"WHAT IS TANTRA?!"
RIDING THE WISDOM TIGER
Introduction:
Tantra
From the beginning of time there have been those rare women and men who, following their hearts great yearning, have answered the
existential question of birth and death with realization of who they
truly are - who we all are. Pranama is such a one. He invites,
cajoles, dares us to join the dance. Read his words, let them enter
your heart and smash the taboo against unreasonable happiness. The flame of being is passed from master to disciple in the great silence
of the heart - these words are an engraved invitation.
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"What is Tantra?"
an interview with Tantric Master Prem Pranama
This interview occured in the summer of 1994. The interviewer, Ralph
Abrams, has been a spiritual seeker for the last 25 years. He has
worked with Swami Muktananda, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Chagdud Tulku,
Nagkpa Chogyum, Native American teachers and currently lives in the
Crazy Cloud Hermitage where he studies the Tantric path with Pranama.
R: The word Tantra is thrown around quite a bit in spiritual circles
these days, and it often means very different things. I'd like to
start off with the simple question: What is Tantra?
P: Tantra is the hot blood of spiritual practice. It smashes the taboo
against unreasonable happiness; a thunderbolt path, swift, joyful, and
fierce. There are many different types of paths. Some touch you like
a gentle spring rain, but Tantra is the wild summer thunder storm
churning with creation, destruction, bliss and emptiness. Tantra is a
wild mother tiger - if you approach her with right motivation, right
intention, and integrity, she'll suckle you at her breast; but if you
come to her in a sloppy way, she'll rip apart your body-mind, eat you
for dinner, and shit out what's left.
R: Wow! I think that this sense of joyful abandon and the force and
bliss you've described would make the Tantric path attractive to many
people. Plus the fact that it is known to be a very swift path to
enlightenment.
P. Swift, yes. But the Tantric Vajrayana path is complex and can be
dangerous. It requires a strong, well integrated sense of self
prepared through careful preliminary practice. Otherwise it is
possible for the practitioner to make gross errors in judgment. On
the Tantric path, it is perhaps easier to become the ultimate form of
egohood and delusion than it is to become free. You can start off
intending to liberate the tyranny of ordinary appearance into
primordial awareness and end up crystallizing the ego into
diamond-hard delusion. There is no authentic Tantra without profound
commitment, discipline, intelligence, courage, and a sense of wild,
foolhardy, fearless abandon.
R: Why is that? And why foolhardy abandon?
P: Foolhardy because the path is for gamblers. There is a beautiful
Rumi poem which speaks to this from the Sufi tradition.
"Love is reckless; not reason. Reason seeks a profit. Love comes on
strong, consuming herself unabashed.
Yet in the midst of suffering love proceeds like a millstone, hard
surfaced and straight forward.
Having died to self interest, she risks everything and asks for
nothing. Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
Without cause God gave us Being; without cause give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.
Religion seeks grace and favor, but those who gamble these away are
Gods favorites, for they neither put God to the test nor knock at the
door of gain and loss"
(translation by Edmund Helminski)
Tantra takes the jump into crazy wisdom by eliminating even God from
the equation, leaving only the mystery with no ultimate attempt to
define it. This is a path for those whose hearts are so wild that they
are ready to throw it all away on a hunch, for an intuition.
Discipline, courage, hard work and intelligence are required
because that is what any quest of the heart demands. Tantra, which
molds the power of creation and ego into skillful means cutting
through delusion, requires careful preparation. We don't expect
someone who just wants to play around now and then on a keyboard to
become a concert pianist. We don't expect someone to be able to get up
off the couch one day and run a four minute mile. Great tasks require
great effort.
With Tantra we are taking the mind and body as cauldron, feeling,
ego, elements and world as alchemical ingredients, and imagination
informed by divine power as catalyst; and we are accomplishing the
great magical task of alchemical transformation. The base metal of
dualistic view becomes the infinitely valuable gold of pure and
luminous awareness. Tantra is a path of tremendous power. This power
is not easy to use without getting burned by it. Yet, at the same
time, it is a path of great joy.
If you're going to use poison, pleasure, and personality as the
path, you have to be careful not to auto-destruct. In working with an
advanced sadhana (practice) such as Vajrakilaya, which is central to
our lineage, powerful energies of psyche, nature, and the subtle
realms are harnessed. When such a powerful sadhana is introduced into
one's system through authentic empowerment, it is not something to be
taken lightly. Let's say you re going to bring anger into the
path. It's a razor's edge between liberating anger into the wrathful
compassion of mirror like wisdom and just becoming an arrogant,
self-righteous prig. With Vajrakilaya, either you are actually
transforming your mind stream into this wisdom-being of great wrath
and power, or you are just dressing up your egoistic anger in the
deitie's clothes. If Tantra is misused, the divine becomes a demon.
When you work with the Tantric path, you are playing with a live
wire. It s charged not with electricity, but with the power behind
creative force. Tantric sadhana deconstructs and constructs reality,
as play, until the essence of reality becomes obvious. Through the
sadhanas, private non-realities interface with the public non-reality
until you realize the true nature of both. You use illusion to cut
through illusion.
