Cancel Culture in Tantra
Cancel Culture in Tantra
How Modern Sensitivities Clash with Ancient Spiritual Traditions
So, recently I posted a retreat I am doing for one single man in Kenya. I posted this retreat on a Facebook group called Tantra Wisdom. I used a Midjourney prompt where a white guy around 50 is surrounded by four Kenyan women. They are actually just standing around the man; they are not doing anything. It reminded me of a ritual, one of the core rituals of Forbidden Yoga, where people are standing in front of each other, staring at each other while doing a specific pranayama. This ritual is related to Sparsha (स्पर्श), the Sanskrit word for touch, and the different variations of touch, like touching with the eyes. During these pranayamas, you observe the different kinds of Vrittis (वृत्ति). Vrittis in Devanagari Sanskrit means what the mind produces, like the object of the mind. So, in this practice, you observe these Vrittis. I thought it was a nice Midjourney creation.
However, in this group, it was mostly women who began to scream about how horrible and wrong it was on so many levels, without really describing these levels of wrongness. I thought, oh, holy shit, something must have gone really wrong in this society. However, I had to apologize for using this prompt because, of course, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But it made me think that our society is pretty messed up. There seems to be not just a war in Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, or practically everywhere in the world, but also a war between men and women, between the yin and the yang, the feminine and the masculine.
It seems that Tantra was appropriated by Western women who completely want to rewrite the narrative of the Tantra tradition. It’s actually not their fault. It’s basically the fault of some Tantra schools that are probably trying to do something very good for humanity. But once they put the label Tantra on it, the Western people feel entitled to dictate the narrative.
As I am Western too, I look at the Tantric tradition more from an anthropological point of view and from the Indian perspective—not even the contemporary Indian perspective. Now, this needs a few words to explain. The contemporary Indian perspective on Tantra is basically related to the definition of black magic. So, if you say in India, “I will do Tantra on you,” it basically means, “I’m going to kill you.” “I send you Kali” basically means the same, “I will kill you.” “I will do Chinnamasta practice on you” means “I will win the court case against you.” This is how contemporary India, just to simplify it, sees Tantra.
Of course, the Tantric tradition is much more and much deeper. India is a huge continent, and Tantra is basically everything India has ever invented because every yoga asana, every mudra, every pranayama is based on the Tantric traditions, on the Tantras, the book of the Tantras. Tantra is not just a definition of expanding into the web of life or the technology through which you can achieve non-duality, or however you want to translate it. Tantra means Tantras—it’s something like, okay, there is a book, there are scriptures. It’s basically scriptures, and the Tantras are part of the Agamas, the scriptures, just another level of the Puranas, the mythological stories.
You have the fairy tales, the mythological fairy tales, like the archetypes of humanity. Parallel to these archetypes of humanity, you have the sadhanas and rituals, which are investigative practices to realize that you are everything, that you are God, that you are it, that you are it (!) To do this, the ancient Indians developed quite sophisticated ideas in different regions of India, with different ideas and practices, most of which have been destroyed or forgotten. Some of these ideas have been reinvented or rethought in a very different way in modern society in Europe and America.
Now, here’s the thing: if we as Western people want to rewrite the narrative—which we can do, as there are no laws against it—we just need to consider that we are not the only people in the world. We need to consider not becoming evangelical, not using our genetic imprint of morality to dictate the discourse on Tantra. Because Tantra can be anything from Aghoris eating human flesh in Varanasi to someone putting black magic on you, doing any kind of mantra sadhana, being a monk of the Advaita Vedanta society—your practices are based on Tantra. Tantra is a lot.
When we look into the left-handed traditions, the Vamachara traditions, compared to the Dakshinachara traditions, the Dakshinachara practices are more suited for families or for couples, while the left-handed traditions are for individual warriors. They did practices to achieve Moksha (मोक्ष), liberation, stepping out of samsara, by practicing with other people, working with polarities. A man needs the energy body of the woman, the Sukshma Sharira (सूक्ष्म शरीर), and the woman needs the Sukshma Sharira of the man to finally solve the quest of life and attain a state of non-duality.
Non-duality is not a theoretical concept; it is a state of being where your ego consciousness dissolves and merges with the big ocean of life. The big ocean of life is just one of many names you can put into it. When I do my retreats, I usually work with single clients because, for me, it’s easier to concentrate on one person, especially when it comes to complicated rituals. I observe one person and then cast other people who fit the subconscious brain map of my client.
For example, a client had a Japanese mother who was cruel to him. She had black hair, looked Asian, and in his later life, he was afraid of Asian women and only wanted to date Russian women who were blonde with blue eyes. So, I would cast one of his dream people and someone he’s absolutely scared of. This process sometimes takes months before the retreat starts and can also be quite costly.
This retreat in Kenya is simpler. I’m not investigating the subconsciousness of the person who books the retreat but just trying to pick the right placeholder actors for him. This means finding women who are mentally, intellectually, and sensually capable of participating in these practices because they get the same benefit and treatments. I have to be careful not to select people who are unstable or on medication or drink too much alcohol. It’s still a challenging process to filter people willing to go so deep into practices of pratyahara, pranayama, and shodhana.
On top of that, they should look interesting, have a good quality of speech, and be articulate. This can be a logistical nightmare and a challenge, but an interesting one. You have to meet many people and explain how this works. It seems that the rewriting of Tantra by Western people is backfiring because they will never find out what Tantra was really created for. Tantra was created to increase self-awareness, to find out why you act the way you do and where your desires come from. At the highest levels of Tantric practice, you may even step out of samsara, the cycle of rebirth.
There is a saying that in Tantra, you do not ritualize sexuality, but you sexualize ritual. In the West, we want to ritualize sexuality, making everything sweeter and more beautiful, which is valid, but it’s not the point. The point of the tantrics was to sexualize ritual. I could talk for hours, giving examples like Bhuta Shuddhi. You may Google Bhuta Shuddhi in the Bihar Yoga School, as they are one of the few who really do it the right way. When you sexualize Bhuta Shuddhi, as the left-handed tantrics did, you create a practice that blows you away and gets you into the essence of the five elements of the Mahabhutas much faster.
It seems that the negative feedback I got from women in this Facebook group indicates a hidden desire to direct how Tantra is performed today. I wonder why. Because, you know, it is very hard for men today to exist in this society. It’s hard for guys to interact with you. We never learn how to deal with you; there are no schools about what is in a girl’s mind. I’ve worked with many girls, women, young and old, and the hard truth is that when girls are together, they talk about guys in ways that would make men vomit if they knew. It’s worse than men ever talk about women.