Tantric Sexuality Business Project

At one point, an ST2 Rama student (the ST2--Star Trek 2--students were the second generation of Rama students who began studying with Rama around 1992) ran a website which featured photos of nude women. The site was founded in the early days of the Web when it seemed that most profitable sites were sex-related in some way. If you are an adult over the age of 18, and open-minded about the concept of nudity even in a Dharma-related situation, please click here for an uncensored version of this page showing two of the female Rama students from the site posing nude for this project.

Rama was known to place a very strong emphasis on the Enlightenment of women, but one of the contradictions--koans, if you will--of Rama's teaching program was his handling of the area of human sexuality. A koan is a sort of a puzzle where a teacher of Enlightenment presents apparently contradictory viewpoints in a effort to force the student to reconcile superficial differences to reach a deeper understanding. In the case of sexuality and the Enlightenment of women, Rama is known for having given a talk back in the 1980's called "Why Don't More Women Attain Enlightenment". In that talk he commented on how men can hold women back from achieving Enlightenment by focusing sexual energy on them. Yet there were also other times when Rama clearly encouraged his students, both women and men, to use sexual energy to move forward in life. Indeed, this was one of the more controversial areas of Rama's teachings. Not too long after the 1980's talk, one of Rama's female students--this was before my time--posed nude in Penthouse magazine, and Rama praised her for doing so. It appears to me that Rama encouraged sexuality when it was helping students reaching a higher state of attention, and discouraged it when it was bringing them down.

In the summer of 1997, Rama recommended that his students start Internet companies because this was one area where you could start a company without millions of dollars of capital outlay. One of the women looked around and saw that online soft-core porn sites were one of the few areas where Internet firms were actually making money, and so she decided to do likewise. She founded the site, http://www.funwomen.com/, in early 1998, and recruited about 10 or 15 of the female Rama students to pose nude for the site. This occurred right around the time of Rama's Mahasamadhi--one of the videos produced by Rama's band, Zazen, was entitled "Death is Sexual". The site may also be seen as a celebration of the sexual aspects of Rama's Mahasamadhi. The site went live in mid-1998 and had a very clean and professional energy to it. It was available on the Internet until early 1999.

There’s no question, the site being what it was, that it involved quite a bit of sexual energy. Earlier in his teaching career, Rama tended to discourage his students from focusing on sexual energy. He felt that his students, and the women students in particular, needed a break from the sexual energy of the world and needed a chance to develop power in other areas. Towards the end of his life, however, Rama seemed to change his views on sexuality a bit. When Snowboarding to Nirvana came out, in early 1997, there was a great deal of very graphic sex in that book. (It was described as Tantric sex, and serving a higher spiritual purpose, but it certainly read like there was a lot of good old-fashioned lust involved—and there’s nothing wrong with that!) Though Rama didn’t talk that much in seminars about Tantric sex, he did explain that sexual images—but not necessarily the physical act of sex—were absolutely necessary in the advanced stages of the practice. The advanced stages began with the Kalachakra empowerment in late 1997. To reach the higher states of Enlightenment, people—both men and women—need to be able to deal with the sexual energies of the world without attachment and without getting stuck in any of the emotional states often associated with sexuality.

For Buddhists on the advanced stages of the path, sexual energy seems to definitely be the razor’s edge: it can propel someone to much higher states of mind, but it can bring people down in a hurry. All forms of sexuality can be tantric—celibacy, monogamy, and promiscuity—straight, bi, gay, or lesbian-any form of sexuality where you are using the energies to propel yourself to a higher state of consciousness can be tantric. The sexual chakra is one of the lower chakras, but the energy must be flowing through the lower chakras if you are ever going to reach Enlightenment. Often Buddhists are so focused on the higher states of consciousness that they forget the necessity of dealing with the lower energies. Sexuality—along with survival and power—is among those centers and must be handled gracefully!