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

"the other world" of the eternal and divine. Related to the understanding of
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Vama as excrement is its commonly understood meaning of "ejecting". The
Sanskrit word Vamati = "he vomits" gives us our English word vomit, so
Vama is also the expulsion of waste products in general. The concepts of
following the path of leftwardness, the path of woman, the path of
contrariness all have their appeal – but who wants to follow the path of shit
and vomit? It has even been speculated that this deterrent quality may be the
point of this designation, a way of keeping the insincere away from the
teachings.
More importantly, although a god-like consciousness is sought on the
left-hand path, one method of attaining this is by embracing that which is
despised by conventional morality, deliberately crowning oneself with a
disgrace that makes it impossible to return to commonly approved standards.
As the Tantric historian Philip Rawson has commented, "a pride in social
identity and virtue is the most insidious and crippling of all the mental
blocks on the road to release. The Tantrika has to commit himself to acts
which destroy any vestiges of social status and self-esteem."
To Western psychology, with its simplistic cult of self-esteem, the
left-hand path adept's systematic eradication of these much cherished
hindrances must of course seem like madness. But these acts are the very
steps that lead to left-hand path sovereignty. A crucial phase in seeing
through the flimsy nature of maya that is the magician's working material is
experimentation with the arbitrary social roles and standards of status
through which human animals submissively learn their place in the pecking
order. The low man or woman on the totem pole must slavishly work to
impress his betters, struggling to prove what a good citizen and member of
the tribe he or she is, hoping for a crumb of praise from the master. But the
sovereign being, the master of his or her fate, can surmount the rules of good
behavior and respectability that regulate monkey psychology. To challenge
these social conventions can never be without risk; it is the unflinching
confrontation with these risks that partially determines the heroic vira
character of the advanced stage of left-hand path initiation.
A more recent European interpretation of this aspect of left-hand
path practice is presented by Peter Tracey Connor in his Georges Bataille
And The Mysticism Of Sin. Writing of the French mystical pornographer
Bataille's spiritual inspiration in those "unruly elements ... [that] society
rejects in order to constitute itself as an orderly and productive body,"
Connor notes that "Everything that is considered abject, from trash, vermin,
and excreta ... finds its way to the surface in [Batlille's] essays as in his
fictional works ... the objects he describes, precisely because they have been
sacrificed to social values, are touched by the 'sacred'." Connor's description
of Bataille's focus on that zone of being "where the rejected and the
undesirable dwell", ruled by a "force that disrupts the regular course of
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things" allows us to interpret Bataille as a contemporary Western visionary
of the left-hand path, to whom we shall return.
The lowest stage of Vama Marga transformation is the herd-animal
or pashu, who is as bound by the fetters of "proper conduct" as a beast of
burden is yoked to its forced labors. The pashu strives to please its owner.
The hero of the left-hand path has cut the fetters that bind absolutely.
One of the other enduring reasons for the relatively disreputable and
subversive position of the left-hand path in the spectrum of Indian spiritual
teachings is partially a social one, again related to caste. The Tantric Vama
Marga originated primarily in the ancient traditions of the indigenous
Dravidian population of the Indian sub-continent, with far less influence
deriving from the Vedic philosophy of the Brahmanic Indo-European
conquerors of India. Its apparent historical origins among the lower castes