"What
is Tantra?" an interview with Tantric Master Prem
Pranama
Interviewer,
Ralph Abrams.
R: The word Tantra
is thrown around quite a bit in spiritual circles these days,
and it often means very different things. I'd like to start
off with the simple question: What is Tantra?
P: Tantra is
the hot blood of spiritual practice. It smashes the taboo
against unreasonable happiness; a thunderbolt path, swift,
joyful, and fierce. There are many different types of paths.
Some touch you like a gentle spring rain, but Tantra is the
wild summer thunder storm churning with creation, destruction,
bliss and emptiness. Tantra is a wild mother tiger - if you
approach her with right motivation, right intention, and
integrity, she'll suckle you at her breast; but if you come
to her in a sloppy way, she'll rip apart your body-mind,
eat you for dinner, and shit out what's left.
R: Wow! I think
that this sense of joyful abandon and the force and bliss
you've described would make the Tantric path attractive to
many people. Plus the fact that it is known to be a very
swift path to enlightenment.
P. Swift, yes. But the Tantric
Vajrayana path is complex and can be dangerous. It requires
a strong, well integrated sense of self prepared through
careful preliminary practice. Otherwise it is possible for
the practitioner to make gross errors in judgment. On the
Tantric path, it is perhaps easier to become the ultimate
form of egohood and delusion than it is to become free. You
can start off intending to liberate the tyranny of ordinary
appearance into primordial awareness and end up crystallizing
the ego into diamond-hard delusion. There is no authentic
Tantra without profound commitment, discipline, intelligence,
courage, and a sense of wild, foolhardy, fearless abandon.
R: Why is that? And why foolhardy
abandon?
P: Foolhardy because the path is for gamblers.
There is a beautiful Rumi poem which speaks to this from
the Sufi tradition. "Love
is reckless; not reason. Reason seeks a profit. Love comes
on strong, consuming herself unabashed. Yet in the midst
of suffering love proceeds like a millstone, hard surfaced
and straight forward. Having died to self interest, she risks
everything and asks for nothing. Love gambles away every
gift God bestows. Without cause God gave us Being; without
cause give it back again. Gambling yourself away is beyond
any religion. Religion seeks grace and favor, but those who
gamble these away are Gods favorites, for they neither put
God to the test nor knock at the door of gain and loss" (translation
by Edmund Helminski)
Tantra takes the jump into crazy
wisdom by eliminating even God from the equation, leaving
only the mystery with no ultimate attempt to define it.
This is a path for those whose hearts are so wild that
they are ready to throw it all away on a hunch, for an
intuition. Discipline, courage, hard work and intelligence
are required because that is what any quest of the heart
demands. Tantra, which molds the power of creation and
ego into skillful means cutting through delusion, requires
careful preparation. We don't expect someone who just wants
to play around now and then on a keyboard to become a concert
pianist. We don't expect someone to be able to get up off
the couch one day and run a four minute mile. Great tasks
require great effort. With Tantra we are taking the mind
and body as cauldron, feeling, ego, elements and world
as alchemical ingredients, and imagination informed by
divine power as catalyst; and we are accomplishing the
great magical task of alchemical transformation. The base
metal of dualistic view becomes the infinitely valuable
gold of pure and luminous awareness.
Tantra is a path of
tremendous power. This power is not easy to use without getting
burned by it. Yet, at the same time, it is a path of great
joy. If you're going to use poison, pleasure, and personality
as the path, you have to be careful not to auto-destruct.
In working with an advanced sadhana (practice) such as Vajrakilaya,
which is central to our lineage, powerful energies of psyche,
nature, and the subtle realms are harnessed. When such a
powerful sadhana is introduced into one's system through
authentic empowerment, it is not something to be taken lightly.
Let's say you're going to bring anger into the path. It's
a razor's edge between liberating anger into the wrathful
compassion of mirror like wisdom and just becoming an arrogant,
self-righteous prig. With Vajrakilaya, either you are actually
transforming your mind stream into this wisdom-being of great
wrath and power, or you are just dressing up your egoistic
anger in the deitie's clothes. If Tantra is misused, the
divine becomes a demon. When you work with the Tantric path,
you are playing with a live wire. It's charged not with
electricity, but with the power behind creative force.
Tantric sadhana deconstructs and constructs reality, as
play, until the essence of reality becomes obvious. Through
the sadhanas, private non-realities interface with the
public non-reality until you realize the true nature of
both. You use illusion to cut through illusion.
R. I am not sure I understand
what you mean by public and private non-realities. Are
the images, energies, and beings worked with in the practices
real or not? Could you elaborate on that bit?
P. The basis
of all this lies in an understanding of Dharmakaya and
sunyata, "the
realm of essence" and "emptiness".
The Dharmakaya is not a place or even a state of being or
consciousness. Dharmakaya is the field of pure potential,
which is exploding into actualized energy and matter at every
moment. Each object or thing, even in its "thingness",
is still in essence characterized by this field of potentiality.
In other words, each "thing" is empty of permanent
characteristics; its characteristics share the quality of
pure dynamic potentiality and are always tending towards
the expression of that potential via constant change and
transformation. All worlds and fields of perception explode
from this pure potentiality, which is also pure awareness
or emptiness. This essence, this emptiness, is unspeakable
and is not any thing at all. And yet it is the dynamic matrix
from which all of this (waving his arm about the room) arises,
and of which all of this is a presentation, and into which
all this returns. This explosion of essence creates fields
of energetic perception.
This energy is conditioned into
forms by the play of cause and effect. These forms are our
world and our self. The world, and all worlds, are coincident
with the essence of awareness, which is birthless and deathless
and utterly free of the implications of form and limit. The
manifest world is not other than essence, but essence is
not limited to the shape or conditions of the manifest worlds.
One might say that the world and all worlds are held together
as form by the conditioned and habitual intent of consciousness.
Our particular world is held together by the intent of human
beings. The worlds of other beings are held by the force
of their conditioned intent. The structures of existence
are not "real" in
any ultimate sense. They are public non-realities, playful
dreams shaped out of essence and molded in form. They are
the radiance of pure potentiality, momentarily given shape
by intent and held in a seemingly cohesive pattern by karma
or patterned habitualized consciousness.
A Tantric yogi shatters
the tyranny of ordinary appearance - the forgetting of how
things took on their seemingly real forms - by molding new
structures of existence - private non-realities. We are not
talking here about "creative visualization" in
the sense generally used. Imagination is, generally, simply
mind forms within the public non-reality. We are talking
about the actual deconstruction of the building blocks of
reality and reconstruction of alternatives. Both public and
private non-realities are conditioned forms of consciousness.
By enacting the process of creation and destruction in the
private non-reality the unquestioned authortiy and permanence
of the public non-reality is undermined. Through the process
of advanced Tantric sadhana one is able to recognize the
ground of intrinsic awareness within all conditioned forms.
This realization allows one to live as intrinsic awareness
and recognize all arising as ornaments of that awareness.
The idea of Tantra is not identification
with endless new conditioned forms of awareness and color.
The point is to slip between the cracks into the matrix
of pure potentiality itself. The goal is not achievement
of unusual states it is to recognize your primordial intrinsic
nature in all appearence. Then all appearance has the single
taste of bliss and wisdom. That's not the end either it's
the beginning of endless play.
R. That goes quite a bit
beyond the general view of Tantra as merely a way of advanced
self-help rather than a profoundly magical or transcendental
practice. But isn't it also true that Tantra (in this radical
form) works with the ordinary emotions and everyday problems?
P. There are no ordinary emotions and everyday problems.
That's the point. Being is the natural luminous quality
of this matrix of pure potential and Being presents itself
in the play of existence. The bliss-mad radiance of pure
awareness plays in the colors of Being. The world and your
own body, your mind and your energies are nothing other
than the natural communicative thrust of limitlessness.
There is absolutely nothing ordinary about anything. When
the colors of Being are read through the distortions of
dualistic view, they appear as emotions and confusion,
and one is bound in the tyranny of ordinary appearance.
Being freed from distorted view plays as feeling and clarity
in the wild and raucous romp of manifestation. When the
true nature of every event is recognized, even the most
seemingly mundane moment will hold such great beauty that
it will shatter the mind.
Tantra's power lies in its ability
to recognize the poisons of ego as distortions of the qualities
of enlightenment. The practices transform these distortions
or, depending on one's capacity, spontaneously liberate
dualistic distorted view into its own true nature. For
Tantra the stuff of body, emotion and mind, ordinary emotions
and events are the essential ingredients needed for the
alchemical transformation of distorted view into Buddhahood.
R. You mention Being's appearance
as a play of colors, and that intrigues me. So often Being
is described as clear light or white light. Non-dual realization
seems to be a one dimensional and one flavor thing, whereas
this seems to have depth.
P. Light broken open by a prism
displays the colors that are always its nature. Its essence
is clear light and its nature is to manifest as the colors
of the rainbow. Pure awareness is completely transparent
like a sheet of glass. But when broken open, it displays
the rainbow of colors or flavors that are the substance
of manifestation. Pure awareness and the colors of Being
are not in opposition or even in any way two. They are
aspects of singleness.
So many spiritual paths inherently,
though often subtly, negate world, body, and existence.
They are always seeking to get elsewhere into the "light" failing
to recognize that all is light. Spiritual systems often misinterpret
bondage as resulting from being in form rather than from
wrong view. Because of this, they wrongly assume that enlightenment
means to be abstracted out of form into subtle realms or "pure" awareness.
These spiritual systems try to negate form and dissolve,
or return, into the pre-form matrix of pure potentiality.
This is possible and that radical act of transcending form
is most blissful - but it is not enlightenment. Form and
formless are not two; they are a single mystery. These systems
are spiritualized forms of the dualistic delusion.
Tantra,
which in its true form is Advaitic (or non-dual), transcends
this limitation. Tantra is wisdom gone wild embracing the
totality of what is. With Tantra you are not getting somewhere;
you are just waking up to the true nature of things as they
are. The colors inherent in clear light are not other than
the light. The display whereby Being presents its limitless
mystery is not other than the birthless and deathless pure
mystery from which Being comes..
R. It's interesting that
you mention Advaita. I recently read Poonjaji, an Advaitic
master. He advocates no practice. Form is illusion and every
action by the illusory self adds to unenlightenment. What
do you think of that.
P: Well, I have great respect for the
traditional forms of Advaita. I have always been intimately
connected with Ramana Maharshi, and the path that I teach
is "Advaitic
Tantrayana". On the other hand, there are some serious
problems and limitations with the talking school of Advaita
versus the various practice schools such as Tantra.
R: What
do you mean by "talking school"?
P: Talking schools are those that understand that delusion is
only an illusion and all that you need to do is understand
the illusion to be free of it. Because all you need to do
is understand, then all I need to do as master is explain
the truth to you, and all you need to do is listen and you
will "get it".
The problem is that this is a superficial grasp of understanding.
Understanding in the talking school is considered a primarily
mental act. I talk; you listen. In truth understanding is
a whole body act. You must understand with the cells of your
body, your mind and your feelings. Listening involves a profound
action of the entire self. This action is what practice is.
Spiritual practice is the act of listening to the teaching
with the whole body. There are fundamental differences between
a teacher, even an awakened one, and a master. Poonjaji is
a teacher. He speaks about Truth very nicely, though he suffers
a bit from the delusion of viewing form as illusion rather
than presentation of the formless. Due to this he lacks the
skillful means needed to deal with the actual roots of delusion.
He lacks the skillful means to communicate with the whole
bodily being rather just the mind. In a recent interview
he said that he teaches the pure Truth - some get it, some
don't, and he doesn t know why. That's the difference between
a teacher and a master: A master knows why and can deal skillfully
with the causes. A master is willing to deal with delusion
on its own ground if necessary. He or she is willing to take
on the dragon in its cave, even if the dragon is only an
illusion. The teachers of the endless talk no practice school
go on to say "open
your eyes and see the beautiful sunset. You do not need to
do anything, add anything to yourself. Just open your eyes".
While it is true that you don't need to add anything, the
problem is that your eyes are shut and you are wearing a
blindfold. You open your eyes and see nothing. These teachers
do not see you because they are too busy admiring their own "non-dualism".
The teachers of the Advaita talking
school do in fact give practices. They give the very difficult
practice of pre-verbal inquiry which works once you have
taken off your blindfold. But until then it leaves you
stranded. All too often people make sense of the words
and develop conceptual enlightenment. You understand the
description of the sunset so well that you think you are
seeing it, even though you are still wearing a blindfold
and have your eyes closed. People in this condition even
go on to become teachers of the talking school, endlessly
describing the imagined sunset to others. I am sure that
it is based on my Tantric predilection for wisdom gone wild,
my delight in manifestation, but I often find these Advaitic
teachers a little prissy. They are unable to enjoy the game,
unable to enjoy the madness and wildness of existence. There
is no space for non-dual dualism in their non-dualism.
R: That clears up some confusion about Advaita which I hadn't
quite been able to put into words. You mentioned Ramana Maharshi.
As I understand it your path was not originally Tantric.
I would be interested in hearing about how you evolved into
this style of practice and teaching. What led you to awakening
and to teaching the way that you do?
P: My introduction and
initiation into the world of Tantra began with a naked menstruating
woman in the University of Michigan's graduate school library.
She danced and sang and placed her bleeding * over my
mouth and I drank from that source the nectar of immortality,
the liquid union of bliss and emptiness. She was the Vajra
Dakini Yeshe Tso-gyal, Mother of my true life. But that is
the end of the story and was not planned, asked for, or expected.
For most of my spiritual journey I had nothing to do with
Tantra nor wanted to. My own spiritual work began in the
Gurdjieff system. Gurdjieff was influenced by Tantric teachings
though more strongly influenced by the Sufi schools. In his
system I found a concrete practical method for working with
the habitual conditioning of my body, mind, and emotions.
I got to see myself without any veneer. It was in this school
that I began to truly crystallize the wish to grow and forge
it into a center of gravity that could begin to pull the
unintegrated parts of the self into a unified whole.
After
some time I began to find that certain axioms on which the
work depended were, for me, limited in their view. Given
the lack of anyone I considered a true Master, I resumed
my search for a system that could take me farther. I visited
many different teachers and communities, read enormous amounts,
and engaged in a variety of rather extreme experiments on
myself. Eventually I encountered the work of the enigmatic
and rascally Master Osho.
My meeting with Osho, who was
called Bhagwan at that time, awakened my heart into intense
ecstasy and devotion. It also began a long period of powerful
visionary experiences that centered on the Virgin Mary
and the Goddess Kali. For me devotion was an instant and
natural though hard path often filled with confusion. My
heart exploded in love. The Guru is the trigger. The Guru
is the object that the devotee uses as an excuse to slip
through the boundaries of ordinary feeling. I learned,
in a trial by fire, that irresponsible devotion to the
master always ends in serious suffering. In other words
the Guru ain t your daddy, the Guru is an introduction
to your own nature. What is most important is that I did
learn, and over time the love that Bhagwan awoke in me
matured into non-dual inquiry. One day all the energy that
had been pouring outward in love for five years simply
stopped and began to move inward.
This process was fundamentally
Ramana Maharshi's question "Who
am I"?. Who is the one who experiences all experience?
This process cuts through all hierarchy of "higher" or "lower" experience
by cutting to the root of all experience. Each time I sat
down it was like a vortex of energy moving into expanding
fields of silence. I would feel this vortex and rest in it.
It would draw me into deeper and deeper states of silence
from where I would engage pre-verbal inquiry. What had been
ecstasy and love before was now recognized as a womb-like
place of silence. When I started the meditative phase of
my practice, all the visions stopped short. Previously they
were explosions of love, and they kind of rode on the outflowing
energy of devotion, my interest in them fueling their appearance.
Very late in the silent phase of practice, several months
before my own awakening, a new series of visionary experiences
began. Visions of Yeshe Tso-gyal, Queen of the Lake of Awareness,
Mother of Pure Pleasure.
These visions exploded from the
depths of emptiness and silence. One morning, after I had
finished my practice, I went to the library to study Sufi
texts. I was reading two volumes of Rumi's works. As I was
walking towards the library, I had a feeling that was familiar
from previous visionary experiences. It was an intense pleasurable
sensation that pushed out from the center of my body, from
my heart, towards my skin, though this time it seemed to
open forth from silent space. I felt giddy and drunk. I looked
up and for a moment I could swear I saw the outline of a
dancing woman standing in the air above the library. She
was huge! Maybe three hundred feet tall. The vision lasted
for a second, and I went in and began reading on the nearly
deserted fourth floor. The longer I sat, the more intense
this vibration became. I knew this process very well, and
I knew it would lead to a feeling of such intensity, that
the ordinary world around me would black out. This feeling
of ecstatic drunkenness gets stronger and stronger as if
it's resonating more and more swiftly through the entire
body. At a certain point visionary experience outshines the "ordinary" world.
I found myself in a cemetery. A woman approached. She was
naked, except for some bone ornaments. She was singing and
dancing a tune of haunting melody, which I later discovered
was the mantra of her consort Padmasambhava: Om Ah Hung Vajra
Guru Padma Siddhi Hung! I was entranced, simultaneously with
ecstatic love and an absolute feeling of overwhelming sexual
desire so strong that I was sure I would die from it. She
danced around me and then swiftly stood directly in front
of me placing her genitals over my face. Her vagina was over
my mouth, there was blood flowing from it, and I drank this
blood deeply in an unending flow. I could feel it coursing
through my body like liquid heat. Suddenly the vision disappeared.
I got up and went home - well, actually, I think I first
went and had a chocolate chip cookie. This began a period
of what my wife and I refer to as the "drooling in
the living room" period.
I spent close to a month, mostly sitting in a rocking chair
in our living room unable to function because the force of
Bliss that was flowing through my body was so overwhelming.
I was also unable to speak about what was happening.
R: You
have a very understanding wife.
P: Yes. Without her I cannot
imagine what would have happened to me during this time.
These experiences awoke in my mind and body such intense
unending bliss and latent neurotic traces of such force that
it was unbelievable. Feelings of every kind of distortion,
rage, anger, lust, grasping, aversion. I am sad to say that
I did a fair amount of acting out on these before any balance
was restored, causing suffering to myself and others. Needless
to say, this was a very trying time for our marriage. One
of the things that happens in spiritual practice is that
the subtle aspects of our ego, the seed essences of ego,
hide within our own practice. If you are lucky enough, at
some point the bliss force of the divine will force these
out into the open. So it wasn't all just bliss. It was an
encounter with the ugliest sides of myself and the most beautiful.
The whole picture. The visions, on a daily basis, kept arising.
By and large they involved an experiment in mixing states
of bliss with my previous practice of self inquiry and the
feeling of silent emptiness. Bliss wed to emptiness produces
tremendous power and that's what was being introduced at
this point.
R: I can see the evolution of
you path from Gurdjieff's very concrete self work into
the devotional relationship with a master and mystical
states and that leading into silence and inquiry. It seems
kind of like this Tantric part was finishing you off. So
did this practice lead to your realization?
P: This was
all going on without any conscious volition at all. I was
continuing Advaitic non-dual self inquiry with all the
force I could: Who is the one experiencing this? And if
I had actually been able to stop these experiences I probably
would have, because they were distracting me from inquiry
as well as provoking some pretty stupid behavior in my
ordinary life. Luckily, the power of the Dakini, the wisdom
woman, was so much greater than my piddling efforts to
prevent it. But as these experiences continued in the body,
mind and emotions I continued my inquiry. The awakening
came as a result of this practice mix. The mind of bliss
is capable of penetrating much more deeply into truth. Happiness,
bliss and pleasure inspire a radical kind of courage. Without
it no one would leap into that sky of deathlessness and selflessness.
Without the bliss force no one would be such an idiot as
to throw their life away on a hunch. Realization itself is
beyond any and all experience. It is, however, not exclusive
of experience or even rejecting of it; it is all-inclusive.
After awakening one is restored to absolute and endless humor.
R. So how did your teaching work
begin and where did the Tantric transmission figure in
that?
P. Several months after Awakening, a friend of my
wife's, feeling the difference in me, asked if I would
help her with her spiritual practice. I agreed, and several
months later more friends of our family asked if I would
work with them. My teaching began very slowly and gradually.
In the beginning, what I taught was non-dual inquiry, because
it seemed the most direct. What I realized over time was
that the practice of inquiry and also the natural practice
of devotion toward the formless divine is ineffective in
most people's lives. It doesn't carry with it the skillful
means to work with the obscurations and defilements - the
gross and subtle neuroses - that prevent people from realizing
their own nature of bliss and awareness in perfect union.
The Advaitic practice that I was doing was extremely similar
to the Dzogchen or Ati Yoga teachings of the Nyingma lineage.
It was through the Advaitic practices that I was able to
reconnect. One of the most amazing things about Padmasambhava,
Yeshe Tso-gyal's Guru, was his recognition that there were
many teachings that would need to be re-discovered at a later
time. He and Yeshe Tso-gyal wrote the practices down and
hid them in the elements and in the pure nature of awareness
- in the mind stream of his disciples. This is the true origin
of my connection to Tantra. Padmasambhava created what is
called a Mind Mandate Seal and hid teachings on Tantra's
skillful means like a timed-release capsule. When my own
practice matured to the point where it was appropriate this
force of wisdom opened. The force, power and bliss of it
was released also, even though I had completely forgotten
this connection.
R: So you really didn't have
any contact with Tibetan lamas, or the Nyingma (Padmasambhava's)
lineage, yet your teaching is very much influenced by Tantra
and you recognize Padmasambhava as your root Guru. Without
any contact with the lineage, you're kind of a wild card
as a teacher.
P: (Laughing uproariously) Yeah, I am a wild
card as a Tantric Master. But even wilder than this crazy
connection with Tantra is that I am free. Free of birth
and death, fear, anxiety, worry. Free beyond being and
non-being. Free to do anything. And I just might - and
it's a wonderful thing! A wild card like me who has awakened
into and embodied the heart of Tantric practice is unique
in terms of the trans-cultural migration of Tantra to the
West. Padmasambhava was a wild guy because he was the freedom
and bliss of this mysterious reality. Those who awaken
to their true nature are the same one - though in their
own unique appearance. As Tantra develops in this culture,
many aspects of its form are going to have to change. At
the same time this must be done in such a way as to not
damage the teachings. This is a job of great delicacy.
These changes need to be done by someone who stands outside
the traditional lineages yet respects the heart drop of the
teachings with extreme reverence.. All Tantric practice originates
from Pure Vision revelation. Tantric practices in the Buddhist
form originate from the Sambhogakaya, or the Visionary Bliss
Realm of reality. An advanced practitioner can receive teachings
from this source though it is very rare. An awakened master
is this realm - it is an aspect of their body.
It is certainly
reasonable to be skeptical, and I ask my students not to
accept anyone's teachings on blind faith, but to test them
in the laboratory of their own body/mind. The faith needed
to have a Tantric relationship to a Spiritual Master has
to develop over a long period of time. You can't simply jump
right into it. There must be testing on both sides - time
and deeds. I certainly am mad by any standard. You and I
don't live in even remotely similar worlds. I know the universe
to be my body, time itself to be my subtle form, and the
sky of deathless awareness to be my mind. My interest now
is to spark this awakening in others, not to have them fixate
on me. That would only destroy their growth and in the long
or short run cause them to hate me. We all hate what we are
dependent on - no one likes to be a slave. You should take
a little time before hopping into the Dharma bed because
once in it there really is no such thing as safe sex. Think
about it as carefully as you would a marriage partner. It
can take years. There is a safety catch: You don't receive
advanced Tantric practices in the beginning anyway. You begin
with the pre-preliminary practices, which in our community
are a series having to do with developing stability in body,
mind and emotion at the ordinary psychological level. You
can use the traditional meditations on loving kindness, and
exchanging oneself for others. These styles of meditation
work very deeply.
At the same time, I might suggest
that somebody seek out therapy, or work in a Twelve Step
program. If you are obsessed with anxiety, fear, worry,
comparison, shame, self doubt, body doubt, sex doubt, then
those things become your center of gravity. The constant
effort to compensate for the pain of neurosis saps you
of the joy of ordinary life and the energy for spiritual
evolution. In this state of being, people try to replace
the work neededto develop an authentic center of gravity with the Master or God
- as if some external could be it for you. This must be outgrown.
Next there are the extraordinary Tantric preliminaries involving
Prostrations, Vajrasattva practice, Mandala practice and
Guru Yoga. These are fairly traditional. This is not an assembly
line to enlightenment. Each person s path is unique and possibly
very different from this description. There are people in
our community who never work with the Tantric path at all,
who work along other lines. The extraordinary preliminaries
however are profound psycho-transformational methods weaving
together body, emotion, energy and mind to awaken latent
potential. During this phase and after the preliminaries
are finished students begin to work with the energies of
diety yoga and the radical practices of Advaita and Mahasanti.
Another way I work with my students is to send them to the
best of the living masters from the traditional lineages.
This broadens their view and them to test my teaching, my
style of teaching, and the authenticity of my transmission
in the context of those who are commonly acknowledged to
be Tantric Masters. Three wonderful Masters I send my disciples
to are Chagdud Tulku, Lama Tharchin, and Nkgapa Chogyam.
R: It doesn't sound like you're
shy about letting your students go out and experience other
Masters. P: Absolutely not!
R. That seems a bit unusual.
Most people have a great fear of Gurus entrapping them
in dependency relationships. Sending disciples to other
masters seems like it would help cut through that.
P. It
is necessary for two reasons. One is that it cross-pollinates
the lineage. This is one of the beautiful things about
Tantra. You need the foundation of more than one master.
You need to receive the special energies of transmission
and empowerment from a variety of skillful masters. This
cross-pollinates, just like in gardening; it creates a stronger
plant. There is one Guru in your heart and many in the world.
It is up to each person to figure out who their heart connection
is with. The other reason is, I am a wild card as far as
Tantric teachings go. I claim the authority to teach Tantra
based on my own radical awakening into non-dual awareness
and my own Mind Mandate Transmission from Padmasambhava.
Such claims could easily be made by any idiot - and often
are. I want my students and disciples to have a strong ground
on which they can evaluate me and decide where our connection
will go. I would like my students who do Tantric practice
to be able to work with other masters so that they can come
to a greater degree of understanding of my work when evaluated
in the context of the traditional tantric practice.
R: It
seems to me that there is a lot of information and books
written about sexual Tantra, and certainly more people are
interested in that than in other forms of Tantra. Perhaps
they are seeking this bliss courage that you mentioned earlier.
Do you think that people practicing sex yoga are by and large
serious Tantric practitioners?
P: Well, there's no point
in judging other peoples' spiritual paths. If your path is
not authentic over time that becomes clear. Traditionally,
the use of sexuality in Tantra comes at a very developed
stage of the path. There is no sexual Tantra if one has not
transcended desire. Certainly a lot of people are trying
to explore and play with sexual energy, and that is great,
and they are relating it to the word Tantra because Tantra
uses sexuality as part of the path. We live in a seemingly
open and permissive culture that actually is very uptight,
prudish and provincial. We hype neurotic sense stimulation
in order to sell everything from shampoo to cars. Underneath,
there is fear of everything genital. Tantra, however, is
not about sexuality. It is about enlightenment. Compared
to the bliss force of your true nature, the pleasure of orgasm
is pretty puny. The teachings can be used to bring a certain
degree of ordinary balance to the psyche, including openness
about sexuality. That's a very good thing but let's not stop
at the doorway!
R: Enjoying Tantra for the psychological
help is good but no substitute for radical absolute spiritual
liberation.
P: Right.
R: You emphasize community and
that is very interesting to me. I find that many people
these days want their practice to be a personal and private
part of their life. Relationships are hard and spiritual
practice is hard mixing the two seems like it could ease
up the process or complicate it.
P: For spiritual practice,
community is of vital importance in our culture. In traditional
cultures the shock that broke one out of complacent patterns
came from moving out of a community that had been the center
of one s life. In our culture, we have just the opposite
senario. The shock here is brought about when people move
into community from the isolated lives that our culture
creates. This was central to the Gurdjieff system and very
powerful.
R: That sense of isolation we
have as a culture is very sad.
P: It is very sad - heartbreaking!
As you grow and mature in sadhana you need to test your
growth in daily life, in job, in relationship, and in the
community of other practitioners. There are of course exceptions
to this, people who need solitude for their practice to
grow strong, and there are practices which require prolonged
solitude for accomplishment. Right now I am discussing
with the community the formation of a Hermitage center
for long term intensive retreats. This is very important
if we re going to actually manifest the higher levels of
practice and destroy the tyranny of ordinary appearance.
We must be careful that the higher and highest levels of
Tantric practice do get transmitted. The loss of these
great methods is a real danger. There is a danger to the
traditional forms of Tantra because the cultures of Tantric
practice are being decimated by war or westernization,
the cult of scientism. I think in our culture there is
a different threat: That the deeper levels of practice
will not be reached to begin with. In our culture the threat
is that Tantra will be stillborn. Practitioners will have
to break through the cult of TV. mentality and mediocrity
into the dignity of their Vajra natures if Tantra is to
take root here and flower in its fullness.
R: There might
not be enough students who have the basics down and then
move into the deeper levels of practice.
P: Right. As Tantric
practice takes root in our culture it is important that
there be an understanding of the vastness of possibilities
that Tantra offers. Waking up into the bliss-mad realm
of the perfect union of perception and pure pleasure is
really quite something. It is better than what people are
dreaming up in the sex workshops. For one who is awake,
the relationship to the world, to the elements, is completely
different than for anybody else. We have to be able to move
into the really magical and wondrous forms of transformational
practice where you are working not only with your own body/mind
at its most subtle levels, but the elements themselves. That
level of awakening needs to be realized It s power needs
to be applied to the culture and the actual ground upon which
we live. To work at these levels - the beginning levels and
the most advanced levels, which bring radical awakening or
enlightenment - to work with all of these is the real gift
that Tantra brings. The gift is that we can encompass the
whole of our lives, from the ordinary to the most wondrous,
in a single path.
R: Which is quite a feat.
P: It is! The Tantric
yogi, who can live married with children, a completely
ordinary life, but at the same time play with the world
as an ornament of awareness, is really something! To recognize
all appearance as the ornament of your own wisdom nature
and to live in the bliss-mad realm of freedom where all
perception is delight: That is the goal of Tantra.
R: Thank
you.
P: Remember we
are talking here about your birthright. Awakening is your
birthright. Accept your inheritance!
