learn · 2026-09-19
The Vigyan Bhairav Tantra is a dialogue. Devi asks Shiva the largest questions there are — what is reality, what is consciousness, where is liberation — and Shiva does not answer with a philosophy. He answers with a hundred and twelve techniques. Try this. And this. And this.
I have recorded all of them: a short introduction and a fifteen-minute guided sitting for each, two hundred and twenty-four tracks, forty-four hours. It is the largest single thing I have made, and on the old site it was the most chosen — more than half of everyone who took a course by donation took this one. Recording the whole text, one doorway at a time, taught me something the text itself does not say: which of the hundred and twelve a beginner can actually walk through today, which open only to a trained mind, and what the difference is.
First, what the text is not. It is not a linear training. The techniques are not steps; each is a complete doorway in itself, and a person who goes all the way through one of them needs none of the others. That is why the course is not organised as first this, then that. But it is also why a beginner, given all hundred and twelve at once, tends to walk through none of them. A hundred and twelve open doors is a corridor, not a practice.
So the course does the one thing the text does not: it says where to start.
The first twelve techniques are breath techniques. Attention to the two breaths; the turn of the breath; the fusing of in-breath and out-breath; the pause; the point between the eyebrows; the gap between two breaths. Then, still through the breath, the ones that use it to go further: over dreams and death itself; know the knower; lie down as dead; stop the doors of the senses; weightless.
That order is not mine. It is Shiva's; the breath techniques come first in the text. But I would have chosen it anyway, because a beginner arrives with one instrument that already works, and it is the breath. A person who has never sat can be told feel the turn of the breath and can feel it within a minute. There is no belief to adopt and no skill to acquire first. The doorway is right there, and it is the same doorway the Buddha's ānāpānasati uses — the technique that every Vipassana course opens with, and the one I spent my own first years on.
This is also why, on toUnknown, the first five sittings of this course are open to anyone with an account. Not as a sample. Because they are the five a beginner can genuinely do, and the point is to have them done, not previewed.
Anything that takes the breath, or the body sitting still, or a plain sensation, as its doorway. In the first sittings, these:
- The two breaths, and the turn between them. The in-breath ends; before the out-breath begins there is a turn. Attention rests there. This is the technique I would give anyone on their first day, and it is technique one. - The pause. After the out-breath, before the next in-breath, the breath stops of its own accord for a moment. Not held — stopped. Attention rests in the stop. Beginners find this within a sitting or two. - Between the eyebrows. A point, and attention on it. Simple, and one of the fastest routes to a quiet mind that I know. - Lie down as dead. The body still, the breath allowed, the whole thing let go of. Beginners find this easy and often find it the deepest of the early ones, because there is nothing to achieve in it.
What these share: the doorway is a physical fact you can find in under a minute, and the instruction is to stay with it. No concentration is required in advance; the technique builds the concentration as you do it.
Some of the hundred and twelve presuppose a mind that can already hold one object steadily for the length of a sitting. Know the knower — attention turned back onto attention itself — is a doorway only if attention can be held still enough to be turned. Stop the doors of the senses asks for a withdrawal that a scattered mind cannot perform; it will spend the fifteen minutes noticing the doors are still open. Weightless, and the techniques later in the text that work with light, sound, space and the dissolving of the body, ask you to observe something subtle, and subtle things are invisible to a mind that is still coarse.
A beginner who tries these first is not failing. They are trying to look through a lens that has not been ground yet. The technique is fine; the instrument is not ready. I made all hundred and twelve available because a practitioner will want them, and because the text is whole and should be taught whole. But the introductions say plainly, for each one, what it presupposes — and the honest advice for anyone new is to stay with the breath doorways until they open, which takes weeks, not days. Then the rest of the text stops being a corridor and becomes a map.
Tantra, in this text, is not what the word has come to mean. The Vigyan Bhairav Tantra is a practical science of consciousness — precise inner methods, meant to be experienced rather than studied. There is nothing in it to believe. Shiva does not ask Devi to accept anything; he asks her to try something and see. That is the same spirit as the Vipassana I came from, and it is why a Vipassana practitioner can teach this text without contradiction: both are methods, both are tested in your own experience, and both begin with the breath.
Start with the breath. Stay there longer than you want to. The other hundred doors will still be there.
The Tantra Path · Why breath work comes first · About the teacher