In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores the traditional understanding of Tantra and its relationship with personality, reality, and spiritual development.
I am going to paraphrase a question that recently came my way: how is yoga different from Tantra? The questioner suggested that yoga is the gathering of personal power for the purpose of expressing one’s individuality on the path to the Divine. I would argue that this is not what Patanjali intended with Patanjali Yoga. The desire to reinforce or possess individuality was not the focus of his teaching.
Patanjali was speaking about Chitta Vritti Nirodha, the restraint of the movements of the mind. One of the greatest vrittis, or fluctuations, within chitta, the field of the mind, is the personality itself. According to my mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda, Tantra is the science of personality. It is the study of understanding who you are and who you are as a human being within the reality of embodied life.
Vimalananda often created a distinction between bhoga and yoga. Yoga refers to that which moves you away from manifestation and directly toward the Divine. Bhoga refers to experiencing and literally consuming something. Although bhoga is sometimes translated as enjoyment, it does not necessarily mean simply receiving pleasure. It can mean appreciating and fully experiencing the reality in which you actually exist.
Tantra strongly accepts reality as it is. The idea of Tantra is that, for spiritual development, you do not necessarily have to move away from the world or withdraw all your attention inward, at least not in the beginning. The Tantras do recognize antar yaga, internal worship, but fundamentally Tantra is the science of personality.
Vimalananda explained, as others have also explained, that the average human being does not have only one personality. We have many personalities, and this is one reason why it is so difficult for people to accomplish things. The different parts of themselves often move in different directions.
One of the challenges in understanding Tantra is that there is no single, universally accepted definition. Scholars who study Tantra have not reached agreement on one definition, and there is no single feature common to all Tantric traditions except that they involve specific techniques and the understanding that if those techniques are performed properly, results will follow.
Therefore, Tantra can be understood as a system focused on obtaining results. Those results may be sakama, results connected with specific desires or goals, or they may be nishkama, where the practice is performed for the benefit of all beings and for spiritual development.
Because Tantra involves techniques and results, it can be used in different ways. If someone is trying to use Tantra for spiritual development, the goal is to align the different aspects of personality, remove the things that possess and control us, and gather and concentrate energy for transformation.
These “possessions” may include actual spirits, ancestral influences, things we have absorbed from the world, strong emotions such as anger, fear, and desire, or even ideas and beliefs that control us. The purpose is to reduce these influences, bring the different parts of ourselves into alignment, and collect the energy necessary for transformation.
Depending on the Tantric path, this transformation may involve becoming more aligned with the Divine, becoming capable of hosting Divine energy, or generating energy for a particular purpose.
What is central to Tantra is that there is a technique and there should be a result. This is one reason why, in India, the word Tantra is sometimes associated with black magic. Since Tantra is concerned with results, those results can be uplifting and connected with the Divine, or they can become focused on limited personal goals and lead to actions that create difficult karmic consequences.
This is also why many modern people associate Tantra primarily with sexuality. Sexual practices do exist in certain Tantric traditions, but sexuality is not the central feature of all Tantra. It is simply one of many techniques that may be used for gathering, aligning, concentrating, and directing energy toward a transformative experience.