I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
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attempted to whitewash or otherwise downplay the genuinely subversive<br />
42<br />
aspect of left-hand path initiation, the aspirant who takes these contrarian<br />
teachings to heart has engaged on a course of deliberate, even methodical,<br />
iconoclasm from which there can be no turning back.<br />
This sacralized separation from established law and custom,<br />
particularly sexual convention, is not to be confused merely with the empty<br />
acts of the social rebel – it is instead a god-like disdain for the restrictions<br />
that bind the uninitiated, a taking of supreme responsibility for one's own<br />
actions.<br />
Because of the freedom from strictures afforded to the sinister<br />
current initiate, Tantric tradition is adamant that the left-hand path cannot be<br />
the way for the common person; it demands a heroic constitution. A feeble or<br />
unprepared mind that briefly tasted the terrifying sovereignty of a semidivine<br />
consciousness would not be transformed by the experience – at best,<br />
he or she might become nothing more than an everyday criminal, an<br />
43<br />
ultimately powerless identity bound to self-destruct. <strong>The</strong> aim of the left-hand<br />
path's contrary nature reaches to a more sublime level of being; the conscious<br />
separation from familiar boundaries is designed to awaken transhuman<br />
consciousness. To place this in a perhaps more familiar Western context, it<br />
might be recalled that Lucifer does not rebel from God's tyranny to simply<br />
become branded as an outlaw; he is determined to become God instead.<br />
If Vama is contrariness and the Vama Marg is the elevation of<br />
contrariness to a spiritual principle, it should be understood that the left-hand<br />
path can never be a way for those who seek enlightenment through<br />
tranquillity and serenity. <strong>The</strong> sinister current is conflict incarnated and its<br />
illumination is provided by friction – and not just of a sexual kind. Part of<br />
this spirit of conflict is the intrinsic connection of the left-hand path with the<br />
ethos of the warrior.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Indian left-hand path tradition exalts the black goddess Kali,<br />
both for her all-consuming erotic power, and her destructive capacity as<br />
warrior and destroyer of the universe. Outside of that tradition, it is no<br />
coincidence that many deities venerated by contemporary left-hand path<br />
magicians, among them the Egyptian Set, the Mesopotamian Ishtar/Babalon,<br />
the Aztec Tezcatlipoca and the Nordic Odin are principally divinities of war<br />
– the ultimate expression of contrariness. To go any further into the left-hand<br />
path's connection with the cultus of the warrior would take us outside the<br />
erotic parameters of this book. Still, one last point is worth making: there is a<br />
vast difference between the good soldier who follows orders as a servant of<br />
the state and the left-hand path Warrior, who fights for his or her own<br />
illumination.<br />
Another of the associations of the word Vama and leftwardness in<br />
India that is often daintily overlooked is its correlation with excrement. In<br />
India, the left hand is used to clean the anus and has traditionally been<br />
connected with all that is "unclean". This notion of uncleanliness is<br />
extremely important to the fastidious Brahmin caste in India and a deliberate<br />
incorporation of the taboo against shit would be a powerful provocation, a<br />
typically left-hand path exercise of contrariness in action. It also symbolizes<br />
that the left-hand path initiate includes – and even actively embraces –<br />
aspects of existence that orthodox spiritual teachings reject as worthless and<br />
harmful. <strong>The</strong> generally prohibited nature of human excrement in almost<br />
every society emphasizes that the left-hand path has often been regarded as<br />
something loathsome throughout its history. Along these lines, the radically<br />
left-hand path Aghora sect has long been notorious for ritual coprophagia –<br />
the consumption of shit as a sacrament. <strong>The</strong> left-hand path works within the<br />
realm of physical matter, seeing the transitory phenomena of "this world",<br />
including the human body and its pleasures, as fundamentally connected to