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When I first met Vishvanath (the guy who I affectionately refer to as my “guru” – knowing full well he squirms when I do this), we started a conversation about tantra (and everything else) which went on for a year or so. A conversation shaped through walks through local woodland and parks, in and out of pubs and each other’s rooms, criss-crossing the city night and day. It was the beginning of friendship; a forging of affinities. Continue reading »
The Saundaryalahari (“Flood of Beauty”) is a key Srividya text, sometimes attributed to Sankara. Composed of 100 verses, it is usually divided into two parts – verses 1-41 and verses 42-100. The first section, sometimes called the Anandalahari (“Wave of Joy”) is concerned with the facets of Lalita sadhana – her image in external worship, but also her Yantra and mantra-modalities The verses can also be read in such a way as to relate them to the subtle mapping of chakras, nadis, etc. The Anandalahari is sometimes seen as originating directly from Siva, or Lalita Herself. Continue reading »
“Then, established in the body of the mantra, he should practice the supreme concentration. The supreme mantra body is manifested in the succession of letters.”
The Purification of the Body, Gavin Flood, Tantra in Practice, p517
As one might expect, occasionally in my practice I encounter things I don’t quite understand. I put them aside for later and, occasionally, understanding ‘bursts’ forth at a later point. I’ve been practicing various forms of Bhuta Suddhi for some years now, and from 2004 have been working from various versions of this practice, of which the main two are the chapter by Gavin Flood in Tantra in Practice; the second in The Lakshmi Tantra. But, until recently, I’ve failed to grasp the idea of the mantra-body. It wasn’t really until I read Loriliai Biernacki’s Rewnowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra (Oxford University Press, 2007) that understanding went from a trickle to a flood – the stream joining other streams, as it were. Continue reading »
A great deal of contemporary magical discourse establishes a “hard” distinction between theory and practice – and between theory and experience. If you look on occult forums you’ll regularly see people indulging in a kind of magical oneupmanship by claiming that they have “direct experience” whilst others have only read books, so their views don’t carry as much weight. Equally, there is much bashing of so-called “armchair magicians” – people who have lots of theories or opinions, but haven’t yet made the leap into putting those theories into practice. There seems to be a general assumption that to be an occutist is to “practice”. This was pretty much my own stance for several years – I avoided “grand theories” of how various occult phenomena are supposed to work (whether they were based on jungian archetypes, “inner energies” or quantummery) and later, tended to avoid much of what I saw as the “theoretical overlay” of tantra as “unneccesary” to my practice. Continue reading »
A central theme in our approach to tantra is “awake-awareness”.
One way of explaining this concept is being awake to what’s going on around you in the present moment, rather than becoming caught up in future fantasies or mulling over past events. A lot of our general practices aim at extending our capacity to be “awake-aware” and so can be done anywhere, as we go through our busy daily lives – rather than distinct practices that we set aside time for. We don’t make the distinction that you’ll find in a lot of western magic between magical v. mundane, spirit v. matter, lower v. higher, etc – we don’t compartmentalise different aspects of life that way – and quite a few of our exercises can be done anywhere, any time you have an odd moment, rather than having to set a special time aside. Whilst we do encourage people to try out various types of daily practices, we’re also very aware that people who have busy lives can’t always do this. So Tantra is not so much about pursuing a distinct set of practices but living one’s life in a particular way. Continue reading »