learn · 2026-10-07 · 3 min read
The 112 techniques of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, in eleven parts
Open the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra anywhere and you get an instruction. Look into a bowl without seeing its sides. At the start of a sneeze, be aware. When you meet a friend you haven't seen for years, stay with the joy that rises. There are a hundred and twelve of them, Shiva's answers to Devi's questions about what reality is, and they come one after another with no headings and no word on where to begin.
Most people read a few, pick out four that sound appealing, and never open it again. A flat list of 112 is a lot to carry.
When I made them into 112 guided meditations, voiced by Ishta Devata Shiva, I didn't change Shiva's order. I cut it into eleven parts instead: ten meditations each, and twelve in the last. On Audible and Kindle they came out as eleven books. On Insight Timer the same recordings are split into twenty shorter courses with other names, so the numbers there won't match these.
Walked through part by part, the list turns out to have a direction. The first ten are almost all breath: the gap between two breaths, the turn of the breath, the pause when it stops by itself. Then attention between the eyebrows, and lying down as if dead. The second ten move into the senses and the body: closing the doors of the senses, becoming weightless, looking lovingly at one object, letting yourself swing.
Part three is where Shiva starts catching you in the middle of things. Prick yourself with a pin. When you feel the impulse to do something, stop right there. Desire, dance, devotion. Part four is about seeing (a bowl without its sides, something seen as if for the first time, the blue sky, the edge of a deep well) and then the first practices with sound. Part five stays with sound until it turns to sexual union. Part six goes to delight: a long-absent friend, the taste of food, wherever the mind is satisfied, and then the universe as a picture show.
Part seven is about awareness itself: being aware without a break, knowing nothing as pure or impure, seeing that bondage and freedom are relative. Part eight is light, from lightning and a clear sky without end to knowing yourself as light, and then blackness, and ashes. Part nine asks who you are. Part ten is space. The last part, the twelve, ends with being an empty room, the universe as an empty shell, and the final instruction: enter space.
Something else changes as you go, and listeners usually feel it before they can say what it is. In the later parts the voice says less. Fewer directions, no mettā, more silence. People sometimes take that as the recordings getting lazier. It's the other way round. At the start you need a voice in your ear, because the mind has nothing to hold and simply wanders off. Later the voice gets in the way. If a technique only works while someone is talking you through it, it isn't yours yet.
So if you're new, start at the beginning. Most of the first ten work with the breath, which makes it the plainest way in. Don't go hunting for the exotic ones further down; a technique that seems flat on its own is often being set up by the two before it. In the app you couldn't skip ahead anyway: each meditation opens once you've sat the one before it.
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