Tantra and Celibacy

Celibacy and walking the Way of the Lovers

By Christopher Michaels, a humble practitioner.

We hear a lot about the sexual practices of Tantra. But Tantra is much more than a therapeutic program for people having problems (or bored) with their sex lives. It provides more than a group of psycho-physical techniques to master the vulnerabilities of the erotic. Tantra is the way of the lovers. It's about the way we define ourselves in relation to anything that we experience as outside ourselves, as "other", whether it's spirit versus body, the mind versus the emotions, me versus you, good versus bad, allies versus enemies. As such it does not rely on having a lover and/or sex partner to be an effective part of self development. It is a cosmology based on a symbolic marriage, on embracing all the wondrous complexity of real life relationships. This marriage is about achieving a psychic homeostasis between all the various forces of the inner and outer worlds.

Of course, a sense of sexual mastery is foundational to anyone's self-esteem and personal power, since, after survival, sex is the second most important force within us. I believe you should not take up Tantra until you already understand what good sex is for you and how to give and receive it. However, we have to be careful not to be blinded to the deeper truths at Tantra's core because the sexual accomplishments it makes available are so exciting.

This is one of the reasons why celibacy is considered valid in Indian Tantra. When people publish articles and books on Western Tantra, they will talk about the symbolic marriage of complementary and cooperating opposites, yin and yang, female and male, good and bad, etc, but they rarely mention one of central dualities of sex - its presence and absence. In India they talk about the left and right-hand paths. The left-hand path is the path we associate with Western Tantra, its followers have sex, though under very strict circumstances and (believe it or not) in away that is not supposed interfere with their basic celibacy, among many other sometimes confronting rituals and techniques that most Westerner prefer to ignore. Followers of this path are very rare in India.

The right-hand path is much more common and is the path of most ascetic "Tantrikas". The right-hand path is celibate, involves many intense exercises and techniques which are designed to redirect, transform and transcend the power of sexual energy, of desire and craving, in order to fulfil spiritual and magical goals. Sex and desire are often seen as enemies of the spiritual, in away that is familiar to Western ascetic traditions like Christian Monasteries. It is a path away from, beyond and separated from the ordinary world, the world of the senses. It came to the fore after Christian and Muslim moralism was introduced by the British and the Arabs in the 14 th, 15th and 16th centuries.

Since the sixties sexual revolution we have come to think of celibacy as unnatural. Part of Tantra's attraction stems from its mythological, moral and philosophical support for this very modern phenomenon, and also because sex sells. The two paths express the very duality which is central to Tantra by approaching the vulnerability of Sex and desire in opposing ways: Feasting or Fasting.

In Tantra the duality of relationships is symbolised by the Warrior and the Lover. The warrior represents the right-hand path and Lover the left. The way of the warrior is so strong because it uses survival as its central image with fear as its central emotion, usually in terms of conquering it. It pushes us to define our boundaries. The Lovers' central emotional drive is desire and love. It asks us to drop our boundaries. Where survival causes us to contract inwards to gather our resources, sex (desire) pulls us out of ourselves. Desire can push us to expand beyond our capacities. In its negative expression it can cause us to feel we are losing our sense of ourselves. Desire is at its strongest when the object of desire is absent.

Being single is as important an opportunity in Tantra as having a beautiful loving relationship. The central aim of Tantra is an inner marriage between the various forces within the self. Conflict between these internal elements can drain us of our power but can also energise if they are balanced in the right way. Our external relationships are mirrors for that inner world. The intense desire that arises in the absence of the Beloved, when we are lonely or alone, confronts us with the way we compromise our integrity in order to seek fulfilment in other people or even in objects. But that longing can be a confirmation of the depth of your passion, your faith and your willingness to live a life of devotion to love and truth.

One of the central conflicts of life is between the inner and the outer. A powerfully way it plays out is between a desire for something and fulfilling that desire. Where do you look for fulfilment (external or internally)? How do you gain inner fulfilment without being escapist? The practice in Tantric Sex of holding back on the fulfilment of sexual desire, redirecting and transmuting it for other purposes or for achieving greater ecstasy is both real and symbolic.

Symbolic, in that it points to a way of learning to change our relationship with emotion and desire. It can be applied to any emotional reaction or desire turning it into fuel for our greater purposes. It asks us to recognise that we are more than our emotions, more than our desires, more than our body whilst recognising how important they are. Tantra does not ask you to suppress your feelings rather, to choose the path to fulfilling them, and to use them in a way that intensifies your experiences and maintains, promotes and celebrates the integrity of the self.

Celibacy, the ultimate bachelorhood. Celibacy has a role in Tantra but it has to be for the right reasons, with a clear intent. I think it should rarely be a lifetime commitment. Enforced celibacy is a power trip, by saying that you can't achieve your goals without it the enforcers are paying into the idea that "if I own your sex I own you". Celibacy must be a very personal choice. The power of sex in our lives means that if you are truly interested in knowing how it affects the flow of your destiny, your will, your emotions then celibacy has to be considered because choosing not to fulfil such a central desire can be a very empowering choice. However, if we choose it as a reaction against the pain caused by intimacy gone wrong, and we are being escapist, it can be dangerously disempowering. Celibacy, when used in this way can be as addictive as drugs and gambling, it needs to be practiced with clear intent.

There are periods in our lives when we are celibate without feeling that we have made the choice for it. The feelings - rejection, anger, self-loathing, loneliness, even a sense of strength and self-sufficiency - which come up for us in those times can teach us as much, or more, about ourselves as the times when we have a deeply emotional connection with someone. People teaching Tantra are not giving the complete wisdom if they are not showing you how to use loneliness, or aloneness, and frustrated desire, as part of your path to the greater union which sex represents in Tantra.

Tantra in India has several roles. Most commonly it is as a path to extraordinary states of ecstasy through understanding, controlling and directing the flow of sexual energy, desire and its physiology. It also provides techniques to help ascetics deal with what they see as the distraction sex represents to their spiritual evolution. Another role is the same as sex magic in the Pagan and shamanic traditions - that is, as a way of focussing your psychic and physical energies for achieving particular goals.

The way of the Lover seeks to treat the self as an integrated whole, thus wholistic (rather than "holistic" from hole or holy as this other spelling suggests), not as a goal to be achieved, but as a reality now, by fostering self-acceptance and self-love. This means every day states of being are as important as the heightened states of meditation, sex and mystical experiences. It is interesting that when talking about spirituality many people are quick to use images of the warrior but still seem to cringe when it comes to the symbolism of sex and the lovers. The sexual techniques of Tantra are important, but the way of the lover is about embracing the greatest challenges rather than conquering them. When Jesus said "turn the other cheek" and Gandhi stood non-violently against oppression their respect of the enemy made them Tantrikas. Multiculturalism and democracy, in their attempts to create a politics of tolerance and inclusion of all points of view, are political expressions of the way of the lover.

More important than the great sex, a little knowledge of Tantra offers, is the courage to continue to risk the pain of passion, vulnerability and love. When we are single, we can discover the meaning of the lessons of our relationships and integrate them. Some people speak of the love of God as if it's separate from the way we love life, family, friends and our partners, as if you could cut a colour out of the rainbow. Love, especially self-love, is a subtle and difficult problem. The way we deal with being alone is as important as how we give ourselves to our external partners. How we treat those partners is a direct reflection of how we treat ourselves in our inner dialogue.

For example, patterns of thought, desire and emotion can have unexpected implications. A case in point is, it is possible to interpret attempts at self-improvement as a form of self-loathing, because you acould be unhappy with yourself as you are, you could be seeking to push yourself to live up to an idealisation of who you should be, could be or identify with. This can lead to the desire to help or fix your partners without respecting their achievements. At the same time personal development can arise from self-love and the desire to build on your strengths rather than to fix your weaknesses. If you do not grow and strive, you stagnate and give up on fulfilling your potential, on the expansive power of desire. So when questioning all other things on the path of self-development it is important to question the reason we seek that development to ensure it is based on true self-respect. And thus rehearsing on yourself the love and respect you want to give your partners, whether they are friends, lovers or enemies. These ideas are central to the esoteric practices of Tantra, as a way of lovers.