What Is Tantra?

(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)

 

Tantra is spiritual, meditative sexuality. It embraces pleasure, pain, wealth, poverty, ugliness, joy, sadness, anger, fear, ecstasy, sex and celibacy. Cassandra Louris in her book Tantric Sex (1999) says, “Tantra is a path of sensual celebration as a spiritual discipline, which uses the erotic charge of sex to help us to connect with the divine… Tantra is about being spontaneous, playing together as well as nurturing a spiritual connection. It is about creating a path that is filled with the sacred in celebrating love… Tantra is love-making with the intention of exploring real intimacy and connection with your beloved, and allowing yourself to see where that connection takes you, rather than limiting your focus to genital pleasure and orgasm, this creates the right space… The aim is to harmonize life energies and resolve contradictions and conflicts in order to experience life as a flow of intense energy…it involves embracing all aspects of yourself… It is a heart-centered path, and invites its followers to embrace all of creation, in the name of love…total surrender and letting go of cultural conditioning, letting go into a sense of wonder and oneness with the universe… Tantra says you don’t need to suffer to attain enlightenment. Paradise is not in the next world, but here and now, if we can only see it… The goal is to merge the phenomenal world with the divine, in one integrated, unified reality. Tantric sex is about exploring love-making through the god and goddess and calling them in to do with you as they will.

“Tantra, of all spiritual practices, is the most misunderstood and misinterpreted. Often, people will be confused and think of tantra as a sort of occult sexual practice, when in actuality it comprises the “shortcut” path to enlightenment; a process, that is said to normally take thousands of lives, can be completed in only one life through tantra. Tantra is probably the oldest form of religion, an ancient, strongly matriarchal mysticism that includes sexuality, but also all of life. Originally, it was a way of sanctifying experiences from waking to sleeping, eating to praying, abstinence and sexuality. The word “tantra” can mean union, shortcut, magic and science. Tantra is the transformation from a normal being into a Deity and Light Body, inspired and nourished by divine gnosis.

Tantra is not a clearly defined system of belief and practice, but a mélange of worship, ritual, meditation, superstition, magic, sexual ritual, and the highest forms of spiritual yoga. Tantra texts contain advice to tantrikas and Sadhakas, on every conceivable subject: cosmology, astrology, different types of men and women, the significance of the chakras or psychic centers of the body, the nerves and channels through which the prana or vital life energy flows, methods of raising kundalini energy through the chakras, various religions, forms of worship and rituals, including mantras (invocations), mandalas (Deity Maps), and yantras (meditational "machines"); rituals involving the worship of the goddess in the form of women, the yoni, puja or vagina worship; the rites of purification to be carried out before sexual worship; positions for meditation and sexual practices, prayers and poems to the lineages, the guardians, the goddess and her consort; basic health care and how to bring up children.