Superfluid Universe, strings, particles, wave functions and gravity - an inverted understanding

I promised this essay, this attempt at offering an explanation of some aspects of Physics, several years ago. Some of the time that has since passed was needed to really explore the current state of understanding … the background against which the serious ones in physics and related tech see things. As those serious ones could have told me (and some did), things are far messier, disconnected and infected by uncorrected notions than I had suspected.

I was also hoping to find some overlooked (by physics and physics commentators) insight to which I could just point to, like this (about population growth) and this (about climate and desertification). 

I found some tantalizingly close discoveries and insights which provide good hints  … but nothing to date in which the penny, so to speak, actually drops.

That accounts for some of the years since you last heard from me on this topic.

The remaining couple of years’ delay was due to my perverse aesthetic and my right-brain’s (not Dakini-Grade, but serviceable) overview. 

Many understandings of physics result (along with their benefits) in very nasty applications in technology. I wanted to give some time for someone else to say these things, or for some indication that sharing this might be a really bad idea.

So, enough of the why not’s and delays … but, why should I get into this messy stuff in the first place?

The main reason is the time I have spent helping many students to see beyond some seriously erroneous symbols of reality which they have been taught, often by well meaning teachers and commentators.

A common example: Thinking based on popular misunderstandings of the old double-slit wave/particle puzzle abound, particularly the nonsense about the observer determining the reality. This wrong idea caught on among physicists, leading to Einstein saying “I prefer to think that the moon is there, whether I am looking at it or not.” It also led to macabre thought experiments involving cats.

Reading just a little deeper into the exposition of the Uncertainty Principle by their Nobel Laureate (Saint) Heisenberg: “If it could, in principle, be observed”.  If anything (e.g. turning up the lights or magnetic field enough to see which slit an electron went through - whether you look or not) interacts with a thing, it alters/disturbs/perturbs that thing - and that disturbance (pretty damn obviously) changes the outcome of the experiment (messes up the delicate pattern and makes things go fuzzy).

The only sense in which "the observer determines the outcome of the experiment" is by messing with it, semi-messing, or not messing with it. Not very mysterious. Not exactly the scientific support for magical thinking which so many new age teachers think it is.

So .. error-correction. Similar errors, many caused by dogmas of science, pervade our culture and affect the minds I work with. That’s one reason.

The other is to do my bit to demonstrate that there is at least one description of the quantum and relativistic zones that can be consistent with the mathematics and does not require acceptance of things which would be way too fanciful for a children’ story. 

My motivation is to dispel, if I can, the fake/surface mysteries of current physics and reveal where the real, deep mysteries lie.

The troubles/gaps/mysteries within physics which I intend to address are:

- Why gravity is so very much weaker than the other known forces, and why it is proportionate to mass.

- Why mathematics describing particles and waves describe reality well - i.e. why things at small scales seem to have both a wave and a particle nature.

I am not laying out sixish years of my research, and I am not going to cite my sources.
In general, my study ranged from current academic papers to translations of the vedas, included actually reading Heisenberg, discovering Noether (mentor of Einstein), watching videos of underwater gunshots, extreme vaping, computer simulations of vortices in superfluids, dolphin play with vortex rings, my own experiences in meditation and some rough attempts at checking if my description conflicts with the mathematics.

All I have in the ‘willing to share’ category is a simple, rather basic idea which has only been missed on account of a few things about which I will now permit myself the indulgence of a little rant. A rantlet, not meant with any mocking or derogatory intent, just 6 paragraphs of toughish love.

Science separated from philosophy a while back. The study of Natural Philosophy ended. Philosophical basics like: “Existence is self-similar at many scales, “There is no such thing as “time”. “There is no past, no future. All that exists exists only in the eternal arising moment”,  “What is, is and what isn’t, isn’t.” have been long ignored.

According to one of my favorite physicists, Richard Feynman, the state of physics in his time, in its quest to explain the fundamental nature of stuff, was similar to that of the Mayan mathematician-priests in their quest to accurately predict lunar eclipses.

The Mayans had no knowledge or ideas about the actual motions of celestial objects, but they had calculations. Stories were formed to support the memory by providing ‘explanation’, such as “in 54 seasons, the influence of the sun weakens because of changes in friendliness between sun and moon in their God/Goddess roles. Add x to the last tables we had, and the discrepancy with the last eclipse goes away, and we can be more confident in our next prediction.”

He made the point that, when a focus on calculation is yielding results, do not bother about looking for underlying explanations. Rather “shut up and calculate”.

I like to give current science more credit than that. Just as before good theories of orbits and gravity emerged, it was known that planets moved in a timing which could be modeled as circular motion, the current notions of strings, particles, waves and forces are not just mathematical abstractions which happen to work. They hint strongly at a reality which has an actual nature which features existence as a wave, existence as particles and forces, and that ‘empty space’ is, in fact, far from empty. 

I have had years of finding it exceedingly strange that physicists have not caught on to the reality their calculations imply. I blame dogma: “There is no Luminiferous Ether - no medium through which light propagates as a wave/particle.” and I blame compartmentalisations sans overview. Male minds, each running on a one-pointed focus with no cognizance of their part in a bigger picture and no Feminine Overview available to guide them or unify their understandings.

So, with all the simplicity I can muster …

The truth of (the) Matter

Physics currently regards existence as composed of a large nothingness in which particle/wave-like things pop in and out of existence and interact with each other. Basically, lots of empty space in which real stuff bounces around.

Invert that. 

What is, is: One fluid arising. All that appears in it appears on account of resonance/vibration/pulsation/motion/energy. 

It arises, if we must tickle the edge of the mathematics, between 0 and 1, and not from 0 being split into (+1)+(-1). 
In other words it is a oneness which is arising, not a nothingness being divided.
Philosophically, it is the assertion that something exists, not nothing.
The mathematics of 0=(+1)+(-1) though, does apply, not to the arising itself, but … later.

The fluid in question is a superfluid. It has no friction with itself, also it has nothing that we could call mass, and yet it is awesomely stiff/solid … dare I say “Real”? 

When physicists calculate its stiffness - its Young’s Modulus – and check it against their gravitational wave detections, they find it to be huge. Around 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 times more solid/stiff than steel.

Here is a link exploring the mathematics of the stiffness of “empty space”, and another, relating string theory to fluid dynamics.

The fluid arises in the moment, a little more in every step of the moment. More of the fluid arising in the moment creates a motion/pulse in the fluid as well as increasing its volume. 

Taking the mathematics of the arising to a respectable level would probably yield formulas that looks more like fractals than anything else, because it is, to all intents and purposes, eternally arising, incrementally. 

Toroidal vortices in in the fluid are strongly hinted at in stringy maths if you substitute “mechanisms” for “dimensions”. They also arise in simulations of superfluid behavior.

Toroidal vortices (think smoke rings that don’t dissipate) are the particles. If this sounds unlikely, take a little time to enjoy this fellow showing off vortex rings and some of their astounding interactions.

Experiments with superfluids show that they readily produce quantised vortices. From wikipedia:

Some toroidal vortices spin with a lot of energy. Lots. Enough to rip open a thread/loop of true vacuum at their core. These are the neutrinos, electrons, quarks, and the high energy toroidal-threads of true vacuum are the strings of string theory.

Matter is energy expressed as bubbles/threads/loops of true nothingness appearing in the primal fluid.

Think (and maybe google) dolphin bubble rings.

In high energy experiments they are produced as matter-antimatter pairs – opposite-turning vortices like the whirlpools each side of an evenly stroked oar. This is where the mathematics of 0=(+1)+(-1) does apply, and another unnecessary/misleading mystery "Why is there more matter than antimatter".  That (local at least) fact indicates that the arising of the primal all-pervasive fluid came with a twist or a stir – and the cause/source of that is a deeper mystery.

The interlinking of three quark-vortices, two up and one down, gives us a proton. Stir the vortex/spinon of an electron into that and you get a neutron. 

Vortices have gyroscopic forces. In nucleons, three gyros (quarks) linked/knotted, resist changes in motion in all directions, giving them momentum, a core property of what we call Matter. 

Ancient diagrams of trefoil knots and interlinked triple-circles abound.

The property of matter which is called Mass is proportionate to the number and volumes of the true vaccum contained in its skinny thread/strings. The insane speed the vortices of emptiness spin at is hinted at in many equations  of physics using "c" and "c squared". The energy which creates (and is preserved in the momentums of) the thread of emptiness is huge – according to Einstein, as huge as the mass times the square of the speed of light. 

The weak and strong forces arise from the speeds at which these vortices and their composites (protons, neutrons) rotate. Surfaces speeding past each other in a fluid generate a low pressure between them, sticking them together firmly. The various ways a vortex can rotate and spin give us the "flavours" of the quarks. Nearby surfaces, if counter-rotating, can cause vortex-tubes of tension (gluons) to arise between them.

Electromagnetism emerges from gyroscopic imbalances resulting in twisty energies propagating through the fluid as (non vaccum-threaded, hence massless) open vortex tubes which push on same-direction-ended tubes, and pull at opposite-direction ones, giving us "static" electric charge. When the spinning forms close into vortex loops, we have magnetic field lines.

That touches on Matter, energy, forces, mass, momentum and electrics. Now for Gravity and the wave-particle duality.

They both arise from the same thing: The pressure wave of the continual arising of the primal fluid. A continual all-pervasive vibration/pulsation which the high-tech civilization before ours, which last rediscovered these things, called “OM”.

That which I have described thus far is what is happening in the off-beat (the low pressure moment) of the Om pulsation. Call it the Planck Time …

In the high pressure moment of Om, all (most likely, depending local conditions) vortex-loop-threads collapse. Their energies are preserved in the dynamics of the superfluid. They are describable by, and evolve according to Schroedinger’s wave equations. There are no massy particles, though the photons (real and virtual), which do not open thread/bubbles of vacuum (and therefore have momentum, but not mass) continue more or less unaffected - hence their mandatory speed.

Our world of massy particles vanishes entirely. Energies are preserved as motion in the stiff but slippery, frictionless fluid. 

At the next off-beat of Om (low pressure moment), all the matter pops back into existence just where it was before, like bubbles fizzing into existence when a carbonated beverage is depressurised.

Not exactly where it was before, but probabilistically speaking, usually pretty much where it was – but, in the extremes of possibility, it could effervesce back into existence pretty much anywhere … or could split into a few (non vacuum-threaded) photons and later recombine, or perhaps never re-manifest as a particle ever again. 

This indeterminacy as to a thing’s continuing re-manifestation makes it quite reasonable to speak, as some physicists now do, of the seething probabilistic “quark sea” that comprises a nucleon.

Conservation of energy turns out to be a more fundamental proposition than conservation of matter.

Matter particles or even fairly large chunks of matter behave in wavy ways when thrown at great speed because they are waves (fluid-in-motion) for much of the journey.

When thrown through double slits, their interference-pattern is delicate. It disappears if one disturbs them in their particle (off-beat of Om) moment, say by whacking them with enough photons to detect which slit they pass through.

All matter is, by turns, describable as the fluid probabilities of its wave-function in the high pressure on-beat, and as vaccum-threaded vortices in the lower pressure off-beat.

… which brings us to the easy bit: Gravity.

Every on-beat-compression of Om collapses the ever-so-tiny vortex bubble-threads. 

When this happens, the collapse of the combined true-vacuum vortex threads of very massy objects - asteroids, stars etc moves the stiff but slippery primal fluid (along with the motions of the energies it contains) towards where such objects were.

In the next off-beat/decompression of Om, everything reappears (mostly) accelerated towards the centre of that nearby big mass.

The volume of the vortex ring-threads of which matter is composed is very, very tiny. 

Only a really, really large number of them packed close together can be expected to have any effect on things in the surrounding fluid. It takes many to give a volume of the superfluid a tiny bit of sponginess to squeeze flat during the on-beat.

Gravity is proportionate to Mass because both Mass and gravity are proportionate to the tiny volume of true-vacuum which is alternately collapsed and reinflated in the on and off-beats of Om.

It seems that gravity has the effect of 'warping' space without requiring extra dimensions into which the warping could happen. It is perhaps reasonable to suggest that the quantum of gravity is the size of the collapse of the volume of a string forming, say, an electron. Even when large numbers of strings / particles / gravity quanta are present, their tininess and very slight effect on fluid motion when they collapse ensure that gravity is extremely weak when compared to the other forces.

I have enjoyed musing over the implications of this inversion of view for electromagnetism, the speed of light, the differences between fermions and bosuns, anomalous (but self-similar to bubbles in a fluid) galaxy structures, the phenomenon of entanglement and more … and so far, I have failed to rule my inverted idea out.

If my view is more or less correctish, there is much magic happening in the on-beat moment in which the particle-based world of phenomena disappears and everything becomes one fluid arising. Those motions of energy determine what is and what is not going to reappear in the off-beat. They are the mechanism by which best-path options are discoverable via quantum computing. The motions of the fluid are far more detailed, rich and complex than the little bits of really-nothing which we have been studying. Discerning what's going on in that fluid – especially in its on-beat matter-less moments – looks to be far, far more tricky.

Questions raised that I have enjoyed exploring: What electrons doing cooper pairing look like in a superconductor? Does a minuscule energy drop as photon-vortices travel through the fluid explains some of red-shift? Is the superfluid the same – same state, same phase – everywhere? Would distant differences be hidden because everything that reaches us has to manifest here, where we can detect it within the local conditions and can therefore only look like the things that can be manifested in local conditions? 

There are obvious, and I hope helpful, implications for dark matter, not so obvious ones for time dilation,  quantum entanglement and macro scale entanglement through which far apart galaxies seem mysteriously connected … 

This notion describes the evolution of the moment – and it has implications for time. Although I suggest that there is no actual past or future, just the current arising … the current arising expresses its whole history in the current moment and that which is happening now will continue eternally as motion in the primal superfluid. 

"The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on …"

Gnostics and others have long insisted that the divided world of many parts which we observe and take to be real is just a fleeting shadow/reflection/image/expression of a deeper, more fundamental and undivided reality.

I suggest that this is true. The world of matter seems emergent, secondary, dependent on the state of the primal superfluid in which it arises. The very substantial and stiff yet super-slippery all-pervading fluid in which matter appears seems to have more realishness and more causality.

For the more spiritually/mystically inclined, this idea can provide hints of the unity of consciousness. It explains some of the mechanisms by which an indivisible oneness appears as two, then as more, then as all the “ten thousand” things. It clarifies the idea that we can never step in the same river twice, and that there isn’t even a truly contiguous ‘us’ to do the stepping, and there is no “twice” either. We (in the physical, matter-based sense) truly are always freshly created, formed from the formless in this arising moment. 

As always, when I recommend unusual ideas, it it not because they may be "true", but because they can stretch your perceptions, test your assumptions and inspire your own exploration, if that's your thing. 

I hope I have at least managed to demonstrate that:

           Gravity is a myth. The truth is: matter sucks.

As always, with love, however it looks.

Rahasya

Mind, Maturation and Living in the Moment

Mind, Maturation and Living in the Moment

First, a disclaimer, and perhaps a warning:

This description of an aspect of the workings of the mind is intended for those who are being guided by a Dakini or other teacher/practitioner who has some relation or connection to my teaching.

Wider than that, it is perhaps useful to those who take their spiritual journey with a tantric, as opposed to a monastic, approach and understand that some ideas expressed here may be bad for those suited to a monastic pace and methods.

I do not recommend these ideas as having usefulness or merit for academics, social commentators, therapists or most good people. As to bad people … misuse of such ideas is self-punishing.

As with some videos I have been recording lately, this is “inner school” material, which means I am not open to public or casual debate about it. 

Even if you resonate closely with this idea, please appreciate that it is too raw, too close for those who still have to pass through some of the lessons of life that you have likely managed. Each step of your awareness has been followed by a different capacity for understanding, yet each step was, in its turn, necessary. Rather help people with the lessons you needed to learn when you faced what they face.

Enough disclaimer.

Welcome beloved students, friends, fellow teachers and tantrikas.

I feel to share this very stripped down model of mind with you because it is an understanding which has arisen in my work, not something I have heard or read that I can refer you to. Many of you will, of course, have heard it from me repeatedly, so here it is again, if you are needing another repetition ;)

The concise version:

The subconscious mind can do many awesome things for you, but, until it has completed its main work - that is what it will be concentrating on.

From puberty on, until maturation is complete, the subconscious has one job: To purge the massive backlog of incomplete feelings (aka psychological traumas) which have been accumulated.

To do this, the subconscious has to arrange events that resonate with the past traumas. It has to trigger them, moving them towards consciousness, where they can be felt and finished.

In this endeavor, it is in conflict with the conscious mind (you), which reflexively strives to protect itself (you) from the triggering of traumatic memories and feelings.

To get that pile of past trauma addressed, the subconscious has two superpowers:

It gets to generate your desires. 

It is cleverer than the conscious mind (therefore cleverer than you).

This is a natural mechanism of maturation. The subconscious is set up to win. 

If it wins, one becomes truly capable of “Living in the Moment” – responding and relating directly to life’s arising. 

Not “whole-elephant-enlightenment”, perhaps, but a very worthwhile attainment nonetheless.

That’s the concise version.

The verbose version follows …

TRAUMA

Through our childhood, many experiences are too scary, intense, powerful, delightful, painful or pleasurable to be felt in fullness at the time. Not that they are good or bad, just that it is beyond our capacity to feel them in fullness, to completion, at the time of their occurrence.

When feelings cannot be felt in fullness, they get put away for later. This happens continually throughout a typical childhood.

Apart from vanishingly rare extreme variations, such as childhoods featuring exceptionally horrific abuse, or insanely generous freedom (See Osho’s stories of his Golden Childhood), there is, from a therapeutic perspective, surprisingly little practical difference between the feelings which are put away, even though the stories, scenarios and apparent severity can vary hugely.  

There can be remarkably little difference, therapeutically speaking, between feelings  put away on account of being beaten harshly and those put away on account of detecting a parent’s disapproval from a raised eyebrow. 

I am not out to trivialize the differences between the relative suffering involved in, say, severe sexual abuse and self-generated nightmares and terrors on account of having glimpsed, just once, a semi-erect penis. 

They are indeed different. Nonetheless, when it comes to how they are stored, how they later express in life, how they are remembered and how they respond to various therapeutic approaches, they can be very similar indeed.

One’s childhood trauma is simply that which was beyond one’s capacity to feel at the time. It was put away throughout the childhood. There is not a lot of difference between differing degrees of how much beyond one’s capacity things were – overflow is overflow. 

Certainly, great differences exist in how we variously protect, avoid, oppose, confront, nurture, self-destruct over, define ourselves by, or heal our traumas – but these differences have far more to do with our individual capacities and attitudes than differences in the intensities, frequencies, areas or even the reality of the events associated with our traumas.

PUBERTY

Puberty is when hormones pump and a whole new level of desire is experienced.

Let’s take a young man for an example, and let’s call him, for no particular reason, Randy.

Randy, when his hormones hit him at 14, will run around, overwhelmed with desire for almost any level of touch and attention from anything. He will make many inappropriate and possibly offensive sexual advances at beings of perhaps several genders and species … and will suffer rejection after rejection. 

If his subconscious is diligent and clever in its generation of his desires, Randy will spend most of his nights alone, passing in agony through the layers of anger and pain which protect his trauma – and deeper: into the stored feelings that were once put away for later. Feelings about being put in his own room, not mother’s bed. Feelings about failing in trying to please mommy. Feelings about being excluded from her world …

When his conscious mind gets clever, and paralyses him with fears of rejection and terrorises him with whatever the current cultural STD horror is, his subconscious will get cleverer, perhaps not giving him a weird urge to grab boob at exactly the wrong moment, instead letting him get laid (of course just to make the morning-after rejection into a better, deeper-probing trigger). 

In this way, bit by bit, Randy’s subconscious will get Randy to feel what he needs to feel …

Then … one day, Randy will finally pass through and complete his feelings about the overwhelming horror he experienced when his mother first pulled her tit from his mouth.

When that happens, Randy will be relating to things quite differently. We could say that, as a person, Randy will then have matured somewhat.

MATURITY

This process of following desire and enduring (if not exactly willingly accepting) the triggering it brings … is harsh.

Owing to the current degree of domestication, and as predicted 2500ish years ago by The Buddha, the middle bulk of the bell curve do not, and, without unconscionable interventions, cannot mature.

If you doubt that, consider the fact that the most visible elected office on the planet’s current (2019) incumbent gets excited at the idea that his position of power enables him to  grab girls “by the pussy”. That’s … 9, or to give it every indulgence, maybe 12 years old?

Most people do not mature beyond a natural 10-year-old. Most get married with (and have relationship dramas typical of) the maturity of a 5-year-old.

Most people never even start to address the feelings put away through their childhood. The weakened hormones that accompany domestication enable them to ’successfully’  numb, censor, deny and, if needed, bully their subconscious and the desires it generates. They keep suppressing and putting away feelings throughout and to the very ends of their lives. 

They die while struggling to put their fear of death away for later. 

They cannot be fixed – and they do not need to be fixed. Strange, or even offensive though it may seem to you, there are perfectly good reasons, in terms of the development of humanity, for the current state of affairs … which may be a tale for another time.

They can be (and sometimes are) broken (and not in a good way). There is no surer way to break them than to trigger their deeper traumas. For them, Pandora’s box should and generally does remain tightly shut.

The point I am trying to make absolutely clear here is that the approach I recommend to tantrikas is not appropriate to most people, as per my disclaimer.

It was not always thus.

To rephrase the ancient stats from a few thousand years ago, back when humanity was a lot less domesticated:

The 98% (mid-bell-curve-bulk) of humanity used to complete the process of maturity in 50 years from puberty. By 65, pretty much anyone had the wisdom of years. They met you responsively, not reactively. They had a certain kind of wisdom. They were worth listening to. To achieve this, they had made no particular effort. they just lived as their desires, intelligence and capacity allowed.

The 2% (conscious seekers of truth/growth/maturity/progress) who are blessed/cursed with an arising of sufficient energy to make an effort to engage with the secrets and mysteries of life would manage the journey to Living in the Moment a lot quicker. Typically, those who got themselves into monasteries and religious communities reached this level of maturity by around 36. 22ish years from puberty.

Those I am privileged to teach (and those for whom my lessons are most useful) are perhaps a fifth of the conscious seekers – the terrible tantrikas. Those for whom even the best of gold-standard monastic methods can be a retardation. Those exceptional ones who immerse themselves in the lessons of both the spiritual and the worldly.

These extreme ones would manage this journey in just 7 years starting from puberty. Sometimes even from a premature puberty. By 21 or even younger, they could already be living in the freedom from the war of their conscious and subconscious minds.

Returning to modern times, the stats around my work are similar but different. Typically (if there can be said to be such a thing when it comes to people like you) it takes my students 4 to 7 years to catch up from the domesticated condition to their natural (physical-age-related) level of maturity.

METHOD

Appropriate method choice is important. Because many of you are teachers, I feel it is good to give you some meta~, some overview …

METHODS FOR REGULAR PEOPLE

For Pasha and Virya (the above mentioned 98%:

Compassion consists in supporting them at the level of maturity they have. Just as you should support a 10-yr-old. 

Support them to put things away for later, and help them protect themselves from the re-traumatisation of their heavier triggers.

Appropriate methods include affirmations (Louise Hay et al) and positive/affirming imaginal exercises (T Robbins etc) to override/dilute the desires of the subconscious with faked conscious desires.

Help them with avoidance of triggering situations and the triggering itself with NLPish stuff like consciously taking a posture of confidence, or inwardly ridiculing the person you fear by imagining them dressed as a clown, or pissing their pants.

That, and gentle techniques (Traegar and modern trauma release therapies) are useful.

METHODS FOR MONASTIC/COMMUNAL PEOPLE

For most Devya (the 2ish%), monastic/communal methods are best. They will mature somewhat, but progress is slow and uncertain. 

Look for improvement, not transcendence, and work within the context of a polarized understanding. Allow their rejection of the worldly, and their urge towards the spiritual. Indulge their gender-preference stuff, be it fixed or flip-flopping. 

Mostly, their direction of maturing will involve moving into tribal/communal contexts, not individuating from them. Things like Biodanza, Landmark, NLPish clubs and such are generally good for them. Even the dark side, as in a bit of Mr Hubbard, or the dumb side, as in the American Kentucky fried Tantra franchises are good for them, and are not terrible places to get stuck, if that’s what happens.

Those who’s chi suits a monastic approach can move much faster together in a group than they can individually. It is those who always need to jump ahead – those who don’t coordinate/play well with others who most need the methods appropriate to tanrikas.

METHODS FOR TANTRIKAS

Some of the lower-chi methods will occasionally be useful in particularly hard times, but some need caution.

Affirmations, NLPish stuff, zen ox-herding and in general, methods that involve an attitude of opposition/stalking/mastering your subconscious, and/or bombing it with affirmations and manufactured (consciously chosen) desires … all have their place and usefulness, but …

and let’s make that a BIG BUT …

Tantrikas have a lot more chi than monastic seekers, and can therefore bring a much higher than necessary intensity of energy to such practices. A lot more than is good and useful.

In general, the best approach for tantrikas is to find a state of truce, mutual accommodation, even one of cooperation and possibly friendly enmity with one’s beloved subconscious mind, rather than the standard monastic adversarial approach.

Looking the basic facts of what needs to happen: 

The childhood needs to get completed.

Following desire means exposure to triggering.

Being triggered can complete the feelings which went unfelt – if one breaks to it willingly and does not manage a hard defense.

Hence … it makes good strategic sense to give up and admit defeat in the war. It makes even better sense to align your Conscious mind with the Subconscious. In this way, one can get those pesky feelings-past all felt and finished in a hurry. At a speed worthy of an old-times, natural, pre-domestication tantrika.

When you listen to your desire, you already know that it means trouble. Accept that fact, and accept that you want, and that you do have the capacity for that trouble.

One trick: Work on your “This is NOTHING” list. This is the list of things you have already faced and survived. The way you use it is: when you face something daunting and you feel the fear getting to you, pick an item from the list. Hopefully you should have one that, at the time, looked far worse than your current predicament. Then you can quickly review that story, ending it with “I survived that. This … that which i face now, is NOTHING.

Another, not so much a trick as a helpful attitude, is developing what I call an “Addams Family Perversity” or a “Rocky Horror Attitude". When you feel your suffering, yield to it completely. When you feel a passion that you could kill for or die for, acknowledge that “Either way, what Bliss!” When your desire is clearly going to be taking you into a triggering of shame, guilt, helplessness and despair, ask yourself “Can I imagine a childhood in which those feelings have not been put away for later … in significant quantities?” If the answer is “No”, then dive in!

Enjoy the carrot while keeping ahead of the stick. It may be horrible and scary to follow your eros into, for example, a humiliation of some kind, but at least there is the heat and horniness of life in it. Enjoy that!

It is indeed hard to soar with the eagles if you are surrounded by a bunch of turkeys, so do hang out with your friendly neighborhood tantrikas, if you can find them. Tantrikas don’t generally make, or really commit happily to tribes (on account of another topic for another day, called “Individuation”), but they can be friendly with tribes and the individuated.

If you can get the overview and guidance of a Dakini to guid you, that is in itself probably the greatest accelerant of the path in general, and the area currently under discussion in particular.

Guidance is the resource I lacked the most on my own path, and that lack is my main excuse for my taking a monastic 22 years from the start of my sex life instead of something more respectable for a tantrika, like 7 or so.

As to following desires in the specifically sexual department, let your interest be much more in reaching insanely high levels of intensity, rather than in how often you can reach an intensity you can dissipate/expel in orgasm. It is in the indulgence/endurance of high intensities that the feelings from the past can purge the fastest. This is key to how we move at that frantic Tantric speed. 

I asked a student one day how her journey of eros was going. She glowed beautifully and quietly said “Oh, gorgeously, perfectly. It is all about pain, humiliation and tears right now. Delicious.”

I wish you strong desires, deep triggerings and much breaking-open to the most fulsome feelings.

May you soon truly know what it is to Live in the Moment.

Tantric Touch Work

Originally published in Mindchaotica.

Touch techniques in tantric work at two distinct levels, sometimes simultaneously. These techniques are simple and very powerful. There are a few techniques that I do not write about, reserving them for those who can benefit from them in the right timing, with the right support. There are whole categories that I have explored but never teach because they are ineffective, redundant, disproportionately addictive or outright dangerous.

They work at two distinct levels of capacity and awareness. Some techniques are identical in their “low” and “high” forms.

The low form is where everyone begins. Clearing the weeds to make way for the planting of a garden. Formatting the hard drive before installing a clean system.

Touch work at this level confronts your resistance to experience, to the energies of life itself that arise in you. It challenges you to open to what is happening in this moment, and all that this moment evokes for you.

Everything it evokes.

Feeling into sensation, and having that sensation get quite “loud” in order to help you to feel, is an experiential journey through the feelings associated with every judgement, every resistance, and every denial that you managed in your past – and every feeling that you have about having suppressed those feelings.

The T-shirt slogan is: You will feel every little thing.

Usually in my touch work sessions, I emphasize this from early on: You are here to feel and let go of whatever you found too much to handle at the time. You are here to clear the backlog of the past. You are not here to add to what you currently suppress, so I start with your feelings, whatever you would tend to repress, that is arising right now.

I ask you to stand up, close your eyes and feel your discomfort, nervousness, excitement, fear and whatever else there is to feel about attempting this journey.

I remind you of your normal behavior when in a situation in which you are naked – your usual tendency to suppress your discomfort. While you undress and lie down, naked, on my massage table, I encourage you to feel every little bit of that, including your feelings about whether I am watching you or not.

When you are lying down, I urge you to feel these things in fullness. I might bring your attention to the fact that we have not had candlelight dinners, that we have not complied with your usual conditions for intimate touch. I remind you to not avoid or suspend what feelings you have about that fact. I urge you to a deep, slow firm breath and encourage you to exhale through an open mouth, over open vocal chords. Any sound, tones, sighs, grunts, even words will do. One particularly poignant moment for me in a session was when the woman on my table was moaning the word “yuck” repeatedly for a while.

I too get noisy. I breathe with a tone, vocal chords open on the inhalation as well as the exhalation. Throughout the session, I use the sound I am making to draw energy from my body and to guide your body on subtle levels. Sometimes, my breath, or a rhythm in it matches your breath or your pulse. It may then lead that breath or pulse to a change of pace, or a deepening.

 At my first touch, open palms landing gently but firmly in the middle of your back, you might twitch into tension, relax deeply, escape into numbness … whatever feelings are evoked, I encourage them to be expressed through breath and sound. If I hear you choke up, go silent or gasp, I urge your attention to your exhalation – to making it as open and smooth as you can, letting the vocal chords carry your feelings.

I start at your feet, my touch varying from softly sensuous to deep-tissue-massage-firm. As strong feelings start arising in your body. I watch your breath and keep reminding you to feel and breathe.

Firmly massaging the calf muscles and thighs tend to release a lot of suppressed feelings from your past. Tears may flow, glimpses of childhood fears may occur. The buttocks in particular tend to hold memories and suppressed feelings from your childhood punishments, particularly if that involved spankings.

I help these feelings move up through your body. Using more or less conventional massage techniques, I seek and help the release of whatever tensions I find.

I massage your sacrum, spine and cranium firmly, alternating with a very sensuous touch that reaches from instep through back of knees, over thighs, reaching to your perineum.

My hands come to rest, one with its fingers together, pointing down between your legs, the thumb-side edge of the index finger pressing over anus, perineum and the lower opening of the yoni. My thumb is extended at 90% to the hand and touches the base of your spine. The other hand touches the center of the top of your head, fingers perhaps pulling gently at the hair.

I encourage you to feel your intrinsic vulnerability to life. I will likely point out to you that I am touching the physical centre of your vulnerability, and will encourage you to feel everything (every little or not so little thing) that is evoked by your vulnerability. I might remind you that we live always by the grace of existence, that we can die at any moment – that this is just a fact and that you have feelings about that fact. You might roar, you might sob, you might relax into the sensation of strong energy flowing through you. If you scream with tight vocal chords, I will encourage you to open your throat more, to let the energy through more totally, without the constriction and tension usual to a scream.

I may use patterns of rhythmic pressure over your anus and perineum. I might send the energy through your body gently and slowly, or I may send it through in powerful bursts. If your yoni opens and more or less grabs the tip of my index finger, I may slide it in along the lower wall, compressing the anus and giving it a gentle feeling similar to penetration – whatever it takes for your body feel its openness, its vulnerability, and for that to become allowed in you.

Before I ask you to turn over, I want to feel the energy between my hands flowing through you. I want to feel some of it getting through completely, even if it is not much – likely if this is your first touch-work session.

Now that you are open to feeling the sensations arising in your body, now that you can feel things more deeply, more acutely, the T-shirt slogan changes to: “How much Bliss can you stand?”

Starting again at your feet, I stroke a similar line from instep, through the back of the knees, lines meeting at the yoni. From there, the lines of touch divide again and continue up the body to the crown chakra (top of the head).

Most likely, I start by touching more or less straight from your feet, more or less straight over yoni, via nipples to your throat, ears and third-eye chakra to the crown. Sometimes I touch in a single movement, both hands in parallel. Sometimes, with both hands working together on on one side of your body and then the other. Sometimes one hand strokes from feet to yoni, the other from yoni to crown.

At some point, I am likely to gather energy and bump the heel of my hand gently into the second and solar plexus chakras. This shows me how severely these chakras are constricted. I might draw your attention to the kinds of restriction they each have, what will have to be allowed/released in your living for them to function as designed. I might use a fairly fancy technique which temporarily bypasses them and let you feel a taste of the sheer deliciousness that happens when strong energies reach to your higher chakras.

I may, if it is very open and well lubricated, enter your yoni with a finger, touching and pressuring gently in the ridged region over the sacred/G/female-prostate spot. I hold a constant and very measured gentle pressure for a while, left hand at the top of your head.

During your first few sessions, a large range of feelings may happen in you – anything from a burning or a stabbing pain to a smooth flowing of orgasmic intensity.

If you are feeling pain or discomfort, I will tell you that I am doing nothing that is intrinsically painful and nothing that is at all damaging. I will tell you that this spot is where your feelings about men – particularly their pestering, their suppressed or explosive urges to enter, to invade – are held. I will encourage you to be brave and allow these feelings, accumulated since you were perhaps 12, to now be experienced and resolved/completed.

That “very measured” pressure is very measured. There is a pulse at this spot in the yoni. I hold firmly enough to feel it, but not hard enough to feel it strongly or stop it. Very measured.

Over a few sessions, as your capacity for sensation increases (usually dramatically), I turn up the volume. This can involve deeper and more pulsating sensations, higher intensities of touch to clitoris, anus and the lines from groin to nipples and powerful bursts of energy sent through previously restricted chakras.

We may dance sometimes over the border between the low and high forms of touch work. Especially when I am touching yoni and third eye, access to things usually unseen may open up. Vivid encounters with the spiritual forms called angels, guides and higher consciousness may occur.

Typically, I end a touch session with an exercise called the “draw”. You breathe in and hold the breath, simultaneously tensioning your PC/pubococcygeus muscles. You hold the tension of breath and PC muscles until you feel a significant – not extreme, just clear – urge to breathe. At that point, you release the withheld breath and the PC muscles suddenly, even explosively. Three or so of these breaths clears any residual energies, allowing your nervous system to return to something closer to what you might call “normal” before you drive home.

If you have been living a sexually constipated life, the permission you have given your body will probably extend to your mind. You may become much more aware of your erotic urges and impulses. You may be less inclined to automatically suppress these urges.

Most of what occurs to you, in terms of things you want to experience sexually, is likely to be met in your life. Some things may not, or you may want to experience them in the relative containment of a sessions context before trying them out in your relationship(s).

If this turns out to be the case, we may be diving deeply into some areas of your eroticism in your next session – but that is a whole other blog post.

If you would like to read more about touch work, check out Chapter 1 of The Rocky Horror Tantra Book