The divine descent

We as people deny ourselves the feeling of godliness by choosing to see it as an authority figure.

When I was adopted, I later found out that my birth parents specifically requested the new family to be explicitly non-religious. From what I can gather from so little information — including the fact that my mother was half Irish — the experience of Catholicism was enough to state that they didn’t want me placed in that situation. Funnily enough that Catholicism is likely what allowed me to live, considering that the concept of abortion back in those days was not the topic it is now.

So it was only natural that I ended up with a Protestant family, but let’s be clear: religion for most of us in the UK is not generally something that is actively pursued, at least not that I saw. It’s merely a label or an identity and we live more secular lives with occasional spiritual interruptions in the form of superstition (avoiding meat on Good Friday), going to a C-of-E (Church of England) school, studying Religious Education, and of course baptism, marriage and death. From cradle to grave as they say. This doesn’t mean the UK (or should I say England) is devoid of spirituality, more that it does not seem to share the significance it has in other cultures. Individuality and consumerism has taken a much firmer grasp on our collective consciousness there.

Even so, the way we perceive religion in the West is that we are subservient to a higher power and that power basically has the final say on what lot you get in life. God, in that sense, is essentially an abusive parent creating insecure attachment in his followers. He delivers prosperity and randomly and inexplicably takes it away, leaving you to figure out what the fuck his plan is and go begging to him for mercy. He makes you dependent on him by being unpredictable. I’m not sure God is supposed to be a deadbeat dad but you’d be forgiven for thinking so when you hear the rationalisation.

That’s how it sounds to me when you prostrate yourself in front of the Lord and ask him to give you the power you’ve had in yourself the whole damn time, to constantly expect Him to make you whole, and to basically apologise for being alive because the system of belief says you’re here to suffer for Jesus’ death. Your life is precious but it is meant to be spent on repaying him. Such bullshit.

The concept of suffering is universal amongst religion and spirituality. In Buddhism it is through accepting your suffering that you eventually release yourself from it, gradually breaking away from the self-perpetuating cycle, and thus becoming enlightened. It is spoken of in terms of celebration and ascent, and you are lifting yourself up and up to become one with the fabric of the universe. In Christianity it is a tool of oppression and a way to avoid celebration and indulgence in worldly matters, because there lies sin, and if you are sinful then you don’t get to go to the world that is more beautiful than this one when you die. From one perspective, the world is to be integrated with, and from another, the world is temptation and must be resisted; it cannot be seen as equally beautiful, only less.

I’m not so interested in going further into detail there, but it does present the backdrop for how it feels to take the Tantrik perspective. Tantra, as many in the West will see it, is essentially a practice of intense sexual liberation. You have fantastic, transcendent sex, and can come to an orgasm in a way you have never felt before, but that’s it. It’s entirely false but it’s very easy to latch onto because Western (or Abrahamic) spirituality explicitly forbids sex for the purpose of pleasure, and so the energy is stuck at that base level (the purpose of tantra is to see that as a step along your path, not the purpose, because there is something much more). As a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew, sex is for the purpose of consummating a marriage and then reproducing, and the fact it is actually pleasurable is a temptation that must be avoided at all costs.

As a result, people don’t know how to enjoy sex because it is the self-fulfilling prophecy whereby Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit and are banished from Eden. They were never taught how to savour the apple and everything it possesses: the softness of its skin and its freckles and blushes, the juiciness of its flesh, the sweetness of its juice, and its overall deliciousness—all of the most beautiful qualities of femininity—only that it felt naughty and exciting to do so. And their curiosity and their enjoyment lead them to exile. These days the curiosity is unwanted pregnancy, unfulfilling connections and addiction, because parents refused to pass down the wisdom of what it means to nurture intimacy.

In fact, parents take the opposite extreme and strip their beautiful children of their sensuality, by cutting off their foreskin or their clitoris, or damaging their labia. This is the atrocity of hearing the word of God and absolving yourself of all responsibility for listening to that psychopathic bullshit as if it was the truth. This is not spirituality, it is a cult masquerading as a ritual, and it perpetuates the cycle of misery, rather than perpetuating a cycle of celebration. A whole separate topic for sure, but one where those talking about the saviour of the lord are those most in need of it.

Tantra is still far more than that, and you might notice that I referred to a descent in the title, rather than a lifting of energy. Our commonly held spirituality is so convinced that God is up there and we are down here, but the Tantrik teachings (which themselves influence much of Buddhism and Shaivism) reinforce the idea that God is within. You as a human being on this earth are the manifestation of a God or a Goddess, and when we are able to bring the idea of God down into ourselves, then we unlock a potential in ourselves that we may never have seen before. Beyond ego and beyond illusion, it’s more of who you really are.

In these terms, we are all some creation within one universe and, logically speaking, if we were to consider ourselves aware of God we would have to know what God feels like. If, as a man, I see a woman as a goddess, then it follows that I have to know the God in me to even know what that means beyond making a compliment.

If God has a grand plan for you, what is it that makes you so convinced of God unless you were also to possess his qualities. Were you made in his image or made from him? Because we don’t consider our children to be made in our image, we consider them to be something that came from us.

Here lies the descent, of bringing the divine out from space and into your daily life. Of not pushing the responsibility of all of that onto an uncontrollable power, but feeling that power in yourself, of seeing that capacity you have. This has nothing to do with religion any more, but becoming a more embodied consciousness who is not a guest to the world until they get into Heaven (or Hell),. Someone who is a very meaningful part of it and how it functions. This is ultimately what Tantra is about, being one with the universe but doing so in such a way that you are not denying yourself the existence you have and pushing it all onto an afterlife. Bringing the divine right down to earth; and how beautiful that is when it happens, how much you can love yourself and others through it.

When you consider it in those terms the idea of Heaven and Hell sounds utterly crazy. You were born here and your goal in life is to hide away from as much of it as possible so you can get to the life you’re really after. There is no happiness or joy in this, there is no growth.

I’m aware of how crazy that probably sounds; I’m just writing from experience and stripping out a lot of the other stuff. That said, a story by Guy Branum says it better than I could, so I’ll leave with a quote:

Then she remembered that she was a goddess.

It was the most beautiful, wonderful sentence I’d ever read: Then she remembered that she was a goddess.