Tantra Yoga
Posted by Armand
Tantra means many things to many people. Literally, it’s a Sanskrit word meaning “weaving” and “expansion.” The Tantric community is definitely eclectic, containing everything from devout spiritual practitioners to New Age prostitutes. It’s important to ask questions, do your research, and trust your intuition before selecting Tantric teachers or programs.
History
For some Tantric Monks females partners to represent goddesses. In left-handed Tantrism, ritual sexual intercourse was employed, not only for pleasure but as a way of entering into the underlying processes and structure of the universe through a sustained state of altered consciousness.
Ritual practices:
Ordinary ritual
The ordinary ritual or puja may include any of the following elements:
Mantra and yantra
As in other Hindu and Buddhist yoga traditions, mantra and yantra play an important part in Tantra. The mantras and yantras are instruments to invoke specific deities such as Shiva and Kali. Similarly, puja may involve focusing on a yantra or mandala associated with a deity.
Identification with deities
Tantra, being a development of early Hindu-Vedic thought, embraced the Hindu gods and goddesses, especially Shiva and Shakti, along with the Advaita philosophy that each represents an aspect of the ultimate Para Shiva, or Brahman. These deities may be worshipped externally with flowers, incense, and other offerings, such as singing and dancing; but, more importantly, are engaged as attributes of Ishta Devata meditations, the practitioners either visualizing themselves as the deity or experiencing the darshan (vision) of the deity. These Tantric practices used to form the foundation of the ritual temple dance of the devadasis.
Secret ritual
Secret ritual may include any or all of the elements of ordinary ritual either directly or substituted along with other sensate rites and themes such as a feast (food, sustenance), coitus (sexuality), charnel grounds (death, transition) and defecation, urination and vomiting (waste, renewal, fecundity). It was this sensate inclusion that fueled Zimmer’s praise of Tantra as having a world-affirmative attitude:
“In the Tantra, the manner of approach is not that of Nay but of Yea … the world attitude is affirmative … Man must approach through and by means of nature, not by rejection of nature”
In Avalon’s Chapter 27: The Pañcatattva (The Secret Ritual) of Shakti and Shakta (1918), he states that the Secret Ritual (which he calls Panchatattvam, Chakrapuja and Panchamakara) involves:
Worship with the Pañcatattva generally takes place in a Cakra or circle composed of men and women… sitting in a circle, the Shakti [or female practitioner] being on the Sadhaka’s [male practitioner's]left. Hence it is called Cakrapuja. …There are various kinds of Cakra — productive, it is said, of differing fruits for the participator therein.
In this chapter, Avalon also provides a series of variations and substitutions of the Panchatattva (Panchamakara) “elements” or tattva encoded in the Tantras and various tantric traditions and affirms that there is a direct correlation to the Tantric Five Nectars and the Mah?bh?ta.
Sexual rites
Sexual rites of Vama Marga may have emerged from early Hindu Tantra as a practical means of generating transformative bodily fluids. These constituted a vital offering to Tantric deities. Sexual rites may also have evolved from clan initiation ceremonies involving the transaction of sexual fluids. Here the male initiate was inseminated or insanguinated with the sexual emissions of the female consort, sometimes admixed with the semen of the guru. He was thus transformed into a son of the clan (kulaputra) through the grace of his consort. The clan fluid (kuladravya) or clan nectar (kulamrita) was conceived as flowing naturally from her womb. Later developments in the rite emphasised the primacy of bliss and divine union, which replaced the more bodily connotations of earlier forms. Although popularly equated with Tantra in its entirety in the West, sexual rites were practiced by a minority of sects. Sadly, for many practicing lineages, these maithuna practices. due to prevailing conservative, almost Victorian, attitudes towards sexuality in India, progressed into strictly psychological symbolism stripping it of its essential energetic aspects as is the case with most of hatha yoga practiced today in the West.
When enacted as enjoined by the tantras the ritual culminates in a sublime experience of infinite awareness, by both participants. The Tantric texts specify that sex has three distinct and separate purposes: procreation, pleasure, and liberation. Those seeking liberation eschew frictional orgasm for a higher form of ecstasy, as the couple participating in the ritual, lock in a static embrace. Several sexual rituals are recommended and practiced. These involve elaborate and meticulous preparatory and purificatory rites. The act balances energies coursing within the pranic ida and pingala channels in the subtle bodies of both participants. The sushumna nadi is awakened and kundalini rises upwards within it. This eventually culminates in samadhi wherein the respective individualities of each of the participants are completely dissolved in the unity of cosmic consciousness. Tantrics understand the act on multiple levels. The male and female participants are conjoined physically and represent Shiva and Shakti, the male and female principles. Beyond the physical, a subtle fusion of Shiva and Shakti energies takes place resulting in a united energy field. On an individual level, each participant experiences a fusion of one’s own Shiva and Shakti energies.
The Tantric practice carries within its essence a non judgmental understanding of the limitations imposed by the always subjective and relative “morality” and their full acceptance of the physical vehicle as an extraordinary accelerant rather then a hindrance to spiritual evolution. This attitude of inclusive embracement of all sides of the human experience as they progress towards the enlightenment through ecstasy, allows Tantrics to access dimensions of consciousness altering ecstasy, magick and life flow, rarely, if ever achieved by any other spiritual discipline.