The early Taoist texts did not call it Tantra. But if it walks like a duck... Ramprasad does not give the practice he praises so highly a name either. Only Vatsyayana, who wrote for a different, and more corrupt culture. I dont recall that he specified a color either.
But the tradition was subject to the same kind of drivel that was laid on the Christian message by the Catholic church, a complex system with a myriad of special chants to make the adepts think they knew something. If you consider the ornimation of Hindu and Catholic sacred spaces you have a clue.
The earliest ashrams ever found are in the Kara Kum, abandoned 4000 years ago when the grassland dried up, probably exacerbated by over grazing. But at Gonur and Togoluk we have the large meditation hall and the set of individual monk cells. But also, a sacred apocathery. All of it in plain white plaster.
Musta been one helluva protection spell. Thru all that time, 4000 years, it lay out there in the desert, and nobody desecrated the sacred spaces. Desert sand accumulated on the roofs and they caved in, but otherwise everything totally intact, no grafitti.
And in the apocathery, next to the sacred workbench altar, just as Saint Ramprasad alludes to, bowls for sacred potions, completely intact with their dessicated, but recognizable contents: cannibis, ephedra, opium.
Satellite radar identified the compressed ground of ancient trade routes in central Asia. They radiated out from a central point in the Kara Kum, so they went there and found an abandoned city. Which predated the Pyramids. *This*, not India, is where the vedic tradition got going. RG Wasson, "Persephone's Quest" researched the source of "Soma" the famous Vedic potion, and found that Ugarit shamen were still using it. He surmised that along with the East/West Silk Road, there was another North/South Soma Road from Siberia all the way to the Indus.
He didnt know anything about these which were not discovered until long after he published. The ashrams are along one of the routes to India. The most reliable path to spiritual enlightenment is the right sacred potion at the right sacred time in the right sacred space with the right sacred partner. Not that there are not other ways, but this works most reliably for most people in the shortest time. Neither they, nor the Taoists, were into long periods of withdrawl from society for the sake of spiritual enlightenment, but rather to deliver it as quickly and reliably as possible so that the initiates could bring it back with them into their daily lives with the people they cared about.
BTW: *this* is the time of year in the temperate zone to go into the woods to look for Amanita Muscaria. Soon as you find it, slice down thru the cap and stem to start it drying *immediately*. Otherwise fly eggs will hatch out and turn it to mush. As it dries there are chemical changes that detoxify it. The mushroom books which warn people dont know about this, but the Ugarit shamen did. When dry, slather it with reindeer tallow. If you dont have that, you can use butter, or like the Brahmins, ghee.
Start with 1 gram of dried shroom for every 25 lb of body weight. A. Muscaria cannot be grown commercially, only found in the wild. It varies in strength, and a Shakti will experiment with any given batch before hand to know how much to use, and then make an assessment of the initiate; some psyches need more of a kick to get them up on the astral plane.
But its not like a recreational drug. It comes on slowly over the course of an hour or so, and works really well with food. Vatsyayana mentions some delicacies, but Soma has an effect on all mucosa, not just vaginal tissues, so the salivary glands are also remarkably responsive. There's no problem after an hour of upping the dose if need be.
Just make sure to avoid alcohol the day before, and during ritual. the fatty acids in butter, lard, ghee, tallow, or whatever, neutralize the fatty alkaloids in A. Muscaria that can cause gastric distress. Alcohol washes the protective coating off the intestinal walls, and can make a Christian who's had a beer that day so sick he'll think he's going to meet Jesus. Another reason they thot it was poison.
Do not attempt ritual in a private personal space. The associations that come with that space, and the relationships with the people that live in it, will distract from getting on the astral plane. A tent in the woods would work just fine. A church would too if the congregation didnt object. But its not a spectator event for novices.
There are a lotta different sacred potions that work, but the archeological evidence is that Aryans have used Soma for at least 7000 years. Native Americans mite do better with peyote, mescaline, pscilocybin, or whatever is in their shamantic tradition. Wasson says that Ugarit shamen think maybe 1 in 10,000 is allergic, but if so, its not likely only A. Muscaria, but all shrooms. I have always given initiates a dime size piece to eat at least a few days before a ritual to make sure they are not allergic.
I expect that opium, ephedra and cannibis could be combined to make a suitable potion, but Soma is *legal*. If you cant find the shrooms in the woods, you can order them online. I've only used Soma on the new or full moon; it takes a fortnite to make sure your liver has processed all the compounds. Addictive use would produce liver failure. There never have been any Soma addicts. And by itself, is quite useful to facilitate meditation, altered states of consciousness, and the astral planes.
The only diff with tantra, is that you go there *with* someone. This dramatically reduces the fear that some people have of the journey. You dont worry about being left out there. All that business that Vatsyayana gives about chakrahs is for the benefit of young men, to give them something complex to distract the conscious mind to hopefully keep them from orgasm too soon. An experienced Shakti would be far more able to handle that problem no matter what the young man thinks he knows.
http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol ... _bloom.php makes mention of a collaborative effort by the Brits and Chinese to put jpgs of 100,000 artifacts and documents that have been found in the deserts of Central Asia, which is but a small part of what has been found, most of which has not been even looked at, much less translated. We can expect that as this work progresses, we will hear about more Vedic texts that relate to this. Most of it was written by a female hand.
Goddess made sex for company.
