Shiva/Shakti, Symmetry and Consciousness

     When people come across tantra and hear that it is to do with sex (which it is!) and that there are two principals Shiva and Shakti and they are connected to consciousness and energy, and that they can also be characterised as masculine and feminine; many are delighted. It is the answer to their deepest hopes; how to have a good relationship and great sex and be spiritual all wrapped in to one new package. They then make one massive mistake if they only takes Western neo-tantra as their guide. They project on to tantra a sort of symmetry and mutuality. It becomes about Mrs Shakti and Mr Shiva and how they can have this equal, mutual, satisfying partnership. It becomes couple therapy externally, or for their inner estranged couple. They may link it to the yin/yang symbol with its black and white fish eternally chasing each other in a circle. Perfectly complementary and equal. If they are women; and get that tantra deeply honours the feminine as the creator of life itself (which it does!) then it can add a bonus, that after all their suffering under the last few thousand years of patriarchal oppression they will be freed and compensated. If they go to tantra workshops and breathe, move, dance their socks off and get high on; the energy, the cosmic orgasms and the freedom then they are sold! They can both be honoured and worshipped and have everything and a beautiful equal relationship within and, hopefully also, without.

     There is one little problem with this. It simply doesn’t accord with the thousands of years of tantric practices and knowledge which exists as texts and as methods within the deep and sometimes complex world of tantra as it has evolved in many cultures and places. It is not just from India, but there it stayed in the culture so that texts were written and temples built. By about the 11th century it had reached a high point before the Mughal invasion. In England, Stonehenge had long been a ruin and we were busy with 1066 and all that.

     The problem is the symmetry bit. Energy and consciousness are not like Mr and Mrs! Even though in the body the two channels, ida and pingala have a symmetry in their winding journey from the coccyx to the brain, the two qualities are simply not in that sort of relationship.  We certainly can’t get entranced by the energy and phenomena side, and hope that consciousness will follow in time. That simply is addiction. It attracts the child, like sweets in a sweet shop. And tantra workshops can turn in to giant sweetshops and most of the participants become exited children. Great fun and for many a necessary relief. Hence lots of tantra festivals now. But it hooks what the Jungians called the puer and puella eternus, the eternal child, and the tantra world is full of such figures taking refuge from the challenges of being a grownup in a very difficult world. The idea of a regular practice seems ridiculous. As if I need to practice eating chocolate cake! 

     I think it is usually the women who notice first.  The men, often supported by the odd belief that polyamory is central to tantra, are simply not quite there! Presence and awareness are notoriously hard to teach compared to energy practices with breath, sound and movement as their simple and effective guidelines.  Women can also become so busy “skydancing” that they never quite get around to landing and having their feet firmly on the cool damp Earth of reality.

     The fact is that at one of the highest and most sublime times when tantra was flourishing in 11th Kashmir;  Abhinavagupta a great practitioner and scholar (for there was no separation then) wrote The first Shiva sutra, Chaitanyamatma, which can be translated as ‘The nature of reality is consciousness’, or, ‘Everything is consciousness’. It may not be immediately obvious that everything is Consciousness. Our culture is based on its opposite; everything is atoms and stuff. Kashmir Shaivism says that Consciousness underlies all creation. It was there in the beginning, it is there in the middle and it will be there in the end. It is the fundamental stuff of the universe. In Hindu tantra there is the wonderful image of Kali dancing on the prone

body of Shiva. Far from being the patriarchs’ nightmare of being killed and trampled underfoot, it shows that Shiva, as consciousness (he isn’t dead but in deep meditation), is the platform on which everything can be danced into existence. Consciousness, and its cousin, awareness; is the basis of tantra. 

     There is no easy symmetry between Shiva and Shakti. There has to be the deepest respect for consciousness first. So Indian tantra says that everyone is Shiva. Without that foundation, we are lost in maya; in illusion. At the Solstice, as we mark the return of the light; the return of the sun, it is good to worship the light of consciousness for it is from the light of consciousness that things arise; just as it is the return of the sun that will allow the seeds to grow and abundance to flower.

How we Hide

The most fundamental aspect of being alive is the pulsation of breath and energy through our bodies. This can be the obvious pulsation of the chest lungs and diaphragm in breathing; the rhythm of the heart muscles and the surge of blood; or the subtle rhythm of the fluid around the brain. Finer pulsations of life are the streamings of energy in the body like a small bubbling stream, or what the Kashmir Shavite tradition of tantra calls spanda usually translated as trembling.

In the bodies of untraumatised young children it is easy to see this quality of pulsation.  By the time most get to adulthood this is lost. The body has become hardened  against pulsation or disorganised so it is chaotic or uninhabited so that it is too loose and unenergised. Traditionally in body psychotherapy the various ways we loose our fluid pulslation and flow are called character structures. They then imprison us for many years and we come to identify with them. We think this is who I am and remain trapped deep inside.  Both body psychotheapy and tantra aim to re-establish this pulsation and flow. For some this means working with the pulsation through breath, sound, movement and perhaps touch in massage. For other people is is more about bringing awareness back to the energy. Tantra is about this dance of energy or aliveness and awareness. Energy being considered as Shakti kundalini and awareness as Shiva consciousness.  From this dance of Shakti and Shiva all life and aliveness comes. 

Raoul Moat who shot himself at the weekend was described as a man-mountain and from the photo I saw had the typical build (which I associate with bouncers) of a very short thick neck and dense body which looked as if compressed as though they had been shouldering a heavy weight for many years.This is a typical maoschistic character structure and caries within it a huge amount of rage for the suppression they experienced when very young.  In a society which valued movement, pulsation, aliveness, expression and emotion there would be many less with such a structure and such rage which can burst out fatally.  The alternative to celebrating and supporting the dance of Shakti and Shiva is death.

Pilgrimage

I am off to India for a three month visit! Yippee! It is a sort of pilgrimage. Like all pilgrimages it is an outer journey which is a reflection of an inner journey.  The inner journey is towards deeper self-knowledge and connection with the Self an inward journey to a Divine core; a central tantric insight, actually that of all mystical traditions, that the way to the Divine is within. 

In particular it is a journey to discover a better understanding of the deep masculine; Shiva at my core.  In the West we have had such a distorted conception of the masculine for so long, partly from two

 world wars last century and then the reactions against them, that so many men and women have no idea of what a man is.  After; being told that we are all potential rapists, then just used as sperm and then cash donors, then given role models such as professional footballers who are permanently juvenile and now portrayed in almost every TV sitcom for the last twenty years as emotionally teenage; men are pretty confused. Much tantra in Britain seems to be based on the idea that tantra is workship of the divine feminine and that men should just get on with that. This is a long way from most classical conceptions of the relationship of Shiva and Shakti. I shall be in Varanasi, the city of Shiva and the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, for Mahashivaratri, the great festival of Shiva at the end of February and also studying and practicing from the Kashmir Shavite tantric tradtion there.

I am also going to further my study and practice of mantras for healing. Particularlymantras that are chanted on to the body to release the trauma and blocks in the body.  To begin, I will be in Tamil Nadu. The people of South India are desecended from the Dravidian people who lived in India before the Aryans took over several thousand years ago. The Shiva temples of the South are ancient and full of power.  I will visit the five Shiva temples in the South which are connected to the five elements; earth water, fire, air and space. Whilst there, I will be doing a tantric meditation of seeing the whole of the world; every sense-aspect, every phenomena, as the opposite gender. This is easier in India which has a lot of feminine energy. So for me, everything is Shakti, to be honoured, worshiped and connected to with passion, presence and awareness.

I may write more on this blog as I travel; but right now, I am not sure.  Writing can serve to distract from being immersed in the experience. Shiva, consciousness is very much about awakening to what is; not writing commentaries on it.  Either way, I am back by Easter.