CREATIVE TANTRIC PERCEPTUALIZATION

Difficulties in trying to define the indescribable make it impossible to include all opinions and suggestions regarding what Tantra means or is, like trying to define love, it is highly context dependent. A fundamentalist will take exception to anything involving New, Neo or liberation, including, New Thought, Free Thought and other concepts that threaten their security, finances, or what they were born to defend. Regardless of the Tantric flavor, color, or tradition, there is at least one practice common to all. Rituals, mantras, japa, yantras, gurus, deities, worship, and sexual practices may vary, but the visualization process is basic. Since vision is only one of our physical senses, and our experiences go beyond merely what is perceived by these senses, perceptualization seems more appropriate, since touch, scent, taste and sound are so much a part of Tantra.

-

I learned to autopilot my contemplative creative perceptualizations from a person who never had a guru or accepted followers, he told people to let him alone if they got in his way. If somebody kept showing up for anything he presented, even if he earned money from it, he would chide and scold them saying, “What are you doing here again, you haven’t had enough time to work with what you were given last visit. You’re wasting your money; it’s all the same repackaged stuff with a different label”. He knew some people followed him around to get their battery charged, all he was doing was taking away their symptoms, which were really friends trying to warn there was something wrong. They would only end up with different symptoms if they got rid of the ones they had. In addition, it is easy to get loaded up with a lot of sticky stuff people cast off when somebody tries to assist them in learning how to heal themselves.  A healer has to constantly purify and center their being to keep their Chakras from being compromised or clouded. If your energy supply is compromised through your compassion, you begin to feed others from your own being. Giving people the tools to help themselves, without falling back into the temptation of performing personal healings, is like teaching a person how to fish, instead of supplying his family with something to eat. 

Then there were the women of all ages who became captive by the male essence of an old Dutchman who lit their kundalini flames without exactly being a hunk. He could read minds, and would walk up to them, look them in their faces and say “If the others here only knew what you are thinking”. Among other things, he was an entertainer. Any learning process, including when writing is involved, benefits from lightness, humor, and incongruity; even some gonzo if you have the right audience.

If my friend saw a person or family group privately, he didn’t want to see them again for at least a year unless something critical happened. The one time my step-daughter and I saw him privately instead of in public, a complex symbol I had never seen before kept appearing in my meditations for a week before our appointment. When I entered the room, there was the same symbol face up on a piece of paper centered in the middle of his coffee table. He smiled when he saw my face, saying “You see, I’ve been visiting you!”  He asked at the end of our encounter if I could please stop thinking about him, it was getting in the way of his work.

He didn’t see chakras in the traditionally accepted rainbow progression. He suggested people find answers and determinations without blindly accepting what others believe. He warned of becoming a follower or technician, to remain challenged by the firm belief that everything is dependent on personal experiences and interpretation. His was a world of lights and colors, telling me he felt he was on ‘Las Vegas Strip’ most of the time. Instead of trying to fly, his challenge was to remain grounded. Jack Schwarz waited until the year 2000 to transform, taking his big bounce on the trampoline to the beyond, leaving a vacuum behind that is only partially filed by his Aletheia Foundation.

As the Aletheia web pages say, Jack was an exoteric teacher, the opposite of esoteric. He had no use for initiations, and turned away disciples. The people closest knew his love for mankind was like the light that shone from his eyes. Jack had the most intense life energy and male essence of any man I have known, he lived in Tantra. His magnetism allowed him to work as a hypnotist, magician, mind reader and healer, when he was young his family had to move from village to village in Holland to avoid the wrath of religious fanatics.  Even in Grants Pass Oregon, the religious right protested outside of his office. He said he practiced his own form of Yoga; I would call it Clear Light or Free Thought Yoga. He could literally stop and start his heart on demand, dying and returning like a Master practicing Clear Light Yoga, with a compassion for mankind so great it exceeded his desire for liberation and return to the Oneness.   

-

Rather than go into details about the human energy system, chakras, or creative perceptualization techniques, there are plenty of guidebooks similar to Jack’s out there for those who want to hitchhike. I never formally studied Tantra, Clear Light Yoga or Free Thought Buddhism, but discovered from Jack I had been practicing Creative Tantric Perceptualizations without ever reading or hearing about such a thing. I’m not a disciple or follower, Tantra for me is a natural and sensory based practical and applied science, a description of reality based on sexual manifestation.

Creative Tantric Perceptualization can be practiced without a Master, Guru, or teacher other than the inner self. That isn’t to say they have to be avoided, at times people need one, others don’t, sometimes they get in the way. Those who are born followers run the risk of following the path of others instead of their own. The belief that secret and ‘dangerous’ knowledge has to be carefully administered by a qualified Master in customized measures might be appropriate for a student determined to study Black Tantra in its more sinister forms. Consciousness expanding Tantra however, just as learning creative perceptualization exercises, shouldn’t start off scaring and qualifying people who are able to learn from books and other media. For Free Thought Tantra, even rituals that include sound, chanting, music, geometry, colors and illumination are merely stepping stones leading to a place you can learn to project yourself to. Mental gymnastics involving both the material and immaterial are tools, techniques, and processes that combine thought forms, images, techniques, sound, and breathing rituals, therefore they can be dominated by the mind, and made less relevant if one chooses. Tantric traditions and dogmas, along with authoritarian teachings, are rejected or modified in Free Thought Tantra. In place of altering our personal reality through a linear relationship with our own evolution and illumination, union and integration among two people, or those in a group, allows our awareness to be considered part of the ‘Fabric of the Universe’.