I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

human beings who actively seek to forget themselves as much as possible,
sex is just one of many tools available to distract the self from the self.
Watching television, reading books, imbibing sedating chemical substances
and any number of other trance-inducing techniques can be used to this end,
but sex certainly provides one of the most intense feelings of psychic relief
from the encumbrance of individual consciousness.
Thankfully, not all human beings reduce the keen pleasures of Eros
into the dreary numbing of consciousness we describe above. There are those
sensual connoisseurs who do approach sexuality in an alert and purposeful
manner, although they might never consider themselves to be sex magicians.
The magician of the sinister current, in opposition to this general human
drive to divert the attention from the psyche, strives not to forget. This is the
first essential characteristic of left-hand path sex magic, and it is so important
to the successful praxis of the art that we will be compelled to repeat it in
other contexts.
Going against the normative human urge to lose one's self in an
undifferentiated flow of sensation during the sex act, the left-hand path sex
magician consciously utilizes the powerful physiological and psychic
energies unleashed by eroticism to attain an even sharper perception of the
many selves for very specific magical and initiatory purposes. Even at the
moment of orgasm, which is often a time in which the psyche shuts down
altogether in the swoon of bliss, the sex magician of the sinister current
focuses sharply on sorcerous and/or self-transformative desires. To
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accomplish this singular state of mind while the body undergoes the ecstasy
of sexual climax is a skill that does not come naturally but must be
deliberately acquired through practice and discipline.
As we have already established, the left-hand path is consistently
fueled by the breaking of natural instincts, the yoking of instinctive
biological urges to the magician's will. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed
that sex magic consists of nothing more than the spiritualization of the
everyday sexual functions, and that the only skill required to perform this art
is the ability to experience normal sexuality. If that were so, almost every
human being would be a born sex magician, and no training or aptitude
would be required. The significant point here is that the sex magician must
develop a reliable ability to exercise mental control and concentration during
erotic activities that would usually distract the practitioner utterly from any
goal but the attainment of physical pleasure.
The reader who has never previously experimented with sexual
magic may assume then that such a practice would rob sexuality of all of its
pleasure. In fact, the opposite is the case; the retaining of self-awareness
during the sexual act greatly increases erotic pleasure, which in turn provides
the magician with more energy for magical use. As we shall see, the effective
practice of erotic magic requires the magician to build up a state of energized
lust far beyond what is normally required to stimulate a simple orgasm.
If sexual pleasure for the left-hand path sex magician is not a means
of momentarily losing one's psyche in sensation or of blending one's psyche
with one's lover, as it is can generally be described for most human beings,
what indeed is it? Fundamentally, sex is viewed by the initiate as one of the
most powerful and easily accessible altered states of consciousness available
to creatures of the flesh.
Indeed, the intense exultation of sexuality is very often the only
transcendent experience most human beings will ever know. Some moralists
will consider this observation to be a sad commentary on mankind's low level
of spiritual attainment, but for the sex magician it is simply a neutral fact of
some considerable relevance to understanding the erotic instinct and its
perennial fascination. During the four basic phases of human sexual response,
which can generally he broken down to (1.) excitement, (2.) intensification of