Tantric Psychophysics: A Structural Map of Altered States and the Dynamics of Consciousness

Product Description

A bold synthesis of ancient sacred science, modern physics, and neuroscience designed to open access to higher consciousness

• Explores how esoteric teachings from India and Tibet offer specific methods for tuning and directing consciousness to reach higher stages of awareness

• Presents a wide-ranging collection of practical techniques, as well as numerous figures and diagrams, to facilitate navigation of altered states of consciousness and heightened mystical states

• Develops an integrated structural map of higher consciousness by viewing Tibetan and Indian Tantra through the work of Steiner, Gurdjieff, Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo Ghose, and quantum physicists Planck and Bohm

Throughout the millennia shamans, saints, and yogis have discovered how the brain-mind can be reprogrammed to become a powerful instrument facilitating access to higher states of consciousness. In particular, the written Tantric texts of India and Tibet describe, in extraordinarily precise detail, interior transformations of conscious energy along with numerous techniques for stimulating, modulating, and transforming consciousness to reach increasingly higher states and stages of awareness.

In this in-depth examination of esoteric Tantric practices, Shelli Renée Joye, Ph.D., presents a wide-ranging collection of psychophysical techniques integrating Tibetan Vajrayana and Patanjali’s Yoga to induce altered states of consciousness for the exploration of heightened mystical states. Sharing numerous figures and diagrams, she shows how these theories and techniques are not only fully supported by modern biophysics, brain science, and quantum physics but are also in line with the work of Rudolf Steiner, G. I. Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo Ghose, Max Planck, and David Bohm. The author also shares insights from her own personal practices for consciousness exploration, which include prayer, mantra, emptying the mind, psychedelics, yoga, and visualization of interior physiology.

Offering a structural map of the dynamics of consciousness, Joye reveals that one can develop new ways of tuning and directing consciousness to reach extraordinary modes of being and intense levels of lucid awareness, the requisites for the direct exploration of supersensible dimensions and sailing in the ocean of consciousness.

About the Author

Shelli Renée Joye, Ph.D., entered Rice University on a physics scholarship and graduated with a B.S. in electrical engineering. In 1970 she began studying psychonautics with John Lilly and contemplation with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She completed a master’s degree in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy and a doctorate in philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The author of several books, including
The Electromagnetic Brain, she lives in Viola, California.

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From Chapter 1. What is Tantric Psychophysics?

At first glance “Tantric Psychophysics” conjures up images of various erotic sexual poses so harshly condemned by early British missionaries to India. But the term itself has little to do with sex, other than in the eyes of the general public, where a simple internet search on “Tantra” yields the misleading view that Tantra is primarily about sex. The reaction of British colonials in India was one of shock and condemnation when confronted with innumerable carvings depicting explicit Tantric themes of ritual intercourse highlighting the union of universal male and female principles.

Yet Tantra as a Sanskrit word translates rather innocuously as “a loom, a weaving, an instrument or a system.” The connotation is that the subject is an inclusive source of knowledge derived from
direct human experience. It is a methodology developed as an instrument to retrieve an integrated knowledge that culminates in deep wisdom, a knowledge more immediate and comprehensive than that which might be obtained