Tantra

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By the same acts that cause some men to burn in hell for thousands

of years, the Yogini gains eternal salvation. - Tantra

 

For a thousand years, the Western Judeo-Christian, authoritarian

male-dominant strategy for handling the emotions, the body,

pleasure, and our most basic instincts, was to keep them well in

check, and generally disavow as best we could any feelings below the

waistline.

 

Freud said that empires were built on the resulting sublimated

energy, but the game is over. It turns out there's nothing

unspiritual about pleasure, and it's good for your health. It is

instructive to ask just how we ever came to feel so bad about even

thinking about feeling good. The passions are so overwhelmingly

powerful that religions have been warning you away from them since

the dark ages. The heightened intensity of the sexual experience

soon persuades us that it is the most important one in the world.

People get carried away, and begin to believe that the next great

orgasm is the only important thing in life. People use each other

for lust. The most extreme instance is called rape. When we can't

handle our attachments, they enslave us and we enslave others. Yet,

ironically, through no other human activity, save dying, is the

opportunity for ego-loss, transformation and transpersonal

realization so prevalent and powerful as in conjugal love-making.

 

On the direct path of conscious awareness - The Path With No

Obstacles - sexual union naturally also means the union of the

continuing practice and its realization. This is what the west has

come to refer to as Tantric love. (Ultimately, tantra means more

than embracing your physicality: all action, thought, and

realization becomes spiritual liberation itself.) The high art of

making True Love is mystical and miraculous beyond comprehension. It

inundates your entire being. It delivers you - body and soul - to

unimagined heights of ecstasy. The discovery of the key to the union

of spirituality and sexuality is at once a path to, and a gift of

Enlightenment.

The ultimate consummation of physical love-making is complete

transcendental Union. It bestows upon the lovers the experience of a

spectacular breakthrough to the Infinite - beyond, but concurrent

with our everyday existence. What begins as duality and polarization

within time, climaxes as a shared soul-merging experience of

Eternity. A transformation occurs which evolves from desire and

passion to a level of total and perfect bliss, otherwise rarely

known in human existence. Spiritual merging in love is the elusive

prize that everyone seeks when they lay down with another, whether

they know it or not. Lust is only a call to love, and many have yet

to answer it. We may think we are content giving and taking personal

gratification, yet all the while the heart seeks nothing less than

to lose itself absolutely in love, and be consumed in ecstatic union

with the beloved and the Universe.

 

How to achieve such divine deliverance through one of the most

common " animalistic " functions we perform is the secret known to

enlightened lovers as the direct path of Love. It transcends the

trap of the ego-self: In effect, the world's greatest aphrodisiac is

selflessness.

 

 

 

No one is better than the Bodhisattva in bed.

A bodhisattva is an enlightened being

who having no further need to be reincarnated into the physical,

decides to do so to help others acheive enlightenment.

 

The point of giving her sexual pleasure is to awaken the bliss that

she will then combine with meditation on emptiness in order to

attain enlightenment. - Miranda Shaw, Ph.D. Passionate

Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism - (Princeton University

Press)

SURRENDER

The paradox of sex is that the same act can both liberate and

imprison, depending upon one's intent, state of mind, and

conditioning. Sex can drive you either towards or away from

Enlightenment. The great enigma is, how can we transform the trap of

addictive physical appetite to the ecstatic realization of Divine

Union?

 

It all depends on your true and underlying purpose. It calls for

constancy and commitment to the ultimate goal of Enlightenment. Why

is the divine gift of lovemaking so often little more than a

desperate groping for glandular stimulation in dark rooms,

accompanied by feelings of hunger and shame? Ironically, and all too

often - when people use each other uncaringly - this most

universally accessible mystical experience of orgasm is debased into

something dishonorable and dirty. But anti-sex admonitions in turn

only give rise to guilt, when - despite heroic efforts to curb

our " lower appetites " - we find ourselves indulging in what is,

after all, the single most compelling human urge after breathing and

eating. We might even say that repression of this primal biological

imperative creates rapists and pedophiles.

 

Shame is taught by " authorities " who can embrace neither their

animal nor their spiritual nature. They fear one and fake the other,

and call this " correct. " Certain religions contend that sex must be

solely for insemination and procreation, or it is devil-worship. By

that logic, one should certainly refrain from using one's hands (not

to mention lips and tongue), and get it over with as quickly as

possible. Obviously the Good Lord made this procreational pleasure-

drive far more powerful than most individual's (and any church's)

power to control.

 

A truly relevant and realistic religion would teach us how to

consecrate our sexuality, not deny it. We need to unlearn our guilt

about wanting sex, even as we realize what a guilded cage it could

very well become. Of course men and women compromise their morality

and good judgment all the time for sex (although probably no more

than for love, money, power, or fame). But the inherent dangers are

hardly reason to avoid the experience. Respect for that very danger

should make us take care as we take pleasure. Let us celebrate and

make sacred our natural, innate sexuality. Copulation as high

communion? Is there any better way?

 

 

 

SEXUAL SPIRITUALITY

Many in today's generation are beginning to re-learn the sacred

approach to lovemaking, as in indigenous tribal customs, mystical

rituals, Sufi and tantric couples practices, and post-sexual-

revolution " high monogamy. " Cultures much older than ours have

evolved ways for seekers to include their physical bodies within the

context of spiritual practice and the enlightened life. Meditation,

invocations, breathing exercises, incense, candlelight, ceremonial

objects, rituals, music, and potent libations have been used to

create a special environment and mind-state in which to sanctify

sexual union. Such careful preparations tend to quiet the neurotic

mind and increase sensitivity and sensuality, while at the same time

engendering the proper reverence.

 

The essence of this conscious sex approach is to transform the very

energy of your appetite for personal pleasure into one of cosmic

realization, by harnessing your own desire to the happiness, the

thrill, and the total fulfillment of your partner. Thus you achieve

Unity through duality, by making her (or his) ecstasy your own.

Giving and taking merge, and you two become One. The transformation

from ordinary mechanical, confused, guilt-ridden sex to the profound

gift of natural/spiritual lovemaking depends upon a broadening of

one's focus from the genitals to the heart, from passion to

compassion.

 

Spiritualized sex opens you at all centers at once, animal to

divine. Transcendent love is a religious experience. Every touch is

The First, and time stands still. The senses are magnified a

thousand times. Your partner becomes a Goddess or God, whom you

worship in awe. You notice everything, and it all conveys tremendous

meaning and potency. Foreplay is truly playful, breathtakingly

tender. The pleasure is immediately and continuously perfect, the

passion intense and profound. Time itself disappears and the Holy

Universe becomes self-evident. Opening all your centers, engaging

all your faculties, the animal/emotional/spiritual crescendo of love

lasts forever, and the climax is an exquisite release of the body,

the heart and the soul in a spectacular shared revelation of the

Universal Self. The after-glow of such a cosmic physical union

endures for days.. weeks. The experience is healing and unifying in

every way.

 

 

 

HOW TO MAKE ENLIGHTENED LOVE.

 

* Consecrate the setting. Make it Holy.

* Wait for the perfect moment.

* Purify yourself in body and mind.

* Meditate.

* Dedicate the experience to your highest purpose.

* Invoke the Goddesses of Love.

* Begin motionless and in silence.

* Gaze into each other's eyes, long and deep.

* Breathe together.

* Fall in love. stay in love. die into love.

* Listen for Inner Guidance.

* Reside always at the beginning.

* Move in slow motion, with reverence.

* Worship your lover. Touch only in awe.

* Trust your body's deepest impulses.

* Give voice to your feelings.

* Make love with your whole being.

* Transpose taking and giving.

* Decelerate until time stands still.

* Abandon all gain and control.

*

Die as a personality. Be born as pure Love in the Universe.

 

EXQUISITE LOVE

To lose the self in love, look always to the beginning and keep to

the beginning. Worship each other's pure essence as Goddess and God.

Everything matters.

Use all senses Read your beloved's mind/body.

In slow motion abandonment of time itself, Give only pleasure and

love, letting hers become yours, ours.

Surrender continuously, unconditionally, to the sacred fire within,

all consuming, all purifying, all fulfilling.

 

 

From " Enlightenment in Our Time. " by Lonny J. Brown, Ph.D.