Tantra, Tolle, and Transforming Worldviews

A long, long time ago, in a lab not so far away, a fellow graduate student had just finished reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and said that it changed his life.

I gave it a shot. And then I gave up in the second chapter. It was too "woo" and New Age-y, and I wanted to be guided by facts, not interpretation. I said this to my friend, and he said, "it must not the right time in your life right now. Put it away, and it will find you again when you're ready."

Wooow. Ok, maaaan. Let's see what mystical force is going to magically bring this book back into my life.

Eight years later, I'm still thinking about what he said. Slowly, and then suddenly, I'm now ready to receive whatever message is in that book. I look back at my attempt to read it, and I confess that I was too closed-minded to give it a shot. I was stuck in my own ideology, and didn't care about what this German spiritual dude had to say.

Months ago, a good friend of mine was giving a talk about how our local politics should be running on a non-ideological platform (as opposed to the ideology of the more left-leaning caucus of the local Democratic party here in SF). I challenged him and said that there is no such thing as non-ideological. Ideology is inescapable.

Memories of my late twenties came swirling back: my prodigious reading and listening to Slavoj Zizek, a very provocative and often misunderstood Communist Slovenian philosopher who has the ability to piss off literally everyone, not to troll but to wake them up. (Note: I didn't align with him, I'm just a fan of the provocateur).

Zizek has a strong critique of ideology in our contemporary society, talking the dangers of "non-ideology" — that when people believe they are free from ideology, they are even more deeply embedded in the dominant ideology of their time (e.g., Western capitalism). Everyone is working off of some ideological framework whether they are aware of it or not, but those under the illusion of non-ideology are even more resistant to critique than strong ideologues, and that is dangerous.

Even more memories swirled in, of when my ex used to challenge me that my Western scientific worldview is itself an ideology, that it's faulty to believe that knowledge is discovered rather than made. This was challenging because I had been working as a scientist for years, and now I'm supposed to believe that scientifid discoveries aren't what I think they are?

I say all this because I've embraced that ideology is inescapable. There is always a lens. And if that's true, what narratives should we choose to tell ourselves? There's something fun in playing with those narratives than to try–in futility–to resist ideology all together.

This month, I'm reading a book about tantra, called Tantra Illuminated by Christopher Wallis. No, it's not about tantric sex (there's a different book I'm reading for that). It's about a niche tradition of Hinduism focused on uniting the individual soul with the "divine." (Side note: I've learned that "Hinduism" is a modern/Western construct that flattens the vast and diverse traditions in India into one word).

In the introduction the author gives a warning about how to read this book correctly, a guide to how to be open-minded to the ideas in the forthcoming chapters:

One way to initiate this process is to begin cultivating an awareness that we all live in a world of stories, or narratives. Narratives are the more or less coherent stories that we are told, and we tell ourselves, about the events and people around us in order to make sense of them. All generalizations, statements of value judgment, and verbal representations of reality constitute narratives. All narratives are false in the sense that they are necessarily distortions of reality and true in the sense that they bear some relationship to reality, one that can tell us much about ourselves.

This is an important warning because the rest of the book is kind of nuts. The central belief is non-dualism, that there is no separation between the divine and not-divine, and therefore, we are but a microscopic manifestation of the divine itself.

To make it personal: you are not separate from God/dess and never have been. Indeed, you are the very means by which She knows Herself.

Thus for a sentient being, every encounter with any other being is an opportunity for reflecting on his own total nature. Recognizing yourself in the other being, and the other being in yourself, necessarily involves an expansion of your sense of identity. That is, it entails a realization that you have artificially limited yourself to a set of mental constructs (such as any set of “I am” statements), and this realization is simultaneously an opportunity for the expansion of your sense of identity.

Alan Watts, a Zen Buddhist, describes this as if we were a god that chose to relinquish all our omnipotence in order to "play" with the limited view of the universe, which is our existence as we know it.

It's a trip.

All of this is to say, I've been "trying on" this narrative, and holy moly, belief is a powerful thing. I've felt it change the relationship to my body during really hard running workouts. I've been able to tap into energy stores that I haven't been able to tap into in a long time. I've been able to experience subtle changes to how I'm moving and thinking, all through some very attentive breathing exercises. I don't know if it's delusion but the placebo effect works even if you know it's a placebo.

Mark this down in the calendar, that this month might have been the point in Wes's life that he went completely off the deep end.