Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire (19 page)

TH E TANTRI C P ERSONALI TY

Many people say, “The body is not really important; the most important thing is to meditate inwardly.” But this is wrong. According to tantra we cannot say that the mind is more important than the body or that the body is more important than the mind. They are of equal importance. In tantric practice the body is understood to be like a plot of ground containing untold mineral wealth. This body of ours, for all its suffering nature, contains the most valuable of natural resources: kundalini gold, kundalini oil!

At one time or another we have all experienced sensations of great bodily bliss. Sometimes we are just sitting down relaxing and suddenly a feeling of intense bliss will sweep over us. This experience is common and is not a particularly high realization. But it does give a hint of the great store of blissful energy contained within our body even at the present moment. The purpose of the various yogas, exercises, and meditations of highest tantra is to arouse, control, and utilize this blissful energy resource for the attainment of complete fulfillment: the enlightenment of buddhahood. For as long as you do not lose your head and can maintain mindfulness, it does not matter how much blissful pleasure you have. It does not matter whether you call this pleasure samsaric, worldly, or whatever—it can lead to liberation.

The essence of tantra is dealing skillfully with pleasure. The person who qualifies for tantra is someone who can cope with pleasure, someone for whom dealing with pleasure becomes a conducive situation for achieving liberation. This is the tantric personality. If a person only knows how to be miserable then tantra will not work for him or her. Like a nuclear reactor without any fuel, such a person will have no resource to utilize for the necessary transformations.

However, the resource of pleasure is already existent within this human body of ours. This is one major reason why this human form is considered so precious. What we need is a skillful method for awakening and then using this resource to bring perfect happiness not only to ourselves but to all others as well. In order to do this, we must learn to break the habit of relating to our experiences in life with a miserable mind, with our accustomed miserable projections. We should recognize that we create all human problems ourselves.

We should not blame them on society; we should not blame our mother and father or our friends; we should not blame anyone else. Our problems are our own creation. But just as we are the creator of all our own problems we are also the creator of our own liberation, and everything that is necessary for attaining this blissful liberation is contained in the body and mind we have right at this very moment.

I NTEGRATI NG WI SDOM AND ENJOYMENT

The purpose of generating ourselves as a deity through the practice of the three bodies, or kayas, of a buddha is to smash through our self-pitying concept, our suffocating conception of ego. For it is this limiting conceptualization that prevents us from experiencing the explosion of blissful energy latent within our nervous system and thereby realizing our potential for full enlightenment.

The wisdom of emptiness is blissful. It is very important that two elements— clear-sighted wisdom into the true nature of things and the feeling of joyous blissfulness—be unified in one experience. In the West we can see that while so many young people are intelligent they still experience very little or no joy in their lives. Being smart has not made them happy. Instead, many of them are totally disturbed. They can accomplish all sorts of feats, such as designing complex computer games, but because they lack the proper methods for integrating their intellect and their emotions they remain dry, intellectual, sterile, and very dissatisfied.

In contrast, there are other people who have a more practical ability to enjoy themselves. But many of them have no clear intelligence, no sharp penetrating awareness. Although they have a certain contentment in their lives, their minds are dull and plodding.

Tantra tries to cultivate great wisdom, putting intelligence into practical experience, by unifying it with blissfully heightened awareness. In this way it is possible to integrate one’s life and fulfill one’s potential for happiness while eradicating all the problems normally associated with the pursuit of pleasure.

For in this world pleasure is a problem. For many affluent people gross physical miseries such as hunger and disease are not really a significant problem at all. But how to deal with pleasure without becoming berserk or degenerate—that is a big unanswered question for them. The unified tantric experience offers the solution.

It has already been mentioned several times that according to tantra, the fundamental human problem is that when we have pleasure we generally become more ignorant, more dark inside. This does not mean we should not have pleasure. We should have pleasure, but we need to keep from going out of control while experiencing pleasure. We have to keep from falling under the influence of ignorance and delusion. So at this time we are learning how it is possible to experience incredible pleasure while remaining in a state of clarity and control. We are learning how the experience of pleasure can give rise to clean, clear penetrative wisdom.

It is common for us to be possessive about what is happening to us. Even when we are successful in our meditations and feel the blissful kundalini energy arising, there is a strong tendency to hold onto it tightly: “This is my experience; it is mine.” This is the habit we have to break somehow. We must learn to allow pleasurable experiences to happen without grabbing onto them as mine. We can accomplish this by unifying our mind with emptiness, with nonduality. Then when pleasure arises, it is as if it is being experienced somewhere out in space. It is difficult to express this in words so I hope you don’t have trouble understanding what I am trying to say. Somehow, we have to go beyond our normal habit of possessiveness, of relating everything to our limited sense of self.

Perhaps I can make it a little clearer. Imagine that in front of you is a person, a man or a woman, whom you find extremely attractive. Just looking at this person arouses great energy in you. Maybe you want to reach out and grab him or her. Now imagine that this person suddenly dissolves into rainbow light, radiant and transparent. Automatically all your heavy feelings of desire and possessiveness also dissolve and in their place something lighter, more buoyant arises. You still have some relationship with this beautiful object but it has changed. You have let go of your grasping attitude and now experience something more spacious, more universal, instead. It is such a light, blissful, yet intensely aware experience that I am talking about. This is what we are trying to cultivate.

Fina l A c c ompl ishme nt

TH E COMP LETI ON STAGE: I NNER FI RE AND ENERGY

CONTROL

THE GENERATION STAGE PRACTICE of the three kayas is in fact only a rehearsal for the more advanced completion stage practices that actually transform our ordinary body and mind into the completely transcendent body and mind of an enlightened being. But the generation stage preparation is absolutely necessary: it is only through loosening the concrete concepts we have about ourselves—by generating the clear appearance of the deity out of the space of emptiness and cultivating strong divine pride that we are the actual deity—that we create the room needed for the transformations to take place.

Once we are skilled enough to engage in the completion stage practices, such as generating the inner heat (Tibetan:
tummo
) at our navel center, we will be able to bring all our energy winds into the central channel and cause them to dissolve into it completely, as they do at death. As a result the clear light wisdom of our fundamental mind will actually dawn, and eventually we will be able to manifest the rainbow-like illusory body, which can leave and return to our old physical body at will. These things actually happen; they are not mere visualizations anymore, as they were during the generation stage. The precious kundalini energy dormant within us is actually aroused; we attain the simultaneously born great blissful wisdom; and we overcome the limitations of our ordinary physical form.

When we gain control over our internal wind energy to such an extent that we can direct it into whichever channel we choose, we will also be able to control the external wind energy as well. There are many stories that illustrate the great influence highly accomplished tantric meditators have had over the external elements. For example, at one of the great prayer festivals organized by Lama Tsongkhapa in Lhasa, thousands of butter lamps were lit as offerings before the statue of Shakyamuni Buddha. At a certain point the fire got out of control and the people, in panic, ran to Lama Tsongkhapa shouting: “Your offerings are going to burn down the temple!” So he sat down, went into deep meditative absorption, and suddenly all the butter lamps stopped burning.

People may call this a miracle, but in fact there is nothing mysterious or unexplainable about it. Someone with the great mastery over his or her internal energies that Tsongkhapa undoubtedly possessed can definitely manipulate external energy as well.

I think that the inner fire meditation is perfectly suited to the Western mentality. Why? Because the Western mind is fascinated by material: people love to work with material, play with material, fix material, and transform material. And by manipulating material they try to manipulate people’s minds as well. Tummo meditation tries to do the same thing: by manipulating the energy within our physical form it enables us to expand the range of our consciousness and experience advanced levels of blissful wisdom.

It also seems to me that many Westerners are extremely impatient; they want instant results. They buy instant coffee, instant soup, instant breakfast, instant everything. And when it comes to the spiritual path they want instant satisfaction, instant experiences. With the inner fire meditation, that is what we get. By following certain simple, practical steps—all of which are precisely and scientifically laid out—we get the results: a completely transformed state of conscious awareness. We do not have to adopt any unusual religious beliefs; we just follow the instructions and the experiences come automatically.

By concentrating on the energies existing within our own body and mind, we bring about a profound change in the reality we experience. It is so simple and direct, so straightforward.

This modern time is incredibly fast, so full of energy. With this tremendous explosion of energy many good things are happening and many destructive things as well. This is how it is. Therefore, if we want to do something positive with our life, we need a method that is at least as powerful as the confused, materialistic energies we are caught up in. Philosophical ideas, no matter how grand, are just not strong enough to help us out of our present crises. By themselves, such ideas are as insubstantial as clouds; they may look convincing at first but they quickly evaporate, leaving us as helpless as before.

What we need is something active, something powerful, something direct. We need something we can act upon now and get results from now. This “something” is tantra, especially the completion stage practice of tummo.

All this talk about instant results and the generation of incredible bliss sounds attractive, but we should not forget two very important points. First of all, although tummo practice definitely leads to the experience of bliss, its primary purpose is to enable us to enter into a state of clear-light wisdom. It is this wisdom—a clear insight into the true nature of reality—that frees us from the bondage of our delusions. Bliss by itself cannot do this. Therefore, throughout tummo meditation we must develop as strong a comprehension as possible of emptiness, of nonduality, of the non-self-existent nature of the blissful experience itself. If we follow our old habits and relate to the blissful feelings as if they were concrete and self-existent, tummo meditation’s powerful production of desirous energy will lead to disastrous results.

Furthermore we should never be so carried away by our pursuit of bliss that we forget the motivation behind the entire practice of tantra. The ultimate aim of the Buddhist path, of both sutra and tantra, is to be of maximum benefit to others. If we become so caught up in striving for the experience of bliss that we neglect dedicating ourselves to the welfare of others, there is absolutely no way we can ever be successful in our practices. All we will be doing is creating the causes for yet more unhappiness and frustration.

BLI SSFUL AWARENESS

As we become more and more familiar with the blissful experience of clear light available within our central channel, we will be developing a powerful method for transcending the ordinary, limited experiences of this sensory world. We will be able to unify whatever occurs to us during our daily life with this inner experience of blissful awareness. There is no longer any danger that the ordinary pleasures we experience will disturb the tranquility of our mind.

Instead, whatever sensory pleasure we experience through contacting desirous objects will be blended effortlessly with blissful wisdom and will therefore only serve to increase our inner peace.