rigorousintuition.ca

undead wrote:I don't know how this picture relates, and isn't it kind of offensive? Is there a point to posting such a picture, besides making simplistic insinuations? I'm just wondering what the relation is to the poem. It really is a shame that people have such rotten experiences as upper class drug addict wannabe Buddhists following around a drug addict guru.

undead wrote:Kundalini and Qigong Psychosis

By Dr. Tan Kheng Khoo




Qigong

Qi is life energy. It is the animating power or prana that enervate all things. A living person has this life force: a healthy person has more qi than an ill person. A dead person has no more qi left and thus there is no more warmth. To be healthy, the qi must be clear and unpolluted. It should not be turbid and it must be flowing smoothly and not blocked.

Gong means work. Qigong means working with this life force, and learning to control and distribute the qi to improve the health of mind and body. Qigong is a whole system of exercise and meditation. The exercise includes postures, movements, massage and breathing techniques. Qi is accumulated and stored in the body. In disease, the polluted qi is cleansed into pure healing qi. Impure qi is eliminated by proper breathing techniques.

Qigong is a practice because it is a daily exercise of 20 to 40 minutes. It is an enjoyable exercise. It requires only some time and hardly any money. There are techniques for every body of any age and physical condition. No equipment or large space is necessary. It can be practiced with standing, sitting or supine methods. With slight modification the handicapped can also practice some of the techniques.

Categories of qigong

It is generally divided into active (dong gong) and passive (jing gong):

(1) Dynamic (active) qigong means movement of postures as in a dance or if a posture is fixed movements of the arms. Dong gong is yang and active concealing the passive ying. Movement is the external appearance, but internally the mind is quiet and tranquil.

(2) Passive (tranquil) qigong is meditation with the body being still. Qi is controlled by concentration, visualization and breathing techniques. Jing gong is passive yin externally, but internally the mind is alert and actively yang. With the body still the breath moves the qi.

Although dynamic dong gong is movement and passive jing gong is meditation, there is no rigid line drawn between the two. To balance yin and yang, in movement there must be stillness in the mind. In restful meditation, the mind must be aware with attention.

In its application, qigong can also be divided into:

a) External Healing Qi. This is similar to cosmic healing.

b) Meditative or Spiritual Qigong (Jing Gong). This is meditation (jing gong) which is practiced as a complement to the active dong gong (yang), the commoner or popular qigong. There is a tendency to subdivide it as Buddhist and Taoist, but whatever classifications the essence is to attain ‘a sound mind in a sound body’.

c) Healing qigong is the major movement nowadays. Complemented with meditation, the active part includes stretching, deep breathing, low impact conditioning, and isometrics. This practice increases stamina and improves coordination.

So basically one learns qigong in order to establish medical and health benefits. The remaining types of qigong should not interest us. The most popular type of easy daily exercise nowadays is Taiji Quan. A smaller number of people would go to a teacher for proper and graduated training for physical and mental health and this is now generally called qigong.

Dangers of qigong

Although most qigong techniques are innocuous especially when guided by an expert teacher, dangers may be encountered if one is too impatient or eager and does not follow the teacher’s guidance.

Qigong Psychosis

Kenneth S Cohen coined the terms qigong psychosis and qigong psychotic reaction in late 1970s. These are direct translation of the Chinese expression zou huo ru mo, 走火入魔, “fire wild, devils enter”. In 1994, the “Glossary of Culture-Bound Syndromes” of the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association states:

Qigong psychotic reaction: A term describing an acute, time-limited episode characterized by dissociative, paranoid, or other psychotic or non-psychotic symptoms that may occur after participation in the Chinese folk health-enhancing practice of qigong. Especially vulnerable are individuals who become overly involved in the practice.

More is not always better. The lesson here is that the individual should not overwhelmingly go overboard to practice qigong, both active exercises and passive meditation. Kenneth Cohen cites two cases of a Taiji Quan teacher and a Buddhist master. Both were teachers of qigong, but both were out of touch with reality. The Taiji Quan teacher, after ten years of practice, is hallucinating about his ‘third aura’, which is non-existent in any spiritual practice. He was told to stop teaching and to do 20 minutes of standing meditation every morning. After one year his delusion disappeared.

The Buddhist master after spending 25 years of qigong is out of touch with reality. He was constantly talking to God by invoking deities, but he could not carry on a normal conversation with his friends.

In 25 years of teaching qigong, Kenneth Cohen had met 5 or 6 qigong teachers and at least 50 qigong students who developed similar problems after excessive practice of going too fast ignoring proper instructions. Dr. Zhang Tongling, professor of psychiatry at the Beijing Medical University, runs a clinic for the obsessive qigong practitioners. In a series of 145 patients she found that hallucinations emanating from excessive practice of qigong without guidance is common. The advice given here is: proceed gradually step by step. Do not overload your qi circuits by trying to do too much too soon. Do not neglect the joys of life. Relax and not to be obsessed with qi all the time.

Bruce Kumar Frantzis was fully trained in mainland China by one of this century’s greatest Taoist masters. He has written a book called ‘Opening The Energy Gates Of Your Body’. In the Appendix C of this book he described a few cases that went wrong:

Case 1: Too much Qi is painful.

This case concerns a man who was taught the basic ‘Hsing I Nei Gung’ practice of sinking the qi to the lower tantien (hara) in Amoy. After two years of practice the student became very powerful. When his teacher left for another city, this man began learning secret techniques from other teachers. He practiced these new techniques diligently. The combination of the new with the old ended in forcing the qi below the tantien into his genitals. He literally broke the barrier between the lower tantien and the genitals, emptying the tantien of qi. This resulted in mental and physical problems including involuntary semen emissions and hallucinations. His masters took three years to bring him back to normal.

Case 2: Vibrating Qi

In many qigong practices, there is a desire to deliberately trying to vibrate qi in the body, bones, tissues, brain etc. The breathing becomes rapid. The untoward aspects of this practice are that power usurps compassion. Symptoms of hallucinations and megalomania may also induce a mental illness. The shaking, the shutting and opening continue even after the practice is stopped, and this can damage the internal organs. This is like the partial awakening of the kundalini. Cancer patients when they practice this method tend to worsen their disease, because the primary cancer will send secondaries elsewhere.

Fukien White Crane

Psychosis will result when the enhanced qi goes up to the brain. This is quite common in the ‘Fukien White Crane’ type of practice. The madness starts with arrogance and breaking of bones due to the power. Some of the other symptoms are (1) Hallucinations with out-of-body experiences, (2) Things are moving much faster then they actually are, (3) Stiffening of the internal and external body, (4) Thirst for power, (5) Feeling constantly active and restless and unable to calm down. 6) Experiencing involuntary movements and body spasms. The remedy is to drain and re-pattern the vibrational qi.

A personal case of qigong psychosis

This is a good friend of mine. He was 64 years of age and retired from his profession. He started to practice qigong under a teacher. Everything was fine for a year. Then he started to feel strong and powerful. He used to tell me that he was so healthy and strong that he carried his own golf clubs and did not require a buggy to ferry him about. Then a few months later, he told me that he was radiant and light, and that he can put his arms up towards a tree and receives white light and energy from the tree. This sounded a little odd to me then, but there were no other symptoms. Suddenly one evening his son rang me up to say that his father was psychotic. He was meditating almost the whole night and then suddenly he began to shout vehemently. He was paranoid and insisted that there were evil spirits in the house. Then he began to cut round holes out of the carpet where he was meditating. Then he also put his hands around the wife’s neck trying to shake off or blow off the evil spirit in her. When I spoke to him on the phone, he seemed to confide knowingly that there are spirits around his house and he did not want to elaborate as he might anger them. I told the son to stop him from practicing qigong straightaway and to ask the psychiatrist to prescribe a certain drug. He slowly improves from then onwards. In this case he practiced only for 18 months. However, in the last few weeks he overdid it and even tried to meditate the whole night.

Hammer of Los wrote: About Helena Blavatsky, who was a humanitarian and a lively and original thinker;

She delivered up an unlikely package of Hinduism, Gnosticism, and pseudoscience which had a tremendous impact on the intelligentsia of the West. She even converted the Indians themselves to the "ancient wisdom" in modern dress. Her ideas, about ancient lost races with secret knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, the immortal soul perfecting itself through endless rebirths, and mastery of superhuman powers which could unlock the secrets of the universe.

Unlikely to whom? Not to me. I rather like syntheses which reveal the perennial wisdom of the eternal Dao.

I believe the buddha had secret knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, Lao Tzu as well, along with a host of others. Well maybe not the ultimate knowledge exactly, rather we should say the ultimate human knowledge. Or as close as they could get to it. I don't think anyone is perfect, but maybe some are just perfect enough.

I also rather like the idea of the immortal soul perfecting itself through endless rebirths.

The mastery of superhuman powers I'm a little unsure of, but I'm prepared to wait and see.

The jury is out on that one.

undead wrote: It really is a shame that people have such rotten experiences as upper class drug addict wannabe Buddhists following around a drug addict guru.

American Dream wrote:

undead wrote: It really is a shame that people have such rotten experiences as upper class drug addict wannabe Buddhists following around a drug addict guru.

Just to clarify- the above might well describe the experience of the Steinbecks, whose experience is described in the book extensively quoted just upthread.

I don't know that it would describe the experience of the Carreons, the couple who posted the book at their website < http://www.american-buddha.com/> and who authored or posted a number of the other pieces to be found in this thread.

They, like I, would seem to value conscious sexuality and to reject cultishness but not by any means spirituality. For that matter most of this seems to be true for the Steinbecks, even if they reached a breaking point with Tibetan Buddhist hierarchies in North America, as did the Carreons in their own way...

3. THE TANTRIC FEMALE SACRIFICE

Until now we have only examined the tantric scheme very broadly and abstractly. But we now wish to show concretely how the “transformation of erotic love into power” is carried out. We thus return to the starting point, the love-play between yogi and yogini, god and goddess, and first examine the various feminine typologies which the tantric master uses in his rituals. Vajrayana distinguishes three types of woman in all:


1. The “real woman” (karma mudra). She is a real human partner. According to tantric doctrine she belongs to the “realm of desire”.

2.The “imaginary woman” or “spirit woman” (inana mudra). She is summonsed by the yogi’s meditative imagination and only exists there or in his fantasy. The inana mudra is placed in the “realm of forms”.

3.The “inner woman” (maha mudra). She is the woman internalized via the tantric praxis, with no existence independent of the yogi. She is not even credited with the reality of an imagined form, therefore she counts as a figure from the “formless realm”.


All three types of woman are termed mudra. This word originally meant ‘seal’, ‘stamp’, or ‘letter of the alphabet’. It further indicated certain magical hand gestures and body postures, with which the yogi conducted, controlled and “sealed” the divine energies. This semantic richness has led to all manner of speculation. For example, we read that the tantric master “stamps” the phenomena of the world with happiness, and that as his companion helps him do this, she is known as mudra (‘stamp’). More concretely, the Maha Siddha Naropa refers to the fact that a tantric partner, in contrast to a normal woman, assists the guru in blocking his ejaculation during the sexual act, and as it were “seals” this, which is of major importance for the performance of the ritual. For this reason she is known as mudra, ‘seal’ (Naropa, 1994, p. 81). But the actual meaning probably lies in the following: in Vajrayana the feminine itself is “sealed”, that is, spellbound via a magic act, so that it is available to the tantric master in its entirety.

The karma mudra: the real woman

What then are the external criteria which a karma mudra, a real woman, needs to meet in order to serve a guru as wisdom consort? The Hevajra Tantra, for example, describes her in the following words: “She is neither too tall, nor too short, neither quite black nor quite white, but dark like a lotus leaf. Her breath is sweet, and her sweat has a pleasant smell like that of musk. Her pudenda gives forth a scent from moment to moment like different kinds of lotuses or like sweet aloe wood. She is calm and resolute, pleasant in speech and altogether delightful” (Snellgrove, 1959, p. 116). At another juncture the same tantra recommends that the guru “take a consort who has a beautiful face, is wide-eyed, is endowed with grace and youth, is dark, courageous, of good family and originates from the female and male fluids” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 217). Gedün Chöpel, a famous tantric from the 20th century, draws a distinction between the various regions from which the women come. Girls from Kham province, for example, have soft flesh, lovers from Dzang are well-versed in the erotic techniques, “Kashmiri girls” are to be valued for their smile, and so on (Chöpel, 1992, p. 45).

Sometimes it is also required of the karma mudra that as well as being attractive she also possess specialized erotic skills. For example, the Kalachakra Tantra recommends training in the sophisticated Indian sexual techniques of the Kama Sutra. In this famous handbook on the intensification of sexual lust, the reader can inform him- or herself about the most daring positions, the use of aphrodisiacs, the anatomical advantages various women possess, the seduction of young girls, dealings with courtesans, and much more. The sole intention of the Kama Sutra, however, is to sexualize life as a whole. In contrast to the tantras there are no religious and power-political intentions to be found behind this work. It thus has no intrinsic value for the tantric yogi. The latter uses it purely as a source of inspiration, to stimulate his desires which he then brings under conscious control.

Youth is a further requirement which the mudra has to meet. The Maha Siddha Saraha distinguishes five different wisdom consorts on the basis of age: the eight-year-old virgin (kumari); the twelve-year-old salika; the sixteen-year-old siddha, who already bleeds monthly; the twenty-year-old balika, and the twenty-five-year-old bhadrakapalini, who he describes as the “burned fat of prajna” (Wayman, 1973, p. 196). The “modern” tantric already mentioned, Lama Gedün Chöpel, explicitly warns that children can become injured during the sexual act: “Forcingly doing it with a young girl produces severe pains and wounds her genitalia. ... If it is not the time and if copulating would be dangerous for her, churn about between her thighs, and it [the female seed] will come out” (Chöpel, 1992, p. 135). In addition he recommends feeding a twelve-year-old honey and sweets before ritual sexual intercourse (Chöpel, 1992, p. 177).

When the king and later Maha Siddha, Dombipa, one day noticed the beautiful daughter of a traveling singer before his palace, he selected her as his wisdom consort and bought her from her father for an enormous sum in gold. She was “an innocent virgin, untainted by the sordid world about her. She was utterly charming, with a fair complexion and classical features. She had all the qualities of a padmini, a lotus child, the rarest and most desirable of all girls” (Dowman, 1985, pp. 53–54). What became of the “lotus child” after the ritual is not recorded.

“In the rite of ‘virgin-worship’ (kumari-puja)”, writes Benjamin Walker, “a girl is selected and trained for initiation, and innocent of her impending fate is brought before the altar and worshipped in the nude, and then deflowered by a guru or chela” (Walker, 1982, p. 72). It was not just the Hindu tantrics who practiced rituals with a kumari, but also the Tibetans, in any case the Grand Abbot of the Sakyapa Sect, even though he was married.

On a numerological basis twelve- or sixteen-year-old girls are preferred. Only when none can be found does Tsongkhapa recommend the use of a twenty-year-old. There is also a table of correspondences between the various ages and the elements and senses: an 11-year-old represents the air, a 12-year-old fire, a 13-year-old water, a 14-year-old earth, a15-year-old sound, a 16-year-old the sense of touch, a 17-year-old taste, an 18-year-old shape or form, and a 20-year-old the sense of smell (Naropa, 1994, p. 189).

The rituals should not be performed with women older than this, as they absorb the “occult forces” of the guru. The dangers associated with older mudras are a topic discussed at length. A famous tantric commentator describes 21- to 30-year-olds as “goddesses of wrath” and gives them the following names: The Blackest, the Fattest, the Greedy, the Most Arrogant, the Stringent, the Flashing, the Grudging, the Iron Chain, and the Terrible Eye. 31- to 38-year-olds are considered to be manifestations of malignant spirits and 39- to 46-year-olds as “unlimited manifestations of the demons”. They are called Dog Snout, Sucking Gob, Jackal Face, Tiger Gullet, Garuda Mug, Owl Features, Vulture’s Beak, Pecking Crow (Naropa, 1994, p. 189). These women, according to the text, shriek and scold, menace and curse. In order to get the yogi completely off balance, one of these terrible figures calls out to him in the Kalachakra Tantra, “Human beast, you are to be crushed today”. Then she gnashes her teeth and hisses, “Today I must devour your flesh”, and with trembling tongue she continues, “From your body I will make the drink of blood” (Grünwedel, Kalacakra III, p. 191). That some radical tantras view it as especially productive to copulate with such female “monsters” is a topic to which we shall later return.

How does the yogi find a real, human mudra? Normally, she is delivered by his pupil. This is also true for the Kalachakra Tantra. “If one gives the enlightened teacher the prajna [mudra] as a gift,” proclaims Naropa, “the yoga is bliss” (Grünwedel, 1933, p. 117). If a 12- or 16-year-old girl cannot be found, a 20-year-old will suffice, advises another text, and continues, “One should offer his sister, daughter or wife to the ‘guru’”, then the more valuable the mudra is to the pupil, the more she serves as a gift for his master (Wayman, 1977, p. 320).

Further, magic spells are taught with which to summons a partner. The Hevajra Tantra recommends the following mantra: “Om Hri — may she come into my power — savaha!” (Snellgrove, 1959, p. 54). Once the yogi has repeated this saying ten thousand times the mudra will appear before him in flesh and blood and obeys his wishes.

The Kalachakra Tantra urges the yogi to render the mudra pliant with intoxicating liquor: “Wine is essential for the wisdom consort [prajna]. ... Any mudra at all, even those who are still not willing, can be procured with drink” (Grünwedel, Kalacakra III, p. 147). It is only a small step from this to the use of direct force. There are also texts, which advise “that if a woman refuses sexual union she must be forced to do so” (Bhattacharyya, 1982, p. 125).

Whether or not a karma mudra needs special training before the ritual is something which receves varying answers in the texts and commentaries. In general, she should be familiar with the tantric doctrine. Tsongkhapa advises that she take and keep a vow of silence. He expressly warns against intercourse with unworthy partners: “If a woman lacks ... superlative qualities, that is an inferior lotus. Do not stay with that one, because she is full of negative qualities. Make an offering and show some respect, but don’t practice (with her)” (quoted in Shaw, 1994, p. 169). In the Hevajra Tantra a one-month preparation time is required, then “the girl [is] freed of all false ideas and received as though she were a boon” (Snellgrove, 1987, vol. 1, p. 261).

But what happens to the “boon” once the ritual is over? “The karma mudra ... has a purely pragmatic and instrumental significance and is superfluous at the finish” writes the Italian Tibetologist Raniero Gnoli in the introduction to a Kalachakra commentary (Naropa, 1994, p. 82). After the sexual act she is “of no more use to the tantrik than husk of a shelled peanut”, says Benjamin Walker (Walker, 1982, pp. 72–73). She has done her duty, transferred her feminine energy to the yogi, and now succumbs to the disdain which Buddhism holds for all “normal” women as symbols of the “supreme illusion” (maha maya). There is no mention of an initiation of the female partner in the codified Buddhist tantra texts.

The karma mudra and the West

Since the general public demands that a Tibetan lama lead the life of a celibate monk, he must keep his sexual practices secret. For this reason, documents about and verbal accounts of clerical erotic love are extremely rare. It is true that the sexual magic rites are freely and openly discussed in the tantra texts, but who does what with whom and where are all “top secret”. Only the immediate followers are informed, the English author June Campbell reports.

And she has the authority to make such a claim. Campbell had been working for many years as translator and personal assistant for the highest ranking Kagyüpa guru, His Holiness Kalu Rinpoche (1905–1989), when the old man (he was then approaching his eighties) one day asked her to become his mudra. She was completely surprised by this request and could not begin to imagine such a thing, but then, she reluctantly submitted to the wishes of her master. As she eventually managed to escape the tantric magic circle, the previously uninformed public is indebted to her for a number of competent commentaries upon the sexual cabinet politics of modern Lamaism and the psychology of the karma mudra.

What then, according to Campbell, are the reasons which motivate Western women to enter into a tantric relationship, and then afterwards keep their experiences with the masters to themselves? First of all, their great respect and deep reverence for the lama, who as a “living Buddha” begins and ritually conducts the liaison. Then, the karma mudra, even when she is not publicly acknowledged, enjoys a high status within the small circle of the informed and, temporarily, the rank of a dakini, i.e., a tantric goddess. Her intimate relationship with a “holy man” further gives her the feeling that she is herself holy, or at least the opportunity to collect good karma for herself.

Of course, the mudra must swear a strict vow of absolute silence regarding her relations with the tantric master. Should she break it, then according to the tantric penal code she may expect major difficulties, insanity, death and on top of this millennia of hellish torments. In order to intimidate her, Kalu Rinpoche is alleged to have told his mudra, June Campbell, that in an earlier life he killed a woman with a mantra because she disobeyed him and gossiped about intimacies. “The imposition of secrecy ... in the Tibetan system”, Campbell writes, “when it occurred solely as a means to protect status , and where it was reinforced by threats, was a powerful weapon in keeping women from achieving any kind of integrity in themselves. ... So whilst the lineage system [the gurus’ chain of initiation] viewed these [sexual] activities as promoting the enlightenment state of the lineage holders, the fate of one of the two main protagonists, the female consort, remained unrecognized, unspoken and unnamed” (June Campbell, 1996, p. 103). June Campbell also first risked speaking openly about her experiences, which she found repressive and degrading, after Kalu Rinpoche had died.

In her book, this author laments not just the subsequent namelessness of and disregard for the karma mudra despite the guru praising her as a “goddess” for as long as the ritual lasted, but also discusses the traumatic state of “used up” women, who, once their master has “drunk” their gynergy, are traded in for a “fresh” mudra. She also makes reference to the naiveté of Western husbands, who send their spouses to a guru in good faith, so that they can complete their spiritual development. (June Campbell, 1996, p. 107). During her relationship with Kalu Rinpoche he was also practicing with another woman who was not yet twenty years old. The girl died suddenly, of a heart attack it was said. We will return to this death, which fits the logic of the tantric pattern, at a later stage. The fears which such events awakened in her, reports Campbell, completely cut her off from the outside world and left her totally delivered up to the domination of her guru.

This masculine arrogance becomes particularly obvious in a statement by the young lama, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, who announced the following in response to Campbell’s commotion stirring book: “If Western women begin sexual relationships with Tibetan lamas, then the consequence for a number of them is frustration, because their culturally conditioned expectations are not met. If they hope to find an agreeable and equal lover in a Rinpoche, they could not be making a bigger mistake. Certain Rinpoches, who are revered as great teachers, would literally make the worst partners of all — seen from the point of view of the ego. If one approaches such a great master expecting to be acknowledged, and wishing for a relationship in which one shares, satisfies one another, etc., then one is making a bad choice — not just from the ego’s point of view, but also in a completely normal, worldly sense. They probably won’t bring them flowers or invite them to candlelight dinners” (Esotera, 12/97, p. 45; retranslation). It speaks for such a quotation that it is honest, since it quite plainly acknowledges the spiritual inferiority of women (who represent the ego, desire and banality) when confronted with the superhuman spiritual authority of the male gurus. The tantric master Khyentse Rinpoche knows exactly what he is talking about, when he continues with the following sentence: “Whilst in the West one understands equality to mean that two aspects find a common denominator, in Vajrayana Buddhism equality lies completely outside of twoness or duality. Where duality is retained, there can be no equality” (Esotera, 12/97, p. 46; retranslation). That is, in other words: the woman as equal and autonomous partner must be eliminated and has to surrender her energies to the master’s completion (beyond duality).

“Sexual abuse” of Western women by Tibetan lamas has meanwhile become something of a constant topic in the Buddhist scene and has also triggered heated discussion on the Internet. “Sexual abuse” of Western women by Tibetan lamas has meanwhile become something of a constant topic in the Buddhist scene and has also triggered heated discussion on the Internet. See: http://www.trimondi.de/EN/links.htm#SEXABUSE

Even the official office of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama has had to respond to the increasingly common allegations: “What some of these students have experienced is terrible and most unfortunate”, announced Tenzin Tethon, a secretary to His Holiness, and admitted that for a number of years there had already been reports of such incidents (Lattin, Newsgroup 2). Naturally, Tenzin Tethon made no mention of the fact that the sexual exploitation of women for spiritual purposes forms the heart of the tantric mystery.

But there are more and more examples where women are beginning to defend themselves. Thus, in 1992 the well-known bestseller author and commentator on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Sogyal Rinpoche, had to face the Supreme Court of Santa Cruz, alleged to have “used his position as an interpreter of Tibetan Buddhism to take sexual and other advantage of female students over a period of many years” (Tricycle 1996, vol. 5 no. 4, p. 87). The plaintiff was seeking 10 million dollars. It was claimed Sogyal Rinpoche had assured his numerous partners that it would be extremely salutary and spiritually rewarding to sleep with him. Another mudra, Victoria Barlow from New York City, described in an interview with Free Press how she, at the age of 21, was summoned into Sogyal Rinpoche’s room during a meditative retreats: “I went to an apartment to see a highly esteemed lama and discuss religion. He opened the door without a shirt on and with a beer in his hand”. When they were sitting on the sofa, the Tibetan “lunged at me with sloppy kisses and groping. I thought [then] I should take it as the deepest compliment that he was interested and basically surrender to him”. Today, Barlow says that she is “disgusted by the way the Tibetans have manipulated the reverence westerners have for the Buddhist path” (Lattin, Newsgroup 2). The case mentioned above was, however, settled out of court; the result, according to Sogyal’s followers, of their master’s deep meditation.

It would normally be correct to dismiss such “sex stories” as superfluous gossip and disregard them. In the occult logic of Vajrayana, however, they need to be seen as strategically placed ritual practices designed to bring the guru power and influence. Perhaps they additionally have something to do with the Buddhist conquest of the West, which is symbolized by various mudras. Such conjectures may sound rather bizarre, but in Tantrism we are confronted with a different logic to that to which we are accustomed. Here, sexual events are not uncommonly globalized and capable of influencing all of humankind. We shall return to this point.

But at least such examples show that Tibet’s “celibate” monks “practice” with real women — a fact about which the Tibetan clergy including the Fourteenth Dalai Lama have deceived the West until now. Because more and more “wisdom consorts” are breaking their oath to secrecy, it is only now that the conditions are being created for a public discussion of the tantric rituals as such. The criticism to date has not gone beyond a moral-feminist discourse and in no case known to us (with the exception of some of June Campbell’s statements) has it extended to the occult exploitative mechanism of Vajrayana.

On the other hand, the fact that the sexual needs of the lamas can no longer be covered up, has, in a type of advance strategy, led to a situation in which their “spiritual” work with karma mudras is presentable as something to be taken for granted, and which is not inherently shocking. “Many Rinpoches”, one Christopher Fynn has written on the Internet, “including Jattral Rinpoche, Dzongsar Khyentse, Dilgo Khyentse and Ongen Tulku have consorts — which everyone knew about” (Fynn, Newsgroup 4).

And the Dalai Lama, himself the Highest Master of the sexual magic rites, raises the moral finger: “In recent years, teachers from Asia and the West have been involved in scandals about sexual misbehavior towards male and female pupils, the abuse of alcohol and drugs, and the misuse of money and power. This behavior has caused great damage to the Buddhist community and individual people. Pupils of both sexes should be encouraged to confront teachers with unethical aspects of their behavior in an appropriate manner” (Esotera, 12/97, p. 45; retranslation). What should be made of such requests by His Holiness, which are also silent about the sexist mechanisms of Tantrism is a topic which we explore in detail in the second part of our study.

undead wrote:
The Carreons seem like very interesting people, and they evidently have a lot of knowledge and experience to share. The Steinbecks' story was interesting to read as well, at least the parts you excerpted. I don't think I a could read the whole thing, though, just because of the people I have known who have destroyed themselves with drugs. When she says "All the time I was obsessing over John's drunken behavior, I might as well have been drunk." I am thinking, "Yes, and I might as well be drunk too reading about all the gory details." It is difficult to feel sympathy for people who are so affluent that they can fuck up for their entire lives and then get paid to publish a book about it after the fact. Then again I didn't read the whole book so maybe there's more? I'm interested. Do they culminate with any Earth-shattering (or just original / significant) conclusions?

Naturally, Tenzin Tethon made no mention of the fact that the sexual exploitation of women for spiritual purposes forms the heart of the tantric mystery.

Terence McKenna wrote:I was going to take LSD the night of the solstice and sit up all night on my roof, smoking hashish and star-gazing. I mentioned my plan to my two English friends, who expressed a desire to join me. This was fine with me, but there was a problem; there was not enough reliable LSD to go around. My own tiny supply had arrived in Kathmandu, prophetically hidden inside a small ceramic mushroom mailed from Aspen.

Almost as a joke, I suggested that they substitute the seed of the Himalayan Datura, Datura metel, for the LSD. Daturas are annual bushes and the source of a number of tropane alkaloids— scopalamine, hylosciamine, and so on—compounds that produce a pseudohallucinogenic effect. They give an impression of flying or of confronting vague and fleeting visions, but all in a realm hard to keep control of and hard to recollect later. The seeds of Datura metel are used in Nepal by saddhus (wandering hermits and holy men), so their use was known in the area. Nevertheless my suggestion was made facetiously, since the difficulty of controlling Datura is legendary. To my surprise, my friends agreed that this was something they wanted to do, so we arranged that they would arrive at my home at six P.M. on the appointed day to make the experiment.

When the evening finally came, I moved my blankets and pipes up to the roof of the building. From there I could command a fine view of the surrounding village with its enormous Stupa, a conical temple with staring Buddha eyes painted on its higher portion in gold leaf. The upper golden levels of the Stupa were at that time encased in scaffolding, where repairs necessitated by a lightning strike suffered some months previously were under way. The white-domed bulk of the Stupa gave the whitewashed adobe mud village of Boudanath a saucerian and unearthly quality. Farther away, rising up many thousands of feet, I could see the great Anna-purna Range; in the middle distance, the land was a patchwork of emerald paddies.

Six o'clock came and went, and my friends had not arrived. At seven they still had not been seen, and so I took my treasured tab of Orange Sunshine and settled down to wait. Ten minutes later, they arrived. I could already feel myself going, so I gestured to the two piles of Datura seeds that I had prepared. They took them downstairs to my room and ground them with a mortar and pestle before washing them down with some tea. By the time they had returned to the roof and gotten comfortably settled, I was surging through mental space.

Hours seemed to pass. When they seated themselves, I was too distant to be aware of them. She was seated directly across from me, and he farther back and to one side, in the shadows. He played his flute. I passed the hash pipe. The moon rose full and high in the sky. I fell into long hallucinatory reveries that each lasted many minutes but felt like whole lifetimes. When I had emerged from a particularly long spell of visions, I found that my friend had stopped playing and had gone away, leaving me with his lady.

I had promised them both that I would let them try some DMT during the evening. My glass pipe and tiny stash of waxy orange DMT were before me. Slowly, and with the fluid movements of a dream, I filled the pipe and gave it to her. The stars, hard and glittering, stared down from a mighty distance on all of this. She held the pipe and took two deep inhalations, sufficient for a person so frail, then the pipe was returned to me, and I followed her into it with four huge inhalations, the fourth of which I held onto until I had broken through. For me it was an enormous amount of DMT, and I immediately had a sense of entering a high vacuum. I heard a high-pitched whine and the sound of cellophane ripping as I was transformed into the ultra-high-frequency orgasmic goblin that is a human being in DMT ecstasy. I was surrounded by the chattering of elf machines and the more-than-Arabian vaulted spaces that would shame a Bibiena. Manifestations of a power both alien and bizarrely beautiful raged around me.

At the point where I would normally have expected the visions to fade, the pretreatment with LSD synergized my state to a higher level. The cavorting hoards of DMT elf machines faded to a mere howling as the elfin mob moved on. I suddenly found myself flying hundreds of miles above the earth and in the company of silvery disks. I could not tell how many. I was fixated on the spectacle of the earth below and realized that I was moving south, apparently in polar orbit, over Siberia. Ahead of me I could see the Great Plain of Shang and the mass of the Himalayas rising up in front of the red-yellow waste of India. The sun would rise in about two hours. In a series of telescoping leaps, I went from orbit to a point where I could specifically pick out the circular depression that is the Kathmandu Valley. Then, in the next leap, the valley filled my field of vision. I seemed to be approaching it at great speed. I could see the Hindu temple and the houses of Kathmandu, the Temple of Svayambhu-nath to the west of the city and the Stupa at Boudanath, gleaming white and a few miles to the east. Then Boudanath was a mandala of houses and circular streets filling my vision. Among the several hundred rooftops I found my own. In the next moment I slammed into my body and was refocused on the roof top and the woman in front of me.

Incongruously, she had come to the event wearing a silver satin, full-length evening dress—an heirloom—the sort of thing one could find in an antique clothing store in Notting Hill Gate. I fell forward and thought that my hand was covered by some cool, white liquid. It was the fabric of the dress. Until that moment neither of us had considered the other a potential lover. Our relationship had functioned on quite a different level. But suddenly all the normal sets of relations were obviated. We reached out toward each other, and I had the distinct impression of passing through her, of physically reaching beyond her. She pulled her dress over her head in a single gesture. I did the same with my shirt, which ripped to pieces in my hands as I took it off over my head. I heard buttons fly, and somewhere my glasses landed and shattered.

Then we made love. Or rather we had an experience that vaguely related to making love but was a thing unto itself. We were both howling and singing in the glossolalia of DMT, rolling over the ground with everything awash in crawling, geometric hallucinations. She was transformed; words exist to describe what she became— pure anima, Kali, Leucothea, something erotic but not human, something addressed to the species and not to the individual, glittering with the possibility of cannibalism, madness, space, and extinction. She seemed on the edge of devouring me.

Reality was shattered. This kind of fucking occurs at the very limit of what is possible. Everything had been transformed into orgasm and visible, chattering oceans of elf language. Then I saw that where our bodies were glued together there was flowing, out of her, over me, over the floor of the roof, flowing everywhere, some sort of obsidian liquid, something dark and glittering, with color and lights within it. After the DMT flash, after the seizures of orgasms, after all that, this new thing shocked me to the core. What was this fluid and what was going on? I looked at it. I looked right into it, and it was the surface of my own mind reflected in front of me. Was it translin-guistic matter, the living opalescent excrescence of the alchemical abyss of hyperspace, something generated by the sex act performed under such crazy conditions? I looked into it again and now saw in it the lama who taught me Tibetan, who would have been asleep a mile away. In the fluid I saw him, in the company of a monk I had never seen; they were looking into a mirrored plate. Then I realized that they were watching me! I could not understand it. I looked away from the fluid and away from my companion, so intense was her aura of strangeness.

Then I realized that we had been singing and yodeling and uttering wild orgasmic howls for what must have been several minutes on my roof! It meant everyone in Boudanath would have been awakened and was about to open their doors and windows and demand to know what was going on. And what was going on? My grandfather's favorite expostulation seemed appropriate: "Great God! said the woodcock when the hawk struck him." This grotesquely inappropriate recollection brought uncontrollable laughter.

Then the thought of discovery sobered me enough to realize that we must get away from this exposed place. Both of us were completely naked, and the scene around us was one of total, unex-plainable chaos. She was lying down, unable to rise, so I picked her up and made my way down the narrow staircase, past the grain storage bins and into my room. The whole time I remember saying over and over to her and to myself: "I am a human being. I am a human being." I had to reassure myself, for I was not at that moment sure.

Then the prophetess, who led the choir, descended three steps of the staircase and uttered the following malediction in solemn tones and with terrifying look:

“Woe be to such as have come to profane the mysteries! The goddess will pursue such perverse hearts during the whole of their lifetimes, and in the kingdom of the shades she will not let go her prey.”