By Mysti Easterwood
Human potential and self-awareness are something we could do with a lot more of right now. I keep hearing people ask when everyone is going to wake up; this aspect looks a lot like an awakening. I would be more optimistic if I heard people ask about when they are going to wake up. — Eric Francis, Cosmic Equinox
This week has seen the opening of a 10-day international music festival called South-by-SouthWest here in Austin. It’s the very essence of Vernal/Aries/Creative energy is roaring through the city. Since my health club sits at ground zero (well, on the 8th floor) of the festivities, even without the $500 pass, I am marinating in its ambiance.
Yesterday, with Dawes, John Hiatt and Carolina Chocolate Drops playing downstairs in the lobby of the Hilton (off the schedule), I met with longtime Hindu Tantrika Paul Garza. We met to discuss what a Tantra-101 class taught in the West might look like. My background in Tantra is Buddha-flavored, so we’re cooking up a view from both sides of the tradition.
One common ground we quickly reached is what Tantra is not. For example, it is not — per Robinson Jeffers — the “Indian recession.” In this context, recession, referred to in a poem by Jeffers, means a way to escape reality.
While its Asian expression has been shaped into a passive, quietus-seeking, transcendentalist appearance, Tantric practices were first the province of Scythian warrior priestesses, whose Awakening was part of a very active life, one lived mostly on horseback. Scythians were a culture located in what is now western Iran, before the Persians, contemporaneous with the Hellenistic Greeks, who called them ‘Amazons’.