What Is Tantric Practice?

Copyright © 2006 by Barnaby B. Barratt, PhD, DHS.

With collaboration and support from Marsha Anita Rand.

Cover design by Jennifer Everland

Photography by Bruce Nourse (cover photo) and Kirk Candlish (author photo)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Email: BBBarratt@Earthlink.net

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Contents

How to make best use of this book

1.

2.

On tantric realities …

3.

4.

5.

On tantric methods …

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

On tantric history …

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

On tantric lifestyles …

17.

Appendices

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Acknowledgements and Appreciations

About the Author

May all beings be happy and free;

May these writings contribute

to the happiness and freedom of all beings.

How to make best use of this book

The intent of this book is to offer a readily accessible and balanced answer to the question—What is Tantric Practice?—and so to clear up some of the many confusions surrounding the notion of tantra as it is being used today in North America, Europe, and elsewhere.

The question can be approached from a variety of angles, and could be answered in many ways and with different degrees of detail. So I would like to suggest that the manner in which you make use of this book can aptly be customized to suit your particular level of interest, your prior knowledge of tantra, and your preference for a practical approach, a philosophical approach, or an historical approach. In my mind there are at least five ways you might read this volume:

I.     If you would like a quick answer to the question—What is Tantric Practice?—then I suggest you read Chapters 1, 2, 6, and perhaps 17 for good measure.

II.     If you are considering embarking on tantric practice, perhaps even making it your spiritual path in life, then you will want at least to add Chapters 7 through 11, as well as Chapter 5 and Chapter 16. The first appendix is also written with you in mind.

III.     If you are skeptical about the spiritually esoteric notion that our human body contains subtle erotic energies, which do not conform to the objective picture of the body’s structures and functions as generated by western science, then I ask you to study (in addition to Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 17) Chapters 3 and 4. These Chapters are perhaps the most difficult to read because they attempt to specify philosophically the relation between the divine and the mundane. These Chapters address a mode of embedded relatedness that is extremely difficult—and ultimately impossible—for our logical-analytic mind to grasp. We are intellectually attached to foundational assumptions that something either is or is not, that a phenomenon is either one way or the other, and that time is a linear, unidirectional flow, experienced only in the fullness of the present. These intellectual attachments sooner or later obstruct our access to the reality of the divine. Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to honor your skeptical intellect, and yet demonstrate how this dimension of life that is spiritually esoteric may also be more profoundly and meaningfully real than the everyday world of appearances.

IV.     If you would like an historical answer to the question—What is Tantric Practice?—then Chapters 12 through 16 are written to satisfy this curiosity, and can be added to the basic reading of Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 17. The second and third appendices contribute additional historical details.

V.     Finally, I hope that there are some readers who will enjoy the entire book, and find benefit in its reading.

I have written this volume because, in the contemporary scene (in North America, in Europe, and elsewhere), the term tantra often merely implies a commitment to sexual practices that prolong pleasure, intensify orgasming, and promote styles of intimate relations that are more honoring, more emotionally engaged, and perhaps more spiritually grounded than might otherwise be the case.

As admirable as this commitment is, some people—especially those with an interest in spiritual paths of Asian origin—are becoming aware that tantra actually means more than this.

For example, it is well known that Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama, is an abstinent monk, but less known is the fact that his spiritual practices are nonetheless tantric, as indeed, are all those who follow in his path.

What will be shown in this book is that all tantric spiritual practices are indeed erotic, but not necessarily sexual in the conventional sense of the term sex. For tantric practitioners, the erotic entails the mobilization and alignment of our embodied spiritual energies toward the divine, and such spiritual practice may or may not involve sex in the usual sense.

As tantra becomes more widely known, we urgently need to appreciate something about spiritual practices that are erotic—meaning that they lead us toward a union or an alignment of our subtle energies with the divine—and which may or may not involve explicit sexual activity in the ordinary sense. To advance such an appreciation is one of the main intentions of this book. For there is much to be said about the ecstatic nature of these erotic spiritual practices—meaning that they take us out of the conventional and stultifying construction of our egotism—thus offering humanity powerful methods, which free us from our suffering by returning us to the Sacred Unity of Love.

The contemporary western world is understandably confused about the meaning of the tantric label. There has also been confusion in the lands of its origin—the Indian subcontinent. Traditionally, the term has at least three different meanings relating to:

•     A path of spiritual practices, and a way of living in meditation, that finds divinity within our embodiment as the abundant and exuberant flow of subtle sacred energies, and that taps into this flow with the intention of liberating ourselves from the structures that perpetuate human suffering.

•     A body of literature called tantras that refer to any discipline by which knowledge, wisdom or intuition, are expanded, and that therefore may cover topics as seemingly diverse as psychology, medicine, botany, geology, astronomy and metaphysical philosophy—as well as astrology, alchemy, and what many of us would consider magical procedures.

•     A form of religious devotion, often mixed up with what is called Shaktism, which is the worship of female versions of deities (or female and male deities who are erotically conjoined), as anthropomorphic personifications of energetic principles that are found within the divinity of our human embodiment.

The three usages often overlap, but I believe it is helpful to parse them apart, so that we can understand the heart of tantric practice, and distinguish it from what is derivative, tangential, or even thoroughly distractive.

The focus of this work is on tantra as a spiritual practice that addresses the divinity of subtle energies that flow within, through, and all around, our human embodiment. The intent is not to offer any details or instructions as to how to practice tantric spiritual methods. Rather, the intent is to discuss the nature of tantric practice, so as to clear away misunderstandings, and thus to provide a confident orientation for anyone stepping onto the tantric path. A different sort of introduction to tantric philosophy is also available in my The Way of the BodyPrayerPath: Erotic Freedom and Spiritual Enlightenment (Xlibris, Philadelphia PA, 2004), which is a more personal vision of tantric possibilities.

It is my hope that this book will clarify your appreciation of tantra, that it will provide a useful answer to the question of its title. I also hope it will stir your interest in a spiritual practice that I have personally found to be the most challenging, yet precious and empowering, path toward authentic freedom and true joyfulness.

Santa Barbara, California      Barnaby B. Barratt

Spring 2006      (also known as Bodhi Nataraj)

1.

A look at tantric experience

Tantric practice is a sacred path of spiritual methods that awaken our awareness of the subtle energies that create the realities of this universe, and through this awakening, liberate us from the devices of our own psychospiritual imprisonment. In this essential sense,

Tantra is all about divine energy and spiritual awareness,

and tantric practice is a way of living in meditation.

Tantra is a spiritual path that invites us to explore deeply the mysteries of life and to free ourselves from suffering. Tantric practitioners know this path to be the spiritual-existential science that engages the reality of life as it truly is, here-and-now. It is because of this that tantric practice is sometimes described as a science which experiments with, and is founded in, our deepest experience of the creative-destructive lifeforce. Tantric practice experiments with our human experience of the lifeforce pervading all that is and is not, in the presence of our everyday lives.

On the tantric path, we find this experience of the lifeforce to be both human and divine. This discovery of the divine nature of our humanity is accessible to all of us through tantric practice. Such practice makes this discovery available to us precisely because its methods engage the sacred lifeforce not abstractly as cognitive beliefs or articles of faith about the divine, but rather concretely in the everyday context of the subtle energies that are our erotic embodiment.

That is, tantra accesses the deepest realities of our existence through the immediacy of what might be called our sexual-spiritual being-in-the-world. This is the sensuality of our embodiment. Tantric practice finds the deepest realities of our existence within this embodiment—which is our body as the ground of all our lived experience, and as the conduit for sacred energy. In short,

Tantric practices of meditation engage the sacred energies of the lifeforce—

discovering them within ourselves as embodied human beings—

and, by awakening our awareness to this divine calling within us,

these spiritual practices facilitate our liberation from suffering,

which is called our enlightenment.

Tantra is the path of spiritual practices

that lead us into erotic union with the divine.

The intent of this book is to offer us a glimpse—an intimation of and an invitation to—the immense joy and freedom that tantric spiritual practice offers us. That is, it offers a glimpse of a deeper experiential and existential meaning that goes well beyond what can be adequately described in words. Let us begin by taking an external look at tantric experiences.

Tantric practice has many variants. Whether a particular tantric method works and plays with sexual-spiritual energies explicitly or implicitly is not as significant as the fact that all tantric experience addresses our awareness of these subtle sacred energies and grounds this awareness in our sensual experience—that is, in the existential experience of our embodiment, the bodymind as we live in it and breathe through it. In my view—and for the purposes of this book’s presentation—tantra is the name for any and all spiritual practices that engage these subtle energies so as to cultivate ethically our awareness of them, finding them to be the divine potential that flows within, through and all around every human being. Consider the following five sketches.

•     A monk, who is trained in the Geluk tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (which is called vajrayana Buddhism), vows to follow the example of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and to abstain from genital pleasuring or intercourse. As part of his training, he will spend many disciplined hours contemplating images of the divine in order to align his inner energies with those intimated by the images he is contemplating. If he attains the higher practices of what is sometimes called Anuttara Yoga Tantra, or the Supreme Yoga Tantra, he will experience amazing movements of subtle energies within himself to the point where he becomes one with—what in this tradition is known as—the clear light mind. That is, he will become one with Holy Spirit—the awakened Buddhanature or Compassionate Witness that lies naturally within every human being. As he practices, the energies he moves within himself are erotic—for they are the same energies that we all glimpse when we experience a really wonderful orgasm. But this monk is not having sex in the conventional sense of this term, and he never will. He is, however, practicing tantra, and he knows it.

•     A young woman spontaneously swims naked in the warmth of a Caribbean moonlit night. She relishes the sheer sensuality of the air on her skin, and the pleasures of the water cascading over her, smoothly supporting the fullness of her body. Slowly, she finds that she is losing her mind. Ripples of intense energy undulate through her body, as if her entire being were pulsating with a soft pervasive orgasming. Suddenly, she feels as if she has dissolved, and she is at one with the moon and the stars. The vastness of the heavens is within her, and she is spread throughout the galaxy above and the watery depths below. There is an important sense in which this woman is initiating herself onto the path of tantric experience. However, she may not recognize that this is what is happening to her, and—regrettably—she may never learn the tantric methods that facilitate this mode of experiencing. She may never learn how to move further into the spiritual opening or ethical awakening in which she has momentarily fallen.

•     A child jumps for joy at the exquisite beauty of a butterfly. In this moment of what some psychoanalysts have called jouissance, the child is at one with life itself, immersed solely in the enjoyment of the experience—without conceptualization, without narratological context, without past and without future—in love with the Love that is life itself, totally present.

•     An elderly couple begins to lovemake (let us suppose this is a heterosexual couple, although they could just as well be gay or lesbian). They bathe and massage each other tenderly. They join together in an hour of meditation, clearing their mind of all unnecessary preoccupations. Gradually, the chatter that usually claims their attention subsides and disappears. They engage in a special ritual, in which each honors the divine light within the other and within the self. They caress each other slowly, deliciously, and extensively. Each feels entirely focused on the sensations that are flowing within and between their bodies. As they enjoy oral lovemaking, their mutual energy builds intensively. It extends throughout their bodies, pervading the atmosphere around them, and rhythmically undulating through the air they breathe. Eventually, the woman invites his penis into her vagina. They move only softly, sufficient to maintain and expand the energies that are circulating within and between