An Introduction to Tantra, Part 1 | Mark Whitwell

In these writings I am offering you the means to free yourselves and future generations from the pain we feel and cause in dualism’s grip — when we believe we can attain holiness by denying our natural state. If what I am about to tell you is “secret” knowledge, it is also incredibly simple, and instantly recognizable as true. We are guided to this knowledge by an ancient and nondenominational philosophy known as tantra.

Tantra goes back thousands of years to the Indus Valley and Egypt. Though the practice of tantric Buddhism was famously forced underground in the thirteenth century by a hostile political environment, adepts have kept it alive through the centuries, and tantric principles have informed Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish, and Christian mystical traditions.

According to this non-dual tantra, the Source of life cannot be separate from the ordinary seen conditions of life. Our Source is not far away but is in fact the first and deepest of all intimacies. If you have difficulty believing this, ask yourself these questions: Are you, this living organism, the extreme intelligence of Life? And, if there is such a thing as Source or God, can that Source be absent from its expression, the extreme intelligence that is you? If you answer yes to the first question and no to the second, you understand non-dualism.

Here’s another way of putting it. Though we imagine heaven and earth (or male and female, form and spirit) as separate, we have to admit that neither one can exist without its counterpart. If we think about it, we can clearly see that the universe is an impeccable intelligent union of opposites that imply each other — left and right, front and back, above and below, inner and outer, inhale and exhale. And, as there is no right without left, no front without a back, earthly life cannot exist separately from its heavenly Source. In all living things, the union of opposites, of Source and seen, is in place from the very beginning.

Look at a tree. The trunk is utterly strong and stable, the foliage utterly soft and receptive, making one perfect system. Without the trunk, there could be no leaves, no nurturing; yet without the nurturing leaves there could be no trunk. These soft and strong features are not simply the classifiable structural attributes of a physical object but the fundamental life forces of strength and receiving, male and female: the elements of life itself. In its very physicality, the tree is the intelligence of life.

We, too, in our flesh and blood, our heartbeat and breath and sex, are the perfect intelligence of life. We are already manifesting God; we can’t help it! The intelligent union of opposites exists in every cell of our bodies. There is nowhere else we need to go, nothing else we need to be, and no way to get “closer” to God. The very attempt to “realize” God or peace or love denies the divine perfection already appearing as you and me. The wholeness we seek under the name of God, Jehovah, Ishvara, Allah, Holy Father, Divine Mother, Shakti, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu, Durga, Kali, Saraswati, Lakshmi, and a thousand other names, is already present in us!

This means there is no “approach” to the divine and nothing to “attain.” God is there in our effortless participation in what is already given — that is, the natural flow of life and energy that is the breath of the body, the pulse of heart and the movement of sex.

Please understand that when I speak of sex, I am not speaking of mere stimulation, disassociated from mutual regard. Too often people impose their sex addictions on each other, chasing after images of sexiness that may be prevalent in their culture. This leads not to the experience of union but to the pain of separation from self, others, and the world.

I am also not speaking of an impersonal state that is often held up as a goal under the name of “universal love” or “tantric union.” When we reach for God or “the All-Pervading” through the vehicle of another, we disregard the value of the other person as the substance and miracle of life.

And finally, neither do I mean what is commonly taught under the banner of “neo-tantra” in which teachers sell sexual exaggeration without a basis in actual practice of intimacy with our own breath and experience. (And often without any relation to the actual Indian spiritual tradition of Tantra either.) These schools make money from people’s desperation around Sex, promoting an exaggerated, instrumentalized, depersonalized understanding of Sex which removes sincere personal love from the equation and encourages individuals to use each other to achieve fetishized energetic states.

As the movement of the whole body from the heart, sexual loving is the expression of an intimate, personal accord. In loving relationship with our partner, we understand the energy of life. We feel the connectedness of all things and relax into our natural state: not seeking or trying to become something else.

You are perfect, a breathing miracle, just as you are. The universe shows up perfectly as it is. Imagine trying to improve a galaxy, make waves break better, or teach dolphins how to swim. Nature is exquisite in its integration and awesome in its infinite expression. So are you. Yoga and tantra is simply about participation in our natural state of peace and power, that’s all.

Over the next few weeks, we will look more closely at the mutual, spiritual energies by which the union of male and female within and without awakens us to the perpetual union of Source and seen.

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Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.