Daniel Odier - Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening

Part I

1

The Quest: Hedonistic or Spiritual?

F or the past few decades, we have been trying in all kinds of ways to liberate ourselves simultaneously from our frenetic materialism and our tired religious traditions. The wave of the sexual revolution affected us; the return in force of the spiritual, in forms most varied, is sweeping over us. The offerings of personal growth are multiplying to the point of delirium: Today we have our shaman, our spiritual master, our therapist, our crystal-tarot readers, our clairvoyants, and our Chinese or Tibetan doctors, while in the past we had our family doctor and, for some, our psychoanalyst. The New Age has spawned an array of intertraditional collages and has succeeded in turning the authentic mystical movements into the most insipid and illusory of mixtures.

Fortunately, the Tibetans arrived on our shores with their smiles, their sense of humor, their rigor and their profound wisdomand not only them but also the Sufi masters, the Zen masters, the masters of the different forms of Buddhism, and the Hindu or Amerindian masters who do their best to ensure their marvelous traditions become known in all their authenticity.

The most secretive schools have paved the way up to our present day. The practitioners of dzogchen, the Bon-pos, the Naths, the Advaita, and the Aghori are among us. Authentic masters and charlatans daily rub elbows; training programs and retreats are taking place one after another, all over the world. We are learning to walk on fire or to communicate with the spirits, to meditate without moving for twelve hours a day, to go into trances, to breathe like the yogis and yoginis, to do postures, to discover our body and our senses, to have a Tantric orgasm, to recite mantrasunless we fall into the nets of the sects, increasingly hidden yet existing everywhere to channel our dreams of the absolute into a sad alienation from our fundamental freedom. We receive initiations, we have our chakras opened, titillate the kundalini, repeat cabalistic formulas, venerate all the earth deities, converse with the angels, reinvent what little we do know about the traditions into a kind of ready-to-wear, immediately negotiable package... but fundamentally, we are all still looking for the same thing: how to integrate the experience of life in Western society with a deeper consciousness that would bring us bliss and reconcile us with our emotional and sensory natures.

We want a path that would not be opposed to our life; a life that would not be opposed to our path. In short, we want a harmonious integration of the spiritual with the material along an accessible path, one not too estranged from the common culture. We want to attain plenitude without denying lifes marvelous effervescence; we want a light and moving joy that would bring us to a larger, more all-encompassing experience of reality.

If we look around, we can see those people who throw themselves into a hedonistic search for pleasure. They try to live out their passions, and sometimes they succeed. They frantically attach themselves to the material world and end up in a state of chronic dissatisfaction, which pushes them to undertake a more and more neurotic quest. These people are often egoistic; they leave a trail of destruction in their wake, yet sometimes we find ourselves secretly envying them because we imagine them to be free. They cause a natural and fundamental longing for pleasure to resonate within us. Their overflowing vitality affects us, even if we feign condemnation of them. Among them, some are touched by grace and discover a more subtle, refined life force in hedonistic enjoyment. Certain of them are deep philosophers.

In opposition to them we find the people who are fascinated by the spiritual search and whose aim is to purify themselves of desires and passions by trying to reduce the impact these have on their daily lives. They are said to be wise or on the path of wisdom. They proudly claim to be of a spiritual school. In observing them we sometimes notice, along with their austerity, signs of coldness and hardness of heart and body; signs of a certain lack of spontaneity. A halo of fear in relation to sexuality encircles their whole being. They seem to have submitted themselves to overly strong tensions; their virtuousness seems a little artificial. Their tolerance has limits, they are often slightly fanaticalindeed, everything about them leads us to believe that their balance is precarious. It would take just one lovely temptation, it seems, to tip them into the neurotic quest for pleasure that they condemn in others. Certain of them succeed in cutting off their passions; they too find a sort of grace and approach what the teachings promised them.

Our cultural and religious heritage seems to tell us that we must choose: the spiritual against the body or the body against the spiritual. D. T. Suzuki, the eminent scholar of Zen Buddhism, one day made this sarcastic comment on the Christian tradition to his friends, American mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychoanalyst Carl Jung: Nature against Man, Man against Nature; God against Man, Man against God; God against Nature, Nature against God; very funny religion!

It is rare that either the hedonistic quest or the spiritual quest, with its rejection of the body, brings us happiness, harmony, joy. The language of the mystics almost always aims at reintegrating the vocabulary of passion and love with that of the spirit, which is what makes their language so shocking for puritans. In our Western traditions we have much condemned the impassioned, whether they are people of God or of science, philosophers or artists.

The divorce of our sensory and spiritual natures generates serious problems in adherents of both paths. Traditionally, we assign a period of our lives to try them out, each in turn. With disillusioned smiles, we allow our young people to tempt or try out their passion, desire, and sensorality, knowing that one day they will be like us, weary and well behaved out of obligation.

Certain people doggedly persevere in this search and are thus pitilessly condemned by those who expect everyone to join their ranks. In midlife some people are seized by a brief jolt of passion... then they fall back again, exhausted, having become victims of general disapproval. Sometimes this passion revives them and leads them to happiness.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s has been much discussed. It left profound marks on our society, it served the cause of women, and it permitted us to open ourselves to the body, leaving secrecy behind. Today we talk openly about subjects that no magazine would have dared to so much as approach a few decades ago.

In an era where the word communication reigns, where an unlimited mass of information can be accessed within a few seconds, we complain about having lost contact with our body and with other human beings. We suffer from extreme solitude, we suffer from no longer touching each other, we suffer from the virtualization of our feelings, the expression of our emotions, and our sensorality. AIDS has incited in us such a level of sexual prudence that relationships carry within them the seed of fear and compel us to a superficiality of contact; our bodies scarcely stand a chance of entering into the great expanse of the cosmic play with abandon and creativity.