The last day of my recent trip to Tiruvannamalai, Jacqueline discussed tantra, sex and spirituality. I must mention before I begin that I’m mostly just quoting what I understood from the satsang that day, but I felt the need to share the information, so here it is.

Tantra is always thought of in relation with sex, and often looked down upon by most other ‘spiritual’ people. Ofcourse, anyone who knows anything about Tantra knows that sex is merely a small fraction of it, and it encompasses so much more. But looking at it from the aspect of physical desires, tantra isn’t about encouraging the ‘evils’ at all – far from it! The sanskrit word for desires based on greed or other vices would be ‘vasana’. Tantra isn’t about vasanas at all, it is about transcending them, so that the actions associated with those vasanas become meditation, not a fulfilment of the cravings of the mind. So in this regard, Tantra is really about taking the ‘sex’ out of sex!

When I first heard that Osho said there are hundreds of meditations, it confused me. As I know it, there is really only one meditation – witnessing. But I now realise how all these meditations – the dancing meditations, the walking meditations, make sense. Meditation isn’t a ‘doing’, its not something you sit down to do, and get done with, in 15-20 minutes to then get on with the rest of your day. Meditation is a state of being, remaining in awareness all the time, throughout all activities.

So if remaining in meditation is really your goal, you want to be doing it all the time. What better way than to practice it in small bits, like walking, or dancing, for example? You gently get used to it, and then go on to do it all the time in ‘real’ life.

While it is not too tough to remain in meditation in calm and serene moments, I’ve observed that my awareness goes straight out the window when I find myself in an intense situation, either a happy or a difficult one. So any extremely happy or sad situation is really just a test of your meditation – could you meditate through this event? For most people, sex is one of the most intense things they experience. Can you maintain your awareness throughout it, and not get carried away?

She read out a piece by Osho, in which he said that the temples of Khajuraho were not an education or encouragement for perverted activities, but a way of transcending them. Ofcourse there is no way I can verify this information, but it just feels right when I hear it. He talks of how a student wasn’t allowed to enter the temple initially. One had to meditate – yes, meditate – on the sculptures outside the temple, one sculpture at a time, until all they saw in the sculpture was art, and nothing else. There was no excitement, no sexuality left in that sculpture anymore, just art, just meditation. It took a student about 6 months to go around the temple and when he or she finished, he was finally allowed inside, into an empty space – because once you transcend the most intense excitements of life, nothing else is left, just bliss.

Now I can see why Osho’s teachings were taken out of context, because people could easily interpret this as oh well, then we just do what we want until it stops exciting us. That is not how it works, not in my understanding. This is the FINAL test! Tantra is no tantra without meditation and one has to be very proficient in meditation before one attempts a tantrik relationship. As I understand it, a tantrik relationship also involves deep commitment and plenty of meditations together, using the combined energies to heal and lift both people up together.