Tantra Bensko, Watching the Windows Sleep, Naissance Chapbooks, 2010.“A man taking a break from the most expensive restaurant in the world, wandering through the parking lot, catches a glimpse of sentient windows which are having a frisky tender moment, and his perspective on the world changes forever - as does the restaurant itself.
People live at the same place, but different times, with bleed through between the past and parallel lives. Characters are aware of many levels of their selves at once.
Whimsical ridiculous meets explorations of consciousness. Magical Realism, New Wave Fabulism, Lucid Fiction, Absurdism, Surrealism, Spiritual Fiction, and Quantum Fiction genres are all here.”
“Tantra Bensko produces texts which skim along the liminal, stitching together scrims of the thin business of the daily. This book is a blend of fiction, poetry, and photographs working together to contain both the reality of the surreal and the surreality of the real.”
An excerpt, from The Terrace Steps:
The rest of the story shall go unexplained, but the steps were the first token of my affection for the birds, and we shall end there. They became being. Nothing else really mattered at the time, and the steps were the most beautiful rocks I could find in the quarries of the imagination, the shapes being suggestive of alterations in the seamless. The rocks never spoke to me directly, but they called to me in another time, and often their names were apparent in a kind of transparent liquid sensation that would take me over each time I discovered a name I couldn't understand in words.
“Watching the Windows Sleep isn’t simply about dreams—it’s an exploration of the unconscious and its integration with the things we perceive, utilizing language in gentle, elaborate waves, like a series of momentary imprints, one replacing another as they wash against the shore. Reality (if such a thing can even be said to exist in the text) becomes a point of departure, around which Bensko weaves a tapestry of images, until the distinction between what is and is not becomes meaningless, and all that remains is a sense of “having experienced”, in an almost blissful sense.
For the most part, these stories are difficult, if not possible to summarize. All feature fantastic, surreal elements that very interesting and unique in themselves; these narratives run through the interior of the pieces without ever rising to the surface, so the reading experience itself remains quintessentially nonlinear. Each sentence makes us realize that the possibilities are limitless—and we begin to wonder, after a while, why we ever thought they weren’t.
Here’s an especially nice paragraph, taken from “The Boy Who’s a Floating Flower”.
In one event, the boy is singing to you, in many worlds. He looks a bit different in some. He’s barely recognizable in others, certainly not a human form. Yet, though he may exist there as a flower floating in the air, hovering, changing your future, or as a twisting of enveloping patterns of some game with rules encoded on angles of movement, you know it is him. You wonder how you could have forgotten him from your future.
The text has a lush sense of peaceful ambience that I really like as well, a striving towards something nameless, abstract, and beautiful. The text is also accompanied by a series of images, which do an excellent job accenting the stories; the overall sense is of a vision coalescing, always taking different shapes, but never settling on one entirely.
The different shapes mean much on their own, but when they are intertwined in these steps, the patterns of the green exchanging with each other, they make more sense to each other… When the ancestors fly over, if they ever do, they may not understand it. But it is not for them. It is for the shapes themselves…The shapes of dying, the shapes of living. They weave together like singers on a boat. The shapes of water itself, the shapes of shattering oneself forever. The shapes of going out through a window and never coming back through it, but walking through a door instead, incomprehensibly.
Altogether, this brief collection is made up of a handful of short stories with one poem at the beginning and end. Each piece, though, is rich enough to be read over many times, and taken together they form a kind of mind-space, unfamiliar, deeply textured, and on occasion a little erotic as well. This is the kind of work, of course, that seeks to expand our understanding of narrative, or perhaps renovate it entirely.
Who is that person standing in front of the yellow rocks, in this very life? You go closer. He seems lit up better now, in the deepening sunset, almost as if flames were highlighting his features. He turns to you and nothing in your life makes sense.
…Perhaps each moment is a meeting place as powerful as this. Each spot of space. Perhaps this is each moment, each spot. Time, perhaps, to lie down.
The windows are sleeping.” - Kyle Muntz
"To start a chapbook, which mainly comprises of fiction, with a poem is a slightly odd concept. The poem that starts Tantra Bensko’s Watching The Windows Sleep sets the reader into a poetic mode of reading; you get carried away with the rolling lines and it takes you almost the whole way through this slim volume.
The first story, entitled The Accidental Voyeur, reads like a dream, a half dream. It feels like that time at three in the morning when you are not quite asleep, but still not awake; when the characters on the TV assimilate into your dream and suddenly you’re driving down an American Interstate and it all feels so real but out of your control.
The Accidental Voyeur is a story with written with charming flow, an almost Nabakovian poetry but unfortunately no real, tangible substance. At the end of it however, you are moved. You feel like you have woken up and are compelled to say something about how you are changed somehow but you cannot tell your partner what the dream was about.
The rest of this chapbook is more or less the same in that respect. Bensko is playful, bizarre and you get a genuine feeling that she doesn’t take it all to seriously, but sometimes several pages can go by without any clue as to what is expected of you as a reader.
Watching The Windows Sleep is however, littered with some beautiful phrases from a writer likely inspired by Nabokov at some stage.
"13 owls are hooting… As they fly and move, it’s hard to tell whose who-who is whose."
It is lines like this that truly make this little chapbook. They are humorous, poetic, effortlessly enchanting and a pleasure to read. These are the lines which stay with you, after all the rest have dissolved into the dream, forgotten forever, there will always be these lines to remind you it was all a dream, and a beautiful one.
A story towards the end seems to give us a slight glimpse past the strange curtains that, throughout the rest of the collection, prevent us from seeing what Bensko is really going for here. One of the shorter works called The Prize is framed almost like a long question that plants an answer into your head. The Prize blends a story and a poem into one and centers on a question about dreaming "13 dreams in one night."
The Prize appears in this collection at the perfect time. One story before the end it forces you to re-think what you have just read with a brilliant last line, which appears to be the direct root of the entire chapbook.
"So. Here we are, then. Outside of any story. What are we going to do with it?"
The likening to Nabokov should be taken lightly for if you are looking to be challenged with a story and plot as well as something highly stylized and poetic, this chapbook might not be for you. If you are looking for something a little odd that you can read and be moved by without really knowing why or how, this definitely is for you.
Like a song that you loved as a child, your favorite jumper that no longer fits or that reoccurring dream you can’t quite remember, the writing in this book affects you, deeply. You may not understand it all at the time, you might, but one thing is for certain, something within these pages will move you, change you and burn it’s mark on you forever, even if you’re not sure where or how.” - Alex Thornber
“Whimsical ridiculous meets explorations of consciousness.” Bensko is known for her experimental poetry and fiction, work that is strange and surrealist. It seems fitting that she begins this chapbook with the poem “Non Containers”, as this is not a collection that can be easily defined, a mix of poetry and fiction that tantalizes the imagination:
We play
At being fruit and being mouth
Desperate for approval
Until we go through the crack
To the rest of ourselves,
The light
That shows
Between the cracks - ”Non Containers”
In Spencer Dew’s review, he mentions Bensko’s tendency to ask rather than answer, to leave the reader “outside”. After I read Watching The Windows Sleep, I went back to this review and I think I returned with a different sense of what he was getting at, and wanted to explore this observation. I agree, but it didn’t bother me. How important is it for the reader to be led to a destination, as opposed to a more simple submergence in the text, in the now, in the immediate experiences of language and untethered ideas? How much of a burden should be placed on the storyteller? Should we demand a destination, answers?
Is Bensko what we might call “indulgent”? Is she indifferent about the reader’s investment, a tease that provokes, then closes the door? The simple answer is yes, but I don’t think this is a negative tendency. It is a wonderful tendency. It might make the reader uncomfortable, with that sense she mentions in “The Accidental Voyeur” of “the longing to eat something more substantial”. But is Bensko really concerned about the hardiness of the dish, is she concerned with “meaning beyond meaning’? Yes, we are left wanting, but wanting of what? She won’t answer that for you.
I am not sure that she should, and I will get into why shortly. One could take that as neglect, but I wouldn’t. Hers is certainly a defiant, confident voice that does not seem interested in meeting our expectations. Spencer Dew suggests that she wants us to be impressed by her credentials, and this might be true. But this sounds like an assertion about personality, and one that has perhaps tainted his perception of Bensko from the onset.
Keep in mind what absurdist and surrealist literature aims to do: Absurdism, in particular, is rooted in the sense of futility about humanity’s purpose, it takes aim at contrived notions of significance and renders our attempts at resolution as nonsense. Now, can you really argue that Bensko isn’t doing that when she rejects the compulsion to provide answers, and instead chooses to focus on questions?
See, I don’t think she is asking them because the answers matter, to Bensko there is art to the asking. There are places in her work where she pushes us to consider the nature of wondering itself, why do we wonder? Why do we try to resolve things that are beyond the scope of what we can reasonably expect to untangle?
“You start to wonder if you are possible.” – “The Quantum Fool”
Right in the beginning, in the very first story, we see a man who is trying to eat a melon with a spoon, and a waiter reminding him that “melons are eaten with a knife and fork!”
Bensko’s man has been transformed by his experience with the windows, he has been in the presence of something magical, and he is no longer the same man. How does a man unpack this? He begins to question his tools. How do we unpack this? What happens when we meet another of our selves, one who has experienced a fuller communion with the sensorium, how can one rest? Again, he walks. There is no enchantment. Nothing that satisfies.
The next story, The Terrace Steps:
“When we fly together at night sometimes, we almost exchange names like the birds, but I have not yet learned their secrets for how they do that. When I do, then, I would have to teach my friends, and they are perhaps too traditional to learn new things of that nature.”
Again, the theme of challenge, the comments on tradition. Examples such as these come up often enough in Bensko’s work for us to know that they are intentional, and Bensko’s consistency convinces me that she is not in fact being “indulgent” but has a method to her madness. In this story we come across satiety again in the grandmother’s muffins. What kind of fulfillment is she getting at?
In “The Quantum Fool”, tradition again: “Hard to make out such an arbitrary thing. The old ways of looking at things are seeming so outdated. You feel sorry for those who are still trapped with them. Whatever those ways were.”
This passage really hints at what, in my view, the author is trying to accomplish here, she is deconstructing our perceptions, the reader like the changing figure in front of the rocks. And in “this particular reality, the one you are most familiar with, they lean to one side.”
Something else that can’t be ignored in “Watching The Windows Sleep” is Bensko’s way of connecting to the primitive vibe, whether it is the dream self in the wild, the touch of symbols, lush, the mouth that opens wide and consumes us. She connects to primal things, the mouth on the petals, conduit saliva.
You have to know what story you’re in before you can get out. The storyteller sometimes likes to just be. Outside of pretending there’s time. Outside of struggles and their interpretation. (And them anything can happen!) You’re outside of doing something to try to make something happen. Outside of questions and answers. Just plain outside. – “The Boy Who’s Floating A Flower” - Lynn Alexander
“Tantra Bensko is identified in her bio as someone who “teaches Experimental Fiction Writing through colleges, online,” and on this chapbook’s title page she is identified as “Tantra Bensko, MFA.” These credentialing gestures may be absurd, the bow tie on the decorative column, the tattered top hat on the performing corpse, but I fear there is no wink, no knowing Dadaist smile, behind either line. The “Experimental,” with the capital E, and the MFA, a capital accomplishment, are meant in dread earnest, and meant to impress. As, unfortunately, is the content of the chapbook, stories about fragments of dreams and/or the physics and phenomenology thereof. “In the future, you will forget it, in the past you have forgotten it, so I know the secret will be safe if I keep it in the present. The present will enfold it and keep it mine, and yet I can revel in the telling of it.” This about says it all, as Watching the Windows Sleep is characterized by an earnest reveling on the part of its self-identified Experimental author, but likely will not linger long in the reader’s mind.
“How many worlds intersect here? How many worlds are dreaming of other worlds?… How do YOU appear in those worlds? As a shadow of a cloud? As a sound of unusually melodic wind?”
Fair questions, but what I longed to encounter more of in this chapbook was something like an answer, however enigmatic. Consider the “lucid windows” washed down with frothing cream, flashing significant scenes to a cigar-smoking man in a yellow suit who just happens to be wandering by—here at least there are descriptions that can be grasped. Too often Bensko gives us a vague gloss, caving to that profoundly distancing effect of narrating a dream not shared by the person hearing the narration. “Symbols. Yet so real and lush and living, with individual emotions,” she writes at one point, “Being symbols doesn’t make them any less poignant and vibrant.” I’d love to believe this, but it just lacks spark. What if houseplants had hair? Well, that would be a situation, and perhaps a story, but a chain of rhetorical questions does not a story make.
Poetry seems to be the best way to create what you will live. Better than lists. Or affirmations. Proclamations. Colors will create your day. Color sequences become a language translated by your skin. By your stride. By your breath. Not translated into English. Into something for which there is no English word.
This is no Rimbaud, no matter how many “colors dancing and shouting and jumping, free from constriction!” get poured onto the page, mainly because there is no saturation of color in the use of the word color. Rimbaud, when he trips out his new vowels, relies rather heavily on lists, on things, anchoring the balloon of his poetry such that the reader can feel and, maybe, climb inside the basket for a ride. Instead, Bensko’s “Experimental” style gives us this:
We begin. Swirling like a backwards somersault off a swing, landing in a pool of water, sending ripples beyond all knowledge of time. This is the essence, then: heady freedom of motion between worlds of formlessness and form, that which is formed and that to be formed, and other versions of them all that call to you with clear voices from across the river banks.
It’s difficult to feel or know anything here, hard to have an experience or care or continue. “The storyteller sometimes likes to just be,” she tells us, elsewhere, and, again, that is fair enough for the storyteller, but it unfortunately leaves the reader “outside of doing something to try to make something happen. Outside of questions and answers. Just plain outside.”- Spencer Dew
Tantra Bensko: Lucid Fiction: Beyond Anti-Stories
Though the experimental literary anti-stories push apart the structures of traditional plot arc, they may still be required to have conflict according to the current literary concessions. They disregard the idea of having to have only one character’s perspective. But Ethan Joella, in “In Breach of the Story: Braking the Shackles of Traditional Fiction,” (http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/704/1034) in International Fiction Review 33, page 38, 2006, describes how innovative the short story genre was earlier, but how conventional it has become. He does contend that in any case, even anti-stories rest on making an emotional impact.
My contention, though, as a human reaching for spiritual evolution, is: Are not emotions part of the ego’s need to maintain the sense of self focused on the lower levels of the auric field? What if we write from the perspective beyond the emotions?
I do love Joella’s article about experimental fiction, and he gives excellent examples of going beyond linear plot to fit the worldview such as Robbe Grillet’s sense of being a meaningless puzzle. He delves into fiction that goes beyond realism, and he sees the requirements of stories to be the emotional impact but also the universal theme and satisfying a contract between reader and writer. I don’t dispute him at all, and find his essay to be a wonderful comprehensive look at anti-stories.
I want to push the boundaries of experimental fiction by writing anti-stories that go even beyond what he is describing. I want to read more literature that pushes beyond the whole concensus version of reality itself, and I feel the age we are living in now is ripe for that. Meta-stories remain about writing, anti-stories remain about emotion about conflict. There are many stories in those sub-genres which do go outside those prescribed boundaries and are very innovative.
The style I am most interested in expanding is progressive spiritual experimental fiction, or Lucid Fiction, because it questions the very idea of what a person is. Do we have to focus on this particular incarnation? Can we see all our incarnations as pulsing out from a central core? Can we think of ourselves as being multi-dimensional, and describe our relationships with others as including the interactions on all the other frequencies at the same time? This is a quantum physics parallel universe at home to the Many World Theory. Time is scientifically suspected to travel both ways from the present. Lucid Fiction could present the movements and changes in the plot as being something that can be seen outside of one point in time. The actions could be looked at from a higher perspective as well, including perhaps the higher selves of the characters.
I see transformations, revelations, changes in perceptions, rearrangements of attitudes and organizations of life as a substitute for plot based on base action, straightforward events in chronological order. In Lucid Fiction, there could be a wider variety of progression within the stories, just not the typical conflict of someone doing someone wrong and someone feeling badly. A murder to be solved….While that may occur, the meat of the story may be in varying ways to look at that, all of which may be equally compelling. The narrator may move from one to the next and then set them all spinning and fly out through the center of them all, out of the idea of a story at all.
I call for Lucid Fiction to help us all move out of the glue of stories. I like to go into my core and pulse out from the point at which I am free from patterns and stories, linear moments continuing the problems from one minute to the next. I like to live in the miraculous realms in which spontaneous healings can occur, epiphanies can dissolve ignorance and let in enlightenment. And why not write about characters like that at times, where the plot can take the character upwards out of the traditional horizontal plot arc?
Though Joella can see anti-stories going beyond the traditional arc of plot, he still holds the perspective to the traditional idea of the persona most people inhabit, unaware of the rest of themselves they could inhabit if they broke the shell of the modern Western mundane version of the perspective on self. I personally like to write anti-stories that don’t cater to the traditional way that people look at themselves. I prefer to write at times from a more expanded perspective and encourage that perspective instead. It is a kind of Lucid Play between myself and readers, as we engage in an entertaining text together that allows us to hold on to a higher perspective.
I like to push beyond the need the usual persona has for egoistic drama. The individual life of a person is a pretense that I don’t want to be caught up in by living a fiction. I want the fiction of my life to become lucid. And I do experience this state almost all the time hovering on top of the other part of myself which lives inside the story to some extent, the plot of my life, the ups and down of desire and fulfillment. I do my best to keep a conduit between the higher perspective beyond the Maya, as the illusion of so called reality is labeled in Sanskrit, and the warm bodily self walking and sleeping upon the earth, smiling and enjoying the dream.
Can our fictions of this reality be acknowledged as dreams, both in life and in literature, and we become lucid within them, as the fictions themselves become lucid, more glowingly filled with the light of truth?
Tantra Bensko: A New Literary Genre, Lucid Fiction
This is the time for this new literary genre, Lucid Fiction, to erupt on the scene, because it reflects the paradigm of the moment in a way that literature is not doing fully enough so far.
As a writer, myself, I find my fiction relatively easily placed in journals with good reputations, with an appreciative audience, and my acceptance rate is far better than the reported average for successful writers.
However, I also find many rejections that say "there's no plot, dear." Or, "We like work with actual character"or "this is more like a poem than fiction, more lyrical than action oriented." Or, "we never really find out what is going on and it remains ambiguous." Or, "We don't want characters who are paranoid about conspiracies, and we certainly can't take aliens seriously." Or, "nothing really happens with that kind of magical synchronicity, so it's not realistic."
Well, exactly my point. Life doesn't always follow the formulaic plot arc, and we don't always find out what is going on, and really, it all takes place in our head anyway, theoretically. I don't like to encourage the idea that humans are limited by our skins, by what we are told we are capable of by the mass media. For example, I know that rishis and saints have levitated, that some people can bend spoons, that many people can heal by their minds, that people write each other emails at the same moment every day who haven't seen each other for years.
And being aware of the global conspiracy and being well educated on the subject of aliens doesn't make people weirdos. Why shouldn't people who face the conspiracy head on be represented in fiction and taken
seriously? So, I like those rejection letters, am tickled by them, and they let me know I'm onto something good. Because, really, how many other writers have had the same thing happen? Your plot is different from the formula, you experiment with form and identity in ways beyond the understanding of the editors, and you look around you and see that things are not what they are portrayed to be in the mass media? Writing about those things in Sci Fi doesn't appeal to you, but literary fiction doesn't include those subjects in its niche. And, foremost, you realize that life works in very dreamlike ways, and speaks to us in synchronistic, dreamlike symbols, and if we wake up to it, we can learn a lot from it, and direct it more to our liking.
My goal is to write and encourage others to write and publish and read more fiction, and other forms of writing, that helps us move past the very need for more drama, more fiction, more stories that just continue the formulaic plot. The suspense, the sweaty palms, the adrenalin rush, the climax that is always full of conflict and dualism.
I'd like to see more fiction that helps us peek out of the story and look around at the dream from a more lucid standpoint. Is it our egos that make us addicted to the traditional stories, the horror, the detective, the lovers in danger of being forever parted, because it gets adrenalin flowing as we identify with the characters? Our egos thrive on problems to solve, on ups and downs, on stimulants, and then, when the adrenals crash, more stimulants once again. Can we remain more stable, not so dominated by our sympathetic nervous system fight for flight responses, but more in balance with our para sympathetic nervous system's calmer homeostasis? Can we move beyond the addictions to the stories of our egos, and be more aware of the lucid parts of ourselves beyond those stories?
Yes, fiction can certainly entertain, and give us a good story, but can it propel us out of our trap within the dream as well, be a dream that creates the opportunity for lucidity within it? Can it be like a dream that goes so awry that we realize it isn't real, and that we can take off flying? Can it remind us that we are participating in this common dream that we are only pretending to be limited human beings encased in these solid bodies, but that when we astral travel, or travel beyond even the astral plane, we can indeed fly because we are spirits, we are light, we are everything?
You obviously have all kinds of talents with your art, writing, modeling and music. Which of these avenues interested you first, and what if any life event inspired you to pursue this path? What insights have you gained by pursuing this path?
- I’ve been interested in all the artistic pursuits, including making movies, all my life, since I was tiny. I decided back then I wanted to do all these things, and I’ve done them. There wasn’t one event that triggered it, other than being exposed regularly to the great composers, writers, artists, and filmmakers’ work, even before I started school. My mother was the main reason I had the opportunity to do that, so I’d say being born to her is what started it all. I wanted to be one of the absolute great geniuses adding to our world. I wanted to be a person people would discuss in the history of literature because of the ideas I brought to it.
However, modeling I didn’t think of until one day when I was an adolescent, looking in the mirror, and thinking I wanted to share my face with the world, but I don’t think I thought of it more than one or two days. That really came to my life later as a way to make money, starting with posing for painters when I was getting my MFA, and eventually, posing for photographers off an on, even making a living at it for years in San Francisco, at double the age most women would think of modeling.
I modeled for my own photography when I had the equipment for that, and it was a great way to express my creativity in another art form.
In others of my images, the majority of them, whether I was healthy or not, I mostly concentrated on bringing through a lot of energy through my eyes, to the camera, sending healing, transformative vibrations, the energy of honestly being open to being fully seen as a being, love, and infectious enthusiasm.
Inhabiting my physicality theatrically, using the gestures and expressions, and opening up my soul to the camera, making good compositions from the inside out is a form of art. It has never been the intense passion for me that the other artistic pursuits have, but it has certainly a lot paid more.
It’s hard to imagine William Faulker making his money to write his novels by taking off his clothes and striking poses, and it’s hard to picture people taking his writing as seriously if he did. So I’ve kept that part of my life separate to some degree, but integrating them from time to time, gingerly, experimentally. And I find that because of the type of modeling I do, all natural, generally nude, artistic, as an admittedly mature woman, and something I throw myself into with verve, celebrating being alive, without inhibitions, I get more respect, rather than less, for it.
As far as insights from all this, I’d say they are constant, when I go into the deep states of mind that I draw my inspiration from, the theta brainwave frequencies of trancelike creativity.
I’d say the main insight has come from starting this genre of Lucid Fiction, and looking at all the fiction I read now from that perspective, and seeing how rare it is to find work that explores the nature of consciousness and reality and questions the usual definitions of character, and what a person is to begin with, and that employs something other than the traditional plot arc.
I feel the lack of Lucid Fiction in our culture, feel it’s important for more of it to exist, so I am drawn to promoting it, to writing it, and eventually, I hope, to teaching it. Seeing how rare it is doesn’t necessarily show me that people don’t think like I do, but that publishers haven’t been jogged into thinking that way of approaching the world is Okay to print. Because readers haven’t demanded it, because they’re going along with what’s there. And writers have a hard time finding a market for it.
There’s a gap in between the genres, such as Sci Fi, and literary fiction. Writing about topics such as chemtrails, aliens, psyops, the paranormal, the deceits and manipulations of our government, the lies of our history books, as real life, rather than as speculation, is not really allowed. It’s supposed to be couched in Sci Fi formulas, put into the future, embued with technological details, and read alongside other stories of the untrue. But these things are true! Why not start acknowledging that?
And why not start acknowledging the quantum continuum, the ebb and flow of consciousness that need not always be labeled as stopping at the boundaries of the skin? Why not acknowledge that miraculous healing and telepathy, and synchronicities are common?
Why encourage the usual drama, conflict, ego driven, adrenalin based plot in life through constantly insisting on it in literature? I’d say my insight overall has been not only how rare this is in what’s out there now, but also, how many people I talk to about it feel the same way I do. It’s really exciting to talk to other writers, especially young ones, who think it’s obvious Lucid Fiction should exist, and that it’s the most accurate way of portraying reality. It makes me happy.
Obviously it appears this past century of western culture has used the very mediums of print, film, literature, music and such, NOT to enlighten the peoples of the earth, but to steer them away from being truly enlightened with no avenue of debate.
The views mostly allowed to be publicized are the very ones that keep the alternative, and more than likely, the true nature of things. People should be encouraged to seek ways of their inner expressions to promote higher education in hopes of spawning a new renaissance in awakening the souls of humanity to new heights.
On a deeper level, I sense a desire in you that seeks not of acceptance, but something more ‘lasting’ that you would like to leave in this world. If 50 years from now someone mentioned the name Tantra Bensko, what would be the ONE thing you would hope people would have as any lesson, message, or impression you hoped to leave?
- I completely agree. And that’s why the literature I’m promoting, Lucid Fiction, the opposite of what is generally accepted, because it doesn’t just fall blindly into the agenda we take for granted so much in the mass media we don’t even see it’s an agenda. People tend to believe life is really like what it is portrayed to be throughout history, from artists sponsored by the ancient illuminati governments, to current day sitcoms.
My own art embraces the very concept of 50 years from now by being pre-burned. I have a solo show that has been traveling from venue to venue, beautiful ones, with great openings, along the Spanish Levant.
The show is called Reality Burn! And the art is framed in what I call Scorchvision. I burned the giclées along the edges, put them in recycled frames with bits of used cloth for mats, and torched the frames as well, with a blowtorch.
This gives it an intense, unique look that complements the haunting quality of the images, made it possible to afford to frame them without using up any new natural resources, and puts them in the mindset of being found in the future, burned in the rubble of our destroyed culture.
I used to write and make art for the future of this planet, but now I don’t. I don’t know that I believe in that kind of a future.
So I think our souls may before too long be out of the realm of this earthly incarnation, and I’m still doing my work for the future, but for people’s spirits, not personalities. Luckily, that’s been my main work for the last twenty years anyway, working directly with soul-force.
I facilitated hundreds and hundreds of incredible healings with energy, and a large number of spiritual transformations as well. The process of transmitting energy that helps people raise their Kundalini, if they are ready, or open their charkas, reach new frequencies of themselves, which is always dramatic, and can be felt very physically, is called Shaktipat. Traditionally, this has been done by gurus up in the caves in the East. But I’ve lived lives like that already, and am my own lineage, and was born here, so I do it where I am.
People literally saw me disappear, very often, or become so unconnected to my form that I would change shape. I would appear to them out of the blue, seeming very physical, or amorphous. I would give them custom spiritual exercises to do, send Shaktipat, give them insights, make them start shaking as the Kriyas moved their bodies with enlightening energies. This is the real me, Ron, when you ask Who Is Tantra Bensko. And it’s something I don’t reveal all the time.
So, I want to do something like that in literature, not only with my own, but by encouraging others to do it too, with Lucid Fiction. And with my art, such as in my Metaportals series, which is mystical, and works like mandalas or yantras. Even with my movies and music. All of these things include ordinary world aspects, as they are meant to be all-inclusive, to merge the lower and higher aspects, not leave people wafting above their bodies in some sort of dissociation. They are meant to love all the levels of themselves, and treat the physical levels of this world with respect.
I address this with my writing, such as my stories about Kundra, which I’m gathering into a book of short stories (I have two manuscript collections, that one, which is Free Range Mystery Spot, and another called Lucid Windows). Kundra is a spiritual teacher, energy healer, living outside the rules of society, even outside its buildings most of the time.
Kundra deals with chemtrail disease and government mind control program victims and such, so it is lucid in all ways, from being open eyed to what’s really going on, to seeing what we are capable of beyond what the mass media conveys. It’s becoming more and more accepted that miraculous healings occur, that people can raise their Kundalini, etc. so the world is growing into my writing now, and I think it’s time for me to be one of the voices of the new, more lucid paradigm.
And my message from my actions, my writing, my DVD’s about Tantra and Interpersonal Dynamics of the Aura, Hypnotic Exorcism, etc, is that we are capable of far more than we have been led to believe. It can be hard for our bodies to do what we should be able to, more and more, because of things like chemtrails and HAARP, and the mind control waves being sent our way ubiquitously, microwaves, pollution, lowered levels of negative ions, genetically modified foods, and such. I find it much harder than before to do the miraculous things I did for decades. There are entities trying to dampen us down.
I feel it’s important to see who and what they are, to resist and empower ourselves, and to become the bright beings of loving consciousness that knows its free beyond being encased in these beautifully limiting personalities. Yet, it’s important to also completely honor and nourish these bodies, to work with their acupressure points, their nadis, their auras, their physical needs, as much as honoring these aspects of the planet itself.
LucidPlay is a term that includes not only the LucidFiction, but all the other aspects of this, ways we can go into those expanded states through Tantric exercises, for example, and stay there, interacting with others in ways that see lucidly who we are, beyond the selves we pretend to be by incarnating into these specific times and places. That is what I hope I’m remembered for, by spirits who are laughing and playing more freely where ever we end up once this planet is ready for us to leave.
Okay, not sure how to place this question, but I’ll see if I can word it right. Obviously, the human species as with most creatures, perform intercourse as a means to procreate. Do you think this is a built in instinct that is pre-programmed in our DNA, or something deeper in which we as humans gain spiritual enlightenment?
Given the basic belief system put in place that once one is married, he or she can only be true to one partner? I guess what I’m trying to get at is: humans can and do have sex as a pleasurable act, AS WELL AS for the purpose to procreate, whereas animals only do it as a basic instinct to reproduce. Where does the line get drawn between the two?
Sometimes, I feel that I could communicate spiritually via physical sex, and that in itself goes against the assumption of doing it for pro-creating purposes. Is there any sin in lust? This is a pretty hefty topic, but surely, one wonders, what is right, what is necessary and what makes other views wrong? Is it something so simple as black and white, or are there multiple layers, which, could be wrong and sinful? Hope you understand how I’m trying to frame this question.
- Good question, Ron. Well, I teach Tantra Yoga which includes the whole lifestyle, and only one aspect of it is sexual, most times being much more restrictive than ordinary sex. But when you do get into the sexual parts of Tantra, you can feel from the inside out that sex can be a way of communing with the Divine, with being that part of ourselves, of all the energy that is, of the universal urge to create.
I teach people all the time to take their sexuality to higher levels through traditional exercises that form a conduit between the lower chakras at the base of the body and the higher ones at the head, between the individual self and the universal. Freeing up that cosmic energy to travel through the physical body and stay conscious in the outer levels of the aura allows incredible bliss as you feel the parts of yourself you may forget in ordinary life. And being able to share that wider sense of self with another person is so much more intimate that just relating from emotions, personalities, bodies. Sex can feel like patterns of conscious light moving together, and I agree, that’s a true communication beyond words, very powerful and transformative.
I’m not sure that all animal sex is just instinctual, for procreation. Have you seen elephants showing such love and care for their mates? Even sex between slugs is beautiful and cosmic. I don’t know if any scientists have found a way to prove that the feelings animals have during sex are limited to the ego, to physical gratification and blind instinct, as I feel animals are often more spiritual and tuned into the continuum than people are.
I have a lot of respect for people’s marriage vows. If they really chose to be monogamous, and that works for them, great. But I like the idea of it being a choice each couple makes, rather than being part of an accepted social control. As most of the planet isn’t Christian, from what I understand, there are several hundred cultures that are polygamous and less than a couple hundred monogamous. I like the ones with more than one husband! Ha. Now, polyamory is becoming very popular, and that’s the milieu I’m surrounded by in San Francisco, certainly.
I feel it’s strange when people act like it’s their right to be possessive, restrictive, upset by their partner’s attention to someone else, even in casual dating. Why not own their insecurities and jealousies and deal with them head-on rather than making the other person wrong? But that’s just my own viewpoint.
I don’t find pure lust to be interesting, and I’m turned off by pornography, though beautiful, creative sensual photography or art or film can be potent, and invigorating.
After researching plenty of topics related to ‘The Serpent”, with it’s symbolism found in the caduceus, the garden of Eden, the double helix of our DNA, and even down to the likeness of semen, and even the coiling within Kundalini, do you think the earliest authors of the Bible purposely ‘swapped’ the roles ‘assuming there are 2 roles of good and evil’ to keep the masses from learning the truth behind it? And furthermore, the human is obviously a physical, chemical, electrical entity.
Yet, WHAT process “TIES” together our soul/spirit with regards to the serpent themes. There have been many cultures that have utilized potions, drugs etc. to tap into this ether as a gateway to communicate with this ‘energy’?
- Great question, Ron, thank you. And it’s a complex one, and as we are getting into the nature of the Divine, it includes the paradox of having easily more than one correct answer.
People are definitely kept from knowing the truth, but I would look at it a little differently than that.
I don’t want to focus too much on the Biblical, for fear of treading on too many people’s sore spots, but paranormal serpent imagery is all over the world, coming up in names of towns and sacred spots and churches and families. There have been serpent religions relating to snakes, and dragons, throughout all of history, and, in a way, I consider those previous stories with the same details to be the earliest authors of the Bible, and the earliest versions of the garden of Eden.
While serpents live on the earthly plane, two roles are associated with them, one being heavenly, related to the Annunaki type, apparently Reptilian entities that come from the heavens, or the mother-ship above, in the space ships of the historical drawings. That role connected serpents to deities, creativity, life force, and healing. They are particularly related to the caduceus of Ninurta, the mother goddess, who is shown in Sumerian tablets as creating our race through DNA modifications in the lab.
She is the doctor, and the creatress, and serpents relate to the central core of our being, such as the DNA, and we can be grateful to them for the genetic manipulation, if the ancient records are correct about what happened, but there is an edgy side to that as well, as they supposedly did that to create a slave race of people who are gullible, fighting their wars, doing labor for their agenda, being milked for energy and endocrine secretions.
They are also linked them the underworld and associated with evil, harm, and destructive influences, especially regarding the Reptilians which live in the caves. The Reptilians have a relation between the above ground and below ground, the ones above having accomplished being seen as angels, gods, controllers of our society, presenting themselves as benefactors. So, the snake has a mixed reputation, as the Reptilians below have worked more with unabashed fear.
Christ and Satan are both associated with the serpent. This can be seen many ways, such as that there may be less difference between their roles than is thought. Also, if you look at the serpent as symbolizing the Kundalini, it can be either healing or destructive. The snake symbolized the movement of the transformative energies up the spine because that’s how it feels, the shape if fitting, the dramatic risky intensity of it makes sense, and it helps one understand that we are one with the Divine. The Divine is associated with the snake because the Reptilian race is akin to the serpent, and they have portrayed themselves as our creators. The snake in the Garden of Eden originally had legs, if you remember, and walked upright, more obviously Reptilian.
The Sumerian god, Tammuz, who is one of the many pre-Jesus Messiahs with the same traits, was linked to the snake and so of course was his mother, and so was his companion, Ningizzida, who had horns.
All throughout history and the entire planet, there gods and the ancestors of the kings especially are scaly creatures. For example, the Egyptian god Atum was the snake who predicted the destruction of the world he created and his own reversion back to the form of a serpent or snake. Another major Egyptian diety is Kematef, once again, a snake. Amun was the god of the capital of Thebes and combined with the sun god to be Amun-Re, the main god in the New Kingdom. He and the snake goddess Mut, birthed a son, Khonsu. Their right hand man was the snake, Mehen. Thermuthis, another snake god of the earth and “the father of the gods,” came from the earth. The main cobra-goddess of Lower Egypt, Wadjet symbolized royalty, and as we know, the reptilian symbolism is related to royalty in most cultures, such as in China, where the leaders proudly proclaim their ancestors are dragons.
Mythology is full of warring between the positive and negative serpents, with the gods and their supposed spawn, the Pharaohs, for example, used the symbols of the snake to show their hybrid divinity The worst demon in Egypt was the snake, Apophis. Both the negative and positive, the demons and gods, are seen as snakes, because they most likely both were different warring races of Reptilians.
In Mesopotamia, the Enuma Elish were chaotic evil serpents, otherwise known as dragons, that warred against the other gods. preparing to wage a war in heaven against the great gods. Tiamat was the leader of those dragons, and she was transformed into our very environment.
I could go on and on about this, as I’ve read countless books and articles about the subject. It relates to Tantra as well, as it was taught by nagas, the hybrid serpents. Well, they aren’t known to have mankind’s best interest in mind, so I feel it’s very important to look into their motives deeply. The serpent symbolizes the reptilian beings and also the Kundalini, much as the homunculus in the brain that represents our body’s sensations in the various areas of the brain, is a drawing of a human. Reptilians would similarly use a symbol of their own race. And hybrids were the leaders of the religions and the countries, and their symbols are the dragons and snakes.
Yes, many cultures have used natural hallucinogens to tune into the primal energies, the truth about history, and the serpent cults very often include rituals with those substances. They also are sun cults, and might have a Serpent mound aligned with the sun, for example, with people sitting inside at the solstice, taking hallucinogens, as the sun comes through the opening at the serpent’s mouth, and lights upon them at the exactly correct moment. Yes, snakes represented both the good and the bad because it was basically all about the scaly ones, the Reptilians who ruled this planet, above and below.
This is the kind of thing that I’d call Lucid Fiction: this kind of thing becoming more clearly seen and not hidden by the taboo of talking about it, including in literature.” - Interview by Ron Bales
What does the word “lucid” in lucid fiction represent, and which alternate words come close to being similar in meaning? Can the world “lucid” be used in the context of non-fiction?
- “Lucid” in general means being clear, limpid, lit up, understanding and seeing clearly. It describes a person who is clear sighted and has full use of his faculties. It also describes something that in itself is shining and transparent.
So, I’m referring partly to the fiction that has been created by the controllers of our society through manipulation, brainwashing, deceits, mass media, and literary fiction, becoming more transparent, being more easily seen for what it is. A fictional illusion. And being seen through, illuminated by people who have lucid minds, being able to see clearly.
It also means that the fiction itself that we live in is becoming lucid, itself. The continuum, our paradigm, the morphogenetic field, can become more realistic, less obscured by the lies of our religious and political leaders, for example, the more one by one, we become lucid within the dream they have created for us.
Because of years of studying well documented research, and my interacting with a lot of people involved in these studies, I feel the controllers include not only humans, but other dimensional beings, and non humans, which have had a hand in creating us to be as gullible as we are. We are able to see them more, as the shapeshifting becomes more apparent, and as we learn more about history which has been hidden. As history and biology have more light shed on them, we see that nothing is as it seems, and we are able to start to realize that we are more powerful than we have been led to believe.
We are spirit, wise, with huge auras, with siddhas, or psychic and paranormal abilities, and once we do things like Tantra Yoga, for example, we start to tap into the whole rest of our being which remaining stuck in the beta-brainwave frequency perceptions has kept us from experiencing. The rishis who have done these exercises and don’t buy into the limitations humans are supposed to have can do all sorts of things considered supernatural. So the fiction is becoming more transparent, as we become more lucid ourselves.
So, when I use that term, it has many applications. Reality itself, and yes, non-fiction that acknowledges these things, for example, books by Lloyd Pie about hominids, or books that describe how damage the official story says was done by glaciers in the past was actually done by floods. This kind of scientific fact is kept out of the schools, because there’s a whole fictional illusion of history that is vast, and all inclusive.
I also refer loosely to poetry, or fiction, or even movies, or music, art, memoirs, anything in the arts that sees the truth that has earlier been hidden by the mass media, etc. and has that as the context of the work, maybe not always the main subject, but at least acknowledges it within the creators work overall.
However, I specifically focus on Lucid Fiction as written literary fiction itself, as the core of the new genre I’m promoting. Creating a type of writing that acknowledges that things are not what they seem, that explores knew ideas about what consciousness really is, that helps us expand our awareness, expose what’s going on around us. I feel there is a need for these aspects of life to be acknowledged in literature for people to be able to relax into them and accept them rather than going along with the deceits.
Writers, for example, who want to discuss aliens, or MILAB implants, or mind control, or being able to heal people with energy, or remote viewing, or being able to disappear from physicality and appear elsewhere, or synchronicities, or any number of things that might generally be put in the category of Sci Fi have no place to go with it unless they want to set it in the future, make it technological and speculative, and follow the formula of that genre. That makes those subjects seem unreal.
But they’re real, so why not make a subgenre that allows us to admit they are real within the context of literature that is not speculative? It’s like Slipstream, or New Wave Fabulism, a genre that fills in some of the gap that is glaring in between speculative and non speculative writing.
So, shedding light on subjects which are taboo is one aspect, but definitely not the only one that makes it Lucid Fiction. Right now, I feel like Andre Breton, who would say who was a legitimate surrealist. But once the group of surrealists died, anyone who felt a kinship could call himself that, and make his own sliding definitions. I hope other people will run with this, but first, I want to make clear what I mean by it.
Another aspect is narrative form. Lucid Fiction is a type of experimental writing, and there is a lot out there that is extreme, and throws out the idea of plot, such as writing that is made up of nouns scattered across the page, for example. But for writing that does have something along the lines of plot, I’d like to see more that really questions what’s allowed. It’s something people just don’t seem to question often enough for my taste. Bounce, bounce….I want to Play!
Teachers and publishers and editors say it’s important to always have a traditional plot arc. Plots have to do with dualism, conflict, drama. Why? What the heck? We tell each other stories in real life all the time that interest us, and they aren’t always based on difficulties. We have interesting things happen to us that we enjoy passing on, and most of us actually would prefer not constantly hearing about a friend’s problems. To have plots always be based on that encourages us to see our lives that way, as being problems to be solved, and that’s what the egos do, and they make us addicted to adrenalin, keep us in the beta brain-wave frequency perspective of being separate beings who have to fight to stay on top.
Why should fiction encourage the very thing that keeps wars and such going? Wars are the agendas of the controllers of our society, and they make us do the dirty work for them. Why keep that going through making us believe that conflict is the core of life? There are many other things that can drive the plot of a story rather than that. I don’t mean they have to all be happy, or vignettes, or have no action. I mean we can explore far, far more than the traditional plot to really describe what life is like. That’s real experimental literature, isn’t it?
Another aspect is character. Why do we have to use the same outdated concept of what a person is that has always been used, now that we have been introduced to the New Physics worldview that we are part of a continuum, artificially making labels that separate us. So many spiritual people feel we have higher selves, and quantum science suggests to many that we have parallel selves, multiple selves, past lives and future lived all at once.
For example, in our lives, we can be walking along, and we happen to come across just the person we were thinking about and needed to see as we turn the corner, and we haven’t seen that person for 30 years. That’s sometimes just coincidence, but I see it as often being a synchronicity that the higher selves arranged…. or something did. Things really do seem to so often happen magically in life, as reality speaks to us in dreamlike ways. Most people I know have experienced this. Why not acknowledge this in fiction, and why not expand what a person is, and what a character is, writing maybe from the viewpoint of the flow of the moment, from the whole self, not only the conscious and subconscious but the higher self.
I don’t want to see literature like this be second rate, New Agey, just to make a point, but to be actually great, top notch literature that explores consciousness using the structure of the stories and choices about characters and what constitutes reality. I’ve written some articles that are published in magazines such as Unlikely Stories and Retort, and am right now finishing one up about John Crowley, who does this, exploring non-linearity, magic, the nature of consciousness, etc. I’ve found a few authors I feel represent Lucid Fiction to varying degrees, such as Francesca Lia Block, who includes synchronicities, for example. Peter Moon, V. Ulea, Jaimal Yogis.
How does Lucid Fiction relate to Surreal fiction or vice versa?
- Excellent question, Alexander. It does relate often, in that surrealism is written from the theta brain-wave frequencies, bypassing the rational conscious mind and delving into the subconscious. Of course, rewrites can take place from the ordinary state of mind to polish it, but overall, it widens the scope of awareness and acknowledges the sense of identity to include more than what people normally present to the world. It is like a dream that the reader and writer share, and the reader can also learn new things about himself because of the nature of the archetypes in the collective unconscious.
Some what I write myself is surreal, lyrical fiction, and some of what I consider to be Lucid Fiction has elements of the surreal, though it’s certainly not a requirement. However surrealism traditionally uses the subconscious more than the higher self, and so Lucid Fiction includes more of the self than surrealism as it was defined by the originators.
To be considered Lucid Fiction a piece doesn’t necessarily have to go by every guideline I put forth, or it would be too narrow, but overall, it would ideally question something about the nature of reality as it has been presented to us, and surrealism doesn’t necessarily do this with its subject matter, structure, or new suggestions about what being a human is about. Some stories and poems will be both genres, as there is an overlap, but I’d say Lucid Fiction continues the revolution of experimentation that surrealism was part of.
What is the association between Lucid Fiction and abstraction or impressionism?
- There is certainly room for overlap there. Within Lucid Fiction, if we are trying to capture what it’s like outside of the beta brain-wave frequency interpretation of the world, the hard-edged human-centric pretense that everything can be explained in cut-and-dried ways according to traditional narrative, and we are writing from the viewpoint of the theta brain-wave, for example, it may well be truly abstract. If we are describing a situation from the whole, standing back from the limited viewpoint of the human brain and imagining the flow of energy, the synchronistic interactions of all the elements in a scene, abstraction may be how it would look. Actual Abstract Literature communicates meaning without using much detail at all, different from Impressionist Literature.
Impressionist Literature focuses on the experiences of the characters without interpretation, sketching in the details from a subjective point of view, as, for example, the way our memory might distort something and leave seemingly random moments that still stand out to us. Impressionism in art is concerned with light as it hits the changing surfaces, and that concept, for example, could be explored metaphorically in a Lucid Fiction context.
Lucid Fiction can go any number of ways in experimenting, though if it is just using methods like these, which are only focusing on the models of art movements which began decades ago, it may not necessarily be moving forward in the cutting edge experimentation I’m looking for. Those movements were very revolutionary at the time, and the techniques can still be used very well in Lucid Fiction if they also incorporate the attempt, within at least some of the author’s work, to push aside the veils this society has accepted as normal, by the experimentations with literary conventions.
If you are thinking visual art, Alexander, I’ll give you the closest parallel I can think of offhand to the spiritual aspects of Lucid Fiction. The Russian painter, Kandinsky, wrote a book called On the Spiritual in Art. He feels artists should learn to intuit the spiritual dimensions, to see their colors, to influence them correctly. The lightning-like experience he describes is the Kundalini. His goals are similar to mine, including the desire to explore emotions and experiences that are so subtle that have not been named and labeled throughout the centuries, but in literature, require poetic language and the spaces in between the words, to try to get the nuances. His is “the search for a reality above our all-too-narrow terrestrial sphere” in order to form a union between the human and the quantum divine.
As he describes it, the artist, or writer, goes into meditative union of the subject and object, the work springing from the non-dual, uniting subject and object. I see much of my writing as quantum physics related, the wave and the particle, the individual and the universal. This is the nature of Tantra, which is ultimately a way to experience physics from the inside out. Check out the recent literary criticism of the Russian writer, Vera Zubarev, say, in Sein en Werden magazine. She is developing the genre of Quantum Fiction that corresponds with Lucid Fiction and we’re both excited about doing some work together.
Seems that poetry, from its freedom of narrative structure, would be a good way to express Lucid Fiction. What aspect of poetry enables Lucid Fiction and which aspects of poetry do not?
- At the risk of being confusing, I do allow poetry or non fiction in my loose definition of Lucid Fiction, even art, or music or movies, anything in which this dream we are living in is becoming aware of itself, like a lucid dream, waking up to the falsities of what we have been led to believe, becoming more transparent as we see past the illusions.
However, the fact that poetry doesn’t necessarily have narrative structure means it doesn’t have that aspect to work with as fiction does, so it has a strike against it in tearing apart the artificial structures our mind have imposed on reality in the way that I’m describing. I’m not suggesting we write fiction that has no narrative structure, necessarily, though if it is what is required to tell the particular story, then I do believe it should be allowed. I just don’t want us to be addicted to the traditional plot arc. Great writers, like William Faulker, or John Barth, have often used structure brilliantly as a means to get an idea across. The structure can be as important an aspect of the story as anything else. Most experimental writing does disregard tradition to some degree.
A lot of experimental writing is great, but isn’t necessarily always what I’d call Lucid Fiction, because it doesn’t, for example, push us past the traditional ego-based paradigm of the plot arc of our own lives, the need for drama, dualistic conflict, adrenalin rush which over-stimulates and then leaves our adrenals floundering and in need of more over-stimulation. I want to see the structure serve the purpose of taking us vertically, sometimes, rather than just up and down a hilly road, one more story leading to the need for the next story. I love it when a writer uses the story to throw us up in the air, out of the ordinary way of looking at the world, into something more transcendent.
But in any case, I want the structure to be able to follow the needs of the story, and there are many types of stories which can be told that don’t fit into the traditional plot formula. There is an insistence in general literary fiction, on plot that is far, far too predictable for my tastes, and I feel this is something that has been imposed upon us so much that it seems normal. We need to question why such insistence on it? It seems closed minded to me to say a story isn’t a story unless it has some major problem solved by direct action, for example. What if there isn’t a problem? Can’t that still be interesting?
But yes, poetry can be Lucid Fiction, say, if the subject matter includes subjects normally covered up by mass media, or if it is written from within deep and transcendent states of mind in ways that take the reader into those as well.
I have a chapbook manuscript called Soul Waves, and every poem in it is Lucid Fiction, very quantum physics, Tantric, vibratory. I also have one called Art For Dangerous Times, which is Lucid Fiction in that some of the poems address the need for our soldiers to just say no to their orders which are based on lies, illusions, deceits, evil manipulations. Part of the idea of Lucid Fiction is joining the spiritual with the socio-political, which can often be bereft of spiritual awareness, and thus missing the magical, otherworldly reasons behind the political acts. If we combine awareness in both fields in our lives, and in our literature, our fictional reality will start to become more transparent.
What common aspect of this suggested “dream life” has Lucid Fiction’s greatest potential for evolution or realization? In other words, from your view point, what are some main aspects in life that you would wish others to wake up to? And when you think of those people who need some wakening, who are you including and who are you excluding? Who is best poised to benefit from Lucid Fiction and who would benefit least?
- People who would benefit least would be those who are trying to keep our population under their control, dumbed down, addicted to conflict, convinced we are not very powerful.
People who would benefit most would be writers, editors, publishers, and readers who would be excited to see literature that is innovative in its way of responding to the realities of this world, striving to portray the whole self, and the whole of what is going on in the world that is normally hidden behind convention based on control.
As far as the looser definition of Lucid Fiction beyond the literary, our society’s revolutionaries who want to see change occur and know approaching it from a symptomatic, Band-Aid method isn’t working, will be happy to see the truth come out. Once people expand their awareness out of the trap of the matrix and see behind the veils of lies, it will be harder for all the nonsense to keep continuing. It’s not simple to agitate without repercussions being worse, I realize. But it’s better than just going along with the program as it is, because it’s deadly already.
I would exclude very few, because I feel we are continually in a process of waking up, at least in potential, and that is our evolution. There are some masters who have done the spiritual practices enough that they are able to see 360 degrees, literally, can levitate, can go without ever sleeping, can tell anything happening in the world. They are excluded, sure. Others who don’t even know that’s possible are the ones that would most need to wake up, as well as those who believe the official conspiracy theory, for example, that the buildings on 911 fell down against all laws of physics rather than following the laws of physics and being controlled demolitions.
I know a Tantric practioner who is very expansive, dedicated to his mantras and good deeds, but who is involved as a courier within a mind control program between musicians and the manipulators of society. So, though he is awake spiritually, he is naïve about how he is being used, so needs to be awakened even more to the parts of him that have been brainwashed.
I know someone who is a great political activist, who does understand all the brainwashing mind control programs, but who doesn’t realize the religious lies of our world. So, most people could use some waking up, no matter who we are, in one aspect or another. If the information that is out there in the alternative press could be made more acceptable through literature, and music, people wouldn’t be scared of being thought of as weird by admitting these things are true.
Just being good people who look into the issues isn’t enough to fully learn the extent of our human abilities, called the Siddhis in Sanskrit, or the machinations behind the social trends that are arranged so carefully through organized crime, secret societies, government agencies, the mass media, Universities, medical institutions, the entertainment industry, the church, big business and the military, not to mention, aliens.
I’d like people to awaken to the fact that this social reality we act like is true is an illusion created by people with an agenda. Scientists who publish forbidden ancient history, or findings outside of the agreed upon conventions are fired… United States History books tells completely different stories from year to year, even about who won wars, depending on who is in power…. The news is run by the government, so they don’t report on things like chemtrails, the crimes committed by politicians… The medical and pharmaceutical industry put one over on people all the time, selling products that make us worse, and still perpetuate the myth that vaccines are helpful. They are planning on forcing everyone to take vaccines in the event of a staged epidemic, and if we don’t do it, we are to be put away, under martial law at the time….
People see Reptilian creatures and aliens all the time, en masse, and if they go public about it, they have a harder time finding a job, because it’s not an acceptable topic to discuss….Another example: There have been 16 crucified Messiahs through history, with one detail exactly the same as the Christ story, and many more Messiahs with nearly all the same details…
Another example: The CIA was based on the OSS… And… Time travel has occurred through operations based in Montauk, NY… Mind control operations allow people to be controlled through microwaves… Synchronicities occur all the time in people’s lives, outrageous, obvious… Magic works… Non-lethal weapons and biological weapons are being used against us by our government… MILABs are being used by the military in conjunction with the aliens, or pretending there is alien involvement in other cases, to carry out assassinations, etc. all the time. I could go on and on, but you see, these are all the types of topics that are not generally allowed in fiction, or polite conversation, or the news, because it might offend someone because it’s not the status quo, but instead, transgressive truth. Are readers getting uncomfortable yet?
Neither it is considered OK to talk about expanded states of awareness and people who are breatharians, for example, or the transmission of Shaktipat to awaken the Kundalini life force, which can cause peoples’ skulls to split, and big their toenails to fall off, in the process of the flow of the energy of enlightenment through the channels of the body. All these things are experienced by people often, but supposed to be hush-hush, behind the scenes. The more they are considered normal topics by any form of media, academies, institutions, etc., and the more they are allowed into serious literature, the more the Hundred Monkey effect will take place. As people learn to see, to become more lucid, more people will also learn. Our fictionalized reality will awaken from the inside out.
This reality is also fictionalized in the spiritual sense that we are looking at it from within the ego’s beta brain-wave perspective with the illusions perpetuated by mass media, and we are not seeing it often enough from the expanded state of enlightened theta brain-wave meditative visions of the quantum continuum. Those states of awareness are not represented by literature, or anything else.
Yet, I recently had the honor of teaching students in Romania, at the fantastic Atlantykron Academy of Learning, to see from that perspective, write from it, make music from it, and to interact from it. It was a good balance to the other lectures which focused on the beta brainwaves, and a great place to do it, as it was in nature, in primitive conditions in non-formal education, in an academy focusing on the cutting edge advancements, and Sci Fi literature. I feel that the more educational systems like that that include lessons on how to become lucid, the more our society as a whole can realize we are dreaming, and not have all the advantages of lucid dreaming, while awake. There is hope.
You mention a “looser definition of Lucid Fiction beyond the literary.” How would you characterize Lucid Fiction beyond literature? Is this denotation variant omitting “fiction” and pertaining to the word “lucid”? Or are you incorporating some notions of literature in this expansion of the definition since you refer to “fictionalized”? Could you can explain what “fictionalized” mean?
- I’m neither omitting “Lucid” nor “Fiction.” You can see my interview with Ron Bales, if you like, as he and his band, Lucid Fiction, use the term in exactly the same way. I love how that happened. Maybe if enough people use the term people will start to understand, or become lucid, about how our society has provided us with a complete fictional version of reality. I’m incorporating notions of literature in that it is supposed to be not true, changed, and our own history, science, religion, everything is untrue, so we are living in a piece of fiction.
And mainstream literature follows the character definitions and subject matter, etc. that endorse and continue that falsification by the powers that be. Mass media is well known to give us complete false information all the time, as they are paid for by people who are perpetuating falsehoods. For example, the news goes along with the myth of how 911 was caused, rather than the reality that anyone who has studied the physics related to the effects of controlled demolitions will tell you. This is complete fiction told to us as truth. I want fiction that no longer complies with that, but helps that fiction to become more lucid from the inside out. We are living in a fiction that can become aware that it is fiction, like a dreamer becoming aware that he is dreaming, having a lucid dream.
Instead of just pretending that we have normal clouds and contrails, and going along with the fiction that there are no chemtrails, why not actually just admit they are there, in our literature, in our lives, and be real about the whole thing? We are walking around with chemtrails overhead, pure biowarfare, and Roundup under our feet, pure poison, eating genetically modified food with toxins that make people sick, parents being told they’re supposed to vaccinate their kids when there is no evidence it helps, only hurts health, as they take them to school to learn lies from history books, geology books, political science books, then bring them home to play games on the computer, including the ones created by the CIA recruiters who completely mislead what is going on behind the scenes, and make games that glorify wars, about which we are being lied to completely, with no mention of the relationship of drug running, for example.
Authors write books that allude to conspiracies, but they don’t actually tell the truth in the books, I’d assume that’s to keep from being blacklisted. But in experimental fiction, as we aren’t looking to have best sellers, I’d think we could take the chance and actually instruct at the same time as entertain. So many people love the sense they are learning something about history, conspiracy, religion, and the occult, from some books that become popular, but all that reading and excitement adds up to just one more diversion. It seems like such a good change to actually inform through fascinating literature. And as people would learn the truth, they fiction perpetuated by the Bilderbergers, Skull and Bonesmen, Masons, Trilateral Commission, Committee of 300, and such would no longer be able to fool us for their selfish agendas.
I’m digging as deep as I can to look at Lucid Fiction from a socio-spiritual approach. It’s not just the fiction perpetuated by those who are trying to dumb us down with MILAB implants and microwave frequencies and HAARP and psychotropic chemicals in our food that I’m wanting to make lucid. It’s also the limited perspective of the beta brain-wave frequency, the sympathetic nervous system dominance, the accepted ideas of what a person is, and is capable of, the Euclidian physics outdated notions, that I’m wanting to see become more lucid through experimental literature, and through our lives themselves.
We continue acting in our lives and our literature as if the little human first-world country perspectives of the present moment are an accurate portrayal of reality. Look at how much they’ve changed over history. Look at how New physics changes everything, when we see how dreamlike our reality is. Look at how differently a levitating rishi in India, who does Tantric practices and is able to disappear, float in air, go without food or sleep, know what people are thinking across the world, would see reality compared to a businessman in Detroit who has never meditated.
If the businessman were to wake up within his dream of being in a limited body, and became lucid to the idea that we are capable of much more, he would be much more likely to be able to have more ESP, for example, that very day. If he would read quantum physics, he might realize how parallel worlds work, with particles going in and out of them, how they are intelligent, how everyone is living in one continuum with randomly chosen boundaries and labels. He could become more lucid within the dream of living in a mundane world. If he could experience more synchronicities, and pay attention to them, he would realize our lives are far more like dreams that can be woken up inside.
So I do what I can in my Tantra teaching to help people become more lucid through the exercises. I try to portray the same quantum world through much of my writing as well.
So you are using Lucid Fiction in a very general way, not confined to literature, although it may be applied in literature and referring it to “lucid fiction”?
Lucid has references to truth, fiction has references to non-truth, wouldn’t you agree? If so, do you think this is a dualistic notion that is paradoxical if not contradictory?.. . like coining the term illuminating darkness. Do you see this dualistic notion in the meaning behind “lucid fiction”?
- Ron Bales, of the band Lucid Fiction, describes the non literary, social concept well on their site, and in my interview with him. I wouldn’t throw myself into a promoting a genre that was only literary, as it needs to apply to something larger, needs to relate to something very real and pressing and urgent to be worth my spending this much time with, considering the real needs of humanity to pay attention to what is going on around us in order to allow the earth to survive. Every literary movement has social aspects, and the literature is a way of describing and considering society and new notions of consciousness, new paradigms of existence. Each one is relevant to social change, and Lucid Fiction is relevant to the new understandings our society is finally coming to. It’s been hard waiting so long for people to see through some of the illusions. But look at the falling apart of the Bush regime, the popularity of the alternative press, the Truth Movement, the transparency of the Patriot Act and similar methods of control, the fact that we are now considered terrorists if we mention the word “constitution” a few times, the popularity of David Icke books, and the movie Zeitgeist, the way parents are fighting forced vaccines and bringing to light that vaccines are not beneficial, the way that the majority of people no longer believe what they are told on the news or by politicians, the increasingly obvious conspiracies require literature that keeps up with the new illuminated darkness. We are able to see more easily what is in the murky depths which were hidden before. We can see how dark they are, and when the light is shone within the caves, we see the Reptilians lurching.
While the seeming paradox of the term “Lucid Fiction” is what makes it catchy and interesting, it isn’t dualistic. Lucid doesn’t mean truth per se, but the ability to recognize truth. So we are seeing the truth that we have been given a fictional, illusiory story about what is going on in our world. We are told there are disasters and Fema has to come along and help us. That there is an epidemic bewing and so we will have to have vaccines. And we have to be forced to have them, so we have to have Fema quarantine us and we have to have martial law. We aren’t being told that the martial law is the goal and the epidemic is being created by what is being put in vaccines. But more people are talking about how so many other epidemics were created by vaccines and similar methods, and how martial law is the plan, the fiction we are being told is becoming transparent. Transparency is another meaning of Lucid.
Lucid also means lit up, limpid. I am not only promoting fiction that is showing the problems of control but which is showing what it is they may be trying to control us in order to prevent, which may be our own awareness of our power, glowing beauty, potential. They may be threatened by our own ability to be lucid beyond just seeing their lies, and to see the whole fiction of being incarnate. Just being alive in bodies and in a society in which we are taught that we have very limited abilities is part of the control, part of the fiction. Some societies believe in many more abilities which would be seen as supernatural here, and the people have those abilities because they don’t have that fiction. They are more lucid about their own lucidity!
So based on what you have said, would you be satisfied if I explain Lucid Fiction as follows: Lucid is synonymous to awareness and Fiction refers to incomplete or misunderstanding about human’s relationship to life. So Lucid Fiction refers to awareness or understanding the misconceptions about human life. Fiction is not referring to literature per se, but referring to illusionary or artificial. Also, when you say genre, you are not referring to literary genre, but a wider scope that can include visual art, music, video, theater, and perhaps applied psychology. Would you agree with my description?
- To some degree. “Lucid” is not synonymous with “awareness”. It’s its own word, carefully chosen for all of its meanings. All of them apply. But if we are narrowing it down to some of one meaning, then, yes, that fits. Fiction—well, that’s part of it. Our misunderstanding about reality. The fiction I am referring to has a lot to do with lies we are told through everything including mainstream fiction, which constructs a wrong story people are living inside of, which is done on purpose, and which is perpetuated by literature unless it uses experimental form and subject matter to break through it. When I am talking about the Lucid Fiction genre, I am talking about the literary genre of fiction, specifically. But the term “Lucid Fiction” can apply to reality or to other forms of the arts and writing in a wider context, because it is the fiction we live in becoming lucid, becoming more transparent, as we become more limpid, through using the tools within it. Like a lucid dreamer becoming more aware of what is going on, and thus the dream itself becomes different.
Tantra, you mention what can be categorized as conspiracy theories as a type of fiction that you wish people would become lucid about or aware. What other type of fictions do you notice in our society? And which is an aspect of life that most of us are already lucid about—without any fiction there?
- To be able to express through lucid fiction, one has to be lucid oneself about the subject, and there has to be some fictional aspect for the reader to appreciate being awakened. How does one know one is lucid about a subject and how does one know others have a fictional take on the subject? Let’s take Euclidean physics, since I have some working knowledge and experience with it, and of which you suggested a fictional aspect of. Would you explain what is fictional about Euclidean physics and what is there to be lucid about? - Interview with Alexander at Retort Magazine
Tantra Bensko: What is Experimental Fiction?
In some ways, virtually all quality Literary Fiction has elements of innovation, something to make academic scholars interested in what the writer is doing with how he or she tells the tale. What the tale is is less important.
If you read pulp fiction, genres such as romance, mystery, sword and sorcery style fantasy, or simply mass marketed commercial fiction, you most likely drawn on by what happens next, the suspense, and it is a good escape, something to relax into, and it's familiar. You know what you're getting into, something you can depend on liking, as it fits the formula that has been shown to work.
You may have to be in a different mood to enjoy Experimental Fiction, be looking for something different than escapism, though if you've gotten so used to it that it comes naturally to you to think in Experimental terms, it can be just as easy and pleasurable to read. Usually, there is more of a sense of intellectual excitement as you grasp conceptually what the writer is doing different than any formula.
That can become more intriguing to you than the actual plot itself at times. The methods of innovation may develop out of the need to relay the plot in a way that traditional story telling can't. That can be because the plot itself is not conceived linearly.
It may involve synchronicities, for instance, different things happening at once, manifested from a higher plane, because of the spiritual connection between characters who may exist at different time periods.
The structure may be broken up cleverly, the characters may be verbs rather than nouns, and the method of creating the story may involve looking up words in a dictionary randomly, and employing them in the story, for example.
Experimental Fiction has a wide range, from Literary Fiction that is character driven, maybe absurdist, maybe philosophical, but not too extreme--to the actual radical experimentation that is almost impossible to access at all.
Writing and reading any form of it has the effect of liberation, freeing one from being confined, allowing new perceptions and explorations.
This change in the reader's psyche could be considered a major goal in this genre. The word "genre" is used in two subtley different ways. "Genre Fiction" does not include literary fiction, such as Experimental Fiction. They terms are mutually exclusive.
However, the word "genre" used by itself can describe any type of writing, and is used to mean subgenre as well. For example, Literary Fiction is a genre of fiction, and subgenres within that would be Slipstream, Surrealism, The French New Novel.
All of this genre talk can be a little confusing to some, and some writers refuse to have anything to do with it. They consider themselves to be writing outside of an genre at all, and don't like the act of labeling. These tend to be more often than not what could be called Experimental Fiction.
Sometimes Experimental Fiction is influenced more by poetry, or avant-garde film or even Twitter than it is by other fiction. This kind of thing can lead to hybrid forms, sometimes called Whatnots. Not labeling it a story, or a poem, or anything.
Sometimes, it is not presented in a normal format such as a book in print or online, but one by one Tweet on Twitter, though that is becoming so common now, it's almost not Experimental any more.
It can be presented in a stack of papers in a box to be arranged in whatever form the reader desires. It can be painted on a person and photographed and projected as a movie.
Each day of our lives is a new chance for a way to think in a new way.
Tantra Bensko: Strange as it May Seem
It’s Time for Fiction to Catch Up
I am here suggesting that writers look around us, directly at the world, rather than looking through the lens of acceptability. We forget that familiar lens is there, as it has become so much a part of the commercial fiction market, mass media, polite conversation. We have become so used to it, most writers may not even think of setting the lens aside. But when we do, we may pioneer a field that will nourish the people out there who question what has become traditionally acceptable. We can write more honestly about the lives so many of us in our culture are experiencing. And more publishers can open up to such topics if we push together for this to be acceptable, and the audience is already there, as evidenced by the interest in learning from alternative media about subjects which are hidden by the filters of acceptability.
Of course, many writers write scatological, perversely sexual, searingly gory, or iconoclastic works that push the range of acceptability. There is much subversive literature about going beyond gender, or genre. I am asking for something even beyond that. I am calling for writers to take the chance of being laughed at by taking subjects seriously that are serious, but that can illicit nervous laughter among some people. Let’s don’t be afraid of those people. This covert training of the public to make fun of certain topics which challenge the status quo has been done in order to protect those who want to put one over on us, and thus making the subjects inapproachable is a way of hiding. Hiding the facts is a way of disempowering the public. Let’s empower ourselves instead. Let’s not be part of that training by the media. Let’s break out of that.
Many perfectly reasonable subjects are allowed to be written about in Science Fiction, which are not broached in non-Speculative Fiction. People have been speculating about “what if” for so long, setting the scenes in this time period, because there is some likelihood that by, say, 2008, these amazing things may turn out to be true. What if there are actually other-dimensional beings, what if the New World Order secret government and military are actually mind-controlling people through all the technology they have patented and creating plagues on purpose, such as the documents suggest? What if we live in a Quantum Many Worlds Theory world which involves parallel universes? What if time travel has actually occurred successfully as the Montauk research puts forth?
If there is ample evidence for these and many other such things, why keep putting them in the realm of speculation? Why not finally, for once, honestly address those sorts of things in mainstream or experimental literary fiction that sticks to the facts and educates while entertaining? What if our sense of reality itself has been an illusion all along, and we are different from what we have been led to believe? Can we explore the very nature of humanity and the essence of life rather than going on and on with one plot after another that accepts the consensus version? Can we write about it outside the Sci Fi formula, as innovative fiction?
How can we truly write accurately about actual real fleshed-out characters if we don’t include a full world around them? There are subjects which, when we submit to mainstream, will be off-limit. The is supposed to be nothing about aliens, or the agents of the New World Order pretending to be aliens, as our example, because that is only for Sci Fi. In Sci Fi, we can’t just tell a normal, human tale set in the present, which includes aliens, because that is not for Sci Fi. There is no genre open for this particular subject. It is as if it cannot be considered, simply does not exist. There are other topics not allowed in any available genre, which are the very topics people are abuzz about, desperately logging in hours in forums searching, networking, reading. This essay is a call for magazines as well to open their doors to what will truly satisfy a growing sector of our society. There is a gap in submissions. This needs to be remedied.
The world does indeed include a huge number of well-documented studies of abductions, with evidence worth paying attention to suggesting that it could be aliens and some which are undeniably humans. Sometimes one pretends to be the other. The aliens, or the humans pretending to be aliens, are apparently involved in creating hybrid races, which many, many have documented seeing, and they tell us many lies to pull this off. This is a fiction worth exploring in fiction. The illusion of who is whom, and what is what, as it is breaking down around us more than ever these days.
The world does include a vast storehouse of information of the corruption of the government and its mind-control, enslaving programs using multiple-personality syndrome, non-lethal weapons — Cointelpro continued into our century — and deceits perpetrated upon the public are now more out in the open than ever.
The world does include telepathy and various other psychic phenomenon, as well as spiritual experiences of expanded states of consciousness, such as those experienced with Kundalini awakenings. There are quantum discussions of Many Worlds Theory which leave one to believe this is the true nature of the world, not Sci Fi. Books such as the Montauk Project set published by Peter Moon have suggested that time travel is a given, and has been going on for decades. Peter Moon is a perfect example of the kind of writing I am promoting here, and he has launched into fiction with his excellent, recent book, Spandau Mystery, in which he explore the hidden history left out by the official books that create the lie of our society.
The myths of our society that become religion face the public reluctance to delve into that in literature for fear of stepping on toes. While people pretend to be going into the real histories that are behind the scenes, they still go on the assumption that Jesus existed as a human. Rarely is religious history shown in literature to include the myriad other Messiahs throughout the world with the same history as Jesus. For example, Mithra, who was born to a virgin in a cave on December twenty-fifth. At about age 30 he began his ministry with twelve disciples. Known as the “Redeemer,” “Way, the Truth and the Light,” the “Saviour” as well as the “Messiah”; he also was labelled the “Good Shepherd” and the lamb of God. After his Last Supper with wine symbolizing his blood, and wafers for his body, he was buried in a tomb for three days until he resurrected. While I am not saying all fiction should include any of these topics, these are waiting to be mined now, in a more truthful way than ever. I think the public may be ready.
We really can write about those things in a truthful sense, without distortion into the imaginary, can’t we? I would like to see more people writing in a new literary genre I call “Lucid Fiction.” While authors may already write about such things, they still change the stories from the facts about the world, and people are thrown off the track. To some degree, this is often necessary to avoid censorship, especially in any mass media markets. Right now, we have to make a difficult decision about how vocal to be, considering the government’s criminalization of the truth. But as a group, maybe we need to stand up and just say “No Way!” We can get away with the truth safely than the brave journalists writing in alternative media. Perhaps now it is up to us.
People have a hunger to know the truth, and are drawn to literature that helps them understand it, that makes them feel they are getting closer to insight into their own lives inspires them to do something about what they see going on around them. Let’s take advantage of our opportunity to educate readers who want to learn more. Yes, there may be some danger in telling the truth, though less in fiction than in non-fiction. But is there not more danger in letting people get away with orchestrating a mass illusion because no one will write about it? Is there not more danger in perpetrating limited ideas of human nature, rather than allowing for its expansiveness?
I also call this genre “Lucid Fiction” not only because is it shedding clear light on factual reality, but because it also allows the fictional sense we have of reality to glow from within. It lights up what has been going on politically that people are just now willing to admit in the vast majority. It lights up the common theory about our human social or religious history, our physics theories, evolutionary theory, and shows them for what they are. They are fiction. They are not fact. The idea that they are fact has been perpetrated on us by those it benefits. We have believed it. But now, we are realizing that is a fiction, a manipulated illusion, or, sometimes, just a best guess. As the outdated notions fall away, it is time for fiction to catch up and portray the new insights without fear.
I am particularly interested in the fiction of the very nature of reality becoming lucid. Our fiction itself can wake up, can become transparent, and we can look vertically instead of along the usual horizontal plot arc of the traditional story. I grow tired of one fictional work after another presenting one more story based on needs and desires thwarted and gained, romantic love lost and found, murders solved, and so forth. As I see it, and as metaphysical teachers would suggest throughout the history of the world, these are part of the fiction that our higher selves have chosen to live in these incarnated individual lives. They are part of the Maya, or illusion that we are trapped in these seemingly separate bodies. We are more than that, and can’t we write fiction that explores the cracking apart of this fiction that we are such limited beings with only the small perspective on life that is normally assigned to the unenlightened?
Can’t we write more from the viewpoint of enlightened awareness, including not only these lower selves but the higher selves and connections? Can’t fiction sometimes take us flying out of the morass of plot, into the state of being that goes beyond plot, that glows from pure being, pure bliss of expanded states, beyond boundaries, beyond physical gratification? That is what I am calling for from my heart.
Tantra Bensko: A Roadful of Ducks
Tantra Bensko: CHIMPANZEE BEAT!
Tantra Bensko: Daring with Monks
Tantra Bensko: Inside Recursive Glass-Blown Rooms of Explosive Truth
Tantra Bensko: Bringing a New Poet into Your Home
Tantra Bensko: Slice of Lifeforce
Tantra Bensko: Meditation on the Breath
The Art of Tantra Bensko
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