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Tantric Antinomianism and
The Left Hand Path

By P.T. Mistlberger

The word "antinomian" originates from the Greek word for "lawlessness". When applied to spirituality, it refers to a particular teaching that is not concerned with conventional ethics and is largely amoral (as opposed to moral or immoral). The spiritual antinomian approach embraces a wilder kind of awakening that is not founded on traditional codes of behavior. As such, antinomianism is the opposite of legalism, which is the idea that awakening is impossible unless founded on a strict obedience to religious ethical codes. Tantric antinomianism in particular is at the other side of the spectrum from traditional Vedanta. In Vedantic philosophy the world is understood to be maya ("illusion" or "mere appearance"), but in Tantra the world is regarded as Shakti ("energy", or "power") to be awakened to, with the ultimate goal being the union within us of power/energy (Shakti) with vast spacious stillness (Shiva).

There has been a lot of mumbo-jumbo written about the so-called Left Hand Spiritual Path (LHP) in the past, much of it embellished and dramatized and much of it grossly misunderstood, but the essence of Left Handism as it's been explored over the centuries has been how to come to terms with the powerful, aggressive, passionate, emotional, wild and untamed "self-centered" side of human nature...once described (violently) by Aleister Crowley this way....

After five years of folly and weakness, miscalled politeness, tact, discretion, care for the feeling of others, I am weary of it. I say today: to hell with Christianity, Rationalism, Buddhism, all the lumber of the centuries. I bring you a positive and primeval fact, Magic by name; and with this I will build me a new Heaven and new Earth. I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise; I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong.

Crowley was always shooting himself in the foot via his compulsion to acquiring attention from others through notoreity, so one has to temper everything he says with that understanding, but nevertheless I think he gets his point across. You can feel the palpable sense of frustration in him as he tries to find an avenue for challenging his primal energies and be a so-called spiritual human living a spiritual life at the same time...

So, the attractive thing about LHP (for many people) is that it focusses on self. Not "Self" as in the Sanskrit term Atman (roughly "soul" in English), but simply the individual, personal self. "Good old me".

But this "good old me" is in many ways simply the "me" that is identified with the physical body. It's the "me" that feels emotions and experiences sensuality and sexuality. The problem noted by truth-seekers down through the centuries has always been this: how to deal with the so-called dark side of our nature, in a way that prevents it from sabotaging our efforts to develop as a human being?

Let's be honest. Most people live double lives -- it's almost a given of human nature. Deus est demon inversus. Espousing noble ideas, fucking the dog when off stage. The whole culture of deceit has been getting unmasked increasingly in modern times -- we hardly go a month without some scandal breaking about some religious clergy who molested their congregation. The President of the United States, the most powerful secular figure in the world, gets blow jobs from a young assistant. Even the esteemed Chogyam Trungpa, a great Tibetan spiritual master, succumbed to alcoholism in his late 40s. His successor got AIDS and after screwing several of his students, gave them AIDS as well.

Those are the high profile stories that are usually good snicker-material but the real point is to be able to witness these things and at the same time have just one moment of suspending judgment. Simply because if we can't respect the sheer power and omnipresence of the shadow-side of human nature, then we run a real risk of condemning ourselves (when we're done condemning everyone else), and simply splitting ourselves into partitions.

The essential idea of the LHP -- whether Tantric, or Western occult -- is to experience the energies of the physical body ("good old me") in such a fashion as to discover that the essence underlying them is ultimately nothing other than pure consciousness itself, the universal life-force or source-energy. This "discovery" is ultimately an alchemical process, a transmutation of "lead" (destructive primal energies) into "gold" (love-energy, finally).

Alas, this requires a deep degree of sincerity and commitment to undertake, however, because of St. Augustine's old lament, "I can resist anything but temptation!" I think the trap within most LHP paths is to see a legitimate spiritual science as simply a glorified licence to indulge, a kind of adolescent rebellion, a Luciferian attachment to wanting special recognition from others (and God while we're at it).

But, the truth is that many of the modern forms of psychotherapy and transpersonal ways of working -- everything from Primal Therapy to Reichian bodywork and Lowenesque bioenergetics to Red Tantra as it's been popularized by many modern Western seminar teachers who trained under Eastern masters -- are strongly LHP. Not in the sense of glorifying the identification with the body, but simply in the sense of bringing consciousness into the gritty corners of human existence, in -- as Jung put it -- "bringing light into the dark, not fleeing the dark".

My own experience within all of this has led me to believe that a paradigm shift is occuring in which LHP and RHP are beginning to overlap and share approaches. The traditional RHP or Gnostic approach shoots straight for Source and seeks to dissolve negativity at its very root (rather than endlessly pruning the branches). But the trap of this approach for many has been in coming to terms with the dragon of repression.

Repression is a potentially dangerous thing because it works in such an insidious and subtle fashion, truly serpentine (perhaps an ironic symbol for a psychological residue of the RHP). It is repression that lies at the heart of the culture of deceit and pretense, and repression that explodes inevitably in such a fashion so as to sabotage years of spiritual "work" (the standard "fall from grace").

The Lucifer archetype, perhaps to its credit, is not a repressed energy, however it got the other part wrong in that in Lucifer's very desire to legitimize his existence as separate from God he cut out a piece of his own heart. That's the shadow side of the LHP -- the intense longing to be acknowledged as special.

And so, the potential problem with the RHP is repression, and with the LHP is attachment to being special (that is, so unique as to be separate from the Whole).

But the intelligence of the LHP lies in its addressing the immediacy and power of the human condition in a physical body -- emotions, sensuality/sexuality in particular. In left-hand Tantra, the body is worked with as a temple of the divine, and one's partner is to be regarded as no less than a direct expression of the divine. Sexual intercourse is not just some act of frantic compulsion or desperate gymnastics, it is a sacred act of consecration in which the outer union is understood to mirror the inner union of polarized energies resulting in a heightening of awareness of the Present Moment.

The RHP also aims directly for the sacred Present Moment, giving it different names, but the essential point to bear in mind is that consciousness itself is the alchemical force that transforms all limiting tendencies of mind into the gold of love-energy. Both LHP and RHP seek this. The chief difference is that LHP works from the sensory universe (via the body) inward toward the numinous source. The RHP seeks direct access to source. Ultimately the RHP is simply the other side of the coin of the LHP. Once holding the coin, it doesn't matter which side you look at, as long as you have the coin.