Tag: tantra

The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination 🙂 But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress 😉 ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does  not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.

Our love affair with nonsense

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 😉

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 – 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) 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.

Of Gods and Goddesses

Our general understanding of the ontogenesis of polytheistic systems in the space which came to constitute the Indo-European world is approximately as follows, and owes a lot to Marija Gimbutas.

Prior to the Indo-European incursions, the religion of Europe, but probably also of central and south Asia, was essentially matriarchal in form (or “matristic” to use Gimbutas’ preferred term). The central Goddess-figure embodied fertility, the earth and procreation, and by extension the nurturing values of motherhood. The ancient world also knew, however, a variety of other female goddesses having varying personalities and attributes. The Triple Goddess is widely attested, representing the phases of the moon and the phases of the life of a woman through youth, maturity and old age. Other Goddesses offer other role-models or express other, “darker” dimensions of womanhood – think of Kali, Astarte or Hera.

Gimbutas doesn’t make a big point of it as far as I know, but we need to supplement this description with certain other elements. Primitive religion certainly knew divinities who were emanations of natural phenomena – the Sun, moon and other planets; rivers and seas; mountains; the weather, and so on – all the forces to which primitive humans were subject or which filled them with awe. We do not know if these divinities were endowed with gender from earliest times. All pre-Indoeuropean languages of Eurasia which are attested (Basque, Etruscan, Kartvelian, Iberian, etc) do not have grammatical gender, so the assignation of gender to forces of nature was presumably not self-evident. It seems also likely that phallic cults predate the Indo-Europeans; certainly they do so in the Indus Valley civilization, but it seems very likely that the various phallic gods attested from European religion – of which the most notable would be Priapus and Pan – in fact belong to a pre-Indoeuropean stratum of religiosity which recognized not only the nurturing role of the earth-mother but also the complementary roles of both sexes in procreation, something reflected in the metaphysics of ancient near eastern creation myths as well.

Into this somewhat pacific universe characterized by a complex female and rather simple male divinity accompanied by various nature-divinities, erupted the Indo-European warrior class which bore androcratic religious traditions, mirroring their social organization; these traditions then took precedence over, though they existed alongside, traditional beliefs.

It is easy to speculate that, whatever complexities there may have been in pre-existing cults devoted to male fertility (sublimited as the essence of the male in the word “virility”), these were swiftly ousted or relegated to a secondary position by the rich array of male divinities which the conquerors brought with them. Where it suited them, nature-divinities could also easily be shared out between the genders and, indeed, on more than one occasion have their gender changed from female to male, as happened when traditional Tibetan religion (Bön) was supplanted by Tibetan tantric buddhism.

The Goddess, on the other hand, while subordinate to the male divinities, suffered from no such process of substitution and continued to merit the devotion of indigenous populations. Even in her much-disguised Marian incarnation, numerous local specificities and attributes continue to exist to this day. In Ancient Greece she seems to have survived particularly well, and with the rise of neoclassicism, Goddess worship found its way back into the mainstream of the European tradition, albeit in disguised forms. Many men practise it in a transparently pagan form to this day – there is a mass market for portrayals of beautiful women inaccessible to the majority of males, and I would take issue with the feminist notion that they are routinely viewed by men as mere passive and frequently degraded objects of their sexual satisfaction (although within pornography itself, this unfortunate tendency is probably on the rise). These (abstractions of) women are routinely honored by their male acolytes with the giving of their semen.

Regardless of how accurate this account is from a historical standpoint, it pretty much represents, I believe, our collective preconscious – the array of symbols available to us denoting female and male. Masculinity is associated with a reduced set of militaristic attributes which characterized also the ancient Indo-european male pantheons, whereas femininity is associated with a much wider set of creative, healing and nurturing attributes of which males have no ken.

Whenever it is admitted that men may also possess or develop such attributes, this is invariably referred to as “getting in touch with their feminine side”. Women, on the other hand, rarely get in touch with their “masculine side” – the phrase would rather imply capitulation to the paternalistic world order (which I decry as passionately as anyone).

As a man, I have one thing to say to this: Quatsch!

It is not acceptable for me that women get to relate to such a funky bunch of goddesses, and I have to look  in the poverty of the militaristic traditions of a bunch of destructive barbarians for inspiration as to what my masculinity means. Yet in the Shiva/Shakti dualism, Shakti is the clear inheritor of all pagan Goddess traditions, whereas Shiva, at core, is the Rudra of the Rig-Veda, “fierce like a formidable wild beast”. Not only do I not accept this, moreover – I consider it a ludicrous distorsion of who I am, and a pervasive, destructive cultural meme which impedes anything approaching a full expression of masculinity in the modern world.

Have I committed here tantric theocide? I hope so. For the Oedipus myth teaches us powerfully that only when the father is overthrown can the son come into his power.