The Third Eye: An Opening Through Tantric Sexuality

When I first started being interested in Tantric sexuality, it was mainly because of its promise to bring a freshness and health to my sexual life. The concept of using sexual energy in order to attain higher states of consciousness stayed in the back of my head for a few years while I  struggled with the “engineering” problems of Tantric sexuality: control of the ejaculation, movement of the sexual energy to the upper chakras, and so on. I was thus the first to be surprised when, during lovemaking, I began entering into altered states of consciousness that went way beyond the intense and pleasurable feelings I had been accustomed to.

My first altered states of consciousness during lovemaking were quite sporadic and short. I was still too focused on the effort of holding my energy and I was unable to relax into the fullness of the present moment. The risk of losing all my sexual energy through ejaculation and spoiling the whole experience was too high – if the price to pay, momentarily at least, was to stay  focused on “not making mistakes” rather than enjoying, then so be it. Even so, every now and then, I would suddenly find myself in a slightly altered and superior state of mind – but for a very short time. After a few minutes my rational mind would kick in, and I would find myself immersed, once again, in a very pleasurable but also quite controlled sexual encounter.

As it turns out, evolution in this particular area was not going to happen gradually for me. After having noticed very little changes for a couple of years, something suddenly clicked and I had a few groundbreaking experiences, in which those states of consciousness not only got higher, but also lasted much more. This is the account of one of the deepest and longest among those experiences, and of the experiments I did while dwelling in it.

Opening the Third Eye.

On a hot tropical evening of March, in the island of Kho Pha Ngan, Thailand, I had been making love for a bit more than an hour with a dear lover, both an amazing woman and an advanced Tantra Yoga practitioner. We were at her place, and the night was dark outside the glass door. We had just decided to make a pause; while she went to the kitchen to fetch some water, I sat on the bed and prepared myself for meditation. I was buzzing with energy which had raised from my genital area to the head, and I decided to try and use this energy to deepen my meditation by focusing it on Ajña Chakra, the chakra located in the middle of the forehead and commonly known as the Third Eye.

In the previous weeks, I had used some simple techniques to help the energy flow to the Third Eye (a strong emission of willpower as if trying to wake up from a paralysing nightmare, some movements of the head and some other auxiliary details), so I repeated those steps, which took less than a minute, and sat waiting for my lover to come back. By the time she was back from the kitchen, I was completely immersed in a different state of consciousness.

For a few seconds, just before my friend came back, I had the time to experience an enormous joy and amazement. I felt like a child which had been instantly transported to a dreamlike land in which every object is magical, full of mystery, and glowing with invitation. As soon as she appeared in the room, however, she noticed that something had changed. She looked at me and asked – “Are you okay”? I found myself in the interesting situation of feeling perfectly okay, but being quite unable to put that into words. I had not lost the ability to speak; I was simply incapable of any automatism. Articulating a simple phrase like “Yes, I’m okay! But I think I cannot really speak right now” was an entertaining task that had to be planned, so to speak, from the bottom up.

First Experiments.

How complex and beautiful, all of a sudden, was everything! Everywhere I turned my eyes on, astonishing things were to be seen. Transparent and opaque materials were there, dense and subtle objects, rays and waves of energy, all of these things subject to visible and invisible forces; and all the manifested reality seemed  to be almost screaming in an invitation for me to experiment with it and understand it. For example, I realized that behind a transparent frame just in front of me (that was actually the glass door, but I was utterly unable to apply the usual labels to things) there was a vast, black space dotted with shining points that wanted to be explored. It appeared that I had to somehow remove or penetrate this transparent object if I wanted to reach the vastness behind it. But when I started considering the glass door and its frame, they appeared so interesting and new that I forgot about the black field and the shining points.

This situation kept repeating itself: everywhere I looked, in the distance or very near, the manifestation showed the same level of complexity, just like a fractal. There was no way of finding any particular object more interesting than another – everything around me was equally pristine, and full of secrets. Funnily enough, the only “object” that I was unable to focus my attention on was actually my partner. Somehow I did not feel ready yet for a full interaction with another spirit: that would have been too complex. I wasn’t having any of these thoughts at that moment – I was hardly having any thoughts at all – but I still had intentions, some basic emotions, and my full psycho-motor ability. I managed to coordinate my speech and movement to briefly thank my lover, hug her, and tell her that I needed to be alone because the experience was too intense. She immediately understood what was going on, kissed me goodbye and wished me luck, not without asking me to be careful – I probably did not look in the best conditions to drive a scooter!

Just before climbing down the short staircase that led from the house to the street, I stopped to consider which one of my feet I should move first. I felt that if I had considered this issue for long enough, I might get to a true understanding of what “left” and “right” really mean. (These are obviously relative concepts – but relative to what? Where is the center that allows me to have a left and a right foot?) Nevertheless, I felt that I couldn’t simply stay there on the staircase – I had to go, so I gingerly dropped this philosophical line and rode back home.

My house becomes a Laboratory.

The ride home was much less dangerous than it might sound. Actually, I found myself perfectly able to drive and follow the road, avoid the obstacles, and so on. The only difference was that I was driving very, very slowly. This was because I was almost forced to consider every action that I was doing, every object that entered my field of consciousness, every sensation that hit my perception, with great attention. No automatism was possible, so driving a motorbike revealed itself as an extremely complex activity, for which, however, I felt absolutely prepared.

Once I managed to get home, I found there  a good friend of mine who was staying with me for a few days, an amazing woman who I have already interviewed about her experiences in life and open relationships. She immediately understood that I was in an altered but completely harmless state of consciousness, and she supported me by simply non interfering while making clear that she would be there to help me if I needed so. At this point, I felt that the time had come to start using this special state of mind to do some more experiments. I might have just sat and meditated, but instead I felt inspired to interact with and observe the physical reality that surrounded me. There was no need to decide where to start from, as absolutely every phenomenon around me was like a doorway into a deeper understanding of the manifested world.

It is not easy to explain with words the experiments I made that night, because at that time my “inner talking” had completely stopped, and words were not popping up in my head as I moved around, acted and observed. Nevertheless, now that a few weeks have passed, I believe I can try to give an imperfect and limited description of what I experienced. This is one of the paradoxes of spiritual evolution: the deepest experiences cannot be expressed by language, and yet the urge remains to share them with others and with our own rational mind.

A Network of Reflections.

One of the first memorable moments happened when for some reason I wandered into the kitchen. There, I stopped looking at my own image, reflected in the windows. There are two windows in my kitchen, and both of them were half open, so that the image of my upper body was reflected twice, at slightly different angles. But in that state, I perceived the whole situation in a different way. There were actually not two, but three images in that room, and the third one was what I once considered to be my physical body. My “body” and its two “images” constituted a triangle, a network of light rays being reflected back and forth, according to some mysterious laws that I could fathom but not fully understand.

There was no essential difference between the three poles of this triangle, I realized; the distinction between “real” objects (the body) and “imaginary” objects (the reflection in the glass pane) was just a convention of the rational mind. As useful as this distinction is, I now know that it is only valid up to a certain level of analysis, just as Newton’s gravitational law is only valid up to a certain level of microscopic accuracy. That night, for some long minutes, I revelled in the contemplation of a deeper level of physical reality.

Seeing the Vibrations.

I had another profound experience some time after, when I was lying on the hammock in my balcony. I closed my eyes, and started observing the sounds that were coming to me in the tropical night, some stronger, some weaker, all of them with a higher of lower pitch. But in that state of consciousness, it did not feel like I was “hearing” the sounds. Instead, I was “seeing” them, although not with my physical eyes, which were closed: my mental eye was perceiving sounds under the form of vibrations of various frequencies. After contemplating this for a few minutes, I opened my eyes: to my amazement, I discovered that the images out there were also vibrations, of a different range of frequency, “seen” by the same mental eye that was receiving the “sounds”. I could distinctly note how certain parts of my visual fields were vibrating faster than others, according to what my rational mind would have called “colors” – but they were actually simply different frequencies of vibration.

It took me some time of experimentation, opening and closing my physical eyes, to realize that there was no real difference between sounds, colors, and even tactile sensations such as the texture of the hammock against my back. There was just an ocean of vibrations, of an enormous variety and complexity, precipitating towards a central point: my mind, or, better said “a” mind, since by now I had lost all feelings of personal identity. This center of consciousness was constantly receiving vibrations of all kinds, and then cataloging them according to their frequency ranges. Only then, after having been processed by that mind, could these vibrations be called sounds, or colors, or smells; during their journey towards the mind, they were essentially the same phenomenon – a massive, infinitely complex “vibrational soup” to which the mind would later impose a classification.

Immobility in movement.

After having considered this process for some time, I realized that the movement of the vibrations towards the mental eye was centripetal, like the flow of water running down a sink. Thus, I tried to to shift “my” attention to the central point towards which all vibrations seemed to to precipitate. To my surprise, I discovered that I couldn’t “look” directly at it – the mere fact of turning the attention towards the center, created another stream of vibrations that precipitated themselves towards it. To put it another way, in order to look at that central point I had to create an artificial separation from it – it felt like if the central point of consciousness started receding backwards as soon as I tried to look at it!  Nevertheless, there was a characteristic of this central point that I seemed to be able to perceive: it was of a blazing white color, as if my visual mind was trying to translate into an incredibly white color the infinite vibrational speed of that point of consciousness.

I decided to do one more experiment: if that point of consciousness was the center towards which every manifested phenomenon moved, then it should be completely immobile, I thought. So I asked my friend to move the hammock I was lying in, I closed my eyes, and I tried to notice what was going to happen to the central point as the movement increased and decreased. And, sure enough – nothing happened. The central spot of consciousness remained completely unperturbed, immobile, like a black hole in the middle of a galaxy. But, as my physical body moved in different directions and at different speed, what changed was the pattern of vibrations precipitating towards the center! It was amazing to realize that physical movement, and thus anything else happening on the manifested level or reality, was not really affecting the central point of consciousness. The effects of the movement were only on the vibrations, which changed according to specific patterns, and then followed their destiny towards an immobile, pure, and unaffected point.

The Coming Back.

At this point, something in me felt that it was time to put an end to this experience. I was not tired at all, but I had the feeling that I simply had taken all that I could withstand at that time. I consciously decided to “come down” to the level of understanding that works for daily life: I looked at the clock, and realized that more than two hours had passed since I had entered that altered state of consciousness. I thanked my friend, who had been so supportive and patient. Inwardly, I thanked the woman that had made all this possible, by allowing me to use the energy we had created together to propel my spirit to heights I had never reached before.

This had been a groundbreaking experience for me; at the same time, I realized that it was just a first, clumsy exploration of a new dimension. I had let my attention drift freely from one phenomenon to another, possibly sacrificing depth in favour of playfulness and enchantment. I had glimpsed what seemed to be some fundamental characteristics of the manifested world, and the relationship between it and an unmovable, blazing central point of consciousness.  At the same time, absorbed as I was in the intensity of this new state, I hadn’t been able to share it fully with the woman whose energy allowed me to reach it in the first place. I set an intention to be more aware of that next time, and try to transmit this elevated state of consciousness to whoever I was with at that moment.

Conclusions.

All things considered, this experience felt like an important reward for all the practice, the efforts and the unavoidable mistakes I had made on my long journey into Tantric sexuality. It confirmed in me with absolute certainty that sexual energy can be used for spiritual purposes. By no means do I believe that this kind of states constitute the end of the Tantric sexual journey. Quite on the contrary, they can maybe be considered a beginning, something like a first bumpy ride on a bicycle that you have spent years fixing – with the enthralling promise of much longer and more exciting adventures to come.

Perhaps, with a bit of luck, this account can also stimulate you to experience this beautiful form of sexuality. After all, the beauty of Tantra and Yoga is that each one of us becomes a bit like a scientist, doing experiments in the laboratory of his or her own body and spirit. Sharing the failures and successes of those experiments with other fellow spiritual seekers is one of the best ways we have to support each other, to keep our aspiration strong, and to feel that we are not alone in going through the joys and pains of spiritual evolution.

photo credit: Wonderlane via photopin cc