Tantra and Sacred Sexuality

If ever there has been a subject most misconstrued, this is surely the one. The reason; whenever the word `sex’ enters our awareness, we think only sex, everything else gets reduced to the periphery as our minds, repressed as they are, begin to ferret around the word in the most lively fashion conjuring images that disgust or delight us. But the `sex’ the conventional mind imagines has little to do with conscious love-making which is what `Sacred Sexuality’ is.

There are certain aspects of mind that need to be understood here; we have all been indoctrinated into a conventional idea of sexuality, it is strongly patriarchal and, as such, creates the illusion of unequal relationship (that being that the female is subservient to the male). This relationship will be explored below, what’s first important to understand is that this indoctrination has been more thorough than any other aspect of our cultural repression. There will always be advocates of peace in a war-glorifying society; there will be those who speak for racial equality in a prejudiced culture – but where in our pre-modern history can we find an incidence of someone coming forward to alert humanity to its sexual wrong-headedness, to the reality that conventional sex, as we have received it, brutalizes the masculine and scars the feminine? Where the great socio/political movements championing conscious love-making over unconscious sex? Perhaps your answer to these questions will be enough to suggest that this is one inherited myth that we have remained absolutely ignorant of and slave to for thousands of years.

Those mystics who have dared to traverse into the realms of our sexuality, have reminded us that `sexual union’ is a meditation, it is a pathway to higher consciousness, a delicious and magical opportunity to meet, soul to soul, with ourselves and/or another, and ultimately, all existence.

Thus, when we are faced by the word `sex’ and we immediately think the word `fuck’, we must understand that we are totally caught in a trap which demeans `love-making’ into becoming dirty, sordid and sinful, or the equally chimerical trap of excited fantasy and compulsive physical desire. And, when we become aware of someone who advertises or promotes their work with sexuality, be they Tantric practitioner or prostitute, we project all our misconceptions regarding sex, onto them.

If we can accept that we are completely brainwashed with regard to sexuality and ignorant of its practice and its purpose, then we have a chance to unlearn all our compulsions and addictions around it and begin again.

Sacred Sexuality is less about `sex’ than it is about the intention and motivation behind and through it, this is where the foundation work lies; in confronting and transforming our intentions, literally moving our conscious awareness of our sexuality from our body through to our spirit, acknowledging and honouring all of ourselves (body, mind and soul) as we do this. Any denial of ourselves arrests this process immediately and, since most of us get stuck at the physical (bodily) level, that’s where our work needs to begin. Before we look at the work itself we need to clarify a major obstacle to it, the damage inflicted by thousands of years of what I would call `The Rape of the Feminine’.

Horrific in its imagery (to some, not all), we cannot, especially those of us who are men, ignore the reality that, when presented with the opportunity during war, rioting, civil strife etc, a much higher percentage of men turn to rape than would dare cross that boundary under more constrained conditions where civic and moral order have a firmer hold on society. Men particularly need to confront this shadow energy within them, rape is only its extreme; any action which involves `taking’ pleasure from another without their consent is part of this shadow energy. In war, women are usually considered booty, mere objects which, once won, can be used as the man pleases, with total disregard for the woman herself. This again, is an extreme attitude, but it’s all a part of the cultural `male’ attitude of `women are there for the taking’ that has been handed down from generation to generation over the centuries.

A consequence of this, even during times of civic order, is that women are seen as 2^nd class members of society. Apart from the pain caused by this underlying attitude, it is wholly divorced from reality since it encourages focus on male/female roles rather than male/female relationship and, as is the case with all life, the mystery, the magic, the very essence of life, lies in the relationships. In the Tree of Life, drawn from the Kabbala, it is the 22 paths of relationship that contain the quintessence of the teaching; the sephiroth (those points denoting aspects of consciousness between which the relationships emerge) are nothing by themselves. So it is with everything, we are nothing by ourselves, we cannot exist other than through our relationship to all life. And natural relationships are not defined by points of superiority and inferiority, good and bad (and all the other fantastical terms we have coined to express our reality), they are fluid and reciprocal and potentially transformative. The question is never, `am I superior? It is `how am I relating? There is no superior consciousness, only more awakened consciousness.

As I write this, it becomes clearer and clearer how entangled and embroiled any discussion of Sacred Sexuality is; there are simply so many myths to be unraveled, so many unquestioned presumptions and attitudes that must be challenged and examined in the true light of reality.

The reason I’ve placed so much emphasis upon the misconceptions around male/female relationships is two-fold, first, as more evident members of the male principle, men have, for millennia, inflicted such violence upon the Divine Feminine that we have deeply wounded ourselves, and second (and in some ways more significantly) we have forgotten in the process, that the feminine principle provides the environment for sexual (and hence spiritual) union. Thus the male rides rough-shod over the very environment in which he can attain his own enlightenment and deep joy. The feminine has had little or no say in the matter of sexual union and women (by force or by sheer weight of cultural mores) have had to accept a form of sexuality which contravenes their instinctive feelings and, for many women, is at best tiresome, at worst painful.

And this is where we are today; women have the potential awareness to guide men toward sacred union but men have to face their compulsion around the sexual act (especially the compulsion to be in charge of it) in order to allow women, and the feminine principle itself, to emerge into their full knowing of themselves.

Thus the re-learning and re-embodying of our sexual heritage lies (in part) in men neutralizing their compulsions in sex and relationship and in women overcoming their fear of taking control of their personal sexual experience. This is no mean task, especially for the men whose compulsive sexual habits are ingrained, like a poison, into every cell of their bodies, but it is possible, and with love and commitment to the work, the deep connection to life through sacred sexual union is available to all.

This would, and will, transform humanity!