Saying yes to life

Like most Europeans, and all masochists, I am a compulsive pessimist. Not only that but I take pride in it and identify with it as if it’s some kind of sign of my cultural superiority.

Actually, of course, it’s a sign of weakness. Feeling superior to people, being able to outwit them intellectually, gives me pleasure because it is an outlet for my repressed sadism. Being always able to gain the upper hand, I am safe in the knowledge that no one can really get to me. I don’t run the risk of being vulnerable and of getting hurt. That means I’m safe; but missing out on life.

For some reason I’ve never quite figured, life on the other side of the pond has evolved in an opposite direction. Or perhaps it has just not “evolved” at all. There is something about the American outlook on life that grates terribly on a lot of Europeans. That little children laugh and play in African villages is still OK, Europeans can feel superior and still benevolently disposed towards these manifestations of joy in a simpler life, more at one with nature. However that Americans have the hubris to believe that they will succeed against all the odds, that they dare to try to infect us with their enthusiasm for frankly daft projects, well, that’s just too much. They strike us as naive, often dangerously so, and  nowhere outside the mountains of Afghanistan and the souks of Baghdad is the Schadenfreude at American failures greater than in the refined salons of European capitals.

Strangely, our own failures (and God knows they are plentiful enough) fail to fill us with the same sense of joy. Actually, they fail to fill us with anything at all; we are blind to the ways in which the European nation-state extinguishes personal initiative in both the economic and private spheres.

I am certain that the American outlook has a good deal of neurosis built into it, too. I am not trying to eulogize it any more than I am trying to deprecate European sensitivities. However, when the result is that genuine joie de vivre is taken by Europeans for a marker of cultural naivete, it should set alarm bells ringing. This is called cynicism, and it is always an ego defense.

The thing is, ersatz Lebenslust is merely amusing, or sad, but it is not threatening, you do not need to defend yourself against it. And if you defend yourself against what turns out to be the real thing, you miss the opportunity to be taken up in a positive vortex; you miss out on living. In fact your ego defenses are the only thing that prevent you from living: the mirror is being held up to your own resistances.

And so it is that I am delighted to welcome tantra teacher Dawn Cartwright to Brussels. When I feel resistance at her enthusiasm, which I do, I am grateful for the chance to examine what it is that keeps me from jumping into the river of life; and then I just let myself fall in love. Life has this quality, that it is very easy to fall in love with; because life is our nature and it seeks out itself. When we are in love, we are dissolved, free, we are ourselves.

Join us 27-29 November in Brussels; fall in love; and, if you can, dive deeply into all of Dawn’s offerings in Europe this fall. They’re on her website at www.dawncartwright.com.

Lingam massage – a few questions

No, I didn’t only pick the title in a desperate attempt to get my Google rankings up! I really, truly care about the subject

The standard recipe for lingam massage has been bothering me for some time already. As we all know, it was developed about 20 years ago by an American called Joe Kramer who worked with homosexuals in particular. Now I’m not too sure, but I would guess that the distribution of character types across the homosexual population differs from that of the male population as a whole. From my experience of homosexuals they are more likely to be oral or schizoid types. As we all know, also, the nature of the genital reaction in the male (and in the female too, but that is not my subject here) is very much a function of character type. The rigid and psychopathic types tend to show diminished penile sensitivity while the masochistic type is excessively sensitive. Oral and schizoid types are more likely to show erectile dysfunction.

This has got to have some consequences for how a masseur/se approaches the lingam massage. In my opinion, instead of taking over Kramer’s ideas, we should be experimenting a lot more and discovering what works, how and for whom. I don’t have any doubt that an experienced masseuse (allow me my preference for the feminine form) has developed somewhat of an intuition for this, and probably the growth in interest around prostate/anal massage reflects some of this intuition. Still it would be nice to pool experiences and learn more.

Speaking from the masochistic perspective, I believe there are essentially two points.

The first is the failure of the standard tantra+lingam massage ritual to address the pelvic armoring. This is rather skipped over, with inadequate attention to the perineum and the inguinal fold. Of course I appreciate that the tantra massage is a sensual massage and that it does not aim at deep tissue work, even emotional in nature. Therefore my criticism should be (and is) addressed to other modalities. Nonetheless, insofar as these areas form part of the wider erogenous zone involved in male sexual response, their exclusion in my view detracts from the holistic nature of the massage and has more to do with received ideas of male sexuality than any sound neuroerotic basis.

Secondly, one really should be trying to delay the moment of ejaculation in persons who tend to ejaculate prematurely, and this is in fact what one does in tantra massage. But it makes little sense to attempt to spread the energy into the abdominal and thoracic regions when the pelvic region itself is insufficiently charged. In this case, the energy will be unable in any case to move beyond it and remain on a low level.

In my experience of the massage and my male body, I have the sentiment that there is really something missing here and that we should be developing new scripts. I suspect this is true for other character types also, and also for the yoni massage (although since this is necessarily internal, it may be less flawed). I would very much welcome views on this topic from massage professionals and lovers of tantra massage!

The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does  not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.

Our love affair with nonsense

One advantage of undergoing depth body psychotherapy is the anger that it releases; from which my readers can surely benefit. Here goes a rant, therefore

I am of the view that tantra is nothing more or less than an exploration and acceptance of who we really are as sexual, spiritual beings.

To embrace tantra is therefore to rebel against thousands of years of repression and manipulation of our identities by others, and to reclaim the bodies that we live in for ourselves. It’s a revolutionary engagement; nothing can be more revolutionary.

I could also add to my definition the mystical heart of tantra, which is the doctrine of non-duality. But it is not really a doctrine; it is really an evidence, if you know yourself.

To realize this evidence and to enact this rebellion, no-one needed to invent something called “tantra”. Humankind has been doing this forever, in a multitude of cultural forms. I do not believe that anyone, in any period, in central/south Asia had access to any unique insights regarding this problem. At best, it was locally possible in some periods to go further in exploring this path than others elsewhere had done. Nonetheless, this truth of the human condition is around every corner and accessible to everyone. It is a pure evidence, and it has become even more so as scientific knowledge has accumulated.

Being doctrineless, tantra is wonderfully compatible with all forms of authentic knowledge that exist, both scientific and spiritual. A movement calling itself “tantric” can reinvent itself constantly and is perfectly justified in doing so, since its practices are judged only by the canon of utility, and not of  truth. Collectively, I believe we have discovered much about what is useful on the path of self-development; I believe we have discovered nothing about what is true.

It is, of course, understandable, indeed inevitable and even (maybe) desirable, that tantra – like other spiritual movements - manifests itself in movements and communities with a concrete form, and which develop allegiances, language and rituals of their own. This development both aids the spiritual growth of community members and is necessary to the propagation of the message and methods of the group. I have nothing, even, against its “branding” and I am very tolerant of quirkiness in its self-conception and self-expression.

But let’s remember that the very nature of non-duality implies that no doctrine can be “right”; all language is metaphorical and contingent. Nothing is more than a pathway to self-knowledge, and an infinite number of such pathways exist.

Which makes me wonder why so many self-proclaimed tantrikas give such a damn about lineages, ancientness of traditions, Hindu deities and so on; and even when they don’t, still path lip-service to a host of tantric myths and try to anchor what they are doing in the authority of the past.

That seems to me paradoxal, since tantra is all about living in the here and now…

This attachment to form, ritual and myth raises some more fundamental questions about what the nature of tantra is, and about the spiritual marketplace we inhabit, within which movements identifying themselves as tantra compete for attention.

It won’t have escaped the attention of even the most casual observer that this marketplace is unusually crowded, with numerous generic, branded and even patented therapy methods, bodywork modalities and spiritual practices competing with each other in terms of the hyperbole of their claims of efficacy.

The most successful (in terms of the following they attract) are usually those that promise the most for the least effort, or which particularly suit the personalities of the would-be disciples : notably in terms of those individuals’ desire to avoid personal responsibility for their spiritual path (or physical or emotional healing or well-being) and cast this on to the willing shoulders of ego-driven gurus.

Why is this so?

In my view and experience, leaving aside exogenous life events like illness and bereavement, and solitary practices like prayer and meditation, there are only two things which can effect long-term positive change in personal behavior. These are (i) love and (ii) work designed to release underlying tensions in the bodymind.

Furthermore, as far as love is concerned, I am convinced of its power but I am unsure of its duration if it is not accompanied by abreactive work.

Tensions in the bodymind being manifested physically (although they are not purely physical in their etiology), a physical dimension to such work is indispensable.  That leaves a broad panoply of activities which are not without value, though their relative value may be discussed (and may vary from person to person). However, it excludes, at the same time, a vast bunch of stuff which is of little value, no value at all, or quite negative in terms of its value because it distracts people from real solutions to their problems. For example, Tarot, numerology, mandalas, angels, mantras, crystals….It also puts into perspective the possible value of other modalities whose only reasonable mode of effective action is through the love and acceptance they communicate (though also limited energetic effects as well as autosuggestion are possible). In this category I would place, for example, reiki (see here for a review of its clinical effectiveness). I would be still more skeptical about other physical methods which do not involve significant manipulation, such as sophrology.

All of these modalities, apart from competing with tantra in the aforementioned spiritual marketplace, are, perhaps surprisingly (at least to me) actually embraced by many people who practice tantra, as a complement to their own practice.

This is, I believe, very damaging for the credibility of the practitioners concerned and for the layman’s understanding of what tantra has to offer, which is nonetheless so brilliantly set out in books by Osho and others.

At my last workshop with Advaita, I was particularly pleased to hear two spiritual myths debunked, myths with which many tantra practitioners coexist quite happily.

One was the notion of karma. According to Advaita (I paraphrase her), this is an immoral notion designed to encourage resignation in the face of violence. We are born with no form of original sin, whether Christian or oriental. On the contrary, we are born innocent and we are corrupted by parents, teachers and society. I entirely agree with this important, and objectively indisputable, moral standpoint.

A second was the zen notion of emptiness. According to zen, one should strive after emptiness in order to feel compassion. I think I understand this one and for me I have no problem in embracing that notion. Yet when Advaita says that we can only feel compassion from plenitude, it is a vastly more helpful conception to normal people. What prevents us from feeling compassion is what prevents us from feeling ourselves. And the search for emptiness can all too easily become a quest to repress feeling and emotion.

Having brilliantly debunked these concepts, though, why stop there?

I don’t doubt that it’s profitable to peddle the kind of nonsense you can find on www.schoolofawakening.com, for instance; but is it helpful to the soul? And therefore, is it ethical?

In any case, tantra it is not.

Ich schütze deine Lebendigkeit

Welcome to my new mantra. I would like to recommend it to parents and schools the world over.

This came to me in German on the plane back from Istanbul and I don’t quite come up with the translation I want (that in itself probably says something about the alienness of the concepts from our daily reality), but in German it’s absolutely perfect. I defend/will defend/am defending/protect your vitality/vivaciousness/spontaneity/natural élan, something on those lines.

We devote, as a society, as educators and as parents, a tremendous amount of effort towards extinguishing the natural high spirits of children. It’s embarrassing, inconvenient, annoys others or ourselves, brings (and indeed it does) unfortunate consequences in terms of accidents or social opprobrium. And I am not saying education is unnecessary: clearly children need to learn to live in the world as it is, and to defend and protect themselves. Yet our profoundest duty is precisely the reverse – to allow our children to carry their spontaneity and aliveness through into adult life.

So this is my promise to my children; I hope it may also be yours.

Meditation

I am wondering whether this is one of the most uselessly misleading words in the English language.

Latin meditari comes from the PIE root med-/mod- meaning to measure, limit or consider (German messen, Dutch meten, cognate with meter), with, for good measure, the Latin frequentative infix -t-

Much more active, mental and ego-driven than this it doesn’t come.

Yet what we mean by meditation is nothing like this at all. This is such a widespread misconception that I really wonder whether this word is actually useful at all, or whether we should not abandon it and find another one.

Although this is true enough of meditation in any spiritual sense, the Osho so-called “active” meditations are particularly obviously nothing to do with measuring, limiting or considering anything whatsoever.

What is a meditation? It seems to me that the Osho meditations are something like a physical embodiment of the Zen koan, a little trick, a seeming paradox to short-circuit the mind and realize a gestalt switch, a momentary discontinuity in the fabric of the personality through which the force of nature can reconfigure it.

Doesn’t anyone have a better word for this than “meditation”?

Channeling

16 Apr 2007

As anyone who has dabbled in tantra will know, a major problem with it is that it makes you extremely sexually aroused (aka horny) but you are not supposed to dissipate that energy but to use it to achieve higher states of conscious. It sounds implausible, if not positively masochistic. And indeed, the least one can say is that it is somewhat easier said than done…

I’m sure there’s material for a book in this, and I’m certainly not qualified to write it, but the great thing about Web 2.0 is how unqualified people can still write stuff anyway and it is easier to click away from their web page than get rid of them in a bar, so here come my thoughts on that subject.

The objective of “channeling” the energy is easy to misunderstand. There is a huge difference between channeling and repressing, but many of the things we think are channeling are in fact just less obvious ways of repressing. Many people think they “channel” their sexual energy into family, or work, or creative arts, but this is nonsense. The only things I believe we can channel our sexual energy into are sex itself and reproduction, fully sensual love and personal development towards enlightenment. Anything else is just a possible expression of that channeling.

What do I mean by “fully sensual love”? I just use this clumsy pleonasm to emphasize that we are not talking about the kind of “love” that is in fact a repression. Tantric love is a love without limits, a love of all creation and an ecstasy of living. This love is fearless, self-confident and compassionate, playful and committed. It embraces all the senses and delights in all that is delightful. It comes to identify with the ecstasy in the Other and make that a part of its own dance of life. All of the chakras participate in this dance.

In fact, this channeling of sexual energy into tantric love is not a “channeling” at all, it is not something under conscious control and it is not directing energy in one direction rather than another, it is just allowing it to spill over, it is a second level of ecstasy, a making love to the universe, and it doesn’t really “solve” the “problem” but it just moves it onto another level where it is, indeed, not any more a problem. This is a stage in the journey to enlightenment, it is the very meaning of personal spiritual development. Thus, the channeling of sexual energy into love is not distinct from its channeling towards Samadhi, that is, the “non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the consciousness of the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object” (Diener et al.).

To achieve this, we often work with breathing exercises. The breathing exercises allow our whole body and being to resonate with sexual energy instead of being blocked. When sexual energy can flow freely in the body, it can also flow out of the body and into the surrounding cosmos, and this is realized, tantric love, it is a quality of being which is immediately apparent to those who come into contact with us. These and other exercises serve to correct imbalances which we have stocked in our bodies as a result of defensive ways we have found to deal with the frustrations and disappointments of life, and which hinder our self-realization, self-confidence and life in the world.

Channeling sexual energy into sex itself may be more deliberative and is certainly fun and advantageous. Rather than “channeling”, this should better be called “release”. I think that this is the best way to deal with an accumulation of sexual energy provided, of course, that certain conditions are met, such as the consent of the partner and the appropriate precautions. It is good to flirt, seduce and copulate, to be man and woman, to rejoice in this cosmic game and to take pleasure in its afterglow. When we know tantric sex, we may reject this kind of game and take the whole thing so seriously, believing sex must be a “meditation” while having no idea what “meditation” is (a subject for another blog entry!). I think this is wrong, this type of sex is a release, let it be what it is supposed to be and enjoy it. It will not bring you to nirvana but it may help you to manage the process of getting there, because a build-up of blocked sexual energy is also dangerous and we should not underestimate this.

When no appropriate sexual partner can be found (but do not give up too easily!), self-love through masturbation is also fine. Make it self-love in the realest, deepest way you can imagine and achieve. In this way, release and growth will go together – and this also applies to conventional sex.

However, sex does not necessarily have this character of “release” at all. At some point, release is unnecessary and unneeded because energy can flow unhindered. I believe that the physical phenomenon of ejaculation may still occur, without loss or with substantially reduced loss of energy, when we make love in the tantric way.

When Uspenskij first achieves a higher state of wakefulness, his reaction is to ask Gurdjieff how to get rid of it, because it becomes unbearable to him. This is what we typically do in a small, everyday way in our sexual behavior and indeed in our approach to life. To get rid of it is not without meaning, it is not a sin. But gradually, we must allow the ecstasy to remain with us so that it can transform us, and, transforming us, transform the world. The ecstasy and the agony are in the tension between the world as it is and the world as we experience it habitually; by embracing ecstasy, we live more and more in the world as it is, and there we find Samadhi.

So tantra is a return to the source and an affirmation of life, lived authentically. It has no esoteric practices or secrets, however much we may hunger for the mystery and mystification that we desire in order to shield us from the world as it is. It has only a eclectic toolbox of techniques, which are something quite different. In fact, these techniques are not “tantra” at all, they are just therapies for the conditions that hinder us from approaching reality and living life to the full. And tantric sex is not a technique, it is just the front door to ecstatic union which many mystics have achieved, in many spiritual traditions, by roundabout means. The essential unity of all spiritual traditions is close to a self-evidence when you have inwardly grasped the tantric message.

In accordance with this, there is no esoteric method of “channeling” sexual energy, there are just techniques to help bring it to full expression. However, it is very easy to inadvertently repress what you are supposed to be consciously embracing. Many people, including practitioners of tantra, do not understand that this is what they are doing. They have then the form, but none of the content. Only when you understand that tantra is not technique, just as words are not meaning and sex is not love, are you on the path to transcendence and joy.