Again and again, throughout the Wraeththu trilogy, wise hara keep reminding the protagonists - and us, the readers - of one thing in connection with harish magic: "Humans had this potential as well, of course, but they didn't use it, so it was their downfall." When I was reading the book for the second time, I decided to follow this hint and see where it led me. During the first reading, I had noticed that harish culture seemed to be peppered with all sorts of human mystic traditions that the author had cleverly worked into the story - one could clearly see she knew what she was on about. I knew about the concepts behind those traditions from reading Fantasy and Science Fiction as well as from the more orthodox offerings from the New Age book shop that was practically beside my doorstep at that time.

Sexual Energy

It seemed obvious the harish need for aruna was connected with the idea about our bodies containing conduits in which our life force flows. Chinese tradition calls this chi; in the Indian tradition we have the seven rising chakras, and so on. In Science Fiction/Fantasy and in alternative therapy alike, there is a widely accepted theory that our sexual energy and psychic/magic/spiritual powers use these same energy channels in the body/"astral" body -- i.e. the entity of energy sharing the same physical space with our organic bodies, thus imbuing it with life.

Two differing approaches depart from this basic assumption: one, to work magic/psi/healing, the energy needs to be saved up and not dissipated by sex; this is the monastic approach used, for example, by Marion Zimmer Bradley in fiction and by the mystic branches of many actual real life religions.

The other variation claims that, on the contrary, repressed sexuality makes these energy conduits become clogged up and the energy itself grows stagnant, while a sufficient amount of sexual energy flowing keeps the channels clear for the work we want to do with it, that is, harnessing the "aruna energy" (for lack of another word) towards a goal beyond simple pleasure. This, of course, seems to be the attitude in Storm's books as well as in real world practices such as Tantra, some forms of esoteric Buddhism, and some sects of Taoism. In fact, we are wildly off course if we assume that all the things Storm invented about harish nature and magic are mostly speculative - they're just one step removed from what we humans can actually access if we put our mind to it. So, when the chance to experiment with some of those real life Grissecon practices presented themselves to me about five years ago, I jumped at it.

Tantra

A friend of mine from among the New Age crowd was holding a Tantra course on a Saturday in autumn in a small village outside Munich, where I live. I went there all alone, ready to do anything necessary to access those harish abilities inside myself, and feeling a little nervous. Her variety of Tantra, however, was exceedingly tame; nobody ever had to take off a single article of clothing. All we did was stand, sway or jump about concentrating on our breathing, our sexual organs and the flow of energy in our bodies.

In a way, I found it indeed too static: we remained men and women, separate and complimentary, during the development we went through that day; there was no crossing over the borders of gender. In Tantra, one is either Shiva (male divine principle) or Shakti (female divine principle), and you remain so because you are born as that. There are gay Tantric groups out there, but I don't quite know how they adapted the philosophies; their web sites aren't very graphic, and I quite honestly didn't want to pry on their religion. Resources on Tantra are amply found on the Internet; I'd recommend you search Google for it as they proliferate daily.

However, there is one thing I retain from my brief foray into Tantra, a very basic exercise that never fails to get my wildly reacting/reflexing/panicking body back under control. You stand up, spine straight, feet slightly apart - roughly the width of your hips - and parallel to each other, the knees ever so slightly bent. You sway your pelvis backwards and forwards in the rhythmic motion of sexuality, breathing in time with the sway: you breathe in while your hips sway back, and breathe out while they push forward. While pulling back and breathing in, you visualise good, nourishing energy from the earth entering you through your sexual organs and coursing through your body and cleansing you; while breathing out and pushing forward, you imagine the energy expelled through your genitals, taking with it all the waste it has collected inside you. I still do this sometimes when I need it; in situations when standing about and wiggling ones bottom is inappropriate, a minimalistic version confined to just breathing and concentrating is enough.

Tibetan Pulsing

However, another alternative healing practice exists that impressed me much more lastingly and deeply at the time; it is called Tibetan Pulsing. No sexual acts as such occur at such sessions; sexual energy is diverted towards the use as healing energy. It is worked in pairs, one partner being active, the other the recipient, but no set gender is followed - roles are switched halfway through the session, a rather harish aspect of this practice.

In Pulsing, emotional and mental qualities are associated with the organs and areas of energy in the body, primarily the bones, based on the ancient Tibetan medicine that connects pulses, organs and mental/emotional states in its systematic and holistic approach to bodily and mental health - that's why the practice is called "Tibetan Pulsing". Mainly, Pulsing aims to work with you soul, gaining access to it via the organs connected to specific aspects. As we know from "The Inward Revolution", the repressive adult identity we develop throughout our life in order to be able to function in society without getting hurt too much tends to manifest itself in our bodies as the hardening of certain muscular areas. In pulsing, we try to dissolve these hardened areas by very gently putting a lot of weight on them and penetrating them with intense bio-electric (Grissecon) energy.

Different areas of the body connected to different internal organs and different mental/emotional complexes are worked on at specific times of the year that change in interlocking daily and bi-weekly cycles determined by cosmic influences - although the explanation that these cycles merely serve to give a framework of issues to work on to the practitioner so he always knows what to do and doesn't get the chance to avoid areas and issues that might feel uncomfortably should really suffice to explain why there has to be a pre-defined system of cycles at all.

Tibetan Pulsing is done lying down, in comfortable clothing and most definitely shoeless. The ouana partner - I revert to harish terms here as to avoid to many ugly slashes to indicate anyone can be biological male or female here at any time - places his feet on the energetic areas in the body of the soume partner, depending on what aspect of the body and the emotions is worked on at that particular session, which is explained and physically assisted by the expert healer leading the amateur practitioners. The ouana partner lies on his back, with knees in the air, while the soume partner lies either on his back or his front depending on what areas of muscles and bones are to be worked on to reach the organ and the mental/emotional complex that is being worked with at the time.

The ouana partner concentrates on feeling his recipients pulse through his own feet and then lifts his hips slightly from the ground and begins to pump his pelvis in an unmistakably sexual and active way while standing with his feet on the soume partner's body, actually putting part of his weight on the muscles and bones of the area that is being worked on. Thus, he pumps the sexual, giving, ouana energy right into that area. After a while, he lets the hips sink back to the ground, sways his knees gently from side to side and concentrates on the soume partner's pulse again; after doing that for a time, he starts pumping again.

The expert healer who leads the group remains in charge of repetitions and time keeping, telling the amateur practitioners what to do, encouraging and supporting them with his words. After an appropriate time has elapsed, there is a short break which mostly gives the partners a chance to acknowledge each other as persons and letting their energy shift from ouana to soume and vice versa, and then the roles are reversed between ouana and soume, the soume partner just having to relax, concentrate and feel the energy entering him through the ouana's feet and coursing through his body, energising the organs and emotions being worked on.

Personally, I find that being ouana is extremely taxing; for at least a day afterwards, the muscles driving my (physically non-existent) penis are rather stiff and sore. However, I find that the practice actually works very well for me. The first time I did this, five years ago, the organ we worked on was the bladder, and I had to drink and pass water as if running through a desert for the next few days as my body tried cleaning the area that I had had energised at the session.

What impressed me most, however, was the fact that I had come there with a splitting headache behind the area of my left eye, and at some stage during the session an expert attendant had come to me and placed his hand right there where my head was hurting. Demanding an explanation for that miracle after the session, I was told that it was an obvious place to pulse with some additional energy for me during the process, as it was an important point on the bladder meridian. When I protested I'd had the headache all day, so it certainly wasn't part of the session that had only started at seven in the evening, I was answered with a laugh and told that was typical, Pulsing tended to affect you even before it began. I was deeply impressed with this a-temporal effect, satisfied that the potential for aruna energy indeed exists in humans, and never felt the need to come back for the next five years.

No small part of that staying away from the one thing I knew really worked for me and let me be harish in the middle of my commonplace human existence was, I must admit, the way I had been overwhelmed by it and ended up as a small puddle of Grissecon energy on the floor. I consider myself a thoroughly rational creature much more interested in the theory than in the practice of anything - practice is just research with my body to add to my understanding, and when I feel I understand, I stop.

More Practice and Practical Application

Early this autumn, I began reading the Wraeththu trilogy for the fourth time - the third time having been an entirely different adventure that I may or may not recount one day, as opportunity presents itself - and joined the Wraeththu mailing list first as a lurker, then speaking up when I'd finished the book.

Soon, I mentioned my experiments in real life Grissecon and was promptly prompted into promising this article for Inception. However, I felt dishonest talking as if from the horse's mouth about something that had impressed me five years ago, so I searched Google for "Tibetan Pulsing" and "Munich" and found a link right away, leading me via the only Pulsing web site there is (sadly, in German and under permanent construction) right to one practitioner here in Munich who holds an open session every Wednesday. So, I went there again just to do some more research with my body so I could talk with greater conviction to you about the theory, and found the Grissecon working very well for me again.

The emotion associated with the bladder complex (which we worked on again as I came back for the first time after those five years, a rather strange coincidence at first sight, but not that non-linear actually, as it was that part of the yearly cycle again) is the nagging feeling of being not good enough, the constant bad conscience that drives us to be better than what we fear we really are. As I am the network administrator at a publishing company specialising in IT magazines both technical and business-related, I have to subdue - on their own turf - droves of males (who think they know all about technology) into treating the company's technical resources responsibly and diligently. So this feeling of always having to be better just to be able to my job and actually earn the money and recognition I get from it was something very well known to me. Since then, that nagging has just gone. Completely. I know what I am on about just well enough, thank you, and don't need to jump about any more like the Indian goddess Kali on speed trying to terrorise them into compliance.

Making myself mentally harish from time to time, I find, helps me very much with my life as a human. In experiencing my potential to be ouana, I need to be less aggressively defensive against these human males at work. Now, having had a physically male human lying all soume beneath my feet while I was pulsing his energy meridian connected with his sexual organs - Pulsing is adamant in calling them penis/vagina with the unsightly slash every time, insisting we all as an energy state or potential have both, really - I don't have to prove anything any more as I know that I am as ouana as I need to be - very liberating indeed. On the contrary, being able to connect so directly with the ouana aspect of myself, I can accept the dreaded, weakening soume right along with it.

This time, I am sure I will be going back for myself, not just to do research with my body, and do a full cycle. Cleaning up the congestions in my energy conduit as well as having access to perceiving humans as their harish potential will aid me with my own development - the way the hara in the books use their caste progression, really. The concepts from the Wraeththu trilogy can be very inspiring to our own lives far beyond the theory, I find. Whatever way we individually find of letting them influence us, discovering the har in all of us will make us better human beings - human beings better equipped in dealing with the sometimes complicated, frightening and suppressive world around us.