A few years ago, Sadhguru took a group of meditators to the majestic Mount Kailash in Tibet, where he revealed the origins of Tibetan Buddhism and its roots in tantra. He goes on to explain how tantra was systematically wiped out in India by foreign invaders.
Questioner: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. Does past life regression help in working out karma?
Sadhguru: What is generally being done as “past life regression” is essentially a psychological process. You do not touch past lives that way. Even otherwise, your mind has so many layers that you never get to access. Your mind has so much capability that is not really being used. A person with dissociative identity disorder for example is probably using their mental capacity far more than a so-called normal person.
The mind is so complex that it can create different levels of experience. For example, you saw me now; just using me as a subject, you can write a thousand pages if you want. Human beings have that capability. Some have developed it, some have not, but it is there in every human being.
If I just give you one thought, you can build a whole life. This is the art of tantra. Tantra means using the mind in such a way that you create everything in elaborate detail. The Shakti Chalana Kriya and other practices you are doing are very simple, but even to do them, you need to use your mind. If you do it every day, you train your mind in a certain way.
In the physical plain of life, mental alertness can do incredible things – it can create a world by itself. This body slowly got created; every cell, every detail within. A tremendous amount of attention has gone into it. If that attention becomes conscious, then you are aware. Otherwise, it is only mental alertness. Mental alertness can do many incredible things. In tantra, they used to work with mental attention to such a point that you can create a whole new world if you wish.
Kailash is known as the tantric mountain, and Tibet is known as the land of tantra. But tantra did not originate here. The first Gurus who brought the tantric process to Tibet were from India. The first teacher who came was Shantarakshita. He started the process to some extent, but he was more Buddhist than tantric. When he realized that his teaching did not really bring people away from their old occult practices into a spiritual process, he went in search of the right kind of teacher who could do it.
He found Padmashambhava as an eight-year-old boy, sitting on an island, with a diamond in one hand and a lotus in the other hand. There was a very mystical background to it. It may not have been an island as we know it but a different realm altogether. It is from this basis that Vajrayana Buddhism came, which is purely tantric. What you see as Tibetan Buddhism today are remnants of that. It is a socially convenient concoction of Buddhism and tantra.
Tantra by itself would have never found acceptance in society because tantrics are no-holds-barred people. Buddhism is very straight and clean. Padmashambhava, a very clever master, mixed tantra and Buddhism in the right proportions. Buddhism was just a camouflage. Tantra was the real thing that he brought in.
These were tantrics who wore the Buddhist uniform to find social acceptance. They did phenomenal things, which could have never been done with simple meditative processes of releasing you from suffering and those kinds of things. What was done in Tibet is so phenomenal. But from generation to generation, when the science died, the uniform remained. That is what you see today. It is not totally lost, but mostly it is lost.
Tantra means taking life back into the works. It all started in the Indian subcontinent, and is still active in some minimal way, but mostly got wiped out because people misunderstood it as something else. When invaders came in the 13th century, they began to extinguish anything that is tantra because it was considered as being against God as the only Creator. You cannot mess with creation – that was their idea.
Later on, when the British came, with their prudish Victorian ideas, they also stamped out tantra wherever they could. Very small remnants of it are left, and some modern authors are totally distorting it. Because of that, this absolutely fabulous dimension of life has gotten derailed completely.
But if you look at the work that was done here in the past, it is truly out of this world.
