There are dark and gloomy days in the path to self-discovery. There are days when it seems that we’ll never be able to see the truth. I like to talk about self-discovery in very optimistic terms. I suggest that meditating will inspire you, open up new vistas and new horizons, bring you into different levels of attention and show you worlds beyond your imagination, much happier worlds than the worlds you now exist in, worlds of form, formlessness, voidness. I speak about the ecstasy of samadhi and the superconscious states, the peaks of self-realization.
Eternity is everywhere. It’s always with us. Our failure to see and access the pure joy and radiance of life is owing to a lack of awareness. In any situation there is beauty. Even at the moment of one’s death, there is beauty. And we can see that beauty and understand the loving kindness of creation when we’re in a high enough consciousness. Then everything is one, and what occurs in the physical world is but a dream. We’re not affected by it. It doesn’t really matter if our fortune is good or bad. If we’re in a high enough state of consciousness, we see that it is only a passing dream. We draw happiness and radiance from the eternal sun of self-knowledge, from the pure bliss of existence itself. This is true.
But then there are days when we don’t see it that way. There are days that in spite of our best intentions we become confused, deluded, frustrated, angry, depressed. We just can’t seem to raise our kundalini, our energy. The past overshadows the present, and the future looms before us as an empty road through what appears to be a barren desert. We try all of the traditional methods and means, the four paths. The path of love—we try to love, but it’s not working. The path of selfless giving, where we really want to go out and do something for the world, for humanity, for our spiritual organization—it’s not working. We’re not inspired. We can think the thoughts but they lack heart. When we practice mysticism we try and raise the level of attention through drawing on the power and energies of the elementals, of the Earth and the ether—doesn’t seem to be working. Jnana yoga, the highest form, discrimination—it seems empty, barren, lacking in emotion.
When everything has failed you, when it seems that none of the paths are good—which they are, but it doesn’t seem that way at the time—what does one do? When you’ve seen all the best movies in town, you’ve tried all the best people in the neighborhood, you’ve pushed yourself through a mirage of sexual experiences, creative experiences, work experiences, love experiences, drug experiences, whatever it may be. You’ve tried everything and still come away with a feeling of emptiness, but not the higher emptiness. Loneliness. Sadness. A feeling that is accentuated by the knowledge of what could be.
You see enough to know how beautiful and perfect life can be. You’ve had moments where you’ve seen it. You’ve touched it. But now it’s faded away, which makes it all the worse. You know you’re feeling sorry for yourself, but it doesn’t seem that you can extricate yourself from the trap of feeling sorry for yourself. You know you should be self-giving; you shouldn’t be worried about your state or your condition, that it’s all relative. But it still doesn’t matter. At the moment you hurt, and that’s what matters.
What can you do when all the remedies fail, both spiritual and worldly? What can you do? Well, at such a time, there is a form of yoga you can practice that will enable you to destroy everything, including yourself and your conceptions. And from this destruction will arise a creation, a new force; an energy will enter your life. This yoga is, I suppose, the most dangerous of the yogas. But then again, you get to a point where it really doesn’t matter. One can get to a point where nothing is working. We’re headed off the cliff, plummeting to the bottom, so why not try one last thing? When you’ve sunk as low as you can get—or so you think because there’s no end to the depths to which you can fall as there is no end to the heights to which you can rise—when you feel, as my grandfather used to say, “lower than a snake’s ass,” at such a moment, when everything and nothing works, it’s time to practice tantra.
Tantra is the left-handed path, meaning it is the road less taken. Tantra comes from the Far East. And it has to do with the pairs of opposites and oppositions. It is a difficult yoga to practice in the sense that when you practice tantra, it’s very easy to not practice tantra and think you’re practicing tantra. Practicing tantra itself is never dangerous or problematic. The only problem that occurs in the practice of tantra is when you don’t practice tantra but you think you’re practicing tantra, and you fool yourself and you get caught up in powerful vortexes of negative energy which pull you into the lower bardo regions of awareness, down into the mud.
What can one do at such a time? Well, before I enter into a discussion of tantra here and take up more of your time, I’d like to tell you what tantra is not. Tantra is not sexual yoga. When the word “tantra” is used in the West, very often people immediately associate it with some kind of sexual yoga in which you use sex as a vehicle for attaining enlightenment. Sex can never bring about enlightenment. Only enlightenment brings about enlightenment.
The tantras are the ancient sacred books of India and Tibet. And the tantras detail specific means for attaining liberation. When I speak of tantra yoga, I’m speaking of a type of yoga that is best practiced by persons who live in society. It’s a yoga for the last yuga. Tantra means the avoidance of a set or defined form of spirituality. Tantra is intuitive self-discovery, which initially sounds very good and very attractive. We feel that the path of love, the path of mysticism, the path of self-giving, the path of knowledge, the four paths, are very demanding. And they are. Then of course, there is the fifth path that I respect but do not teach, and that’s the path of asceticism.
Tantra is the sixth path. It’s a hidden path only because people don’t look where it is. Tantra appears to be fluid. It appears that we don’t need the discipline required in the other paths. If one is somewhat lazy, it immediately seems like a great idea. “Boy, I’ll practice tantra and I don’t have to go through all those other forms and practice all those different methods.” And so on. Such a motivation will not bring you success with tantra. Tantra is for the desperate. Unless you’ve really experienced pain and suffering, tantra won’t work. Unless you’ve really experienced exultation and ecstasy, tantra won’t work. Tantra is for extremists, but balanced extremists.
Tantra is not for the person who is lacking in self-control. Tantra is for the person who has self-control but doesn’t care anymore—that is to say, the person who is able to abandon self-control and its fixation. Tantra is not for the weak. Tantra is for the very, very strong practitioner. And it is only recommended for someone who has a very developed will power, a terrific sense of humor and a sense that nothing else matters but God and self-realization. It’s only with those understandings that we can readily approach the subject of tantra. Again, I suggest that tantra is for the person who is pure in heart. If you still have greedy desires, if you still think that material success will bring you happiness, if you think that worldly possessions will fulfill you—relationships, people, places and things, fame, fortune, all of those things—if those things still matter to you, you definitely should not practice tantra. Tantra is for the person who has reached the point in their spiritual practice where they realize that these things are not important, but still, in spite of that knowledge and firm belief from the heart—not just because it sounds nice, but you really feel that way, all the way through your being, and you ache for God, you ache for liberation, but still in spite of that, you find yourself getting stuck. That’s the candidate for tantra.
Tantra is for someone who practices all the paths because all the paths are encompassed in tantra. Tantra is a way that can only be practiced by someone who’s truly, truly dedicated, literally fanatical, but at the same time who is not caught up in the trap of fanaticism. A person who has dedicated their life to self-realization, not in name but in action, someone who is actually ready to travel to the farthest ends of the Earth for truth and will actually do it and will leave everything—family, home, whatever—for truth. But in spite of that feeling, in spite of that readiness, one still is getting snared again and again by one’s own games, by one’s desires, by one’s desire for liberation.
How does tantra work? Well, tantra has to do with the reconciliation of the pairs of opposites. A bit of spiritual theory: the paths that lead to self-realization set down prescribed methods and ways, and if you’ve listened to my discourses on the four yogas, you’re familiar with the basic principles of each of the yogas. All of the four yogas, however, recommend that you avoid certain experiences. In tantra, there is no avoidance. All of the yogas say that there is something right that you should do, that there are certain practices that, if you practice those practices, you’ll make spiritual progress. There are certain things that, if you avoid them, then you will make spiritual progress. You kind of combine the two. And each of the four paths shows the way.
Tantra is different than that. Tantra would certainly acknowledge and suggest that there are certain things that are helpful, and those things would include all of the recognized and established methods of self-realization. Tantra is not at all in disagreement with meditation, self-giving, purity, and humility. All of these things, of course, are understood and accepted. Tantra simply changes one small factor, and that is that there’s nothing that you shouldn’t do. Everything can be used as a tool for liberation. The basic assumption of tantra is that God not only exists in the superconscious reality, which everyone is trying so hard to get to in spiritual discovery, but, excuse me, God also exists in the lowest forms of existence, in the darkest regions and confines of the human consciousness. God exists there as much as any place else, just in a different form.
In tantra, one does not seek experiences that most people would consider to be unspiritual and try to see truth in them. That has nothing to do with tantra. In tantra, we don’t try to guide our life in a specific way. We let the winds of existence blow us where they will. Our concern is not so much in directing our life as in living our life and observing and seeing that every experience that life gives us, every situation that we’re put into, is a pathway to perfection.
In this world, we see the pairs of opposites. Ultimately, there are no oppositions. In the superconscious awareness there is no division. From that perspectiveless perspective, there is only eternity in all of its radiant perfection. From the point of view of the mind, the relative world, there are pairs of opposites: dark, light; hot, cold; pleasure and pain and so on. Most forms of yoga counsel the spiritual aspirant to not get involved with the physical world, to not get too caught up in it. Instead, what one should do is to fixate one’s attention on the subtle physical and on the voidness of nirvana, to become absorbed in God and to ignore the world. In the path of tantra, we enjoy the opposites because we don’t see them as opposites but rather as either complements or as one and the same.
In tantra, we accelerate our spiritual progress by not trying. A person who practices tantra yoga will naturally meditate, will practice selfless-giving. When I say not trying, I don’t mean that you won’t meditate every day or that you won’t give from the heart. Tantra is not for the lazy. It just means that on a dark day, in a dark time, in a dark world, in a dark moment, you can actually use that darkness, you can use that depressive force, you can use that frustration, that delusion, to propel you into the heart of light, into God.
How is it done? Tantra and adventure are very, very connected. Perhaps the greatest enemy for one who’s journeying along the spiritual path—after you’ve overcome doubt, fear, anxiety and so on, after you have your house in order and you’ve taken charge of your life and your emotions—perhaps the greatest enemy is complacency. I’ve seen many of my students, and also people who I used to study with years ago, do very, very well spiritually for a number of years. In the initial years of self-discovery there’s great enthusiasm and love. You see your life changing constantly. But then you reach a point, or you may reach a point, where things begin to get a little dull. In other words, the process of self-discovery has just become another state of mind. It isn’t really, it never is. But this is how we see it. In other words, we’ve gotten stuck in our self-discovery just as we were stuck in the world.
Tantra is a means, a way, of reconciling everything. It’s neither here nor there, forward nor backward. It’s a state of awareness. The winds of eternity blow, and in tantra we have complete faith in the winds of eternity. The key to tantra yoga is to feel that you are not the doer, that you cannot possibly act, that anything that you choose, you didn’t really choose—eternity chose for you. All that you have to do in existence and life is to accept.
In bhakti yoga there’s a sense of “I’m loving God, I’m serving God.” In karma yoga, there’s a sense of “I’m working for the welfare of others. I see God in everyone and work for them.” In mysticism there’s a sense of “I am impeccable. I am bringing forth the powers of eternity and working with them.” In jnana yoga, there’s a sense of nonexistence of the self: “I don’t exist, nothing exists, the relative world doesn’t exist. All that is is nirvana.” In tantra, there’s a sense of surrender. True, all of the yogas do lead to this sense.
The highest aspect of all of the yogas culminate in a sense of surrender to eternity: “Let thy will be done.” But tantra is really that way from the beginning. There’s the sense that, “What can I do? I’m a poor, puny human being. How can I possibly attain liberation? How can I possibly rise above the samsara, the illusion of birth and death, of pleasure and pain? Here I am, stuck in the middle of the relative world in a traffic jam, and there’s nothing good on the radio. And I’m dying every day. My body’s aging. My life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. When I try to feel and communicate, there’s little feeling and even less communication.” At that point it’s necessary to break out of the framework with which we view experience.
So then, in tantra we come to feel that that very frustration is the means that eternity is using to break us out of our conditioning. If, for example, you feel that you shouldn’t eat an ice cream cone—I don’t know why you’d feel that way—but if you feel that way and you feel that it’s a very unspiritual thing to do, yet you’re drawn to the ice cream cone and you find yourself eating one in spite of your intent, if you follow any of the other paths you’ll be miserable. You’ll try and accept it as an experience that God is having through you, but still you’ll know that you’ve failed. In tantra, you’ll order a hot fudge sundae, and in every bite of that hot fudge sundae you’ll see and feel God vibrating. The path of tantra doesn’t mean that you will go out every day and seek that hot fudge sundae. But whatever comes your way you will accept as being normal, natural, and perfect. There are no rules for you to break. Since everything is God and everything contains God, you see God in everything; everything is a step towards liberation.
Tantra works well for people who are engaged in relationships and sexuality. Most of the yogas say stay away from sex, stay away from relationships, they’re a terrible trap. And indeed they are. Sex itself, meaning the experience of making love, is really not that much of a deal one way or the other. Very little energy is transferred, for most people. However, the problem with sexuality is emotions. Most people become emotionally involved with someone when they have sex with them and it brings up their ego, their attachments, all kinds of illusions about love and nasty things that will ultimately make you very unhappy. If you listen to the songs on the radio you will quickly ascertain that for every one song about the joys of love, there are a hundred songs about the miseries of love. This is attached love, sexual love. It always seems so promising in the beginning. But what happens is, sexual activity brings up everything in our being that’s impure. Remember, sex itself is just an action, it’s just part of the dream. It really doesn’t matter, in my estimation. Of course the principal path that I follow is tantra. Some days.
Many people have been somewhat confused about my stance on sexuality, and I assure you, if you think you’re confused, you should try being me. But you see, I think confusion is a wonderful state of being. We’re all in states of being, different parts of our being are in states of being, and confusion, I think, is one of the finer states because a person who is confused is definitely making spiritual progress. The person who sees life as being completely clear—if you understand everything, everything is in a state of balance, you’re suffering from complete illusion and delusion. You’ve fooled yourself into thinking that everything is balanced. Nothing is balanced in the universe. The universe is completely chaotic. That’s what makes it work so well. It’s chaos that’s predictable. It’s the most orderly chaos that there is. Uniform chaos is much more orderly than order. This is a perspective that a person who practices tantra has.
Sexuality then, for the person who practices tantra, is a marvelous chance to experience illusion. Illusion is just another way of seeing things. There are no illusions because there is no self. Everything is voidness, and voidness is just another illusion. So why not? Why not, if you find yourself having sex, pay no attention to it? Why not, if you find yourself, I don’t know, whatever your moral prescription is, when you do the opposite, why not realize that it doesn’t matter? There are no rules. Nothing you can do will take you to liberation, therefore, nothing you avoid will help you along the path to liberation. What will actually help in your realization is this realization—that there is nothing that will bring you to liberation, nor is there anything that will hinder your liberation. Everything is liberation. This is tantra.
Tantra does not seek any type of experience, nor does it avoid it. The perspective of tantra could be that everything that I experience every day, from brushing my teeth to sleeping, aids me in my liberation because there is nothing but liberation. Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong? This is why tantra is such a difficult path to follow. You see, tantra is not for a hedonist at all. It won’t work. If you’re heavily attracted to sensual experience, tantra will definitely not be of any use to you. Tantra is for the person who has gone beyond the rules. They’ve learned the rules so well and practiced them for so long, that now they can go beyond them.
You’re learning to play the piano and you’re learning the scales. You learn to read music and you practice for years and years and you follow all the rules. Finally a day will come when you’re so good at playing the piano that you can — not necessarily even break the rules, you’re not interested in breaking the rules — but just go beyond into unexplored territory. You can start to improvise. That’s tantra. Improvisation. Now, there are those who are lazy. They don’t want to learn the scales, they don’t want to practice. They can’t possibly employ tantra. Tantra is for a person who has reached a point in their spiritual evolution where everything looks the same. Such a person is free to do absolutely anything since they see that the rules no longer apply to them. Not because they’re special, but because the rules were just another way of looking at life.
In other words, the Ten Commandments have a social purpose, for people who still need a social purpose. Once you’ve gotten to the point where you’re very, very good, you don’t have to worry about commandments. If your intentions are noble and pure, if you don’t want anything but light and goodness, then it’s extremely unlikely that you’re going to break the rules. You don’t need to worry about the rules. The rules are only for people who still need them. The rules are for persons who are so unsure or lack the discipline necessary to live in the world or in society or to practice an art form or self-discovery, you know, they need those rules. Those rules are good; they help you. Someone is saying, Listen “Charlie. If you do this you’re going to get in trouble and you’ll suffer. If you do this you’ll feel better.” And those rules are true, and they’re logical and sensible. They’ve been set down to help you. But you can reach a point in self-discovery where the rules don’t mean anything anymore. You would never violate them. That’s not your interest. But in spite of the fact that you’ve followed the rules and now have no interest in doing anything else, still something’s lacking in your life. You’re still in the samsara. You have enough knowledge, but your knowledge isn’t complete. Tantra is good for such a person.
Tantra involves radical change, a change in states of awareness. Remember, I said the principle danger for people who practice self-discovery for many years, obviously aside from egotism, is complacency. You can’t be complacent. You must do new things and have new experiences. But you see, people who practice spirituality for a long time have grown to the point where they don’t really want much to do with the world because you go out into the world and the world is grungy. People of the world are so fixated on basic things—pleasure, pain, the senses, things like that—and to be around them at times is almost painful. A person who practices self-discovery for many years works out a very simple lifestyle where they kind of dodge the waves. But they get fixated in it. They forget that God is in those people who seem to be low-vibe as much as God is in an enlightened person. They got trapped by spirituality itself.
Now, you can’t get trapped by spirituality itself—again, if I can come back to this point—until you’ve really done it correctly. This won’t work for you. Tantra won’t work unless you’ve been trapped by spirituality. You have to be trapped by spirituality before you can be liberated from it. Spirituality, self-discovery, is a tremendous trap. It’s one of the biggest traps there is. But you must be trapped by it because you are now trapped by the world and the world appearance. You need to get out of the trap of the world appearance and get stuck in the trap of spirituality. It’s a healthier trap, it doesn’t hurt as much. Then you need to move from that trap to the trap of tantra, and then from there back to the world because tantra means to come back to the world. It’s a circle.
Self-realization is a circle. We run away from the things of the world because they seem to harm us. We leave them, we progress spiritually, now we need to go back into the world again, into careers, into relationships, into all of those things and see God in all of them. That’s tantra—that in spite of your advanced spirituality and in spite of your high consciousness, when you think you should be up on top of the mountain just contemplating all day, you’ll find yourself in the middle of a traffic jam, you’ll find yourself talking to someone, you’ll find yourself working in an office. That’s advanced yoga.
Advanced yoga is not withdrawal from the world. That’s a preliminary state, which is important to go through, when you pull back. And still a person who practices tantra will pull back at times because God is in pulling back too. But the person who practices tantra embraces life in the world, in its formlessness and in its form. Tantra is the yoga of this age. Remember, all of the other paths exist in tantra. Tantra does not disagree with any of them. That is to say, one day you practice jnana yoga, the next day bhakti, karma, this or that because tantra yoga is not going to disagree. Tantra yoga is all yoga. It includes all yoga, but it does not exclude anything. The other yogas include but they also exclude. Tantra includes without excluding. One sees God in everything.
On the dark day in a dark time, when everything is frustrating and depressing, what you need to do is first to meditate, to just sit, even if it seems you’re not meditating well, and think of all the beautiful and wonderful experiences that you’ve ever had in your life. Just take five minutes and quickly review, holding each image just for a moment in your mind—the beautiful places, the power places you’ve been to, experiences in nature, people you love—bring it all together. Just take five minutes and scan very quickly through the good experiences in your life. By that I mean what you would consider to be the spiritually evolved experiences, the higher moments, when you’ve touched a deeper reality. And by doing that you’ll reawaken something in yourself. Then, once you’ve done that, even if you still feel terrible, do something. Break your patterns. Instead of going to work that day, roam a shopping mall—this is why I love shopping malls—and see that all the people in that shopping mall who could care less about self-discovery and spirituality are God.
Go to a movie. And see that God is the movie. Go to Disneyland. Go away for the weekend. Just buy a ticket someplace. Surprise yourself. Put it on your charge card and go with a friend or by yourself to the mountains someplace, to a ski resort even if you don’t ski. That’s true tantra! Be a little bit crazy. Break out. Remember the things that made you happy in those past years that gave you that high moment. Were they experiences with people? Were they experiences in nature? What worked? What brought you to the path of self-discovery? That was your tantra. Don’t go back to those same places. But grab onto that essential energy that you used and use it again, only in the next step, in the next phase.
If going into nature gave you wonderful experiences, roaming through the fields and hills, don’t go back to the same fields and hills. Go to some new ones. Whatever it was that brought the magic for you, bring it back again. Invoke it by remembering it but then doing something. Be radical! Because there is nothing radical. You only think so. And then you’ll catch fire again because you’ll see that what happened was—the reason you feel so miserable is because you put spirituality into a form. You boxed it. You franchised it. You sold it around the country. You decided that spirituality was a certain way, and then you programmed yourself to being on that way. And perhaps it was for a while. But then you got stuck in the way, and now you’re unhappy because you’re not doing what your soul wants.
Your soul wants experience. It wants the world. You’re a human. And you’re eternal and the two are the same. Don’t run away from your humanity. That’s what you’re trying to do. Don’t be afraid to go back in now that you’ve been out for a long time, and experience a little pain and a little suffering and a little transitory joy—because God exists in those things too. And your avoidance of them, of these experiences, is a fixation, and it binds you to this world, it binds you to the personal self.
It’s kind of crazy, this tantra stuff. In other words, after many years of meditation, self-discovery and devoting your life to God, studying with a teacher, different teachers, or just being by yourself but really working on it, and you finally give up everything. All the things that you’re supposed to avoid, then you find out that there’s nothing you’re supposed to avoid, yet there are things that are good to avoid. I mean, you shouldn’t run around killing people or eating meat 5 or doing things like that. That’s not what we mean by tantra. Again, there’s no need to break the rules. The rules have become your life. They’re your discipline. But we don’t have to think about it anymore. You’re a free perceiver. Go out into the world and have experiences. Have adventures. It’s the adventure that is tantra, that energy, that kundalini. Don’t be afraid to be with new people. Change it around. Because you’ve gotten stuck. That’s why you feel that you’re in a dark time on a dark day in a dark world. All the other forms work, all the other yogas work, but you’re stuck in them.
Tantra, then, is for the advanced spiritual practitioner who is ready to push aside spiritual practice in the name of spiritual practice. Good luck.
5. Editor’s note: Later in his teaching cycle, Dr. Lenz advocated a healthy, balanced diet that optionally included meat.