Although it has a few glitches, I still regard Tantra as the philosophical project most aligned with the Eleusian Epiphanies. Here are a few notes from five decades as a practicing Tantrika:
Tantric literature usually begins with a shout-out to one's mentors and lineages, a practice that works a little like a Western CV. Its purpose is to inspire confidence in the reader, and establish the writer's accomplishments within the context of the lineage.
That might be something of a challenge as my actual lineage lay in the future. It will be found within the Fifth Turning of the Wheel of Dharma, the Ghantayana.
I have, however, taken empowerments [/intiations] within the second (Mahayana), third (Vajrayana) and fourth (Tantrayana) turnings of the Wheel. My dharma name was bestowed by a Nyingma lama who didn't know me from Adam, but it happened that the name he conferred, Changchub Drolma (Dedarkened Tara), referred to a practice I had secretly undertaken a few years earlier. So, we tight.
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From 15-18 years of age, I served as a 'kamala' --a kind of cupbearer-- for a household of Western tantrikas. My legal guardian, Carla M., was in a marriage that included a third and occasionally fourth partner, and all were improvising a path using works by Alexandra David-Neel, Ajit Mookerjee, Benoytosh Bhattyacharya, Arthur Avalon and Walter Evans-Wentz, among others. I was too young to participate in the maithuna (ritual union), but I did set up the room, prepare the robes, purify the atmosphere, arrange the mandalas, etc. When I look back on that era, I am amazed by Carla's intuition. Her ability to translate vague textual hints from a few bowdlerized texts into a living practice impresses me to this day.
At age 18 I went guru-chasing, inviting three prominent teachers to my city under the auspices of a fictitious 'Austin Spiritual Council.' The ASC was really no more than a dozen friends who put up deposits for travel expenses and auditorium rental. In this way I was able to buttonhole people expert in meditative practice, and see if I was drawn to work with any of them. The summer of my 19th birthday, I traveled to Dharmadhatu (at the time known as Karma Dzong) in Boulder, Colorado. One early morning in the ashram kitchen, I found myself moving 5-gallon tins of honey with Rimpoche. Sweet.
The massive Green Tara mounted in Trungpa's dining room haunted my dreams for the next several years, but I decided to study with the breakaway Surat Shabd-yoga teacher, Paul Twitchell. She didn't mind.
A few years later I was in a library in Albuquerque, New Mexico, tucked into the Spanish language studies section. Reaching for a grammar text, a large black book fell off of the shelf and hit me on the head. It was Arthur Evans-Wentz's Tibetan Book of the Dead. It landed open to the "dissolution of earth into water" page. I looked around the shelf for any other titles in English -there were none- so of course I checked out the book. Returning home, I got a phone call from a friend in Mexico letting me know that the body of one of my dreamwork students, Carmen D., had just been dredged from Tantra lake in Boulder.
Thus I became a (reluctant) bardologist and psychopomp. Turns out I would be especially attuned to suicides and overdoses. Carmen was the first.
In 1993 --having entered a harrowing graduate program-- I began doing Green Tara sadhana. I figured it would be less risky than the SSRIs flowing through my academic community. A little riskier, perhaps, was the practice of Vajrayogini, whom I have dubbed "The Girl in the Bone Bikini." After my daughter's death in 1998, I took a series of empowerments -- including a Vajrasattva initiation which turned out to be an accelerant for that nascent Bardo practice.†
Later I would discover that BuddhaVajrasattva is the consort of my root yidamVajrayogini, which meant that instead of a 'guru', I was working with a tsong-yab/yum (Secret Consorts). Then it got interesting . . .
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My training, as you can see, has been eclectic and ongoing - with assistance from consorts, companions, husbands, children as well as the exasperated kindness of various swamis, lamas and monks. But the most instructive moments have come through a montage of women: ekmothers, Taras, yoginis at various stages of alchemical transfiguration.
The Eleusian Epiphanies are built around the idea that any empowerment, initiation, diksha - whatever the terminology-- is a gift from your future Self††. The job of a good counselor is simply to get the present and future Self/s lined up to meet one another, and jump out of the way when lightning flies through the mirror. Olé!
Eleusis•Mystes•Alana
January 4. 2021
Korinthos, Greece
Notes:
† I have about 600,000 627,000 Vajrasattva mantras logged, for those who count such things. Kinda like airmiles for Skydancers.
†† ...a phrase I minted a decade before McConaughey's Oscar speech, damnit!
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