Month: April 2020

Formlessness

There are three realms of existence, domains that affect the world. Let’s walk through them. Look around and tap things. That’s the Material world, the Physical Form realm. Form means having characteristics that can be described. Look in a mirror–that is your Physical Form Body. Hold up some fingers. Most people around you would agree on how many fingers you are holding up. Obvious, right? Almost everyone can perceive the Material realm.

Now close your eyes and imagine your face and body. Notice that your mental image of yourself has shapes and other characteristics. That is also Form, Mental Form. Imagine a letter. That visualized symbol has a characteristic Form that you can see in the “mind’s eye” and can be described. Imagine hearing a word. That is an auditory Mental Form. Imagine walking. That is a visualized action, a series of Mental Forms. This is the second realm of existence, the Mental Form realm, or Spirit Realm, the non-physical things you can see, feel, and hear with your inner perceptions.

This Mental Form realm also exists, because much of what you can visualize, with effort you can make Real, you can manifest your vision in the Physical Form world. Even if you can’t bring an idea into Physical reality, there are engineers, artists, animators, or scientists who can. Almost everything humans have created first existed as ideas or plans in someone’s mind.

But where do these ideas come from? Many, like the benzene ring, spring into people’s minds in a vision, fully formed. Artists, like my mother, describe this source of ideas as a well that never runs dry. There is a source of potential that contains everything that could exist, awaiting our mental and physical effort to visualize it and bring it into existence. Potential has not yet taken Form, it is Formless.

Many things that exist in the world have no Form: space, time, love, hate, fear, joy, beauty, consciousness. Every one of these “things” influence the world, therefore exist, even though they are invisible and have no shape, color, size, or other describable characteristics. They have no Form. Yet we experience them. We know they exist. This is the Formless realm of existence.

All three realms of being have power in the world, thus they all exist. People have experienced inhabitants of each realm. We all perceive the creatures of the Material world. Some people experience ghosts, angels, and other spirits as Mental Forms, the Spirit world. Fewer people experience invisible forces and beings without form, the Divine dimension. Atheist scientists who perceive the beauty of the invisible laws of nature, relationships among forces, and mathematics are touching Divinity, the Formless reality underlying all-that-is.

People have differing capacity to perceive and master the three realms, depending on their Spiritual maturity. Everyone has at least some access to physical perception, what we call the Material world. Those of us who are limited to the five senses, or fear what lies beyond them, or have limited imagination, often deny that the other realms exist. They dismiss the Spirit realm as mere fantasy, and say they only believe what they can see and touch. It is possible to be a master of the Material world and have no perception of worlds beyond. Such people can become leaders and “stars,” wealthy and admired by many. But without access to creativity, they must rely on helpers or subordinates who perceive possibilities beyond the mundane. Some masters of the Material world may be Spiritual cripples. This is sad.

Leaving the mundane world of the five senses behind, many people are able to visualize things that other people cannot perceive. In the arts and sports, we say these people are “creative,” they can manifest what they imagine into forms that others can perceive, clay into sculpture, emotion into music, words into story, movement into performance. In the sciences, we call those who have access to the Spirit realm of Mental Form “gifted.” They can perceive relationships among matter, energy, time, space, and forces to create technology that generations ago would have been called “magic.” In the religions, there are people with access to the Spirit realm of thought and deep perception who can see and hear beings and realms without Physical Form. We call them teachers, gurus, psychics, meditators, shamans, and prophets. We say they have the third eye or sixth sense. These are our masters of the Spiritual world. Many of these people, especially those with large egos, regard being a master of the Spirit world as the ultimate attainment. But this is merely a step along the Path to ultimate experience.

Delving deeper than the visualized characteristics of religious images, of gods and demons, beyond even the limits of human imagination, lies the realm of ecstatic religious experience. The realm that can only be experienced, because it is beyond the power of words to describe. The Tao. The one. The unitive experience. Emptiness. The Ultimate. The Divine. The Formless.

This Formless realm can be accessed by anyone, but few make the effort to perceive the reality that is the foundation of our experience. It can be found with stillness meditation into the Heart of Reality. It can be reached through devotional prayer. It can be given as the gift of solace from adversity. It can be the karmic effect from selfless service. It can be found after years of diligent practice, or the blinding flash of insight in an instant. There are as many different ways as there are people, and many ways yet to be discovered. We call masters of the Formless Divine realm Mystics, and they are hidden everywhere. How would you find one, or better yet become one?

Love

Love is one of the three principle aspects of all Tantric spiritual paths and the principle practice for Western Tantra’s Path of Ethics, but what do we mean by the word Love? People use the word love for many things, including sex (let’s make love), craving (I love lasagna), affection (you don’t show me love), attachment (love binds us), devotion (I love my job), and even zero in tennis. We need to first be clear on the meaning. When Western Tantra uses the word Love capitalized, it means unconditional, universal love for all beings and creation. Love for all with no if-then conditions whatsoever, like: “I will love you if you will love me in return.” Universal, unconditional Love is a state of being, not a transaction.

Why should we want universal, unconditional Love? The answer lies with the goal of Western Tantra to become one with the universe. Western Tantra posits a sentient universe that cares for all of us, the sinners and the just, the rich and the poor, the fit and the disabled, the wise and the foolish, the beautiful and the disfigured, young and old, everyone and everything without exception. In other words, the universe loves all of us unconditionally. If we want to become one with that Loving universe, we too must Love in that way to be compatible.

If you doubt that the universe is Loving, the book Western Tantra shows us how to discover if the universe is conscious and cares about us. To find our Heart center and synchronize our mind with that Loving universe, we use various meditations and tune our minds to this loving totality (see Meditation and Tuning posts). When we let go or surrender to this reality, the boundary or border separating us from Totality dissolves, and we are reborn into this new Loving reality. Real people have had this experience. If you suspend prejudice and ask around, you can find them.

What is the boundary or border that separates us from a Loving Totality? Our Egos create these separations from the rest of the Universe. Babies may be born without Egos, we are not really sure. Psychologists observe that babies initially do not seem to differentiate between themselves and the world they are born into. They may see themselves as one with their mother’s breast for example. But the world brings pain as well as satisfaction and they begin to separate themselves from pain. I want to be part of this, but I don’t want to be part of that. We incorporate what we want and distance ourselves from what we dislike. Boundaries between self and other form. People teach us the difference between us and them. People tell us who we are and who they are, and personality forms. Western Tantra labels the set of behaviors and attitudes that we use to interact with our environment the Ego. People hurt our Ego in many ways. In Buddhism, the Ego is the source of all suffering, the Second Noble Truth. To protect our Ego, we separate it from hurt with a boundary between ourselves and others, a sort of armored shell.

This Ego armor is very useful for protecting us from an often hurtful world and some nasty people who inhabit it. But it is a liability when encountering a loving outer reality. Imagine trying to embrace a lover in a knight’s suit of heavy armor. Or trying to swim in it. Our body was born to be in this world, and if we put it in a bubble, our body does not experience the world as it was designed or evolved (depending on your point of view). Likewise, our Soul was born to be part of the universe and experience it, not be separated from it. So the challenge for us is to know when to don our armor to protect us from harm and when to let it fall to encounter Love. When you Love and find Love, let the Ego armor fall, let it go, surrender to Love and embrace Totality. Can you do this?

Death and Dying

We all know we are going to die, or more accurately, our physical bodies will die. Intellectually we know this, but most of us try not to think about it. Many people eat healthy and exercise to try to put that event into the distant future, and not worry about it. But it will come, and we do not know the time or manner of our death. The COVID-19 pandemic brought us to the reality that death could come much sooner than we expected.

We would like our death to be easy, and many hope for either a pleasant afterlife, reincarnation, or oblivion. But in the West, we do almost nothing to prepare for death, other than maybe complete a will and follow the dictates of our religion. Eastern Tantras teach us that our consciousness is immortal, that we are reborn, that there are infinite possibilities of how we are reborn as well as infinite realms and types of beings, and that our rebirth is largely up to us: the karma we create during our life, and our skill at mind control during and after death. And not all the possibilities are good ones, so it is a good idea to train for death.

In the West, most people think what happens in death is out of our control. In Tantra, including Western Tantra, we realize we are in control (or could be in control) of the entire process of dying and rebirth to a new life. If we want the process to be bearable and our next life to be beneficial, we had better learn in advance what to do while we are dying, and learn mind control so that we can choose our next life wisely. We could lose heaven or a beneficial rebirth if we are ignorant or panic.

Ultimately, we learn that the best outcome is to become one with the universe, what several spiritual traditions call union with the creator or the source, often called union with God. Try not to get hung up on exact terminology. We don’t know exactly what happens, because the ultimate experience is beyond description, according to those who have experienced it and returned to tell us about it. Enlightened masters and teachers tell us to have no expectations and just go with it, let go, surrender.

Ethical thoughts, words, and deeds are how we create the positive karma to have beneficial choices for our next life: heavens, paradises, pure lands, or fortunate reincarnations. Meditation is how we develop the mind control to navigate the death process, discern our best choice of rebirth while avoiding distractions, and actualize our choice, especially full Enlightenment as defined by Tantra.

Eastern Tantra will teach you this process if you can understand the lessons and have the time to learn them. Western Tantra will do this for Westerners if you do not. Western Tantra is a skill, not a religion, and can be combined with your current religion or adopted philosophy without conflict. The book Western Tantra describes ethics, Karma, and the dying process in ways that most Westerners can understand without the translations, confusing terminology, and cultural trappings that can impede the learning. What are you waiting for? Do you want to live forever?

Meditation–Breathing

Breathing meditation belongs to the stillness class of meditation. We will describe two methods of breathing meditation, simple and nine-step. The simple breathing meditation starts with finding a quiet location and a comfortable posture or place to sit with the spine fairly straight (normal curvature, not slouched). It is a good idea to set your intention by dedicating your meditation practice to the benefit of others as described in the “Meditation—Preparation” post. Then concentrate on inhaling through the nose, pause holding your breath for a few seconds, purse your lips and blow slowly through your mouth as if you are cooling soup. Breathe slowly like this while concentrating on the feel of the air entering the nose and exiting the lips. Try not to think of anything. If you find yourself thinking, switch the outgoing breath to the “shish” (Shhhh) sound you make when telling someone to be quiet, and concentrate more forcefully on the feel of air entering and exiting. You could set a timer and try to increase the duration of your breathing meditation by one minute per session until you reach the longest session that your schedule permits.

A more complex form of breathing meditation is called nine-step breathing meditation or more commonly nine-round breathing. This method requires a visualization of the inner Spirit Body (see Glossary of Terms) as described in Western Tantra, chapter 9, Tantric Sex, Spirit Body, 107-108, reprinted here:

Spirit Body: According to the spiritual literature, the Spirit Body or “diamond” body, which inhabits the physical Body, has a hollow central channel from the top of the head to the floor of the pelvis. This central channel is flanked by two thinner channels, said to convey male and female Energy to an Energy center at the navel, where male and female Energy combine to power the Spirit Body. It is sort of like matter and antimatter combining at the dilithium crystal to power a starship, although nothing we are describing is made of ordinary matter or energy. Spirit Energy is distributed within the Spirit Body through the central channel to Energy centers called chakras located on the central channel at the crown of the head, the neck, near the heart, near the navel, and near the genitals. Radiating from the chakras are secondary Energy channels called nadi, which branch out smaller and smaller to reach all parts of the physical Body, like capillaries that nourish the physical Body. The heart chakra is thought to be the principal location of our Divine center, the seat of consciousness. My spiritual tradition works mainly with five chakras. Other spiritual systems locate more chakras, some outside the Body. I do not know if this Spirit Body is an actual manifestation of something real or just a convenient way to visualize the Spirit Body in order to control it, the way the human brain projects representations of the physical Body onto the cortex of the brain.

Don’t worry that this structure of the Spirit Body is not anatomically correct in the physical medical sense, it’s a visualized Spirit Body, not a physical body. It will function as the focus of a visualized practice. First find a quiet location and comfortable posture as with any breathing meditation. Set your intention to benefit yourself and others. With the visualized anatomy of the Spirit Body clearly in mind, here is how nine-step breathing meditation is done:

Steps 1-3) First close your left nostril with your left index finger, inhale slowly and evenly, and visualize air entering your right nostril, travelling down the right channel to where it meets the left channel at the central channel about 5cm (2”) below the navel. Then block the right nostril with the right index finger, exhale slowly, and visualize the air travelling up the left channel, blowing any impurities in the side channels out the left nostril. Repeat this two more times to complete the first three steps.

Steps 4-6) Now close your right nostril with your right index finger, inhale slowly and evenly, and visualize air entering your left nostril, travelling down the left channel to where it meets the right channel at the central channel about 5cm (2”) below the navel. Then block the left nostril with the left index finger, exhale slowly, and visualize the air travelling up the right channel, blowing any impurities in the side channels out the right nostril. Repeat this two more times to complete the middle three steps.

Steps 7-9) For the final set of three steps, leave both nostrils open, inhale slowly and evenly, and visualize air entering both nostrils, travelling down both side channels to where they both meet the central channel about 5cm (2”) below the navel. Pause for a few seconds. Then exhale slowly, and visualize the air travelling up the central channel, blowing any impurities in the central channel out an opening at the top of your head, called the “crown aperture.” Yeah, I know the air is really exiting your nose, but this is a visualization, and this is how it has been done for thousands of years. Just accept it. Repeat this two more times to complete the final three steps of the nine-step breathing meditation (or nine-round breathing as it is called on most websites). Then finish with expressing gratitude to the universe for the conditions that allow you to do this meditation.

The way this nine-step meditation works is by giving the discursive “monkey mind” something to do to interrupt the endless flow of disturbing thoughts, allowing Body and Soul (see Glossary of Terms) to rest and heal. The visualizations of the inner Spirit Body plumbing and the thought required to visualize air flow passing through the channels will keep the brain busy. The visualizations are intricate enough that the brain is fully occupied with this task and must set aside any distracting fears. Without the bodily “fight or flight” hormone and muscle responses to fearful thoughts, the Body is able to relax, and the brain neurotransmitters depleted by endless circular thinking can replenish. Our conscious mind can then move its focus of attention from the Head to the Heart center, giving us a chance to find the source of healing energy.

Nine-step breathing can be used by itself to improve mental and physical health and improve concentration, the principle function of the various stillness meditations. It is also used as a preliminary practice to enhance concentration and relax body and mind in preparation for other meditation practices. If you try either of these breathing meditations, simple or nine-step, let us know your experiences and any tips to make them better.

Meditation–Preparation

Meditations of many types have been found to be beneficial to our health, but to enhance their benefit, there are practices we can perform before and after to increase the benefit and improve the odds of doing the meditations well. These are called preparatory practices.

As we said, meditation improves our health, but with Karma in mind (see Karma post), we can do more. Improving our own health and peace of mind is a good thing, but improving the world is even better. Meditation for ourselves alone could be considered selfish and might feed our Egos (see Ego post), especially if we meditate skillfully. Many meditators are proud of their lotus posture and how long they can sustain it, for example.

Can meditation improve the world? Certainly. If it puts us in a more peaceful state of mind, we will be more pleasant to be around for others: family, friends, coworkers, and people we encounter daily. This will improve their mood which will be more pleasant for their people, and so on in a “ripple effect.” Many of you have seen how anger can jump from person to person, like a virus. Love and caring works the same way. So if we make ourselves better, the world becomes better.

Intention is key in Karma (Western Tantra, 54), so to enhance our meditation, we should set our intention to help others at the beginning of any meditation session. This could be as simple as saying to yourself, “May my meditation benefit myself and others.” Or you can choose a dedication or prayer from your religion or life philosophy.

Meditations are highly susceptible to distractions as you well know. Phones can ring, children can interrupt, and bosses can say, “Get back to work!” Our own thoughts can disturb us. It is easier to meditate poorly than well. If it went well, it is a good idea to express gratitude to the universe that allowed our meditation to go well. For example, if you practice mindful driving meditation (Western Tantra, 94-95) you could end the session with the silent thought, “Thanks for letting us arrive home safely!” Even if your beliefs do not include a sentient universe or deity, it can’t hurt to be grateful. Feeling gratitude to forces beyond your control is better than congratulating yourself, which feeds the Ego, the beast we are trying to starve. What are your thoughts about preparatory and concluding practices?