New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit Since 1901
For many people—especially in the Western world—Kamasutra is merely a collection of different love-making positions, a combination of acrobatics and pornography. But for the Eastern mind, the true meaning of Kamasutra reaches beyond this purely physical interpretation. For them, sex—in all of its forms—is sacred. It reproduces the ultimate creative act, the union of the masculine and the feminine cosmic principles. Sex is the cause of the creation and manifestation of the universe. According to Tantra, sexual intercourse, however trivial it may seem, is sacred and cosmic (even when the lovers do not acknowledge this fact, which is usually the case).When doing the ...
In 1976, Dr. Jonn Mumford (Swami Anandakapila Saraswati) delivered a series of very important and influential lectures at Gnosticon 5, an extended conference sponsored by Llewellyn Publications that brought together experts from a variety of occult backgrounds and disciplines. A taped set of these lectures was available from Llewellyn for a number of years. Today, copies are virtually impossible to find, and Dr. Mumford was content to let the information languish because he had doubts about whether some of the more explicit material should ever appear in print. In 2004, my wife and teaching partner Patricia Johnson (Devi Veenanand) suggested that we approach Dr. Mumford about the ...
Most classical Tantric texts seem to have been written primarily with men in mind. For example, the Gheranda Samhita, a 16th-century Tantric/Yogic text advises: "By virtue of this Yoga, the Bindu-Siddhi (retention of seed) is obtained, and when that Siddhi is obtained what else can he not attain in this world."1 Similarly much of the popular mythology about Tantric sex focuses on prolonged lovemaking and concomitant male staying-power (retention of seed), as if that were the defining feature of the Tantric experience. In Tantra: The Art of Conscious Loving, Charles and Caroline Muir contend that tantric practitioners believe that the age-related prolongation of the refractory period is a ...
Human sexuality cannot be understood outside the concept of Yin and Yang. In the tantric view, a human being and his or her relationships are a mirror of the universe—or even better, the whole universe in microcosm. The universe itself is seen as a union of the male and female principles, as represented by the divine couple Shiva and Shakti. In tantra, the male Shiva and the female Shakti are revered as both the divine couple and as the archetypes for consciousness (Shiva) and energy (Shakti). The ancient Vedic texts, which are sacred to yoga and tantra, describe through metaphor and myth a person’s relationship to his or her energy field and the energy field’s ...
