The return from the west : A humanist tale
chapter eight
Power and Sex
She was listening to the Kālī Khadgamālā, the rhythmic chanting looping softly in the background while images began to dance in her head. Kali intruded again. Not the domesticated goddess, not the polite icon framed by ritual, but Kali as she always appeared to her: wild, intoxicated, laughing, mad. A woman uncontained. A mad woman as she always call her.
Then she tried to compare it with the sri cakra [ sri vidya ] Khadgamala that she is familiar with. The beautiful malevolent Lalitha, and asked herself: whats the difference. Both are Khadgamala. As she sees it they are related in form, but very different in spirit and pedagogy.
They’re both weapons that much is clear. But like all weapons, they are designed for different purposes. Weapons are not invented for decoration. They are invented because something needs to be done and these forms of the divine exist because different phases of life demand different forces.
A weapon whether it is a keris or a sword is never independent of the person who holds it. It is an extension of a human being. Created by humans, for humans, to get a particular job done more effectively. The weapon itself carries no morality. It only amplifies what already exists in the hand and mind of the one who wields it.
That is why the problem is never the weapon. It is the person using it.
In the same way, Tantric tools, symbols, and practices are extensions of the practitioner. They do not create maturity, wisdom, or ethics they expose the lack of it. In the hands of someone disciplined, they cut illusion. In the hands of someone insecure, they become instruments of domination.
Use the right weapon, for the right work, with the right maturity.
It was never about which form was better. It was about understanding why they exist. Like weapons, these forces were created for specific purposes.
Śrī Cakra Khadgamālā (Śrī Vidyā tradition), the core orientation are Cosmic order, Integration, Harmony, Balance and Ascent through structure and the Philosophical tone more towards refinement, sublimation, beauty, grace and sovereignty.
In essence this is Tantra of civilisation because it teaches how to live with desire without chaos, how to hold power without domination, how to integrate spirituality into family, work, polity, how to refine instinct rather than explode it. It doesn’t reject the world but organises it.
While Kālī Khadgamālā, the Core orientation are Dissolution, Transgression, Cutting, Exposure and radical truth. Kālī does not refine. She destroys first. Her tone is to shock, to bring about death, Impermanence, Ego-destruction and liberation through rupture. This is Tantra of the cremation ground, where the power is vert raw, dangerous, uncompromising and not socially polite.
In simple terms: Kālī Khadgamālā teaches how to survive truth when everything familiar is stripped away. When you romanticise Kālī, but lack discipline, sexuality becomes entitlement, power becomes manipulation, poetry becomes seduction and tantra becomes abuse.
The chant pulled her back to a memory.
She remembered the day she and her guru sat together going through the Kālī Khadgamālā slowly, deliberately. Line by line. From Sanskrit to English. From sound to meaning. From poetry to intention. They did not rush it. They examined the verses, the layers of symbolism, the metaphors, the violence and tenderness held in the same breath.
They compared translations. Different commentaries. Different traditions.
And then came what mattered most to her : the exegesis. Her guru would pause, reflect, and then offer his own reading. Not as dogma. Not as final authority. But as someone who had lived with these verses, wrestled with them, embodied them. His interpretations were never about power or spectacle. They were about discipline, responsibility, and restraint. Kali, he reminded her, is not madness for indulgence. She is madness that cuts illusion. She intoxicates only those who mistake desire for liberation.
As the chant continued, she realised why Kali kept returning to her, again and again. Because Kali refuses sanitisation. She exposes the uncomfortable truth that Tantra is not about permission to transgress, but about the consequences of doing so without understanding.
Then, suddenly, a message came through from a member of the group who called himself Tantrasiddhi. She had always been fascinated illustrates by the names people chose for their online avatars. For her, the name thegoddessisinme had never been decorative. It reflected her mindset. The divine, as she understood it, was not something separate, not an external authority demanding worship or praise but something already present within, waiting to be recognised and transcended.
The goddess in her mind did not need incense or adoration. She required honesty. Discipline. Responsibility.
The message read: “If I did not make you fall in love with me, if you do not ‘ah’ when my name is mentioned, if your heart does not become a beehive when you remember me, then I am not a worthy sadhak and certainly not worthy of you.”
She stared at the screen for a moment, mildly confused. Not alarmed. Just… curious.
She shared the message with her guru and asked, “Does this sound like a threat?”
He laughed.
“Should I be afraid?” she asked.
He looked at her and replied, “Are you afraid?”
“No,” she said after a pause. “Not afraid. Just amused.” Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “Did I trigger something in this person?”
As time passed, it became clearer. Tantra-siddhi tried repeatedly to draw her into conversation. Private messages. Probing questions. Elaborate words that went nowhere. She responded politely at first, then gradually less, until she began to keep her distance altogether.
It wasn’t deliberate rejection. She simply found that their exchanges led nowhere meaningful. There was no curiosity or inquiry. No willingness to sit with discomfort or question assumptions. Only performance. And perhaps that was the trigger. She realised that what unsettled him was not her refusal, but her lack of engagement. She did not mirror his intensity.
She did not reward his language with fascination. She did not offer the response he seemed to expect. Distance, she learned, can be more confronting than confrontation. He grew colder. Shorter. Irritated. Not because she had wronged him, but because she had opted out.
Later, when she reflected on it, the pattern felt familiar. When someone equates spiritual depth with attention, silence becomes an insult. When meaning is confused with validation, disengagement feels like rejection. She had not triggered Tantra-siddhi but instead the ego. And that, she understood now, had nothing to do with her at all.
“That is the whole problem with these people,” her guru continued. “They do some Tantric sādhana and immediately think they have power.” He shook his head slightly. “They mistake intensity for attainment. They feel something move inside them, desire, energy, imagination, and they assume it gives them authority over others. As if awakening something within automatically entitles them to access someone else.”
She listened quietly. “Real Tantra,” he said, “does not make you hungry for attention. It makes you less dependent on it. The moment someone needs another person to respond, to admire, to be impressed that is already a sign of lack.”
“So, it’s not power,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “Its insecurity dressed up as mysticism. Power that needs to be demonstrated is not power. Power that seeks to override boundaries is already corrupted.” He paused, then added something she would remember for a long time. “Tantra gives responsibility before it gives anything else. If your practice makes you feel entitled, to bodies, to emotions, to devotion you have misunderstood it completely.”
She thought of how easily sacred language could be used to blur lines. How poetry could become persuasion. How symbols meant for inner work could be turned outward, weaponised.
“And that’s why restraint matters,” he said, as if answering her thoughts. “Not because desire is wrong. But because power without restraint always looks for something or someone to consume.”
She understood then why disengaging had unsettled him. She hadn’t denied Tantra. She had denied him an audience. And in doing so, she had kept herself intact.
Somewhere at the back of her mind, the conversation resurfaced.
Power, when not understood, invites ruin. Power, when held with wisdom, becomes service. That is the way. The power of a true Tantric does not announce itself. It hums and hides. It listens and it does not seek to be known. Superheroes save the world with their fists.
You will save it with your silence, with the choices you make when no one is looking. Power, she realised, was not strength or victory or visibility or applause. It was not the kind of power people projected onto superheroes or great leaders, loud, dramatic, admired. The power she was beginning to recognise was something else entirely. Quieter. Older.
Heavier. The kind that did not announce itself, did not demand recognition, did not need to be seen to be effective. And yet, this quieter power often made people uneasy.
As an admin of a Shakti group, she saw this play out in small, telling ways. People wrote to her, just as she had once written her first tentative message to Devi Bhakta. Some came with genuine questions. Some with curiosity. And some with projections they did not even realise they were carrying.
One message arrived without preamble: “Do you have sex with your guru?”
For a moment, she was dumbfounded not shocked, not offended, just momentarily unsure how to respond. But then she understood as the question was never really about sex.
It was about power and the confusion people have when they encounter it.
In a culture where power is often expressed through dominance, possession, or access, intimacy becomes the assumed currency. If there is influence, there must be sex. If there is authority, there must be exploitation. If there is closeness, it must be erotic.
Tantra, unfortunately, has suffered deeply from this misunderstanding.
Sex exists in Tantra, yes as her guru once told her but it is only a fraction of it. And it is not for everybody. Sexual energy is one of the most powerful forces produced by the human body. Precisely because of that, it requires maturity, discipline, and restraint.
When understood and handled correctly, it is not released outward but redirected inward transformed into a force of focus and awareness. Used this way, it does not intoxicate or entangle it fuels clarity.
But without understanding, it destabilises rather than liberates. She often asked herself why Tantra had suffered so deeply from misunderstanding reduced to sex, occultism, or black magic. Over time, the answer became clearer.
Tantra speaks openly about power: embodied power, desire, death, and transformation force most traditions prefer to regulate or suppress. When power is not mediated by institutions, it becomes threatening. So, it is dismissed as dangerous, immoral, or dark.
Yet the real danger was never Tantra itself, but the fear and misuse of power it exposes. In the end, what remained was not power, but responsibility. Power, she had learned, was never the problem. Power existed everywhere in words, in silence, in desire, in knowledge.
Tantra did not invent it. It merely revealed it. And revelation, without maturity, could be dangerous. That was why restraint mattered. Not because power was wrong, but because it was real. Because it could wound as easily as it could transform. Because once seen, it could not be unseen.
Responsibility, she realised, was the true measure of wisdom. Not how much one could access, but how much one was willing not to use. Not what one could do, but what one chose not to do when no one was watching. Her guru had never warned her against Tantra.
He had warned her against immaturity. Use the right weapon, for the right work, with the right maturity. And perhaps that was the quiet burden of the return to carry power without spectacle, knowledge without arrogance, and understanding without harm.
She was listening to the Kālī Khadgamālā, the rhythmic chanting looping softly in the background while images began to dance in her head. Kali intruded again. Not the domesticated goddess, not the polite icon framed by ritual, but Kali as she always appeared to her: wild, intoxicated, laughing, mad. A woman uncontained. A mad woman as she always call her.
Then she tried to compare it with the sri cakra [ sri vidya ] Khadgamala that she is familiar with. The beautiful malevolent Lalitha, and asked herself: whats the difference. Both are Khadgamala. As she sees it they are related in form, but very different in spirit and pedagogy.
They’re both weapons that much is clear. But like all weapons, they are designed for different purposes. Weapons are not invented for decoration. They are invented because something needs to be done and these forms of the divine exist because different phases of life demand different forces.
A weapon whether it is a keris or a sword is never independent of the person who holds it. It is an extension of a human being. Created by humans, for humans, to get a particular job done more effectively. The weapon itself carries no morality. It only amplifies what already exists in the hand and mind of the one who wields it.
That is why the problem is never the weapon. It is the person using it.
In the same way, Tantric tools, symbols, and practices are extensions of the practitioner. They do not create maturity, wisdom, or ethics they expose the lack of it. In the hands of someone disciplined, they cut illusion. In the hands of someone insecure, they become instruments of domination.
Use the right weapon, for the right work, with the right maturity.
It was never about which form was better. It was about understanding why they exist. Like weapons, these forces were created for specific purposes.
Śrī Cakra Khadgamālā (Śrī Vidyā tradition), the core orientation are Cosmic order, Integration, Harmony, Balance and Ascent through structure and the Philosophical tone more towards refinement, sublimation, beauty, grace and sovereignty.
In essence this is Tantra of civilisation because it teaches how to live with desire without chaos, how to hold power without domination, how to integrate spirituality into family, work, polity, how to refine instinct rather than explode it. It doesn’t reject the world but organises it.
While Kālī Khadgamālā, the Core orientation are Dissolution, Transgression, Cutting, Exposure and radical truth. Kālī does not refine. She destroys first. Her tone is to shock, to bring about death, Impermanence, Ego-destruction and liberation through rupture. This is Tantra of the cremation ground, where the power is vert raw, dangerous, uncompromising and not socially polite.
In simple terms: Kālī Khadgamālā teaches how to survive truth when everything familiar is stripped away. When you romanticise Kālī, but lack discipline, sexuality becomes entitlement, power becomes manipulation, poetry becomes seduction and tantra becomes abuse.
The chant pulled her back to a memory.
She remembered the day she and her guru sat together going through the Kālī Khadgamālā slowly, deliberately. Line by line. From Sanskrit to English. From sound to meaning. From poetry to intention. They did not rush it. They examined the verses, the layers of symbolism, the metaphors, the violence and tenderness held in the same breath.
They compared translations. Different commentaries. Different traditions.
And then came what mattered most to her : the exegesis. Her guru would pause, reflect, and then offer his own reading. Not as dogma. Not as final authority. But as someone who had lived with these verses, wrestled with them, embodied them. His interpretations were never about power or spectacle. They were about discipline, responsibility, and restraint. Kali, he reminded her, is not madness for indulgence. She is madness that cuts illusion. She intoxicates only those who mistake desire for liberation.
As the chant continued, she realised why Kali kept returning to her, again and again. Because Kali refuses sanitisation. She exposes the uncomfortable truth that Tantra is not about permission to transgress, but about the consequences of doing so without understanding.
Then, suddenly, a message came through from a member of the group who called himself Tantrasiddhi. She had always been fascinated illustrates by the names people chose for their online avatars. For her, the name thegoddessisinme had never been decorative. It reflected her mindset. The divine, as she understood it, was not something separate, not an external authority demanding worship or praise but something already present within, waiting to be recognised and transcended.
The goddess in her mind did not need incense or adoration. She required honesty. Discipline. Responsibility.
The message read: “If I did not make you fall in love with me, if you do not ‘ah’ when my name is mentioned, if your heart does not become a beehive when you remember me, then I am not a worthy sadhak and certainly not worthy of you.”
She stared at the screen for a moment, mildly confused. Not alarmed. Just… curious.
She shared the message with her guru and asked, “Does this sound like a threat?”
He laughed.
“Should I be afraid?” she asked.
He looked at her and replied, “Are you afraid?”
“No,” she said after a pause. “Not afraid. Just amused.” Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “Did I trigger something in this person?”
As time passed, it became clearer. Tantra-siddhi tried repeatedly to draw her into conversation. Private messages. Probing questions. Elaborate words that went nowhere. She responded politely at first, then gradually less, until she began to keep her distance altogether.
It wasn’t deliberate rejection. She simply found that their exchanges led nowhere meaningful. There was no curiosity or inquiry. No willingness to sit with discomfort or question assumptions. Only performance. And perhaps that was the trigger. She realised that what unsettled him was not her refusal, but her lack of engagement. She did not mirror his intensity.
She did not reward his language with fascination. She did not offer the response he seemed to expect. Distance, she learned, can be more confronting than confrontation. He grew colder. Shorter. Irritated. Not because she had wronged him, but because she had opted out.
Later, when she reflected on it, the pattern felt familiar. When someone equates spiritual depth with attention, silence becomes an insult. When meaning is confused with validation, disengagement feels like rejection. She had not triggered Tantra-siddhi but instead the ego. And that, she understood now, had nothing to do with her at all.
“That is the whole problem with these people,” her guru continued. “They do some Tantric sādhana and immediately think they have power.” He shook his head slightly. “They mistake intensity for attainment. They feel something move inside them, desire, energy, imagination, and they assume it gives them authority over others. As if awakening something within automatically entitles them to access someone else.”
She listened quietly. “Real Tantra,” he said, “does not make you hungry for attention. It makes you less dependent on it. The moment someone needs another person to respond, to admire, to be impressed that is already a sign of lack.”
“So, it’s not power,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “Its insecurity dressed up as mysticism. Power that needs to be demonstrated is not power. Power that seeks to override boundaries is already corrupted.” He paused, then added something she would remember for a long time. “Tantra gives responsibility before it gives anything else. If your practice makes you feel entitled, to bodies, to emotions, to devotion you have misunderstood it completely.”
She thought of how easily sacred language could be used to blur lines. How poetry could become persuasion. How symbols meant for inner work could be turned outward, weaponised.
“And that’s why restraint matters,” he said, as if answering her thoughts. “Not because desire is wrong. But because power without restraint always looks for something or someone to consume.”
She understood then why disengaging had unsettled him. She hadn’t denied Tantra. She had denied him an audience. And in doing so, she had kept herself intact.
Somewhere at the back of her mind, the conversation resurfaced.
Power, when not understood, invites ruin. Power, when held with wisdom, becomes service. That is the way. The power of a true Tantric does not announce itself. It hums and hides. It listens and it does not seek to be known. Superheroes save the world with their fists.
You will save it with your silence, with the choices you make when no one is looking. Power, she realised, was not strength or victory or visibility or applause. It was not the kind of power people projected onto superheroes or great leaders, loud, dramatic, admired. The power she was beginning to recognise was something else entirely. Quieter. Older.
Heavier. The kind that did not announce itself, did not demand recognition, did not need to be seen to be effective. And yet, this quieter power often made people uneasy.
As an admin of a Shakti group, she saw this play out in small, telling ways. People wrote to her, just as she had once written her first tentative message to Devi Bhakta. Some came with genuine questions. Some with curiosity. And some with projections they did not even realise they were carrying.
One message arrived without preamble: “Do you have sex with your guru?”
For a moment, she was dumbfounded not shocked, not offended, just momentarily unsure how to respond. But then she understood as the question was never really about sex.
It was about power and the confusion people have when they encounter it.
In a culture where power is often expressed through dominance, possession, or access, intimacy becomes the assumed currency. If there is influence, there must be sex. If there is authority, there must be exploitation. If there is closeness, it must be erotic.
Tantra, unfortunately, has suffered deeply from this misunderstanding.
Sex exists in Tantra, yes as her guru once told her but it is only a fraction of it. And it is not for everybody. Sexual energy is one of the most powerful forces produced by the human body. Precisely because of that, it requires maturity, discipline, and restraint.
When understood and handled correctly, it is not released outward but redirected inward transformed into a force of focus and awareness. Used this way, it does not intoxicate or entangle it fuels clarity.
But without understanding, it destabilises rather than liberates. She often asked herself why Tantra had suffered so deeply from misunderstanding reduced to sex, occultism, or black magic. Over time, the answer became clearer.
Tantra speaks openly about power: embodied power, desire, death, and transformation force most traditions prefer to regulate or suppress. When power is not mediated by institutions, it becomes threatening. So, it is dismissed as dangerous, immoral, or dark.
Yet the real danger was never Tantra itself, but the fear and misuse of power it exposes. In the end, what remained was not power, but responsibility. Power, she had learned, was never the problem. Power existed everywhere in words, in silence, in desire, in knowledge.
Tantra did not invent it. It merely revealed it. And revelation, without maturity, could be dangerous. That was why restraint mattered. Not because power was wrong, but because it was real. Because it could wound as easily as it could transform. Because once seen, it could not be unseen.
Responsibility, she realised, was the true measure of wisdom. Not how much one could access, but how much one was willing not to use. Not what one could do, but what one chose not to do when no one was watching. Her guru had never warned her against Tantra.
He had warned her against immaturity. Use the right weapon, for the right work, with the right maturity. And perhaps that was the quiet burden of the return to carry power without spectacle, knowledge without arrogance, and understanding without harm.
