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

initiate in this gruesome atmosphere is sometimes instructed to envision
himself and his perfumed and desirable sexual consort as foul, disintegrating
corpses, even in the midst of the most delirious physical pleasure. Another
meditation involves the visualization of one's ritual lover as the fierce Black
Kali of the graveyards, with her skirt of severed human hands, tearing the
adept apart during the "death" of orgasm. As Tantrics frequently say, "all
colors are absorbed into black just as all beings enter into Kali".
Any attempt to provide a strictly rational explanation for the lefthand
contemplation of death-within-sex must fall wide of the mark. To an
extent, these actions are intended to break through the mind's endlessly
rationalizing tendency to categorize opposing forces into tidy, discrete
departments, allowing an understanding that such contrasting phenomena as
sex/death and desire/disgust are actually not the opposites they normally
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appear to be. Beyond this, the sinister current's mingling of the morbid and
the erotic is designed to build up the adept's fearlessness in the face of all
sensory manifestations. Beauty and horror, pleasure and pain, joy and
sorrow are perceived as interwoven strands in the tapestry of maya.
Notably, Westerners who have been eager to adopt the pleasant
sexual aspect of left-hand path rites into their practice rarely incorporate the
equally important focus on death that characterizes the authentic left-hand
path. Initiation through physical joy and ecstasy is an important part of the
Vama Marga. Nevertheless, it is ever balanced with the initiatory ordeal of
terror through close confrontation with death. It is the radical expression of
dissent from normative, socially acceptable values that this Vama Marga
embrace of the rejected aspects of existence must entail that separates the
intellectual dilettante attracted to some of the left-hand path's more
fashionable outer features from the genuine initiate dedicated to radical
transformation.
The Kali Yuga
Tantra, and especially its left-hand path, are thought to mark such a radical
departure from previous initiatory teachings that it is said that the Vama
Marga is a form of illumination suitable only for the specific historic
conditions that prevail in this period of time.
Specifically, the left-hand path is geared to the unique demands of
this present age of darkness and dissolution – Kali Yuga, or the Aeon of
Kali. According to the Vishnu Puruna, the world will have fallen under Kali
Yuga's shadow "when society reaches a stage where property confers rank,
wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union
between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the
only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner
religion." From an exoteric perspective, taking things at face value, the
established goal of the Tantric sinister current is to provide a method of
illumination suitable for the era of chaos, violence, massive social
breakdown and spiritual ignorance in which we undisputedly find
ourselves.
Left-hand path metaphysical chronology would have it that
mankind has already been operating under such diminished spiritual
circumstances for many thousands of years, with no end in sight for at least
another 200,000 years. Only then will Kali's sinister era run its course to
ultimate destruction and unthinkable terminal horrors. Shiva's alldestroying
eye will then open, awakening from the absurd nightmare of
history. However, this doom is not to be understood in a linear manner;
from the ashes of the cremation grounds will come an eventual renewal;
and the whole cycle will begin yet again, as it has for eternity.
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These harsh observations of life in the Kali Yuga are not made by