Tantra: Mystical or Make-Believe?

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

Our beliefs and philosophies are, like the thoughts from which they arise, our personal movies. Taken together they constitute our world-view - our mythos - through which we seek, or pretend, to understand existence. The mystical begins at the point where we break through the fabric of our myths into a here-and-now encounter with existence. In that moment all our thinking gives way to our personal experience of “all that I am and all that is”. We cannot help recognizing then that all beliefs - whether ours or other people’s - are myths. Many originate in the idiosyncratic thoughts, opinions and personal beliefs of individuals and have little or no relationship to truth. Others are valuable because they can help us deepen our experience of truth and the real. The mystic plays with myths, but essentially in touch with the real, he knows his beliefs are only fingers pointing to the moon.

On the material plane we may have come far since the Stone Age, but our inner relationship with reality is not so evolved. Our lives have for countless centuries been run by our religious, political, social, psychological and personal myths as though they are realities. Our next collective quantum leap is probably from belief-based existence to our conscious presence in the real. The fact that this awakening is already happening for many individuals suggests so, and it needs to happen because most of the pain and suffering in our world stems from our inability to recognize the difference between myth and truth. Even in a domestic argument we can fight and hurt each other because we insist that our view is the right one. Magnified onto the global scale the consequences throughout human history have been war and bloodshed in the name of beliefs upheld as truth – most often, ironically, religious beliefs.

Mysticism serves our quest to discover the ultimate truths of existence because the mystic knows and cares for the real. He therefore knows and cares for who we really are. He wants to help us wake up and share in the wonder of the real that we are. George Gurdjieff, wild avatar of the early twentieth century whose life-work was to wake up anyone who was asking for it, entitled one of his books, Life is real only then, when ‘I am’. Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity because he was intellectually brilliant at playing with elements of the real. He brought to physics his deep engagement with truth because this was the way he encountered existence. When he shared his insights about being human his whole being spoke: “A human being is a part of the whole... He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

This is Einstein flying, as Osho Rajneesh would say, on the two wings of awareness and love. Anybody who knows a little New-Age jargon can ramble on about human beings being part of the whole, just as any fool can call himself a mystic, but as Carl Jung said, “Words don’t butter parsnips”. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Gurdjieff, Einstein, Osho and Jung all used their genius to explore and make available to others life’s deepest truths. They were devoted to serving reality, not to fabricating it. This is the hallmark of the mystic. It doesn’t require fame or name. We can’t help being mystics when, having experienced all that it means to be here now, we become devoted to living what is real and true. We may seem a bit mysterious to others because our interest is not so much in the soap operas of everyday life as in something that is rather inexplicable and doesn’t really lend itself to gossip. Mysticism isn’t really a talking point. It quietly offers itself as a way of life to anyone who encounters the real, in themselves and so in existence; and every mystic is a lover because when we open into our whole being, we are naturally in love. It cannot be otherwise since our heart sits at the centre of our being and the nature of the heart is to love. To be here now is to be in love.

The online Free Dictionary defines mysticism as “a belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience.” Here is the connection between the mystical and the spiritual. It is our experiencing of reality through being present to it that makes us receptive to more than the mundane - “life is real only then, when ‘I am’”. When our heads are full of beliefs and myths, they occupy so much of our inner space that we don’t have room to see much more than the obvious material world, or to hear more than the noise coming from our own and other people’s minds. We also miss a lot of what is going on within us or in others because our senses, sensitivities and feelings are muted by our busy-ness. When we are released from all this distraction into being fully present – when our mystical life begins! – we find ourselves experiencing everything more vividly; the colours, the music, feelings, and all the subtleties to which we were previously oblivious. We become much more aware of what is going on around us and much more able to read the less visible signs in people’s behaviour. And those “realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension” are no longer beyond us. The mysteries in all that is– the mystical aspects of existence– become increasingly accessible to us as we become open to them. This is one of the truly awesome characteristics of being here now, and it is not a fixed or end-state. Being present is in itself a journey, because our awareness and receptivity keeps opening up to more of the mystery. There is no end unless there is an end to the infinite, because when we open all the way and awaken fully, the present moment becomes the eternal present. Time disappears and we become one with the infinite. We are one with spirit. The destination of the mystical is the spiritual.

Mysticism may mean belief in all of this, but living the mystical makes believing redundant. There is no need to believe what you are actually experiencing. This raises an important point. All the world’s religions ask for belief in their doctrines and dogmas – their myths - in order to find “the truth”. For many people, belief then serves as a comforting and comfortable substitute for truth. Karl Marx went so far as to call religion “the opium of the people”. Yet every religion has its mystical core, often a kind of secret inner sanctum that is devoted to experiencing the spiritual rather than merely believing in it. Within Christianity is Christian mysticism. Within Buddhism there is Buddhist mysticism. Within Islam is Sufism, within Judaism the Kabbalah, within Hinduism Vedanta. Wherever humanity is concerned with realities beyond the normal range, the mystical is to be found, albeit sometimes hidden in unlikely places.

Which brings us to Eros and the Tantric world. Simply said, it is no different here. The ordinary dictionary definition of Eros is “sexual love and desire” which is reasonable given that Eros was the Greek god of lust, love and intercourse. In contemporary Western usage, and virtually regardless of its much more scholarly and esoteric origins in Buddhist and Hindu religion, Tantra describes a broad spectrum of sexual and erotic learning methods and experiences. They are usually presented as workshops and seminars and offer everything from the opportunity to be sexual with others who want the same, to ways for people to become more conscious, playful, liberated, integrated and fulfilled in their sexual intimacy. Like the world’s religions, the Tantra pool contains everything from the silly to the sublime. The shallow end is a sensual-erotic playground; the deep end is where you go to discover the mystical in the erotic. You get there by opening more and more deeply into your own nature and being.

People who are drawn to Tantra looking for the spiritual in the sexual attend Tantra workshops because they believe that they will learn more in an experiential workshop than by reading classical Tantric texts. It’s a valid working myth. They don’t want philosophical information, they don’t want to be fed religious beliefs – not even erotic ones. They don’t want to sit in a church of Tantra praying to Tantric gods and goddesses. They want to experience the spiritual ecstasy attributed to those gods and goddesses in their own erotic intimacy. Not surprisingly, they may well find themselves at times guided into experiences in which they are fed the beliefs and fantasies their teacher or Tantric guru believes they should be having. This happens as much in the New Age Tantric world as it does in evangelical Christian gatherings. In every walk of life true believers are to be found preaching “the truth”. If what you are looking for is truth and reality, you learn to recognize them and pass them by. The longing to discover the deepest realities - even if you don’t know this consciously – will eventually guide you towards the people and places where you can make discoveries through experiencing, without being asked to take on all the belief baggage.

A good teacher’s methods and processes are not random; they are a body of learning based on his own mythos. He knows that what he offers is not the truth. Nobody can offer this. As the great mystic Lao Tzu said, “The truth that can be told is not the truth.” What a good teacher offers is a way that people may be able to discover truth. It is a transforming journey into the mystical, and depends as much on the willingness of the student to go the journey as on the teacher’s ability to make it available. Learning about truth is not being on the journey, any more than learning about swimming makes you a swimmer. If all you have is knowledge and you jump into deep water, you need either waterwings, or the willingness to drown!

It is understandable that many people settle for accumulating knowledge about truth because it is much safer and far more comfortable than going in search of truth. The only reason anyone embarks on the real quest is because they are unimpressed or discontented with the life they are living. Something in the soul knows intuitively that there must be more to life than this! With the recognition comes the courage to go on an adventure; and what an adventure it is!

If the journey into being is like learning how to swim in deep waters, it is also like learning how to let go and drown! The adventure puts us into an inner process that completely undoes our personality with all its conditioning, beliefs, attitudes and opinions, our self-image and too the glue that binds all of these together - our fear. Rarely can we accomplish this unraveling on our own. Our personality will resist its own undoing, even though this keeps us from the experience for which our soul is yearning. It believes in itself, and is intent on protecting all it has manufactured over the course of our lifetime. So we can no more decide to let go and surrender totally than we can choose to give up breathing; and we can happily hold to beliefs and myths that clearly have no basis in reality even when face-to-face with reality. We have to be taken by surprise. The mystical experience will always blow our mind!

This has happened for everyone who ever found their way into their real being. It was the essential ingredient in the first group workshops born in the USA in the middle of the twentieth century. In its early years, and by no accident straddling the 60’s, the Human Potential Movement was like a treasure-map leading seekers to the Holy Grail of being here now. Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Lowen, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson may have differed in their methods. What they shared was the recognition that people had to be surprised out of their fixed ways into their real presence in being. And again and again people were! Eventually, the various group processes of these pioneers became established and popularized, and were adopted by teachers and practitioners who might know nothing of the journey into being. The mystical became, as it is today, a somewhat more hidden treasure. Half a century later the Human Potential Movement provides a vast and ever-growing array of experiences ranging from the real to the fantastic. Among them are jewels; regardless of their stated purpose they invite the surprise that opens the mystic door.

It is a process that always brings us to the edge of our known world; our fear keeps us holding on in the face of an unfathomable mystery. As our personality unravels, we can find nothing to hold on to. Accepting that in truth we do have nothing to hold on to, our transformation happens. Letting go into the mystery is the surrender that sets us free. With nothing to hold on to there is space to be – with all that we are, with all that is, and without all the stuff that we thought we were or had to be. With the dawning of our real being we can let our personality be undone and experience life happening with no myths obscuring our vision.

And there is so much to discover! Being present, everything changes. Truth is always to be found here, now. How deeply we experience it depends simply on how present we are. Nor is truth any thing. It is a happening that we are in whenever we are open and awake. The Holy Grail is only the object until we find it. In the moment that we find it we become the presence we have been searching for. When we become the Grail there is no Grail. It is simply our being here in the real.

This is as true of the Tantric journey as it is of all adventures into self-realization and spiritual awakening. Among all the workshops, seminars and courses available there are plenty that are distinctly not mystical. In the Tantric zone they tend to offer erotic gratification, sometimes presented in wrappings of sweetness and light to advertise the spiritual touch. This doesn’t invalidate them, because for many people who have grown up enduring their sexual confusion rather than celebrating their sexual nature, just having the opportunity to touch and play can be helpful. The limitation is simply that participants are not guided into encountering and transforming their confusion. Rather than learning to befriend their inner demons they are shown how to have more fun avoiding them. Fair enough, but if what you mean is to open into all that you are and in your wholeness to live in the real of all that is, this is a cul de sac. The mystical intention is missing, first and foremost in the teacher.

That intention is always going to lead us to encounter our fears, our mistrust, our wounds and the personality games we built around them to survive. This doesn’t mean that the erotic journey into the mystic has to be harrowing. A good teacher is already at home in the mystical and guides with presence, skill and love and as invisibly as possible, to help people encounter whatever is in their way. Sex is by nature pleasurable. The pleasure and the ecstasy to which it can lead give people exceptional motivation to move through their obstacles. So a Tantra workshop with a mystical purpose is going to be a dance incorporating pleasure, desire and the opportunity to encounter and befriend all one’s inner demons until they become colourful, accepted aspects of one’s Eros. The demons are not the point. Opening and awakening are what matter. Whatever I meet in myself on the way is part of me that I either accept or reject. In my acceptance is my surrender.

The ecstasy of the Tantric gods and goddesses happens when, in sexual intimacy, our surrender is total – body, heart and soul. Open, awake and in complete surrender to all that we are, through each other we come into communion with all that is. This present moment dissolves into the eternal present. We may drown, and drowning is bliss. Never mind mysticism, this is the mystical happening.

© Alan Lowen 2009