Book Insight - Ecstasy through Tantra by Dr. John Mumford

Sexuality and spiritual experience have traditionally been linked in the literature of mysticism. Religious ecstasy seems strikingly similar to erotic excitement in the accounts of saints and holy people who have like "rapture, spoken of enlightenment in language based on sexual images. Terms "passion," "union" and "ravish" " occur frequently. Such images, they said, were the closest they could find for describing an otherwise ineffable revelation.

The common element between sexual and spiritual experience. of course, is consciousness. The states of consciousness experienced by lovers in union and mystics in God-intoxication are states in which the usual mental sense of self as a separate, isolated, lonely individual is dis-solved. They are no longer locked in the prison of ego, no longer in conflict with the world. In some of the writings of the erotic mystics, we learn of techniques that can be systematically employed to alter consciousness toward that much-sought state, erotic mysticism. The best known is tantra.

The explicit aim of Mumford's book is consciousness-expansion and spiritual illumination. It is solidly based on love between sexual partners. It recognizes that many of the so-called sexually liberated have entered an emotional void because mechanics alone don't achieve magick. Attitude or inner stance is paramount, and this book firmly ties illumination to the sacralization of sex. It emphasizes that the magical work of tantra is to transform the individual partners into divine lovers/ lovers of the divine.

Ecstasy Through Tantra is not for the squeamish, the ascetic or those preoccupied with erotic thrills. It is for those who, accepting human sexuality as a means to a spiritual end, want first-rate instruc tion in lovemaking.

- John White