«Sex as a Divine Experience
An Interview with Virginia Lee (part 2)
VL: How do you define tantra?
MA: I would say that tantra is the art of choosing with awareness what brings you joy, so that it opens the door to your spirit. That’s one definition. Another is that tantra is the art of weaving the contradictory aspects of your personality into one whole for the purpose of expanding your consciousness.
Let’s say you’re on a date. Maybe your heart says, “Yes, I want to open up. This is the one.” But your mind says, “Absolutely not, remember what happened last time.” And then your body says, “I’m turned on. I want sex.” All the different aspects of yourself are in contradiction to one another. You’re not in harmony, you’re in pain. So the tantric work I teach on the chakras harmonizes your energy and your consciousness into one entity. It’s the marriage between shakti (pure energy) and shiva (pure consciousness). When they marry, the world is born. That’s the cosmology of tantra. The goddess Shakti, embodying the feminine, and the god Shiva, embodying the masculine, are the two aspects of the divine. When they are joined as one in their fusion, the cosmos is born. From the tantric perspective, the cosmos is born out of an erotic union between the male and the female, which is a much more juicy perspective than the one that tells us to honor the prophet who was nailed on the cross to redeem our sins. That’s spirituality based on pain and punishment.
VL: What is the greatest misconception about tantra?
MA: There is a big misunderstanding in this country about tantra. Unfortunately, tantra has gotten a very bad reputation and is often thought of as a bastardized, semi-mystical sexual ther-apy. Some people seem to think if they can manage to have a one-hour orgasm, they can claim to be enlightened. Everybody who has been repressed by this puritanical culture becomes obsessed with the senses and the garden of pleasure, and all of a sudden, sexual prostitutes are called dakinis. The original meaning of the word “dakini” is the female Buddha, the enlightened woman. It saddens my heart to see how low we have gone. As one of the original teachers of tantra in this country, I see that most people don’t really know what it is all about.
In this country, it is hard to talk about sex and maintain any dignity. Sex is often perceived as something hidden, dirty and forbidden. Although that’s exactly what makes it so interesting, it’s what brings so much violence into it. It is as if you have to fight through all the cultural taboos to have a good time. That’s where I come in, to recondition people’s bodies, hearts and minds to understand that’s not the right approach. And I’m quite successful at it. I understand tantra to be a door to enlightenment. It is a spiritual path like yoga or zen. The only thing that makes it different from other spiritual paths is that sex doesn’t have to be left out of the picture. Sex is a skillful means, among others, that we use to awaken. There is no more challenging meditation than the sexual meditation, because in the sexual meditation, everything comes up: your timidity, your self-doubt, your lack of self-esteem, your lack of trust, all your past experiences that condition you to fear love.
But it’s really no different than any other meditation. If you can approach the sexual experience with the same quality of emptiness that you approach a zazen sitting, then you have understood everything. It doesn’t matter if you’re having sex, eating food, having a conversation or taking a walk. It is the state of your consciousness that matters, your understanding of who you truly are and who is behind the person engaged in the action. If you ask this question, then you come to emptiness, because there is nobody there — just pure consciousness. And consciousness cannot be upset, changed or swayed. It just is. It is all and everything. Once you know that, you can experience anything in life.
VL: Are all tantra teachings the same? If not, then how are they different?
MA: All tantra teachings are not the same. People don’t know that in the ancient tantra sutras of the enlightened masters, it is said that he who is empowered to be the guru (the teacher) is someone who has received direct transmission form an enlightened master. If one has been deemed ready to pass on the work, they are part of a protected lineage. That protection allows the tea-cher to tread where nobody else can tread, into very difficult and dangerous zones.
In tantra, working with sexual energy is not an easy path. One has to know how to confront the demons of our society in order to transform them into allies. The people I see come to me because they don’t know how to do it. This requires a lot of discrimination and power that doesn’t come from your ego. It’s something that comes from the master who empowered you to do that. In my case, there were three masters: Osho, Swami Satchidananda and a Sufi master named Siddhi Mohammed, the custodian of the Mosque of the Sacred Rock in Jerusalem.
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