The Unseen Real
Are Tantric practices an antidote to civilizational collapse?
I haven’t written in a bit because—I admit—I don’t know what to say right now. I don’t know what to say, as of yet, about what’s happening in the United States. We have entered the next stage of the brutal techno-fascist takeover. This has been prepared for a long time, many decades, but the timeline has been accelerated by AI and, now with the purchase of Tik Tok and Paramount by the Ellisons, an unbelievably yer level of media consolidation.
Obviously I recommend everyone write to their representatives in Congress, pressure corporations, and join movements like Indivisible and Rise and Resist. I hope that the plans for a national economic strike come to fruition very soon. I will come back to all of this.
In the meantime, I keep wondering: If AI and advanced automation/robotics eliminates most forms of labor in the next decade, what then? It seems that the billionaires and tech overlords now plan to passively or actively eliminate most people, one way or another. For instance, Larry Fink of Black Rock just said, at Davos, that population growth is no longer intrinsically valuable, and the countries that will succeed in the next decades will be the ones with homogenous cultures and shrinking/aging populations, as they will find it easiest to move into full automation / robotics:
I find this a very significant statement. It suggests that, for the ruling elites, their entire conception of the future has shifted. With AI, they no longer see a large consumer base, middle-class intelligentsia, or industrial working class as meaningful for their end goals. In fact, large heterogenous populations stand in the way of their objectives.
Whatever happens next, humanity faces an unprecedented crisis of meaning and a profound identity crisis. As an answer to this, I wonder if it is possible to focus on healing the crisis in Eros—the crisis in love, gender relationships, and sexuality—that seems to be part of our rapid slide toward the abyss. And I wonder if the key to this is to focus on the metaphysical and tantric/alchemical potential of erotic contact.
Perhaps, at this extreme threshold, we might finally turn, collectively, toward practices that many cultures once considered essential: the disciplined cultivation and intentional intensification of consciousness itself. Psychedelic shamanism is one avenue for this, also yoga and meditation. Among the most potent and most easily misunderstood of these technologies is Tantric sexual alchemy—a system of techniques that claims to unlock latent human capacities through ritualized eroticism, breath control, and the transmutation of vital fluids. I have not yet explored this area personally to the extent I would like, but I keep accumulating information on it, and thought I would share some of that. I suspect that the terror of female power—which leads to the desire to control and suppress – we see in the behavior of Right Wingers and “manosphere” influencers has its source in this hidden side of the goddess, the liberatory power of Shakti to break us free from conditioning and identity through direct experience of transcendence.
Peter Redgrove’s The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real is a fantastic book that I found on the street in the West Village many years ago. Redgrove was a poet and an explorer of consciousness who wrote about the limits of modern, visually-dominant consciousness—what he calls “Oedipal” awareness. Contemporary society, he argues, systematically ignores the atmospheric, electromagnetic, and invisible worlds that surround us at every moment. We have become sensory cripples, cut off from vast dimensions of experience that our ancestors accessed through sacred communion with nature as well as initiatory and esoteric practices.
Redgrove writes about the “Black Goddess” as an archetype representing these subliminal and invisible realms: “The Black Goddess is so far hardly more than a word of hope whispered among the few who have served their apprenticeship to the White Goddess. She promises a new pacific bond between men and women, corresponding to a final reality of love. . . She will lead man back to that sure instinct of love which he long ago forfeited by intellectual pride.” She fuses the Sphinx of Oedipus with what he calls “illumined darkness”—Lilith, the Dark Girl of Eastern love texts, the Goddess of Night and the Interior of the Earth. In Christian symbolism, she emerges as Mary Magdalene, counterpart to the Virgin, the sensuous lover of Christ. The core elements of her worship are transformation and rebirth.
Even as a child, Redgrove writes, he felt connected to “invisibles”—subtle atmospheric forces that most people dismiss or fail to perceive. He moved to Cornwall as an adult, where he underwent profound psychological and physiological shifts due to weather fluctuations. He began to realize that modern civilization catastrophically underestimates the influence of weather and electromagnetic fields—what he called “invisible potions and tides”—on the psyche. Working with analyst John Layard, who defined depression as “withheld knowledge,” Redgrove came to understand that we suffer from ignorance of the multidimensional reality surrounding us and its constant influence on our inner states.
In his work, Layard emphasized raw sensory experience. He prioritized the non-visual senses—touch, smell, taste, hearing, and something akin to psychic perception—as fundamental “touchstones of truth.” Inspired by his teacher, Redgrove embarked on disciplined methods for enhancing sensory perception: yoga, pranayama (breath control), and eventually Tantric meditations practiced in erotic communion with his partner.
The preparatory techniques are diverse. “Sealed Writing” involves recording thoughts for twenty minutes before sleep, then deliberately not reading the results for months, in order to access hidden patterns of unconscious information. Redgrove also pursued rigorous dream studies using Jung’s method of active imagination—dialoguing with archetypal images, conversing with dream-figures to penetrate the unconscious.
For physiological preparation, he practiced pranayama, jalandhara bandha (throat lock), and mula bandha (contraction of the anus and genitals) to enhance subliminal senses and sensitize olfactory perception. For the male practitioner specifically, strengthening the capacity for semen retention requires contracting the anus in long sequences while pulling up the perineum and lower abdomen.
The ritualized practices of Tantric alchemy lead, Redgrove claims, to deeper communion with both physical and psychic realities. Erotic arousal is understood as a naturally occurring hypnoidal state that promotes heightened suggestibility. “Sex had always been powerfully synesthetic,” he writes, “but touching, smelling and tasting were enhanced by experiments new to me, particularly in oral sex.” With sustained practice, the entire surface of the skin becomes sensitized as “one extensive, massive genital organ.” Over time, he and his partner could attain “superhuman bliss without difficulty.”
Central to this alchemy is the creation and exchange of vital fluids, referred to as elixirs or kalas (rays, emanations). Redgrove discovered David Wood’s research into the secrets of the Prieuré Notre-Dame de Sion, where the maverick scholar found a hidden alchemical tradition regarding female biology: a “minute trace of a very potent liquid” seeps from the brain of a woman and collects in the womb or vaginal cavity during sexual arousal.
