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…
