S3E1 Tantra, Hatha, Alchemy

This episode is the first in a series that delves into what is known as “Siddha” yoga, which is a combination of indigenous Hindu Alchemy, Tantra, and Hatha Yoga. We discuss each of these areas as key sources for the ideological framework, the aims, and techniques of Modern practice. The images that emerge are those of mystical eroticism, in which all aspects of the universe are in an alchemical process of generating a subtle essence whose symbolic representation is that of divine and human sexual fluids. Via interaction with this sexual essence, the Siddha-based traditions aim at the creation of an immortal body with the power to transform reality at any level.

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Episode Transcript

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Welcome everyone. I'd like to start by saying something about the two elements indicated in the title. We have secrecy on one hand and domination on the other. The secrecy part refers to Hatha, Alchemy and Tantra, and the fact that they're fringe disciplines with kind of an inherent air of secrecy in their practices. A lot of this comes from the fact that they're willing to engage with people in very intimate ways who are not necessarily from the cast that that the practitioners are in. So recruiting across caste boundaries, for instance, to gain participants in your in your order or your sect, is something that they do that also would involve elementary violations, eating across caste, and ultimately also sexual violations. And so there's a part about the secrecy here that's they're going to have to keep things secret if they're going to practice what they want to practice. But there's another part that I would also caution everyone to remember, think of how artists are very secretive about the works that they work on, how they have difficulty talking about what they're doing sometimes, how they're very protective of no one seeing it until it's just where they want it or where they're willing to surrender it to the public because they can't go further with it. That kind of secrecy that's tied to creativity, that's definitely inside each of these disciplines. I'd also like to point out the secrecy that happens, say, for instance, between children at play. Children have secret sayings and secret handshakes and secret places where they meet. And so there's a piece to that secrecy element that's directly tied to play. So in addition to caste violation and the secrecy that that would necessitate, we have the secrecy Association associated with artists and creation, and that associated with children and even lovers that play the domination piece refers to the British occupation and the the influences that came from the west into India with that and how, because we're going to be talking as we go forward about how those influences really mix together to give us the modern practice of yoga in a certain sense. So so we'll continuously be referring to aspects of the British occupation. Once we get through the detailed sections on Hatha and alchemy and Tantra, a pattern emerges as we go through this material. The people who are interested in maintaining the existing power structure generally know a little bit about what the Renegades are doing, what the fringe groups are doing, because it's in their best interest to know, and many times they're envious, or they admire the techniques and the results that have emerged amongst groups of people who are willing to experiment on themselves and things thinking outside the box in a certain way, but They don't want to suggest that those people could cross cast boundaries, for instance. So the the existing power structure tends to appropriate the techniques from the fringe groups without appropriating their world view, for instance. So there's a there's something lost in translation, as there always is. So this pattern of of the people, quote, unquote, on top right, mining the the fringe groups for innovation, is something that that will come out as we go forward, talking about the ideas that lead us up to modern yoga. When we talk about Hatha and Tantra and alchemy, it's really important to remind ourselves of a few things that have been important throughout all of the episodes that we've made. Number one is how far we are as modern people away from the experience of the world. How far we are from the way ancient people experience to the world because of the scientific revolution. For one, rise in secularism. Number two, though we tend to not see nature and ourselves and the mind and so on. In the same way, let me read you something from this titan of mythological thinking and symbolic interpretation. This is from the Forge in the crucible, which is Mircea Eliades short book on alchemy, and it's commenting on the difference between a modern person and. And an ancient person, specifically in the in relationship to the ability to experience reality as sacred. Here's what he says, modern man is incapable of experiencing the sacred in his dealings with matter. At most, he can achieve an esthetic experience he is capable of knowing matter only as a quote, natural phenomenon, but we only have to imagine communion, no longer limited to the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine, but extending to every kind of substance in order to measure the distance separating a primitive religious experience from the modern experience of, quote, natural phenomenon. So this idea that the things in nature are just natural phenomena, and that they're devoid of purpose, that they have no inherent meaning because they've been placed inside the Darwinian rationalist worldview. They didn't happen for a reason. They don't point to things beyond themselves. They just sort of kind of are what they are, and we're the ones that attribute meaning to them. That's not where the ancient world is. The ancient world is a place, according to Elliot, where the sanctity that has been afforded the Eucharist in the Catholic Church, for instance, the the ultimate transformative power of the bread and the wine and the setting, the holy setting, we have to take that idea and experience and extend it to all the things that we might come across. So everything that is in the natural world, for the ancient person, is capable of pointing beyond itself. It is more than what it is. It's embedded in a mythic, symbolic structure that gives a realness to it and a relationship to our sensory activity that we don't tend to have because we think we're these inner, subjective creatures who project meaning onto the world, either more or less accurately. So when we come to Hatha, tantra and alchemy, it's important to remember that, because all of these disciplines see this kind of sanctity, this kind of ultimate sacredness in the natural things in the world. Eliot says again, quote, to symbolic thinking, the world is not only alive, but also open. An object is never simply itself, as is the case with modern consciousness. It is also a sign of or a repository for something else. So each thing points beyond itself. It is trans phenomenal, deeply housing, meaning a sign right of something more than what it is. We got to remember that we don't tend to be there, and as we go forward through the episode, really be willing to let the imagination take hold of the images that come out of this discussion. So let's also take time to remember that in this world view, the microcosm or the human system or organism is a an image of the macrocosm, a replica of the macrocosm of the larger Cosmos, with the sun and the solar systems and all that that would entail. That means the micro and the macro are intimately related in a way that can be trusted for the ancient world, the micro and the macro are fractals, or David Gordon White would call them homologs of one another. We can recall the saying As above, so below, or as below so above, to give us a sense of what it feels like to be in that kind of world. What that means is, for Hatha and alchemy and Tantra, is is that the universe is creative because it shows the shocking diversity of things that have meaning and point beyond themselves. But we also engage in creativity too. This is largely going to be spoken of in terms of the creativity that emerges from a certain union of the male and the female. This idea that humans are inherently creative and that the cosmos is too really comes to the fore when we look at how Tantra Hatha and alchemy speak about reproductive tissue, or sexual fluid, because the fact that the micro and the macro are images of one another, or homologs of one another, means that the macro has sexual fluid also there's divine. Sexual fluid. Just as there is human and small time sexual fluid in alchemy, that sexual reproductive tissue is seen, is seen as the metal in the earth and so tin and copper and gold and lead and so on and so forth. All of that is considered to be a sexual fluid, a divine sexual fluid, in their their myths that show how that stuff got into the earth. And so these disciplines are deeply interested in the the relationship between human sexuality and divine sexuality represented in these fluids and these metals, because it's all about creativity. We can see also that nature, great nature, or the cosmos, aims at something like perfection, because there's gold. So gold is representative of a deep, awakened consciousness. Also power freedom to transmute things in each of these disciplines. So it would be like the the ultimate product of the digestion of the of the macrocosm. What's interesting is that by now, in in the production or the the evolution of human ideas, is that the tantric is in the Hatha, yogis and the alchemists all think that that because gold is like a natural production of the Earth's ripening process, or the cosmos becoming ripe, producing what it's supposed to be gold would be like fruit in that sense. They think that they can intervene in that process and the slowness of that process, and speed it up by, you guessed it, bringing a fire into the equation so that things can be transmuted. And they ultimately begin to behave as if, in intervening in this natural, slower process that produces gold, they also intervene in their own process, and they begin to work on themselves. It's also safe to say that each of these disciplines is an heir to the internalization of the traditional Vedic sacrifice that we have spoken of in almost every episode, in some sense or other as we've come up to this point. So we're still going to see fluid, fire and wind in all of the tantric Hatha and alchemical references that we make, we're going to actually start to speak of tantra Hatha and alchemy as if They were not necessarily the same body of people, but a body of practice and orientation toward the existential problems in life that makes them a cohesive group, something that we could speak of as if in one breath. David Gordon White's book, the alchemical body, is an amazing tome as all things from the University of Chicago seem to be that tries to make this argument that quote, at least if the tantricas, the Hatha yogis and the alchemists are not one in the same people, they are deeply and closely related and linked in their practice. Muta Eliade also provides evidence for this in his book on alchemy, when he says, speaking of one of the great Hindu siddhas, or philosophers, Madhava, he says, quote, mudhava shows alchemy, which in Sanskrit is rase vara, that's rasa, the Mercurial science to be a branch of hatha yoga. Madhava says the Mercurial system must not be looked upon as a simple eulogy of metal, for it is an immediate means by preserving the body, of attaining the supreme goal, which is deliverance. If we go further into the texts themselves, some of the key texts on Tantra. For instance, the rasar Nava Tantra famously says, quote, as in metal, so in the body, by means of the work. That's the alchemical work, a stable body is attained. Mercury and breath control are known as the work in two parts, karma, yoga, David, that's David Gordon white, providing that information from his book, The alchemical body. So, as in metal, so in the body, ah, look, we've already seen that the Earth shows ripening of sexual fluid in that the sexual fluid starts off someplace, like in lead, and then, and then ripens all the way up to gold. We can intervene in that. We do so in Tantra and Hatha and alchemy, because mercury and breath control are. Niyama are a work in two parts. It's not only about the metal, it's also about the prana. And so here's Hatha Yoga, tantra and alchemy mixed very closely in a certain sense. Let's give some details about each of these disciplines. Start with Alchemy. And I think I'm starting with Alchemy, because I believe historically, since this episode is sort of more historically focused, Alchemy is older in the sense that it comes from metallurgy and from mining, from digging, for those things in the earth. Here's what Elliot says. Quote, one of the principal sources of alchemy is to be sought in those conceptions of the Earth Mother, with ores and metals, and above all, with the experience of primitive man engaged in mining, fusion and Smith craft. So if alchemy is as old as mining and fusion and Smith craft, we could make a conservative estimate by saying that it's at least as old as the Bronze Age, which basic dates would be 3300 to 1200 BCE. That's, that's a long time. That's well before the Veda. We gave dates for the Veda, 1700 to 1500 maybe 1200 BCE, this is 3300 the Iron Age, which follows the Bronze Age, is generally thought to go from 500 to 332 BCE, the brahmanas begin to emerge about 800 BCE. So you can see actual metallurgy and the need for mining happening well before and during the early and Vedic late Vedic periods. According to Eliade, the earliest alchemical text proper is a pseudo democratian text called the physical chi Mystica, and that's from the second to the first century CE. And there's only a fragment of it, which is preserved by an alchemist named zosimos. Alchemical practices would then be well underway. By the time that Tantra and Hatha emerge as strong cultural forces, we'll see that Tantra emerges sixth, seventh century, Christian era, and Hatha six to the ninth century. So the Alchemist is, if we say it in Latin, homo fab, that means man the maker, the one who immerses himself in the sacred by way of his own work with his own tools, and in order to assist the Great Mother in reaching her innate perfection, or gold, while simultaneously freeing himself into his own innate perfection. And so this idea that I can be a little small microcosm where the fire gets jacked up and the process that is inherently aiming toward perfection in me might be sped up directly tied to metallurgy, Alchemy and the macrocosm mirroring the microcosm. If we go to Tantra, said a little bit about it already, but Tantra is really important because it forms the ideological universe in which alchemy and Hatha tend to work. Tantra began to sweep over India about the sixth century. Ce David Gordon White says of it at that time what some have called madness and abomination, others have deemed a path to ecstasy or the sublime. And so you can see as a cultural influence, it had some clout at this time, there were actually great tantricas who were advisors to Kings, but it didn't tend to have a staying power, ultimately, because it was so willing to buck the system. Tantra means something like, quote, warp of reality, and the warp being the part of a loom in on which something is being woven. So that's one, one meaning of the term Tantra. The root of the word is T, a n, tan, and that literally means to stretch as one would a thread on a loom. And so a loom is also called a Tantra. In Vedic parlance, if we go a little bit further back, tantra comes from is related to the word Tanu, which means a body that is to be sacrificed on an altar within. A ritual framework. And that ritual framework is also called Tantra. So here, the idea of weaving, of creating, the idea of that being a sacrifice, and the idea that a body is sacrificed and stretched is all inherent in this kind of enigmatic word and discipline. There are many forms of Tantra, we would have to say now, there's Hindu Tantra, there's Buddhist Tantra, there's Jane Tantra or Jaina Tantra. This at this time, all of the maritime ports were doing a lot of business. The Silk Road was going. Things were coming back and forth. China is in the mix. Tibet is in the mix. Central Asia, Persia and Europe are all in the mix. And so Tantra is is filled with multicultural diversity in a certain sense, but we want to focus because we're talking about hatha yoga. We're talking about the early Hatha Yoga that we can get to. We want to focus more on the indigenous roots of Tantra, those that came from India, rather than the stuff that was imported from all this interaction. If we just to kind of try to separate things out. I know that's a difficult task. So David Gordon White says the indigenous roots of tantra were not so much a departure from earlier forms of Hinduism as their continuation, albeit in sometimes tangential and heterodox ways. So we are revising revisionist revolutionaries here, not totally departing from what has come before, but we being adding this element of cohabitation and mixing across caste, because the goal is very lofty and involves extreme means, since we're talk talking about the indigenous roots of Tantra, that those roots indigenous to India, we have to talk about the sectarian groups known as the Siddhas, s, I, D, D, H, A, the Siddhas as a common noun, the word Siddha means perfected one, and that's a term that's usually applied to a practitioner of a system. That practitioner would be a sadhaka or a sadhu, and someone engaged in practice, the practice is called sadhana, as you know, if this one is a Siddha, then this practitioner has realized the goals of that practice and the goals of the practice for these Siddhas were twofold. One is bodily immortality, the transmutation of the human body into a vessel that is capable of of lasting and one is a set of superhuman powers called cities. And in that sense, city means realization, and it also means perfection. Now that's as a common noun, but as a proper noun, Siddha has a broad application of meaning. Many are called Siddhas. So there are devotees of Shiva, known as the Mahesh vata Siddhas. There are alchemists called sitars, and those guys practiced in Tamil Nadu. There are groups of early Buddhist tantricas from Bengal called the MaHA Siddhas and the siddhacharyas. There were alchemists in medieval India called the rasa SIDS, the juice masters, but most especially in North India, this ties us to Hatha Yoga. There's a group of Siddhas called the Nath, N, A, T, H, Siddhas, and Nath is just basically a word that means lord or master. When we get to speaking about the NAS within the contract context of the tantric universe and the alchemical universe, we start finding the lineage of the people who are said to be responsible for hatha yoga. We know these people as garakshanath, machindranath, Karpati, data Traya nagnath, Adi Nath, the great teacher, Adi Nath and so on. These are all the early teachers and disciples of, ultimately of Shiva, and they're the ones that produce the text that are most directly related to Hatha Yoga that we know, I don't know, hardly any at all, three or four, some of the guruk shapati, the Shiva Samhita, the. The Hatha Yoga, Pradipika, that kind of stuff is the stuff where we start seeing posture and pranayama that looks a lot like what we consider modern Yoga. But that stuff is also deeply intermingled with Alchemy and the idea of of the sexual fluids being similar as the divine sexual fluids and the metals in the earth when you read that stuff. Now, when you go back, you'll realize that you've been reading about alchemy the whole time. Who is the not siddha? Who is the master? Here's what David Gordon White says, the ideal, not Siddha, is a God, man who plays with the entire universe, with the lives of the great and the small alike. Secure in the knowledge of the identity of microcosm and macrocosm, of the imminence of the absolute in every creature in stone, he takes the universe to be his plaything with its every element, nectar and ashes, cloaks and bodies, earrings and the power of flight. He takes all those things to be interchangeable and accessible according to his whim. So here we are with this idea that we've already touched on in our earlier discussion of the quote, unquote, secrecy in these disciplines. There's an element of creativity and play here, but it's also at a sublime proportion. The Siddha is the one that plays with everyone and everything as he pleases. I it was interesting to find out that there was something like a Siddha heaven, something similar, in a way, to the Judeo Christian heaven, which is the one that we all tend to think over when we think of places where everyone goes after they die. The the sin of Heaven is a place of sensual gratification and freedom from pain. It's a place where the transmuted body and the subtle body having been fused and created and then also discovered and realized that it's a place where those masters are. And what's very interesting about the city of Heaven is that it was said to last. It wasn't subject to the to the Yuga, the cycle of the great yugas that begins with the Golden Age and cycles through two as it falls toward the Kali Yuga, and that changing and circling over and over and over for eternity, endlessly in a cycle the city of Heaven is apart from that, not destroyed or created in that sense. It's also interesting that those capable of reaching this level remained there, forever liberated from the fruits of their actions, forever exempted from the lower worlds of rebirth, but not divested of their individuality, as was the case with the impersonal workings of release and to the absolute. So it's not like the it's not like the absorption of the mystic in which the soul is like salt dissolved in water when it realizes its identity. This is the unique individuality which seems to be so impermanent now, having been transmuted in an alchemical process, so that it was conceived of as being lasting and also now, all in conjunction with an immense power that has been acquired. What about hatha yoga? Since we're speaking about all these three things, tantra, the naths, Hatha practitioners, Hatha has two meanings, one an outer meaning and one an inner meaning. The outer meaning would be that it is, quote, forceful. So Hatha is a is a technique that is squarely in the realm of bodily action, like the asanas that we do, that was considered strong stuff in a certain way, because most of the postures that had been taken had been devotional postures, seated postures, meditation postures, where not much is going on in Hatha, we're dealing forcefully with the body, binding it in a certain way, heating it up and then dealing also forcefully, in some sense, with the breath. The inner meaning of the word is the yoga of Sun and moon, and those two symbols cover a really, really broad array of meaning and application, but most essentially, they refer to the fire that's inherent in the system, and that's the sun and all of the things that it would bring, the dangerous destruction that the sun brings, but the revelatory light that the sun brings, and also the growth power right that the sun brings the moon. Would then refer to Soma or or the juice, or the rasa, or the metal in the earth that we've been talking about. And so this is still that profound dynamic going on since the time of the Aveda, between the fire and the food that it eats. The third element is, is obviously breath and prana that's going to be strong in the mix in Hatha and Tantra. Here's what Mark singleton says about Hatha. Quote, Hatha is concerned with the transmutation of the human body into a vessel immune from mortal decay. The gerunda Samhita compares the body to an unbaked earthenware pot, which must be baked in the fires of yoga to purify it, and even refers to this system as quote, The Yoga of the pot, rather than Hatha Yoga. So look at how closely the ideas of Hatha, its conception of the body and also of the process, resemble cooking, which is what happens in alchemy and in metallurgy, if you like, at very high temperatures. There has to be a stove or a furnace in alchemy to heat metals high enough to deal with them. And likewise, in Hatha, there has to be a vessel, the human body, and a fire where we begin to cook the material that's in it. And so first the vessel is going to be created, because the body is like an unbaked pot. So we have to cook that first. And once that is made, we can move through the process, turn up the heat and begin cooking as the forceful action begins to unfold. Now, the origins of this Siddha practice. And when I say Siddha practice, I'm talking about tantric, oh, the CO, alchemic CO, intermingled practice, those three things almost as if they're one. So if we talk about the origins of Hatha, we're talking strongly about the origins of tantra in a certain way. Who's the origin? What's the origin? It's Shiva. It's the god Shiva. He is often called Adi, not which means primordial Lord. And so Shiva is the source of the original teachings. And as I learned it, the original teachings were delivered to the primordial Yogi known as matsyendra Nath, and that means Lord of the fishes, sometimes translated as the fish belly. Machindra is also referred to in the literature as men enough. So if you ever come across men enough, it's the Evidently, the same person as machindra. Machindras first, first student was goraksha. So this is karaksha, not these are the first two masters of the revelation from Shiva. Gorakhsha was menath or matsyendras main disciple. Both of them were powerful Siddhas. The Legends depicting their deeds are deeply symbolic of the process of alchemical transformation of the mortal body into what's sometimes called the diamond body, the vajra deha. Let's look at a story to leave off the historical investigation so we can finish with our imaginations. This is the story of gorakshanas birth. Legend has it that a peasant woman implored Shiva to grant her a son touched by her fervent prayers that God gave her magical ash to eat, which would ensure her pregnancy, in her ignorance, the woman discarded the priceless gift on a dung heap. 12 years later, machindra happened to overhear a conversation between Shiva and his divine spouse, Parvati, wishing to see the child granted to the peasant woman. Machindra visited her, she sheepishly confessed what she had done to she was graceful gift, unperturbed. The Siddha asked her to search the dung heap again, and lo and behold, she found a 12 year old boy who she named goraksha, which means cow protector. That's from Georg fairstein That retelling this story is replete with alchemical images, images of cooking and transmuting and so on and so forth, images of the relationship between the divine and the divine. Mines seminal fluid or reproductive tissue, and the earth and the Earth's reproductivity. First of all, Shiva grants the woman magical ash as a result of her fervent prayers. Fervent prayers mean the heat is being turned up. Fervent prayers mean that that the conditions are now ripe to give birth to something. They're fertile, and they need to be fertilized. And let's say a few things about this ash. Number one, it's very important to understand that she was given ash to eat, that this is a kind of food, and that that eating is the method of impregnating the heat which is is shown or brought to being by her fervent prayers. Number two, Ash is the absolute essence of things that have been passed through a fire, things that have been sacrificed in a fire and burned to the point that they could be burned, burned no more. So that Ash is a perfect symbol of like reproductive tissue in a sense that it's an absolute essence. If we think about the reproductive tissue in the body that results from digestion, in Ayurveda, we see that the food we eat has to go through like a 15 stage process where it gets cooked that many times in different fires in order to produce a really small amount of semen, or the female really small amount of egg. Those tissues are very expensive, and they take a lot of material to cook down to make something very rare. So Ash is the homolog here of that kind of reproductive tissue, and it comes from the God, and it is the food. Okay. Now, in her ignorance, instead of eating it, she throws it into a pile of manure. And this pile of manure is a is a fantastic alchemical symbol, not just in Hinduism, but the world over in Greco, Roman alchemy, in the later European alchemy, Alchemy goes through several stages here, also in Arabic alchemy, the idea of a dung heap is really, really important because of the kind of fire that the dung heap represents. So here she goes. She has this substance that's she's supposed to eat, but it's dry, and so in a way, it can't be eaten and it can't be digested. It has to be moistened, in a sense. So she throws it into the dung heap, and she thinks it's a mistake. She feels bad about it, but it's actually not a mistake, because the higher is always in control of the lower, and the lower sees the higher from its own perspective. So as they say, All things in good time, but this dry ash gets thrown into this dung heap. The dung heap is a is a symbol for the alchemical furnace, and it's also a symbol of the womb. So as the alchemical furnace, it's the place where the ash gets reconstituted in a way and cooked. And it's interesting, because this level of heat can't burn the hand, is what the alchemist would say. So we have a really low level heat. And the heat is also the heat of so it's the heat of fermentation. It contains lots of moisture, and it's also deeply fertile. You know, everybody knows that we fertilize our gardens with manure and that we make compost piles, they heat up in this way. So we're engaged in that same alchemical process. So it's also like a womb. In that sense, a woman's womb is is 98.6 it always is deeply controlled. It doesn't go up and down. That fire never becomes too dry and never becomes too wet. And in order to produce something of this nature, which is the the first student of machindra and an actual divine human creation, we have to protect it and nurture it and fertilize over a long period of Time. The great archetypal psychologist James Hillman would point out that alchemy is very unique in the in the way it thinks of the transmutation process, because it introduces what he calls an anti hero myth into the into the mix. And I find that interesting that we see these. These images coming from Tantra that are feminine. We have a womb here. We have a fire that's involved in the sacrifice. That's a really low fire. You can't burn your hand on it. It's deeply feminine. It's, it's, it's symbolic of the of the woman and how she engages in the trans mutation process. Because the the hero myth would be the opposite of that. That would be the hero stepping into the center of the ring and probably having to walk through real fire in order to be transformed. Tantra is so feminine, so deeply concerned with the feminine that it I can see deeply how it dovetails nicely with this idea of the anti hero kind of of myth. So what kind of work is alchemy? At least at this stage, it's the work of guarding something and protecting it so that it can be at a very low heat and stay moist for a long time and unfold at a slow pace. Finally, there is the Divine Child, which is like a metaphor in alchemy for gold, and here it's also a metaphor for the complexity and the essence that is produced in the transformational process. The Divine Child has way too many qualities to go into in the short time that we have now, but we're getting an idea just from this initial pass of what kind of images we're going to be dealing with as we go through the episodes on Hatha, tantra and alchemy. Always remember cooking. Always remember that we're dealing with the art of the fire, keeping the fire at a certain temperature and a certain moisture level and so on. We're always dealing with the homology between metals in the earth, divine sexual fluids and human sexual fluids, and ultimately, we're looking to produce something that is eternal through this cooking process and this eating process that we're going through. So let's make a summary. Tantra forms the ideological context within which Hindu alchemy and Hatha Yoga coalesce and procreate. And when we begin to speak of Tantra, we should know that we're speaking about alchemy in a certain way. We should know that we're speaking about Hatha in a certain way. And it would go the other way from those to Tantra. All of these form a technical body of of aspiration and tools which aim to intervene in the natural creative process that the universe is going through, that the human also is going through, and accelerate that process, push the process a little bit faster toward the perfection that is possible. There's a strong emphasis in each of these disciplines that the uniqueness of the individual practitioner might persist eternally in realized freedom, in contrast to the flavor of mystical absorption presented in the Upanishads, where the individual is like salt in water. And last, we know we're dealing with some fringe disciplines here, because they overtly speak of a human being able to acquire or realize power that certainly looks divine, the ability to transmute the things that are touched, the ability to change reality in the way that fire changes something. I hope this has been interesting. We sure do appreciate your listening. God bless you, and we'll see you next time.