Aghora: At the Left Hand of God - Spiritual Book on Tantra & Hindu Philosophy | Perfect for Meditation & Yoga Practitioners

Of Svoboda's Aghora trilogy, the reviews accurately reflect that this is by far the one most worth reading, and the only place to start. The Vimalanda personage (person? character? it matters not) is a wonderful, brilliant, iconoclastic and amusing teacher.The books are filled with anecdotes, sometimes stories from ancient literature, sometimes his own experience, sometimes the experiences of others. To summarize it, this is the path of the vira (hero, warrior), not the pashu (see Julius Evola's Yoga of Power for some background on these terms). And that path is so easily misunderstood, appealing, naturally, to ambitious male practitioners who want to prove their fearlessness and (for example) spend the night in a burial ground (if you think that sounds easy, read the book), a kind of vision quest (to borrow from another tradition), with the pitfalls always the same -- an inflated ego which is the opposite of what should have been the intended result, and a kind of all-male yangness that, as we learn right from the the first parts of this book, is all wrong.This is a path of Goddess worship. The Goddess has many guises. If we're lucky we can choose which one(s) to follow. This goes back to the beginnings of history and far beyond. The Goddess is lover, mother or terrifying one, the Celtic triple Goddess, the thrice three muses that have inspired (mostly) male devotees for all time, and every Goddess from every tradition from all over the world. If it all sounds sexist, it is. I'm not making it up. It is the nature of the spiritual world for those who have somehow escaped the life-stifling patriarchal ideas of male god and bloated rationality.At any rate, of the three books, this is the only one that I come back to. If I wasn't being lazy, I'd give (only) four stars to the second book and three for the third. The second book is about Kundalini, which, when you look for it, seems to be everywhere (for example, the stories of Ovid are full of it), so we don't need to go to India to find it and it certainly doesn't have to be thought of as exotic -- if I can digress for a moment (I don't think Vimalandna would mind), our most famous guide to "Kundalini syndrome" is Gopi Krishna, who had all those terrible symptoms not because Kundalini is so harsh but because Kundalini is feminine, and, being a product of one of our male-dominant societies, used the excuse of his debility to treat his wife like a slave for many years. It's (obviously) a huge mistake to try to use the power of the Goddess to subjugate women.The third book, about karma, a very literal, pedestrian kind of karma, was of little interest to me if not for V's gift for telling a story. Maybe I just don't want to take too seriously the claims about the karmic effects of gambling, having done plenty of that in the past. Basically, according to him, I'm screwed.Any book that teaches us so much about the Goddess is well worth reading. She is certainly not the passive or any other stereotype we may associate with being female. It has all gotten so perverted in our male-dominated world that even our best scholars on the thought of the east associate "yin" with "female" and "passive." It's just sexist stereotyping and subjugation. The female is dynamic, changing, active, she is the earth and the physical world around us. All the male can do is surrender to her or, if he is master enough, to control her and guide her dynamism in such a way the he recognizes that the power itself comes from Her, not from him. Just my opinion.