Below is an account from
Sri Atmatattva Das about the infamous Tantric Masters in Kerala taken from the india.divine.org website. It is one of the my favourite writings:
Exposure to the Tantric PathBy Sri Atmatattva Das. Published 05/24/2006
In that little town under the foothills of the western ghat in Kerala, there was just one real building which was a small temple with a tile roofing. The temple was surrounded by huts and shanties. When I arrived, there was a competition going on in the market place between two tantrics who had selected an onlooker from the crowd to be their medium. They had him standing stiff as a bamboo in trance. One tantric pointed a stick at him and said “lay down” he fell flat! The other pointed and said “get up” he rose up straight without bending a limb! A thing about six inches long made from flour which had loose hay for hands and feet with half an egg each for it’s eyes and a knot of real hair stuck on the top was lying on the ground nearby. One of the tantrics recited an incantation and the thing rose up and started moving towards him, rocking back and forth on its own, moving its hay legs sideward.
This town was near the famous Durga temple-town Chotanikara (where midnight tantric rituals are conducted treating hundreds of haunted people). This used to be a kind of show by the local tantric voodoo priests.. they will put up a small challenge to the competitor and usually they meet in front of some old temple in an empty ground .The names of competitors will be announced in the local market place , community bathing lake, and in the temples. So there will be two or three villages gathered around for the fete. About 200 people will be there, and the priests don't have any stage or microphones or anything like that. They just start shouting at each other and the people will stand in a circle. I was just sitting back in fear. I heard some of them murmuring, "When these things start to happen it means it is getting dangerous." One of the tantrics cuts the tongue of the medium with a gross looking blade, there is blood all over . He covers the medium with a blanket and starts screaming out some questions to him, while going in front of different people in the audience. The questions are like what is the color of shirt this man is wearing, what vegetable this lady has in her bag, where is this old man coming from etc. The tongue cut medium screams back answers from under the blanket. Then the other tantric sticks the tongue back in its place, but now the guy cannot talk! In the zeal to outdo one another tantrics call more people out of the crowd. asking them to perform as mediums. No one comes forward fearing that they may possibly perform injurious acts.
Finally, to the relief of everyone they declare a draw to the challenge and announce that they will meet everyone again on another date. The crowd broke up. I walked around the little bazaar near the temple. There I saw one of the tantrics going from stall to stall. This is a weekly kind of market there. There is no building or anything like that, people will come, may be spread a mat or spread a long blanket and then they will put their things on and start selling, while shouting loudly the prices . It will go till sunset time in the evening. Just before they close, the local criminals will come and collect their tax. After they left, everyone was afraid of this magician who went around collecting his toll. After he left I asked some of the shop keepers why they allowed this to go on. One man says if I don't give he will change all these vegetable into creatures. He said, “ He can make snakes fall from the sky”. Another said anything may happen , this man has no heart. He can do what he likes and no policeman will dare touch him. A third man told me he will change the color of my wife's skin. He has chatan (a type of spirit) working for him. Chatan is derived from the Sanskrit word chetana or consciousness. Whether there is a relationship between this name and the Arabic saitan or Hebru's Satan is a question for etymologists.
I was eager to get to the bottom of what I have seen and heard. Without wasting more time in the bazaar I headed for the woods outside the village. At the end of a long paddy field in the eucalyptus woods is where I was told I will find the tantric showman’s residence. after a time consuming hike through the thick village I finally reached the place. The small shelter in the middle of the clearance was assembled with crude wood, with a cut rock that deemed the roof and the ‘hut’ was built under a banyan tree. The roof was not full because one could stand up and see part of the tree where one side there was no or very little roof (rock). It had all around animal bones and human skulls and hair and all kinds of disgusting paraphernalia.
A charming, fair skinned, young lady sat just inside the doorway, if you call it a doorway, that was again a broken side of a wall. She was not yet 20 and looked fresh and virgin. Her hair was worn long , half wet and loose. She had on a simple ankle length maroon red gown which had a long open neck in the front, revealing her flesh.. There was a vacant look in her eyes that did not change when I spoke to her. Asked about the man I was looking for she slowly mumbled, “ please wait he said he would come” which really didn't tell me what I wanted to know . I replaced the question and got the same reply!. Now like a recorded message repeated over and over I could see that see was under some kind of influence. Curiously , I slowly landed my palm on her right cheek, I was right, she didn’t seem to know that I was touching her. Every couple of minutes, she slowly moved her head down a bit, like a newsreader. There was a bewitching smile on her lips too.
I sat down outside the stone shelter. I heard someone moving through the forest. A man stepped into the clearing and I recognized him as the tantric I have seen demanding goods in the village market. Now he didn't look so wild eyed or fearsome. In fact it could have been any common fellow from the street, a rickshaw-driver for instance. Still one could see in his face a strange sort of controlling mood. Not that of a gross sensual lusty person. But someone who had some lust for power. One might say he had the same sort of air about him as a very successful business man - a mixture of ruthless ambition and a cocky confidence. But his success was not in business it was in the black arts. Soundless, he led me into his hut.
The foreside of its dark disjointed interior was taken up by a stove that was simply an arrangement of bricks housing a wood fire. Upon that squatted an oversized copper kettle with two earlike handles on either side. Steam spooled out from under the jug, filling my nose with a stomach unsettling odor. Just a bit short of disgusting and causing me to throw up. Against the other two walls were a flat stone with a highly polished mirror-like surface, a small book case with a thick bundle of palm leaves crowding the shelves and an old, half broken harmonium. In the other corner I saw more of the now familiar rice flour “figures” chilling in their combined morbidity and childishness. As I walked in stooping, my head brushed against bones tied with knots of hair hanging from the timber rafters above. With the stove's fire he lit a couple of candles and we sat down.
By this time it was getting dark. Nervously I began explaining myself, and my new found interest in Tantra. He gazed at me steadily with a cold thin smile until I broke in, in haste, “Can you teach me? Do you think I can learn from you?”
Then he asked in a deadly calm voice, “That job is mine, but tell me, how far do you want to go.?” A scary giggle followed his question.
“To tell you the truth, my real interest is to develop faith in spiritual things by actually seeing something like this”.
“Did you see the show I did today”, he asked , maintaining his reptilian smile.
“Oh yes it was very impressive. How do you perform such feats?.”
He thoughtfully stared at me for a moment. Then he replied, “I can tell you where you can get a little deeper look into the mystery of Shakti, (power). This will be a sort of test for you. But it will have noting to do with me. I will tell you where to go and give you some advice in preparation. But you will be on your own after that. I have selected a venue very close to the house of your Muslim friend." It was bewildering to me how he knew about my Muslim friend.
"If what you see convinces you that this is not parlor magic, you may return here for some serious instruction. Are you interested?" I nodded eagerly - I was very interested. He told me about a small Muslim settlement near a stand of trees known by the name Chavuk, similar to Pine. In the midst of Chavuk woods was a clearing. I was to go to that clearing on the next full moon night and sit and simply watch for something to appear.
“Don't fall asleep whatever you do. You should bring with you a pocket full of small white stones - if you get frightened spit on these stones one at a time and throw them behind you as far as you can and then run. This will help you to get away. Try this encounter , then you may return here”.
I left in no small state of excitement eager for the next full moon night. The afternoon before the full moon night I returned to the region with my Muslim friend. We soon found the little village, that the tantric had told me about and made discrete enquiries about the chavuk forest. Around sundown we located it. Just in case we might need some help, my friend made a quick acquaintance with a Muslim family living some 100 meters across the road that skirted the edge of the trees. These people confirmed that certainly there could be danger and told us they would keep the lamp burning in the window so that we could find our way there easily. We had our pockets full of white stones.
After some hours of killing time in the village we returned about 11 o'clock in the night and entered the woods. The moon was high in the cloudless night sky flooding everything with its pale shine. After a brief walk down a gentle incline we came to an area where some trees had been felled. In the midst of the clearing we saw a broken circular wall that rimmed an old well.
We sat down on a fallen trunk some 20 meters away from it not knowing what to expect .Our attention was drawn to each and every rustle of the woods. For long time nothing happened. Finally after midnight my friend nodded into sleep. I remembered the tantrics warning and remained alert. My back to the well and my gaze moving like a searchlight along the line of trees all around. You could hear every single turn of breeze that was going through the thin leaves of those chavuk trees.
Ten minutes after my friend fell asleep, I trembled, as a cold tingle crept up my spine. Leaping to my feet and turning around I saw something that made my heart almost stop. Bathed in the moon shine a tall statuesque women stood on the well’s rim. I was sure she didn't walk to that place because I was watching. Her eyes were closed. For a moment I wondered if she was a sleepwalker. In face and physique she did not resemble an Indian woman . She had a long loose hair that hung down over the front of her body to her knees - otherwise, she was naked. She was hauntingly voluptuous in a way that was both enticing and frightening.
Staring open mouthed at this apparition I nudged my sleeping friend with my foot. He sat up with a shock, turned to see what I was looking at, then gasped and scrambled to his feet. At once her eyelids lifted revealing twin orbs from hell to penetrate the darkness with a glare like the eyes of a tigress. She fixed those terrible eyes upon mine and stepped off the well alighting to earth as if she was not heavier than a wisp of cotton. The woman’s legs propelled her forward. I cannot say she walked or ran or floated for these words will not simply be able to give you an accurate picture as how she advanced upon us. Her legs moved without bending at the knees making swift little steps of such fluid effortlessness that I was reminded of the locomotion of a centipede. It was almost as if below the waist her body was motorized for when her legs started her head and upper torso with her limbs snapped back slightly from the sudden forward motion at least to our vision.
My friend shaking violently and gibbering caught my hand and tried to pull me with him in a dash for the road. But I was rooted to the spot transfixed by the mysterious eyes of the women. I tried to tell him I couldn’t run but no sound would come from my contracted throat. He left me and fled for his life just as she halved her distance from us. What deadly hypnotic power an automobile’s head lights will have over a deer standing in gaze on it’s path - her eyes had over me. She closed the last few feet between us and I heard my friend shout from behind me “get ready to run!” something flashed through the air and landed behind the woman. She broke off her mesmerizing stare and turned to see what it was. As soon as she looked away I regained control of myself. I bolted in sheer terror to catch up with my friend who was now in the woods on his way up to the road. He turned took something from his mouth and threw it past my head. It was then that I remembered the stones! Still running like a mad man I fumbled in my pocket and pulled one out. Popped it in my mouth for an instance then passed it over my shoulder without looking back.
Hearts pounding we burst out of the groove, crossed the road and entered the field at full tilt on our way to the Muslim’s house. I turned and saw the woman emerge from the trees and skitter over the road right behind us. An awful thought crossed my mind - that’s it! we will never make it. Slow into a stumble I plunged my hand in my pocket to snatch a whole fistful of stones. I licked them ravenously before hurling the lot right at her, then sped off again at full speed. Looking over my shoulder I saw her stoop to examine some of the stones, picking them up one by one. but as if in sudden fury she flung them down again and rose to resume her pursuit.
By this time we had reached the house. We entered breathlessly and bolted the door behind us. A man and his old mother came out of another room and made us to sit down as they quickly drew the blinds on all the windows. That done, the man handed my friend and I each a large shiny bladed knife. He rubbed some limestone paste on the sides of the blades and told us to hold the knives ready. In the mean time the old lady read aloud from the holy Koran. Whoever or whatever the mysterious woman was, she did not try to enter the house. After an hour or so the man and his mother retired. My friend and I still trembling with fright did not dare drop into sleep before the first rays of dawn.
Secrets of Left-hand TantraWhen we met again, the tantra master was much more forthcoming. I was greeted with a warm embrace and invited to relax under the banyan tree. I sensed that I now belonged. In an awed voice I asked him, "What was it that I saw?"
He chuckled at my neophyte's excitement. "So, you were impressed?" I nodded. "You saw Mohini, a demoness from the underworld. Had you known how, you could have entered a pact with her for the next cycle of Jupiter (twelve years). You promise to satisfy her lust once a month, and she will do your bidding in return - protect your property, destroy your enemies, whatever.
"But a pact with Mohini is very dangerous. When she comes for sexual satisfaction, she may assume eighteen forms in the course of the night, expecting you to fulfill the demands of each one. If you cannot, it will cost you your life. And if during the twelve years of your relationship with her you have an attraction to another woman, that will also cost you your life. You suddenly vomit blood - finished."
I asked, "Why was she attracted to the white stones?"
"Mohini draws energy from the male sexual fluid," he answered. "Besides the pleasure of sex, this is her main interest. Of the bodily fluids, saliva is the most similar to semen; that's why throwing a white stone upon which you've spat is a sure way to divert her attention. People who drool while sleeping unknowingly invite this kind of succubus to take control of their bodies."
Looking at me appraisingly, he then asked, "Has your faith in the occult increased?" I swallowed and blurted, "Yes, how could it not? I'll never forget that experience as long as I live!"
"So, you want to learn something from me?"
"Yes, of course!"
He devised a schedule of appointments based on my days off from work. On the average I would see him once every two weeks, but sometimes he insisted that our meetings be separated by as much as forty days, in deference to his own obligations. He ordered me to keep my relationship with him a strict secret.
During our meetings he taught theory, reading and explaining Sanskrit verses to me from a old book. In the course of these lessons, I learned he had twelve chatans under his control. He engaged these demons in grisly tasks for paying customers, such as frightening or inducing insanity in the customers' rivals, or even killing them.
I also learned that my master had taken up vamamarga in vengeance against people who had used the same methods to hurt his family. He destroyed these enemies and then went into business for himself. In India, vamamarga has always been the last resort of the downtrodden in securing justice and getting respect: 'Dog as a devil deified, deified lived as a god.'
Apart from my master's ruthlessness, I found some things in him that were admirable. One was that he was strictly self-controlled, despite the fact that he used women in many of his rituals. He was a rare man who was motivated not by sensual pleasure but by sheer power.
Another good quality of his, fortunately for me, was that once he was your friend, he would not betray you. Many tantric masters accept disciples simply because they need assistants, not because they want to impart knowledge. Since in tantra today's disciple may become tomorrow's rival, a master's students can find themselves in grave danger when he no longer needs them. But my master accepted me as a friend, knowing that I would not seriously pursue tantra later on. I was only experimenting.
For the last ten years he'd been attempting to get mystic powers by a method known as uttara-kaula: the worship of Shakti in the form of a virgin girl with particularly fine lakshanas (physical qualities). His chatans would search for such beauties as he traveled around Kerala doing his magical exhibitions.
From time to time he would place one of these women under hypnotic control and bring her to a burning ground, where bodies are cremated. There he would bathe her in liquor and invoke the power of the goddess with mantras and mudras (symbolic hand gestures). Yet during all this he had to remain completely unperturbed by sexual desires (he'd been celibate for the last thirty years). After the ceremony he let the girl go home untouched, unharmed and unable to remember what had happened.
Having completed theory, one night I assisted him in a particularly gruesome ritual. He took me to a crematorium where he had the cooperation of the man who burned the bodies. This man had pulled from the fire a smoldering half-burned carcass that we used as a kind of altar. My master sat down near the body in meditation. I had a box containing eight different powders; on signal from my master, I would sprinkle one of them on the hot, crackling corpse. The other fellow would place burning cinders on the body from time to time to keep it hot.
The powders produced different colors and flavors of smoke. With the rising of each puff from off the carcass my mind would be opened to a particular realm of thought. For instance, one powder caused thoughts of clear skies to flood my mind - the dawn sky, noon sky, sunset sky and night sky. With another I saw different kinds of clouds. Visions of bodies of water were induced by a third. Sometimes the visions were horrible, as when I saw mounds of different kinds of stool, and sometimes they were very sensual. In all cases, I had to keep my mind under control and not allow it to be overwhelmed by fascination, lust or revulsion.
I was being used by my master as a 'video monitor' for his own meditations. I was to sustain the images in my head undisturbed while he entered them with his mind. Each image was a door to a particular level of consciousness, and at each level he had to propitiate a particular form of Devi.
This ritual meditation went on until about an hour before sunrise. Finally he stood up and embraced me, saying, "With your help, tonight I was successful. What a mind you have!"
He explained that he had long attempted to complete this ceremony, but because of not having a suitable assistant, he'd never seen it through to the end. Now, he told me, he'd attained the power to render objects - including his own body - invisible, as well as reproduce them in multiple forms.
Such powers are called siddhis, and are obtained by yogis after long, arduous austerity and meditation that might stretch over a succession of many lifetimes. Yoga slowly opens by increments the chakras, the hidden power points of the mind.
But the tantric process, when successful, places the mind of the meditator under such intense pressure that the siddhi-chakras can be abruptly wrenched wide by a mighty burst of willpower. This is precisely why tantric ritualism combines such explosively contradictory elements as the vow of celibacy with the bathing of nude girls in liquor. This is also why tantra is so dangerous, for its forcible distortion of the mind often ends in insanity.
Likewise hazardous is the congress the tantrics have with chatans, mohinis and similar evil spirits. As an old saying goes, 'Mahouts die by elephants, snake charmers die by snakes, and tantrics die by the entities they summon and attempt to control.'
After the session in the burning ground, my master told me not to visit him again. "You have seen enough to have faith in the realm beyond the senses. If you are intelligent, you will take up a proper religious life. This path is only for wild men like me."
And in fact my faith was greatly reinforced by my master's help. I concluded that if such displays of power as he could effect were possible through the dark practices of left-hand tantra, the miracles attributed to the Krishna murti at Guruvayur must be of an infinitely more sublime and pure nature.
During the period I was learning from my master, I visited other tantrics. There were two in particular who became the main reasons why I took heed of my master's warning to abandon vamamarga. I didn't want to become like them.
The first, who directed me to the second, was a woman who was reputed to be the most adept tantric in all of Kerala. She sometimes stayed in a ruined house in a village outside of Trichur. It was only with great difficulty that I managed to find her there as she was very secretive about her movements. It was rumored that she was wanted by the law, so I dared not make open inquiries about her for fear of being arrested as an accomplice.
When I came to the house, I saw nothing indicating recent habitation except for an old ragged quilt flung in a heap on the veranda. After looking around a bit and finding no one, I picked up a corner of the quilt to see what was beneath it. The cloth was snatched from my touch as a voice hissed from under it, "Don't touch my blanket! If you want to see me, come back after sunset!"
Shocked beyond words, I recoiled from the quilt as if I had suddenly seen a scorpion in its folds. I went into the village and had dinner in a small eatery. As the sun sank below the horizon, I returned to the old house.
As I mounted the veranda, the figure under the blanket stirred and sat up. Her face gave me yet another shock, for it was decrepit beyond belief and covered with infected running sores. Her hideous visage reminded me of a reoccurring nightmare I'd had as a child, in which a hag much like her peered from beneath a staircase of an old building.
But fascination for her reputed abilities overrode my loathing. As she was physically unable to stand (she moved about with the help of people over whom she had power), I sat down next to her. In a rheumy, quavering voice she said, "If sunlight touches my skin, I will die. That's why you can only see me after dark."
I tried to introduce myself, but she cut me off. "I know you and know why you've come, but I do not deal with beginners. You are looking for drastic displays of power that will give you faith in the mystic realm. Very well; I have thousands of tantrics working under me, and I will recommend one to you who will more than satisfy your curiosity. And I guarantee - after you've met him, you will not want to become a tantric yourself."
She told me to go back to the village and spend the night there. The next morning I would see a line of people boarding a bus. "You give the driver two rupees. Where he tells you to get down, you get down. From this veranda I will direct you the rest of the way. Now go."
Everything transpired as she said it would. Around noon I got off the bus at a Muslim village where the main business seemed to be the sale of deep-fried plantain chips. From there I walked, following a footpath out of town and through a green field of tall grain. At the end of the field I saw a house perched atop a rocky knoll. Somehow I knew that was the place I was supposed to go.
On the veranda of the house were four young, pretty women in red dresses, each wearing her hair tied in a long pony tail; they were arrayed on either side of a flamboyantly-dressed man sporting a full beard and shoulder-length hair. He looked for all the world like a gangster, and I began to wonder if I'd stumbled upon a house of ill repute. The five sat in chairs as if they were expecting someone. As I came up the front steps to join them, I saw the veranda was also host to a large population of pet animals - cats, dogs, monkeys, and even a jackal.
"So, you've come!" the man welcomed me heartily. "And you want to see something interesting. Well," he gave me a toothy grin from within his beard, "you must see the performance we have planned for this evening. But until then, make yourself comfortable." He introduced his female companions and hinted that they would be as friendly as I might like them to be. I modestly declined their assistance in passing the time, for I was by now curious to find out what sort of discipline this man was following.
His specialty was spying on people and locating lost objects by means of mystic sight. And to attain his power, he performed the most obscene rituals imaginable. That night I would be witness to one.
He told me that his line of tantra required no vows or austerities like those maintained by my master. In fact, he knew all about my master and his trust in me; this, he avowed, was the only reason why I'd been permitted to meet the old lady who had directed me to him.
He said more about her. "Her greed for power knows no limit. She has attained levels that no one else can master, and she still wants more. Her physical disabilities are the result of the terrible methods she has used to get where she is now - but that doesn't matter to her, because her satisfaction is not in the pleasures of the body. To be truthful, she cannot be satisfied. The secrets of the universe are unending, and she has set her mind on fathoming them all. Her goal is to swallow the universe."
Tantrics consider the siddhi they call 'swallowing (internalizing) the universe' to be the summit of attainment: one has access to anything in the cosmos, on any planet, anywhere, simply by thinking about it. Thus all desires are fulfilled by the mind alone.
Yogis who know this mystic process can mentally move through the regions of the universe as easily as someone using an elevator can move from floor to floor in a building. The yogi's elevator shaft is his body's central psychic channel, which runs through the length of his spinal cord. By meditation he can link this channel to the shishumara-chakra, an astral tube coiling from the Pole Star down to the nether regions, and project his subtle mental body through it for an easy journey to other planets. He may even teleport the elements of his physical body through the channel, reassemble them in the place of his choice, and so seem to appear there out of nowhere.
Shortly before midnight, the tantric gave me a battered tin box to carry and led me to a nearby burning ground, where the body of a pregnant woman had been saved from the fire for his use. I watched in growing horror as he stood on the corpse and recited mantras. Using a special instrument he took from the box, he removed the fetus from the womb of the dead woman. Examining the tiny limp form, he assured me it was still undead, though beyond hope of revival. He'd kept the soul within the body by a magic spell, he claimed. He pulled a razor-sharp knife and a large jar half-full of some solution from the box, and then, chanting more mantras, he began to butcher the baby, dropping the pieces of flesh into the jar. Aghast and trembling, I fled the scene.
I went to the watchman who had let us into the burning ground. "How can you permit this?" I raged. "That woman's family paid you people to consign her body to the flames, and you're allowing such evil things to be done to her and her baby!"
The watchman cautioned me in a frightened whisper. "Don't say anything more, please! That man knows what you're speaking to me now. Don't make him angry! You must be very careful with him - he even knows your thoughts. If you don't like what he's doing, why have you come here with him?"
Feeling ashamed of myself, I mumbled, "I only wanted to see the secrets of his power..."
The watchman shook his head in pity and said, "Your curiosity will ruin you. You're a young man, you look well-bred and intelligent, why are you getting mixed up in this? Just leave. Don't spoil your life." But I couldn't leave, as I didn't know where to go. One does not stumble around the Kerala countryside at night, for snakebite is a likely consequence. I settled down near the watchman's campfire and soon dozed off.
Some time later - it could have been one or two hours - the watchman roused me. The tantric had come out of the burning ground carrying the jar under one arm. In the other hand he held the baby's skull. "Why did you leave?" he admonished me, not unkindly.
"If you want to do things that other people cannot do, you have to do things that other people cannot do!" He laughed, and his easy manner stupefied me.
"Look at this!" he exulted, thrusting the jar under my nose. I thought he would unscrew the lid, and my gorge rose. But he only wanted to explain that by treating the baby's flesh in the solution he'd made a powerful ointment. He reproved me again for not having stayed and watched how he'd done it. In the darkness the jar looked empty to me.
"Go get the box," he ordered. "We'll go back to my place and tomorrow I'll show you what this preparation can do." He led me through the fields back to his house. Inside, he went to bed with two of his girls. I slept fitfully on the veranda.
The next morning he set the jar down on a small table between us. Now I could see that the bottom was covered by a pasty substance. With a hand caressing the shoulder of a girl on either side of him, he leaned back in his seat and probed my mind for a moment with a quiet stare. "I think you ought to test the power of this ointment," he said, raising his eyebrows allusively. "There's a problem at your factory that you can solve with it ... some missing cash?"
He was right. A considerable sum of cash funds had disappeared recently, and suspicion had fallen upon a Mr. Murthi, though no proof could be found against him. The tantric smeared a bit of the ointment on my thumbnail and told me to look carefully at it. As I concentrated, I saw in the nail the image of the office from which the money had been taken. I found I could alter the view with directions given in my mind, just as a TV studio director changes the image on the video screen by telling the cameraman to pan, zoom in for a close-up, and so on. But my mystic thumbnail scope was incredibly more versatile, for it even showed the past.
I saw that it was not Mr. Murthi, but another man who had entered the office surreptitiously to take the briefcase of money and hide it in his car. I followed him after work; he drove to the place of an accomplice and stashed the briefcase with him. The accomplice spent the money on black-market gold so that the cash could not be traced. And I saw how the thief had his share of the gold made into doorknobs that he placed on the doors in his home, naturally without telling his family what they were really made of.
Later I tipped off a friend at work who wrote an anonymous note to the police. They verified that the doorknobs in the man's home were solid gold. He was arrested and convicted on charges of grand larceny.
From my further discussions with him that day, I learned that when people came to the tantric for the recovery of stolen or lost property, for a fee he had one of his girls trace the missing goods with the mystic thumbnail scope. The existence of the ghastly ointment was kept secret, of course. The customers thought it was the power of the girls themselves.
The thumbnail scope had its limitations. Though it could penetrate any closed door or wall, it could not see above or below a specific height or depth, nor look into powerful holy places or temples and could be baffled by expert singers performing certain melodies. Certain kinds of smoke would likewise render it ineffective.
I asked him about his karma. "You have attained this siddhi by very obnoxious methods. What do you think lies in wait for you in future births?"
On this point he was surprisingly philosophical. "Those who would master this knowledge must be ready to face the consequences without flinching. I will surely have to suffer for all the black deeds I have done. But that's part of the game we play.
"We tantrics view all existence as an ebb and flow of Shakti. We connect with that power, and it sweeps us up to untold heights. Later on, the same power may plunge us into despair. But what else is there? Everything is but a manifestation of Shakti."This man's question - 'But what else is there?' - for which the tantrics have no answer, bothered me. If there was really nothing else beyond the goddess and her power, then he, and the old witch on the veranda, and my master who poured liquor over women's bodies, and the brahmin who broke coconuts on his head, had attained all there is to attain. I couldn't accept that. There had to be something more.
I was now not interested in going any further with vamamarga. But I thought that the theoretical principles and the basic discipline I'd learnt from my master were of great use to me. I had no inkling that once the lid of the Pandora's box of occult mind power had been pried off, it was not so easy to close again.
Regards
Kinryu
