Tantra- "The Great Work".

Valentine Worth: 

'All of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensible complexity is in the end interrelated - worlds within worlds within worlds: the seen and the unseen - the physical and the immaterial are all connected - each exerting influence on the next - bound, as it were, by chains of analogy - magnetic chains. Every decision, every action mirrors, ripples, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation. The world is indeed bound with secret knots.'

I can remember a time when sex was a wanty + shouty man trying to get his fingers into my bra and down my pants and then cumming too quickly, or not cumming but trying to, with a fixed expression of bored determination on his face...

I can remember a time when the promise of sex with...

1. ... an emphasis on the woman's sexual fulfillment;
2. on a man's ejaculation control;
3. and acknowledges the spiritual connection between the couple and the Universe.

would have made me weep with relief!

Some part of me- at the age of seventeen after my first so called proper sex- soon realised that anyone I had sex with was going to be a new student who needed to be taught to slow down and enjoy...that no one else was going to take care of the erotic, or teach someone how to listen. It had to be me.

My problem was, at the time when those three promises of Tantra could have made me cry, I was married. The game was lost, my goose was cooked and I was thinking of leaving for good....

New Age Tantra could easily be Female led-lite, just tweak it a bit and I see a Cybele Domme and a small man on string. It is a bit of a porky pie (lie) to pretend that there is no power dynamic going on under the sweetness and light, New Age surface. From where I am now (finally with a man I can genuinely respect and willingly bow down before) New Age Tantra looks like a reflex, or inversion of what the Daily Mail and 'Women's magazines' tell us is normal; it is an antidote to the errors of patriarchy.

But it is just one way out of many, to deal with bad sexual technique.

Finally- some decades latter- I am grateful to what I learnt before I'd slept with anyone from books that alluded to 'Tantra' and I'm grudgingly grateful to my experiences of the real thing.

All in all the version of Sacred sex I use, never really was, and never will be, Tantra.

Though saying that, breaking taboos is a left hand technique and I do use a visualisation of a central channel filling, expanding and spilling (spilling is getting it wrong). But I don't 'refine' ching or chi; I don't use energy to cast spells, I do not become 'the deity', nor do I imagine my partner to be anything other than all that he is.

So, where did New Age Tantra come from and how did it get here?

In short: New Age Tantra borrowed images and terminology from two religions Chinese/Tibetan/Japanese Taoist ‘inner alchemy‘- Nei Tan- and Indian Hindu, -deity worship.

Deity worship is union with the divine, this includes visualizing oneself as the deity in the act of sexual union with a consort and/or "transgressive" acts such as token consumption of meat or alcohol (Dear reader, we are talking New Age here, you may not find the idea of coffee or wearing a fur coat so transgressive. Just accept that some people are less jaded than you or I). The most famous of the first books on this subject to be written in English was Shakta and Shakti by Sir Arthur Avelon (Sir John Woodruff)  in 1918.

Modern day alchemists (Nei-Tan) having taken a Taoist view, use sex as a force to accomplish the circulation (and therefore purification) of ‘life force’. Probably the first book to introduce the ideas of Nei-Tan to English readers was The Secret of the Golden Flower translated in the 1920's by  Richard Wilhelm

Tantra then, is practiced by people who wish to combine sex and spirituality; Tantra is a way to elevate consciousness to a higher plane.

Both interpretations  require the practitioner to use visualisations in order to control, contain and focus energy/ consciousness.

Likewise, another use of sexual energy is to raise a 'cone of power'. This technique belongs to modern day Wicca. All spell work consists of visualising a goal, then focusing  energy and intention onto that goal. The release of the energy with the imagined 'cone' is not always released then and there as an orgasm. There is no need for people to get closer than side by side in a circle and clothes can remain on. But there is still inherent in the cone of power the concept that sexual energy is a thing that can be directed and used for some purpose.

Wicca was- my apologies, this is only what I think- invented by Margaret Murray- Witch Cult in Western Europe 1921- Gerald Gardener and Alistair Crowley.

The Golden Dawn (MacGregor Mathers, William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott) follows the 'Hermetic' lineage and doesn't seem to deal in energy to quite the same extent as Wicca.

It isn't just pleasure.

Circa 1920, the idea of 'wireless' energy as a spiritual transmission, seemed to move away from spiritualism and towards sexual energy, libido as Freud called it. Wilhelm Reich- who worked with Freud during the 1920's- treated sexual energy as something analogous to electricity; it could be stored in its own special kind of capacitor called an Orgone accumulator: orgone being the name for sexual energy.

This lineage of thinking about living bodies and desire as a kind of magnetic force deriving from a flow of energy can be traced back to 1631 and Athanasius Kircher's first book, Ars Magnesia and before then to William Gilbert's De Magnete (1600).

Again in the 1960's old books on esoteric subjects began to recirculate, perhaps stimulated by Gerald Gardner publishing  Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). In the 1970's I was reading about techniques required for The Magnum Opus- the great work- in books about witchcraft, psychology and alchemy.

But finally, when I actually got to practice the things I'd read about I was in a situation that required me to practice ‘tantra’ within celibacy and this really does explain why being tied up or beaten, humiliated or given away, anything BDSM is, and would be easier than my three years as a songyum.

Sex within the practice of Tibetan Buddhism is used as a ‘force’ to induce consciousness to coalesce and to enter the various inner-channels. It was also used, in my experience, as an antidote to sex.

In the end I learnt a lot, but Tantra isn’t my path or calling, just something that I could do. I’d practised creating a belief in the channels and learning orgasm control years before, because such stuff was hinted at in books about witchcraft as essential, but I didn’t believe that it would lead to enlightenment.

The dissonance between being a partner in bed and completely separate during the day, ultimately proved too much. Interesting though it was because some sick part of me enjoys expending intellectual power trying to integrate something that is impossible to integrate. I simply cannot see sex as something to over come or grow out (develop out of because enlightened beings don't do sex for pleasure!). The Vajrayana was a discipline that enabled me to use what I already knew and to look at things from a different angle…I'm not ungrateful. I am puzzled that I didn't change my partner's mind...

Well so far this has been a list of all the things I have probably believed in at one time or another; but the basis for why goes back to my first experience of sex. Sex and the ignorance about sex made having sex as precious as finding water in a desert, sex was precarious, it was treated badly (not supposed to matter) it could be taken away at any moment, I decided that other people's ignorance made sex difficult for me. So I resolved to make things clear in my own mind, to deal with it- what ever it was- and I vowed never to go along with any paradigm that made sex out to be inherently a problem.

In other words sex+

From Crowley I took on the notion that sex is sacred because it is the simplest way to experience transcendence or complete immanence; and it was clearly a big mistake to have thrown the whores and lady-boys out of the temple.

From my own experience, it can be a mistake to treat sex as if it is an ordinary thing.

‘Sacred sexuality’ as I practice it has two main sources: Herodotus (far from accurate about ‘the Persians‘), and who ever first wrote ‘The epic of Gilgamesh’ (the role of Shamhat). There is no Higher purpose to Sacred sex, no enlightenment or altered state; but it is ‘a calling’. My ambition was to have become someone’s ‘Scarlet woman’ (perils of reading Crowley). But having read of some of the things Crowley put his scarlet women through, perhaps I took the right direction!

+Link For a blog entry on the Candamaharosana Tantra.