Great-Bliss-Tantric-Sex-and-the-Path-to-Inner-Awakening

Equality
Equality establishes the necessary respect, cooperation, and responsiveness that leads to success
in the Tantric path. Equality begins with establishing a mind set of mutual sacredness. You must
avoid thinking of yourself or your lover as mere sex objects, always seeing each other as god and
goddess. The Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa Tantra praises the sacredness of men and women and equally,
sharing “Every man is Vajrayogi and every woman is Vajrayoginī.” Equality also encompasses a
spirit of cooperation and complementarity (pratyāsanna). Inequality of any kind is a false concept
that leads to dependency, resentment, and suffering. Responsiveness must also be cultivated - if
you aim either to please only yourself or your lover in your lovemaking, you will gain nothing.
Nonattachment
While building the depth and power of the connection between the two practitioners, you must
avoid dependency. You cannot use your lover to try to fill an emotional lack within you - they
can never fill the hole. Because Tantric practice is inherently healing, you become less dependent
upon each other and more personally empowered. Through sexual yoga, you expand beyond the
bliss of sex and attain the Great Bliss, in which you are eternally nourished and contented.
Practicing sexual yoga with attachment to your consort is not even sexual yoga - just defiled sex.
Nāropa warns, “The practitioner, without grasping at duality, should seek the consort in sexual
embrace. If the yogi is drunk with mindlessness and attachment, he misses the essence and falls
to the realms of misery.”
Devotion
Devotion draws you and your lover together and unites you in blissful meditative absorption.
The man should see his woman as the goddess, who is, as the Hevajra Tantra delightfully
describes, “the cause of the Innate Bliss. She is the great blissful one, the divine Yoginī. She is
the maṇḍala circle. She is the embodiment of the Five Wisdoms.” Similarly, the woman sees her
man as the god, “the Lord of the maṇḍala,” “the essence of the Innate.”
Erotic Desire
The two practitioners must have sexual desire for each other. Releasing yourself from the
obscuring emotions of lust for sex, you let your erotic passions run strongly, which fuels your
path with erotic power that transforms you into a perfected being.
Love
Love is the supreme expression of reality. To see reality clearly, as the awakened ones do, is to
be in a continuous state of love. In sexual yoga, it is essential to hold strong feelings of love for
each other. Love is the binding power between two people that does not lead to attachment but to
103