In 1893, Swami Vivekananda, a chief disciple of the 19th-century Indian Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, landed in America. The treasures he brought from his homeland were not material. His gift for America was yoga, which in its original form includes mystic philosophy, mantras, dietary instructions, mind training practice, and more. In Sanskrit, the root word “man” means “to think” and “tra” means “to protect from” or “to free from bondage.” Together, they mean “to free from the mind”. Though Vivekananda and his contemporaries found a following in the new world, they were also met with extreme resistance. Robert Love, in his Columbia Journalism Review piece about yoga’s history in the West, Fear of Yoga, recounts the trials and tribulations of the early yogis. Love writes that amongst other indiginities, they endured accusations of being cultists, were hit with trumped up claims of property fraud, that Yogananda, who came later on in the 1920s, was “run out of Miami by 200 angry husbands”. Love recounts,
In the autumn of 1911, the slimiest-but in retrospect the most entertaining-of these attacks was published by the Los Angeles Times. ‘A Hindu Apple for Modern Eve: The Cult of the Yogis Lures Women to Destruction,’ the headline read. ‘The incense of sandalwood burned in their honor all the way from the Lake Shore Drive to Fifth Avenue and the Back Bay,’ the article said. ‘These dusky-hued Orientals sat on drawing-room sofas, the center of admiring attention, while fair hands passed them cakes and served them tea in Sevres china.’ Toward the end of the year, Current Literature published a version of a recent piece titled ‘The Heathen Invasion of America,’ which concluded: ‘Literally, yoga means the ‘path’ that leads to wisdom. Actually it is proving the way that leads to domestic infelicity, and insanity and death.’
Despite the biting hyperbole, it would be a mistake to dismiss these reactions purely as nativist backlash. And as entertaining as Rose finds the headline, something was definitely happening here. Why were 200 husbands ready to drive this yogi out of town by force? Was it simply propaganda to spur anti-Eastern sentiment? What power was Yogananda wielding here? I would contend the thread is rather apparent: involvement with these Hindus and their yogic mysticism was having an effect on these women that nobody else in their lives or culture had any context within which to understand it.
For somebody with Erotic vision, seeing what happened here is simple arithmetic: women live with their power contorted and here it was beginning to unfurl. Entry of the mystical–of contact with the ineffable–roused something in these women that directed them to shed the trappings of the lives they had lived and, from the sound of it, inspired something their husbands could not control: devotion to that and to who had freed them. They were having the first real Eat, Pray, Love experience on record in the West.
The mantras, postures, and other Hindu practices they had been taught were working their magic and the tyranny of the rational mind was beginning to recede. When the rational loses its grip, desire can finally emerge. It's impossible to fully describe the experience of touching this kind of freedom to those who have not yet tasted it and to those that have, what happened here is instantly recognizable. The life you had lived just a moment ago slides through your fingers. They touched what in many numinous traditions could be called emptiness which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “‘a state of “pure consciousness’ in which the mind has been emptied of all particular objects and images; also, the undifferentiated reality (a world without distinctions and multiplicity) or quality of reality that the emptied mind reflects or manifests.” In modern spiritual parlance, oneness. In Eros, we might refer to the experience of finally having been emptied enough to then be filled with the presence of the ineffable as turning on, where the innate wisdom of the body begins to circulate. Consciousness, instead of running the show based on its learned rule and duty-based system of order that views the body as subordinate, now has contact with the source of something it could not provide for itself: unconditional love.
The mind that had previously been exclusively occupied with presenting a contorted facade in the world of appearances has been subsumed to some degree and the yet-to-be loved parts of ourselves that reside in the unconscious mind can emerge and be known. At that point, we encounter our true, non-rational self: our soul. We will find that this self, the self that has been tamped down and obscured out of self protection may not always agree with what we have set out to accomplish or be when we were simply following instructions.
The Greeks had a word for this force of the unconscious mind: they called it the daimonic. Dr. Rollo May referred to it as “any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.” Those 200 husbands might agree that something had come through their wives and it was altering the power dynamics of their marriages, they just didn’t realize it was not just a who, but a what. Eros, as May refers to by name, is the likely culprit.
Eros is a power that stems from the inner recesses of our emotional lives. Its roots stretch into the chaos from which all creative expression and embodied wisdom issues, and its branches animate and unify the various levels of our lives, from the physical and tactile to the spiritual and intuitive. It is a magnetism, a force of attraction, which saturates our experiences with meaning and potency by drawing us into engagement with the natural mystery and innate playfulness of life.
Eros is perpetually asking us how deeply and fully we can feel in every moment, as this receptivity to feeling is itself the means by which we experience Erotic satisfaction. A life led by Eros, then, is a life directed towards those experiences that most draw out the powers and complexities of our emotional landscapes into the world. We begin to acutely feel the cost of numbness, withdrawal from life, self-denial, and repression.
Once we recognize the richness of our emotional lives, and discover the power that can be accessed through our feelings and desires, we can no longer settle for mediocrity from ourselves. We begin to expect the most from our relationships, our work, our creative expression, and our engagement with the world. This recognition naturally gives rise to an awareness to the felt experience of quality, and an Erotic life orients us always towards that quality, towards that point at which beauty, meaning, sensory delight, and perfection coalesce.
When we enter the realm of the Erotic and open this power we allow ourselves to be guided by our deeper selves. Anybody who begins such an endeavor could be said to symbolically leave the strong arms of the husband of their rational minds behind. We claim our power and with it our innocence as our sense of goodness is no longer reliant upon the approval of a guardian we have appointed to keep us safe, regardless of whether that guardian exists strictly within ourselves as the inner critic or whether we have assigned that role to another person or institution. It’s no surprise, then, that the daimonic is also seen as the source of our genius. And it makes sense as genius must break the mold of the status quo and venture into the yet unknown. One can almost hear the first breathless woman trying to explain to her friends about what was happening inside of her. From the sound of things, she was successful.
Looking around today, it's hard to imagine how what transpires in today’s brightly colored yoga studios with their promises of 30-day abs, reduced anxiety, and sleekly designed apparel could cause such upheaval and uproar. The answer is simple: it cannot. Since the time of Yogananda, yoga has been commoditized, or perhaps more precisely it has been domesticated. What had arrived on our shores was a Bengal tiger and what passes by the same name today is more akin to an orange tabby. The through-line back to the uncut mystical is practically non-existent in modern western yoga. It's become a fashionable fitness regimen and gentle healing modality. This is not to say it is without value. It is simply a lower power version than the original.
Here is where a question of goals arises. If your goal is to make a lot of money, the smart thing to do would be to offer people something that gives them more of what they already want. We can extrapolate that from what yoga currently offers, it would seem people want stress reduction and fitness–to feel better. But also to generally keep everything else the same. If your goal is to provide access to the only thing that truly heals, powers, and vivifies human beings then you would offer them a method of repeatable, sustainable, access to the profound. If there were enough power coming through today’s yoga to create the change we saw from Vivekananda’s yoga we would be seeing it, we would be hearing about it. It would be known, “don’t do yoga unless you want to wake up. If you don’t want to be kicked out of the nest of your life as it exists now, do not do yoga.” But nobody is saying that about yoga.
I am saying that now about Erotic training in Orgasmic Meditation (OM). Erotic training in Orgasmic Meditation (OM) isolates the Erotic Impulse by extracting it from the sexual plane. We train in how to detach it, harness it, and aim it for the purpose of developing unitive, mystical, peak-state consciousness: the Erotic State. OM concurrently develops the capacity for heightened human connection and links that capacity to peak states of consciousness. Enclosed in this volume is a rigorous mind and attention training protocol that will help the aspiring Erotic practitioner dissolve their conditioned ideas about reality and identity by revealing the ways they avoid contact with Eros. Emptiness is a natural byproduct of such an inquiry.
As with yoga, it is, of course, possible to practice tabby cat OM. Simply think about something you already want–more skill in producing desirable experiences for the opposite sex, a more active libido, the ability to climax, or the best sex you’ve ever had in your life. The best of what could fit into a life you already recognize is incomparable to a life infused by Eros. It is the difference between a very large number and infinity.
If you want to know the difference between commodity OM practice and Erotic OM practice you can simply look for the markers. Eros is known implicity, not directly–we know it through things and people. Look for who is offering themselves to that which freed them, even if they look strange. Even if they are sitting in a dusky, incense-filled room serving tea cakes on Sevre china. True contact with emptiness is paradoxical–it strips us down and in the process breeds the truest devotion we can know. That’s the difference. Commodity anything will never bring about devotion; it simply fortifies the existing. In practice based on contact with emptiness we commune with the ineffable and a true life can be born. May we all leave the strong arms of our own husbandly safety and venture into the mystery to know ourselves, should we desire.
