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

such stimulating circumstances.
The final state of being – the rarest of all – is the divyabhava, or
divine disposition. The divya, or Divine, has transcended even the heroic
mode, and has become a self-deified spiritual intelligence, liberated while
still in the flesh, and free to operate as a god in human form. To come into
being and remanifest as an immortal, independent divya is the true aim of
the sinister current initiate. And yet, this divine being is not to be confused
with sainthood; the traditional image of the benevolent sage is not the way
of the left-hand path divya. Indeed, the most highly initiated left-hand path
adept would probably seem far from a saint or holy man by most
conventional standards. According to the Kaulavalinirnaya Tantra, the
liberated initiate of the left-hand path may sometimes appear to the
uninitiated as a "demon" or "madman". He or she may persist in playing in
divine lila with the world of maya but has transcended all of the external
forms of ritual. The quality of the divya is sattva, or purity.
The superior being forged through the alchemy of the Vama Marga
is not reduced to the bland and blissful "niceness" of the archetypal Buddha
or enlightened consciousness of other teachings. The divya's sovereign
freedom is just as likely to be expressed through a sometimes volatile,
unpredictable, and untamed mode of conduct that can only startle those still
enraptured
Supta, the great sleep. One of the greatest hazards on the left-hand path is
the tendency of its initiates to proclaim that they have reached this state far
too early in their development; a guarantee of disaster for them, and not
infrequently for those around them.
The triad of beast/hero/god recognized by the Indian left-hand path
is a common feature of Indo-European spirituality, namely the tripartite
121
model of separating phenomena into three distinct modes of being. Even
among these three grades there are further subtleties. The initiate of the lefthand
path, for instance, is also known in Tantricism as svechchhacaya,
alternately translated as "the one who walks his own way", or "the one who
can do all that he wants." Such an initiate is free to act according to will,
rather than as the subject of law. In the Tantric tradition, to do all that one
wants is decidedly not a liberty granted to every human being. The
svechchhacaya has progressed to a stage of development in which he acts
according to will without the guidance of the guru considered so crucial to
other initiates. Only certain candidates are considered to be of a strong
enough disposition to handle the absolute freedom that these highest levels
of sinister current initiation can allow.
One of the specific qualities thought to be befitting left-hand path
initiation is a philosophical outlook known as dvandvatita. This describes a
person who is free of all of the simple and confining diametrical black and
white opposites that rule ordinary human thought. He or she, who is
dvandvatita, in a Nietzschean sense, has gone beyond Good and Evil and
revaluated all values. Nietzsche's nineteenth century concept of the
Übermensch, or Overman, is not new; it can be traced to the idea of
dvandvatita, a forgotten key of the left-hand path.
This notion that some persons are more innately qualified than others
to exercise and enjoy total freedom and illumination instantly makes many
modern Westerners uneasy, accustomed as they are to democratic concepts of
egalitarianism. However, the traditional left-hand path understanding of
initiation takes a radically different view of humanity than that currently
promulgated. Tantric metaphysics considers that because men are clearly not
equal, it is only logical that the method of initiation that liberates one
individual cannot possibly be suited to another of an entirely different
constitution.
The Eastern left-hand path does not discriminate based on those