Tag: truth

Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (2) Innate Resources

 

In the previous article in this two-part series, I explained why, in a broad class of cases, the information we receive is likely to be a very poor guide to the actions we should take. This is the much-delayed part two; delayed mainly because I realized I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to my own question of what a better guide might be. In this post, I’ll put together the elements I now have even if I am sure there is much more to be said.

So what basis may we then have for decision, if science does not afford one and positivism is to be mistrusted? And a linked question: on what basis, descriptively, do we actually make decisions?

To the best of my knowledge, though both have grappled with it, neither science nor philosophy has an answer to this age-old riddle.

Derrida was fond of the claim – somewhat abusively attributed by him to Kierkegaard – that “the moment of decision is madness“. Decisions, claimed Derrida, are characterized by circumstances in which “it is not possible to know what should be done, when knowledge is not conclusive and does not have the vocation to be so” [1]. In this case “the only possible decision passes by way of the folly of the undecidable and of the impossible” [2].

Kierkegaard in reality was talking about the act of faith, characterized by the Christian apostle Paul as “foolishness to the Greeks“, i.e. outside the frame of logical deduction to which Hellenistic philosophy by virtue of its very precepts could lead. [3] Paul’s account of the conversion experience rings phenomenologically true: it is a moment in which a feeling of knowledge renders reason superfluous, one which subjectively appears to take place on another level of consciousness. This describes not only religious experiences, but many key moments in the life of anyone. It therefore seems to be at least descriptively accurate. The decisions one takes in such moments are experienced as beyond doubt, as led by a higher force, as apodictic: and therefore as right even if, paradoxically, they ultimately turned out ‘wrong’. And yet conversion presumably is, in fact, in our normal sense always wrong as it is interpreted to include the act of adhesion to a number of precepts which cannot be completely correct – as Kierkegaard rightly noted.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see many ways in which I might have improved, in my own life, upon decisions which I took under the influence of internal circumstances which might be compared to a conversion experience. They include matters related to relationships and academic choices. And yet although I am capable of imagining or even holding some of those decisions to have been wrong, I am incapable of regretting those same decisions, however unwise a seemingly “neutral” observer might find them to have been. There is therefore, it seems, a state in which certain decisions can be taken which, even if they are arguably unwise or suboptimal, are at least insulated from regret.

If such a sense of certainty can pervade weighty decisions, therefore, it nevertheless seems to be well worth examining them critically. Psychologist Arthur Janov has argued that conversion experiences display a universal psychodynamic pattern of ego collapse, but this is of course entirely separate from the specific meaning attached to these experiences by those who undergo them[4]. It follows that, even if in that moment the subject may indeed have been in contact with “truth” – a possibility which cannot be assumed away – nevertheless it is essentially impossible to interpret this “truth” in a way which is verifiably and intersubjectively correct[5].

De facto, even under less dramatic circumstances a number of people would doubtless cite not only science and values as a guide to decision making, but also hunches/their inner voice and self-observation. This “inner voice” represents a type of knowledge the nature of which bears further consideration, comparable in some regards to Spinoza’s “third type of knowledge” which he called intuitive knowledge [6], as well as to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology.

Innate somatic intelligence

At one level, it seems to me that we can found the notion of an inner voice biologically. I will take the example of food. It seems (at least to me subjectively) that our body has some sense of the nutrients which it requires at any given moment – an innate, pre-conscious nutritional intelligence – and that when we make decisions related to procuring nutrition, for example when shopping, preparing food or choosing from a menu at a restaurant, this innate intelligence plays a role, together, of course, with many other factors which may be less nutritionally relevant (emotional associations with particular foodstuffs, physiological addictions, what we have been told about food, what our choices communicate …). The reality of such a sense is well illustrated by the phenomenon of cravings during pregnancy  – these appear to be informative of physical needs (although this has not been proven) even if there is unarguably merit to interposing a reflective act between the drive and its gratification, as the linked article suggests. Such an innate intelligence presumably also informs the hunting or foraging impulses of other animals. We, as other primates at least, also have an innate ability to learn from our experience of certain foods which, perhaps largely subconsciously, feeds back into future decision making.

At the same time, it is hard to believe that if he were left to make all the decisions himself, my son would naturally gravitate towards a healthy diet (unless, perhaps, I were to release him into the wild). Food behavior is learnt socially in our species, presumably a significant evolutionary advantage; although on a simpler level, this is also true of other primates [7].

Unfortunately, explaining how this innate nutritional intelligence works, distinguishing it from other neurophysiological mechanisms, and determining the confidence we can have in it in making nutritional decisions is a serious philosophical and neurobiological problem which we are not even close to understanding. Some philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn even argue that the mind-body problem, of which this is an instance, is inherently insoluble. Ramping this up to the next level to explain the role of intuition in complex decision making and the faith we should or should not put in it is therefore beyond the reach of any current theory, and quite possibly beyond even the reach of scientific enquiry per se. The most we can do is list instances where it goes wrong or is misleading and develop heuristics designed to avoid giving it excessive weight. This is perfectly valid and useful, and yet here is a core dimension of human existence about which we are struggling to say anything sensible.

Attitude

Faced with this situation, and with no way to resolve it, the philosophical tradition has focused on the question of the right attitude to adopt vis-à-vis our drives and urges. This tradition has tended, until recent times, to place in my view an unwarranted degree of trust in reason, the logos of Hellenistic philosophy, which presents itself as a metaphysical concept the boundaries of which (as with any socially constitutive concept) are inherently contested. The abandonment to reason urged on us by philosophers seems to lack practical value and to be value-laden, as I have previously argued. It inevitably leads to the tendentious classification of desires on a scale of value, with ‘base’ desires conspiring to lead us astray contrasted to lofty desires which lead to transcendence. This imposition of judgment can be labelled as at best arbitrary and necessarily leads to a bifurcated sense of self which is always in a state of internal conflict.

I therefore prefer a system of heuristics on top of intuition to a metaphysical belief that there is something called ‘reason’ which, if only I would listen to it, would direct my steps better than I might do myself; it sounds awfully like the superego. In my view, there is no need to sublimate desire or benefit from doing so; the contrary impression is merely the consequence of a parody of what constitutes human desire which incorporates unnecessary and ill-founded value judgments. However, I would still reason that the attitude to adopt towards desire is a question of both ethics and esthetics (in other words a question of consciousness), largely because these concepts capture a necessarily intersubjective dimension of desire which is missing in the atomistic Freudian account. This merits a discursus.

An important concept in this context is that of epoché or bracketing, popularized by phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl who argued that the question of the real existence of objects perceived by the mind, which Kant argued was inaccessible to inquiry, could be set aside without losing the possibility of truth and meaning.

Epoché played an important role in the Greco-Roman Skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism. Without actually claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrhonism argues that the preferred attitude to be adopted is the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent, since only in this way can the seeker achieve the state of ataraxia or tranquillity. This does not imply that we have no rationale to choose one kind of action over another; however, one kind of life or one kind of action cannot be definitively said to be ‘correct’. Instead of a life of inaction, the Skeptic insists (presumably for no compelling reason other than social convenience) that one normally ought to live according to customs, laws, and traditions.

The nature of desire as movement-towards, and therefore presupposing representation of an object, is one which Franz Brentano argued it shares with other psychosomatic phenomena and which distinguishes such phenomena from phenomena in the natural world, a notion referred to as intentionality. Although it is questionable whether consciousness can be fully reduced to intentionality, for present purposes this problem can be set aside since the category of impulses we are concerned with for the purpose of assessing their reliability is certainly intentional. This intentionality may be social in nature, either because it is directed towards another person as such or because it involves the representation of an act or project which would confer more than purely private benefits or inflict more than purely private costs. Because of this fact, it is obvious that ethics and esthetics enter into the question; these are in fact social means – constitutive of intersubjective modes of action – which allow for group intention. To my mind, the possibility of intersubjective intention is fundamental to the nature and experience of desire.

It might appear that individual and group intention would be prone, even frequently, to conflict, and that there is a trade-off between them which poses itself in win-lose terms. Do we not, indeed, speak of antisocial desires and of social tyranny? While certainly a part of the felt experience of desire, however, there is more to it than this: the participation in shared desires also expands the individual’s range of possibilities and constitutes a source of gratification which is unavailable to her as a purely atomistic actor.

The question of the right attitude to adopt to desire depends at least in part on the confidence we can have in its subjective manifestation. Given the phenomenon of neurosis, that is, of displaced desire, it would seem that this may sometimes require considerable powers of introspection. This statement would appear also to hold good in respect of intersubjective intention. If food cravings are problematic enough to interpret, sexual desires, consumerist impulses and other displaced manifestations of the will to power are surely even more at risk of being tainted and subverted. Is this distinction phenomenologically available to the mind? That is, is there some qualitative characteristic of mental representations of desire which allows the subject to determine their authenticity, their freedom from involuntary subversion?

Probably all I can say at this point is that it seems to me that there is. Not that I am entirely comfortable with a binary disposition of desires between authentic and inauthentic, nor indeed that even authenticity is sufficient to ground action, but nevertheless, all this being said, certain desires just ‘feel’ different from others, just carry within them more of a sense of growth and expansion which gives them greater appeal and authority.

So I think that this distinction can be made phenomenologically, but also that abandon and detachment can coexist. Readers will recall my earlier criticism of Buddhism on the grounds that it seems to preach an unwillingness to actually live life with full commitment. Nevertheless, the attitude of detachment is objectively a part of Dasein and required for its metaphysical consistency. Any identification with a project of ones life, or with ones sensory experiences, is necessarily a confusion since all of these things are perceived or shaped by ‘something’ which cannot be reduced to them, of a form of thought which precedes mind and possesses a potentiality which vastly exceeds its lived experience. It is the adoption of the perspective of this ‘something’ (for which of course a variety of names have been proposed, but I prefer not to employ them for fear of being misunderstood) which constitutes detachment in the sense of apprehending the finitude of ones temporal existence as an artefact of historicity and its subdimensionality relative to the perspective sub specie aeternas. In other words, there is a dimension to which even philosophy can painlessly accede, because it is required strictly by logic, but which cannot be reduced to individual experience and nevertheless is immanently present to being. This seems to me to be what Heidegger is saying in Being and Time: that the dichotomy between contemplation and celebration can actually be overcome, must, in fact, in the logic of things be overcome.

The attitude to be brought to desire is therefore both the serenity of ataraxia and the ecstasy of abandon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, stillness and dance, the esthetic and the ethical, the perspective of being and the perspective of time; both, simultaneously.

To view this as an inadequate basis for decision is the result of a rationalist bent which I believe it is easy to show reduces to the absurd. The argument is on the following lines, but I will just sketch it out. Taking decisions is just a part of living life. In order to assess the quality of these decisions, it is necessary to determine their effect on the individual’s life. This is their sole yardstick, but it is inaccessible to anything other than the subjective experience itself of being. There is, in essence, no counterfactual and no possibility of error which we could speak about in intersubjectively meaningful terms. Given this, the only pain which is real and actually borne as a result of decisions is the pain of regret, a pain conditioned on having in fact taken a decision other than the one which one ‘knew’ at the time, or should have known, was the ‘right’ one to take. It follows that a strategy which insulates against regret is the best strategy available; there is nothing better, and certainly nothing better about which we can meaningfully talk.

Now, I may seem to contradict myself since the whole premise of my blog is that there are behaviors we are likely to engage in because of our biological nature which we would be better off avoiding. But this formulation, although clear and easy to understand, contains a subtle error : it is not our biological nature which prompts suboptimal decisions, but the way in which the available options are framed by social institutions. The error comes from the institutions, and not from our nature. When I insist that we need a better understanding of our biological nature, what I mean is merely that we need to adopt a standpoint which allows us better to detach ourselves from social institutions, to see their contingency, to reform them so that the act of making right decisions will require less of a superhuman effort than it does now, perhaps to see or consider options we otherwise would not, and to understand why our spirit suffers in the world as it is, that is, to attain to wisdom. This is an agenda of growth and it is part of life; it is not a precondition of being able to live or to live meaningfully.

Attaining a conscious perspective on the part of the individual will often not make additional social options available; the same menu of choices will be there. This is why taking a decision which is at variance with that which one would take if fully reconciled to ones biological nature is not wrong. It is because one cannot be fully reconciled to ones biological nature in isolation from ones peers. The range of decisions available even to a Buddha is a small subset of what would be the decision space of an enlightened humanity. Because I cannot take decisions for all of us, my decisions will never have the quality of plenitude which, if I criticize the decision framework I have outlined for being insufficient, I would be implicitly berating them for not having. It is simply the wrong yardstick.

If we manage to live without regrets from this point forward, we will have attained to the highest trajectory available to us within what remains of our lifetime given where we stand now. It seems to me that this should be our highest aspiration.
*****

Notes

[1] “Quand il n’est pas possible de savoir ce qu’il faut faire, quand le savoir n’est pas déterminant et n’a pas à l’être”

[2] “La seule décision possible passe par la folie de l’indécidable et de l’impossible“.

[3] First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. On this paragraph see Bennington (2011), “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard”, in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 33, Number 1, July 2011, Pages 103-127.

[4] http://cigognenews.blogspot.be/2010/11/conversion-experience.html

[5] Janov speaks of the conversion experience as if it is necessary a solitary one. It seems to me likely that in so doing he significantly underestimates the importance of community – that is, of the tribal impulse – in religious conversion.

[6] Ethics, Part II, proposition 40

[7] Whiten, A. (2000), Primate Culture and Social Learning. Cognitive Science, 24: 477–508

The emergence of the spiritual

This merits a much longer piece, but I want to get the idea out there.

In Les Regles de l’Art, Pierre Bourdieu describes the emergence in the 19th century of a concept of autonomy in the sphere of cultural production, whereby progressively artists shook off the constraints of the need to conform to sanctioned norms and/or to  communicate a “message”, in favor of “art for art’s sake”. To be an artist was to be someone whose duty of truth to him- or herself took absolute precedence over any other consideration.

This, I see, merely prefigured a wider emancipation of humanity which is still only at its early stages today, and not yet widely recognized as such.

The concern to live a good life has for a long time been the preserve of philosophers and theologians, figures who occupied a consecrated position within the hierarchy of social power. Even the artist’s freedom to create has not always meant a freedom in personal life, an ars vivendi (neither has the philosopher’s souci de soi).

As the social institutions of religion have collapsed in Western society, new religious movements have stepped in to occupy the space vacated. These movements have sometimes been of a mass nature, but also sometimes are little more than a clan. The easy availability of information in the internet age has also had a profound effect on these dynamics, rendering them both more ephemeral and more centripetal. But almost all of these new movements, to this day, seek to do exactly what religion has always sought to do, that is to respond to the human need for community by building social systems in which degree of initiation determines place in the hierarchy and ideas are turned into doctrines and dogmas, falsely dehistoricized to become foundational myths. However, in the modern world it is very hard to monopolize habitus and many forces militate against ever recreating the religious empires of the past.

The discipline of inquiry taught us by the philosophers potentially contains a grain of truth, but since Plato until modern times it is certainly thought of wrongly: as a search for what is “out there”, can be uncovered by reason and accordingly should guide our behavior. As I have argued before, this project in reality (the tyranny of reason) seeks only to control us in the service of a possibly (once) imperative social goal, but not one we have freely chosen or even, frequently, questioned.

Although most of us recognize that there is no “truth” in art, we are still highly conditioned to believe that there is truth in life; a meaning which is external, which some have found and which we can emulate by following in their footsteps.

In my opinion, our relationship to our spiritual forbears should be no different to the relationship of the artist to hers. Spiritual creation is a work of art, which may uncover something of the structure of the universe but which simultaneously embodies what Zola called “the particular language of a soul”, specific to time and place. It is a universality without universalism, and utterly contingent on this impossible paradox.

Is there evidence that this spiritual field, in Bourdieu’s sense, is emancipating itself from religion and coming into an autonomous state of being?

I have of course not done any historical study and it is very much my impression that almost no-one yet understands or espouses this understanding clearly, although there are clearly echoes of it already in systems both ancient and modern. Driven by economic factors, ego, habit or expectations, most spiritual teachers try to keep their disciples on the hook, and many aspire to found their own dynasties.

I say, spiritual truth can only be communicated as art, and the spiritual teacher must have the attitude of an artist and should be thought of in this way; indeed, the attitude of an artist is incumbent upon all of us, for we are all artists of our own life. There is no possible way that the student can emulate the teacher; the student can only express her own essence. As (even) Jesus said, unless the seed falls into the earth and dies, it cannot bring forth fruit.

It is very hard for those of us who seek truth to understand that it does not matter where we look for it; to understand that, in fact, “truth” is not a very good word. We all tend to think that if one person has truth, another does not; that is the nature of positivistic truth and we are accustomed to thinking it is also true of spiritual truth. But it is not. Spiritual truth, like artistic “truth”, is inborn, in our cells and in our consciousness; no-one can transmit it to us, all anyone can ever do is wake us up to it within ourselves, and to do this they are never more than instrumental. The environment around us most propitious to our spiritual awakening is not a problem we need to solve, it is much more an emanation of what is already inside.

We need to cease the search and become artists of our own lives, surrounding ourselves with and attracting other artists, certainly, but purely for the joy of sharing in their beauty.

Guru

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook a query about whether a gentleman called Sadhguru (whose site is here) was or was not an authentic spiritual teacher.

Trying to distinguish true from false teachers is, for reasons I will suggest below, a particular obsession of ours, around which considerable emotion is generated. But really we should be forewarned. If there were true and false teachers, then there would be truth and falsehood, good and bad, and these things there are not. Truth is situated not only beyond good and evil but also beyond truth and falsehood; truth in the non-dual sense does not tolerate or recognize a world in which teachers are true or false, any more than it tolerates or recognizes one in which they are good or bad, right or wrong. This is all a conceit of the mind. Yet we play it, again, and again. This game of the mind closes us to the heart, the only organ with which we can see and understand.

Now, personally, when I am trying to figure out whether a teacher has really “got it” and is saying and teaching something of general value to the human race (and not only to themselves, which is not my concern), I have a golden rule – what they say about sex. Mostly they ignore it, which is not a great sign. However, in this video, Sadhguru is asked a question and in his reply he portrays the sexual instinct, not as bad, but as essentially unimportant and a distraction.

This is objectively not the case. Whatever realms sexuality may or may not open us to – and many of us instinctively sense its relationship to the divine – it is in any case the locus of mankind’s fundamental neuroses. It cannot be worked around or ignored – it needs to be healed. That is, it perhaps can be worked around, but this is no shortcut, it is a very, very long detour. One can well imagine how Osho would have answered; but perhaps even more tellingly one cannot imagine that, in Rajneeshpuram, this question would ever have been asked. It was clear to Osho and I believe it was clear in practice that human sexuality should be unleashed, and that whatever mess one might make of it (provided it did not lead to unwanted pregnancies or disease) was in any case better, and resulted in more learning and personal growth, than the alternative.

Several of the others on the discussion thread, in tending to defend Sadhguru, displayed, to my mind, two fundamental mistakes. Firstly, they used their mind to try to assess whether what Sadhguru was saying was or was not, or could or could not be construed as, compatible with other teachings, such as those of Osho, with which they were familiar and tended to identify. To me this question is entirely unimportant and not very informative. What I say is very compatible, I believe at least, with what Osho said; I feel I know his mind and it is as if we are one mind. And yet, people are not queueing up to follow me, nor I think should they (yet 😉 ). Osho has simply realized, embodied, things that I have not, and these things are transmitted from heart to heart; what he says is just background music to this language of the heart. The relevance of what he says is a sign of his connectedness to the universe, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient, and it could deceive. Secondly, and this underlines the folly of the approach via the mind, my companions seemed unduly concerned to be inclusive; not to exclude Sadhguru, or anyone else, from the circle of qualified teachers, always to give them the benefit of the doubt, to avoid choosing. This should show us that the mind is not the neutral arbiter we imagine it to be. It is at least as concerned to avoid disrupting the ego as it is to uncover truth.

So my very rapid working hypothesis on Sadhguru is that, whilst he may be worth listening to and may have many qualities, he is not pushing his followers on the issues they need to be pushed on and they are not getting the answers they look for and need.

But how do I feel, making this judgement? If I am honest, it provides a certain gratification, but, though I stand by it, it is not very pleasant to really become aware of. In it I find shades at least of anger and destruction, triumphalism and revenge. And yet he seems like a nice guy whom I might well find good company and could in the worst case simply ignore. Perhaps he is indeed a con artist. But it is not my protestations or any views of mine at all which are going to determine whether or not people seek him out or how they feel about what they find.

My joy in judgment and the sense of victory it gives me are primal emotions which serve primal survival needs. These needs, however, are objectively absent here. I find myself hating that he may be loved, admired, respected and resenting my own, uninvited feeling of inferiority. By labelling him a false teacher I foreclose the possibility I might learn anything from him, which gives me nothing. Ultimately, I condemn him for not fulfilling a role he has never asked to play: that of a father figure in whose hands my childish insecurities would dissolve into boundless love and reassurance; and I envy him for having access to love which seems denied to me.

Seen in this light, the sense of victory masks a profound inner defeat. I have essentially said to him, as I have said to my father, “Fuck you, I can stand on my own two feet.” This attitude of defiance, this unresolved Oedipus complex, while it may have been necessary for ego-survival, has become so etched into my behavior patterns that it forecloses ever receiving that which my inner child and my soul desire. And that is very sad, and very lonely.

It is exactly the same thing I do on a daily basis when I foreclose possibilities which come across my path to learn and love, out of a misplaced fear of displacement and manipulation. Even if those I encounter may not come into consideration as gurus. This is because I approach no-one as myself a whole being. Onto each and everyone I project a paternal role, hoping desperately they may meet some unmet childhood need of mine, and being eternally disappointed. Disappointment becomes a lifestyle; it even becomes a solace.

Humankind’s search for a guru is always a search to meet unmet childish needs. This is why, in the search for guru, we are always disappointed. There is no guru unless and until we are guru ourselves; and then all is guru. Thus the quality of the other, their state of enlightenment, is in reality irrelevant. What we call enlightenment is only a quality of awareness, not the essence of being, and it is with the essence of being that we must first come into contact. It may help to be in contact with someone who is aware of that essence of being within themselves; I do not deny it. Yet the surrender we need is a surrender only to ourselves. The false guru is the one who will allow you to believe he (or she) is true; that he or she really corresponds to your childish impulses. In such a relationship, as in any relationship founded on such a presupposition, you will become trapped. If a teacher is desirous to help you, he will never allow you to believe that he is “true”.

This means that another’s discernment can never substitute for your own. So much confusion stems from lack of awareness of this fundamental law! I may be right about Sadhguru, or I may be wrong, but you should not listen to me, or to anyone else, because it is not possible, even for an enlightened person, to answer this question other than directly to your heart, and by inviting you to examine yourself what you would have liked him to advise you on. Essentially, either I do not know, or I can not tell. Whether I am right does not help you to be right; not unless I can become you and this I cannot do through the mind. You must remain open to the essence of being wherever you find it, and you find it everywhere, accepting that the unmet childish needs will always remain unmet, but also understanding that there is no need any longer to meet them, and therefore remaining vulnerable, never judging with the ego-backlash of the mind which hates all, but weighing wisdom with the heart, which loves all. Then you will no longer seek guru, but it will have come to you.

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.