Reading Room

Excerpt: Chapters 1 and 2
from Barnaby B. Barratt’s
What Is Tantric Practice?

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Chapter 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 love make (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 them. Their breathing coordinates, and becomes synchronized with this movement of subtle energies that is flowing within, between, and all around them. They feel they are melting into each other, and dissolving into the universe itself. As they surrender into a prolonged orgasming, they lose the perception of any boundary between each other, or between themselves and the entire universe. They fall into an ecstatic flowing process of bliss. They are discovering tantric experience-and indeed, they may or may not acknowledge that this is what they are doing-but, regrettably, they probably do not know the methods by which such experimenting may be integrated into the routines of their everyday lives.

• A Hindu yogi (sometimes called a "sadhu" or "sadhvi") lives in a cemetery next to the "charnel" grounds where bodies are cremated. He (or she) meditates there, attending to the way in which his thoughts and his sensations arise-insisting themselves upon his consciousness-and then dissipate into the ether. He lovemakes joyously with his partner-his "tantric consort"-in this place where death is everywhere apparent. He attends to the way in which life appears and then disappears-every creation holding destruction within it, and every instance of destruction facilitating creativity. He becomes exquisitely aware of the "deathfulness" that lives within life itself, and the way in which the liveliness of life blossoms from within the very processes of death. He experiences the inherency by which a moment of destruction is required for every moment of creation, and in which every instance of creation will be destroyed. Facing immense physical and emotional hardship, he enjoys-he "finds the joy in"-both life and death, both pleasure and pain. Practicing yoga, he becomes enigmatically and extraordinarily aware of the way in which his own breath is merely a pulsation of the rhythm of all that is around him-and that this, indeed, is what his life most truly is, a mere pulsation in the diaphragm of the entire universe. He is practicing his tantric path, and he knows it. He is deliberately attending to his experiences toward his spiritual awakening.

Even glimpsed "externally" in this manner, it is surely evident that tantra offers us incredible opportunities to address the sensuality of our embodiment in a meditative way that expands our spiritual vision and insight-to awaken or cultivate the spirituality of our experiential awareness, and to free ourselves from the obstacles to our inherent bliss.

Chapter 2: An approach to tantric practice

Let us now take a more "internal" look at tantric experience. It can well be said that

Tantric processes awaken us to the way in which
the intense and personal realities of our presence in the world
align us with the infinite and supreme flow of the universe
which is that of the truthfulness of Love.

"Love" is understood here not as the bonds of a "positive" attachment between two or more people, but rather as the most profound and powerful vibration of spiritual energy that suffuses everything in the universe. As we will discuss throughout this book, tantric practice enables us to appreciate Love in this way-as the "Sacred Unity" pervading the universe, conjoining all that is and is not.

It is in this sense that tantra opens our lives to Love. And it does so by freeing us from the encumbrance of repetitive and compulsive thinking, from the alleged necessity of faith, from futile efforts to return to imaginary pasts, or from stale promises about imaginary futures, and from our imprisonment within the dogma of our judgmentally chattering minds.

Appreciated in this manner, tantric practice can serve as a label for any spiritual practice that requires our courageous commitment to live life to its fullest in this present moment, to live on the edge of the raw beauty of our human experience, and to celebrate the sacred energies that create, destroy, and recreate this present universe-by finding all these energies within the existential presence of our human embodiment.

Tantra is a spiritual practice that awakens us meditatively to the reality
of who we truly are, and of what life really is.

It invites us to dwell naturally, spiritually and ethically,
within the subtle desires of our embodiment,
and so to align ourselves with the Sacred Unity of Love.

If this statement is astounding or confusing, we can help ourselves by noticing at least three aspects of it.

> Tantric practice is a universal spiritual path. It is not a religion. Its methods do not require our orthodox or fundamental subservience to a Judgmental "God." Rather, these methods invite us to live life as a spiritual and erotic experience and experiment in the here-and-now.

Let us briefly elaborate what it means to suggest that tantric practice is a spiritual path and not a religion. To be on the tantric path, no abstract comprehension is required, no subscription to a set of beliefs, and no leap of faith about some divine “other” that is there-and-then, as contrasted with here-and-now in the present realities of our embodiment.

The former are hallmarks of religious commitment, and not the constituents of tantric practice. In this sense – quite unlike the orthodoxy or fundamentalism of religious belief – tantra releases us from any need to think about, or subscribe to, anything that is not discoverable here-and-now, within the realities of our own immediate experience as living, breathing, laughing, dancing beings-in-the-world.

Many of us have already turned to organized religions and found, to our disappointment, that all too often their “remedy” for our suffering is an impossible return to the past, or the promise of something better in the future. This applies not only to the evangelical Christianity that seems predominant in the United States, but also to most fundamentalist orthodoxies in Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and other traditions.

All too often, such belief systems demand that we strive for a past-future that is “better” in terms of the criteria of our egotism – more luxurious, totally safe, more comfortable, and definitely everlasting – a “heaven” somewhere other than this earth. And this “something better” will be available to us only if we subscribe to a particular system of beliefs, and if we behave according to some moralizing ideology that is supposedly the price of our deserving this eventual reward. Moreover, because “God” is conceptualized and narrated as an “other” that is somewhere there-and-then, these sorts of organized religion typically require that there be a clerical “middle-man” – priest or pastor – to interpret the dictates of this “other” to the faithful laity. In most organized religions, God is male and a strong advocate of patriarchal privilege, whose word is interpreted to the populace by clergy, who are usually also male.

It could be said that organized religions of this sort typically capitalize on the fearfulness of our egotism, exploiting its capacity for shame and guilt, telling us that whatever is present is "bad," and reinforcing the chattering judgmentalism of our egotistic mind. It could also be said that, by the installation of clergy as "middle-men," organized religions of this sort usually promote moralizing ideologies that support the specific interests of the ruling castes or classes, as well as the patriarchal system in general.

By contrast with such organized religions, the locus of spiritual practice is the individual's relationship with the divine, and because tantric practice finds divinity within our human embodiment, no "middle-man" is required to interpret the word of the "other."

Against religion as the pursuit of something there-and-then, tantra invites spiritual experience that is grounded in the divine flow of the sensuality of our embodiment. Against this sort of tantric spiritual practice, religious faith tends to support our egotism's insistence that we should live anywhere except in the presence of our fullest experience of our own life here-and-now.

The blandishments of organized religion, the platitudes of its orthodox and fundamentalist underpinnings, have all too often left us longing for an authentically spiritual path. In this essential sense, much organized religion is effectively anti-spiritual.

Unlike the "there-and-then" of organized religions,
tantra is existential and experiential;
inviting us to live ethically in an experimental adventure
that engages, erotically and ecstatically,
with what is really real and truly true,
within each of us individually.

Let us make a note here of what might be called the "seven Es" of tantra: Tantric practice is existential, experiential, ethical, experimental, and erotically-ecstatically engaging with life itself. Tantric spirituality involves methods of meditating with the body-it is always a practice, never a systematization of beliefs.

>- Tantric practice engages the subtle realities of sacred energy and is thus the "royal road" to ending human suffering. Tantra is a mystical engagement with the realities of the lifeforce that vibrates and flows within us, through us, and all around us. This lifeforce is pervasively within, yet as if somehow besides and beyond, as well as all around, the apparent and conventional "reality" of things and thoughts.

As soon as we accept the tantric invitation to engage the "reality of life as it truly is"-as soon as we begin to attend mindfully to the messages of our erotic embodiment-we encounter at least a hint that "life," as it conventionally appears to us in all our conceptual and narratological discourse, may not be "life as it truly is."

The only "prerequisite" to our stepping onto our tantric path is this openness to the possibility that there is a more profound reality to life than that of all the things commonly preoccupying us-namely, all our identities, positions or stories, and all our strivings for comfort, credibility, fame and fortune. There is a more profound reality to life than anything that all the business and busyness of our egotism will allow us to know. There is a more profound reality than the phenomenal world of objects, attachments, and persons-the "world" within which we enact the drama of our ambitions and attachments, by constructing, revising and adapting all our judgments about what "is" and what "should be."

To step onto the tantric path, we have at least to be a little open-minded to the possibility that this "world," as we conventionally know it, is something of an illusion that partially conceals and yet somehow also reveals (in so far as it actually intimates to us) a more profound reality.

In Chapters Three and Four-which are rather dense, "philosophical" chapters, that might be postponed or skipped by anyone who knows already the powerful experience of the subtle energies of our spiritual embodiment-we will discuss the nature of this more profound reality, and suggest how this sacred universe of spiritual life is, in a crucial sense, more real than the "reality" of objects, attachments, and persons-the ordinary world of things and thoughts. At this juncture, let us briefly address the question: Given its esoteric nature, why would anyone bother with this spiritual life?

As with any spiritual practice, no one would be drawn toward tantra if they were fully happy with the mundane world as it appears to them. You have picked up this book, and you are drawn to tantra because, in our world as we have construed it, you and I are suffering.

Through the course of our life's journey thus far, perhaps you (like myself and all other tantric practitioners) have already had some strong hint that the preoccupations of this mundane world-all our ambitions and attachments to objects, persons, and ideologies-will not ultimately deliver happiness. Perhaps you have already found out that:

Our egotism’s ambition to gain wealth, to accumulate material possessions, or to avoid the loss of anything to which we are attached, is never going to bring us happiness.
Our egotism’s strategies to achieve fame, to receive the attention or admiration of the masses, or at least to avoid reproach, scorn, persecution and disgrace, are never going to bring us happiness.
Our egotism’s extensive appetite for what it thinks of as “love,” for praise or validation from others, as well as its craving to be liked and respected or respectable, and to avoid blame, criticism, loneliness or isolation, is never going to bring us happiness.
Our egotism’s insistent preoccupations with physical and emotional comfort, as well as its fantasies that it might evade decay, deterioration, and death – along with all its futile efforts to avert the inevitable pain and losses involved in the lived experience of life itself – are never going to bring us happiness.

Perhaps your current situation is that you have pursued all these goals with greater or lesser degrees of success, and still found that material wealth, fame, praise, comfort, and even the attachments of what is commonly called "love," do little or nothing to stave off the reality of our ubiquitous dis-ease. The thrill of our egotism's successes in achieving what it craves-comfort, credibility, fame and fortune-always brings with it an intrinsic sense of lack, and the sense that whatever gratifications exist are only transitory. Everything that our egotism might tell us we can possess-our fortunes, our talents, and everything we hold most dear-brings inherent frustration into our lives and will, in any event, sooner or later be lost.

Perhaps we find ourselves hugely successful in this mode of "life," yet still aching for something more profound-a more real and more effective way to live more fully, and to return to that which we desire the most-the Sacred Unity of Love. The gratifications that our egotism has provided have left us numb, and in a certain sense, ever more alienated from the source of all that is really real.

Perhaps we sense that we have long since lost the intensity of our passion, the beautiful rawness of our human experience in the natural magnificence of this universe. Perhaps we sense that we have mortgaged ourselves for the achievement of false goals.

Or quite the reverse, perhaps we actually do know that we are anguished, wracked with grief and despair about the miserable state that we are in, and about the catastrophes of suffering that humans inflict upon themselves.

In any event, somehow-either deep down or in our immediate awareness we are sad, frustrated with, or merely angry at, the futility of egotistic "successes." We are frightened by the meaninglessness of a "life" organized around our egotism's inevitably futile attempts to avoid pain and loss.

We step onto the tantric path
because we are suffering in our life as we know it.
We are longing to find the genuine joy in life, to live life more fully.
We are longing to embark on our authentic spiritual journey.
Tantric practice is this spiritual journey,
for it engages the subtle energies of our personal embodiment,
and allows them to lead us to surrender ourselves
to the supreme flow of the universe,
which is the truthfulness of the Sacred Unity of Love.

The challenge of a journey is exactly what tantra offers us: A spiritual path grounded in our existential experimentation with the abundant flow of Holy Spirit that moves here-and-now within our erotic embodiment. The notion of "Holy Spirit" is, after all, just one way of pointing to the sacred energy by which we access the divine-by which we align ourselves with the Sacred Unity of Love. There are many other ways of speaking about this, and we will mention them later. The important point here is that, in this sense, "tantra" is any spiritual practice that engages the subtle realities of the sacred energy that calls from within us, through us, and all around us, and that aligns these embodied energies with Love.

> Tantra is a "high stakes" spiritual practice, engaging every aspect of our lives. Tantra is not an easy route to happiness and freedom-although it may be our only way out of suffering. Tantric practice is a "high stakes" adventure because, sooner or later, it challenges us to release ourselves from the imprisonment of our egotism. This is-in short-why we must be skeptically cautious about currently prevalent tendencies, in the western world, to render "tantra" into some sort of show-business, or to reduce it to the admirable goal of having "hotter and more vibrant sexual partnerships."

There is a sense in which tantric practice is the "fast track" to our spiritual awakening, but even so it is not an immediate solace in the face of our fear and trembling. If engaged seriously, tantra will not make our egotism "feel good." Far from it, our egotism mightily-persistently and often sneakily-resists authentically tantric practices precisely because they are its death knell.

Tantra invites us to trust exactly what our egotism, in its fundamental paranoia and grandiosity, cannot trust. It invites us to trust life itself, to trust the universe, and so to trust in the natural processes of our own ethical and spiritual awakening. It invites us to trust our own inner potential for spiritual awakening. Sooner or later, such trust entails the dissolution of our egotism, along with all its separatist and judgmental ideologies.

Tantra engages the reality of subtle energies
that lead us to surrender to the Sacred Unity of Love,
but in so doing, our egotism melts and dissolves.

Tantric practices cast us out of our preoccupations with conventional "reality," out of the business and busyness of maintaining our worldly successes, and even out of the illusions of our attachments to the relationships that we ordinarily think of as "love." Such practices shake up the very foundations of our mundane sense of who or what we are.

Tantra leads us into a profound and infinite joyousness, but in a way that is awesomely challenging-because, sooner or later, tantric practices bring into our awareness every painful experience that we have encoded in our embodiment. When we step onto the tantric path, we open our arms, our hearts, our genitals, and our entire bodymind to life itself. If we imagine that this will merely bring joy immediately into our lives, we will find ourselves sorely mistaken.

Whenever our egotism imagines that we can select the pleasure and avert the pain of life, it will effectively have taken us off our spiritual path. And when our egotism imagines that spirituality means the avoidance of pleasure, it has also taken us off our spiritual path. Authentic tantric practice embraces life's pain, and transmutes it into enjoyment of the totality of life itself. Tantra opens us to the full depth and intensity of our pain and loss, inviting us to live through these experiences in a way that ultimately liberates us from our suffering. Just as the potential for every joy in the universe can be discovered within our sacred body, so too can the possibility of every sorrow. The truthfulness of this is the discovery of tantric practice.

So tantra is not to be mistaken for our egotism's synthetic and superficial ideas about how to have "fun." It is not to be confused with a repertoire of "feel good" intimacies, nor even to the excellent project of having "better sex." And it is not to be mistaken for anything remotely comforting to our egotism. Tantra is a seriously spiritual journey intent upon the relief of human suffering, but this is far from congenial to our egotism.

Tantra leads us into an erotic union-a joyous, blissful, ecstatic union-with the divine source of energies that are both within us and permeating the entire universe. But it is dangerous to all that seems initially to "make sense," and it is ultimately terrifying to our egotism. Tantric practice is the path of fire.