Tantra: Encounters Of The Colonial To The Inner Kind

Indic traditions and spirituality have largely been a mystery to Western scholarship. Western academia, from the colonial days to the Freudian, Marxist and post-modern decades, has approached other cultures with a certainty derived from the assumed superiority of Western tools and frameworks. When a system of the ‘other’ defies the ways of these tools and frameworks, it is condemned, deemed uncivilised and dangerous, and used to stereotype the culture that hosts it.

With a loving crescent adoring His head is He

With His consort the Daughter of the mountains

They adore Him with songs and bring water to bathe and worship Him

Leaving no footprints I reach the sacred town of Ayyar (Thiruvayyar)

I see the young elephant come with his loving female consort

I see His auspicious foot and I see the unseen and the unknowable

The tantric system was not only part of the mainstream spiritual culture but played a major role in imparting its knowledge to seekers. We find it working as a well-organised system with no apparent gender biases, remarkably so for the age. Thus, we see a Bhairavi Brahmani not only coming to Sri Ramakrishna and initiating the Master into tantric exercises, we also find her admitted as an important personality in the Dakshineshwar meet of scholars, where we find her speaking with authority on a very delicate topic of whether or not Ramakrishna could be considered as an avatar.

The Dakshineshwar meeting included the “who is who” of traditional scholarship – Vaishnavcharan, a great Vaishnavaite scholar of Kolkata, and Gauri Pandit, a master of tantra from Bankura, among others. Brahmani was the first to declare Ramakrishna as an avatar based on the authority of tantric texts, delineating the states of expansive consciousness that Ramakrishna was experiencing. All these show that even well into the colonial times, the Indian social psyche was mature enough to understand the place of tantra in the spiritual growth of the seeker and accord it a respectful place as a psychological and spiritual discipline without considering it as either esoteric or barbaric.

During the freedom struggle, an Anglo-Indian daily from Calcutta, on the authority of a British statesman with a “Christian outlook on politics”, pointed out to Indians demanding self-rule that “the Tantric view of life and its problems still insidiously survive”. One of the colonial arguments against Indian self-government was that it would “subject the Englishman to the control of the races who are not his peers in the sense of their having attained to the same plane of civilization and culture”. It asked rhetorically:

The thesis that alien encounters are actually intense psychological traumas happening in inner space and may point to some kind of spiritual crisis is in itself not new. Carl Jung had extensively written about it. Maverick technologist and UFO enthusiast Jacques Vallee had made comparisons between visitations in medieval European folk literature and the UFO phenomenon. While these conjectures oscillate in a twilight realm that is quasi-psychological and quasi-physical, astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who spearheaded a scientific search for extraterrestrial beings, hinted at a purely psychological or rather psychopathological explanation when he talked about the abduction phenomenon as “a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry”.

It is indeed interesting that Kripal chose Striber of all ‘abductee’ authors to collaborate with. Striber too was brought up as a Catholic like Kripal. And interestingly, both betray a clear awareness of the deficiency in Catholic Christian theology to accommodate a variety of experiences stemming from varied states of consciousness or psychological states.

That was Striber in his first book in 1987. However, by 2016, when he was co-authoring his book with Kripal, he had mapped this alien encounter into a “love affair with a Goddess” – “One way to put it would be to say that I had a love affair with a goddess. Another would be that it was an affair with an alien.”

One needs to go no further to show the completely distorted and flawed understanding of tantra and the wrong interpretation of an unrelated experience as an authentic tantric experience. Kripal misleads his readers, either intentionally or out of ignorance, and essentially does a suave Castaneda.

Kripal should have clearly recognised the “God of love within heterosexual intercourse” in Hindu tradition. But he does not want to. Rather, he wants to reduce Hindu spirituality – especially tantra – to an experience which is a sub-group in the esoteric new-age cults of the West. Is Kripal exhibiting a kind of theological envy at Hindu traditions? By reducing tantric experience as a parallel category with the UFO-abduction experience, he thinks that he brought tantra within the purview of Western psychology and maybe even ultimately available for comprehension by Christianity.

Tyagananda and Vrjaprana clear the confusion when they bring out the relation between sex, tantra and yoga.

In other words, the UFO phenomenon, the abductee experience, visitation by fairies or the non-physical phenomena of the inner realm or the encounters of the inner kind as either, or both the manifestations of social unrest (as seen in South America) and internal crisis of individuation can be addressed by a tantric or yogic psychology if they are developed.

(Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons)