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Archive for the category ‘tantra’

  1. Heart Practice: Tantra as ethical practice – I

    “Using the plow of truth,
    sowing the seeds of love,
    plucking the weeds of falsehood,
    pouring the waters of patience;
    they look directly into themselves
    and build fences of virtue.
    If they remain rooted in their good ways,
    The Bliss of Siva will grow.”
    Appar (seventh-century Tamil poet-saint, from Pandian, 2009, p21)

    “Ethical encounters are jubilant, joyous encounters of both affectivity and liberty.”
    Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics

    A great deal has been written about tantra as a transgressive practice and the perceived necessity of moving beyond normative values in order to discover “freedom”. However, the idea of tantra as an ethical practice seems to me to be relatively unthought. For this post then, I want to make some preliminary reflections on the possible ethical dimensions of contemporary tantra practice. Continue reading »

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  2. Reading the Saundarya Lahari – V

    “When she, the supreme power, [becoming] by her own free will embodied as all that exists, perceives her own throbbing radiance, the chakra is then being produced.
    The Heart of the Yogini Tantra

    “I worship that goddess who is supreme Siva, whose form is the indestructable a-letter, manifesting the tides of the waves of the kulas.”
    Nityasodasikarnava 1:10

    Continue reading »

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  3. East meets West: New Thought, Thelema, and The Holy Order of Krishna

    We are once again being taken to task for some of our writers quoting often the slogan of verse I8.63 of the Bhagavad Gita “Yatha ischasi tathha kuru” – of which we accepted Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” as the best English paraphrase; and if there is so much public opposition to the very mention of Crowley’s name we have to bow thereto, and do so. But that is not to deny that Crowley had been trained in India of men who were great Yogis such as Karunananda, Sabapati Svami’s disciple. In deference to occidental opinion we shall paraphrase the Gita dictum by the English in “Fulfill thy Will”.
    The Kalpaka, Volume 26, 1931, issues 4-5

    Much has been written about the westward transmission of Indian esoteric themes in the early twentieth century – via movements such as the Theosophical Society, esoteric groups such as the OTO, and charismatic teachers such as Pierre Bernard, but instances of transmissions in the other direction – of Indian esotericists engaging with western occultism, seem to be rarer. Continue reading »

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  4. Some useful online resources – II

    Back in 2010 I did a brief review of some online resources I’d found useful. Here’s a few more. Continue reading »

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  5. Reading the Saundarya Lahari – IV

    Following from the previous two verses (examined in the last two posts – (see Reading the Saundarya Lahari – III-2 for summary) which together, produce an image of the goddess for dhyana) verses 9-10 shift focus suddenly towards what seem to be, at first glance, expositions of the goddess in relation to the chakras. Verses 9 and 10 are often interpreted in relation to various yogic accounts of Kundalini. Some contemporary commentaries on Saundaryalahri take this as a cue to go into long, detailed expositions of Kundalini schemas. I’m not going to do that, however. Continue reading »

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  6. Krishna in the dock: the 1862 Maharaja libel case and its consequences – I

    The cardinal idea of the doctrine of Vallabhacharya is the incarnation in his person and in that of his descendents of Krishna, and the enjoyment for that reason, of the right to confer upon the faithful the privilege upon this earth of a personal union with the deity of their worship. Theoretically speaking, were this personal union to be regarded spiritually and held to elevate the mind to an intimate union with the highest moral principle; were it to hold forth by meditation and isolation some incentive to a consideration of self-annihilation and self-denial, this doctrine might have claims upon our attention as doing some, however limited, a good. But preached to a people who, from climatic influences and early conditions of puberty are peculiarly lascivious and prurient, the evil grows more and more enormous with the progress of the sect. …Gloomy faiths, bound to asceticism, have no real hold on the moral conduct of the professors of them, but a religion which rushes into an opposite extreme, and stimulates an evil too great already for the patience of mankind and civilisation, deserves to be trodden out.
    Anthropological Review, Vol.4, No.14, 1866

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  7. Elizabeth Sharpe and “The Secrets of the Kaula Circle”

    Elizabeth Sharpe (1888-1941) is one of the “forgotten” writers on India of the early twentieth century. Born in Bangalore in 1888, she seems to have spent most of her life in India, with a brief trip to England in the 1930s. She wrote several books concerning aspects of Indian life, including at least one work on tantra; translated sanskrit texts such as the Siva Sahasranama; and had a passionate interest in the education of women in India. She is best-known for her 1936 novella, The Secrets of the Kaula Circle – a tale of black magic and left-hand tantric “orgies” which featured a recognisably unflattering portrayal of Aleister Crowley. Continue reading »

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  8. Lecture notes: On the Kamasutra – III

    In the first post in this series, I discussed the “discovery” of the Kamasutra by Richard Burton and its publication in the nineteenth century, and in the second post the western reception of Kamasutra and its incorporation into sexological discourse throughout the twentieth century. These two posts were useful for me to write, in that they enabled me to think about some future directions for exploring the relationship between representations of tantra and sexology/sex-therapy, which I may return to at later date, but in doing so, I realised some months later, that I hadn’t paid much attention to the actual content of the Kamasutra. So, for this third post, I’m going to take a cue from Daud Ali’s (2011) suggestion that, in examining the Kamasutra (and related texts) it is useful to move beyond the limited frame of viewing these texts as simply books about sex, and instead, approach them from a wider perspective – what Ali terms a “kama world” – wherein kama (sensual pleasure) “was not abstracted into a special, sui generis category in and of itself, but instead formed part of wider practices of aesthetic, material and ethical transformation.” Continue reading »

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  9. Practice notes: On lingering

    There are times when I languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.
    Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali Poem #14

    lin-ger

      1. to remain or stay in a place longer than is usual or expected, as if from reluctance to leave
      2. to remain alive; continue or persist, although gradually dying, ceasing, disappearing, etc.
      3. to dwell in contemplation, thought, or enjoyment.
      4. to be tardy in action; delay; dawdle
      5. to walk slowly; saunter along

    dictionary.com

    Last year, on my birthday, we went to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where we experienced Zarina Bhimji’s haunting film – Yellow Patch. There was one sequence – where the camera zooms slowly towards the crumbling facade of an old Indian palace, revealing a world of untold richness and depth. Afterwards, I was struck by the thought that it is when we slow down – even momentarily – that the world – in particularly the everyday or mundane world that so much of contemporary magical writing tends to disdain – becomes wondrous. Continue reading »

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  10. Review: Two books on Bauls

    In my recent post on syncretism I made mention of two books that I had recently read concerning the Baul tradition. I found both of these books helpful in relation to their attempts to understand religious difference and the negotiation of Identity, and what follows is a brief review of each. Continue reading »

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