resorted

to the imagery of nectar and ambrosia to account for it.

 

 

 

Dakinis

 

But what can we point to in the experience of even a single yogin who

has drunk nectar to make this process intelligible for ourselves?

What happens when an individual forsakes the empirical world and

becomes immortal? We get some hint of the beginning of this journey

in the many stories about kings who have been converted to the

Tantric path by a pair of lewdly dancing dombis, who awaken him to

sexual practices that lead to immortality (D. G. White, 1996: 308-9).

Dombis are the most skillful and desired of Tantric consorts,

initiatrixes who appear to be as "enchanted" as Vimalananda's

Bhairavi. They are superhuman beings capable of shape-shifting, and

they are terrifyingly indecent, alluring, and challenging. In Tibet,

dombis are called dakinis; and "the Dakini principle" describes the

ever-changing flow of kundalini (Allione, 1986: 32). The dakini

(masculine: daka) changes our lives by transforming all of our

experiences, by appearing "at crucial moments to destroy the fixed

ideas of the practitioner" (Allione, 1986: 37). Trungpa Rinpoche

describes the dakini as a dangerous challenger:

 

The playful maiden is all-present. She loves you. She hates you.

Without her your life would be continual boredom. But she continually

plays tricks on you. When you want to get rid of her she clings. To

get rid of her is to get rid of your own body -- she is that close.

In Tantric literature she is referred to as the dakini principle. The

dakini is playful. She gambles with your life (Allione, 1986: 38).

 

Dakinis are, in fact, so fearsome and indecent that the uninitiated

in Nepal use the cognate word dankini "as an expletive or slur on a

vile woman, a witch, enchantress, or manipulator of the spirit world

and a seductress who abuses her sexual powers" (Dowman, 1984: 258).

 

The positive value of a dakini is that she can awaken in us "the

universal urge to enlightenment" whereby we penetrate "to the true

meaning of doctrines too profound to yield their secrets at the

everyday level of consciousness" (Blofield, 1987: 114). But the

dangers are considerable, as Vimalananda insists regarding the Hindu

category of seductive beings called yakshinis (masculine: yakshas):

 

There is a type of spirit [Yaksha] who comes to a woman and makes her

fall into a stupor, what we call the state of Tandra in Sanskrit, and

then enjoys sex with her. If you were to watch it, and I have watched

it, you will see her lying on the bed, twisting and turning, oozing,

enjoying orgasms, and what-have-you. In fact, she will find it much

more satisfying than physical sex, because he has no body to tire

out, and he makes her enjoy much more than any man could. . . .

 

.. . . And believe me, a Yakshini can make you enjoy sex. If you do

this five or six times the Yakshini will come to you on her own and

force you to copulate with her and extract all your energy. And you

can't get free of her; It's next to impossible. When you die, you

become one of the fraternity of spirits, of an order lower than even

the Yakshini, and you will have to work your way up from there,

roaming about. You don't even have to copulate with her; just kiss

her -- once only -- and you are finished, done for (Svoboda, 1986:

195-6).

 

Beings of this sort would seem uniquely qualified to build a fire in

the navel chakra. We need the challenge a wrathful heroine with the

wiles of a dakini if the fire at our navel is going to boost us all

the way to the cranial vault and make nectar. Thus when Yeshe Tsogyel

masturbates to awaken kundalini, she enters an erotic trance in which

her guru Pema Heruka appears to her as a daka (male form of dakini).

A wrathful daka would surely be able to turn any heroic meditator

into an intensely writhing snake. A mad saint would simply writhe

helplessly. The heroic saint, however, becomes conscious of the

serpent as "other." Yeshe follows Jung's advice: "It is wise not to

identify with these experiences, but to handle them as if they were

outside the human realm. That is the safest thing to do -- and really

absolutely necessary. Otherwise you get an inflation" (Jung, 1996:

27). As the serpent power rises to possess her, another dragon surges

forth from within, the life energy of her soul. It gives her the

strength and spontaneity to engage with that daka-conjured serpent.

Not merely to stand up to kundalini but to dance with her. As Yeshe

writhes, the kundalini of her soul is racing like lightening up the

staircase of her tubular palace.

 

Next the Sun of Splendor lights up the sky. The drop of nectar has

melted. The semen of Shiva has penetrated Shakti's lunar pool. The

wrathful daka, whose abusive and rapacious vajra sits within her

writhing lotus throne unmoving as a god in a sand painting, and whose

scornful laugh just moments before ruptured them through onto the

sublime plane of the heart chakra, now unites with Lady Kundalini in

the cranial vault. Bliss supervenes.

 

 

 

The Nature Of Bliss

 

Unfortunately bliss is a very abstract word. It connotes an

experience of very pleasant but ineffable sublimity; and although in

this context it is a bodily experience, it is not merely a physical

sensation but carries with it a large component of something vaguely

transcendental. We who live most of our lives in the empirical world

cannot be sure we have ever experienced the sort of bliss the mystics

speak of. If we have been fortunate enough to have felt the fans of

the heart chakra spin and have been led to refer to this experience

as "bliss," the substantial augmentation deriving from the crown

chakra suggests a body-mind state that exceeds the bounds of our

experience. In fact, the only indication we have regarding the

content of nectar's bliss is the imaginal appearance of the mystic's

consort, before and after nectar's contribution.

 

Once nectar has dripped slowly down to the region of the throat and

heart, the consorts find they are sharing a sublime oneness no longer

with a wrathful daka or wrathful dakini but with a blissful consort

of superhuman power, wholly unanticipated spontaneity, and timeless

significance. Dowman defines the dakini according to the following

lines of the Great Paramita Sutra:

 

Indescribable, unimaginable Perfection of Wisdom,

Unborn, unobstructed essence of sky,

She is sustained by self-awareness alone:

I bow down before the Great Mother of the victorious ones,

past, present, and future

(Dowman, 1984: ix).

 

Dowman comments, "Desireless, blissful wisdom is the essence of all

desirable qualities, and unobstructed going and coming in endless

space." This is a very "Buddhist" formulation, reminiscent of the

Buddha's own title, Tathagata, which may be translated, "Thus come,

thus gone." Such phrases reflect an unimaginable subtlety and a

spontaneity that implies transcendental intentions. If we have been

able to stretch our language to suggest something intelligible about

the experience of the heart chakra, nectar from the crown challenges

our capacity to find words. We have to begin to speak in comparative

analogies: if the sublimity of the heart chakra seems to transcend

everything we associate with corporality, then the nectar of the

crown transcends sublimity.

 

The dakinis leap and fly, unfettered by clothing, encircled by

billowing hair, their bodies curved in sinuous poses . . .

enlightened women who can spark a divine experience of reality with a

precisely aimed word or gesture . . . their exuberant air of passion

and freedom communicate a sense of mastery and spiritual power

(Shaw, 1989: 3).

 

The best type of dakini is one whose awareness is so transcendently

lofty that her mind is free from worldly thoughts and flows in a

natural and spontaneous stream, a level of attainment known as sahaja

realization, or "enlightened spontaneity" (Shaw, 1989: 170).

 

The blissful dakini (and daka), therefore, represent the "ever-

changing flow of energy with which the yogic practitioner must work

in order to become realized" (Allione, 1986: 25). The absolute

spontaneity which these beings make possible is often compared to the

open and unobstructed space of the sky -- hence the frequent

description of the blissful dakini as "sky dancer."

 

All dakinis, whether blissful or wrathful, are to be found on a

distinctive level of the subtle realm, what we might call the dakini

plane. The difference between them -- that is whether we see them as

full of bliss or wrath -- depends upon the admixture of nectar to our

erotic trance. Their appearance as blissful or wrathful depends upon

us, upon the level in our subtle body to which kundalini has risen.

If we have been privileged to encounter a daka or dakini, kundalini

is awake. If the spirit beings appear wrathful, kundalini has not yet

risen to the cranial vault. If blissful, we have experienced the

ineffable augmentation of nectar's bliss.

 

Objectively speaking, we can say that in themselves there is no

difference between a wrathful dakini and a blissful one. It is the

same dakini, whose appearance reflects the state of our

consciousness. She is wrathful when her spontaneity strikes fear in

us. Everything that she is and stands for challenges the stolid

illusions of the empirical world and the persona field. When we see

her as wrathful, we are feeling a challenge to the comfortable

realities of our habitual existence in conventional reality. She puts

our ego's point of view in crisis. When she becomes blissful, we have

dropped our dependence on ahamkara, our memory of what

constitutes "me and mine." We have entered the dakini plane without

presuppositions -- without the safety net of what we have dependably

come to know. We have embarked upon a subtle-plane sojourn without

reserve, without fear, in total acceptance and spontaneity.

 

 

 

Spiral Progress on the Left-Hand Path

 

When we consider the more conventional saints, the ones who say

nothing of any indecent sexual component in their spiritual

practices, we are led to think that they proceed on an ever-upward

path: perhaps from profane consciousness directly to the plane of

blissful dakinis and dakas and then onward and upward to the blissful

gods and goddesses. Tantra's left-hand path aspires to the same

ascent, but it does so by first dipping downward into the realm of

the disturbing shadow, where a rush of sexual arousal and terror

gives the practitioner a powerful boost of energy. By way of analogy,

we may consider how earth-born space vehicles are given a boost from

the gravitational field of a planet or the sun. The gravity --

or "eros," as Isaac Newton called it in his notebooks (Berman, 1981) -

- of the heavenly body threatens the vehicle with final destruction

if it should succumb entirely and crash upon the surface or burn up

in the furnace of the star. But by skillfully employing that erotic

gravity and maintaining a precise balance of nearness and distance,

the space vehicle increases its acceleration by swinging around the

danger in a half-arc that propels it onward with the force of a

celestial sling-shot.

 

Such is the technique of the Tantrikas. They make no attempt to deny

or circumvent the disturbing and potentially destructive effects of

the wrathful dakini or daka. Instead, they enter directly into the

disorienting realm of the shadowy spirit beings so as to build a

roaring conflagration in their navel center. It is a dangerous

practice, for they risk being shattered or burnt to a cinder in the

heat. But when used skillfully, when employed as the most natural and

straight-forward source of psychological and physiological boost,

they use the wrathful dakini's disturbing power to propel themselves

into the region of nectar's bliss. Like gravity-employing space

vehicles, they calculate the danger in full consciousness. Instead of

succumbing to the wrathful dakini's power helplessly and

unconsciously, and thereby losing their awareness in a shattering

crash, they redirect their attention to the dragon of their soul's

life energy. Riding the serpentine head of kundalini as she streaks

up the central channel of their interior palace, they attain the

cranial vault where nectar transmutes their arousal to bliss. At this

point the dakini is no longer a wanton and dangerous challenger. Her

unfettered spontaneity ceases to be a threat and becomes an

invitation to the dance. Nectar gives us the freedom of the open sky.

We have dropped all presuppositions. We have ourselves attained the

spontaneity of the daka or dakini.

 

The left-hand path generally describes itself as "the most

natural,the fastest" and "the most immediate" course to

enlightenment. It argues that the dragon of desire is not to be

overcome, extirpated, or rendered harmless. Rather it is to be

engaged and redeemed. In effect the left-hand path urges us to begin

where we are. If we find something exciting or disturbing, we are not

to ignore it or attempt to vanquish it with ascetic practices such as

fasting and self-flagellation. Rather we are to see what that

disturbance does to us and direct our attention specifically to the

consciousness it induces. For that aroused consciousness is the first

appearance of kundalini. It is the source of a boost which we can

ride into higher levels of erotic trance.

 

The tubular palace meditation of Gyatso lays out for us a path in

several stages by which we: (1) leave profane consciousness by means

of an emotional and physiological disturbance which takes the form of

a wrathful daka or dakini; (2) engage with the wrathful one by

directing our attention to the flame induced in our navel chakra; (3)

ride kundalini in her first upward climb to release nectar and

transform the wrath into bliss; (4) descend the central channel with

the nectar to gain a new boost of wrathful energy and leap from the

dakini plane to the divine plane at the navel chakra, where a

wrathful god or goddess is encountered; (5) ride kundalini up to the

observation deck of the ajna chakra to obtain a vision of blissful

gods and goddesses in sexual embrace on the strength of the nectar-

augmented flame in the navel; (6) achieve Spontaneous Great Bliss on

a final trip through the tubular palace when the impressed nectar is

boosted by an internal orgasm.

 

Omitting the last of these, I have diagrammed this "Spiral Progress

on the Left-Hand Path" in Figure 10-1. In the center of the chart are

Yeshe and Pema, two human individuals, each with a personality, a

history, and a persona-field identity in the profane world (#1). As

their consciousness is aroused to the dakini plane by the fire at

their navel, Yeshe loses her human personality and becomes a wrathful

dakini engaged with Pema's wrathful daka (#2). Remaining on the

dakini plane, represented in light gray, they employ a boost of navel

fire to attain nectar and become blissful daka and blissful dakini

(#3). When they ride the descending nectar to the navel's fire, the

dakini plane is ruptured; and they break through to the divine plane,

where they become wrathful god and goddess for one another (#4).

Finally, a boost of nectar-enhanced fire takes them back up through

the tubular palace to the brow chakra, where they obtain the vision

of nectar impressed with divinity and become blissful god and goddess

(#5).

 

 

 

The wrathful gods and goddesses resemble the wrathful dakas and

dakinis but are immeasurably more powerful. We have revisited

Vimalananda's advice to Svoboda many times: the strategy is to

attract an "enchanted woman," presumably a dakini, and then resist

her advances so as to attract a wanton goddess. Now that we have

Gyatso's structure to sort out the five stages running from ego-

consciousness to the encounter with blissful deities, we can better

appreciate what the old exaggerator had in mind.

 

 

 

Wrathful Goddesses

 

The main wrathful god in Hinduism is Shiva, whom we have described in

some detail. McLean says the Shiva of folklore is an old reprobate

who "spends all his time high on bhang and datura," chasing

prostitutes and young girls (McLean, 1998: 62). He delights in

overturning all the distinctions between the moral and immoral, the

pure and polluted. He loves cremations grounds (a place of transit

between the worlds), smears himself with ashes, and is generally to

be found naked, with matted hair, wild eyes, and an erect penis.

 

Wrathful goddesses, however, are much more numerous. Most are

consorts of Shiva. In Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine (1995),

David Kinsley has done the spade work in assembling pictures of

the "Ten Mahavidyas," each a symbol of defiant female independence in

a society that severely restricts women's freedom (Kinsley, 1995:

70). Although there are always exactly ten goddess of "Great

Knowledge" (Maha-Vidya), their names are not always the same in every

list. We shall briefly mention four of them.

 

The best known of these wrathful goddesses and never omitted from any

list is the Black One, Kali. Kinsley says that she is primarily a

woman who "deconstructs" the categories of cultural

consciousness, "inviting all those who would learn from her to be

open to the whole world in all its aspects" (Ibid., 83).

 

Although [Kali] may be said to serve order in her role as slayer of

demons, more often than not she becomes so frenzied on the

battlefield, intoxicated with the blood of her victims, that she

herself begins to destroy the world she is supposed to protect. Thus,

even in the service of the gods she is dangerous and likely to get

out of control (Ibid., 74).

 

Kali's nakedness displays her sexual readiness, her unbound hair

implies a state of pollution, very likely menstruation (Ibid., 84);

her necklace of skulls and skirt of arms characterizes

bloodthirstiness and her dismemberment of our ego. Her black

color "represents transcendence over any manifested thing" (Ibid.,

30). Often her blackness is covered in sparkles, representing "the

gods [that] arise from her like bubbles from the sea, endlessly

appearing and passing away, leaving their source unchanged" (Ibid.,

76). Thus her shameless and indecent appearance is merely a wrathful

illusion behind which lurks the eternal and unchanging (blissful)

reality. Although this profound mystical significance is widely

known, Kinsley reports that a great many Hindus are

uncomfortable "with her outrageous, shocking features" (Ibid., 91).

 

Chinnamasta, another naked and shameless goddess, is generally

pictured with a knife in one hand and her own severed head in the

other. Three streams of blood fountain up out of her neck and fall

into the mouths of two naked woman disciples and into the mouth of

the head Chinnamasta holds in her hand. According to one tradition,

she becomes so intoxicated drinking the blood of her victims that she

loses control and cuts off her own head (Ibid., 149). In another she

blows her head off by absorbing the sexual energy of copulating human

couples whom she stands upon or straddles. Kundalini rises up within

her so forcefully that it cuts the knots in all the chakras --

something she can do for us -- and tears off her head, rendering her

egoless (Ibid., 159).

 

Dhumavati is a widow sitting in an unhitched chariot, therefore, "a

woman going nowhere, the ultimate symbol of all that is unlucky,

unattractive, and inauspicious" (Ibid., 182). But sometimes she is

presented as attractive, in which case she embodies the most

threatening of women in Hindu society, for widows are believed to be

driven by unsatisfied sexual longings they have no reason to resist

(Ibid., 190). The goddess Bhairavi, after whom sexual initiatrixes

are named, loves anger, jealousy, and every form of selfish emotion

and activity. Righteous behavior by humans weakens her power (Ibid.,

170). Two of her titles refer to her favorite indecencies: She Who is

Fond of Semen and Menstrual Blood, She Who is Worshipped by Those Who

Worship with Semen (Ibid., 172).

 

 

 

Nangsa Obam

 

Tsultrim Allione, an American woman who is an initiate in Tibetan

Buddhism, illustrates the achievement of wrathful divinization with

her detailed account of a Tibetan folk drama that depicts legendary

events from the eleventh century, a time of Buddhist revival in Tibet

(Allione, 1986: 66-128). The story of Nangsa Obam displays many

typical features of Tantric stories from India and Tibet in that it

concerns itself with a woman whose predilection for mystical

attainment, evident from birth, was temporarily thwarted by an early

marriage. In Nangsa's case, her parents were themselves devout

Buddhists who "did extensive practice without interruption, and

without thought of personal gain" (Ibid., 66). They resisted all

Nangsa's suitors until the King of Rinang insisted upon marrying her

to his son, Dragpa Samdrub, and threatened Nangsa's parents with

death if they did not accede to his request. Thus she was married

against her will but eventually found a way to escape from court to

become the mystical consort of the Great Lama Sakya Gyaltsen, who

recognized immediately that Nangsa was a great dakini.

 

Soldiers were sent to Gyaltsen's monastery to seize Nangsa and bring

her back. They found the pair in ritual sexual embrace. Their

accusation that the great lama had "sullied" the king's wife was cut

short when they themselves suddenly entered erotic trance and saw the

two mystic partners flying off from the earth in the form of yab-yum,

sexually coupled divinities. The highly attained mystic consorts had

become the dark-blue wrathful god, Cakra Sambhava and his consort

Vajra Yogini. The soldiers' minds were opened, and the report they

brought back to their king inspired him to give up his worldly life

and practice dharma.

 

This is clearly a story of lust and the spiritual attainment that may

be based upon the fire sexual arousal generates in the navel chakra.

The worldly figures of the king and his son have experienced a

peculiarly compelling sort of lust whereby the object of their

attentions, the saintly Nangsa, stands out above all women. Thus far,

their judgment agrees with that of Lama Gyaltsen. But being tethered

to the world of social and political gain as well as bodily pleasure

of an "attached" and purely instinctual sort, they are incapable of

properly valuing the beautiful and graceful adolescent woman who has

so powerfully won their admiration.

 

The soldiers, therefore, are brought in by the story-teller as rude

and wholly believable witnesses. Nothing in their prior experience

prepares them for a physiological and emotional atmosphere of such

spiritual power that their brow chakras are opened and they see the

adulterous liaison of their once esteemed princess and a raunchy guru

on the plane of wrathful deities. According to this wide-spread

literary device, what appears merely immoral and polluted to the eyes

of the profane ego is in reality a sublime and holy event. The

spiritual reality of ritual intercourse is so compelling that even

the lowest of the uninitiated cannot resist its influence, and they

themselves undergo a rupture of plane as their consciousness is

elevated in a moment from the profane level to the divine stratum of

erotic trance. The break-through they experience is far more abrupt

than that of Promode Chatterjee, when he was privileged to witness an

Aghori chakra ceremony in a smashan during a thunder storm. For

Chatterjee had evidently been a sympathetic by-stander from the

start, and his testimony that what he had witnessed was not lustful

but sublime indicates that his heart chakra had been open during most

of the night. Thus in that stoke of lightning, when he saw the

Aghoris in the form of a sexual mandala on the divine plane,

kundalini had only to rise from the fourth chakra (heart) to the

sixth (brow). The soldiers of Rinang, however, shifted abruptly from

a condition in which kundalini was asleep all the way to the

observation deck of the brow chakra.

 

Sufism tells similar stories about the awakening of observers who are

prepared to condemn indecent sexual practices until their own

consciousness is suddenly elevated. One of the most famous of these

incidents concerns Ahmad Ghazzali, the brother of the great

philosopher who justified Sufi practices through rational argument

based on the Qu'ran, Abu Hamad Ghazzali (1058-1111). Ahmad Ghazzali

was therefore a contemporary -- albeit geographically and culturally

far removed -- of the events in the folk drama of Nangsa Obam.

According to the story, Ahmad Ghazzali was a practitioner of what

Sufism calls "the witness game," in which a naked "beardless youth"

is employed as the object of meditation in order to elevate the

meditator through an emotional and physiological boost to the divine

plane of consciousness. [7]

 

[His friends] found [Ahmad Ghazzali] seated in his cell-retreat,

staring at a young boy, with a single rose on the floor between

them. "Have we disturbed you?" they asked. Ghazzali replied "Ay

w'Allah" ("By God!") -- and all the company thereupon fell into

a "state" [8]; that is they attained some measure of non-ordinary

consciousness or ecstasy (Wilson, 1995: 95).

 

When profane witnesses [9] see through the appearance of an

adulterous affair between lama and princess to its hidden divine

reality, the story seems to provide "objective verification" that the

liaison between Nangsa and Gyaltsen transcends the good/evil

distinctions of the persona field. If this seems to constitute an

exaggeration worthy of Vimalananda, the reader is asked to withhold

judgment until we address the issue of mystical influence from one

individual to another in Chapter Thirteen. At this point in our

argument, it is enough to agree that the soldiers' witness serves as

a testimony from the Buddhist community of faith that it is not only

possible but expected that accomplished practitioners can attain a

subjective identity with their deities when erotic trance carries

them to the divine plane.

 

In fact Vimalananda himself agrees with Ibn al-`Arabi that if you

think you see "the Reality Itself" you have no gnosis; the mystic

with real gnosis knows that it is his own essential self that is

seen: "What you will see is not the real deity; it is your own

creation, from your own astral body" (Svoboda, 1994: 124). This means

that Nangsa and Gyaltsen, when they experience themselves as a

wrathful yab-yum, encounter the divine dimension of their own subtle

body, as it manifests through the medium of their navel chakra. At

the same time, their svadhisthana arousal induces a similar stirring

in the navels of the soldiers. What the soldiers see may not

correspond in all respects with what the consorts themselves

experience. The two experiences are alike only in the fact that it is

a wrathful yab-yum that is enacted by Nangsa and Gyaltsen. Their

limited personalities have been "effaced" in favor of the wrathful

divine dimension of their own being (Svoboda, 1986: 16).

 

He forgets who he is, and she forgets who she is. He says, "I am Lord

Shiva in the form of Bhairava (the Fearful Lord), and this is my

Shakti, my Bhairavi." She thinks, "This is my Lord Shiva, and I am

His Grand Consort, His Bhairavi (the Fearful Goddess)" (Svoboda,

1986: 271-2).

 

The central issue in the Tibetan folk drama hinges on the meaning of

lust. The profane consensus, which thinks it knows what lust is, is

confounded by a vision of lustful deities. The king and prince

believe they have "normalized" their lust by bringing it into

conformity with society's horizontal value system, "till death do us

part." Nangsa and Gyaltsen also manifest lust in the sense that their

mutual erotic trance demands carnal expression, and pursuing that

mystical impulse appears indecent and scandalous to profane eyes.

Although we have subtle-plane testimony that their "sexual acting

out" achieves divinization, it is still lustful insofar as the

activation of their respective navel chakras predominates. The

lustfulness of their encounter persists in the image of intercourse

between wrathful god and wrathful goddess.

 

As a wrathful yab-yum they ascend into the sky and disappear from the

soldiers' view. Wrathful god and goddess ascend to the blissful

sector of the divine plane, and the soldiers' gaze is incapable of

following. For the soldiers, we have to assume, are familiar with the

terrifying and seductive nature of sex but not yet of its blissful

potential. Thus the wrathful yab-yum disappears before their eyes as

Nangsa and Gyaltsen are transformed in their own experience into

blissful god and goddess.

 

 

 

Blissful God And Goddess

 

Gyatso's inner fire meditation does not address the stage in which

the partners become wrathful deities. He speaks only of the

intensification of the navel fire when the slowly falling nectar

reaches it. In his account, we do not encounter divinization until

the penultimate moment of the meditation, when the nectar-enhanced

fiery winds carry us to the observation deck of the ajna chakra.

There three events take place in succession: (1) we witness a mandala

of yab-yums; (2) one by one these yab-yums melt into a drop of

blissful light; and (3) the many drops condense to a single one which

we absorb through our third eye. In the stage of witnessing, those

deities are not yet me and my partner. The potential divinity of our

own being is still projected. At the second stage, the image becomes

extremely abstract -- mere drops of blissful light. But the fact that

we can know those drops as bliss implies that the vision has done

something to us. Like the soldiers witnessing the wrathful yab-yum of

princess and lama, our witnessing the bliss of the deities in the

mandala effects an emotional change in us. It elevates our erotic

trance to the point that we have an implicit awareness of bliss

within our own bodies -- much as the soldiers attained an implicit

awareness of spiritualized lust. They themselves did not become

mystics, but they were so affected that the report they brought back

to their king persuaded him to embark upon the mystic path. Finally,

in the third stage, when we absorb the condensed drop of divine bliss

and fuse it with the nectar in our cranial vault, divine bliss is

within us and has become a component of the fiery winds that climb

the central staircase of our subtle body.

 

The fact that one actually becomes a blissful deity united with a

blissful divine consort is declared in unmistakable terms by Yeshe

Tsogyel when her union with Pema Heruka reaches this stage:

 

Out of the bliss-waves of the forehead center of our union, in the

sphere of intense experience of Awareness of joy, arose a white

paradise divided into thirty-two lesser pure lands. In each of these

pure lands was a white Heruka in mystic union with his Consort

surrounded by hundreds of thousands, an incalculable number, of

Herukas and their Consorts identical to the principal. In the centre

of this vast mandala was the Master of all the Herukas, the principal

Heruka and Consort into whose Awareness of joy I received initiation.

Through this joy the passion of anger was purified, the body cleansed

of all traces of habitual action and reaction patterns, insight was

gained into the elements of the path of application, and I was

enabled to act for the benefit of the seven worlds of the ten

directions. At this level I was conferred the secret initiatory name,

Tsogyel the White Goddess of Pure Pleasure (Dechen Karmo Tsogyel)

(Dowman, 1984: 40-1).

 

In Yeshe's account, the paradise vision is recognized as a projection

of the "bliss waves" she shares with Pema Heruka. It has been an

unconscious component of the intense awareness of joy they share, and

first becomes known in projected form as a vision. She sees a mandala

divided into thirty-two parts, each part ("pure land" or "Buddha

paradise") is itself a mandala with countless yab-yums. [10]

 

Thus she clarifies the nature of the brow-chakra vision. It is an

image to describe her bliss. Gyatso's nectar of unspecified bliss

unfolds its contents as a mandalic vision when the brow chakra opens.

This is the witness stage of the inner fire meditation. It is

followed by awareness of the joy that is experienced by the principal

heruka and consort. This corresponds to Gyatso's second stage of

appreciating the bliss of each of the couples and combining them into

a single drop of bliss. Evidently Yeshe absorbs this awareness, for

she says that it initiates her. It reforms her into its shape, much

as Gyatso's nectar is "imprinted" with the divine vision. When "the

body is cleansed of all traces of habitual action and reaction

patterns," ahamkara, the memory of "me and mine," is abolished. She

loses her personal identity and becomes the White Goddess of Pure

Pleasure.

 

Gyatso presents the inner fire meditation with economy of expression.

He wants us to know exactly how it is done and what we are to take as

the object of our meditation at each stage of our ascent and descent

through the tubular palace. He evidently assumes that his disciples

are steeped in Tibetan Buddhist teachings and familiar with the sorts

of stories the great saints of the tradition have left us, like Yeshe

Tsogyel's autobiography. For this reason, he does not dwell on the

imaginal stages the practitioner employs to identify with her deity.

His attention is directed exclusively to the subtle body and the rise

and fall of kundalini within its central channel. To understand more

fully what he is teaching us, we have to round out his account with

complementary material from the Tantric tradition.

 

It is important to recall the gender differences stressed by Shaw --

that men must worship their consort as a goddess and women must

accept that worship and their own implicit divinity. Nevertheless, it

is not possible for the man genuinely to worship nor for the woman to

accept worship unless both parties are in a very high state of erotic

trance. We find our consort worshipful not by some trick in a ritual

that is manipulated by our ego. Rather we do so by cultivating erotic

trance, retaining our aroused consciousness, and bringing it

deliberately or by accident to the level of the brow chakra. When the

third eye opens onto the divine plane, our consort simply is divine,

regardless of our conscious intentions; and we have no option but to

worship her.

 

In illustration of this principle, we might consider a myth wherein

the goddess Parvati succeeds in redirecting Shiva's yogic attention.

Neither her voluptuous beauty nor divine wiles has any effect upon

the disreputable God of Yoga until she relinquishes her aim of

rousing him from meditation and decides to join him on the subtle

plane. She leaves him in his smashan smeared with ashes and returns

to her mountain home, [11] where she covers herself in ashes and

enters meditation, remaining as unmovable as Shiva for many years.

 

Deep in his meditation, Shiva began to sense an extraordinary shakti,

a divine energy more powerful and sublime than anything he had ever

experienced before. To his shock he realized that it was a growing

field of consciousness as perfect and extensive as his own. What

could possibly be the source? He opened his three eyes and there on a

distant peak he saw a yogini sitting immovable as the mountains

themselves, covered with dust, her mind merged in the absolute. In

that instant the great renunciate and lord of all yogis fell madly in

love (Johnsen, 1994: 92).

 

This myth implies that even a goddess has to enter erotic trance if

she is to attract the attentions of her deity and bring about divine

union. Shiva is inaccessible on the plane of mere pleasure. If

distracted for a moment by Kama, the God of (ordinary) Lust, Shiva

incinerates him with a single glance from his third eye. Only an

erotic trance as profound and extensive as his own can catch his

attention and fascinate him. The union of Shiva and Parvati that

follows takes place on the plane of blissful god and blissful goddess

and results in a thousand years of semen-retaining dalliance in which

yoga and maithuna (ritual intercourse) are one and the same.

 

Thus when Vimalananda instructs Svoboda in the practice of avishkara

(the worship of deities called into one's own body), we have to

follow the neat steps he lays out without forgetting the central

importance of the divine plane of erotic trance. The old exaggerator

says we must start by "losing" our personal identity, so as to create

a "spiritual vacuum" into which the god may enter. This already

implies a level of erotic trance at least as far from profane

consciousness as the wrathful dakini plane. Then we are to identify

with the deity in an outward manner by donning the god's garments and

accessories. Surely this is an imaginal activity that will bear no

fruit if performed on the plane of ordinary awareness. To properly

appreciate Vimalananda's teaching, we have to be able to stabilize an

imaginal construction of ourselves clad and accoutered as an icon of

our deity -- a feat that might be compared to Tibetan mandala

meditation. But this imaginal exercise is only preliminary to the

next stage, in which we identify directly with the deity "with no

thought for physical details." We have enabled our deity to acquire a

living presence through our mastery of imagination. Then we drop the

subject/object distinction between ourselves and the god. Gyatso's

depiction of this stage provides a useful detail; for in directing

our attention to the bliss attained by each visualized yab-yum, he

makes it clear that what unites us with our deity is an emotional

reality that can be attained exclusively through a very high level of

erotic trance. In Vimalananda's last stage, one has become so

familiar with the deity that the god comes at our "merest thought."

Although at first the god comes when he or she wishes to do so, our

increasing mastery of erotic trance brings us to the point where the

deity comes and goes as we desire (Svoboda, 1986: 213-4).

 

If read cautiously, Vimalananda's instructions make a good deal of

sense. In mysticism nothing is possible unless we first become

familiar with erotic trance. Further progress requires mastery of the

trance state in all three of its dimensions: physiology, emotion, and

imagination. The method outlined to Svoboda assumes that the

practitioner has already accomplished a great deal in the realm of

bodily and affective arousal before taking up imaginal exercises. For

the subtle body is discovered through physiology and emotion. It is

mastered through imagination. The work of imagination takes us beyond

the rung of scandal to the subtle-body rung. Further mastery of

imagination employs the subtle body to effect apotheosis, our own

divinization.

 

 

 

----

----------

 

 

 

 

"With a vigor unknown elsewhere, India has applied itself to

analyzing the various conditionings of the human being . . . in order

to learn how far the conditioned zones of the human being extend and

to see if anything exists beyond these conditionings"(Eliade, 1969:

xvi-xvii).

 

 

Indeed, the copious welling up of prostatic and vaginal fluids may

even be an index of an arousal that has become more erotic than

spasmodic, as Paschal Beverly Randolph seems to have believed

(Deveney, 1977). Evidently the feces-smeared Trighantika, who knew

the nature of lust, had arrived at the same conclusion -- although he

valued the fluids themselves as magical substances, rather than as a

physiological by-product of a change in consciousness.

 

 

"The permission that a woman become a guru is, as far as I know,

peculiar to the Tantric tradition" (Dimock, 1989: 98).

 

 

In my psychological work with middle-aged men and women, I find it

not uncommon for women to complain that they have become

sexually "insatiable," believing that something is wrong with them,

and for men to express great fear that their potency is gone and that

they will never be capable of satisfying partners whose new-found

sexual aptitude intimidates them. Such individuals are fighting their

physiology as well as their psychology.

 

 

It is no accident that sexual initiatrixes are generally women in

their middle years. Although they are not likely to attain their

distinctive skills and wisdom without years of practice, their

ability to initiate others requires a lengthy physiological,

emotional, and imaginal maturation. It appears that the best

Bhairavis are between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five. This

fact was clearly recognized by Noyes' Oneida community in their

initiating of the young by elders with spiritual and physiological

attainment.

 

 

"In the second half of life, the accent shifts from the interpersonal

or external dimension to a conscious relationship with intrapsychic

processes. Dependence upon the ego has to be replaced by relationship

to the self; dedication to outer success modified to include a

concern for meaning and spiritual values. Jung's emphasis for the

second half of life is on consciousness of a sense of purpose"

(Samuels, et.al., 1986).

 

 

The three great poets of the Witness Game are Ahmad Ghazzali,

Fakhruddin `Iraqi, and Ahwhadoddin Kermani (Wilson, 1993: 57).

 

 

The ladder of divine ascent in Sufism is described in terms of well-

defined "states" of mystical consciousness and "stations" of

attainment. "State" and "station," therefore, are technical terms.

 

 

Lest the reader be confused, it should be noted that the "witness" of

the witness game is the beardless youth who bears witness to the

Reality of God that resides in every created being. My use of witness

in this sentence refers to the ordinary meaning: the soldiers and

Ghazzali's friends are witnesses of transcendent realities in this

ordinary sense.

 

 

The herukas of the vision are not necessarily Pema Heruka, for a

heruka is simply "the male personification of yogic power" (Evans-

Wentz, 1967: 174). Shaw (1994: 28) says herukas are wrathful deities,

but in one place Yeshe says the herukas banished the wrathful deities

(Dowman, 1984: 2). In any event, it is clear that the passage in

question deals with a vision of blissful divinities.

 

 

Parvati means "Goddess of the Mountains."

 

 

 

 

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