02/11/2026
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Why don’t you conduct retreats on ta***ic s*x?
Question by Raquel Valdés
Response of Prabhuji:
नान्यः पन्था मुक्तिहेतुरिहामुत्र सुखाप्तये ।
यथा तन्त्रोदितो मार्गो मोक्षाय च सुखाय च ॥
nānyaḥ panthā mukti-hetur
ihāmutra sukhāptaye
yathā tantrodito mārgo
mokṣāya ca sukhāya ca
“There is no other path like that of Ta**ra, which is the cause of liberation and the realization of happiness, both in this world and in the next.”
(Mahā-nirvāṇa Ta**ra, 2.20)
You can imagine that you are not the first to ask me this question, which is both innocent and dangerous at the same time. Wherever the word “Ta**ra” is written, people hear the word “permission.” In an instant, the mind becomes a mischievous child playing with matches inside a gasoline depot.
Every time in recent years someone asks me, “Why don’t you conduct retreats on ta***ic s*x?”, I hear two questions at once. One appears on the surface, expressed through the mouth, and another burns in what is hidden. The first sounds innocent, while the concealed one says: “Is there a place where I can finally unleash my desire without guilt… and also call it spiritual?” The ego is an expert poet at turning its hunger into a sacred practice. Here it is worth remembering Nietzsche, who warned that we are capable of turning our needs into “virtues” simply to avoid looking at them directly.
So, why don’t I offer “ta***ic s*x retreats”?
Because for most participants it would not be ta**ra, but merely a sacred alibi. It would simply be the ego wearing a white robe, scented with incense, hunting for experiences.
Ta**ra carries with it a consciousness so vast that even s*x, when it touches it, ceases to be urgency, need, or compulsion, and becomes meditation. But what sells is the shortcut, the fast track, the quick route: the weekend of enlightenment plus guaranteed or**sm. And I am not willing to feed such inner transactions. True ta**ra is not born in bed; it begins with observation, with the gaze that sees energy rise, burn, tremble, without becoming enslaved by it. S*x without such a gaze is nothing more than simple biology and its ancient dealings; even if it is pleasant and enjoyable like a good cake, it should not be confused with heaven. When it is confused, the cake itself becomes religion, and religion becomes neurosis. I believe Jung would have something interesting to say here, because every neurosis is, in some way, a misunderstood spirituality: a longing for wholeness lost in a substitute.
Around Ta**ra there reigns great confusion: people experience a certain pleasure and immediately declare it “absolute.” Something very similar to a hungry person who, after tasting a pizza, feels they have found paradise; yet they have only found a pizza. Every pleasure can be pleasant, tender, intense, fabulous, wonderful, but every enjoyment is a temporary state that comes and goes, is born and dies; it is only a wave, not the ocean. The cause of this confusion is ancient human repression, that factory of ghosts which Foucault described in another way: the more the body is disciplined, the more the secret discourse about the body multiplies.
If you live too long in drought, the first drops of rain feel like a deluge. When some pleasant experience occurs, greater openness appears, more contact, more permission, and the mind performs its trick, exclaiming: “This is spiritual.” That exclamation does not arise because it is spiritual, but because it finally feels alive. We say that the cake becomes religion because there are those who begin to worship the means instead of the truth. When you seek to repeat the experience, when you pursue it and organize your life around it, instead of practicing Ta**ra you are merely collecting sensations. We say that religion becomes neurosis because, by turning pleasure into “paradise,” you need enjoyment to be constant and permanent. Yet pleasure is not faithful; it signs no contracts, it comes when it comes and disappears when it goes. Neurosis appears when you live in the pursuit of repeating an experience instead of resting in that which contains all experiences. Ta**ra does not teach us to make s*xuality into a god, but to remain awake, attentive, conscious of everything—including our s*xuality.
Ta**ra is a sacred revelation, one of the two great revelations of India, the Vedic and the Ta***ic—not an excuse or a justification. But the human mind is extremely quick and, at the same time, lazy. It reads an announcement that says “Ta**ra” and imagines: “Perfect! Free s*x with a spiritual diploma.” That is where the misunderstanding begins, because attendees will not come to learn the art of transforming energy, but to consume permission.
In retreats and even ashrams where Ta**ra is taught, people open up, transcend limits, breathe, let go—but unfortunately, accumulated repression propels them only toward s*x. Understanding, meditation, study, the path, consciousness are pushed aside. What attracts them is only the practical—that is, impulse wearing sacred makeup.
Society harbors an ancestral fear of Ta**ra; it fears s*xuality because, when illuminated, it can reveal that control and domination were merely a lie. Participants return after the retreat to their jobs, their families, their “normal” lives. At first they bravely sustain what they have learned and practiced, until sooner or later pressure arrives—one way or another. Judgment appears, preconceived ideas, condemnation, discredit. One day, perhaps when they decide to marry, or when their parents ask them, or when a new partner hears, “What did you learn? What did you do in that retreat?”—then the invisible army appears, composed of social morality, inherited shame, the traditional gaze of centuries. If you do not have authentic inner strength—not just the excitement of the retreat, but the essential root, the knowledge—you will give in. And together with giving in comes the need to justify oneself; justification, which is the first cousin of cowardice.
First they say, “Yes, I went… I learned… I practiced…” Then they say, “Well, it happened, it occurred, it just happened…” And finally, to save their image before the tribe, the poisonous phrase appears: “I was not responsible… I was brainwashed… I was induced… I was manipulated… I am a victim.” Do you see the mechanism? The person sheds all responsibility like someone taking off wet clothes, and when guilt needs a place to fall, it falls upon whoever organized the retreat.
Then the same process begins by which society has attacked and persecuted Ta***ic masters for generations—a process I refuse to feed. First it is used as fantasy, then condemned as scandal, and finally some official culprit is manufactured, whether the instructor, the retreat, the guide, the place, or the institution. Ta**ra is a medicine, but the repressed mind and frightened society turn medicine into gunpowder.
I have not the slightest interest in organizing spiritual tourism where people come to “discharge,” only to return home and blame the retreat.
Ta**ra is totality, and totality is not sold in a weekend package. Totality demands that you stop blaming, that you stop justifying yourself, that you stop acting to impress someone. Spinoza spoke of freedom as understanding—not as caprice, but as lucidity that no longer excuses itself. That you be so honest that, even if society rejects you, you never betray your truth for a social embrace, because the price of freedom consists in renouncing the applause of the asleep. Thoreau lived this with sobriety: preferring integrity over approval.
आनन्दं ब्रह्मणो रूपं तच्च देहे व्यवस्थितम् ।
ānandaṁ brahmaṇo rūpaṁ
tac ca dehe vyavasthitam
“Enjoyment offers a glimpse of transcendental bliss, which is how—the texts say—the Absolute expresses itself in the human body.”
(Kulārṇava Ta**ra, 5.80a)
If your interest in “ta***ic s*x” is genuinely spiritual, you can begin right now, without a retreat, without a teacher, without permission. Breathe, feel your body, observe desire as it arises—not as a master nor as an enemy. Observe it as energy, and remain watching until desire becomes light. Then you will realize that Ta**ra does not begin in bed, but in consciousness.
