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

can enter the body through this orifice.
Many a non-magician has accidentally experienced the detachment
of the subtle body from the physical body as the result of a powerful orgasm,
or any shock to the system, an experience which can be profoundly unsettling
for a consciousness unprepared for such a violent breach of mind from body.
As the magician's dense body enters a state of post-coital death-like trance,
his or her subtle body – sometimes known as the astral body in Western lore
– is free to explore the realms beyond waking awareness. Perhaps the most
fantastic of the siddhis performed in this state is the reputed ability to project
the sorcerer's subtle body and consciousness into the physical body of
another human being.
Most frequently, this practice is attempted with the sleeping or the
magically unprotected. However, a necromantic form exists in which the
sorcerer strives to enter the bodies of the dead. During such operations, the
sexual partner of the magician is given the task of guarding the physical body
of the adept who has departed. One of the supposed dangers of this procedure
is a likelihood that unwelcome discarnate entities, – or the subtle bodies of
other magicians – may enter the "unoccupied" body left behind whilst the
magician's consciousness is wandering. The result of such a possession,
according to tradition, would be that the departed magician would be barred
from returning to his or her own physical body. The outward result of such an
obstruction can be madness or physical death.
Left-hand path practice in Tibet – at least before the Communist
Chinese invasion forcefully disrupted the lineage of teachers instructing
initiates in these arts – uses the altered states of consciousness accessed
through erotic junction with the shakti for the development of magical skills
condemned by conventional religionists and right-hand path Tantricists alike
as being of a "black magical" disposition. The power of dragpo, or "the
wrathful", is especially notorious, as adepts possessing this siddhi profess to
be able to cause unendurable pain or physical death in a chosen subject from
a great distance. Of the sexual sorcerer using dragpo is in an especially good
mood, he or she may only choose to remove the targeted individual's ability
to speak.) Bangwa allegedly permits the sorcerer to attract desired partners,
among other skills, by gaining control over hidden forces revealed to him or
her during ritually machinated ecstasy. Gyaispa is concerned with the
traditional Faustian goals of attaining riches, knowledge, and fame – material
gratifications of kama or desire scorned by traditional Buddhist teaching in
Tibet. There is no doubt that such sorcery is often performed by Tibetan
Tantrics for the sole purpose of simply fulfilling personal desires. But these
siddhis are also exhibited to students at certain stages in their initiation as a
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traumatic lesson in the flexibility of reality.
As Buddhists in particular seek to expunge their attachment to
worldly things, thus freeing himself forever from rebirth into this world, all
of these left-hand path siddhis are considered extremely harmful to the adept
practicing them by orthodox Buddhist monks from the Tibetan lamaist
tradition.
Although the attainment of magical powers through sexual
initiation in Buddhism is customarily associated with the rise of Tantra in
medieval Tibet, it is almost certain that such sex-magical operations were
already known to the indigenous and shamanistic Bön religion of pre-
Buddhist Tibet. As in India, many atavistic magical traditions of a
supposedly amoral or anti-social nature are rather arbitrarily assigned to the
left-hand path. Bön, shrouded in mystery and condemned by Tibetan
Buddhists as a "demonic" practice – much as the Catholic Church vilified
survivals of European paganism as the work of the Devil – actually seems to
be a survival of the Mithraic cult, which reached Tibet by way of Iran.
As we have seen, the majority of Eastern spiritual teachings insist