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

whose adherents positively exult in the play of maya, whether that play takes
the form of the intense delights of erotic initiation or the horrors of the
cremation ground. Rather than repudiating the world, the Tantric initiate of
the Kali Yuga makes active use of every aspect of its phenomena,
transforming all facets of existence into fuel for illumination. This joyous
acceptance of all spheres of reality – including those conventionally judged
to be harmful or delusive – as equally valid, is Kali Yuga's antidote to the
sickness of world-negation, an affirmation of maya that condones the
previously denounced cultivation of magical powers and sexual ecstasy.
What the uninitiated draw from in loathing or shame, the Vama
Marga adept regards as the fascinating dance carried out by Shiva and his
shakti Kali. It is often mistakenly presumed that to accept the reality of Kali
Yuga is to sink into the powerless pessimism of the doomsday fatalist. On
the contrary, the attitude of the walker of the left-hand path in the Kali Yuga
is one of sheer delight. Consider the image of Kali herself in this regard;
violent, chaotic, bejeweled with skulls and decapitated heads, her lolling
tongue promising both blood thirst and carnal abandon. And yet, the walker
of the Vama Marga loves this vision of incarnate chaos with the same
passion with which he or she embraces her age of terrors.
Even when confronted with the sometimes nightmarish nature of existence in
the Kali Yuga, the left-hand path adept never loses a deep sense of sacred
play, mirroring the play of the gods. The Sanskrit word lila (play) is often
used in Indian mythology to describe the spirit of divine play which informs
the erotic liaisons of the gods and goddesses, as well as the aloof but always
light touch they maintain when creating and destroying whole universes
through their deft toying with maya.
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The Western mind can grasp something of the affirmative attitude of
the Kali Yugic left-hand path to existence by comparing it to Friedrich
Nietzsche's declaration in The Gay Science, that he wants only to be a "Ja-
Sagender", a "Yes-sayer". Nietzsche's injunction in his The Twilight of the
Idols to "[stand] in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting
fatalism" accepting that "in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed
– he no longer denies." is a fundamentally Tantric philosophy. Nietzsche,
interestingly, anti-christened such an attitude "Dionysian", invoking that
androgynous god of ecstatic dance and divine intoxication whose striking
concurrence with left-hand path metaphysics we will explore later.
One of the open secrets of the Kali Yuga is that those initiated into its
inner mysteries welcome it as the true Golden Age, seeing beyond its
despised Iron veneer through an act of visionary alchemy. The lowest
conceals the all-highest.
To contrast the Kali Yugic approach to initiation with its antithesis,
the Tantric left-hand path specifically repudiates the Buddhist teaching that
Desire (kama) is the greatest obstacle to spiritual freedom. On the contrary,
deliberately awakening the full intensity of erotic desire and lust whilst in a
state of willed lucidity is perceived as a key to self-deification in the Kali
Yuga. It is important to understand that we are not speaking here of the
everyday, somnolent sexuality which fetters most human beings in its
compulsive grasp. The left-hand path adept seeks a transcendent Eros yoked
to the control of an awakened mind.
After all, millions of creatures in the Kali Yuga indulge in a thousand
forms of pleasuring themselves. And yet the common pleasures of the
uninitiated cannot be said to lead to liberation or self-deification – these acts,
no matter how ecstatic, merely provide a temporary release or distraction
from the human condition. As we shall see when we examine the traditional
qualifications required for induction into the Tantric left-hand path, the Vama
Marga is not suited for the merely bestial condition of most human beings,