Mod+ Sex & The Sacred

Crowley & "Sex Magick"

http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeV/Unleashing_the_Beast.htm

http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Equinox-Vol-Magick/dp/1578635713

When we talk about "sacred sex", really we're talking about a moment when the "self" dissolves into the "All" during orgasm. The question is, how do you choose to interface with that moment? Is it nothing more than "getting off", or is there a genuine union with the infinite going on? That's really the crux of it. The Magick is what you make of it. But that isn't to say that the "energy release" can't have "reverberations" in the Aether, regardless of what someone brings to the experience.
 
When we talk about "sacred sex", really we're talking about a moment when the "self" dissolves into the "All" during orgasm. The question is, how do you choose to interface with that moment? Is it nothing more than "getting off", or is there a genuine union with the infinite going on? That's really the crux of it. The Magick is what you make of it. But that isn't to say that the "energy release" can't have "reverberations" in the Aether, regardless of what someone brings to the experience.

The thing about some "Tantric" sex practices is that they allow one to expand the orgasm into a rolling wave that lasts for minutes. It's like stepping outside standard time perception. So you get to move within that state and even move into other states that last seemingly hours. (Still minutes in standard time) My lightly-held goal is to experience a week within orgasm.
 
The thing about some "Tantric" sex practices is that they allow one to expand the orgasm into a rolling wave that lasts for minutes. It's like stepping outside standard time perception. So you get to move within that state and even move into other states that last seemingly hours. (Still minutes in standard time) My lightly-held goal is to experience a week within orgasm.

When you manage to pull that off, would you mind writing me up a step-by-step manual?
 
Myers immediately explains that there is no “emotion subliminal” that ranges so widely and shows itself in so many guises as love. 121 Employing his spectrum method again, he explains that at one end of the scale, love is “as primitive as the need of nutrition,” that is, it manifests as sex. At the other end, eros morphs into hermeneutics. Literally. Here is Myers:

“at the other end it becomes, as Plato has it, the hermeneueon kai diaporthmeuon, ‘the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man’” (HP 1: 112).

We are back to the threshold and the art of interpretation across the gap of two states of consciousness or being. Myers immediately glosses this rather mysterious line with another:

“The controversy as to the planetary or cosmical scope of the passion of Love is in fact central to our whole subject” (HP 1: 112).

In other words, it all comes down to whether we understand the erotic as something simply sexual and biological, or as something also potentially mystical and hermeneutical, that is, as the “the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man.” It is worth repeating, in my own terms now: by his own stark confession late in life and in his own final statement, a metaphysical understanding of the erotic lay at the very heart and center of Myers’s lifework.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2011-09-16). Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (pp. 87-88). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
 
Interesting opinion piece on contrasting Tantra with the magician "loyal to the Thrice Great Hermes":

Beyond Tantra

“It’s all sex nowadays” my mother used to grumble after an evening in front of the television. Even her favourite nature programmes, she moaned, were increasingly obsessed with it. Much the same might be said about Tantra. Or, at least, about what currently passes for Tantra, something which to many people today means little more than sex with fancy trimmings.

No surprise then that among the first ‘tantrik’ sites to appear on Google is one that markets books on sexual techniques, as well as performance-enhancing potions like – currently on special offer – tiny pots of nipple sensitising cream. True, there’s a token reference to Tantra’s origins in India but it’s the “get your kit off” message that counts. My mother wouldn’t approve. And neither, frankly, do I.

What offends me is not so much the sexual free-for-all – each to his own as far as I’m concerned – but the attempt to glamorise, even sanctify it by calling it Tantra.

Not all Hindu teaching is sympathetic to Tantra, with many scholars, especially more recent ones, uneasy with its intentionally blunt language (Sandhya-bhasha) and overtly erotic symbolism. At times even its defenders sound apologetic, pleading that, for want of anything better, it is at least a convenient path to mystical experience in the current Dark Age (Kali-yuga),1 a period when our race is woefully lacking in spiritual refinement. (Held to have started 5,000 years ago or, as others maintain, following the death of Krishna in 3120 BCE, the Dark Age is scheduled to last for 430,000 years so there’s lots more of it ahead.)

With the advent of Kali-yuga we are said to have lost our ability to see beyond the illusory appearance of things (maya), something traditionally expressed as the loss of our Third Eye or Eye of Siva. This symbolic organ is depicted in art as a lotus blossom, the sun, a snake or a star and set in the middle of the forehead, though some occultists maintain, none more forcibly than Mme. Blavatsky, that the Third Eye was, literally, just that. Today, the pineal gland is claimed to be its only anatomical remnant.

Hinduism accommodates two kinds of Tantra, that of the right hand (Dakshinacara) and that of the left (Vamacara). The first, regarded as the more respectable, favours a metaphorical interpretation of the erotic language found in the texts, while the second, often dismissed as ‘black’ magic, adopts a more literal approach, treating what it finds as a practical guide to attaining enlightenment. Only the latter approach need concern us.

As was said earlier, Tantra is not about sex. Well, not just about sex. Its spiritual element – ‘psychical’ may be a better epithet – is at least as important as the physical. In any case the two are complementary. More than that, they are inter-dependent for only when acting together – physical act and spiritual intention – will they induce awareness of the unity subsisting between the conditional world and the absolute reality on which it depends.

Nowhere is this togetherness more sublimely realised – here comes the sex – than in the act of coition, that synergic conjunction (Paramsiva or the union of Siva and Sakti) of two individuals or, better still, two creative polarities.

A similar bliss is accessible through magical practices, particularly those with an overtly sexual component. For that reason the latter are often referred to as Tantra, proof again of how the word has become synonymous with sex. And true enough, the methods of sexual arousal available to the magician are often similar to – because copied from – those of the tantrika. (They have, after all, proved their worth over time.) Even so it may be misleading, no matter how convenient, to describe sexual magic as tantrik because there is one important, indeed fundamental, difference between the two.

To grasp it we need to remind ourselves that for Vedic scholars, phenomena and form enjoy no real existence (avastu). Our awareness of them is merely the accidental reaction of our senses to a reality, itself imperceptible, which is nothing less than the creative self-projection of Brahman.3

Over time this emphasis on the “otherness” of what is truly real (and, as such, a manifestation of God’s inviolable Oneness) led to the view that the phenomenal world, product of our faulty perception, could not be other than inferior to what lay beyond it. After all, was it not the imperfect, because conditional, aspect of what is immutable and absolute? And so the notion grew that the world of matter was somehow debased and, as such, unworthy of being cherished or respected on its own terms.

Such a notion is not confined to Hinduism. Closer to home we come across it in much Christian thinking, both orthodox and (to a far greater extent) heretical, while the neo-Platonists – to whom Western magic owes much – were, like the Manicheans, particularly infected by it. The celebrated Plotinus summed up their views by dismissing matter as “the primary evil.”

We have always to remember, therefore, that while Tantra indulges the body and the senses, it does so with the aim of transcending both. Because of that, all the tantalising foreplay and eventual orgasm, however incidentally enjoyable, are simply means to an end, devoid of any ultimate value themselves. A way of escape from the snares of conditionality, they facilitate a brief triumph of mind over matter.

For the magician by contrast, matter is inherently sacred. Far from being a route to the Absolute it is the route by which the Absolute becomes real and present – even palpable – to us. For that reason the aim of Magic is to exploit the sacramental nature of matter, treating it (in the language of St. Augustine, asmodified by St. Thomas Aquinas) as the outward and visible sign of an inward, divine and efficacious grace.

From this it follows that for the magician the sexual act is no longer the means to an end but correctly understood, the end itself. Through it, with it, in it, a higher, unconditioned reality manifests itself in terms appropriate to our environment. Tantra, by contrast, requires us to ‘liberate’ ourselves from that environment before the same reality is met. At the risk of labouring the point: for Tantra it is through matter that we strive to touch the Absolute; for Magic it is through matter that the Absolute touches us. Matter is the Absolute in posse.4
 
Beyond Tantra

...What offends me is not so much the sexual free-for-all – each to his own as far as I’m concerned – but the attempt to glamorise, even sanctify it by calling it Tantra.

After all, Tantra is first and foremost a spiritual practice by which the self aspires to merge with the energies that sustain or, rather, constitute, the universe. It is a means of becoming one with the Whole, of escaping from the illusion of separateness that determines how we experience the phenomenal world around us. Sensitised nipples have precious little to do with it. (And anyway a dab of Vaseline does the job, if you’re curious.)

The word Tantra is Sanskrit for ‘weave’, a term used to indicate that a particular text has been composed according to an orderly pattern (samhita). Others prefer to believe it points to secret teachings ‘woven’ into the Vedas, the thread visible only when teased out by a scholarly commentator or qualified guru. This interpretation, though appealing, is undermined by evidence that before being taken up by Hinduism, Tantra was already a feature of Buddhist practice, later becoming associated with Mahayana Buddhism in particular. (There the feminine principle, sakti, has long been held in high esteem.) This might also explain its early adoption by the Vajrayana (Sk. “Diamond Vehicle”) sect of Tibet, one that borrowed heavily – again significant perhaps – from that country’s indigenous religion (Bön).

Yet the true origins of Tantra almost certainly pre-date all of these and are rooted in the ancient practice of Yoga, especially in what later became Hatha Yoga, so called because it is the path (Sk. marga) of effort and discipline, both essential if the body and its vital energies are to be brought under control. Appropriately enough, one of the early names given to Tantrik teaching – Agamas or ‘What has come from before’ – may be an acknowledgement of its great antiquity.

Not all Hindu teaching is sympathetic to Tantra, with many scholars, especially more recent ones, uneasy with its intentionally blunt language (Sandhya-bhasha) and overtly erotic symbolism. At times even its defenders sound apologetic, pleading that, for want of anything better, it is at least a convenient path to mystical experience in the current Dark Age (Kali-yuga),1 a period when our race is woefully lacking in spiritual refinement. (Held to have started 5,000 years ago or, as others maintain, following the death of Krishna in 3120 BCE, the Dark Age is scheduled to last for 430,000 years so there’s lots more of it ahead.)

With the advent of Kali-yuga we are said to have lost our ability to see beyond the illusory appearance of things (maya), something traditionally expressed as the loss of our Third Eye or Eye of Siva. This symbolic organ is depicted in art as a lotus blossom, the sun, a snake or a star and set in the middle of the forehead, though some occultists maintain, none more forcibly than Mme. Blavatsky, that the Third Eye was, literally, just that. Today, the pineal gland is claimed to be its only anatomical remnant.

Hinduism accommodates two kinds of Tantra, that of the right hand (Dakshinacara) and that of the left (Vamacara). The first, regarded as the more respectable, favours a metaphorical interpretation of the erotic language found in the texts, while the second, often dismissed as ‘black’ magic, adopts a more literal approach, treating what it finds as a practical guide to attaining enlightenment. Only the latter approach need concern us.

As was said earlier, Tantra is not about sex. Well, not just about sex. Its spiritual element – ‘psychical’ may be a better epithet – is at least as important as the physical. In any case the two are complementary. More than that, they are inter-dependent for only when acting together – physical act and spiritual intention – will they induce awareness of the unity subsisting between the conditional world and the absolute reality on which it depends.

Nowhere is this togetherness more sublimely realised – here comes the sex – than in the act of coition, that synergic conjunction (Paramsiva or the union of Siva and Sakti) of two individuals or, better still, two creative polarities...
 

The Kamasutra, composed in the third century CE, is the world’s most famous textbook of erotic love. For its time, it was astonishingly sophisticated and, even today, there is nothing like it. Yet it is all but ignored as a serious work in its country of origin—sometimes taken as a matter of national shame rather than pride—and in the rest of the world it is a source of amused amazement, inspiring magazine articles that offer "mattress-quaking sex styles" such as "the backstairs boogie" and "the spider web."

University of Chicago Divinity School professor Wendy Doniger, one of the world’s foremost authorities on ancient Indian texts, seeks to restore the Kamasutra to its proper place in the Sanskrit canon. She emphasizes its landmark status in the oevre of India’s secular literature, as a text that emphasizes grooming and etiquette, the study and practice of the arts, and discretion and patience in conducting affairs. Doniger describes how its social and psychological narratives also display surprisingly modern ideas about gender and role-playing, female sexuality, and homosexual desire.
 
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