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Tantra & Erotic Trance Volume PSYCHOLOGY / MOVEMENTS / JUNGIAN Human sexuality is a problematic thing. It gets us into trouble, breaks our hearts, involves us in painful compulsive relationships, even transmits deadly diseases. It would surely scare us off, if it were not for its siren call to higher forms of union and moments of bodily bliss. When examined more closely, however, and especially when we turn our gaze inward to see what sexual arousal is doing to our consciousness, we find we are in an altered state—a form of “erotic trance” that reveals dimensions of ourselves, our partner, and possibilities for human life that otherwise would not have been discovered. Procreative sex forms the foundation of the nuclear family and the glue that holds society together—what we might call the “horizontal” potential of sex. Tantra, however, is about its “vertical” dimension—about “tuning” our awareness to bring higher, spiritual realities into Tantra & Erotic Trance focus. It all begins by mastering our bodily reflexes. This first volume ofTantra and Erotic Trance deals with the preliminary stages of mastery and the transformations of consciousness that they make possible. The whole project is imagined as a ladder with its feet on the earth and Volume One its top leaning into Indra’s heaven. Each rung represents a new level of awareness, a mastery of what just the rung below had appeared to us as a poorly understood gift. John Ryan Haule holds a doctorate in religious studies from Temple University. He is a Jungian analyst trained in Zurich and a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute-Boston. In addition to Tantra and Erotic Trance I & II, his publications include: Divine Madness: Archetypes of Romantic Love; The Love Cure: Therapy Erotic and Sexual; Perils of the Soul: Ancient Wisdom and the New Age; The Ecstasies of St. Francis: The Way of Lady Poverty; and Jung in the 21st Century, in two volumes: Evolution and Archetype and Synchronicity and Science. Cover design by Ann Yoost Brecke © 2012. To order books call toll free in Canada and the U.S. 1-800-228-9316 +1-831-238-7799 www.fisherkingpress.com Tantra & Erotic Trance Volume One - Outer Work by John Ryan Haule Tantra & Erotic Trance Volume One - Outer Work Copyright © 2012 by John Ryan Haule First Edition ISBN 978-0-9776076-8-6 Paperback All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Published simultaneously in Canada and the United States of America by Fisher King Press. For information on obtaining permission for use of material from this work, submit a written request to: [email protected] Fisher King Press PO Box 222321 Carmel, CA 93922 www.fisherkingpress.com [email protected] +1-831-238-7799 Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders; however, if any have been overlooked, the author will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Cover design by Ann Yoost Brecke © 2012. For the Arrow Makers Acknowledgements The manuscript for this book has been out of circulation for a dozen years. I am there- fore most grateful to Mel Mathews of Fisher King Press for recognizing its value and agreeing to publish it. I am grateful, too, to Cornelia Dimmitt for her thorough review of the text of this book, based in her dual expertise in Sanskrit studies and Analytical Psychology. Thanks too to Jeffrey Timm for his encouragement and for suggesting important texts I had not discovered on my own. Thanks to Ann Yoost Brecke for sharing her library and acting as a sounding board for drafts, early and late, as well as for the art work on the covers. James M. Haule read and commented on late drafts, providing strong en- couragement. I also could not have written this book without the help of colleagues, students and analysands who have shared their experiences and insights with me over the past three or four decades. Contents Preface xi The Brink of Orgasm 1 1. The Real and Unreal in Sex and Spirituality 3 2. The Problem of Orgasm 29 3. Beyond Orgasm to Eros 51 Transforming Energy 75 4. Serpent of Light 77 5. The Way of Longing 105 6. Scandalous Accomplishments 133 7. Beyond Good and Evil 162 Bibliography 183 Index 197 ix Tantra & Erotic Trance - Volume One x PREFACE Writing this book has been a labor of love in several ways. It is based on some thirty years of learning from loving relationships and sexual partners, and an overlapping twenty years of practice as a Jungian analyst as well as decades spent in the study of world religions with a particular interest in mysticism. I found that physiology and psychology are deeply intertwined, that for millennia people have been training the human body to produce mystical experiences capable of transforming our conscious- ness in marvelous ways, and finally that mythologies and religious dogmas are the documents that describe these transformations and their results. A recurring metaphor in the pages that follow is that of the ladder of mystical ascent, sometimes called the “diamond” ladder, evoking the Tibetan concept of dorje and the Hindu lingam but especially the diamond body of Buddhism. An ascent is described, beginning in the very first chapters where controversies about sex lead to the conclusion that human sexuality has both a horizontal meaning as the founda- tion of the nuclear family in a stable society and a vertical meaning as the engine of consciousness change in Tantra. We embark on the vertical path only by developing a new relationship with our body, in fact reversing some of the assumptions most of us take for granted. This first volume, “Outer Work,” describes the influence our body can have on our conscious- ness, beginning with a new valuation of orgasm and its role in human sexuality. We also learn that being separated from our partner can be no less important than being together. Finally, Tantra takes us into conflict with the values of society at large and recommends an heroic stance in which we court the most disturbing and overwhelm- ing emotions in a spirit of equanimity. The first volume ends with the reforms of the great tenth century devotee of Shiva, Abhinavagupta, who urged his disciples to turn their attention away from the outer forms of their practices and to attend instead to the changes occurring in their consciousness. Abhinavagupta made the essential mystical move recognized in every religious tra- dition: that we must learn to reverse our attention, away from the deity or sacred object before us to the effects such beings cause in our awareness. His contribution, then, becomes the foundation for Volume Two, “Inner Work.” xi Tantra & Erotic Trance - Volume One xii The Brink of Orgasm 1 Tantra & Erotic Trance - Volume One 2 1 THE REAL AND UNREAL IN SEX AND SPIRITUALITY The linkage between sex and spirituality—whether it be three, eight, or thirty thousand years old1—has become a subject of fascination in recent years. A visit to the Barnes and Noble website turns up ninety-one volumes with the word Tantra in the title, all of which can be de- livered to our doorsteps within three or four days. Many of these purport to reveal the secrets of Tantric sex as a series of easily mastered techniques, some with glossy photographs of beauti- ful naked models illustrating the various “positions” for us. Although we may find little that is “spiritual” in books that gloss the merely naughty as exotic and possibly “serious,” scholarly treatments of the several Tantric traditions may be more convincing. They have little to say of “positions” but much about meditation techniques and the elaborate imagery of gods. There can be little doubt that sex is sometimes employed for spiritual purposes. At the same time we may well be suspicious. Possibly our ancestors of thousands of years ago were simply ignorant of their human dignity, stumbling in the dark grip of their basest instincts until the voice of God was finally heard by our more enlightened and nearer ancestors from Abraham to Jesus. For 2000 years our Christian culture has envisioned sublime experience as the reward for asceticism and denial—particularly of the sexual urge. The vast majority of Buddhists, Hin- dus, Jews, and Muslims appear to be in substantial agreement. Yet there is another tradition according to which nothing is to be repressed or denied. When used skillfully, sex can be the 1 That the linkage between sex and spirituality may be three to four thousand years old is supported by the standard conservative estimate of scholars of the Indian Vedas, who date these ancient scriptures at about 1500 b.c.e., and where we find stern disapproval of wandering bands of ragged mystics, the Vratyas, who belong to the earliest history of yoga and rejected the sacrificial religion of the Vedas. Their central rite included an enactment of the creative, erotic play between god and goddess that constitutes the two worlds: the empirical world of space and time and the transcendent world of the gods and spirits (Feuerstein, 1990). The figure of 8000 years is supported by Daniélou: “From the beginning of the sixth millennium, the marks of Shivaism are to be found everywhere; the cult of the bull, the snake and the phallus, the royal symbol of the horns, Yoga positions, funeral chambers” (1992: 30). Feuerstein, Kak, & Frawley (1995) are in substantial agreement.
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