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| The body and the cosmos share one design — the same fire moving through different scales of creation. |
The Voice that Pretends to Be Fearless
There is a tone that appears again and again in the modern rhetoric of “tantric freedom.”
It mocks ascetics, laughs at vows, ridicules restraint. It claims to be fearless, but something about it feels brittle — a freedom that needs an audience.
Its sentences arrive like punches: half-jokes about celibates, sneers at piety, boasts of conquests. The speaker sounds liberated, yet you sense a wound underneath: the wound of someone still at war with the religion of his childhood.
It is a familiar pose — rebellion recast as enlightenment.
To break the rules becomes a sacrament; to scandalize is proof of depth.
The man who once trembled before commandments now measures his power by how easily he can offend them.
He believes he is burning hypocrisy, but the fire feeds on the same wood.
The energy of repression has simply flipped polarity: the same shame now speaking through laughter instead of guilt.
Such speech flatters both the speaker and the listener.
It promises absolution without insight — “You are free if you dare to mock.”
But the daring here is theatrical.
The laughter doesn’t open space; it tightens it.
Behind the laughter, you can feel the effort to maintain voltage, as if silence would expose the hollowness beneath the performance.
Real fearlessness does not need to humiliate anything.
It neither hides behind purity nor parades impurity.
It moves quietly, like an animal that no longer needs to announce its strength.
What pretends to be courage here is often just revenge — a last duel with the ghost of one’s own repression.
When rebellion becomes a performance, truth turns into exhibition.
Psychological Dissection
The vulgar “tantric” tone is not born from realization but from wounded pride.
Its mockery conceals a psyche still fighting for air inside the ruins of its own repression.
The sarcasm aimed at celibates, monks, and moralists is not insight; it is a displaced rage — the anger of a man who once bowed too long before a false god and now must kick every altar to prove he is free.
Such a voice does not integrate desire; it performs desire.
It needs to exhibit pleasure, to declare superiority through transgression.
That exhibition is itself a symptom — proof that the energy has not yet ripened into awareness.
The boast of erotic freedom becomes another chain, because it still depends on contrast: someone must be “repressed” for the rebel to exist.
Underneath the ridicule lies something tender and unacknowledged — shame.
Shame about hunger, shame about the need for validation, shame about loneliness.
Mockery becomes a way to project that shame onto others.
Hence the jokes about monks in toilets, about vows broken in secret: every punchline hides the whisper “I would rather laugh than feel how similar I am to them.”
The listener senses the misalignment immediately.
Instead of liberation, there is contamination — a sticky aftertaste of cruelty.
The words excite, but they do not cleanse; they make one complicit in someone else’s unresolved fight.
True eros expands the heart, but here the current runs through cynicism.
It cannot nourish, because it comes from resentment, not from intimacy.
The tragedy is simple: the man who could have used his pain as a doorway to compassion instead uses it as a weapon.
He fights the mirror that could have healed him.
And in that fight, his supposed “freedom” becomes only another mask of fear.
Kaula Ethics of Eros
The Kaula vision begins where mockery ends.
It does not ridicule repression or glorify indulgence; it simply looks directly at energy.
Desire is not condemned, but neither is it romanticized.
It is treated like fire: sacred when tended, destructive when thrown about.
The question is never “Should one be celibate or sensual?” but “Can one remain awake while energy moves?”
Eros, in this sense, is not an ideology but a medium of awareness.
When the body trembles with attraction or hunger, consciousness has a chance to know itself in motion.
To integrate that current means to stay transparent in the midst of intensity — to let pleasure arise and dissolve without turning it into identity.
The moment it becomes performance or proof, the ritual collapses into psychology again.
Real Kaula eros carries tenderness at its core.
It does not use bodies to feel powerful; it meets them as mirrors of the same Śakti.
It recognizes that every act of love is also an act of responsibility.
Because if everything is divine, then nothing can be treated casually — not a body, not a vow, not a moment of touch.
To hurt another while quoting non-duality is to blaspheme against the very truth one claims to serve.
In this light, integration differs radically from indulgence.
Indulgence feeds desire’s story; integration dissolves it.
Indulgence seeks repetition; integration leads to quiet.
After genuine union, the mind falls silent — no bragging, no laughter, no need to persuade.
The current completes its circle and returns to stillness.
The Kaula measure is simple: what remains when the pleasure passes?
If compassion widens, it was worship.
If vanity remains, it was theatre.
Compassion Toward Those Who Fail
Failure in spiritual eros is not shameful; it is almost inevitable.
Most seekers, in one life or another, vow too soon, abstain too harshly, or fall too far.
The force of desire is vast — older than religion, stronger than discipline.
When a young ascetic collapses under the weight of his own ideal, what he needs is not ridicule but understanding.
He did not sin; he tried to imitate a ripeness he had not yet grown into.
To mock such collapse is a failure of empathy disguised as wisdom.
A real teacher sees the broken vow as a mirror of human limitation, not as material for jokes.
He knows that premature celibacy without inner architecture leads to fragmentation — that repression without consciousness turns the mind into a pressure chamber.
So instead of laughing, he would teach the fallen one how to stand again, this time with humility and warmth.
In every tradition, the movement of awakening is the same: architecture before voltage.
First, the vessel must be built — the capacity to contain energy without denial or compulsion.
Only then can vows arise naturally, as fragrance, not as armor.
When restraint comes from ripeness, it is luminous; when it comes from fear, it becomes self-hatred in disguise.
Kaula clarity sees this without judgment.
It knows that both repression and indulgence are forms of the same immaturity — the refusal to stay present with energy as it is.
Thus, it bows to the struggling monk and to the overconfident libertine equally, for both are learning the same lesson:
that freedom cannot be borrowed from role or rebellion, and that desire, until sanctified by awareness, remains a teacher more than a sin.
The Vertical Shock (Abhinavagupta’s Clarification)
At the far end of this spectrum stands a different kind of shock — the shock of clarity without sarcasm.
Abhinavagupta, in the Tantrāloka, speaks words that, when first heard, can feel almost heretical; yet they carry no scent of rebellion.
They are not a challenge to morality but an unveiling of ontology.
oṣṭhyāntyatritayāsevī brahmacārī sa ucyate ॥ 29.98 ॥
“He who worships through the triad ending with the labial consonant — that one is called a brahmacārī.”
Commentary of Jayaratha:
oṣṭhyaḥ pavargaḥ tasya antyo makāraḥ, tad-tritayam — madya-māṃsa-maithuna-lakṣaṇam ॥
(The labial consonant is ma; the triad ending with it signifies madya [wine], māṃsa [meat], and maithuna [union].)
Abhinava does not mock restraint here; he dissolves its opposite.
He takes the three things that moralists condemn and declares them forms of Brahman when touched by awareness.
The reversal is absolute, but it comes without glee.
He is not saying, “Do what you wish”; he is saying, “See that even what you call forbidden is made of the same Consciousness.”
This is the real Kaula shock: not rebellion but transfiguration.
It does not desecrate holiness; it restores holiness to what was never outside it.
Where vulgar tantrism screams freedom, Abhinavagupta simply names reality.
The words do not inflame the senses — they silence them.
In his vision, brahmacarya no longer means abstaining from contact but moving in Brahman through every contact.
The ascetic and the lover meet here, both transparent, both innocent.
Nothing remains to boast about.
The fire has found its home in stillness.
The Quiet Truth
When speech descends from ego, even truth curdles into poison.
When it rises from realization, even shock becomes healing.
Between those two tones lies the entire difference between a performer of freedom and one who has dissolved in it.
The vulgar provocateur uses desire to wound; the Kaula adept uses it to reveal.
Both speak of sex, of vows, of breaking taboos — yet their vibration could not be more opposite.
One speaks to be seen; the other, because seeing has happened.
One leaves the listener feverish; the other leaves only stillness.
There is nothing glamorous in collapse, nothing heroic in rebellion for its own sake.
But when, through many collapses, one begins to see that even the fall belongs to Consciousness, then desire itself becomes transparent.
At that point, nothing is left to defend or ridicule.
Energy moves, awareness witnesses, compassion remains.
This is the quiet truth that mockery cannot touch:
that holiness does not begin where passion ends,
but where the war between them finally ceases.
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