Lilian Silburn (1908–1993)

I will come clean - I generally find South Asian spirituality obscurantist (not helped by its Sanskrit technical terminology) and tend to avoid it.

However, this book is a worthy addition to the library. It is scholarly and as clear as can be expected with the subject matter.

Silburn was Honorary Research Director at the French CNRS and has taken seriously her task of comprehensively studying the texts that are available and works hard to explain what we have to hand.

Many modern readers will show more be most interested in what the texts have to say about the esoteric sexual practice of tantra in the third part and the book certainly has insights.

Sexual transgression was still transgression in early medieval Vedic India so the obscurity of some practices will remain a secret forever unless a new hidden cache of texts is found.

Nevertheless, what we have here is a recognition of the transcendental orgasmic response identified as a very real phenomenon by Dr. Jenny Wade and others and an attempt to explain it along traditional lines.

My own view is that the spiritual language of universal consciousness is sincere obfuscation - the sort that we are used to hearing from drug-happy Californians - but there is still something to learn here.

The egalitarian attitude between men and women is refreshing but the real interest lies in the awareness of sexual union and transgressive behaviour as in themselves potentially personally transformative.

There is a certain gnostic pessimism in the texts about just how many people might benefit and the claims are extreme to say the least but something very real in terms of experience was going on here.

The precise techniques are probably lost though they clearly involved self-generated sound and vibration, concentrated mental effort and breath control but not scientifically non-recoverable if we will it.

The question is whether our culture can will it because the process clearly requires a particular sexual dynamic that is counter-intuitive to Western habits and separate from 'household sexuality'.

The question beneath the question is how much people want to be transformed in line with their inner nature. This is the real barrier then and now to adoption of sex as transformation tool.

The adoption of sanskrit gobbledygook (by Westerners) is really a sign of evasion and resistance to early medieval South Asian discoveries. Sexuality has to be cloaked even now in invented 'meaning'.

I am pleased to see scholars - professional and amateur such as Phil Hine - working hard to uncover the real meaning of sanskrit texts to contemporaries and their subsequent interpretation.

This is a major service to culture but, if the discoveries are to be productive, the texts have to be not merely translated into terms we can understand but understood as suggestive rather than scripture.

The discoveries need to be considered in a modern materialist context as matters for bio-physical, neuro-scientific and psychological investigation and offered as possibilities and tools for today.

Hidden in the coded language of South Asian and alchemical texts are important insights into the way we can control our bio-mental faculties to remove past encodings and realign ourselves.

One of the tools for this has to be a non-neurotic approach to sexuality that permits it to be a tool for such an alignment and not just a bonding mechanism to keep society ticking along.

This dual nature of sexuality - as trigger for bonding and as source for personal transformation - has never been accepted fully in Western society and not always wholly or healthily elsewhere.

Perhaps the lesson of seeking sexual means to non-dualism is that we need to deal with the dualism of society as part of the process of general species transformation.

To be uncharacteristically idealistic for a moment, one can envisage a situation where people are so economically, socially, culturally and sexually secure that they can integrate these two sexualities.

A society of multiple bondings between transformed and non-neurotic individuals is a pipe dream at the moment because economic insecurity, social and cultural competition and sexual neurosis are normal.

Once the bonding element is sorted out (which is really a sub-set of anxiety), then minds can turn to sexuality as a tool in conditions where 'detachment' and 'love' are not incompatible.

Still, this book at least offers a small corner of the history of the world where, in a perhaps unsatisfactory way, men and women could consider practical measures on equal terms to achieve transcendence. show less

A complex and beautiful offering from this scholar-practitioner.

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Silburn-Sivasutra-et-Vimarsini-de-Ksemaraja-Etude...
> Scribd : Bibliographie Du SHIVAÏSME DU CACHEMIRE

> Philosophe de formation (elle a été l'élève de Gaston Bachelard)2, elle étudie le sanskrit et la pensée indienne auprès de Sylvain Lévi et Paul Masson-Oursel. Elle entre au CNRS durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale et y fera toute sa carrière.

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Silburn-La-Kundalini-ou-lenergie-des-profondeurs/...
> Scribd : Bibliographie Du SHIVAÏSME DU CACHEMIRE