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Oct 15, 2012 - News Release
Just Published - John Ryan Haule's 
Tantra and Erotic Trance in two volumes.

Tantra and Erotic Trance
Volume One - Outer Work
Human sexuality is a problematic thing. It gets us into trouble, breaks our hearts, involves us in painful compulsive relationships, even transmits deadly diseases. It would surely scare us off, if it were not for its siren call to higher forms of union and moments of bodily bliss. When examined more closely, however, and especially when we turn our gaze inward to see what sexual arousal is doing to our consciousness, we find we are in an altered state—a form of “erotic trance” that reveals dimensions of ourselves, our partner, and possibilities for human life that otherwise would not have been discovered.

Procreative sex forms the foundation of the nuclear family and the glue that holds society together—what we might call the “horizontal” potential of sex.  Tantra, however, is about its “vertical” dimension—about “tuning” our awareness to bring higher, spiritual realities into focus. It all begins by mastering our bodily reflexes. This first volume of Tantra and Erotic Trance deals with the preliminary stages of mastery and the transformations of consciousness that they make possible. The whole project is imagined as a ladder with its feet on the earth and its top leaning into Indra’s heaven.  Each rung represents a new level of awareness, a mastery of what just the rung below had appeared to us as a poorly understood gift.

ISBN 978-0-9776076-8-6
9.25 x 7.5 x .75
226 pages
Index, Bibliography
Publication Date November 1, 2012

Tantra and Erotic Trance
Volume Two - Inner Work
In the first volume of Tantra and Erotic Trance we learned to overcome the ejaculatory reflex and go “beyond orgasm,” and in turn were introduced to aspects of our awareness that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. Holding ourselves in a state of longing where nothing needs be done, we learn the transpersonal potential of “erotic trance,” inhabiting the body and mind of our partner as well as our own. We become acquainted with an inner force that has a will of its own, the serpent of light that India calls “kundalini.” By now, every step we have taken has separated us from the cultural assumptions of our society and aroused disturbing emotions and images. Facing them down in calm openness calls kundalini forth as our ally, clarifies our emotional responses and gives us a new stance toward life.

Now in this second volume of Tantra and Erotic Trance, we find that the “diamond ladder of mystical ascent” is no longer “out there” in bodily congress or social expectations. Its “rungs,” instead, are the series of chakras through which the kundalini serpent rises. Each chakra that opens brings us into a different visionary world and a different emotional state. We begin in the heaviness of earth and rise through tumultuous waters and the fires of rage before entering the lightness of air and the endless expanse of ether. Indra’s heaven is finally visited in the brow chakra, and we become one with the cosmos at the crown chakra. The ultimate goal, however, is to climb back down and live on the earth with our experience intact so that every empirical event is charged with transcendent meaning.

ISBN 978-0-9776076-9-3
9.25 x 7.5 x .75
226 pages
Index, Bibliography
Publication Date November 1, 2012

John Ryan Haule holds a doctorate in religious studies from Temple University. He is a Jungian analyst trained in Zurich and a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute-Boston. In addition to Tantra and Erotic Trance I and II, his publications include: Divine Madness: Archetypes of Romantic Love; The Love Cure: Therapy Erotic and Sexual; Perils of the Soul: Ancient Wisdom and the New Age; The Ecstasies of St. Francis: The Way of Lady Poverty; and Jung in the 21st Century, in two volumes: Evolution and Archetype and Synchronicity and Science.