Tantra Rising

More and more Westerners are embracing Tantra as a means for transforming day-to-day experiences into a cause for blissful celebration. Can it change your life?

By Nora Isaacs

One night Vasugupta, a great sage believed to have lived during the latter half of the eighth century, had a dream in which Lord Shiva appeared. Shiva instructed the sage to visit a nearby mountain called Mahadevgiri, where he would find 77 sutras (verses) under a rock. When he awoke, Vasagupta did as he was told. He found the sutras—they revealed a path to samadhi (spiritual liberation) through a philosophy and a powerful practice of meditation that, together, were known as Tantra—and began to teach them to others.

According to a branch of Tantra called Kashmir Shaivism, that is how one of their central texts, the Shiva Sutras, came about. But great debate surrounds the origins, history, and practice of the complex and at times controversial body of knowledge known as Tantra. "There are widely different Tantric texts," says meditation teacher Sally Kempton, "and different philosophical positions taken by Tantrikas," or practitioners of Tantra. One core aspect of Tantric philosophy that's taught in the West, however, remains consistent: That aspect is nondualism, or the idea that one's true essence (alternatively known as the transcendental Self, pure awareness, or the Divine) exists in every particle of the universe.

In the nondualist belief system, there is no separation between the material world and the spiritual realm. Although as humans we perceive duality all around us—good and bad, male and female, hot and cold—these are illusions created by the ego when, in fact, all opposites are contained in the same universal consciousness. For Tantrikas, that means that everything you do and all that you sense, ranging from pain to pleasure and anything in between, is really a manifestation of the Divine and can be a means to bring you closer to your own divinity. "In Tantra, the world is not something to escape from or overcome, but rather, even the mundane or seemingly negative events in day-to-day life are actually beautiful and auspicious," says Pure Yoga founder Rod Stryker, a teacher in the Tantric tradition of Sri Vidya. "Rather than looking for samadhi, or liberation from the world, Tantra teaches that liberation is possible in the world."

Until as recently as a hundred years ago, Tantra was a practice that was shrouded in mystery because it was passed down orally from teacher to initiated student. Some of the streams are highly secretive, and many Hindu Tantric texts haven't even been translated into English. But the second half of the 20th century brought a group of dedicated teachers who started to make the teachings better known, such as Swami Lakshmanjoo, thought by some to be the reincarnation of the famous 10th-century Tantric master Abhinava Gupta. Meanwhile Swamis Muktananda and Chidvilasananda spread their approaches to Tantra through the Siddha Yoga tradition in the West. Today their students—like Stryker, Kempton, and John Friend (along with other popular Western teachers like Swami Chetananda and John Hughes)—are fervently leading a Tantric renaissance in the West, and translations of influential texts such as Spanda Karika, Vijnana Bhairava, and the Shiva Sutras have become widely available in English.

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