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Tantra takes us from pleasure into bliss, but what does it mean?

Taking the example of lovemaking, because it is there that mostly pleasure and bliss play a great role for all of us. Pleasure is a momentary sensation in the body triggering happiness, relaxation, aliveness, a sense of togetherness with a partner.

Bliss is a state attained from being lovingly present without judgment, nore preference to whatever sensations occurring in the body. This state can last hours, days, months and hopefully eternity depending how much we surrender into it.

The deeper we surrender, the more bliss will refine into different layers of expansion starting from the body bliss, where we feel one with our partner. We lose a sense of personality. There is no more you and your partner, but a big space of bliss unifying both of you. But on some level there is still a separation. When bliss expands beyond the body bliss, it moves you into unity with the cosmos, universe, god, something much bigger than you and your partner. This cosmic bliss, if I can name it this way, has no point of return. It is an ever lasting journey.

This journey starts with simple pleasure, such as looking into the eyes of your partner or moving together into deep embrace and lovemaking, just to say it starts in your body! From pleasure into bliss, could be called from body to no-body or the great body of the universe, which I refer to as the Mother space where we all come from.

One of our precious Tantra masters, Arya, has developed his whole teaching around a method uplifting our pleasure into bliss: the Yoga of Creation. The method doesn’t deny desire, but uses it intensely for us to reach a high state of pleasure. When pleasure reaches a peak it is like water boiling, it changes its quality from water to evaporated air. In this way, water doesn’t have a downward movement; it shifts to an upward movement. It literally flights instead of flowing. So it goes for us, when we allow pleasure to reach a peak, we start flying (not literally). This flight is a state of bliss. The very interesting thing making the Yoga of Creation unique is that it views desire, attachment, duality as forces for expansion into bliss. We all have in the back of our so-called spiritual mind that attachment and desire are a source of duality and duality is the black duck of a spiritual seeker, but not in the Yoga of Creation where it is viewed as a phenomenon of creation.

What does lovemaking create in us? What does lovemaking awaken in us?… The Yoga of Creation offers the answers in a lovely, sensual disturbing approach where our believes, concept of what is love, what is divine, what is spiritual get shattered in order to open up a window into the reality of creation within us. From this window we have the choice to take a jump into the unknown, the unnamed. This jump is pure bliss!

Do you like to jump into it?

Arya Maithuná: 4-day retreat from 11 June to14 June at Venwoude Centrum, Netherlands.

The retreat is open as much for lovers as for singles. If you come as a single it is recommended that you bring a person with you, whom you feel like to be intimate with. That will make your process more sweet!

With love and gratitude…

Pema

Wake Up!!

“Wake Up!!” I remember these terrible words knocking on the door of my bedroom every morning to shake me out of bed to go to school. I hated it! It was really a nightmare. But I did get up, I did go to school to finally in the evening end up again in my bed. Lying down falling asleep, it always felt as if the real life was starting! Dreaming was better than real life!

Many years later, I heard again “Wake Up!” this time I was not sleeping, which was puzzling because I felt awake, so how to wake up?…

“Wake Up!” my Master said until I understood the meaning of it. Though I had my eyes open, going for my daily life activities which would show that I was definitely awake, I saw I did it all from a sleepy state, like a robot. This realization was extremely shocking and painful. It happened 20 years ago. Since then, it has been a constant journey to come out of sleep! The sleep of jealousy, of greed, of sex, of anger, of desire, of conditioning, of believes, of spiritual ideas, of tantric concepts, of identification, of whatever keeps me divided… There is a long list, but it can be simply resume to: “Wake Up out of Illusion!!”

The essence of every spiritual Path is about waking up and the Tantra Path is one of them, but it can be easily misused. Misused for ones own pleasure, desire and ego. You can use Tantra as a very powerful entertainment that keeps you in the illusion that you are awake while actually you are simply feeding your dream of awakening!

I hear many people say: “I long to be awakened.” It always makes me silently giggle, because I can see it is not true. At night, before going to sleep, you put an alarm clock in order to wake up the next morning! You do not trust your silly longing of waking up because you know yourself, once asleep you will indulge into some nice dreams in your cozy bed. Somewhere you can’t deceive yourself completely. You know your weakness! So you put an alarm clock to wake up!

In every Tantric method lies a hidden alarm clock, but you can avoid it by staying on the surface of your own little selfish pleasure. It gives you a momentary feeling of aliveness that you confuse with being awake. Alive and awake are not at all the same things! You do not end up with the same result at all. You can be very alive and yet totally sleepy. And you can be nearly dead and yet totally awake!

Tantra stimulates your life energy. It boosts it to its full capacity, potential. It makes you really alive, ecstatic like you have maybe never felt before, but did you ever ask for what? This whole energy is not just for the ecstasy of aliveness, but essentially for the bliss of awakening. It is not only for your physical orgasm, however amazing it is! It is for an all together different orgasm: awakening, enlightenment in other terms.

It is easier to present Tantra as a Path to super full-body-orgasms than towards  awakening, because it sells better! Sex sells good!! Awakening is too scary and it doesn’t feel very juicy! In putting out Tantra as a “super sex food” that is going to change your life totally, by solving all your problems just because you are going to have an amazing orgasm, it triggers the temptation to misuse it by staying on the juicy side of great sex. It keeps you indulging into dreams, into sleep.

Though it is very important to wake up the full orgasmic potential of the body, it is even more important to understand why and what for! The only purpose is awakening, the by-products of ecstasy, fantastic orgasm, and delightful sensations are gifts you can enjoy fully, but not indulge in or confuse with awakening.

To avoid going astray, there is a key: surrender. It is very important to understand its functions. Without this key, you do not open the door for the energy to rush higher than your body pleasure. You keep somewhere in control of your energy. You can guide it to amazing full body orgasms, or to a very ecstatic state, but you do not cross the other side where you are awake. You are in a state of letting go, but not of surrender. Like the confusion between being alive and being awake, there is also the confusion between letting go and surrender. To come to a state of Aliveness, you need the key of letting go. To come to a state of Awakening, you need the key of surrender.

Alive, in letting go, you still have a certain subtle control. Your body might be very ecstatic but you still hang onto your ego. You are still divided. Awaken, in surrender, you are out of control, the ego has dissolved and you are in bliss, in expansion, in unity.

Now, if you receive this newsletter it is because you are on the Path of Tantra. I would like you to take time to look a bit deeper where you are on the Path.  Are you in letting go or in surrender?

If you want out of Tantra only to be alive, I would like to tell you without offending you, that you are misusing the Path. Tantra can offer you much more then that! Are you ready for it?

With love and gratitude…

Pema Gitama