Introduction to Tantra

Our main desire is for happiness. But due to our limited concepts we get caught up in our day-to-day desires connected to our sensations and thoughts, becoming attached to these objects of desire. In most religious or spiritual traditions, we then try to suppress these desires through guilt. In tantra we don’t. In tantra there is no place for guilt. We use our ordinary experiences of pleasure as the resource for attaining enlightenment, ie, we use our desirous energy to cultivate experiences of calm and satisfaction that mirror the goal of peace and tranquillity awakening brings.

The Path

The path of tantra then is the transformation of desirous energy to propel us to our highest destination through direct experience. That is, to transform all pleasure into transcendental experiences. The prerequisites for achieving this are through:

1.     Pure motivation (ie, altruistic). This also relates to not grasping onto the pleasure and sensation, ie, not becoming attached to them where they become little more than a source of future pain and dissatisfaction. A key obstacle here is that of self-absorption rather than utilising our desires for the greater good.

2.     Patience and self-discipline, working through preliminary towards advanced practices. It is only this way we can learn to take advantage of deeper and more intense experiences of bliss. A key obstacle here, alongside habitual grasping, is arrogance in thinking we can jump over the preliminary practices.

3.     Differentiation between the essence of tantra and superficial levels of practice, for tantra provides powerful methods for getting in touch with our essential wholeness, our inner unification (that is, the symbolic representation of greater bliss and nondual wisdom we often see reflected as sexual union). This is the integrated state of blissful wisdom that transcends our ordinary sense desires. A key obstacle here is that of self-gratification and indulgence.

So, what is the tantric solution? How do we transform our ordinary desires in practice?

Lama Yeshe says there are various steps we can take to open the space within us to discover our essential nature.

1.     We need to develop an attitude of renunciation (or, to put it another way, diss-attach from our habitual attachments to sense objects). We need to stop our grasping after pleasure. This does not mean, not participating in pleasure, but not hunting for it, not trying to hold on to it, not possess it for the sake of our own happiness.

2.     We need to free ourselves from an obsession with ourselves. Then we can open our hearts to others, where compassion replaces pity. Where we benefit others from moment to moment. Our life becomes our practice. And we do it to the best of our abilities in the here and now. This is called bodhichitta motivation, open-hearted motivation.

3.     We need to cultivate the correct view (ie, the wisdom to realise Reality from Illusion) which can then help free us from our habit of believing in conventional appearance. This is ego-thinking, our ego-grasping mind. This helps us cultivate the Middle Way, of not immediately accepting dualistic appearances but staying loose and a bit sceptical (sometimes referred to as the beginner’s mind).

The Practices

The first practice Lama Yeshe prescribes for this is Deity Yoga, where we dissolve our ordinary conceptions of ourselves, to create a space for the arising of ‘the glorious light body of a deity’, that is, our deepest archetypal qualities. Here we start to build our inner resources. The key obstacle here is likely to be our limited and ordinary way of seeing appearance, where we don’t come to believe our self-image is that of the deity, and so we keep looking outwards for the answers we have inside.

The second practice is Meditating on Equilibrium which produces good mental health and opens the space for ‘an unbiased attitude towards all other beings’, this is the foundation of bodhichitta. Here we abandon the usual five sense perceptions and sink deeply into awareness. This practice, it is said, is necessary for all subsequent tantra practices.

The third practice might best be described as a form of Spiritual Enquiry. This is the cleansing process where we let go of our limiting beliefs and illusions of dualistic appearances, when we come to realise there is no solid, inherent self, where we let go of ego-grasping and come to recognise ‘the embodiment of fully awakened wisdom’, ‘the emptiness that is the ultimate nature of everything’.

These three practices can be practiced now, but for the longer term and for deep transmission Lama Yeshe says we need Guru Yoga. This is the yoga / disciple relationship where the disciple receives initiation (the shared act of meditation). Here the impersonal deity in Deity Yoga becomes inseparable from your personal spiritual guide, creating closeness and intensity to speed up your spiritual evolution.

It is from this point on we can move on to more advanced practices, such as the Vajra Body. The vajra body is the subtle body, indestructible. It is where we find the nadi’s (channels) which the prana (energy wind) flows through, and the bindu (drops) that are the source of bliss. The nadi’s (channels) run through various focus points, sometimes called energy centres (chakras or energy wheels). We focus on different chakras depending on which practice we are engaged in. However, the most important chakra is the Heart, home of the subtle mind.

Once we have mastered the chakras we can move onto Death and Rebirth (the Three-Kaya Meditation) where we emanate as a deity. This ‘is not merely a matter of imagination; our physical being is profoundly transformed as well.’ It is important to recognise the equal importance of mind and body in tantric practice. Indeed, this is how we learn to deal skilfully with pleasure, not by rejecting it, and not by grasping it, but by unifying our mind-body with emptiness, nonduality, where we experience pleasure as if it where somewhere in space, where it becomes universal (not grasped by a ‘self’).

After this we can then step into, what Lama Yeshe calls, The Completion Stage: Inner Fire and Energy Control. This is where we generate inner heat in the navel centre, awakening our kundalini energy, leading to clear insight, wisdom. This is often where we find people talk of gaining ‘instant results’ (gained, of course, after years of practice).

Bringing it all Together

Tantra is the path of joy and affirmation, to uncover our essentially pure nature. It is the quicker path if we can rid ourselves of our limited concepts and transform our ordinary desires. We do this by bringing our life (of renunciation and dis-attachment), our practices (of dedicated heart bodhichitta) and view (of emptiness) into alignment.

It is worth noting that tantric practices, in Lama Yeshe’s book, are self-practices. It is only with the last practice that we embrace ‘another’, sometimes referred to as the Union Meditation. Even here though the physical contact is very different to ordinary sexual embrace, where traditionally the focus is on a man entering a woman. In the tantric practice it is more an energetic exchange between any gendered person to person, where the *transformational energy thrusts into the self-generating source.

*see Rudolph Ballentine’s Kail Rising which elaborates on the four modes of a person.

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See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2

And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: ‎978-1398437159