Venus and Her Lover

by Becca Tzigany

  Nepal had bestowed much upon us during our visit, and bowing gratefully, I stepped outside the shrine. There was a small pool of water in the trees, and I could hear it tinkling down the hill in a rivulet. A map appeared in my mind, and I knew then what I had to do to conclude my ceremony. Rummaging in my bag, I pulled out a little bottle of water I had brought with me from New Mexico... from the Río Pueblo de Taos, which flowed down the mountains from Blue Lake, the sacred place of emergence of the Pueblo people.

  “James and I are bringing Venus and Her Lover to you, Mother India. Please receive us,” I asked, holding the bottle at heart level as I faced south. Then, pouring it into the pool, I sent our watery ambassador on its way, down the mountain into the Hunumante Stream, where it would be fed by springs, and on to the Bagmati River, past Hindu and Buddhist temples where the river was praised for its holiness, and yet still received untreated sewage and garbage and runoff from deforested land, then farther south through the Chobar Gorge cutting through the Lesser Himalaya to reach the plains of India, and the grand river, the Ganges.

  India lay before us now, and with the blessings of Shiva, here in his Himalayan abode, we were on our way.

  AT THE FEET OF THE GURU

  Given the title, this chapter should go something like this: James and I spent months traveling through India until finally, one day, while we were hiking through the Himalayas, we came upon a cave in a mountainside. Attracted by the scent of sandalwood incense that emanated from the dark space, we peered inside. To our surprise, there in a lotus posture sat a white-bearded man, dressed in crumpled white robes, surrounded by flickering candles. Opening his eyes, he said to us in a melodic voice, “Come, my children. I know what it is you seek. Come and sit here at my feet and I will tell you the secrets of the Universe.”

  Then I could proceed to reveal those secrets to you, dear reader, making you so happy you had stuck with this book all the way to here. Of course, this would not be a very Tantric story then, for it would rob you of any toil or devotion incumbent upon you discovering the ultimate truths of your existence in your own body, in your own time.

  Nonetheless, in our wanderings through India, James and I did meet various gurus, and they revealed certain truths to us because of – and sometimes in spite of – their guru natures. We were paying attention because India had represented to us the final chapters of Venus and Her Lover; revelations about the fifth element, aether; and the ultimate pilgrimage of our eleven-year odyssey.

  But to tell this story properly, I must back up in time, to 1991, and to a pyramid by the sea on a tropical island...

  Shaktipat

  Everything can come your way if you let it.

  All possibilities flourish within the quantum void we call our universe. Einstein knew this,

  Buddha and Jesus knew this. You know it.

  ~ Magenta Pixie

  When I lived in Puerto Rico with Will and our three-year-old son Alex – while James was off on his global artistic odyssey, long before we ever looked at one another in a romantic way – I was honing my priestess talents in the wooden pyramid underneath two stately old mango trees. Our little spiritual community always gathered to mark the wheel of the year. So it was one winter solstice afternoon in 1991 that over 50 of us sat in meditation, focused on inner peace and world peace. We concluded by chanting Om. As people filed out of the pyramid to prepare the potluck meal at the beach, a short man with black hair, a beard, and dark brown eyes approached me. I had never seen him before. A friend introduced us, and I learned he was Shashi, a Hindu Brahmin, who was passing through Puerto Rico for three days, and so “naturally” he had turned up at our peace vigil.

  “Very nice ceremony,” the short Indian man told me.

  “Thank you,” I said, apparently interrupting him, so he continued.

  “But your practice is sloppy.”

  I took a breath and looked at this man. His light brown skin might become much darker, I thought, if he spent time in the sun. He had the bearing of someone who spent time indoors. His dark beard was neatly trimmed, framing a small mouth with full lips, on the verge of a smile. His slightly protruding eyes, I now saw, were not his alone; he seemed to be looking at me with such depth, I felt that a whole line of people was peering into me.

  “Sloppy practice, OK,” I ventured. “Tell me more.”

  “You come from a family that did not actually comprehend who you were. Your sisters – sisters, isn’t it? – thought they saw reflections of themselves in you, but you did not fit in with any normal picture. So you have tried to fit into it, but that is actually not possible for you. You are a great soul, and you have a great destiny. When are you going to tend to it?”

  I realized I was holding my breath and exhaled. “How do you know all this about me?” I asked.

  Leaning toward me as if to whisper a secret, but never taking his eyes off of mine, he said, “My dear, it is written all over you.”

  “Well, I don’t know about the great destiny part. I mean, I’m just doing what I can here...” I began, but his gaze stopped me, making me realize for the first time that I was making excuses, fending off any intimation of my magnificence. It was just a flash of a realization, like a pelican’s sudden plummet for a fish, but one that would circle back around later when I began posing questions as to why I was enduring Will’s alcoholic behavior, why I would want to martyr myself in relationship for the sake of my son, why I would deflect the title of High Priestess, why I was peddling handicrafts because my dream of being a writer was just that... a dream. All those questions would come much later; at this moment, the fish got away.

  “You need to devote more attention to your practice,” Shashi said.

  “OK, how would I go about doing that?” I asked.

  His tidy smirk stretched a little farther into a smile. “I can teach you.”

  That is how we began. Shashi became my teacher, and I agreed to be his student. I was not a Hindu but I did not mind learning the tradition so associated with yoga. Shashi was from a Brahmin family. In the old caste system of India, the Brahmins were the priest class, the highest rung on the social ladder. According to a Vedic creation myth, purusha (Primordial Man) was dismembered to make creation: from his feet came the women, slave class, and Shudras (agriculturalists); from his thighs, the Vaishyas (merchants); from his arms, the Kshatriyas or Rajputs (warriors, rulers); from his head the sky; from his eye the sun; and from his mouth, the priestly Brahmins. And what do you know? – the higher up the castes, the lighter-skinned were the people in them. Millennia ago, the Brahmins were crucial in Vedic culture, for they alone knew the proper ceremonies through which to contact the gods. They orally passed the ancient wisdom of the rishis – the original “seers” of the Vedas (texts which would later be written down and become the foundation of the Hindu religion) – from generation to generation for at least 5000 years. Next to paganism, Hinduism was the oldest spiritual system on Earth, and that longevity is due to the Brahminical tradition.

  Shashi’s family was part of that tradition, and when he became a teenager, he had agreed to study the esoteric arts. Now in his late 20’s, he was already counseling political and business people through astrology and other methods. He and I set a time to meet in the pyramid, when he proceeded to teach me chanting and breathing. He gave me a small engraved metal square to look at when I chanted: a shri yantra.

  “How long do I practice this?” I asked him.

  “When you’re ready, I will come again,” he said.

  Finished with his short stop in Puerto Rico, he departed, and I began my daily trips to the pyramid to practice my chanting. Inside, under the protective arms of the mango trees, I would light candles and incense, and chant the Sanskrit words he had taught me, casting my eyes upon the shri yantra until they closed and I ended up in meditation. Sometimes the image of Shashi’s dark brown eyes, with their unblinking penetration, emerge
d from the mists of my mind.

  After about six months, our mutual friend dropped by with a message: Shashi was coming through Puerto Rico again, and I should be ready. He arrived, we went to the pyramid, and he said, “Show me your practice.” I breathed and chanted. He made a few adjustments, gave me new mantras, and told me to keep practicing.

  “For how long?” I inquired.

  “When the time is right, I will come again,” he said.

  And sure enough, about nine months later, he reappeared, I ran through my chanting with him coaching me, and then he said, “Come now, sit on my lap.”

  Startled, I glared at him sitting cross-legged on the floor of the pyramid. Oh no, I moaned internally, so it comes to this! A seduction? My Venusian qualities had attracted this dynamic before, but when I checked in with my feelings, it surprised me that I did not detect lechery. Deciding that it was safe, I cautiously sat down. He guided my legs so they met behind his back. Likewise, our arms held one another. Years later I would learn this position was called a yab-yum. Instructing me to breathe in his out-breath, as he did mine, we began breathing, looking into each other’s eyes. Again there was the feeling of the eyes of many other souls, somehow telescoping through his, and boring into me. It was so intense that I had to close my eyes. A gentle undulation moved through our bodies that – to my shock – felt sexual in my groin. But I kept breathing in and out, breathing, breathing. I had the sensation of a feather touch at my chakras, particularly the heart and the third eye. When I felt Shashi’s hand on the top of my head, a surge of energy sloshed up through me, as if I were a thermos being filled with hot soup, until it reached the top and I was completely full. Then my body was no longer there, and I was just a sea of energy, a warm ocean swirling with life. I knew my body rested heavily on a solid floor but it was also absolutely porous with the Universe around me.

  Breathing, breathing... the energy subsided. Still sitting in Shashi’s lap, I opened my eyes, and he was smiling. A breeze redolent with the sweet odor of crushed mangoes – fruit fallen off the tree – wafted in, and I could hear the faint buzz of bees and flies feasting on the yellow flesh outside the pyramid windows. “You have done very well. Excellent, actually,” Shashi pronounced. “May your practice serve you well in your life. Now you can take me to the airport.”

  On the drive to the nearest city, Mayagüez, we did not speak much – words felt superfluous to the deep communion we felt. I put him on the plane and did not see him again for 15 years.

  What had happened there in the pyramid? It was only after James and I had been working on Venus and Her Lover for several years, requiring the study of Tantric traditions, that it hit me: Shashi had given me a Tantric initiation. Shaktipat is a spiritual transmission, from guru to disciple, that awakens the kundalini and jumpstarts his or her process toward moksha (liberation). In my innocence and naïveté, I had called in a guide to set me upon the path of fulfilling my destiny as a Tantrika. Even the mandala he had given me, the shri yantra, was a symbol used in Hindu Tantra. Shashi had shown up at that homemade temple by the sea, setting a force in motion that would completely redefine my life.

  Delhi: Entering Guruland

  In a way, I agreed to do Venus and Her Lover that morning in the pyramid. Look where it had brought me! By winter solstice 2008, exactly 17 years after first meeting, Shashi, James, and I were now guests at his apartment in Delhi. Shashi welcomed us warmly, expecting us to stay with him for months, but accepted it when we explained we had more to experience of India than Delhi. His hair and beard were now salt and pepper colored, and he looked even more like he spent too much time indoors. He had never married, and devoted himself unreservedly to his business and spiritual practices.

  We had been with him about a week when Shashi sat us down to have a serious conversation about Venus and Her Lover.

  “This is a great book! It will help many people,” he declared. “But you must do two things. First, you must take out the paintings of the Hindu gods and goddesses. There are Hindu fundamentalists who will be offended how you show the gods and goddesses naked... and sexual.”

  “But they are shown that way traditionally,” I argued.

  “It is true. But this is now and the norms of the society now do not accept it. Sex is something private, and it’s not something people accept in their gods and goddesses.”

  “But everything is sexual, Shashi. You know that. The whole Universe is the union of opposites,” I explained.

  “Yes, you are right. You are absolutely right. Sex is a natural part of life. But people here will not accept it.” He leaned toward us and drilled us with his brown eyes. “Listen, people here will kill you for it. I cannot protect you. There are fanatic people here.”

  James interrupted. “Shashi, that is exactly why this work is needed. Because there are people who would kill us for portraying love. Listen, if we take out what is offensive to people, we will have no project, no books! There are Christians who will be offended, and Buddhists who will be offended... “

  “You must take out those paintings for your book to be published!” he insisted.

  “Shashi, this book is not for the people who will be offended. They have no reason to ever see it. It is for the people who are already waking up to their own natures and the nature of the Universe,” James asserted.

  Like the immovable mountain, Shashi could not accept our position. So I changed the subject. “Shashi, you said there are two things we must do for Venus and Her Lover. What is the other thing?”

  Tilting his head from side to side as if to dispense with the previous topic and begin a new one, he finally asked, “Where is Kama Dev in your book?”

  “Kama Dev?” James asked.

  “Kama Deva – the god of sex, of love, of the honey of life. Kama Dev holds the secrets to the deep joy of life, the secrets of sex. Without his help, you will not complete your book.”

  “I’ve finished the paintings,” James stated with finality.

  “But yes, we’re open to knowing about him,” I hurriedly added, not wanting to quash both his suggestions outright.

  Subsequently Shashi provided me with a mantra through which to invoke this Hindu god of love and sexuality. I would learn that he was depicted much like Cupid: a handsome young man with a bow of sugarcane, string of honeybees, and arrows decorated with sweet-smelling flowers. He was associated also with Krishna. While in India, I did ask for his help. Shashi’s first advice, however, we could not follow. James and I would not remove characters from Venus and Her Lover in the name of sexual repression.

  Running a business supporting development projects, Shashi spent long days at the office. His days included a parade of appointments – some business, some spiritual. He often sat cross-legged and barefoot in his chair to receive them. Before coming to India, I had asked in meditation for a guru, if it was meant to be. Receiving guidance from a guru was an Indian tradition and a particularly Tantric requirement, after all, and I wanted to be open to learning from Shashi, or any spiritual master willing to share his or her wisdom. Having blatantly exceeded the bounds of Hindu propriety, however, I was not receptive to Shashi’s advice, so he could do nothing but let me go my own way, as if I were a headstrong kindergartner.

  Nonetheless, in the company of Shashi, I met the spiritual teachers that came to pay their respects. A Sufi man offered me a blessing, though he would not look me in the eye. We spent one morning with an older Hindu man named Guruji who spoke no English (and we no Hindi); he kept jovially bobbing his head at James and me. At the shrine of a Muslim saint, even though I was not fully covered, the worshippers welcomed us, giving James a hand getting up and down, and sending us off with presents. It was only with a Sikh man, however, that I connected on a spiritual level. Breaking Shashi’s warning for me to not talk about our work, I had explained Venus and Her Lover to this older man in a turban, even showing him some images. He listened a lon
g time, nodding, and finally saying to me, “You are very brave. It is all true what you say. The feeling of sexual passion – maybe you experience it only once in your life, but you never forget it — because you do feel like you are in union with God.” When he left, he bowed, and made a gesture of reverence to me, as I did to him.

  Before leaving Delhi, Shashi wanted to stoke my energy, to give me strength to finish our work. Recognizing how depleted I was from the previous months of moving out of Taos, he had me stand before him. His eyes were deep pools of brown – how well I remembered those eyes that would appear through my eyelids in my meditations in the pyramid! Waving his hands around my aura, he blew his breath toward me.

  Then he had me sit yab-yum in his lap and hug him tightly. We breathed together. Tingly energy moved along my spine. In spite of the horn-honking, polluted atmosphere of Delhi, I did feel my energy re-balancing. In addition, I felt gratitude to this man who had initiated me on a path that now led into a swamp of sexual Shadows and dangerous conclusions... tangled roots, perilous currents, and apparitions that seeped up from the muck of frustrated human desire... to reveal a shimmering new reality. It was a path he had repudiated – both physically and philosophically – and yet he was willing to offer blessings as James and I blazed a trail into territory he himself dare not enter.