Based on a series of real classes hosted by a nonprofit temple in the Pacific Northwest," American Tantra," takes a modern American look at the ancient art of Tantra, using plain English and easily grasped metaphors. Students say it's a life-changing path and have pushed to get this method into print. Ten years of study and feedback from over 200 students helped shape this book, which includes every question asked in class. "American Tantra" is for Americans who know little of Vedic scriptures. It's a way of looking at traditional Eastern practices with American eyes. It's a little bit sexy, a little bit scientific. Along with older White and Red methods, there are new community based "Blue"methods for a unique American outlook. Exercises include balanced actions of both males and females, and instruction for same-sex couples. There are over a dozen hands-on exercises and related stories from students, plus extensive references for further study. All genders and sexual orientations will find this path welcoming. If you are interested in Sacred Sex or maximizing your body, mind, and patriotism at the same time, you will love this book.

Bhadriraju Krishnamurti (1928) is Professor and Head of the department of Linguistics at Osmania University, Hyderabad. He received a B.A. (Hons.) Degree (1948) in Telugu language and literature at Andhra University Waltair and an M.A. (1955) and Ph.D. (1957) in linguistics from the university of Pennsylvania U.S.A.

Tantra seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life and has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be.

Tantra: The Way of Action provides a complete guide to the Tantric path of liberation. Topics include esoteric physiology, Qabalism, right and left-hand Tantra, and arousal of the Kundalini serpent power. Following the spirit rather than the letter of the traditions, Francis King maintains that Tantric techniques are universal processes adaptable to Western culture and lifestyle.

A fascinating look at India’s remarkable impact on Western culture, this eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the mind-body methods of Yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape. What exploded in the 1960s, following the Beatles trip to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, actually began more than two hundred years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge--as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics--from Asia. The first translations of Hindu texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed India’s “science of consciousness” and wove it into the fabric of their lives. Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them. The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms. Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of India’s sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americans—and continue to do so every day. Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.”

In the West, the varied body of texts and traditions known as Tantra for more than two centuries has had the capacity to scandalize and shock. For European colonizers, Orientalist scholars and Christian missionaries of the Victorian era, Tantra was generally seen as the most degenerate and depraved example of the worst tendencies of the so-called 'Indian mind': a pathological mixture of sensuality and religion that prompted the decline of modern Hinduism. Yet for most contemporary New Age and popular writers, Tantra is celebrated as a much-needed affirmation of physical pleasure and sex: indeed as a 'cult of ecstasy' to counter the perceived hypocritical prudery of many Westerners. In recent years, Tantra has become the focus of a still larger cultural and political debate. In the eyes of many Hindus, much of the western literature on Tantra represents a form of neo-colonialism, which continues to portray India as an exotic, erotic, hyper-sexualized Orient. Which, then, is the 'real' Tantra? Focusing on one of the oldest and most important Tantric traditions, based in Assam, northeast India, Hugh B Urban shows that Tantra is less about optimal sexual pleasure than about harnessing the divine power of the goddess that flows alike through the cosmos, the human body and political society. In a fresh and vital contribution to the field, the author suggests that the 'real' meaning of Tantra lies in helping us rethink not just the history of Indian religions, but also our own modern obsessions with power, sex and the invidious legacies of cultural imperialism.

Human sexuality is a problematic thing. It gets us into trouble, breaks our hearts, involves us in painful compulsive relationships, even transmits deadly diseases. It would surely scare us off, if it were not for its siren call to higher forms of union and moments of bodily bliss. When examined more closely, however, and especially when we turn our gaze inward to see what sexual arousal is doing to our consciousness, we find we are in an altered state-a form of "erotic trance" that reveals dimensions of ourselves, our partner, and possibilities for human life that otherwise would not have been discovered. -- Procreative sex forms the foundation of the nuclear family and the glue that holds society together-what we might call the "horizontal" potential of sex. Tantra, however, is about its "vertical" dimension-about "tuning" our awareness to bring higher, spiritual realities into focus. It all begins by mastering our bodily reflexes. This first volume of Tantra and Erotic Trance deals with the preliminary stages of mastery and the transformations of consciousness that they make possible. The whole project is imagined as a ladder with its feet on the earth and its top leaning into Indra's heaven. Each rung represents a new level of awareness, a mastery of what just the rung below had appeared to us as a poorly understood gift.