Liberation

Tantra Style

When I was a much younger man, I was really, really into mysticism. It was mysticism of a Christian variety, characterised by endless hours spent in prayer and study of Christianity’s sacred texts, and by many thousands of words handwritten in journals to analyse these texts, and, of course, to analyse my soul. I loved the Romantic and Metaphysical poets, I loved to play spiritual songs on my guitar.

I loved every search for anything transcendent.

Like most good mystics, I found in this search some experiential rewards: those moments of ecstasy, of stepping beyond the ordinary, those glimpses beyond the vagaries of change and decay, beyond the material limits of the body and the intellectual limits of the human mind.

But because my path towards transcendence was shaped by a conservative form of Christian belief, it included a negative stance towards the human experience. This can be captured by one word: “sin.”

If you approach Christian mysticism with an interest in the textual traditions of Christianity, “the Bible”, I think you have to confront a troublesome proposition of the Christian faith. This is the idea that every human is broken in a basic way. According to conservative Christian belief, everyone is born sinful and this sinfulness has something to do with a body that needs taming and a mind that needs cleansing.

Don’t take it from me. Hear it directly from Saint Paul, the original Christian, a man Friedrich Nietzsche characterised as the “greatest of all the apostles of revenge” and as a great hater:

We know that the law is spiritual and that I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin […] when I want to do good, evil is right there with me … I see another law at work in the members of my body … making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death!” (Romans 7:15-24)

This negative stance towards the ordinary human experience is not unique to Christianity. It might be labelled differently elsewhere, but in almost every religious and spiritual tradition there is a mystical strain that seeks to escape, cleanse, transform or avoid the material reality of the human as both body and mind.

Upward and Inward

This is one way to think about spirituality, as a kind of liberation from mundane human experience. But, thankfully, it is not the only way. There are mystical traditions that take a different approach. The Tantric traditions of South Asia are in this category.¹

Here, liberation does not mean liberation from anything. It does not involve escaping or cleansing, it does not involve denial or rejection.

In the Tantric traditions, liberation is achieved through and for the body and the mind.

I prefer to think of this, as many do, as a kind of ‘ascent’ towards a spiritual insight. I prefer to think of it as an inward movement. This is because in spiritual circles the “ascent” is often confused with escapism and frequently ends up with some negative implication towards what is below.²

We can avoid this by thinking about liberation as a journey inward towards a direct realisation of your own true nature.³

Think of it like a set of Russian Babuschka dolls. The outermost dolls are the body and its senses. The more you pay attention to them, the more focused you are on what they bring to you, the more likely you are to realise that there is something inside. Another doll.

And this one is your mind. Again, the more you pay attention to it, the more you practice what the Tantrikas call “one-pointedness,” the more likely you are to find that there is something else inside it this one too. Another doll.

And then, at least according to Tantra, you find that hidden at the heart of all of this, within the body and its senses, within the mind and its constructs, is something else again. Another doll, but this time it is something universal. They called this thing at the heart of every human ‘shiva/shakti’, that is, absolute, unlimited and undifferentiated awareness and energy.

At the moment when you enter into the heart of this universal awareness, you have a particular type of experience. The Tantrikas had many ways of talking about this experience. The one that I like is called pratyabijña, translated as “recognition.” Here, spiritual awakening or enlightenment is simply a moment of recognition, where you see yourself for what you are. And that is, you are a specific instance of a universal thing: the combination of consciousness and energy.

This journey of liberation from the experiences of a particular human body and specific mind to a experience of universal awareness is not an escape from either of them. It is, instead, an intensification of, and immersion into, the full range of experiences that body and mind offer, until we get that moment of breakthrough when we see them for what they really are.

Em-bodied and En-minded

In Tantra, the highest point of the ascent is achieved by going deeper and deeper into the body and the mind. By developing a deeper appreciation of what they really are. The more you experience them the closer you get to the heart of reality itself. And this means that Tantric spiritual practices are immersive and not escapist.

I think this is quite a profound shift in what we think spirituality is. I frequently hear spiritually minded people denigrating both the body and mind. Even when they are not rejected as sinful, they are often downgraded to the status of a mere tool, a temporary necessity that can be either discarded or disregarded as the occasion permits.

People talk about their bodies as “meat suits” that we can somehow abandon when we want to. People talk about their minds as places of distraction and noise, that we aim to make silent and empty. People reject the notion that their actual personhood, their entire identity and existence is tied to the specificity of their particular bodies and their particular minds.

This is not the Tantric way. In Tantrism, it is only by more complete embrace, more total identification with body and mind, that true spiritual insight arises.

Let me pause there. I find that when I talk to people about these matters, they very quickly rush to think I am somehow mistaken. That I may have misspoken. Have I not heard the importance of stillness, of emptying, of the void, of calming and synchronising the nervous system, have I not understood meditation and the quiet observation of thoughts as they pass by. Have I not grasped the signal importance of quietening the chatter, of non-attachment with the ego, and on and on it goes.

Let me assure you. I have understood those things. And I think they are misguided. Absolute identification with the particularity of body and mind and the intensification of experience offer an alternative approach for anyone who finds these other more mainstream approaches to spirituality tedious and unfruitful, as I do.

This has profound effects on what you might think spiritual practice is. Here, it doesn’t have to be the pursuit of a quiet mind. It can, instead, be complete immersion in the noise and clamour of a busy mind. In fact, your spiritual practice might require you to intensify and exacerbate the dreaded so-called monkey mind. Give them chimps bananas, produce for them both friends and enemies, and refuse to put them in a cage.

This also has profound effects on what you might hope for in your emotional life. The endless pursuit of equanimity, of non-attachment, of the extinction of desire, falls away. The continually frustrated hope that you might experience peace, love and compassion for the world reveals itself as just another desire.

The Tantric practice, perhaps best exemplified by the terrifying Aghoris, is to go the other way. The idea is to fully experience your hatred, your contempt, your disgust, your enmity, your jealousy, your rage, your fear. The Aghoris went to great lengths - sitting on corpses and drinking blood, urine, semen, faeces and wine from hollowed out human skulls - all in an attempt to get to the extremity of experience and find out what it revealed. Here, in either extreme equanimity, and extreme disturbance, true spiritual insight can be gathered.

And finally, the experience of the body. Tantric yoga is not as health-focused as other forms of yoga might be. At least in the sense that moderation is not a thing for Tantrikas. The whole idea that you don’t drink, you don’t do drugs, you eat well and live pure - this is not necessarily the Tantric way. It might be your path, which is fine. But if you want to get drunk and live in debauchery, indulging every sense in every pleasure and every pain, then that can be a perfectly legitimate and deeply spiritual path.

The archetype of spiritual attainment, Lord Śiva himself, is portrayed in these two contradictory ways: the supreme ascetic in perfect stillness, and the drunken, ash-smeared Kāpālika wandering among cremation grounds. You don’t have to choose which is better. According to Tantra, they are ultimately exactly the same.

Perhaps you can see where this is going? Next week we’ll talk about the path of enjoyment…

Neil

1. More liberal forms of Christianity do this, as do many Asian traditions like Zen (shout out to Matt Cawood!)

2. In Tantra, the ascent has to do with the 36 underpinning principles that describe all of reality, the tattvas. This is like a great chain of being, with the union of Shiva and Shakti at the top, the individual psychology of a human person in the middle, and the body and its senses at the bottom. But in tantra there is no value judgement associated with this hierarchy. the bottom principle ‘earth’ is considered by as divine as the top principle Shiva.

3. This approach has very strong support in Tantric philosophy, where the ‘heart’ is the portal to spiritual awakening, and it sits at the centre of the human being.