Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire Read Free

oppresses or restricts our basic human nature is held not only by its critics but by many religious practitioners as well. There are a lot of people who feel that the proper way of following a spiritual discipline is by denying their simple humanity. They have become so suspicious of pleasure that they think there is actual value in being miserable: “I am a religious person so I shouldn’t enjoy myself.” Although their aim is to achieve some form of eternal peace and happiness they make a point of denying themselves the everyday pleasures of life. They view these pleasures as obstacles, hindrances to spiritual development, and if they happen to experience a small amount of pleasure, they feel uncomfortable. They cannot even eat a piece of chocolate without thinking they are sinful and greedy!
    Instead of accepting and enjoying such an experience for what it is, they tie themselves up in a knot of guilt and self-reproach: “While so many people in the world are starving and miserable, how dare I indulge myself in this way!”
     
    But all such attitudes are completely mistaken. There is no reason at all to feel guilty about pleasure; this is just as mistaken as grasping onto passing pleasures and expecting them to give us ultimate satisfaction. In fact, it is just another form of grasping, another way of locking ourselves into a limited view of who we are and what we can become. Such guilt is a perversion of spirituality, not a true spiritual attitude at all. If we were truly content with our situation—happy and peaceful when encountering good and bad conditions alike—there might be some real value in practicing self-denial. It could be used beneficially to strengthen our sense of detachment or to help us understand what is truly important in our life. But we rarely deprive ourselves of something for the right reasons. We squeeze ourselves into a state of misery because we think that being miserable is itself somehow worthwhile. But it is not worthwhile. If we wallow in misery the only result is that we experience even more misery. On the other hand, if we know how to experience happiness without the polluted attitudes of either grasping attachment or guilt, we can cultivate deeper and deeper levels of this experience and eventually attain the inconceivable happiness of our full human potential.
     
    If the fearful, self-restrictive approach that I have criticized is mistaken, then what is the skillful approach of someone seriously interested in realizing his or her highest potential? Stated simply, it is to keep the mind continuously in as happy and peaceful a condition as possible. Rather than letting ourselves follow habitual patterns of grasping, dissatisfaction, confusion, misery, and guilt, we should try to improve our mind by developing deeper and deeper levels of understanding, more skillful control of our mental and physical energies, ever higher forms of happiness and bliss, and a better life. Such an approach makes much more sense than trying to reject our everyday experiences. This is the logic of tantra.
     
    BUDDH A AND TH E P ATH OF ENJOYMENT
     
    Certain episodes in the life of Shakyamuni Buddha himself clearly demonstrate the superiority of an approach that uses desire-producing objects over a self-denying approach that forbids them. When he left the isolated and indulgent life of a prince at the age of twenty-nine and was just beginning his quest for the cessation of suffering, Buddha—then simply the bodhisattva Siddhartha—took up the discipline of extreme self-mortification. As some people still do in India today, he sought to uproot the causes of misery and dissatisfaction by beating his bodily senses into submission. He denied himself food and other comforts to such an extent that eventually he was little more than a skeleton. After six years of such self-deprivation he realized that this approach was fruitless. Instead of bringing him closer to his goal of transcendence, it was only making