Spirituality & Sexuality

[Pleroma]

So I take it that you don't wish to answer in genuine honesty as it might deprive you of consuming a commodified, heavily debased and reinterpreted derivative of Indian thought without acknowledging the intellectual dishonesty in doing so?

I would think an archaeologist would know better than cultural misappropriation, but... :/

Just like there is para vidya there is shudra vidya and one can use it to fulfil one's personal desires.

In the same way there might have been other ways of getting liberated and sexuality might be one of them, I'm not denying it. I just said its not the highest form of philosophical thought. There is a difference between para vidya and shudra vidya.

 

[Shuddhasattva]

That's quite the case of South Asian inferiority complex you got there, either that or a severe case of South Asian centrism.

That has to be the worst, most hypocritical justification. We can culturally misappropriate, and call some made-up newage nonsense tantra and claim pedigree from the Indian tradition, but if there is objection to this absurdity, it is because they have an inferiority complex.

What? That's totally irrelevant. We're not arguing Aryan-Invasion theory here, in which I could see why it'd be thrown around (though still not agree with it) we're talking about an obvious disservice.

Fortunately today, people don't need to travel back in time to historical Indian eras in order to enhance their sex life.

Yeah, just stick with your sex shops and leave 'tantra' out of this. Or at least have the good sense to know what you're doing isn't tantra at all. Have fun with that.

Sex has as much to do with real tantra as it has to do with life. That is to say, a great deal, but you don't find life in a sex shop. Tantra encompasses the full breadth of life, of which sex is indisputably a major aspect, but hardly the only thing in life. Moreover, the sexual practices in tantra are highly nuanced and impossible to practice without understanding the agamic self-cosmology, and practicing the other aspects of tantra, a vast field of yogas.

In fact it seems that the developed world is succeeding today where a much more conservative Indian culture is failing,

Nice, now you're attacking Indian culture. I don't even disagree with you; mindless conservatism is a huge problem in India, but this is as ridiculously irrelevant as your first comment about South Asian inferiority.

whether they are doing it on the basis of native Indian historical thought or if they are reinventing the wheel is quite irrelevant.

You know that by saying such things, you are ******* in the well of your own academic field, right? If you decontextualize tradition, you have no archaeology to speak of.

 

[Caladan]

That's one morbid flamebait I have no interest to bite into. You can certainly have the last word buddy.
I'll leave you with this though, decent sex manuals and literature can leave out the term 'tantra' for all I care if it offends some people. The fact will remain that they will remain more relevant and communicative to modern readers, furthermore, many of these sex manuals have zero relation to 'New Age', they are de facto focusing on the physical, the psychological and the social without excessive references to spiritual ideas.
If you are so devastated by the use of the word 'tantra', you can read my first post while ignoring this word completely, as the main point was that sexual engagement can go well beyond taboos, familiar standards and values, or a conservative approach to sexuality. In fact, it was a mistake to use the term 'tantra' at all. Whatever is the source for variation in sexual techniques is irrelevant to the people who begin to experiment or practice them.

 

[Shuddhasattva]

By that logic, by stripping spirituality out (and obviously, neotantra is totally moulded by new age interpretation of it, regardless of anything said by you) you needn't contribute to this thread at all: spirituality & sexuality.