Kundalini Thinking

Some believe that there is an unconscious and instinctive, indeed libidinal, force that can be felt as a physical phenomenon. Others deny its existence. Those who say it exists win the argument for the simple reason that, if they feel it, then it is there as a reality for themselves. If it is a reality in the context of their own perception, then, unless they are outright liars, even if it cannot be measured scientifically, it exists - end of story.

A mental state does not require general social approval to exist. It merely has to be experienced as real. A delusion is a real mental state but it is a delusion in the context of social and not individual reality and so not a delusion about its own state of delusion-ness. We may go on to apply all sorts of metaphor to such a felt libidinal force. We may develop vitalist theories or call it a serpent power or a goddess or use lots of sanskrit gobbledygook. We may try to make it more than it is by giving it value and romance - but at the end of the day, it is simply what it is: a sense of experienced reality that is real to the person experiencing it and different from mundane 'normal' existence in the world.

This force may, of course, not be experienced identically in every person who experiences it (as we write there is a furore on the internet over whether a dress is blue and black or white and gold which is really a furore over human perception in the face of the variable outputs of our electronic world) but there are some common denominators in the descriptions of such forces (once we get past the spiritual guff) that suggest that people who have this sense, whether intrinsic to their nature or intermittently experienced, are all experiencing the same phenomenon.

There is no issue with saying that the experience might be bio-chemical nor that the experience has such meaning to a person that this meaning might force a person to engage in some sort of struggle with others, indeed with society, to be permitted to engage with his or her own experience as good and worthwhile. It might be this that forces us to have to face the 'reality' of Islamist gnosis. Experience of, and existence with, this force is a defining issue in human freedom because the spiritual guff may well be nothing more than a pragmatic attempt to 'justify' (when no justification should be necessary) something that is difficult to communicate and is not a universal phenomenon in a social context. The issue is not the normalisation of people but the harm done to others by abnormalised experience - which would brings us back to statue-smashing Islamists.

For historical and cultural reasons related to the pragmatic exercise of power and the discomfort and anxiety of the those who cannot comprehend this force, or perhaps to relieve the anxiety of those who experience this force but are not given a language for it that is positive, the force’s own existence and value may be denied but only as once it might have been denied that the earth could be round. It may be that the person who feels this force is faced with such resentment and incomprehension from those who do not feel it that they are obliged to create a mythology and religious or cultic context rather than be able simply to say what should be said - 'this is what I am and you just have to live with it'.

Perhaps organized religion was and is the revenge of those who feel this force on the uncomprehending only, in one of many paradoxes that will we see in this Note, to see this revenge appropriated by pragmatists who thereby exerted their revenge on the revengers in turn! The lack of a language of assertion in the modern world for those who feel this energy means that the force-full are always placed on the defensive. This defensiveness extends to their very natures, in the round, as people different to the pragmatic mainstream. They constantly have to justify their difference!

A barrier is equally set up for 'intermittent' experiencers who learn to experience their difference in shame or silence instead of discussing their moments of difference openly or being permitted to create some personal meaning out of it, while those who live in a permanent state of relationship with this force are obliged to become not merely silent but secretive - or cloak themselves in that cultic nonsense we have already noted.

Perhaps much of the essentialist nonsense surrounding spirit that seems to have led to the absurd institutions of organised religion come down to little more than this - that non-sense has been a necessary defensive weapon for those who feel this libidinous force in an uncomprehending society. They are obliged to re-cast that which is not permitted in order to be open and then turn it into something false but socially acceptable. Of two main strategies for coping, our culture may have chosen the wrong one in the past because of resource constraints and the need to maintain social order but our social order may now no longer require communitarian falsehoods.

There is the opportunity to replace a strategy of silences and displacements with a new strategy of assertiveness and for the stripping away of all those accretions that force those who have a sense of their internal biochemical power to give absurd meanings to a surprisingly simple phenomenon. Social authoritarians remain rather frightened of this force because it is creative and innovative but it is also centred on a gnostic relationship to itself as not only desire is but as all other forms of high emotion and constructed meaning are so centred. High emotion and intense meaning are frightening to many people. The co-existence of non-reason with reason causes anxiety.

For social authoritarians, an inner force that cannot be reasoned into ‘normality’ must be repressed and contained. In the worst case, it becomes redrafted as 'sin' or even into particular 'sins' such as Lust which may then be rationally contained in a numbering system (the '7 Deadly Sins', for example). Nor is this force to be assumed to be simply sexual (the sexual may have a higher or lower place in its expression in particular individuals). The force is a general force that is not easily explained in conventional language. It may also have very different expressions in different people - the 'desire' that exists within it is also a form of yearning or love that need not at all be focused on, say, orgasm at all.

The force may equally well be focused simply on a state of being, one that has had accreted to it terms like 'spiritual' but whose terms are far too limited by such language, language designed merely (as I suggested above) to contain, channel and socialise something infinitely more complex that, in itself, needs no myth of universal consciousness or divinity. The ancient Indians would have seen this force as sleeping, dormant, a potential in the human condition. I am not so sure. Their analysis is based on a determination to see human beings as operating within some universal type or essence of human nature.

It is far more likely that it is present or not present to different degrees of intensity, possibly even circumstantial in its form to environmental conditions, in different persons, often at different times of their lives. This lack of essence to the force is why it presents such a difficulty to men and women who demand fixed essences instead of accepting existence as Heraclitean flux. It is why it is not merely contentious but a subject of anxiety, horror, social control and re-invention.

Whatever this thing is, it presents two immediate problems – how do I describe it to myself in order to manage it and how do I explain it to the world? Both exercises require that it be expressed linguistically or in terms of some ritual which, in itself, starts to remove a person from the actual experience. The degree to which this ‘force’ is shared is the degree to which it becomes exponentially attenuated so that the intense connection between individual persons (‘love’ included) becomes revised into a weak spirituality that ultimately leads to the psychic onanism of universalism and the covering of the experience with cultural layers and language that bend the experience into tribal or, again, cultic paths.

To some extent, it might be useful to create a theory of the force – in the Indian tradition, there are introspective models that lead to concepts of energy channels (nadis), subtle energy (prana) and essential elements (bindu) within a subtle body. Something similar takes place in the Chinese Taoist and Western alchemical traditions. But it is important to see these descriptions as allegorical and not as necessary truths. They exist to manage, control and communicate but not to ‘live’. The practitioner who believes in these forms has taken a step away from the truth.

Hindu, Chinese and Western language of the force should really be seen not as truths in themselves but as different technologies of 'spiritual' exploitation to which many other technologies of the past and the future might be added – including, possibly, a monist materialist scientific one as the science of mind and body progresses. The descriptions of the schools all taken together are mistakenly read as referring to some ‘perennial philosophy’ where the underlying reality is assumed to be of some universal quality where consciousness is to be set against matter. This is absurd because it mistakes the effect for the cause.

Instead, we have to think of the sensation of 'spirit' as an intrinsic quality of some forms of matter, arising naturally under certain conditions of evolution, where ‘spiritual technologies’ merely represent pre-scientific methods of dealing (through experience) with something that scence should theoretically (though possibly never actually) resolve through its methods of investigating the material plane, the only plane that ‘matters’ for descriptive purposes. This presents us with another paradox because the language that best describes what is going on is a phenomenological language, a description of experience in which cultural and personal metaphor, even poetry or visual symbolism in the form of art, best describes what is to be scientifically explained.

A scientific explanation may thus lie not in the description of things in mathematical terms but in the refinement of shared artistic representations that accumulate to become a paradoxically 'scientific' description of the phenomenon, one that has to be ‘felt’ as true because the artistic description in its right context (looked at with apollonian detachment) becomes the intellectual ‘last man standing’ - based on ‘praxis’, the doing of things that elicit or make use of the force. There is an existent Hindu technology (not the only technology) of systematically raising, containing, directing and using the force that is sensed as a physical sensation of movement from base through spine and upwards. This is Kundalini yoga.

The point today, though, is that such techniques should be looked at afresh primarily as technologies and not permit obfuscation with strange Sanskrit words and unscientific explanations that require the experience to represent more reality than it can take. We have covered this at length in our Tantra series but both these technologies and drugs should be able to recreate high-level experiences of a delusory nature that have effects on persons that are highly fulfilling and life-changing without demanding belief in God, gods or universal consciousness.

A further paradox must be that the delusion of universality becomes an apparent reality, not the ostensible reality of the vision (the absurdities of universal consciousness or reincarnation), but the felt reality of dramatic changes in personality, mind and the relationship between mind and body and then between mind, body and social reality. Some Indian sages will be usefully clear that the energy of which we speak is just the natural energy of the self but they then go on to make the unproven and unprovable assertion that this self is somehow dissipated as universal and is to be found in every being at the same time. This may help us to love rocks, spiders and frogs but it is a distraction.

Instead of seeing our experience of the universal as an attribute of an integral self to be mastered and understood, the Hindu sage somewhat foolishly takes the attribute for the whole and then dissipates the self into all sorts of creative invention. The ultimate absurdity becomes planet-worship, where rock displaces mind. This is not merely the general-universal but universals that then become re-personalised as God or turned into a nothingness (Nirvana) that is supposed to be higher than Man and still have meaning as a No-Thing in which he is to be merged in the future rather than contended with as 'Le Neant' in the present.

Humanity is unlikely to be free of its own delusions until it can face the awful fact (to many of its number) that its experiences are entirely contingent on the material structures of the brain in the body. This is not cause for gloom but for joy because it states that the person, though destined (at this point in history) for death, is his own invention and is not merely the fluff on the back-side of eternity.

Above all, this is an opportunity to recapture the various mythologies about the inner force and make them work as technologies rather than as eternal belief systems. By yet another paradox, this may 'save' the religious impulse by permitting many systems to co-exist as technologies without going through knots trying to find some perennial common denominator at the philosophical level.

To believe for the purpose of transformation in, say, Freyja or Shakti, is a wholly legitimate method of personal transformation, so long as the practitioner fully understands that, existentially, he is engaged in a technology in which the goddess both exists (as means) and does not exist (as ultimate reality) at the same time. The end of the technology is very similar to that of the ancient sages – a ‘gnosis’ or self-realisation that has been falsely connected to the idea of God or to an external wisdom. To think that some 'divine' external force transforms us is to diminish the power of one's own intrinsic resources.

Wisdom is connected to a self-knowledge that need have no connection with the universal except that it is an illusory experience shared biologically with some others of one’s own species, without any necessary specific connection to what it appears to be. The genius of self-knowledge lies not in knowing the other (impossible) or knowing the universal (illusion) but in knowing that the knowing of the other or of the universal is an illusion but one that is embraced as transforming.

Again we are into a paradox because the transformation into a state of understanding that all universalisms and all other-knowing is illusory – which may cause a passage through the ‘dark night of the soul’ – is ultimately so liberating that this knowledge of our lack of knowledge permits a much healthier relationship with others and with society. It is this state that the sages will refer to as an ‘awakening of inner knowledge’ or ‘pure joy, pure knowledge and pure love’ but is here taken to the next stage existentially, one where one observes objectively the illusion of this knowledge so that it can become the 'highest' form of knowledge – the knowledge that the illusion lies not in the Self but in the projection of Self into the universal.

From this perspective, a key figure in our understanding (though the existentialist perspective in this paper is different) is Jung who linked the process of Kundalini yoga with individuation. Another such figure is Wilhelm Reich who identified the ‘drives’ involved with more perspicacity than he has been given credit for – a failure created by his many other errors of judgement. Jung put it succinctly (in relation to the Eastern exploration of these issues): “… the concept of Kundalini has for us, only one use, that is, to describe our own experiences with the unconscious”. We only differ from Jung in our view of that unconscious as being possibly far more materially based than perhaps he considered likely.

The issue raised here is thus only whether individuation must be illusion-full (essentialist) or illusion-less (existentialist). We are discomfited in the West by the value placed on being ‘without illusions’ in spiritual matters but a position that is filled with illusion (whether generated by meditation or Ayahuasca) is not, in value terms, any better or worse than one that is without illusions (existential) or perhaps is one of having the illusion that one is without illusions.

There is a point where we cannot know anything but merely are forced to make choices (even if less than conscious choices) of the level of illusion we find acceptable. It is merely the contention of this Posting that full individuation probably requires that we go beyond the comfort zone of the illusion of having gone beyond material illusion into high essentialism (the construction of pragmatic but false meaning) and re-engage with our materialism as 'no-meaning' other than the meaning we create out of our material being (existentialism).

There is, however, no obligation on us to do so and no moral superiority in moving beyond the ‘spiritual’ back into the material. It is simply a choice for full individuation – an individuation that might well be in danger of detaching oneself entirely from the social (as pre-eminent value system) and into a state that might almost be considered intellectually post-human. This would simply be, then, a matter of choice ... the embracing of Existence, including the felt forces of Existence, without illusions because Life is in itself sufficient to justify the ways of Man to Man.

On Madness & Socialisation ...

Are minds today different from minds in the past and why? An equally interesting question is why do some minds seem to reflect entirely the values and attitudes of the past and others to arrive at entirely new values, some of which seem to have no obvious past equivalent? How is the 'now' constructed? I am not going to try to deal with these questions here but only to pursue a train of thought circling the position of radical scepticism about what we can know about past minds.

One major problem is, of course, that we cannot know other minds even when they are present to us. This is that central issue raised by Thomas Nagel of what it is like to be a bat. We cannot really know what it is to be a bat. We are constantly imagining what it might like to be another human just as we can imagine that we know what it would be like to behave like a bat yet we cannot ever be a bat. Other humans are, in this sense, bats. We cannot be other humans. We can only surmise the contents of other people's minds from our own mind's operations and their behaviour as seen through the lens of our own experience. We rely on evidence and if the evidence is flawed, our analysis must be flawed.

Language (texts in particular) are false friends in telling us what other minds are like. Those people who say that they know that people in the past thought in such-and-such a way are really only telling us what they think other people may have thought (a 'best and most probable guess'), generally based on these false friends (as texts) which say only what a few people said in specific literary contexts or as reported by people seeking to use the words as weapons or tools for their own purposes. Even very recently, we may have archives of papers and they may tell us a great deal about how decisions were made, the tensions between people and what people said they believed but they can never give us access to the private conversations, silences and thoughts of people who may have been playing very different games from the ones outlined in those texts.

Past minds are thus largely unknown except in defined historical conditions where the minds are really just functions of a social operation and what we do know is often based on merely textual material that the past has used for its own purposes with the inner motives often masked. All texts are performances where we do not know or perhaps care what the actor is really like but only what he or she is trying to present themselves as on stage. We reinterpret the play, guided by the script and the skill of the actors, in order to present them to ourselves as what we paid to see - as exemplars, as warnings, as tales, as imaginings, as the building blocks to an argument in our local context.

However, there do seem to be differences in minds between generations that can be observed by us in the here and now and we should not assume that such differences did not exist in the past. Things do change even if we are unsure of what we can know. For example, there seem to be functional 'brain differences' emerging between minds that depend for their meaning on texts and the rest of the population and between minds that rely on printed texts and those that rely on internet 'textuality'. There is no reason why these effects of technological change should not apply as much to the past as the present. The technological conditions of each age appear to dictate not merely the forms of thought but also our ability to contextualise and judge content so the current age of high complexity and mass interactive communications suggests that the past is going to be mentally different from the present even if we cannot know much about the minds of the present and less about the minds of the past.

The shift of minds from printed texts, cinematic story-telling and still photography and art works to fast-moving video game play, internet grazing and interactivity does seem to be, literally, changing minds. Most of this is represented in the media by standard issue cultural hysteria but the issues raised are serious and they may take some time to work their way through to changes in our own capacity and culture.

Memory effects seem to be of most interest under conditions where there is no now requirement for memory palaces and loss of interest in rote learning for anything but basic skills. However, the mind that thinks in terms of textual 'canons' (where part of the personality has been pre-templated from 'great works') is very different from the mind that operates synchronically with a fast-moving world in a constant revision of mental drafts. Rote learning is also associated with traditionalist text-based canons for a good reason - both are emergent properties of the Iron Age yet we are now in the Silicon Age where general information is broadly free and widespread and not held tight by small elites. There is no point in 'valuating' this as good or bad, worse or better, but there is equally no point in resisting the facts of the matter - minds are changing and must have changed in similar ways in the past. If we have problems understanding these changes today, how can we possibly believe we know how minds functioned even in the recent past.

There are many thinkers who have prepared the ground for the new ways of thinking based on new technologies - we have often pointed out the role of the existentialists and phenomenologists and, more recently, radical trans-humanist thought - but there are also contributions from psychologists. Again, the tentative findings of consciousness studies, neuroscience and the cognitive sciences seem to be lock-stepping with our use of the new technologies. We have already noted the flawed but dynamic reasoning of Wilhelm Reich and the absurdity of behaviourism except as a functional tool but another fruitful line of enquiry is that of Lacan.

Lacan is a problem in many respects but one stands out. It is the problem of all thinkers working within a pre-ordained theory. The truth becomes impenetrable because the thinker is operative within a framework which is mere mysticism at root. Lacan's mystical belief system is Freudianism - much as others operate within Marxist or scholastic frameworks. Early Reichian theory - for example - is hobbled by Reich's commitment to Marxism. It might be argued that Lacan cannot be removed from his framework any more than, say, Lenin or Aquinas from theirs. There is some truth in this but only if we insist on treating these thinkers as texts and not as door-openers, introducers of new ideas that help drive culture even as the texts begin to ossify their followers. One should follow the ideas through to new ideas and not dwell amidst the textual interpreters of ideas.

Lacan was imaginatively engaged in the mind and was closely associated with the surrealist movement which was a living cultural force in the interwar period. It was not just that surrealism responded to a psychological theory (Freudian) but that Lacan's thought and surrealism engaged in a direct dialectic with the intellectual life of artists and thinkers.

The first Lacanian case (amongst scarcely any published) is that of Marguerite. Forget the detail (which involves a 'mad' attempt to murder a famous actress of the day) except to note that we have a paranoiac who identifies with the actress, in herself a 'false front' for social performance. Forget also that Lacan stank as a psychotherapist and was a consummate narcissist on his own account (in the minds of some, a brilliant high functioning sociopath) and see him as an interpreter of culture which is where he may have something to say to us. The desire to be an actor or actress is not uncommon but it is madness to seek to kill one because you have over-identified with her (if we accept Lacan's interpretation).

What is important here is not the case but the use  to which Lacan put it. Here were the seeds of the uncovering of something that divides the contemporary mind and those who just 'exist' in inherited versions of the past - an understanding of how our identities are constructed by our appropriation of the social (of objects and of others, both real and imagined). This awareness is revolutionary and certainly derives from the 'uncovering' of the unconscious as a central cultural concept. Once we know this, then the search for individual identity or individuation (to leap across to the world of Jung) requires a shift from having the social thrust upon us in order to create our identity from without to re-ordering the social in order to have it reflect an identity that we have created for ourselves alongside the social.

What is interesting about this is that cases like Marguerite are 'mad' only because they have taken a step towards liberation (the attempt to construct an identity that chooses what to appropriate in the social to meet psychic needs) but have imaginatively detached themselves from the functional reality of the social. One is reminded of the 'mad' Last King of the Imperial Dynasty of America in Chambers' the Repairer of Reputations: the hero has a collection of books on Napoleon, the quintessential mad appropriation of the nineteenth century, on his mantelpiece. It could be argued that the fully socialised who are mere reflections of social order and have 'no individual mind' represent one radical category, the individuated who can see the social as just a set of tools for individuation as another radical category and the 'mad' (especially the paranoiac) as representing a half world radical category between the two. The 'mad' simply seek to appropriate the social (in Marguerite's case, the adulation and status of the actress) as a tool without understanding how it all works.

From this perspective, 'madness' (and an awful lot of persons are mad by this definition) is a perceptual problem about the social and its functional reality equivalent to the perceptual problems of inadequate sensory inputs but it is one that is essentially a failure of reason (as madness is classically understood) combined with a failure to 'know thyself' in a socialised context. Madness' thus lies somewhere between the rationality of the social and the reasoning of the individual - the first operating as a blind machine underpinned by manipulative social engineers (the 'reasonable' basis for individual paranoia) and the second struggling to assert the individual will against the enormity of the first (whilst not descending or ascending to the status of high functioning sociopath).

Some cannot cope with the strain - if a mind is not intellectually able to understand the machinery of the social and yet desperately seeks to be something that is not represented solely by the identity thrust on it by the social, then paranoia and other forms of mental disturbance become understandable, ranging, in the paranoid case, from the rigid conspiracy theory of the half-socialised to complete break-down. Lacan is most interested in what he thinks of as narcissism (perhaps because he identifies with it deep down) but there is a fine line here between the narcissism of the maladapted and the sensible narcissism of non-sociopathic self development on the one hand and the need to collaborate and co-operate in a complex society and the loss of self in total socialisation on the other.

And how does this fit with our introductory comments about knowing other minds in the past? Only that, when trying to understand how other past minds might have thought, the relationship between the complexity of the social and the individual and the amount of self awareness permitted in analysing the social in order to assert the individual claim against the social become relevant. To say that minds were like ours in the past is both probably true and probably false (though unknowable). Probably true is that the basic substrate of the mind is biologically similar (for simple evolutionary reasons) across vast tracts of time and probably false because that substrate is dealing with its own dialectical relationship with exponentially increasing social complexity and increasing awareness, through communications, of not only the fact of the complexity but the contingency of the complexity. Existential anxiety is thus not only a matter of death (as we have from the classical existentialists) but of the problem of social complexity and the death of social stability - of uncertainty in the relationship between the individual and the world.

Of course, while there is still room for madness today, there is less room for attributing madness simply to not being adequately socialised. So, for example, being homosexual is no longer seen as a deviation (from a norm), someone who hears voice is no longer automatically seen as insane and someone is no longer requiring treatment for saying they are a woman trapped in a man's body. Attitudes to these things represent material differences in 'what it is like to be a human being' and until we know what people in the past actually thought of such things at the micro-level of 'ordinary people' who did not write texts and did not use texts in elite contexts, we simply have to start admitting that we really do not know how past minds worked. We scarcely know how our own minds work.

Traditionalism & Sexual Magick

Please note that this essay contains verbal material that is sexually explicit and those of an anxious or mildly neurotic disposition or who have an aesthetic distaste for such matters should not read on.

The problem with sexual magic or magick is its history - its practice has derived from the eclectic acquisition of many traditions under conditions where nothing might be said or broadcast to the world for fear of shame or, in certain societies, persecution.

But perhaps a future shift in Western consciousness about sexual autonomy (only one element in the debate about autonomy) does not lie in the appropriation of these traditions or the maintenance of the idea that, somehow, sexuality is so different and dangerous that it has to be surrounded by ritual and performance.

Perhaps sexuality is far more 'normal' than we think even if it contains risks that must be accounted for.

Doubts About Traditionalism

Take the tradition of the retention of semen. This is a Taoist convention apparently linked to longevity but it also emerges as karezza, almost certainly independently, in the modern West.

It links to 'coitus reservatus' (the standard use of Latin is often a clue to a neurotic refusal to face up to what is going on as 'normal') and there are Tantric equivalents.

Magical import has been placed on this practice with an elaborate ritualistic language of spirituality despite it largely being a) an attempt to accommodate high sexual energy with poor contraceptive methods and b) often emphasises the ability to extend male pleasure to a level believed to be spiritual without real regard for the 'vessel' (the woman).

Modern technology can now largely sweep away the fear of pregnancy (with a bit of common sense) even if, ironically, fear of disease now returns us to the condom quite quickly, so the central issue is b) - do such techniques really improve matters or are they based on 'false consciousness'.

We are reminded here that our Taoist friends were not scientifically well informed and, indeed, that they poisoned themselves with mercury intake. Their insights were 'a priori'.

Science seems to be telling us much that casts doubt on the Taoist model - orgasm is in itself a 'good' in terms of health and welfare and we do not now have to rely on Wilhelm Reich for some understanding that it also has positive socio-psychological effects.

For a great deal of humanity, joyful sexual engagement is a major factor in relieving stress and tension but I will leave you to study the links and come to a view, assuming God has not told you not to do so.

Keeping the Baby, Throwing Out the Bath Water

The spiritualisation of the orgasm (incomprehensible to many people but a fact of the matter to others) is merely the extension of the orgasm from 'coping' with reality to a process that, insofar as reality is constructed by perception, radically transforms reality through transforming a person's perception of reality.

The struggle between a given and socially constructed reality and the inner reality of a person, which is at the heart of a great deal of human misery, is not necessarily a sexual matter by any means but sexual repression and transformation through sexual engagement provides a resolution of that struggle for many people.

From this perspective, the effect on longevity (the Taoists' main purpose) of failing to orgasm is not merely unproven but looks to be as precisely as wrong as the imbibing of mercury while the length of the act may indeed have excellent effects on the self-trained male but requires a level of tolerance from most women beyond reason.

Of course both Taoism and and Tantra were quite blunt about the receptacle and submissive nature of the woman. Sincere devotees of their techniques have had to do a fair number of somersaults in the last century to introduce some notion of gender equality and take account of homosexual and 'third sex' aspirations.

But there is no point in throwing out the baby with the traditional bath water because of the 'false' aspects of traditionalism, corrected both by science and by a legitimate modern ethic - not so much one of equality as one of regard for the 'other' as person of value in their own right.

The key issues here are the recognition that sacral sex is a personal development strategy and not couple therapy (as in neo-tantra) and the insight that sacral-sexual techniques mobilise the chemical interplay behind mind and body to create transformative states that can be legitimately interpreted as 'divine' (even if there is no divine objectively speaking).

Honesty & Difference

The obvious problem is that male and female body chemistries have requirements that are so different that the transformative techniques are not likely to be identical.

One school of thought is blunt about what this may mean - the 'other' is abstracted as a vessel and receptacle, albeit one that is treated with respect. There is a whole ethical debate that is inconclusive about whether a 'magical practitioner' actually informs their partner about what they are up to in this respect.

Some of this debate descends into a matter of angels dancing on the head of a pin because all sexual activity involves both a deep inwardness (including unshared fantasy) and a sense of bonding that, at its best, is felt as a merging of persons.  Our Tantra series will explore this further at a much later date.

It is only convention that has Westerners speaking of the bonding in romantic terms without recognising the existence of the former self-absorbed inwardness.

It is not just that the inwardness is often transgressional or incommunicable but the other party is, bluntly, probably not interested in yours because it cuts across their own experience and their transgressive thoughts.

Part of the sheer pleasure of a loving sexual relationship is the right to be yourself in your own head and that is not in the slightest bit incompatible with radical differences in actual experiences (inevitable anyway given male and female body chemistry in any serious heterosexual play) and of different fantasy imagery.

The Mind-Body Relationship in Sacral Sexuality

The baby that we might wish to save in the traditions, alongside a pragmatic approach to technique, is the 'allegorical' role of their modelling of how the body works as perceived by the mind rather than as described objectively by scientists. In essence, we are speaking of different truths for different purposes.

As our biochemistry shifts in response to sensory stimulation, we 'sense' changes in our body that are not the same as emotions. They are physical concomitants of emotions - such as a fluttering in the chest or a dullness in the forehead - and much of the art of 'magic' directed at the body is about the mastery of these sensations and their redirection.

The entire infrastructure of the chakhras, like the circulation of energies in Taoist thought, is a pre-scientific but perfectly realistic attempt to describe actual phenomena that exhibit themselves in different ways in different persons.

Some of these sensations will never be present in some people. In others, they can be awakened.

If these sensations are observed and cultivated, they match the felt sense of an energy that can be guided in a way that appears to be observable in terms of cause and effect through the body until something takes place that can easily be interpreted as of the highest spiritual nature, a transformative moment of devastating effect.

Such descriptions are pre-scientific but science has still not be able to produce its own adequate description of the 'felt' management of the body by the mind, in part because the experience is unique to the individual and incommunicable. The framework for its description is more poetic and analogical than anything science can cope with.

Given that pre-scientific traditional thinking identified some real felt phenomena, we can draw a distinction between the analysis of meaning and working (which resulted in errors over mercury and semen retention) and the actual skill and success of the techniques in making a cause have an effect that could lead to an explosion of new meanings.

In other words, if we can identify the phenomena in ourselves and assuming we will ourselves to a meaning and do not decide, rather than have decided for us, that we would prefer a socialised to an individuated meaning, then these techniques can be learned and improved upon, the better (I contend) if they are stripped of the cultural accretions of the past.

The Ethics of Sex

One of these techniques is the managed use of sexual stimulation ... and, the modern would add, the full body or extended orgasm (of special value to the female who can reach heights in this respect undreamt of by any male tantrik adept or taoist priest).

Ethically, one person could reasonably use another as a magical vessel so long as the process was not a betrayal of private trust in regard to bonding (or involved a conscious decision not to bond on both sides which is perfectly possible) and showed a balance of respect over time.

What do I mean by balance of respect over time? This is that, assuming a bonding beyond one event, and unlike the use of the deliberate use of a 'lower caste' vessel in Tantric or, implicitly, some Taoist lore, a sort of unspoken magical balance is provided between the needs of the partners, with no prejudice intended here against polyamory.

In this context, inwardness is best served by a degree of communication not as to detail but as to attitude, an openness about preferred technique and fantasy, no matter how radical in content, that permits the one to give to the other in Situation A in order that they may be given in Situation B.

This deals with the problem of equality because, at Situation A, the female (we stick to the heterosexual for the argument here) permits the male to lose themselves in adapted techniques for his biochemistry but, in Situation B, the male responds to her biochemical needs in order to get the appropriate level of orgasmic energy for her.

It has to be said immediately that all human beings are on a massively variable continuum of libidinous energy and that this waxes and wanes with perception and with external conditions so there are no laws as such to love-making. Each moment is its own moment so we are left with an attitude, a form of will or a sense of an individuated self.

A Caveat to Criticism

Before we leave the subject, we should not be too negative about the 'retention of semen' model because it does represent a very specific technique that does have its particular use.

There is a biochemical kick-back from certain techniques that halt male orgasm at the very moment before fulfilment. These clearly do have effects that are dramatic.

The mental modelling is based on the idea (that somehow feels right even if it is not right) that the fluids in our body are all closely connected - this idea is very much at the root of the Taoist and alchemical concepts of a furnace in the bowels circulating fluids so that mental and physical acts can purify and drive these fluids towards 'gnosis'.

Not to expend a fluid but to kick it back at the moment of highest felt pressure into the body reverses the orgasmic sensation as a shudder that shifts perception of the body in radical ways - and, with body integrated to mind, changes the mind from one state of excitation to another state altogether.

So, while I have been critical of the Taoist approach or that of Karezza at the macro-sexual level, at the micro-sexual level, it is something that 'works' as a technique. To run one's sexuality on it as a law strikes me as inappropriate but to experience the situation with a willing partner may have individual benefits.

Taking Things Forward

Tradition and past 'teachers' can get in the way of something much more normal that our society allows. It is not just that we have to cope with an historic Judaeo-Christian mythos of repression but also with a trivial public presentation of sexuality for commercial reasons which masquerades as liberation.

Our culture has developed an increasingly untenable situation where we live in a huge shopping window of theoretical sexual possibilities at which we stare like podgy armchair viewers of sporting events, observers and not participants.

Meanwhile, no one dare discuss such matters because the shame culture still subsists at the provincial and daily level, in the home and in the work-place. Desire is massively displaced into an inactive voyeurism - impotence being the equivalent of the sports fan's obesity.

If we shift our perceptions dramatically back to ourselves as individuals who sit at a natural place in the continuum of libidinal energies where it is good for ourselves (including the choice of a-sexuality as well as hyper-sexuality), we can negotiate and calibrate our attitude to sexuality more precisely, ideally making it less an obsessive interest and more a tool for self development and long-lasting relationships.