Episode 17 - Viktor Vajra, “Transcendence, Bliss, and a Budding Software Empire”

Viktor Vajra, “Transcendence, Bliss, and a Budding Software Empire”

Intro
This program brought to you by personallifemedia.com is suitable for mature audiences only and may contain explicit sexual information.

This is Part 1 of a 2-part program.

[music]

Beth Crittenden:  Hello everyone, and welcome to A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews on Personal Life Media.  I’m your host, Beth Crittenden, hello, coming to you from One Taste Urban Retreat Center in San Francisco.  This show is dedicated to orgasmic researchers and their many forms.  And we define orgasm a little bit differently than you would expect here at One Taste.  It’s actually when your involuntary musculature is activated.  So you could even have a really good sneeze and be in orgasm.  Our guest today is Viktor Vajra.  Hi, Viktor.

Viktor Vajra: Hey, how are you doing?

Beth Crittenden:  Great.  Viktor is a former computer programmer who has actually created a weekend retreat experience called “The Bliss Experience”.  It combines sound healing, sexual healing, table work, and dance and meditation, all these wonderful amazing things that helps people transform.  He’s actually taught “The Bliss Experience” at Esalen and across the country, and the work that led him there is part of what we’re going to focus on today.  Viktor’s a Selva practitioner, which is active meditation, for those of you interested in meditation.  He’s a sound healer and has studied with some of the greats in the field.  He also co-hosts a TV show that shows in Palo Alto.  It’s called The Next Step.  And you can learn more about this and get episodes at his website fastmovie.tv.  Viktor’s also a “one brain” instructor, which we’ll hear a little more about later.  And he’s a former avatar wizard master teacher.

[music]

Beth Crittenden:  Join us today on A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews as Viktor Vajra shares with us the three principles of Buddhist Tantra.  We’ll hear a new paradigm for sexual behavior, starting with how you approach people on the dance floor, and also learn the basics of bliss dancing.  Viktor has developed a really fascinating approach, and a weekend retreat experience called “The Bliss Experience”, that you’ll hear more about.

Viktor Vajra: Computer programmer, and had a hard time getting a date, learns Tantra, becomes a concert pianist, and starts teaching the stuff.  God, it’s like…

Beth Crittenden:  So, wow, Viktor.  All this and computer programming.  How did you get into this exploration of such variety and depth?

Viktor Vajra: Well it actually… it’s a good thing you say that, because I think ultimately relationships is what causes us to move into great states of despair, and then we always try to find a solution out of it.  So one of those things is, you know, anyone who’s ever gone through the pain of loss of their relationship falling apart, there’s a part inside of them, when they’re at the bottom of the barrel that they want to seek out new knowledge.  And oftentimes that’s the greatest time when you have an awakening experience happen.  So that is really how my quest began many, many years ago in Hawaii, when I started researching the connection between spiritualness and sexuality. 

Over 15 years ago I took a very first Tantra class.  And without naming names, it was really one of these big group experiences, very sensual.  Like right away, everyone says, “Okay, let’s pick a partner and I’m going to teach you yab yum.”  And you’re sitting in someone’s lap you don’t even know, you know, within a few minutes.  And all these people are all of a sudden having all their buttons being pushed, and they’re going, “Wait a second!”  And then you look over, and there’s your wife or your husband, you know, in the lap of someone else, and all your jealousy issues are immediately enflared, and they sort of… over the end of the course it kind of stabilizes, but it was sort of like shock therapy.  And I said, “Wait a second.  This doesn’t seem like this is really what I want to consider to be Tantra.”  Right?  This is not really my shtick.  And I want something more conscious, more spiritual something that uplifts my soul. 

And so that’s where the quest began.  It was from the dissatisfaction of seeing, hey, you know there are all these great Tantra classes out there, or so I thought, and then I realized, “You know, why are none of them really teaching Tantra?  And really, what is Tantra?”  So that’s some of the stuff I’m going to get into as we talk through this interview.  If there’s an interest in understanding the distinction between Tantra, Kama Sutra, all these buzz words that have…  Ultimately, it comes down to spiritual sex. 

It’s like, why do we have sex?  Is it to have a baby?  Well, biologically, yes it is.  I kind of like thinking about it as if you actually look at why are we here on this planet, it’s really to have sex.  If you actually said we have a sex-o-meter, right?  And every time two people are having sex, you know, they are sending off a beacon of light.  If you looked up from the heavens you would see, just like all the lights in the sky, you know, of the planet at night, because everyone’s doing it at the same time.  Now if you map that onto like an orgasm, it’s pretty much the same thing as a neuron firing and transferring knowledge from one neuron to another.  So could it be that maybe sex is the way that human beings communicate knowledge to each other across generations.

Beth Crittenden:  What knowledge do you feel like you’ve learned by having sex?

Viktor Vajrat: Oh, I learned Tantra by having sex.  I learned how to be a yoga instructor.  It was a literal direct transmission.  I met a master teacher once, and it was actually the hallway of a hotel room.  Our eyes met and I knew who she was and she knew who I was, and she was just like…  I said, “I know this may sound strange, but I would like to have an experience with you.”  Those were my exact words.  “You know, I want to have initiation, and I want to go back and I want to teach this.  I’ve been studying for years, but I never really met a master teacher.  You know, all the teachers that I’ve gone to classes, I don’t really want to be initiated by them, because that’s not really my shtick, but I feel this kinship with you.”  And so after about a half hour of due diligence questions, she would go, “Oh, OK.  You qualify.  Here’s my room number.  Come and I’ll initiate you.”  And so… I’ve never ever seen a hotel room transformed into an ashram so quickly, because I walk in and incense is burning, the lights are… there’s all silk on the walls, and I walk in like, “God, this is like a hot…” You know, they’d turned the Hyatt Regency into an ashram.

Beth Crittenden:  So do you think it’s any sex, that it’s the physical act that can do the transmission?  Or does it have to be the whole intentional experience beyond the physical act?

Viktor Vajrat: It has to be the whole intentional experience beyond, and it has to be with someone who has had that intentional experience beyond.  In other words, from what I understand, she had been initiated into that back in the Eastern areas and had received this knowledge through lineage.  And so it was through that, that she was able to, through sex, transfer that knowledge from that lineage directly.

Beth Crittenden:  And when you say she was a master yoga teacher, do you mean yoga as in “the art of living” yoga, or literally the physical asanas that you were able to…

Viktor Vajrat: The physical asanas and being able to move the body into positions without effort.  I mean, to me a great yoga teacher is one who can move into any of the postures, without effort, with grace and ease, without having to follow a certain set pattern, and can also drop into that state where, almost like a transcendent force is guiding you through what posture you’re supposed to be in.  It’s like when I studied yoga many, many years ago in my twenties, I met a teacher and he opened me up to this concept of tantric yoga.  It wasn’t really… he didn’t call it “tantric yoga”, but in hindsight that’s really what it was.  It was foundational principles, foundational postures.  But when it actually came down to it, what he wanted us to learn was, “Can you, from your deep state of meditation, can you move from spirit and allow your body to move into that posture, move into some posture that you may never have even experienced?” 

And what he explained was, in India the way that yoga’s taught is it’s a connection with the divine.  So sometimes we in the West, we want to structure something.  You know it’s like a business plan, and we want to have your executive summary, and you have all these different statements and you have your business and all this.  And we kind of treat yoga like that.  So you’re actually looking at some yogi on the Ganges who’s having an enlightenment experience.  He’s completely connected with the divine source; he’s moving his body in amazing postures… So a Westerner comes at it with a notebook and draws them, and then goes back and says, “Okay, this is yoga.  If you go to this posture, and then you go that posture, then you go to that posture, then that is an asana, and therefore you will learn yoga.” 

Well what they’re missing is that there’s an inner experience that that yogi is having, and that something inside of him is moving there.  It’s not that he practiced that sequence or that sequence has any particular relevance.  At least that’s what my teacher wanted to get across.  It’s that your body will move into the sequence that it needs when you’re in that transcendent space.  And that transcendent space is what I believe is the same space that we talk about as the nirvana experience or the enlightenment experience or… You know if two people can experience that together, I call that “the bliss experience”.  So the whole focus of what my workshop is about is about stripping away the layers that hold you back from having that with another human being.

[break]

Beth Crittenden:  You mentioned before we started the recording that you still have three software companies.  So how do you take this transcendent kind of enlightened approach and bring it into modern day, where you do inevitably have to manage details and other people aren’t on that same channel.  How do you bring these parts of yourself together?

Viktor Vajrat: It’s weaving.  “Tantra”, the literal term of it is “to weave”.  So you have all these different threads.  And sometimes, if everyone sees how the basket is woven together, it’s like overwhelming.  Right?  So what you have to do is you have to take a thread, you have to find the thread that you and only you can do, and then delegate the rest of it.  So I work in teams.  I have teams of people all over the world.  I have a team in Hong Kong, a team in India, a team in Arizona, you know a team in North Bay, a team in South Bay, and I sort of am moving these teams to build different experiences that have to have a result on the web.  So if you go to fastmovie.tv, for example, what we’re working on there is to deliver broadcast-quality video and make video distribution easy on the Internet, not at the small grainy quarter-screen-size video, but at full-screen full-motion video.  This is going to be revolutionary because we will be able to now deliver like a DVD-quality experience from point A to point B.  Well obviously that requires thousands of hours of engineering.  So our engineering is done overseas, and I’m working with a few people at the architectural, at the meta-architectural level. 

And so to answer your question, once you’ve reached and you’ve tapped into these transcendent states, you can literally do anything.  It’s like the music you heard when we came on.  I had no idea that…  I guess it’s seven years ago, that I had this music inside of me.  And I once heard Wayne Dyer speak, and he said, “Don’t die with your music still inside of you.”  And I was just like, “Oh, God, that touched me,” you know.  God, don’t die with your music still inside of you.  I say, “Well I’m glad that I got it out.”  You know?  But it was through this awakening, through conscious sexualness that that came; it bubbled up.  It bubbled up. 

So a lot of what I’m wanting to explore is the connection between creativity, you know the ability to create art…  Let’s look at music.  Well the word “music” itself is from “the Muse”.  The Muse is a goddess, or the feminine principle.  “Muse-ic” is “from the muse”.  So music is inspired by the feminine or the goddess.  Or it’s like a man being in awe of the beauty of a woman and then he writes a piece of music.  I mean one of the greatest pieces ever written, probably definitely the most popular, by Beethoven was Für Elise and he wrote that for Elise, a mistress.  And so I think it’s really important also to emphasize this notion of the mistress, because the mistress means something very different in the West than it does in the East.  And if… have you ever seen the film Kama Sutra?  There’s a…  You saw the film, yeah.  It’s all about the tension that’s created between the king and the mistress and the mistress’ sister, who is the queen.  So he marries the queen, but her sister is his mistress.  And the tension that’s between that couple, and how she falls in love with someone else and it just gets really, really a whole big mess. 

But what I think it’s really important to take home form that experience is that that culture, from which Tantra and Kama Sutra and all these things came from is a different culture than the culture we live in today, and that we need to adapt.  A lot of people say, “Oh we must go back to that.”  I’m saying, “Well you know what?  Evolution is evolution.  We’ve evolved since that day.  We need a new paradigm on sexual behavior.”  And so my intention in creating “The Bliss Experience” was to define that new paradigm of sexual behavior, redefine the four bases that you know all boys learn in high school, and then weave it together with dance, and mudras that come from these ancient traditions, in such a way that there are boundaries that are established, that it’s safe, women feel honored.  The original subtitle of this workshop was called “honoring the goddess”.  Well then someone came along and said, “What about the god?  Honoring the god?”  I said, “Well okay, so, yeah we do.  We also have to honor the god.”  So it’s really about exploring these subtle energies, and in a sense of reverence.

So how does that fit into software development?  Very simple.  When you…  There are three principles that come from Buddhist Tantra and Buddhist Tantra yoga.  I could recommend several texts on that subject, but basically the three principles are ‘renunciation’…  And renunciation is the act of completely letting go of attachment.  Okay?  And it’s a very simple…  In the West we, “It’s hard.  I can never let go.  I have this boyfriend; I can’t let go of him.  I have this girlfriend; I can’t let go of her.”  You know a master lets go of them every moment, because they don’t want to have their previous conception of what that person is be any different from one second previous to the next second.  So it’s just like you pick up a pen and you drop it.  Okay, that’s ‘letting go’.  It’s an effortless statement, right?  But you know like the struggle to let go, it’s like I could hang on to this pencil and never let it fall.  But it’s really just the willingness; it really comes down to willingness.  Are you willing to renunciate?  Are you willing to let go?  That’s when Tantra happens.  It’s a pre-requisite. 

The next thing is bodhicitta.  Bodhicitta means aligning yourself with being, that of a bodhisattva, and a bodhisattva is someone who has a respect for all beings.  All beings, not just the good or the bad or the ones that I like or the ones that I don’t like.  But I’m looking to see how may I be of service to all beings?  And when you align yourself in that directive then it sort of opens up a doorway where this tantric energy flows from above, from heaven, into your body.  And then all of a sudden you just know.  You just know.  You can get up on stage, you know, you can speak, give a…  I never thought that I had it inside of me to get up on stage and compose a song in front of a live audience, you know with cameras running, video cameras running.  And I did it; I made a DVD out of it.  So…  You, the listeners out there, all of that is inside of you too. 

And what I believe is that if we can tap into that core essence through this blissful experience…  And some say, “Oh yeah, well can you do it without a partner?”  Maybe.  In my experience, I think you need to have a partner that’s able to go there with you, because both of you bring each other into that ecstatic level.  And it’s through that experience of bliss with another human being that you reach this state of awareness that transcends everything, your job, your career, how you interact in the world and the type of friends you have in your life.  It’s truly a breakthrough.

Beth Crittenden:  Is there a third?

Viktor Vajra: Ah, yeah; you’re perceptive.  The third one they call “the proper understanding of emptiness”.  And I have a personal story that I like to share, to explain that.  Emptiness is understanding that if you have like a really, really busy schedule and you have a lot going on, you’re not allowing any room for this divine presence to sort of organize your life, or to create synchronicity, or just meeting that person in a sidewalk café that happens to be your beloved, or you know, walking into Best Buy and there she is.  Your beloved is standing right there and you have thirty seconds to decide, “What am I going to say or she’s going to be out of my life forever?”  That doesn’t happen when you have an appointment at 7:30 you’re running off to.  Right?  You’ve structured your life in such a manner.  So to illustrate this, flip a coin.  It’ll either come up heads or tails.  Ask the divine, “Should I do this?  Should I go left? Should I go right?”  Flip a coin; make a decision. 

Now I tested this one time.  I was out with…  Many, many years ago in Hawaii I was dating someone and we were out with the kids.  We were going to go to, uhm, we didn’t know where we were going to go!  And we actually created this complete renunciation, “We don’t know where we’re going to go.  Hey, but we have this idea… when we come to an intersection let’s flip; if it’s heads we’ll go left; if it’s tails we’ll go right; and we’ll see where we end up.”  And we end up at a duck preserve.  And the kids had a great time.  And there was this beautiful rainbow that came out.  We had a nice picnic.  It was a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful day.  And then we said, “Okay, now we’re done.  What are we going to do next?”  We said well let’s just see what happens, and we flipped, and so then we went left and then we went right, then we went right, then we went left, and then we went right and left and right and left, left, left, left, right, left, right, and we ended up back at her house.  Now if you actually look at how many coin tosses that is, that’s two to the power of eleven, you know which is like one trillion to one improbability that that would happen.  But it did! 

So that is the third step.  That is the proper understanding of emptiness.  Because once you’ve surrendered and you’ve aligned yourself with the highest intention as a bodhicitta and bodhisattva, then you can allow the random experience to occur and it’s inside the randomness that God can move.

Beth Crittenden:  Wonderful.  We’re going to take a short break now to support our sponsors.  This is A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews.  I’m your host, Beth Crittenden, coming to you from One Taste Urban Retreat Center in San Francisco.  We’re speaking with Viktor Vajra.  And when we return from the break, hear more about the bliss experience and how you can start to live some of these principles yourself.

[break music]

Beth Crittenden:  This has been A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews.  I’m with Viktor Vajra tonight, from One Taste.  We’re so glad to have you here.  Thanks a lot.  And if you…  You heard his websites; I’ll repeat them just one more time.  You can either go to FastMovie.tv or ViktorPiano.com and that “Viktor” does have a “k”.  If you’d like to learn more about One Taste and our practice of orgasmic meditation, you can visit OneTasteSF.com, as in “One Taste San Francisco dot com”.  Thanks for joining us.  If you would like to get transcripts of the show you can also visit the Personal Life Media website, which is PersonalLifeMedia.com, and go to A Taste of Sex and look up the show details.  We’d be glad to do some bliss dancing with you anytime.  Thanks for joining us and take care of yourselves.

[music]

Announcer: This concludes Part 1.  The interview will be continued in the next episode of this show.

Announcer: Find more great shows, like this, on www.PersonalLifeMedia.com.