The Tantric Third Eye

In recent ponderings of several experiences throughout my life it occurs to me that the third eye, or mind’s eye, the lotus, or whatever you want to call it, has many definitive faces and aspects. From everyday sensing of the deeper reality around us, to a fine tuned focus that leads to a break though, or epiphany, or revelation or whatever you want to call it, this epicenter of spiritual entanglement and meaning provides many functions to our senses. I have spent many meditations trying to access the same place that I had accessed in past meditations or experiences and have been unsuccessful. Every time I do reach that place, or feeling, or state, or whatever you want to call it, it seems the feeling always comes from a new place and takes me to a different state than the time before. Though the joyously liberating sense of, “this is exactly where I was before”, “this is who I really am” is always present, or perhaps there may be parts that are the same, overall each experience in that realm is always vastly different than the last.
Why is this? Perhaps it is because the layers, or access points, or types of third eye experiences actually correspond to many chakras and bodily process centers in the body (not to mention in the world at large!), meaning the third eye itself is a synthesizer of all these other centers. It seems to me that the third eye is meant to be used as the lens with which to view all energetic bodies, whether they are a friend’s emotions, warm sunlight on a windy day, a sick neighbor or your sacred lover’s intent when he or she looks deep into your soul.
I mention these ponderings, not because I believe I have the answers of the uses of the third eye in general, but because the particular issue that I do wish to discuss is the Tantric Third Eye, or the lower chakras as seen aligning with the higher chakras through the third eye. However, I do not want to confuse the reader into thinking I am talking about the third eye reached though psychointegrators, meditation, breathing techniques, drumming, yoga or near death experience- which perhaps align to other chakras as seen through the third eye? Instead, I want to discuss the opening of the third eye while the body is engaged in sexual intercourse. In the end, this is just semantics, as all these things (and so many more!) do activate the third eye which is a definitive center within itself and thereby allow a human much insight and inner recognition of the great questions and answers of the universe. Unlike many other methods of reaching the third eye, the tantric method always involves more than one person. Although the other methods may involve multiple people, they are also possible to practice alone. Although masturbation can access the third eye in the right circumstances, this is qualitatively different than the tantric third eye which requires the energies of more than one person to be accessed.
I recently spent three months celibate, with the intention of remaining so for the entire year. At the time I made this decision on December 31, 2008, I had not had a menstrual cycle for two months but was not pregnant. In October of 2008 I stopped taking birth control pills which I had been taking since puberty at the insistence of my mother and doctors to combat “PMS”, a made up disease which has been entirely misunderstood. I realized that coming off of birth control, which causes “fake” periods with no egg being released, may be a reason that I had not had a period. However, around October while sitting in front of the altar in my bedroom, I had the profound realization that it was time for me to “get to know” my male side in a deeper sense than I had paid attention to before. For so much time I had been looking for this male side in other people, and for the first time I realized he was inside of me, waiting to be integrated with the rest of my selves.
When I decided to abstain from intercourse and other sexual activities in December, it was mostly because sex had become routine and expected, and because my sex drive had always played such a dominant role in my decision making. Although I knew that sex was a tantric activity, I had never felt that I had really “gotten there” through tantric experience. I vowed that the next time I participated in intercourse, I would “get there.”
So, when I discovered that a dear friend of mine who was bursting with sexual energy, light and blessed with one of the most intricate and perceiving minds I knew had only had a single sexual experience in his entire life and had been under the influence of psychointegrators and at a music festival at the time, my mind was thoroughly blown. How could this beautiful man that literally drips sexual energy have only engaged in the act once? It was obvious to me that he very much desired to have more experiences, but refused to simply “hook up with a lot of girls” to satisfy this desire, as many are content to do. Of course, this challenge and opportunity quickly made me put my own tantric quest aside because I felt it was more important to help my dear friend expand his horizons than to hold to my narrow-minded, band-aid solution of celibacy.
Late one evening as we lay in my bed, I realized that the moment had arrived. I very much felt that I was sacrificing my own needs to find true enlightenment in my next sexual act to his desire for me and his need of deeper connection during intercourse than he had previously experienced. Not to be boastful, but because I feel that I am a walking encyclopedia of sexual practice, I felt like it was my duty to enlighten him. All I have ever really done is talk with people about sex and experiences and I have had plenty of variety in interesting experiences myself, so it was natural for me to feel this way. Oh, what a surprise was in store for me!
The act itself was relatively typical of most of my sexual encounters. On the outside, there seemed to be nothing unusual. I did notice that I was more “in the moment” than usual, and that I was not creating my own mental fantasies as I often did, instead satisfied and overjoyed by the act occurring. However, I have experienced this before, and was glad to be experiencing it again. It had been three months, after all. When I began to ride the wave to orgasm, however, everything about this sexual encounter began to change.
As a woman, I realize there are a variety of “places” that when stimulated, will bring me to orgasm. Orgasms from each of these places all have slightly different feelings and “textures” to them. I have had orgasms from clitoral stimulation and from stimulation of the perineum which are both “outer” orgasms. I have had orgasms from various spots from “within”, most notably through stimulation of the “g-spot” (whatever that is!) and stimulation of the area just in front of the cervix, not to mention through direct anal stimulation in all of its variety. Of course, as a woman, I perceive almost all orgasms as coming directly from my mind, with the myriad of possible “places” it offers, only slightly influenced by the site of stimulation. I have had orgasms that last a millisecond and are accompanied by a feeling of simply “being done” and I have had orgasms that last for 15-20 minutes and leave me wanting more, not to mention multiple orgasms that can seem to last forever, and a multitude of varieties in between. But until that day in March, I had never had an orgasm like I am about to describe.
The orgasm I had that day brought with it an intense vision. During the act of sex and during the orgasm, I was aware of the vision only in an odd, remote way. I was wholly in the moment, and the orgasm came and went in a very usual manner, physically speaking. However, the feeling and things that poured into my head changed my life. After the orgasm, I had to stop having sex though my partner had not reached climax. I was disoriented and confused. I realized later that this confusion was due to the fact that I was coming out of a deep vision, only to find myself locked back inside my own body.
I sobbed in my lover’s arms. I have never cried after sex before, though I have had some very powerful experiences. I did not just cry in his arms as a sad lady in a movie may do in her lover’s arms, which is always a comment on her sadness and sexual trauma. This was all together different. I was sobbing loudly, from the depths of my being. I remember standing up in my bed completely naked and looking down at him, asking him where we were. I remember asking him if we had just smoked a bunch of DMT, because the world seemed to be sliding back together as it did after an intense blast off session. I asked him if we were dreaming, and pinched us both, trying to confirm. I felt wild, untamed, naked in the deepest sense possible, and utterly confused. As I lay next to him, I began to recall what I had experienced, and it took me several days to fully recall what had occurred.
What I can piece together of what happened is as follows. The orgasm began, as usual, between my legs and in the lowest chakras. Instead of staying there, as it almost always did, the feeling of ecstasy rose through my body and into my head with lightning speed. I had been close to this feeling before, but this time it did not just stop in my head. The energy of my orgasm and the energy of the man beneath me all coalesced in my head and then began to spew forth from my third eye. I felt as if lavender/rainbow light was being pulled from my forehead like strings or tentacles. These tentacles shot out around me and my lover, enveloping us in a cocoon of woven light. It was not a solid enclosure, instead it had two definitive sides, a top and a bottom, like a round box with a lid. The colors and textures of the strings around each of our sides were slightly different, but woven from all the same energies, which were our combined energies. Then, just as I began to notice this cocoon around us, the cocoon burst open.
If we had been outside, I am positive that this bursting would have filled the entire tangible world around us all the way to the sky with those strings and tentacles of light. However, being in my bedroom as we were, the strings were limited by the walls in the room. As I looked around, my room seemed to be chaotically filled and covered with purple silly string of all sizes. The burst cocoon had splattered our love’s energy all over walls, ceiling and floor of my bedroom. There were rainbowed geometrical shapes of every form piled into one another and constantly moving and melding, blinking and reforming in and out of the strings that were around all of the edges. Saying I saw fractals seems to be too simple, though that is surely exactly what was going on.
When I fully recalled what I had seen, I laughed and continue to laugh when I think about how I had asked my lover if we had smoked DMT or if we were dreaming, because those are the only experiences I could compare the vision with at that moment. I think that my sobbing was definitely a reaction to bring myself back into my body and out of the odd trance I had been in. It was odd, because while under the influence of psychointegrators, or while dreaming, I have always very much “known” that I was in those particular states and experienced them fully in the moment and with full consciousness of what I was experiencing. However, this particular orgasm caused me to see a vision that I could absolutely not comprehend or be conscious of while experiencing it. I acted as if under a deep hypnosis or trance and while my body went through bodily emotions and I was able to communicate my befuddlement, another part of me was experiencing something so mysterious that my conscious mind could not yet comprehend it. It took me about 30 minutes after orgasm to bring whatever I had sent up through my body and out of me in spiderwebbed manifestations back inside of me and “come to.” Immediately my head was full of pieces of what I had experienced, exactly the way I usually remembered a specific dream upon waking. Once I had remembered it, it took weeks before I could fully verbalize it and once I had, and especially now that I have written it down, it seems more intangible and indescribable and the words feel more inadequate than ever.
What remains clear is that something inside of me and forced into manifestation by the sexual act I engaged in during that moment was able to bring me into a state through my third eye in which the air itself felt tangible, the boundaries of reality were dissolved away, and I felt both the inherent separation between “body” and “soul” and also the joy which is its unity in the here and now. I feel that what I once considered to be my “male” and “female” sides have blended very cohesively and though each inner identity is still intact and sacred, they are all now present in each moment, instead of seeming to “take turns”.
The human body is the most beautiful tool that I can imagine for experiencing the joys and sorrows of this world. At many times during my life I have felt that it was a cage. This perspective has for a while now seemed very hilarious and a little sad to me, because though I confess I have done great ill to my body in a myriad of ways in favor of focusing solely on my mind, I now realize it is the soul’s job to ensure that both work in harmonious union and therefore to their full potentials so that my human energy can be put to proper use in the greater workings and cohesion of the planetary, universal whole. I now question that feeling of “knowing” that I am under the influence of psychointegrators or that I am dreaming, and have decided it may be that exact limitation of “knowing” that is keeping me from “breaking through” during such experiences. It is the concept that those experiences are somehow different from “sober” or “waking” experiences that has kept me from allowing them to fully work their effect upon me.
I am humbled, amazed, grateful, overjoyed and most of all incredibly excited to see how this “sober”, “waking” experience will allow me to fully explore my own consciousness and open new doors. Already the effect has been mind numbing. My period started a few days later, half-way between the full and new moon, and that night I saw the most beautiful half-blood-moon in all of its fiery splendor as it hung luminously large and overpowering in the sky. I had known and commented to my lover after the orgasm that my period would start. The world of strings and shapes and colors continues to appear around me at almost random since this experience, and my memory itself seems like it is becoming patterned with these images. There was a time in my early life that I had stopped looking. Now I refuse to turn away, instead, I try to look closer, try to take more in, because the tangible nothingness full of everything really is right there, holding and connecting and beautifying us all. And maybe, just maybe, if I can have some effect upon the darkest spots in it, turning them to rainbowed light, I can change a lot more than just my self.