What I learned from classical Tantra

Part 1: Falling radically in love with existence and surrendering to the universal pattern

If you enjoy my writing, feel free to give it a❤️ and share your comments with me!

---

I’ll admit that what initially drew me to tantra was this provocative notion of “transforming sexual energy into spiritual energy”. I pictured people caught in powerful mystical experiences with life energy convulsing through their bodies, rolling in ecstasy, straddling cosmic planes that my uninitiated self could hardly fathom.

Then I read Tantra Illuminated and spent a good chunk of last year immersed in the teachings of classical (non-dual Shaiva) tantra. This is a spiritual tradition that originates from the Kashmir Valley of India – and it has very little to do with sexual energy.

For a while, I was that person at parties who got some satisfaction from telling people that tantra is “not all about eye-gazing”. In fact, one friend, who attends festivals like Burning Man, vehemently argued with me that it really is in fact about eye-gazing. 

This is the tragic consequence of the spread of the neo-Tantra movement. The word ‘tantra’ now gets associated with stuff like ISTA and Leyla Martin. With things like withholding ejaculation, sacred sexuality and consent games. I have no issue with any of these things, but it’s a bit sad if a rich, 2000-year-old spiritual tradition gets whittled down to just this. 

Tantra is not what we think it is

The origins of ‘tantra’ actually come from the Tantras which were old Indian spiritual texts containing varied teachings, philosophies and practices. Some of the original Tantric practices were far more intense than we’d imagine. For example, sexual tantric rites often had a specifically non-sexual intent, as it was meant for advanced practitioners who already had a high level of spiritual awareness and could do the practices without getting lost in sexual gratification. As Frank Yang puts it: you have to be highly stabilised if you can abide in non-duality even during sex.

You also had the "left-hand" Tantra (Vamachara) traditions, which specifically challenged societal norms. This featured anything from having sex in graveyards to drinking menstrual blood.

Extreme practices aside, the particular tradition of Non-Dual Shaivist Tantra I explored has a special place in my heart. I find its philosophical worldview so resonant and in many ways, beautiful. So in the following posts I’m going to share a few particular ideas from this ancient spiritual tradition that I found most eye-opening. 

#1: Falling radically in love with all of existence 

The end goal of the Tantric path is sometimes formulated as “to fall radically in love with all of existence” - which is a way of describing a particular flavor of liberation (moksha). There is something so naturally sweet to this – almost a kind of irresistible allure that’s somehow missing from Buddhism which is so preoccupied with suffering. 

Perhaps, like me, you’ve resisted the notion that life is, in fact, one endless journey to eradicate suffering. Because on a good day, isn’t this sheer existence all rather utterly amazing? 

Perhaps, like me, you also don’t take kindly to the idea of renouncing worldly desires and attachments. Isn’t it so nice to desire things? Kisses, chocolate, warm days at the beach. Reposing in a calm, detached equanimity can seem so dull at times. And then how does one square the demands of living a normal 21st-century life with serious spiritual practice? 

Luckily, Tantra is considered a “householder practice”, which means even in old times, it was designed to allow regular folks outside a monastic setting to have a shot at full awakening. It also has a secondary goal of worldly enjoyment and prosperity, including pleasure and all the good things of the tangible world. This is always subordinate to the main goal of liberation – hence it’s not a free license to indulge – but it does mean that Tantric practices give us tools to become better at navigating the ride of being a human.

Desire also features deeply in Tantra – in fact, it posits that we are ourselves Essence Nature stimulated by innate desire. Desire for what? Some may say for union with the Beloved, the Divine, or for primordial love. Even when we think we long for some external person or thing, what we really long for is reconnecting with and remembering our true nature. Another way of seeing this longing for the Divine is that it’s the same thing as Enlightenment but seen from the perspective of the heart. 

But what does falling radically in love with existence actually mean? For me, it’s been about finding a deep intimacy with reality. It’s about getting to taste the world up close, as direct and naked as possible, without the greasy filters of our stories and mental projections. It reminds me of those rare moments during psychedelic journeys or deep meditation, or when we’re so present with somebody we can feel the sense of time disappear, the sense of being a person slipping away.

Except in a much bigger, more total and permanent way. 

We achieve this intimacy by realizing that the whole of humanity – the good, bad and the ugly – is the direct expression of the same “universal consciousness” expressing itself through each human life. As Tantrikas, we experience God in everything, everywhere, in everyone. We embrace everything – no experience or emotion can be wrong, because the whole spectrum of human experience is seen as equally valid and divine.

If you think about it, this is actually pretty radical. Falling in love with all of existence includes embracing war, famine, Hitler and mortgages. Can we truly love it all?  

#2: Surrendering to the unfolding universal pattern  

The tantric answer to this is that everything is a natural unfolding of the universal pattern. As human beings, we’re a tiny piece in the grand unfolding of nature, too close to the ground to see what’s happening on a cosmic scale. But zoom out enough, and we see that everything is already in a sense, perfect. There is no birth without death. No love without loss. Everything moves in natural cycles according to the perfect intelligence of nature. An intelligence that has deep structures and rhythms, too vast and subtle and complex for us to understand.  

When we look at it this way, we can’t take much credit for who we are. Neither our gifts nor our traumas were ‘chosen’ by us. We’re here because of our genetics, our conditioning, and a whole chain of cause-and-effect that came long before we began life as embryos. On a broader scale, the societies we live in are the result of generations of the pattern unfolding on a planetary scale for millions of years. 

Carl Sagan captures this interconnectedness nicely: 

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

From the perspective of nature, there is no inherent meaning to any event. There is no such thing as a “tragedy” – because everything is simply just a result of everything else that came before. Even a car crash can be beautiful, when seen as just another expression of the universal pattern unfolding. 

I find this a radical but liberating perspective. Not because it absolves me from personal accountability (our actions still carry karma), but because it helps me surrender to forces far greater than I can comprehend. It makes it easier to find forgiveness and see the futility of blaming ourselves or anybody else. 

This is captured in the idea of divine indifference: all we can do is embrace equanimity in the face of life’s dualities – that simultaneously, everything is infinitely precious, and yet nothing matters.

My favourite image to dramatically anchor this point home is: even when a Tantrika looks into the eyes of her lover, she sees him as already dead. Because even while recognising it as a profound moment of love, she simultaneously sees the truth of loss, as the universal pattern will inevitably absorb all such moments, for all such lovers, into the absolute void of time.  

(To be continued in Part 2…)