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

comfortable thing, as is sometimes imagined, as simple as walking from one
room into the other. Like a rocket jettisoning its burnt out fuel tanks as it
ascends, something must be left behind in the process of self-deification. The
operation of separating the unnecessary aspects of your socially
manufactured self from the enduring core Self is often a profoundly
disconcerting metamorphosis. The left-hand path, no matter what ultimate
goal is sought, calls for the death of some aspects of the self, as is made clear
by the wide-spread presence of death symbolism and imagery in its
traditional Tantric practice. Not the least of these is the "death" experienced
in the intensely felt orgasm of sinister sexual rites.
The ancient Tantras themselves, like so many magical texts, are
enigmatic enough to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Some seemingly
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suggest the course of continued self-deification that we have followed, others
appear to point the initiate towards the more conventional Eastern road to
selflessness. Of course, there are many left-hand path Tantrikas who have
cast aside the final goal recommended by most traditional instructors in favor
of the eternal continuance of the psyche. This is relatively rare, however, and
such Adepts are often condemned as having fallen from the path.
Indeed, one of the authors of this book was self-righteously scolded
by an otherwise liberated Vama Marga instructor from whom some of the
techniques spelled out in this book were learned. According to her, to use
the left-hand path for any purpose other than the final unraveling of the self
was akin to "black magic", and was a grave abuse of the teaching. However,
we take the more pragmatic view that any technique is merely a tool that be
can be used by the practitioner for the attainment of any objective. To those
of our readers who wish to follow the left-hand path to psychic oblivion, it is
only fair to point out that this will not be the course we will be taking in the
remainder of the book. In this regard, our understanding of the left-hand path
is without limits, following the heretical and dissident unorthodoxies of the
Vama Marga to their logical conclusions.
The Tantras, from which the majority of the Indian left-hand
teaching is derived, have frequently been rewritten and reshaped by later
interpreters, many of them Brahmins hostile to the radical methods of the
Vama Marga. There is no doubt that in the process of such editing and
revision, a great deal of deliberate distortion and watering-down of the true
aims of the sinister current was accomplished, in an attempt to make Tantra
more palatable to orthodox Hindus and Buddhists. However, he or she who
moves away from the accepted written theory and engages in the actual
body-to-body practice of the left-hand path will discover an esoteric
technology of the flesh that leads anywhere but the "blowing out of the
flame" of nirvana. One of the mouth-to-ear secrets of the whispered doctrine
is that the left-hand path can take the initiate to the very opposite of nirvana:
the willed recreation of your present self into a deified psyche – a
bodhisattva – whose vivid flame may burn even past the death of the
physical body, that alchemical laboratory of transmutation. In this sense, the
state of consciousness attained through left-hand path sexual congress can be
understood as a bodily trial run for creating your own godhood, as well as
the process through which that godhood is wrought.
To explore this possibility further, it will be necessary to trace the
sinister current as it has manifested outside of the Tantric tradition. From the
very cradle of civilization in the temples of Babylon, hidden beneath the
seemingly sex-negative creed of Christianity, and in the Western magical
revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the siren song of the lefthand
path calls.
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BOOK TWO: