One advantage of undergoing depth body psychotherapy is the anger that it releases; from which my readers can surely benefit. Here goes a rant, therefore đ
I am of the view that tantra is nothing more or less than an exploration and acceptance of who we really are as sexual, spiritual beings.
To embrace tantra is therefore to rebel against thousands of years of repression and manipulation of our identities by others, and to reclaim the bodies that we live in for ourselves. It’s a revolutionary engagement; nothing can be more revolutionary.
I could also add to my definition the mystical heart of tantra, which is the doctrine of non-duality. But it is not really a doctrine; it is really an evidence, if you know yourself.
To realize this evidence and to enact this rebellion, no-one needed to invent something called “tantra”. Humankind has been doing this forever, in a multitude of cultural forms. I do not believe that anyone, in any period, in central/south Asia had access to any unique insights regarding this problem. At best, it was locally possible in some periods to go further in exploring this path than others elsewhere had done. Nonetheless, this truth of the human condition is around every corner and accessible to everyone. It is a pure evidence, and it has become even more so as scientific knowledge has accumulated.
Being doctrineless, tantra is wonderfully compatible with all forms of authentic knowledge that exist, both scientific and spiritual. A movement calling itself “tantric” can reinvent itself constantly and is perfectly justified in doing so, since its practices are judged only by the canon of utility, and not of truth. Collectively, I believe we have discovered much about what is useful on the path of self-development; I believe we have discovered nothing about what is true.
It is, of course, understandable, indeed inevitable and even (maybe) desirable, that tantra – like other spiritual movements –Â manifests itself in movements and communities with a concrete form, and which develop allegiances, language and rituals of their own. This development both aids the spiritual growth of community members and is necessary to the propagation of the message and methods of the group. I have nothing, even, against its “branding” and I am very tolerant of quirkiness in its self-conception and self-expression.
But let’s remember that the very nature of non-duality implies that no doctrine can be “right”; all language is metaphorical and contingent. Nothing is more than a pathway to self-knowledge, and an infinite number of such pathways exist.
Which makes me wonder why so many self-proclaimed tantrikas give such a damn about lineages, ancientness of traditions, Hindu deities and so on; and even when they don’t, still path lip-service to a host of tantric myths and try to anchor what they are doing in the authority of the past.
That seems to me paradoxal, since tantra is all about living in the here and now…
This attachment to form, ritual and myth raises some more fundamental questions about what the nature of tantra is, and about the spiritual marketplace we inhabit, within which movements identifying themselves as tantra compete for attention.
It won’t have escaped the attention of even the most casual observer that this marketplace is unusually crowded, with numerous generic, branded and even patented therapy methods, bodywork modalities and spiritual practices competing with each other in terms of the hyperbole of their claims of efficacy.
The most successful (in terms of the following they attract) are usually those that promise the most for the least effort, or which particularly suit the personalities of the would-be disciples : notably in terms of those individuals’ desire to avoid personal responsibility for their spiritual path (or physical or emotional healing or well-being) and cast this on to the willing shoulders of ego-driven gurus.
Why is this so?
In my view and experience, leaving aside exogenous life events like illness and bereavement, and solitary practices like prayer and meditation, there are only two things which can effect long-term positive change in personal behavior. These are (i) love and (ii) work designed to release underlying tensions in the bodymind.
Furthermore, as far as love is concerned, I am convinced of its power but I am unsure of its duration if it is not accompanied by abreactive work.
Tensions in the bodymind being manifested physically (although they are not purely physical in their etiology), a physical dimension to such work is indispensable. That leaves a broad panoply of activities which are not without value, though their relative value may be discussed (and may vary from person to person). However, it excludes, at the same time, a vast bunch of stuff which is of little value, no value at all, or quite negative in terms of its value because it distracts people from real solutions to their problems. For example, Tarot, numerology, mandalas, angels, mantras, crystals….It also puts into perspective the possible value of other modalities whose only reasonable mode of effective action is through the love and acceptance they communicate (though also limited energetic effects as well as autosuggestion are possible). In this category I would place, for example, reiki (see here for a review of its clinical effectiveness). I would be still more skeptical about other physical methods which do not involve significant manipulation, such as sophrology.
All of these modalities, apart from competing with tantra in the aforementioned spiritual marketplace, are, perhaps surprisingly (at least to me)Â actually embraced by many people who practice tantra, as a complement to their own practice.
This is, I believe, very damaging for the credibility of the practitioners concerned and for the layman’s understanding of what tantra has to offer, which is nonetheless so brilliantly set out in books by Osho and others.
At my last workshop with Advaita, I was particularly pleased to hear two spiritual myths debunked, myths with which many tantra practitioners coexist quite happily.
One was the notion of karma. According to Advaita (I paraphrase her), this is an immoral notion designed to encourage resignation in the face of violence. We are born with no form of original sin, whether Christian or oriental. On the contrary, we are born innocent and we are corrupted by parents, teachers and society. I entirely agree with this important, and objectively indisputable, moral standpoint.
A second was the zen notion of emptiness. According to zen, one should strive after emptiness in order to feel compassion. I think I understand this one and for me I have no problem in embracing that notion. Yet when Advaita says that we can only feel compassion from plenitude, it is a vastly more helpful conception to normal people. What prevents us from feeling compassion is what prevents us from feeling ourselves. And the search for emptiness can all too easily become a quest to repress feeling and emotion.
Having brilliantly debunked these concepts, though, why stop there?
I don’t doubt that it’s profitable to peddle the kind of nonsense you can find on www.schoolofawakening.com, for instance; but is it helpful to the soul? And therefore, is it ethical?
In any case, tantra it is not.
I had some comments offline on this article, in particular in relation to reiki. Perhaps I can clarify. I do not exclude that this and similar modalities may have therapeutic value; I keep an open mind on that. However, I believe that this modality is both offered and sought by many people on the basis of exaggerated claims/expectations. This kind of passive therapy can be very comforting to people who do not want to confront their shadow. It may possibly be of some assistance in managing specific problems; but it is most unlikely to bring about long-term changes in behavior. It is not impossible and it may contribute, but it is a very long way from being the most effective therapy for the traumas and neuroses we all suffer from. This kind of therapy is very popular only because avoiding confronting our shadows is very popular. Precisely for that reason though, it also has a role to play. I let that be, I only want to point out to the true seeker that the ways your mind has to distract you from your goal are myriad and subtle. Active bodywork is the most important means to release the traumas that hold you back on your spiritual path.
Youâre way too nice to Reiki! I donât want to suggest that hostility or exclusion are called for. Quite the contrary: I bristle myself when I feel that I have an obligation to censor myself in order to be a welcome member in a community. And I do, indeed, feel that I must keep a lid on my thoughts when, for example, a proponent of a certain kind of Reiki expounds. Or when T.M. fans swear that their masters can levitate, or when someone claims that the wifi-waves make him or her sick.
If an individual or group in progressive new-age circles were to 1)argue in favor of creationism, or 2)claim that earthquakes were caused by work on the Sabbath, or 3)warn teenagers that masturbation causes blindness, or 4)refuse to vaccinate their children against polio, I donât think that those opinions would be met with the same well-intentioned silence, as is reiki or astrological literalism. But to me, these are all essentially equivalent examples of anti-rational, divisive sectarian dogma. The world has suffered a lot because of willful, self-righteous ignorance, and I donât think I am helping myself or my community by not politely (but vigorously) speaking out. I do not think we should pretend that novel forms of spiritually-justified anti-reason are anodyne simply because they arrive by way of California or Glastonbury, or because they smell of patchouli rather than of ecclesiastical incense.
Like mind-reading or fortune-telling, for some practitioners at least Reiki is not a spiritual practice requiring of us that we transcend the mere rational. It is frequently presented as a quasi-medical practice, making claims that lay squarely in realm of the scientific and rational world. These claims can be and have been refuted. In the small circles in which this kind of Reiki is defended, the simple facts of this refutation are as unwelcome, in the same way and for essentially the same reasons as those reasons for which heliocentrism and Darwinism have been unwelcome in some Christian communities.
Of course, not every Reiki practitioner makes medical claims. I hope very much to have room in society for ritual, spiritual practice, non-traditional methods of (and even definitions of ) healing. But history is full of spiritual communities whose wisdom has been poisoned by literalism, whose desire to transcend reason has morphed into the simpler and more militant claim to embrace esoterism and magic, and to defy and reject reason.
The rational mind is a part of a whole human being, just like the spirit, the body, the call to community, and sexuality. At the front door to all too many churchesâand temples, sweat lodges, and ashramsâis an ideological bouncer, pressuring me to deny one of these parts of myself. I am not going to do it. I wonât deny my spirit for Scientific Materialism. I wonât deny my body or my sexuality for a church. And I wonât deny my reasoning mind for any new-age community.
Indeed. I simply don’t know much if anything about reiki and I think I hinted in the article at the only mechanisms I could conceive of that might lie behind any efficacy that it may have. Subject to the limits I set out in an earlier article (“la science de l’inconnu”), I hold body psychotherapy and the other methods I advocate or sympathize with to be subject to scientific enquiry. That rider was the simple one that there is a difference between what has been supported by scientific enquiry and what may work, even if scientific enquiry has not yet been able to establish its efficacy; the imperative therefore to live life fully in a world of imperfect knowledge, or equivalently to take another view of risk than the one which the scientific method does and must be based on. In this regard, body psychotherapy is in any case certainly no less scientific than psychotherapy as a whole, on which subject there is of course a vibrant debate.
I also donât know very much about what reiki *can* be to its responsible practitioners. My strong feelings about it are based on experiences I had while in contact with the overlapping new-agy, ârecovery,â and personal growth communities in the midwest of the US. I wonât list the spectacular claims made, in that loud American way, for the no-touch Reiki practiced there.
What bothered me in that context, and which I have seen replayed often in various forms, is the dishonest silence of the community… a silence which is treated as if it were a virtue (tolerance, open-mindedness) when in fact it is mere social cowardice. In private, there was a great deal of discomfort with the Reiki subgroup, whoâin addition to the militant magical claims made for their artârationalized a lot of dubious couple-wrecking bed-hopping based on energies that had been mixed up or mis-aligned during bodywork sessions. They were, if I may use the esoteric jargon of the spiritualists, full of shit.
I donât, however, think every claim needs to be scientifically verified, nor that every truth claim even needs to be scientifically verifiable in principle. A few examples: 1) Everything happens for a reason. 2) You create your own reality. 3)Jesus loves you. These are not scientific claims to be verified or refuted. They are, I suppose, choices about how to view the universe. All of the above *can* be treated as literal truth claims, which leads to the worst kind of airport-bookstore, as-seen-on-Oprah, self-help snake-oil… if not mega-church televangelism.
In other words, there are scientific claims and non-scientific claims, which represent different kinds of truth. The problems arise from un-scientific or quasi-scientific claims, which actually do fall within the domain of verification and refutation, but which reject or dodge or fail to acknowledge the inevitable refutation: Medical charlatanism, for example, or telekinesis, or levitation, astrology or other sooth-saying. Defenders of these powers use the rhetorical or social defenses of the non-scientific to protect the un-scientific.
I am not sure where the wide and diverse fields of psychoanalysis fall. I would say that they are only partly scientific, being mostly interpretive frameworks that do not offer much for refutation. The scientific parts, practices, and directions within psychoanalysis are still evolving. Freudian psychotherapy, for example, has not done well as a scientifically verifiable treatment for mental illness, but it is exactly for this reason that a careful consideration of what *is* scientific, and what *should* be scientific, is called for. All scienceâeven good scienceâis or has been or will be refuted… and the improved understanding arises from the ashes of the old. The refutation of Newtonian dynamics does not, for example, de-legitimize Newtonâs place in the history of physics. It is the relationship with refutation, rather than the amount or degree of refutation, that ought to define the rational or scientific legitimacy of a school of thought.
Yes sure and there may be even many things which are true but not provable by the scientific method (as there are mathematical statements true but not provable according to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems)
Still I would not put your three examples in this category.
(1) means I need to find some way to bypass the insecurity generated in my ego by the fact of my being subject to stochastic processes;
(2) appears to be an attempted definition of the term “reality” as being undefinable outside subjective experience
(3) means I would like you to join my religion, possibly by appealing to your low sense of self-worth
as such, I fail to see any truth in these statements, of any kind at all…