The science of tantra is very ancient. It is not, and it has never been, confined to any one culture or period of history. Even when man lived in a primitive state, tantra was known from time to time in every society. Especially in the olden days, people living in communities or villages found someone having special abilities like healing, reading thoughts, controlling the weather or predicting coming events. Such people were found in every community, in every time and period in history. These people did not practise any yoga. They somehow jumped over the fence, or maybe the generative combination in them meant they were born with a particular ability unrelated to the logical combination of mind, object and senses.
Our experiences in day-to-day life depend upon coordination between the mind, the senses and the object. If this coordination is not there, then there is no experience, but in those cases which I am referring to, knowledge and experience did take place without any coordination between object, mind and senses.
In the communities of primitive ages, these people were known as psychics, witches, hermits or ascetics. They were given various names according to the quality of the culture, and at the same time their ability was attributed to different causes. Some people said a spirit had entered them and so the spirit was doing it. Others said that those abilities had developed due to drugs. Still others said that they had been blessed by God, some divinity, angel or deva and so he was doing this. Various explanations were given for these psychic abilities.
In India, they tried to find the exact source of man’s psychic abilities, whether it was due to an external spirit, devil or demon or if it was due to a spontaneous evolution in the system – maybe psychological, maybe genetic. In this research, this experimentation, this discovery, they came to realize that all that was happening in these people was on account of expansion of mind, expansion of consciousness, expansion of awareness.
This expansion of awareness, which took place in these people spontaneously, by an accidental genetic combination, created what we call a fresh release of energy. Here you come to the secret. When you are able to expand the mind, you release energy. Releasing energy means liberating energy, emancipating energy. What is this liberation, what is this emancipation and what is this word freedom?
Let me explain this in the tantric sense. When you churn milk, the butter is released; butter is freed or liberated. In the same way, when you separate the elements in matter, say uranium, then the energy is released – nuclear energy. In all matter there is a certain amount of energy. According to the tantric science, matter is a gross form of energy. The matter does not contain energy, matter is a gross form of energy and, therefore, matter is nothing but energy. As such, matter can be completely converted into energy and energy can be converted into matter totally.
Matter and energy are not two separate things. Matter in one state, when converted, equals energy. However, when we are talking about a process of conversion, then we come to the conclusion that the energy has to become free from matter and to release the energy, a certain process has to be initiated. In nuclear science there are two processes. One is called fission and the other is called fusion. These two processes are utilized in the nuclear release.
The same fission and fusion process is also used in releasing, in liberating one’s personal energy. When we say fission we mean that you will have to separate the idea and experience from the experiencer. He is called the seer, the one who sees, experiencer who experiences, witness who witnesses. What does he see? He sees an object. What does he think? He thinks a thought. What does he witness? He witnesses an event. There is an experiencer in us. And that experiencer is experiencing, is witnessing, is seeing each and every process, but these two things, the experiencer and the experience, are both so mixed with each other, like tea and sugar, so interspersed and entangled with each other, that we philosophers, logicians, intellectuals know them as two, but we can’t see them as two. We can’t separate the seer and the seen. This separation is called fission. You have to separate both seer and seen, and when you are separating the seer from the object, the witness from the event, at that time what happens is called yoga – separation.
Now, in the Samkhya system, which is the basic philosophy behind yoga and tantra, they don’t say seer and seen, witness and event. They use the terms purusha and prakriti. The consciousness is called purusha and the experiences or the events are called prakriti.
It is very difficult to translate these two terms exactly. Prakriti means nature, not just in the relative sense, but in the total sense. It refers to all creation, everything that is in existence. Purusha is the consciousness, the seer of time, the seer of space, the seer of all events, the seer of past, present and future, the seer of everything. You are that, but you cannot experience yourself in the pure purusha state because whenever you try to experience yourself, you are experiencing yourself in time and space. There is no pure awareness of the self, of the consciousness, and this has to be established, accomplished first. That is called fusion. What is fusion?
In fusion, when you are concentrating on a particular point, object, idea or substance, at that time the whole of your mental consciousness must fuse with that object, so that for the time being you lose self awareness – ‘I am that’. These two processes have to be established. In one you become aware of yourself and also of the experiences. That is called fission – separation. In the other, you lose self consciousness and merge with the experience. That process is called fusion. This is tantra.
In tantra they say very clearly that the mind is the tool of awareness and knowledge in every sphere. This mind can function without limitation, but in order to make it function beyond limitation you will have to train it. The mind is limited. If an object is here, you can see it; if an object is not here, you can’t see it. If music is played here, you can hear it; if music is not played here, you can’t hear it. That is the limited scope of the mind.
Now, what is expansion of mind? When the mind can experience something without the aid of an object, without the aid of the senses, then it is called expansion of mind. If you sit down quietly somewhere and spontaneously begin to listen within yourself to a theme of music or a song, or you begin to see within yourself something beautiful or horrible, something pleasant or unpleasant, that is called expansion of mind, because your mind is able to perceive without any external basis.
At this time a certain amount of energy is released and the release of this energy is called awakening. It is in this context that tantra has established the processes of yoga: hatha yoga, kriya yoga, mantra yoga. These are all branches of tantra; they are not different from tantra. Yoga is the practical side of tantra.
In this tantric system innumerable experiments have been conducted for thousands of years. Of course, many of these experiments are unsuitable today, although the scholars who write the books on tantra never fail to mention all those frightening practices and then the people try to utilize them. These practices are unsuitable, because in each and every age the techniques of yoga and tantra have to be adapted to the particular culture and taught in the framework of that culture. That is the way the practices have to be done.
In the olden days, sometimes people tried to awaken their consciousness through the drinking of soma, but later it was stopped because they found that it was not adequate for perennial spiritual experience. They also realized that after the drinking of soma, if the expansion of mind did take place and energy was released, they were not able to handle that experience. Later on, many other drugs were tried in the course of history. They tried cannabis indica and hashish, which the West is trying now, and finally they rejected it.
Early tribes used many things in their quest for consciousness expansion. Here in the museum you have ancient tribal symbols called tikis. Now the origin of these symbols has been forgotten, but they were once intended to influence the psychic framework, the psychic dimension of the mind. That is why they used to keep these things for ceremonials and dance around them and sing and sing. Thereby, the practice was obviously able to trigger off the higher consciousness.
Many ancient tribes all over the world in Africa, South America, India, Persia, the Middle East, Scandinavia, Slavic countries, Japan and China had symbols of psychic culture. These symbols were considered to be idols or to represent some form of divinity, and they were intended to stimulate, to blow, to detonate, to explode that energy within us. They also tried the method which releases energy through sexual interaction. In tantra, this is called the pancha makara, which involves the use of the five tattwas or elements: wine, woman, flesh, fish and grain. Throughout the world, even today, scholars who write about tantra never fail to mention this practice, not because it is relevant today, but in order to expose this aspect of tantra.
People did try that aspect of tantra as well, but they found that all these practices had their own limitations, either cultural, moral, religious or even spiritual. If you keep taking hashish or cannabis indica for many, many years, your memory will definitely be shattered along with your lungs. If you try to practise this pancha makara ceremony, you are going to create moral anarchy. There will be problems everywhere throughout the country.
In addition to these practices, Sage Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras gave five traditional ways of awakening. If you want to perfect your consciousness, to raise your energies and to improve the quality of your awareness, then these five ways are suggested:
1. birth, 2. mantra, 3. austerity, 4. herbs, and 5. concentration.
18 March 1984, Auckland Country Ashram, New Zealand, published in Teachings of Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Volume V