The path to bliss is bliss / Tantric Sex and the Inner Awakening

Juicy Buddhism:
The Power of Sexual Yoga

“Buddhahood is obtained from bliss,
and apart from women there will not be bliss.”
– Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa Tantra

Praise to Vajravilāsinī, goddess of eternal love!

India, 800 CE: Two practitioners, students of the great master Śabara, entered a beautiful pleasure garden to begin their practice. The garden was filled with cuckoo birds, bright flowers, and tall aśoka trees bursting with red blossoms. It was the night of the Full Moon, and a cloudless sky bathed them in a gentle light. They had already taken hot baths and received sesame oil massages from their friends, and their naked bodies glistened in the moonlight. With the air still warm from the heat of the day, they were embraced by the lush forests of Oḍra. Their devoted practice was The Sādhana of Secret Vajravilāsinī. Clear in their determination to attain enlightenment and liberate all beings from suffering, the practice began with a bow in heartfelt reverence to each other. They recited the opening verses together, which they had long ago memorized by heart. Viewing each other as god and goddess, he touched her body pleasurably with his hands, and they kissed each other with rising passion… And now, hundreds of years later, the practice begins again.

 The Power of Inner Awakening

“Let your heart unite with my heart.” – The Ṛig Veda, Ancient India

You can live permanently in peace and bliss. Calm and relaxed, joyful and carefree, yet charged with energy and enthusiasm. You can possess clarity of mind, profound wisdom, kindness and understanding toward everyone you meet. Radiating love, you can feel complete fulfillment through your relationships. Fully open to the pleasures of life, you can create what you desire. All this can be yours, in this very lifetime. And you can use these inner qualities to help bring others to the same bliss as well. Enlightenment, the highest goal of all spiritual paths, is truly possible for you. While most spiritual paths require great hardship, you can follow a path of intense pleasure. You can have more fun than you ever had before, and find yourself growing in love and joy each day. Thhis book shows you how. The practices are so enjoyable, you will want to do them again and again. These methods are not new. In fact, they come from the oldest spiritual tradition in the world. They have just been hidden for a very long time.

Tantra: The Primordial Path

“If you wish to see the nature of the divine mystery, consider the marvelous image of sexual intercourse. At the moment when the male reaches his climax, the female receives the strength of the male and the male the strength of the female. These are holy mysteries to be reflected upon and acted out.” – The Perfect Discourse, Ancient Egypt

The path to bliss is bliss. That is the path and goal of Tantra. Tantra is the path of becoming whole through pleasure. It awakens your senses to reveal the sacred in all of life. As you practice, you break out of all the restrictions that have been your safe, boring shell, and expand to the fullness of your true being. The only rules in Tantra are to open to life, drench yourself with its pleasures, and rise again and again to the peak of your ecstatic true being until you and the universe are one. When there is no separation between you and All That Is, then you are free. You become the primordial bliss that is your birthright. Once you attain this bliss, it is eternal. The word “Tantra” comes from the Sanskrit root word “Tan” which means “to weave.” Tantra weaves together seemingly opposing energies (such as female and male, sex and spirit) to create wholeness, health and happiness. You weave or unite into your entire being breath with spirit, your own daily life with the sacred power of ultimate reality.

The result is eternal peace and bliss. The Guhyasamāja Tantra (The Secret Assembly Tantra) defines Tantra as “continuum,” the ability to maintain continually the awareness of the dynamic unity of all experiences. It is the simultaneous awareness of oceanic clarity and stillness with pulsing, exultant aliveness, the release of all your limiting beliefs and emotional afflictions, the sexual ecstasy you always dreamed of, and the power to fulfill your heart’s desires, also called Great Bliss.

The Tantras, divinely revealed texts from medieval India, teach the secrets to attaining oceanic bliss very rapidly. The central principle of their teachings is: everything is sacred. And the path of Tantra is: embrace everything. In the Tantric view, any spiritual path that rejects the pleasures of this world is incomplete – a dishonoring of the gift that life truly is. Whatever you love about life, Tantra wants you to have that experience even more. Tantra is the most fun you can have in the universe. It is the ultimate act of being alive, and the ultimate gift you can give to others. Nothing is or could ever possibly be better than Tantra.

The earliest peoples knew that through uniting sex with spirit they could be transformed into higher beings. The oldest written evidence for Tantra comes from the world’s oldest story, the Sumerian tale The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to around 2800 BCE, and speaks of timeless wisdom. In this story, the wild man Enkidu spends several days making love to a Sumerian priestess (often pejoratively translated as “sacred prostitute”), after which he becomes “like a god.” In India, the Harappans (6000 BCE to 1800 BCE) participated in ecstatic sacred sex rituals using sacred ring stones and liṅgaṃs – the ancient origins of the religions of the divine female principle (Śakti) alongside the worship of the eternal male principle (Śiva).

Shiva and Shakti

Source: Great Bliss: Tantric Sex and the Path to Inner Awakening by John T. Houseman (translation of Shabara’s The Sadhana of Secret Vajravilasini)