Virtual Tantra 1

VIRTUAL TANTRA

Physical Plane - Instantaneous Rapport (Earth):

Rapport exists between people when communication is fluent, pleasant, engaged and smooth. It can be either natural or deliberately applied with learned skills. When people are in deep rapport they are more co-creative and make more efficient and effective decisions.

Rapport generates a harmonious glow, genuinely warm sympatico, and mutual feelings of warmth. It is a bonding agent, whether temporary or much deeper. Rosenthal describes three primary aspects that catalyze rapport, including mutual attention, shared positive feeling, and a synchronized nonverbal duet.

Shared attention leads toward mutual empathy and mood-matching, at the neurological and conscious and unconscious emotional level. We all know when we are “in synch” or “share a wavelength.” There is a flow, a harmony. Timing, body language and emotional contagion are natural parts of the reciprocal process, which can be intentionally modulated with mirroring, pacing and leading.

Hypnosis has been used knowingly and unknowingly through the centuries to enhance rapport, as well as the pleasure of sexual experience and spirituality.  Natural trance can be used to facilitate transcendence.

The consciousness altering heightened excitement, herbal refreshments, luxurious baths, oils, sensuous massage, sparkling drinks, flickering candle-light, incense and languid atmosphere of the boudoir setting are all conducive to self-suggestion for greater relaxation, sensual enjoyment, and fantasy experience.  By changing your imagery, you can even evoke a more spiritual atmosphere viewing the act as a sexual sacrament.

It is relatively easy to learn the techniques of mutual hypnosis for use with yourself and your lover.  Just begin to imagine the creative possibilities of trance-formations for yourself and your complementary loved-one.  You can begin using the male and female, left and right sides of your brain for whole-self integration, for an inner unification, mythically called the union of the Sun and Moon.

Self-hypnosis can help you create a virtual experience to add another dimension to your sexual life.  When that dimension is spiritual in content that is VIRTUAL TANTRA.  It helps open the inner eye to a whole new world.  In relation to tantrum sex, hypnosis can serve a variety of purposes, from building rapport to enhancing experiences of an influx of Divinity, subtle energies, time distortion, of the Void at the climactic moment, or alternatively of fullness or Cosmic Unity Experience.

This article will help you learn the rudiments of inducing trance and how to create your own hypnotic scripts or tapes, so you can relax and fully enjoy your experience at your chosen time.  It will suggest how to create inductions as well as inner journeys to guide you toward greater ecstasy, participating in sex as a sacrament.

Self-hypnosis is a natural process.  Most of us spend our lives in the throes of a variety of automatically programmed trance states, such as driving on auto-pilot, anger trances, love trances, fear trances, trances induced by memories of places, phobia trances, archetypal trances, subpersonality trances, social roles, etc.  Reactions are spontaneous trance states when they happen to us.  Consciously applying hypnosis to changing old programming and using it for self-enhancement can open new realms of experience and psychic depth.

Self-hypnosis, even outside the bedroom, helps us become more aware of the body, more tuned in to it and our feelings, sensual and otherwise.  Self-hypnosis and hypnosis among lovers is a permissive process, rather than authoritarian like the old model of the controlling hypnotist.  You simply give yourself and your partner "permission" to enjoy altered states of consciousness, other ways of being.

You can change your body image for the positive, as well as change any outworn attitudes about sex.  Problems created by the mind can be solved by the mind -- leaving you freer and more passionate about love and life, in general.  Self-imposed limitations and constricting boundaries can be dissolved, even eradicated from your belief system.

Sexual trance-formation, or Virtual Tantra can be applied to awakening or re-awakening the sensual self, overcoming dysfunctions, fears and anxieties, increasing desire and relaxation, building rapport and mutual resonance with your partner.  Hypnosis can facilitate communication (sexual attraction, mirroring, congruency, mood matching), creating sexual suggestions, post-hypnotic suggestions, and response on demand.  Hypnosis compares favorably with Viagra some say. When fear of failure, anxiety and embarrassment dissipate, the sex drive returns, testosterone levels increase, erections can be sustained longer.

Practice focusing on your self-talk when you consider having sex with your lover.  Do you anticipate, expect, or visualize yourself failing?  Do you feel disappointed before you even start?  You can just STOP! and change this pattern. Change what you think about when you fantasize about having sex with your partner. Visualize: Change the picture in your visual representational system in your mind's eye to one that shows you happy, magnetic, excited and euphoric. Brain chemistry changes to make it so.

Kinesthetic: Change your internal feelings to those of satisfaction, similar to the feelings you have when you masturbate. Or remember a satisfying sexual experience, and bring those feelings of satisfaction to mind every time you think about having sex. Experience multi-sensory aspects of your vision.

Auditory:  Notice how you have been talking to yourself and how your self talk may have been sabotaging your pleasure. Change your inner voice to one that says, "I am desirable, I love sex, I deserve sex," or whatever feels right for you. Even a simple phrase like, "I enjoy sex, and I trust my body to perform beautifully" will begin to change the way your subconscious anticipates the sexual encounter.

Now, every time you think about having sex with your partner, see, feel , and hear these things. While you are relaxed with your eyes closed, create as vividly as possible your outrageously pleasurable experience, and then add an inner voice, and the kinesthetic (the way you feel physically) and the emotions that are there when you are enjoying sex.

Bring your quantum mindful awareness into the present moment. Be fully present and aware of your deepest psychophysical nature. You are an expression of nature in action. You are the fruit of evolution engaging in a primordial act of creation in each and every moment.

Several hypnotic inductions are conducive to bedroom hypnosis, such as the Direct Gaze, Candle-flame gazing, stroking, hand passes, Temple trance, rhythmic beating and breathing.  Trance-inducing music and incense are useful tools. Bells or tone bars can deepen your state.

Imagining your sanctuary, safe place, power place, or an astral temple can add an additional dimension of confidence, freedom and imagery.  Images will arise spontaneously. What is important to know about hypnosis is that positive expectations tend to be manifested.  Ultimately, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis; you give yourself permission to suspend rational disbelief and go along with it.

Exploring psychophysical sensations through hypnosis can amplify the experience to delightful natural highs.  The energies of the subtle body, such as the chakras, nadis, or chi can become more tangible, through visualization and kinesthetic experience.  Subtle sounds may be heard.

Euphoric recall or pleasant memories of former experiences may bootstrap arousal into an ever-escalating process.  Likewise, it can help us to let go of the past and any negative associations.  Hyp-Know-Sex can also help us synchronize alpha and theta brainwaves with our partner to produce a new level of harmonious resonance and spiritual penetration into the deep nature of our existence.

We can simply induce trance in a regular conversation, even when meeting someone for the first time.  It all depends on rapport and sensory acuity.  The primary NLP skills involved include Mirroring & Matching and Pacing & Leading.  Sensory acuity means being sensitive to body language and cues from the other person.   Subtle signs include pupil dilation and changes in pore size and skin flushing. "PAY ATTENTION!!" allow your attention to be FULLY focused on the person with whom you're engaged.

The only exception to that is you must have a clear outcome for your experimental application.  Let's keep in mind that trance is a natural and altered state.  We each experience a variety of natural and altered states every day. Sleeping is an altered state from driving, enjoying a conversation with a friend is an altered state from eating so ANY change in state can be a trance.... so consider what type of trance you want to induce.

So, what do you want to accomplish from the conversational trance? If all you want is the person to be confused and glassy eyed you can probably do it but it's better to have an outcome you can more easily measure. Do you want them to smile, laugh, call their mother, feel good about their job, change the oil in their car, or find you irresistibly attractive?  Having Rapport, Sensory Acuity and your Outcome here is JUST ONE conversational hypnosis technique.

Have several different responses available depending on how they have unconsciously responded. For example, say something like "Yeah! That's good!" and make sure your face and eyes light up as you say it. If it's close but not on the mark say "Gooooood." Less intense feedback rewards work for responses that are still on track but not with full intensity. If the person doesn't give the unconscious response at all then BREAK EYE CONTACT and shrug while shaking your head and say " Yeah, well.... That's close.... Ok....". Let the tonality sound less than completely satisfied but don't over do this one.

Of course, you have to calibrate your response depending on what the subject does. To do this well make sure the other is exposed to all the degrees of your response spectrum so that s/he can have a response from you to anticipate and a response to avoid.

If you want to do this as an exercise with a friend try this:  With two people, Person A and Person B pick an outcome. Person B talks about his/her experience or difficulty with the outcome. Person A responds with various gradients of responses depending on how close person B is to the outcome. ALWAYS MAINTAIN RAPPORT.

Rapport is the ability to bond instantly with others. Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another.  It is experiencing the world through the same portal as the person you're communicating with.  Rapport doesn't require understanding.  Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. In rapport like attracts like.  Rapport reverses the axiom that opposites attract.

When the initial challenge of opposite attraction wears off, we're left with someone who thinks, acts and behaves unlike what we consider the norm.  Consequently, that means someone who will mostly be out of sync or rapport with us.  Look no further for the cause of broken relationships.

If you are involved with someone and a good part of the time you don't understand each other, you are out of rapport.  And if you are out of rapport, the chances of your relationship surviving are slim to none.  In fact, the duration of your relationship may be a testament to your persistence and grim intention.  If you happen to fall in love with a person with whom you have no rapport, you are in a no-win situation, destined for failure.

If you want to love someone who see things differently, or you want to sell yourself or your ideas to those whose maps of the territory are not in alignment with yours, you will have to do something you never consciously did before.  That is, create rapport with them by being like them.  People have rapport with others because of the reflection of themselves they perceive.

When we "fit" well with someone we are more at ease than with someone who is incongruent with us.  We must relearn our communications strategies so that we relate to others in a manner that fits their map of the world.  That is what rapport is all about, (Brooks, 1989).  Rapport is the foundation of successful, unencumbered communication.  It is essential to being an understanding and empathetic partner and an exciting and satisfying lover.

Emotional Plane - Empathy and Interbeing (Water):

Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective.  Empathy needs a face!  This concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy understood as a unique kind of intentionality, in sex magick known as True Will.   Tantra is rooted in the desire for deep communion with Universe, but in an evolutionary rather than regressive manner.  In Tantra, we don't fall in love, but rise in love, through mutual interpenetration.

Consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded on empthy -- our empathic cognition of others and their empathic perception of us. Empathy is evolved biological capacity. Gestures and tones and sight of the other are recognizable to the infant.

We learn and evolve by emulating, imitating, by mirroring.  The mind isn't in the head, but the whole body. Mirror neurons are the biological correlate. Our primordial sensory self-image helps us make the rudimentary distinction between self and non-self.  Pre-verbal communication is through gestures and action.  The face is an expression of a self available for others.

Human empathy is inherently developmental; we learn it in infancy in the CORE DYAD, coupled dynamics.  It opens us to pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity -- shared virtualities.  In tantra, we share one dynamic pattern of neural-somatic activity.  Empathy is essentially a "mimicking" of one person's emotional state by another.  Our awareness of ourselves as embodied individuals embedded in the world depends on empathy, in particular our empathic grasp of the Other's empathic grasp of oneself.

VIRTUAL TANTRA reintroduces the safety, nurturing and fulfillment of the original Core Dyad, and allows us to return to the blissful "garden" which we inhabited prior to our sense of separation.  Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other.  It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading.

To be empathic implies intersubjective openness.  This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop.  We experience another person as a unfied whole through empathy. The more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified.  We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.

This downward causation of spiritual experience, or incarnating energy works from global-to-local and is the basis of our personalized transcendent experience.  It is the alchemical discovery of the Godhead in matter, through the union of opposites.  It heals our cultural mind/body split in a unified experience of shared embodied minds.  From birth our senses are linked to each other by an intra- and inter-personal body schema, or love map, which suggests the possibilities of action at the supramodal level -- cosmic consciousness.

The mind is not embodied in our head, but in our whole organism is embedded in its environment to the subatomic level.  Our moods and behavior effect and condition one another. This embodiment is an emergent and self-organizig process that spans and interconnects the brain, the body, the environment, and in tantra, another special person. Tandem interpersonal coordination erupts when both respond with complimentary intensity.

The tantric experience thus emerges through the common intentionality and dynamic co-determination of self and other.  Self-other co-determination and co-creation is the foundation of tantra.  Even seeing is a way of acting -- a visually guided exploration of the world leading toward the next phase in the flowing process.

Inner representations also generate experiences which can guide us and show us a Way. One action leads fluidly and spontaneously to the next. Even the gaps between are fraught with electromagnetic tension and pregnant with the potential meaning of felt sense.

Empathy in tantra occurs through the immediate 'pairing' or 'coupling' of the bodies of self and other in mutual interaction.  Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies of self and other in embodied action.  We participate consciously in the tantric process at the level of intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation and participation mystique.

The empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation has been called 'sensual empathy' or 'sensing in.'  It is a natural ability in all great lovers.  The wider one's ability to sense-in pleasure, the greater become the number of possibilities for fulfillment.

Facial expression of feelings and emotions are paradigms of some aspects of empathy.  We all inherently understand them.  Interwoven with this sensual empathy is the experience of the Other animated by the feelings of life.  It is through sharing the sensory dimension of these feelings, our fields of sensation, that we find common ground and begin to merge.  The deeper this experience, the greater the degree of merging.  When the common ground is the primordial ground state -- the Void -- lovers merge in cosmic consciousness.

Another ingredient of empathy is the experience of the Other as another center of orientation in space, in the world.  Our experience of space and sense of self-identity are tied together, existentially and in the brain.  We all live at the center or "zero-point" of our orientation -- always "here," present.  'Here' and 'there' emerge from identification with body-space.  Others are perceived as 'there' in relation to 'here.'  We perceive also that Others have their own 'here' in relation to we stand 'there.'

In tantra, through proximity, prolonged arousal, shared core experience, identification, participation mystique, etc. a melting of these personal boundaries takes place.  This is surrender – to the other, to flow, to cosmos. In the intersubjective field there is no one single zero-point or bodily center of orientation.  Or alternately, the intersubjective openness of consciousness and empathy are the preconditions for our shared experience of inhabiting a common intersubjective, spatial world -- a co-created virtual reality.

Empathy provides a viewpoint in which one's center of orientation becomes one among others.  The new, more universal zero-point is a new spatial perspective which contains one's zero-point as simply one spatial point among many others.  Literally, no matter how we turn in our bodies, we are always 'here,' but we can also evolve toward a non-local perception of our embedded nature in Nature and Cosmos.

In ecstatic states we can experience the sensations of our atomic and subatomic selves, dissolving into mystic union with the universe through the most fundamental essence of our being – non-being. It is through empathy as the experience of oneself as an Other, for the alter-ego that we gain a viewpoint of our own embodied being beyond the first-person singular.

Reciprocal or Reiterated empathy is a self-reflexive, mirroring process. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective.  Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathetic experience of me.  I experience myself as recognizably conscious from your perspective, the perspective of Other, and the feedback loop is closed.  One's sense of self-identity, even at the most  fundamental level of embodied agency is inseparable from recognition by another -- and grasping that recognition empathetically.

Empathy -- like imagination, recollection, and reflection -- can be described as a 'self-displacing' or 'self-othering' act.  It involves a displacement or fission between my empathizing self and the empathized Other; recollection between my present recollecting self and my past recollected self.  It is an imaginal process between myself imagining the Other's viewpoint of my self imagining.  It is a house of mirrors of myself reflecting between my reflecting self and the experiences I reflect upon.

These spontaneous self-displacing experiences indicate that the ego is structured or inhabited by many 'inner splittings' or 'inner openings,' openings that intrinsically involve otherness or alterity.  Thus, we experience our self as a complex interaction of sub-personalities with different agendas.

This inner openness to differing points of view manifests the open intersubjectivity of consciousness.  It is embodied in the feeling of being led by the Other's experience.  This certainly comes into play in tantric sex as lovers become synchronized to one another at all levels and are virtually telepathic.

Emotions are our value feelings.  We experience emotion only in regard to that which matters.  Emotions mark importance, meaning.  It is emotion or value feeling that makes one experientially aware of one's personal self, the depths of the 'I' from which emotions arise. Emotions, as value feelings, make possible the evaluation of oneself and the world.  Emotions anchor us to the here and now.  The ability to perceive how a situation affects the well being of all and react appropriately, meaningfully is the basic emotional faculty of empathy and the basis of morality.  Values transcend personal concerns.

The embodied mind and the lived body are NOT two different entities, or belong to two different orders of reality.  Rather, they are two aspects of one single spatiotemporal individual.  The alchemists called this unification of spirit/soul and body, the unus mundus -- or One World.  It emerges through empathy as a non-egocentric, self-transcendent mode of consciousness, we can call "interbeing."  Compassion is the heart of interbeing, including considering the suffering of others as one's own.

Just this intersubjective and empathic openness is the pathway of self-transcendence of the world's spiritual wisdom traditions, including tantra.  In Transcendent Mode the locus of concern is nowhere or outside of spacetime. Concern centers on the infinite and eternal -- the supreme value.  Therefore, the response evoked is one of the deepest mindful emotion, forming one body with the Universe.  In tantra, we ultimately transcend even the concepts of existence and nonexistence, finding our essential nature -- the fathomless wellspring of intuitive wisdom, compassion and power.