Daemonic laughter

"Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one might as well burst out laughing!"

"Tibetan Yoga. Principles and Practices" is a book by Ian A Baker published in 2019. The contents surprised me, and might shock the unwary. For a long time, Tibetan Buddhism has been depicted in the West as a highly spiritual, enlightened and pacifist creed associated with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. But as notorious book-worms like yours truly tried to tell you long ago, actual Vajrayana Buddhism also includes a secret "Tantric" tradition which is essentially the exact opposite of the public messaging of high-ranking lamas. 

Reading "Tibetan Yoga", I realized that I didn't know half of it! 

Ritual sex, ingestion of bodily fluids (no, I won't specify which ones), highly potent psychedelic drugs, awakening of the kundalini through weird "yogic drops", attempts to consciously control your dreams, and Tantric dance are all part of the picture. So are exercises in which the yogi identifies with a wrathful Tantric deity, daemonically laughing at samsara and nirvana. The author even describes a cannibalistic practice in which small quantities of flesh from the corpse of a Brahmin are eaten by the aspirant! There is also a ritual in which the yogi offers his body to flesh-eating spirits, although it seems said spirits have to wait until the naturally-occuring death of the practitioner before claiming the prize... 

And all this time, I assumed Dzogchen was pretty extreme! 

The paradoxical point of Tantric practice is to use the physical body and "embodied experience" as a tool for extra-cosmical transcendence. Thus, orgasm is a "skillful mean" to experience the unity of emptiness and bliss which is the foundation of the world. Dream Yoga teaches that not just dreams, but also the reality we experience when awake, are equally illusory - and equally possible to playfully control. Kundalini or the taking of drugs are other examples of "physical" practices which point to the spiritual inner essence of existence. 

Vajrayana's view of the Divine is - unsurprisingly - difficult to conceptualize, being entirely beyond concepts. Samsara and nirvana are said to be one. Existence is at all times both a divine luminosity beyond all phenomena *and* the constantly arising phenomena themselves. Reality is a grand illusion, but when approached with the right attitude, a blissful illusion. 

Despite this, I get the impression that some kind of "duality" has creeped in even in Tibetan yoga. The goal of some practices is to eject the consciousness at the time of death to a "pure land" of some buddha, really a phenomenal paradise of some sort. There is also the difficult to understand idea of the "rainbow body", when the physical body disappears into rainbow-colored light and presumably merges with the noumenal luminosity (and not with the illusory phenomena). 

The biggest surprise in the book was that Tibetan yogis use psychotropic drugs. I rather naively assumed that was considered incompatible with meditation practices. Datura, cannabis and other plants are freely used by the Tantrikas to induce altered states of consciousness. In passing, Baker reveals what he suspects is the real identity of Vedic soma. Yes, it's the mushroom Stropharia cubensis... 

While "Tibetan Yoga" is interesting and richly Illustrated, I'm not sure if a beginner will be any wiser after reading it. Baker has a strong "scientist" tendency, trying to interpret the yogic exercises and attendant phenomena as non-supernaturally as possible. He constantly claims that the Tantric practices will make the practitioner more compassionate, healthy and happy - which somehow seems to miss the point. Interestingly, the author fears that Vajrayana faces an uncertain future in the West, ironically because the Western world has become simultaneously more egalitarian and more restrictive. The former clashes with the traditionally hierarchic structure of Tibetan Buddhism, while "politically correct" puritanism makes the antinomian character of Tantrism (such as ritual sex between teacher and student) beyond the pale. 

But then, why should this really be a problem? After all, the Left Hand Path has always been a secret minority activity... 

Only a few are called to daemonically laugh at our predicament.