Fluid Gnosis - Kaula Jnana

Guruji: The half-female, half-male form of Sakti-Siva - Ardha Nari Iswara - is standing on top of your head, facing in the same direction as you; and the feet above your head belongs to this form. In this form, the creator Siva is eternally surrounded by its own Yoni, emitting an unending, life-giving stream called Ganga. The divine form of this nectar is Time. The earthly forms of this nectar are the juices of sex
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Q: Then what is objectionable [in practices of Kaulas]?

Guruji:: The use of bodily secretions in rituals. Everybody uses milk and honey to bathe the icons of power: of desire, nourishment or manifestation. Use of menstrual blood and semen is objected to by most people in rituals. Why? Let me explain. Milk is blood, modified by addition of calcium, which happens automatically in lactating mothers. .So, milk and blood are same, obtained without injury to animals. All we eat comes from organic living matter only; the seeds of paddy, wheat, nuts, etc. Semen is just human seed. Both menstrual flow and semen are living, life giving substances which can be used to give life here, or offered to fire to fulfill our desires to gain control of environment. This is the precise part which is abhorred by people. Notice that menstrual blood and semen are obtained with pleasure instead of pain; so they promote peace loving good energies

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Commenting Tatraloka 4.57-58 Jayaratha writes: ‘(Oneness is attained) within Kula, that is, in accord with the dictum, ‘Kula is the field of creation (utpattigocara)’ (it is attained) everywhere here within (all that is) of the nature of subject and object that arises (continuously) by a process of separation from one’s own (true innate) nature.’ Jayaratha’s explanation presents Kula as the one all-embracing reality which encompasses the polarities of subject and object  in the one Unitary Consciousness that is one’s own essential nature. As Guruji says that this All-Embracing reality consists of Shiva (knower, subject) who is the power of being and Shakti (known, object) who is the power of awareness, desiring, knowing and manifesting. When these two merge, the result of their Cosmic Orgasm is "emitting an unending, life-giving stream called Ganga. The divine form of this nectar is Time".
So on the Divine, macrocosmic level there is a supreme emission (visarga) of Shiva and Shakti, with a resulting nectar of Time (and hence Cosmic Manifestation). And it's physical, microcosmic counterpart is  Kulamrita (kula-dravya, yoni-tattva etc), which are the united opposites of the male and female sexual juices that together are ‘the field of creation’.

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(from D. G. White, "Kamakala Practices in Hindu and Tantric Traditions"):

Earlier body of theory and practice often referred to itself as the Clan Practice (kula-dharma), Clan-Generated (kaula), or the Kaula Gnosis (kaula-jnana). The evolution of what is generally called "Tantra" was in fact a three-stage process. In the beginning was the Kula, the Clan, persons whose cremation ground-based practice centered on the "terrible" worship of Siva-Bhairava together with his consort, the Goddess (Aghoresvari, Uma, Candi, Sakti, etc.), and clans of Yoginis and/or the
worship of the goddess Kali, independent of a male consort but surrounded by circles of female deities. The Kula, whose most notorious adherents were the Kapalikas, was reformed, in about the ninth century, perhaps by a figure named Macchanda-Matsyendra: for this reason, Matsyendra
is generally taken to have been the founder of the Kaula. This reformation involved the removal, on the one hand, of certain of the mortuary aspects of the Kula in favor of a greater emphasis on the erotic element of the Yogini cults and, on the other, a reconfiguration of the earlier clan system into the new Clan-Generated system of the Kaula. Classified under the Kaula rubric are the Siddha Kaula, Yogini Kaula, and Krama cults of Kali, as well as the "Early Trika" cults of the goddesses Para, Apara, and Parapara. It is among the Kashmiri theoreticians of this last group-and here I am referring specifically to Abhinavagupta and his disciple Ksemaraja.

Here, in the socioreligious context of eleventh-century Kashmir, these reformers of the Trika sought
to win the hearts and minds of the populace by presenting a whitewashed version of Kaula theory and practice for public consumption, while continuing to observe the authentic Kaula practices in secret, among the initiated. This eleventh-century development was Tantra, a religion of dissimulation and of the progressive refinement of antinomian practice into a gnoseological system grounded in the aesthetics of vision and audition. This tendency culminates in the twelfth-to-thirteenth-century Srividya.

The theoreticians of post-tenth-century C.E. high Hindu Tantra (i.e., the later Trika and Srividya traditions) were especially innovative in their integration of aesthetic and linguistic theory into their reinterpretation of earlier theory and practice. As such, the acoustic and photic registers lie at the forefront of their metaphysical systems, according to which the absolute godhead, which is effulgent pure consciousness, communicates itself to the world and especially to the human microcosm as a stream or wave of phosphorescent light and as a "garland" of the vibrating phonemes of the Sanskrit language. And, because the universe is brought into being by a divine outpouring of light and sound, the tantric practitioner may return to and identify himself with this pure consciousness by meditatively recondensing those same photons of light and phonemes of sound into their higher principles. knowledge.
Through the meditative practice of mantras-phonematic, acoustic manifestations of the Absolute-and of mandalas or yantras-graphic, visual representations of the same-the consciousness of the practitioner is uplifted and transformed to gradually become God-consciousness. But what is the nature of the "practice" involved here?
While the acoustic and the photic, phosphorescing drops of sound, lay at the forefront of post-tenth-century Hindu tantric practice, there was a substratum that persisted from an earlier tradition (or that was borrowed from a contemporary but peripheral tradition), a substratum that was neither acoustic nor photic but, rather, fluid, with the fluid in question being sexual fluid. In these earlier or peripheral traditions, it was via a sexually transmitted stream or flow of sexual fluids that the practitioner tapped into the source of that stream, the male Siva, who has been represented iconographically, since at least the second century B.C.E., as a phallic image, a lingam. Siva does not, however, stand alone in this flow of sexual fluids. Here, his self-manifestation is effected through his female hypostasis, the Goddess, whose own sexual fluid carries his divine germ plasm through the lineages or transmissions of the tantric clans, clans in which human females called Yoginis, identified with the Goddess herself, play a crucial role. In the earlier Kula practice, it was via this flow of the "clan fluid" (kuladravya) through the wombs of Yoginis that the male practitioner was empowered to return to and identify himself with the Godhead.

In the early Kaula, knowledge transmitted not only from "ear to ear" but also from "mouth to mouth" (vaktradvaktram) and there can be no doubt that the mouths in question are the male and female sexual orifices. A number of early tantric sources further support this reading, as do iconographic representations of rajapana from the four corners of the Indian subcontinent. In tantric worship
of the vulva (yonipuja),the so-called Clan Ritual (kulaprakriya), the "Clan Sacrifice" (kulayaga) and especially tantric initiation, we find repeated descriptions of the transmission of sexual fluids from the mouths (oral and vulval) of a Yogini into the mouth of a male practitioner. In sculptural representations of the worship of the vulva, which are frequent in this period, we see male practitioners crouching beneath the vulva of a female figure, in order to catch her sexual or menstrual fluids in their mouths, in the practice called "drinking female discharge. In addition, the most powerful yantras were those drawn with the "ink" of this female discharge. In this role, the Yogini serves as a conduit, through initiation and ritual, for the transmission of the clan or lineage essence, which uninitiated males intrinsically lack: there is a literal fluid flow from the "mouth" of Siva-Bhairava to that of the Goddess (who, even in her role as transmitter of mantras in high Hindu Tantra, is called bhinnayoni, "she whose vulva is open"), from her to a guru and/ or a Yogini, and thence to a male Siddha initiate.

This is stated explicitly in Jayaratha's commentary to TA 1.13. Quoting an unidentified source which states that "gnosis is to be cast into a woman's mouth and then taken out of her mouth," he goes on to say that in the kulaprakriya, the Clan Ritual, the disciple receives the gnosis from the lineage (amnaya), via the mouth of the duti, and by means of the unified emission (samaskandataya) of the Guru and the Duti. What is being described here is the dynamic of the lower end of the flow chart of the Kaula gnosis, in the form of the clan fluid (kuladravya) emitted by the guru and his consort in sexual intercourse and drunk by the initiate. It is this that makes the latter a member of the clan, of the family of Siva, the Goddess, and the Yoginis, Diutis and Siddha teachers through whom that clan fluid flows.

As if to emphasize her transmissive role, the Yogini is termed, precisely, the Duti, the female "Messenger." At no time do these sources ever describe the Messenger as speaking, so the question is, What is the Messenger transmitting? When Marshall McLuhan stated that "the medium is the message," he was referring to television and other technologies. When the Kaulas made essentially the same statement through the use of the term Duti, their medium/message was, instead, sexual fluid.
That this is the case is made explicit as well in the term employed for the fluid messages that flow through the genealogical flow charts of these tantric clans. As we have seen, this is referred to by a number of names-including kulamrta (clan nectar), kuladravya (clan fluid), yonitattva (vulva essence), and sadbhava - and is identified, in a multitude of sources, with the Yoginis' female discharge, either her menstrual blood or sexual emission. In worship, initiation, and ritual practices involving the transmission of the clan essence from the Absolute to male practitioners through the conduit of the upper and lower mouths of the Goddess and the Yoginis or Duitis, it was this fluid essence, which manifested in the form of sexual fluids, that made these practitioners part of a clan or family (kula). It was only later that this concrete flow of information was sublimated or semanticized into the phosphorescing drops of light or consciousness in high Hindu Tantra. Both Kaula and tantric rituals enable the practitioner (generally male) to tap into the flow of divine energy that animates both the world and his clan or lineage and to channel that flow into the crucible of his own bodily microcosm. It allows him to encapsulate the divine for internal use, to capture its boundless energy and being within a single "drop" that, absorbed into the microcosm, transforms it into a divine body. Many if not most of the sectarian differences within these allied traditions arise from the particular means these groups employ to signify the divine within the human microcosm. At one extreme, that of Kaula practice, the means or medium of identification is often sexual; at the other, that precisely of Srividya practice, it is through quietistic graphic, diagrammatic, or acoustic meditation techniques that the identification is made. Quite significantly, it is the image of a drop (bindu) that recurs, across the entire gamut of tantric theory and practice, as that form which encapsulates the being, energy, and pure consciousness of the divine; and so it is that we encounter a multiplicity of references to drops of fluid, drops of light, drops of sound, and drops of gnosis. In the earlier Kaula, the fluid medium itself was the message that once internalized, transformed the very being of the male practitioner, injecting him with the fluid stuff of the Divine, transmitted through the Yoginis, in whom it naturally flowed. The female Yogini or Duti, by virtue of the natural presence of the clan nectar in her menstrual or sexual emissions, was vital to aspiring male practitioners who wished to be "inseminated" or "insanguinated" with the liberating fluid clan essence and thereby become members of the clan family (kula). Absorption of the clan fluid was effected through the drinking of such emissions as described or through the practice of vajroli mudra, urethral suction.

The vajroli sculpture at the Kandarya Mahadeva temple

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(An example of the practice of Kaula ritual intercourse (maithuna) aimed at its production and consumption, which appears to have been literally prescribed, is taken from a section of the Manthānabhairavatantra of the Kubjikā tradition. This rite is also called Śāntayoga (Tranquil Union) or Bhagayāga (the Sacrifice to the Female Organ). The mandala is drawn first and food offerings are made to the deities in it and the Kaula partner. The text continues: ‘Once (the female partner) has been made blissful with mantras, worship the secret place (guhyasthāna) (i.e. the female sexual organ). Consecrating the Linga (the male sexual organ) with its three seed-syllables, touch it. O Lord of the gods, first of all, insert the right index finger. Move the tongue around there and insert the Linga. Then by means of (the movement of the vital breath called) the Weapon of Intercourse (helādasanaya) merge into the supreme power. Contemplate one’s own Self in the form of Bhairava and that beautiful Yoni (bhaga). The expert should kiss (the consort’s) eyes and ears with vigour
(yatnāt) and slowly kiss (her) navel, heart, and throat. O Lord of the gods, one should contemplate the
divine form (mūrti) (of the Yoni) until it flows (with sexual juices). Then having produced the mixture of male and female fluids (kundagola) along with the five nectars (of the bodily secretions) and worshipped the Krama (mandala) and the scripture, O Bhairava, the Kula yogi, along with (his) partner (dūtī), should eat it with effort.’ YKh (2) 12/7-12. )