Desire Read online

  The supreme goal of the voyager is to no longer know what he contemplates. Every person, every thing, is an opportunity for a voyage, for contemplation.

  Lao-tzu

  For Geneviève

  Contents

  Cover Image

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I Chapter 1: The Quest: Hedonistic or Spiritual?

  Chapter 2: A Third Path

  Chapter 3: Nostalgia for Unity

  Part II Chapter 4: The Power of Woman

  Chapter 5: We Are What We Seek

  Chapter 6: Breath: Door of Our Sensorality

  Chapter 7: Experiencing Totality: First Experience?

  Chapter 8: Touching the World

  Chapter 9: The Heart of Reality

  Chapter 10: The Source of Consciousness

  Chapter 11: Savoring the World

  Chapter 12: Desire and Its Object

  Chapter 13: The Supreme Reality

  Chapter 14: Naked Awareness

  Chapter 15: Sounds of Life

  Chapter 16: The Essence of Satisfaction

  Chapter 17: Sensorality and Consciousness

  Chapter 18: The Interaction of the Eight Consciousnesses

  Chapter 19: The Power of the Senses

  Chapter 20: A Question: Freeing Oneself from the Past

  Chapter 21: Scents of the World

  Chapter 22: Tuning the Body-Instrument to Absolute Love

  Chapter 23: Questions: Love, Sexuality, Fidelity

  Chapter 24: Chants of the Dakinis, the Great Secret

  Chapter 25: Looking at the World

  Chapter 26: Passion

  Chapter 27: Questions: Passion, Ego, Freedom

  Chapter 28: Entrance into the Kingdom of Reality, Cosmic Sensuality

  Chapter 29: The Sexual Ritual, Maithuna, and the Path of the Left Hand

  Chapter 30: The Tantric Orgasm for Women

  Chapter 31: The Tantric Orgasm for Men

  Chapter 32: The Group Sexual Ritual

  Chapter 33: A Tantric Path for the West?

  Part III Chapter 34: Questions: Sexuality, Desire, Passions, Yoga, Ecstasy, Love, Joy, Pleasure, Space, Beauty, the Heart’s Peace

  Footnotes

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

  Copyright & Permissions

  Index

  Part I

  1

  The Quest: Hedonistic or Spiritual?

  For the past few decades, we have been trying in all kinds of ways to liberate ourselves simultaneously from our frenetic materialism and our tired religious traditions. The wave of the sexual revolution affected us; the return in force of the spiritual, in forms most varied, is sweeping over us. The offerings of “personal growth” are multiplying to the point of delirium: Today we have our shaman, our spiritual master, our therapist, our crystal-tarot readers, our clairvoyants, and our Chinese or Tibetan doctors, while in the past we had our family doctor and, for some, our psychoanalyst. The New Age has spawned an array of intertraditional “collages” and has succeeded in turning the authentic mystical movements into the most insipid and illusory of mixtures.

  Fortunately, the Tibetans arrived on our shores with their smiles, their sense of humor, their rigor and their profound wisdom—and not only them but also the Sufi masters, the Zen masters, the masters of the different forms of Buddhism, and the Hindu or Amerindian masters who do their best to ensure their marvelous traditions become known in all their authenticity.

  The most secretive schools have paved the way up to our present day. The practitioners of dzogchen, the Bon-pos, the Naths, the Advaita, and the Aghori are among us. Authentic masters and charlatans daily rub elbows; training programs and retreats are taking place one after another, all over the world. We are learning to walk on fire or to communicate with the spirits, to meditate without moving for twelve hours a day, to go into trances, to breathe like the yogis and yoginis, to do postures, to discover our body and our senses, to have a Tantric orgasm, to recite mantras—unless we fall into the nets of the sects, increasingly hidden yet existing everywhere to channel our dreams of the absolute into a sad alienation from our fundamental freedom. We receive initiations, we have our chakras opened, titillate the kundalini, repeat cabalistic formulas, venerate all the earth deities, converse with the angels, reinvent what little we do know about the traditions into a kind of “ready-to-wear,” immediately negotiable package . . . but fundamentally, we are all still looking for the same thing: how to integrate the experience of life in Western society with a deeper consciousness that would bring us bliss and reconcile us with our emotional and sensory natures.

  We want a path that would not be opposed to our life; a life that would not be opposed to our path. In short, we want a harmonious integration of the spiritual with the material along an accessible path, one not too estranged from the common culture. We want to attain plenitude without denying life’s marvelous effervescence; we want a light and moving joy that would bring us to a larger, more all-encompassing experience of reality.

  If we look around, we can see those people who throw themselves into a hedonistic search for pleasure. They try to live out their passions, and sometimes they succeed. They frantically attach themselves to the material world and end up in a state of chronic dissatisfaction, which pushes them to undertake a more and more neurotic quest. These people are often egoistic; they leave a trail of destruction in their wake, yet sometimes we find ourselves secretly envying them because we imagine them to be free. They cause a natural and fundamental longing for pleasure to resonate within us. Their overflowing vitality affects us, even if we feign condemnation of them. Among them, some are touched by grace and discover a more subtle, refined life force in hedonistic enjoyment. Certain of them are deep philosophers.

  In opposition to them we find the people who are fascinated by the spiritual search and whose aim is to purify themselves of desires and passions by trying to reduce the impact these have on their daily lives. They are said to be wise or on the path of wisdom. They proudly claim to be of a spiritual school. In observing them we sometimes notice, along with their austerity, signs of coldness and hardness of heart and body; signs of a certain lack of spontaneity. A halo of fear in relation to sexuality encircles their whole being. They seem to have submitted themselves to overly strong tensions; their virtuousness seems a little artificial. Their tolerance has limits, they are often slightly fanatical—indeed, everything about them leads us to believe that their balance is precarious. It would take just one lovely temptation, it seems, to tip them into the neurotic quest for pleasure that they condemn in others. Certain of them succeed in cutting off their passions; they too find a sort of grace and approach what the teachings promised them.

  Our cultural and religious heritage seems to tell us that we must choose: the spiritual against the body or the body against the spiritual. D. T. Suzuki, the eminent scholar of Zen Buddhism, one day made this sarcastic comment on the Christian tradition to his friends, American mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychoanalyst Carl Jung: “Nature against Man, Man against Nature; God against Man, Man against God; God against Nature, Nature against God; very funny religion!”1

  It is rare that either the hedonistic quest or the spiritual quest, with its rejection of the body, brings us happiness, harmony, joy. The language of the mystics almost always aims at reintegrating the vocabulary of passion and love with that of the spirit, which is what makes their language so shocking for puritans. In our Western traditions we have much condemned the impassioned, whether they are people of God or of science, philosophers or artists.

  The divorce of our sensory and spiritual natures generates serious problems in adherents of both paths. Traditionally, we assign a p
eriod of our lives to try them out, each in turn. With disillusioned smiles, we allow our young people to tempt or try out their passion, desire, and sensorality, knowing that one day they will be like us, weary and well behaved out of obligation.

  Certain people doggedly persevere in this search and are thus pitilessly condemned by those who expect everyone to join their ranks. In midlife some people are seized by a brief jolt of passion . . . then they fall back again, exhausted, having become victims of general disapproval. Sometimes this passion revives them and leads them to happiness.

  The sexual revolution of the 1960s has been much discussed. It left profound marks on our society, it served the cause of women, and it permitted us to open ourselves to the body, leaving secrecy behind. Today we talk openly about subjects that no magazine would have dared to so much as approach a few decades ago.

  In an era where the word communication reigns, where an unlimited mass of information can be accessed within a few seconds, we complain about having lost contact with our body and with other human beings. We suffer from extreme solitude, we suffer from no longer touching each other, we suffer from the “virtualization” of our feelings, the expression of our emotions, and our sensorality. AIDS has incited in us such a level of sexual prudence that relationships carry within them the seed of fear and compel us to a superficiality of contact; our bodies scarcely stand a chance of entering into the great expanse of the cosmic play with abandon and creativity.

  One day soon this phantom will no doubt be eliminated, and we will know a new period of sexual euphoria, of frenzy, joy, pleasure. Then this cresting wave, too, will turn to calmer waters under the shock of some as yet unknown event, or simply under the weight of its own depletion.

  So are we condemned to oscillate unceasingly between these two paths? In just about every person I meet there is a deep intuitive knowledge that a third path does indeed exist. We have suffered too much from fanaticism, violence, and exclusion; we have progressively opened ourselves to the world and its diversity. What men and women seek today is a path that reintegrates these opposites with genuine love and acceptance of all the richness that each human being carries within.

  2

  A Third Path

  From the first centuries of the Common Era, a mystical path whose roots date back at least as far as 3000 B.C.E. revolutionized Hinduism and certain schools of Buddhism. At the time all these traditions were permeated with a fairly acute puritanism and with a striking exclusion of women at the highest levels.

  This third path is called Kashmiri Shaivism. Born in the Indus valley five or six thousand years ago, it underwent its most spectacular development in Kashmir and Oddiyana (a neighboring kingdom) and reached its peak between the seventh and thirteenth centuries A.D. Tibetan and Chinese masters of Buddhism and the Indians of the various traditions came to drink from the source in close proximity with the yoginis, women of knowledge who taught the path of the whole person, and with the Siddhas, realized or perfected men and women.

  This path, of incomparable depth and subtlety, has nothing to do with the product that the West has commercialized under the name Tantra. It is a path whereby a person evolves through sensorality and consciousness. It stands in opposition to both the hedonistic sexual quest and the ascetic spiritual quest because it reunites the totality of the person. It is these profound teachings that I propose to introduce to you so that you may discover how to put them into practice in the setting of everyday life—finding joy, ecstasy, and autonomy through being present to reality.

  Can that be called perfect knowledge . . .

  If one is not released while enjoying the pleasures of sense? 2

  sings Saraha, one of the Buddhist masters who lived sometime between the second and seventh centuries. Saraha became the disciple of a yogini accomplished in the art of shooting arrows into the hearts of people. She belonged to the sahajiya school—“awakened adepts of spontaneity.” Returning the senses, desires, passions, emotions, and sexuality to the spiritual being is the most profound and the most audacious inner adventure ever imagined by these Buddhist, Hindu, and Kashmiri Tantric masters.

  In the beginning the Tantric movement distinctly dissociated itself from the puritan orthodox traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. It produced such great masters—philosophers, poets, and artists—that Tantric creativity profoundly influenced both the various Great Vehicle Buddhist schools and Hinduism. Numerous historical masters discreetly adhered to the Tantric views. The Vedanta philosopher Shankara, for instance, was a Tantric master. Contemporary Indian figures such as Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and Ramana Maharshi—they too were tantrikas. All of Tibetan Buddhism is profoundly Tantric; Chinese Ch’an is permeated with this thinking to such a degree that a female contemporary, master Yuan-tchao, declares that “tantric practise was the crowning of Ch’an.”3Dzogchen has equally influenced and been influenced by Kashmiri Shaivism.

  Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Small Vehicle Buddhism, and Hinduism all teach us that we must abandon or sublimate desires and passions in order to carry out a spiritual quest. This puritan position has historically been accompanied by the partial or total exclusion of women from the highest level, that of transmission and teaching.

  The different Tantric schools, however, completely reject all formalism, dogmatism, puritanism, eviction of women, and existence of castes. They place the spiritual and mystical path in the social context by abolishing all differences between people. I believe that this profound revolution will blossom into unprecedented creativity in the mystical, scientific, and artistic arenas, a creativity in which each person regains her unity in the total acceptance of her nature.

  Far from paving a way that extols the egoistic search for pleasure, the masters of these schools encourage us, through a refined yet playful discipline, not to cut off anything that makes us human, so that we may find a profound way to live our desires and passions by taking them to their ultimate point of incandescence. Attachment and suffering disappear when, as Saraha sings:

  The faculties of sense subside,

  And the notion of self is destroyed.

  Such is the Body Innate. 4

  It is this path—with neither negation nor transcendence—that I have been exploring for thirty years, first with my Tibetan master Kalou Rinpoche, then with my Kashmiri Shaiva master the yogini Lalita Devi. I received permission from the latter to transmit to you this direct and spatial path, that of the recognition of the Self (Pratyabhijñâ).

  Reintegrating desire, the senses, and passion with spirituality is the only serious antidote to religious and sectarian madness or to generalized materialism, because nothing terrifies their adherents as much as these words and the incandescence they point to. These people have a holy horror of anything that cannot be controlled, taken over, or subjugated. And today our desire, our passion, is to find absolute freedom, love, and plenitude without being bound hand and foot. We want to leave behind our ancestral guilt and accept the body wholly: It is our only door into infinite reality. Without the body, we would be nothing. With it, we can be everything.

  The American ethnologist Gregory Bateson has also ventured into this complex terrain, which today fascinates a good number of scientists. It consists, Bateson writes, of

  explor[ing] whether there is a sane and valid place for religion somewhere between these two nightmares [the material and the supernatural] of nonsense. . . . I regard the conventional views of mind, matter, thought, and materialism, as totally unacceptable. I repudiate contemporary materialism as strongly as I repudiate the fashionable hankering after the supernatural.5

  3

  Nostalgia for Unity

  One of the causes of our suffering comes from the presence, in the deepest part of ourselves, of a kind of nostalgia for unity that sometimes surfaces with great force not only during infancy and adolescence but also in adulthood. This powerful feeling of unity with the world is generally interpreted disfavorably. Adults speak of daydreams, of distracti
on, of merging states more or less suspicious and destined to disappear over time. And unfortunately this is, in general, how it happens.

  We all, at times, go through what are acceptably called crises, in the course of which we once again encounter this powerful nostalgia. Anything that submerges us with force, that makes us doubt our well-regulated life, that carries us away, that touches us deeply, that makes us become conscious of our limits can revive this state of unity—or underline its absence in a disturbing manner. During these crises, we will feel vulnerable but extremely alive, and it is this feeling of drinking once again at the tremoring*1 source that will push us to perform sometimes beneficial, sometimes neutral, sometimes catastrophic actions.

  This feeling, this need for freedom, this “high” is what we call the passions, and even though we know they give life back to us, they generally trigger in us a certain guilt that goes hand in hand with social disapproval, as if to live is to become progressively used to suffocation, to slow death. No one, not even the paragons of virtue, escapes these jolts, these cataclysms, and if they are most often misinterpreted, it is simply because we all know how essentially marvelous it is to be awakened from our torpor by the passions. Those who have lost this state of grace are the first to condemn the victims of these inner earthquakes, and the misunderstanding continues, carried from generation to generation.

  Moralists talk about controlling, reducing, destroying desires and passions, while fanatics take action by destroying the impassioned, but no one can go through life without feeling the devouring substance of desire and passion. Why do these jolts cause us so much suffering? Why, after living through them, do we often return to the state of hibernation? Why do we agree to pay the exorbitant price that society demands of the impassioned? Is there not a fundamental error in the way we orient our lives? Why does our ideal not correspond with our deep intuitive knowledge? Why do we accept that wonder and marvel should no longer be fundamental qualities of our lives?