We live in a culture that is more than ever before obsessed with the physical body and disconnected from it.

We are obsessed with its shape, with youth understood as triumph, obsessed with a form of beauty painfully transforming the concept of woman. We hunt at all costs the pleasure of the senses, the carnal pleasure. Pleasure as instant gratification.

The consumer society reduces man to the body. It invites him, tempts him, seduces him to devour products and services with the promise that he will receive satisfaction and the feeling of his own value. The body becomes a machinery. A net in which this mentality wants to catch the human soul.

And this is exactly at the opposite pole of any authentic spiritual tradition, concerned with elevating the man, awakening his soul and supporting him to unite with the Supreme Source.

Pure Eros is the path towards Beauty and Truth

For Tantra the body is a devoted servant of the inner evolution. It is a mandala – an essentialized form of the sacred energy from which we are made. It is a living, dynamic mandala and we can activate its power when we learn how to purify it, elevate it, maintain it in a state of vitality and health.

Yoga poses called asanas, symbolic gestures – mudras – breathing exercises (pranayama), meditation are all powerful methods that support us to create a complex, fascinating relationship with our own body.

But according to the Tantric vision, the high practice by which we honour our body to its true and sacred value is complete when we receive the initiation into the art of making love: a vast knowledge and revelation of the body as a cosmic resonator, a total experience, the fusion with the core of one’s being, with what is eternal and divine in the beloved being, with the universe.

Why is it that the spiritual methodology revealed by Tantra and erotic Taoism (also a form of Tantra, but from Chinese culture) is worth the name of art of lovemaking?

• Because it makes us partakers of the archetypal energy of beauty, and of that of truth.
• Because it allows us to access our creative power, the pure eros reflected in our own micro universe, the energy from which the very Creation of God originates.
• Because it means participating in a mystery that the ordinary mind cannot understand. And it awakens an elevated exaltation of all subtle bodies as the physical body discovers through direct experience that it is in fact condensation of energy, not opaque matter.
• Because it produces the same wonderful state and mystical emotion that we experience when faced with authentic art.

So even if we ourselves are artists, and if we are lovers of art or eager to become artists of our own lives, knowing the principles of Tantric art is a very valuable gift.

One of the characteristics of this art is the fact that it works consciously with the energy of eros – not necessarily in the sense that it always chooses erotic themes and topics, but rather that it operates in an assumed manner and full of awareness with the gigantic force of pure eros, which is the primordial and eternal impulse of Creation.

That is why it is also beneficial for us to learn to use, for our own enlightenment, the tools of pure eros, which participate (known or unknown) in any creative act.

Hugh Hefner’s robe and the Gods of Khajuraho

There is a colossal difference between the way the West represents the physical body in the erotic act and the way in which the tantric teachings sacralise it. And for this reason, it is enough to analyse the staging used by Playboy magazine and compare them with images from Tantric art.

Hugh Hefner created an empire of sensuality and eroticism by cultivating and imposing a brand of the very macho man, with a real dose of elegance and style, that asserts his power and especially the insatiable appetite for a hedonistic life.

Praised by pictorials in which the aesthetic is often delicious, the Playboy body is still nothing more than what the magazine’s title declares – a toy for boys. Boys who behave like gentlemen, but do not care to go beyond the epidermis, do not want more than the immediate satisfaction of the senses, in a more refined form than we usually encounter it in the industry.

The Playboy body is the object of pleasure. Hugh Hefner turned into a legend the silk robe he wore as a symbol of his permanent availability for sexual pleasure. 

The Playboy body is a narcissistic statement. The playmates most often pose, showcasing their sensuality and beauty in a shop window, they don’t live them. And it never shows the source of this beauty and sensuality, it is opaque, it does not reflect the heights.

We chose this example, which may seem old-fashioned today, in a time of the explosion of amateur pornography, precisely because the Playboy culture still had a kind of class, it was not a simple display of sexual greed. But the body was seen only as a body, it was seen as an end, not as a resonator and mediator.

Unlike this type of vision embedded in the flesh, the tantric-like gaze sacralises, transfigures, ennobles the body that expresses its sensuality and eroticism, as it becomes an opportunity for contemplation, for a subtle connection with the essence.

That is why the expression of ecstasy on the faces of lovers in the bas-reliefs of Khajuraho is so natural and frequent. Gods and people alike experience the same frenzy with which the Supreme Absolute expresses itself, gods and people alike have the same thirst for unification, for merging with Him.

It is not the erotic pleasure that is required of the body, but the liberation from its material limits; it is not the crushing force of gravity that transposes in the attitudes of these sculpted bodies, but the miracle of weightlessness, of the liberation ensured by the presence of the spiritual breath.

The Power of Initiation in Erotic Positions

It is fascinating the comparison of the way Western eroticism understands the meaning of the erotic positions and the way they are understood and practiced in Tantrism.

For the Western, sexual imaginary, the erotic positions are a show off of manhood, masculinity and of admirable athletic forms. They are a kind of gym display of sexuality. The more positions a man knows, the more flattering they are through the physical mastery they require, the more confident the man is and the more desirable a lover feels.

Of course, in a loving couple relationship, the choice of erotic positions can have both inspiration, and effervescent passion, and even a charming playful air.

But even so, the benefits of these positions are too small compared to what treasures are bestowed on the tantric lovers who know what an erotic posture means, with what energy it resonates, what processes of profound transformation and what kind of revelations it can trigger.

In Tantrism the body is the dwelling of the spirit that is expressed through it. The freer the body, the more vital, the healthier, the more energetic, the more elastic, the more nuanced in its powers and manifestations it is, the freer and more nuanced are its possibilities of expressing the spirit.

In Tantra, to make love means a perfect connection between body and soul, between matter and consciousness. And the erotic positions, as part of a sacred ritual, are dynamic asanas, mudras of the body, yantras that bring elevated harmony between the masculine and the feminine.

Contrary to the fears that the idea of a ritualistic erotic fusion arouses in the mind of the Westerner, it is not a scheme that restricts the spontaneity and the possibilities of the lovers to manifest their uniqueness.

Just as the cherry trees that come back to life in spring do so in precise stages – first the buds appear, then the flowers blossom and only then the leaves burst, it is in the same manner in a tantric ritual in which the precision of the steps we follow does not limit, but sustains, prepares, certifies the leap from the limitation of our physical bodies to the infinity of cosmic states.

In Tantrism, the erotic positions are forms of access to mystical ecstasy, not acrobatics for sensual pleasure. Even the names given to them in the Kama Sutra, Ananga Ranga and in treatises on erotic Taoism show the spiritual, metaphysical perspective to which they elevate the fusion between the lovers.

The Woman on Top – Initiatress, not Dominatrix

A significant difference between the way in which the erotic positions are understood in the current western culture and the way they are invested with sacredness by the tantric vision, can be witnessed when it comes to the position in which the woman is on top.

For the western man, this erotic position means a role play, because the woman is perceived in this context as dominant. In the man’s interpretation, she takes the lead, and he consents in order to add some salt and pepper to the erotic act.

It’s something like, “I let her be on top of me as if she is subduing me, as if I had given her my power. But I know it’s not like that, and that makes everything even more exciting. “

For the tantric mentality The bee buzzing position(see illustration above) represents an essentialization of the sacred play between Shiva and Shakti. It is said that Shiva without Shakti is shava, which means dead.

Why? Because Shakti is the energy through which Shiva manifests his entire Creation. The shava position, that of the lifeless inert body, is exactly the one in which the man sits still during The bee buzzing position.

Such an erotic posture reflects another essential aspect of Tantrism – the woman is never a dominatrix; she is an initiatress. In the art of lovemaking, she is the one who opens for the man the universe of the great secrets of pure eros. She is the one who helps the world, the universe to be fertilized by Consciousness, by its Creator (as does the bee that carries pollen from the calyx of flowers).

She is movement that feeds on the transcendent, on the immovability of Shiva.

The bee buzzing position allows the lover to stand on the man’s lap and to tighten her legs as soon as his lingam penetrated her. What is important is the voluptuous rotation of the hips which helps control the rhythm of the movements and helps her lover to easily transmute the sexual potential and to sublimate the resulting energy.

Therefore – and from a very practical point of view – the woman does not play in this position a role of domination, but rather helps the man to control his own erotic energy. This is how they can live together multiple orgasms, without seminal explosion; total tantric orgasms, which transport them both in ecstatic states of consciousness.

Making love in this way, following the steps of a dance of energies, souls, galaxies, elevates the erotic fusion to a mystical height that is hard to imagine in a couple where the body is just a simple source of arousal, and the erotic positions are considered just spices for the sake of diversity.

For the initiated lovers in the tantric art of loving, the erotic positions become a celebration, a contemplation, a revelation that connects them with the archetype of the Supreme Masculine and the Eternal Feminine.