Tao Semko for www.UmaaTantra.

com

P.S.
Learn more about authentic tantra and yoga in solo practice here:
http://smashanpress.com/guru_secrets.html

and about practicing tantric lovemaking (maithuna) with your partner here:
http://smashanpress.com/tantra_secrets.html

WHAT'S MISSING FROM "MODERN" TANTRA? PART TWO...

This is e-letter is not intended for persons under the age of 18.

Dear Friend,

Last issue I covered some of the basic premises of "modern tantra." Here's what the new-age influenced
movement has missed from traditional tantra:

While it may include sexuality and love as a wondrous part of spiritual experience, Traditional tantra teaches
that success depends mostly on individual sadhana or practice. Granted, spontaneous lovemaking can be a
spiritual union and creates an enormous amount of energy, but over time it is only as fruitful as the emotional
and spiritual development of the individual lovers allows.

Consider this: If you prepare a meal, the meal is only as good as the freshness, purity, and nuanced flavors of the
ingredients you make it with. Knowing a bunch of fancy cooking techniques, but only using poor, flavorless, or
artificial ingredients, will just give a lot of exotic looking, but ultimately bland, stale and flavorless food.

Now think of that meal as a tantric sexual practice, think of the ingredients as the lovers, and think of the
cooking techniques as the sexual techniques, and you have the picture.

Neo tantrics place 80% emphasis on the cooking techniques and 20% on improving the quality of the
ingredients.

Real tantrics place 90% emphasis on improving the quality of the ingredients and another 50% emphasis on
improving the cooking techniques. Yes, I'm aware that those numbers add up to more than 100%. So you get the
picture then...

Real tantrics do individual practices of purification, devotion, sensitization, and focus. A few of their many tools
are physical exercises, diet, contemplation, concentration, visualization, mantra, relaxation exercises, methods
of touching, expansion of awareness, and more.

Why? Because sex can create as many social masks, illusions, and obstacles as it strips away. Even 8-hour long,
multiorgasmic, emotionally satisfying lovemaking. So the tantric needs to constantly observe herself, from
solitude as well as lovemaking, to catch the ego when it gets in the way of seeing true self-nature (whether
"good" or "bad").

Most Neo-Tantrists never learned the full practices used to prepare the individual for maithuna (ritual union),
because they themselves learned from New-Age gurus in a time when "anything goes" was the norm. The vast
majority of Neo-tantric gurus today were at one time disciples of Osho (nee "Sri" Bhagwaan Rajneesh), who
actually began his own spiritual life and achieved realization as a renunciate (*not* a tantric), and whose own