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

The main techniques of deity yoga are visualization and mantra recitation. Meditative
concentration, devotion, and continuous practice insure your success in practive. As you discover
the deity’s own devotion to you, you develop in your devotion to the deity. However, the
relationship is much more than devotional. While in other spiritual traditions you are taught to
worship a deity, in Tantric Buddhism you actually become the deity. As you do so, great power
is bestowed upon you. You invite the consciousness of an enlightened being directly into your
mind and body, becoming one with it, allowing it to transform you, and maintaining a blissful
union through day and night.
Through deity yoga, you recognize that the visualizations of the deity that you create have no
more or less reality than any other appearances. This discovery breaks down your attachment to
the substantiality of appearances and allows you to see them as empty of an independent nature.
You release your attachments to your personality as having any substantive or permanent nature.
Released from concepts of self and other, you dance in the empty display of appearances. While
from the philosophy of the Innate the deity is regarded as real, as a beginning practice deity yoga
is often tied to the philosophy of Emptiness as a tool for releasing attachment. Seeing the deity
repeatedly arise and dissolve as a display of emptiness, you are liberated from suffering.
The Hevajra Tantra delightfully shares, “Bliss arises from sexual union with the deity.” Deity
yoga is also called Jñānamudrā, the practice of the wisdom consort, because you visualize
yourself as the deity making love to the deity’s consort. In this way, you discover the blissful,
erotic nature of reality. Deity yoga is classed as a Creation Stage rather than a Completion Stage
practice because you are not yet performing sexual yoga with a physical consort – and sex with a
visualized consort does not hold the power to attain enlightenment. Deity yoga is not an abstract
mental exercise, but an intensely intimate practice. Tantric deities are beings of great light,
wisdom, joy, and erotic power, and uniting with them can bring unexpected and deeply treasured
moments of ecstasy and bliss.
Deity Yoga and the Innate
The four characteristics of the Innate are present in deity yoga:
1. Pure Appearance (Evaṃ) - The deity is a Pure Appearance of ultimate reality into the world,
and by meditating on the deity’s form as pure and the world as the maṇḍala of the deity, you are
transformed. Pure Appearance is the most prominent characteristic of the Innate cultivated your
awareness in deity yoga.
2. Great Passion (Mahārāga) – The deity feels Great Passion for its consort and for you to attain
liberation. As you experience the Great Passion the deity and its consort have for each other as
well as for you, your own Great Passion for enlightenment intensifies.
3. Essence (Tattva) - The true nature of the deity is unchanging Essence. As you meditate on the
deity, you develop your potential to perceive ultimate reality directly.
4. Great Bliss (Mahāsukha) - The deity in sexual union with its consort is an emanation of the
Great Bliss, and guides you in attaining the Great Bliss also.
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