Energy

Tantra style

I remember as a young child growing up in South Africa a particularly close call with electricity.

My father was replacing the plug on his electric drill. I’m not sure exactly why, but this process produced a metre long black electric cable with a functioning set of prongs to plug into the wall, and two orange copper wires poking out the other end.

Spotting this, I immediately took the plug-end, marched over to a wall socket, and plugged it in. As it happens, the copper wires were resting loose against the skin of my thigh. I remember the exquisite power of that jolt, and the cable falling from my leg, and the entire house going into darkness.

It is not obvious what the electric outlets in a suburban house, the way that the thigh muscle of a human being contracts, and, say, a lightning bolt kilometres high, have in common. Many of us will think it’s obvious, but that is because of what we have learnt in school about physics.

If you dropped all of that underlying cultural and scientific knowledge, the actual experience of these things, what a philosopher might call the ‘phenomenology’ of these things, appear to have little in common.

And yet, somehow, a thousand years ago in Srinagar, Kashmir, the philosopher-saints were starting to piece this all together. Not in a strictly scientific way, but in a way that was consistent with thousands of years of observations and experiments.

Tantra and Energy

The yogis of India, and especially those of the Tantric traditions like Trika Shaivism, were able to observe a connection between the fundamental experience of being alive and some invisible force, what today we might call ‘energy,’ a thing that they called shakti.

In my last post I talked about one of the most basic principles of Tantric philosophy, the idea of consciousness. These philosophies claim that consciousness is the fundamental building block for all of reality. There is a sense here that everything that exists exists in and through the power of awareness. You can think about this as both an absolute universal principle, and as the individual conscious experience of a human being.

This idea, however, does not stand alone as the most basic principle. It has a twin. It shares this position with the Tantric idea of energy, the shakti principle. Or, more precisely, these two things are twin aspects of the one underlying thing, like two mirrors pointed at each other. But more of this later.

Let’s try to define what the term ‘shakti’ means in the Tantric scriptures. This Sanskrit term is much harder to nail down for English speakers than the terms used for ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness.’

For example, Shakti can be a proper name for a goddess, or even, the goddess who manifests herself in various ways as Kali, Tripura Sundari, Kubjika and so on. This is where Shakta religion and spirituality comes from.¹

Shakti can also be just a regular word, a term that you can translate as ‘energy’ or ‘power.’ Or, it can be a word-ending, something that you add to other words to give them this sense of being a type of energy. For example, the term ‘iccha’ (translated as ‘will’) can include this word-ending, and become the term ‘iccha-shakti’, which can be translated as the power of will, the force or energy of a person’s will to bring something about.

If you put all of those various senses of the term ‘shakti’ together, you land on one main theme. The idea of ‘energy’ or ‘power’ in Tantric philosophy has to do with the idea of making things real in ordinary experience. In the human sense, shakti is the power by which the universal, abstract, theoretical concept of ‘consciousness’ becomes an actual human being in time and space, with a particular personality and body.²

Upwards and Downwards

You can put this philosophically. A great deal of philosophy and theology wrestles with two foundational concepts. On the one hand you have the concept of ‘transcendence’. This is the idea of transcending the concrete reality of ordinary experience in search of more abstract things - organising principles, invisible powers, hidden structures.

On the other hand, you have the concept of ‘immanence.’ This is the idea of concretising, of manifesting. Here we move towards specific, embodied, physical realities. The general becomes specific: we talk about ‘instances’ of things, of ‘instantiating’ abstract principles.

These are usually also given direction. The journey of transcendence is talked about, most often, as the journey ‘upwards.’ The journey of immanence is talked about as the journey ‘downwards.’ Up and away from the earth and its concreteness, towards the heavens, and vice versa.

It is not an accident, then, that the symbolism of many Tantric schools uses both upward pointing and downward pointing triangles. These geometric shapes are used to capture this most fundamental idea. Tantrism presents these two approaches to life and spirituality, in a unified way.

Embodiment and Relationships

If you can understand this elemental structure - where the principle of transcendence (shiva) is perfectly united with the principle of immanence (shakti), you will make very rapid progress in your understanding of tantric philosophy.

But it’s not all theoretical. There are practical results from this structure that touch on how Tantrism can help you to reimagine your life.

Let me give you just two examples of this.

The first has to do with how you relate to ordinary, embodied life. In Tantrism, the move towards immanence, towards the body and its senses, towards everyday life, is profound. Tantrism considers that this direction - the descent away from the heavens and into the earth, is exactly coequal with the opposite. Spirituality here is not only the ascent, away from the body and its pains and pleasures. It is not only the ascent into the high mountain cave to meditate, to have profound enlightenment experiences.

In Tantrism, it is precisely, and without remainder, as spiritual to wash the dishes or plant some trees as it is to experience blissful union with absolute consciousness. There is absolutely no value judgement, no difference in the profundity of implication, between the ecstasy of ego death and changing your baby’s nappy.

The second practical implication of this has to do with relationships. And here we start to drill down into the real beating heart of Tantric philosophy and its implications for life.

As I mentioned above, the fundamental idea is not, actually, that there are these two different but twinned principles that together explain everything. The idea is that there is just one thing that underlies everything, including these two basic principles.

My proposal, which is an advance on what the classical Tantrikas actually said, is relational. That is, the one underlying unifying thing that gives rise to everything else is not a ‘thing’ at all. It is the relationship between the things that gives rise to the things themselves.

This might not be easy for you to grasp at first. Think of it this way. These two principles, variously described as shiva/shakti, masculine/feminine, transcendence/immanence, awareness/energy, are bound together into a relationship. And it is the union of these two principles, the type of relationship that exists between them, that gives reality to the principles and therefore, reality to Reality.

And, in Tantrism, the character of this underlying union, this foundational relation, is bliss, ecstasy.

And that means that, wherever you find yourself lost in bliss, transported in ecstasy, you are aligning yourself most closely with the fundamental character of reality itself.

This has really profound consequences for how you might conceive your best life. On the one hand, it reorients your ethics towards your relationships. If we can extrapolate from these abstract metaphysical ideas to the ordinary lived experience of a human being, then we can say that the thing you need to nurture in your life is not your ‘self’, and is not the ‘others’ whom you love. It is the relationship inbetween that matters most.

And, further, we have here a goal for these relationships. The goal is ecstasy, ecstasy in a technical sense. We can understand this technical sense of ecstasy as the pleasure that we get from the experiencing of existing not in and for ourselves, and not in and for others, but in the never-ending dance between the two.

Neil

1. Which can be contrasted with “Shaivite” religion and spirituality, siuch as Trika Shaivism, Shaiva Siddhanta and so on. These are based, mythologically speaking, on the god Shiva.

2. This is why shakti is considered the feminine principle. There is an obvious parallel where between the general sense of making things manifest and real, and the maternal experience of bringing a human being into the world.