This movie is extremely evocative, and gets at deep realities about what it means to be human, specifically to be sexual. Nicole Kidman’s performance was amazing, I thought. It just seemed honest to me when she was simultaneously fantasizing about the naval officer, and feeling tender towards Bill. Emotions get all mixed up like that, in both men and women, with the difference that most women spend far more time feeling and processing them.
Crowley, it seems to me, was an idiot. He took what was a wonderful system for perfecting Goodness and all of the open joy that comes with it, and degraded it to sex and power.
Tantra means web, and I interpret this as meaning connection, that we are all connected with one another, and also that our experiences flow together, harmonize, congregate, cluster. What it builds is an openness to ALL experience. Everything good in it can be done without sex, and sex alone confers nothing. It is neither necessary nor sufficient.
As far as power, it seems to me that there is far more resonant potential spending a pleasant afternoon with someone you love deeply, than in ruling the entire Earth. There is nothing interesting there. It is dull, boring, insipid. Power mongers are inherently insipid.
What power mongering is, is a contraction of the soul, of experience, of mind. It is a permanent spasm, one that never ends. We see rituals like the one in Eyes Wide Shut as aberrant because they are the solution to this spasm. They are the antidote to the steam brewing up in human beings tied in knots.
In the past week or two, I have provided all the ingredients for the so-called Left Handed Path. Everything.
And being emotionally shallow, even if intellectually gifted, Crowley missed it all. One hopes it is not true that people of power and influence have mistaken his tricks for anything of substance.