Tantra and Sex

04 Feb 2008

It won’t have escaped my readers’ attention that sex is a major commodity in the West. We’re literally bombarded by it in all shapes and sizes and from all angles.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy we have this freedom. Sex is a basic human drive. I’m not going to start getting bitchy and elitist about it. Its ubiquity does mean our neuroses are on public display; but that’s a good place to start talking. People, relationships and family are not better where less open norms apply.

Sex sells, and it sells tantra too. But what does tantra really have to say about it, if we dare to saw off the marketing branch we are sitting on? (Believe me, I am more than indifferent to that prospect). More importantly, what is in fact the effect of practising tantra on someone’s sex life?

The great American psychoanalyst and writer Robert Stoller, who devoted his life to studying eroticism in all its forms, argued that erotic excitement was linked to scripted behavior which allowed the user to balance fear and mastery and act out resolutions of early trauma. He believed this was a pervasive characterization of sexual behavior, both “normal” and “abnormal”. And where there are scripts, there are roles to play, and people willing to play them.

The cultural scripting of sexuality generates the sexual identities, patterns and artefacts that we see around us. In other words, these are not “natural”, however primary may be the underlying drive. This should not surprise us; what is “natural” in human behavior at all?

Scripting sexual behavior, though, has a number of obvious inconveniences. Firstly, the scripts are unilateral. You may find someone willing to star in your production, for reasons of their own, but they will not rewrite the script. You will remain in a relationship, perhaps, because you play some complementary role in their script, quite possibly unconsciously; it’s a trade off, but it isn’t nirvana. As people become mere instruments in the realization of your scripts, they are objectivized. This is not exactly a recipe for a psychologically healthy society.

Secondly, these scripts, if they do not become obsessive in nature, lose their power over time. And insofar as they are about power and revenge, which they usually are, they need new objects. As scripting replaces the primitive psychobiological sexual reaction, however, the latter is muted. Sexuality becomes identified with the script and the sexual experience becomes less and less satisfactory.

We all know, of course, that there is another story here (or at least I hope that most of us know, though I realize I should be more circumspect in this assertion). We remember love, falling in love, abandonment, enrapture, passion, folly. We remember it and, if we are women, we have probably scripted it too (it is very easy to access those scripts to elicit sexual response from a woman, but it is a dark magic). This is very powerful and it can be so powerful that it is almost pure, at least for a while. In this sexual rapture, we are overwhelmed by the other. But after years together, we are not quite sure where it belongs; we seek refuge in technique, or in new scripts which aim to reproduce this passion but in fact have nothing in common with it.

A lot of people, and I am including popular writers on the subject, present tantra in such terms, especially tantra in relation to lovemaking; and even if it is not their intention, it is very easy for this to be the effect as the advice they dispense is received as prescriptive and technical – a mere user’s manual for human sexual response.

Tantra, however, is not another technique, it is not even compatible with technique and fantasy roleplay; it is about deprogramming these scripts so that real encounters can take place.
In this way, it undermines the ontological basis of sexuality as the vast majority of us have constructed it. And this demolition work is extremely frightening and dangerous. It is very unlikely it will make your sexual life any “better” unless it does so by reforging your psychic makeup from the bottom up, which might well not be what you intended. It may leave you disoriented, as old scripts have become inoperant but authenticity in relations remains elusive (for authenticity requires two). This is because it is a path to enlightenment, not another sedative, and the world is resistant to waking up from its sleep.

I want to warn you particularly about what tantra means if you are in a couple. When couples come to me, as they often do, believing that tantra might be a solution to their relationship problems (or just a nice add-on), they are wrong in almost every case, and even if it does work it will require perseverance, courage, understanding, and hard work over a long period. Tantra is a purely solitary path, from which richness in relationships is only a byproduct; it is not some kind of new age relationship therapy.

Tantra involves seeing and accepting what is there – what you feel, what the other feels. As you discover the self beneath the neuroses, it may lead you absolutely anywhere; in fact it would be statistically astonishing if it happened to lead you closer merely to your partner with all your wider relationship scripts intact. Jealousy, possessiveness, insecurity, fidelity, duty, image, all these scripts are logically slated for demolition too (in a humane, consensual, conscious and progressive manner of course – at least if you come to us; we know that these scripts hold important parts of your personality in place). If your current relationship, or indeed your very idea of relationship, is premised upon these scripts, it will not survive. So enter at your peril. If by writing this I have put you off, I will consider that I have done my duty.

Underneath, though, is, indeed, what (hopefully) was present at the outset: lust; love; transcendence. Awakened, descripted, it will not be mastered, channeled and controled; it will not fit any more into the boxes you made for it – if you try, you will cast it back into slumber. But awakened, it will at least be there. Getting there may be practically impossible, but if you feel the inescapable urge to seek this reality, an urge which dominates everything else, then you may just be better off when you arrive.