The “inner saboteur” is a term I first heard watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. In this famous reality show, when a contestant is collapsing under the pressures of insecurity or an inferiority complex, RuPaul often intervenes to name this voice one’s “inner saboteur.”

RuPaul’s encouragement is generally one of domestication: “don’t let that inner critic get the best of you,” as it were. Put her/him/them in their place, and own that this is a part of you that is getting in the way. To truly ‘love yourself’ – as RuPaul is so often at pains to preach – you have to learn how not to listen to the part that tells you “you’re not good enough.”

While this compartmentalizing tactic has certain benefits and certainly empowers some participants on the show, therapeutic approaches like “inner parts work” (often called Internal Family Systems) and Jungian-inspired “shadow work” take more of an interest in understanding what this voice is saying underneath the negative self-talk. The question becomes something like, “What is the unmet need that this part of us is asking for?”

In many instances, what is being requested is precisely not negation, suppression, or compartmentalization. It is rather an “integration.” This doesn’t mean that our negative self-talk should be allowed to run rampant or that we should take its distortions to represent reality. It rather means that the suppression logic reveals a certain kind of relationship with that inner part. It bespeaks a sort of communication style that we are engaged in with that part of ourselves.

On the other hand, this ‘inner saboteur’ — the part that criticizes, reacts, defends, and hides — is often treated in the ‘integration framework’ as something that has gone wrong. It is a piece to recover, a wound to heal, or a fragment to reintegrate. This approach has been deeply effective for many people and is clearly an improvement upon the earlier cultural tendency to silence or ignore all our problems – or follow the admittedly wise-for-its-time Fraggle Rock anthem, ‘dance your cares away, worries for another day.’

In the workshop that I am teaching this Friday, June 5th, we’re looking at an alternative theory that could be applied to ‘shadow work’ or the ‘inner saboteur’ – one derived from the Pratyabhijñā tradition.

To share just one idea, what we experience as that ‘inner saboteur’ (or ‘shadow’) is saṅkoca — contraction. The same consciousness that is svātantrya (inherently free) is, at any given moment, performing a ‘narrower’ expression of itself. The saboteur therefore isn’t a broken part, but rather consciousness-as-contraction. For reason of its own playfulness, it manifests as varyingly situated modes of itself.

This subtle shift of orientation has potentially radical implications for shadow work. You’re not trying to fix something foreign. You’re learning to recognize a familiar gesture of your own awareness — and, in recognizing it, to feel where the contraction might begin to loosen and expand.

Thank you for reading. Interested in the workshop?

In this 2.5-hour live workshop, we will explore this contraction: what it is, why it happens, and how to meet it through a lens informed by Abhinavagupta’s ‘aesthetics of recognition.’ You’ll leave with a short, portable practice for the moments the saboteur arrives — not to ‘manage’ it, but to recognize what it already is.

The Inner Saboteur: A Tantric Approach to Shadow Work

LIVE | June 5, 2026 | 10:00am-12:30pm ET | Recording Included

Learn more and join

Body Norms, Body Shame, and Social Power

It has been argued that the more marginalized and subordinated a social position we occupy, the more we are identified as bodies, and the more pressure we experience to modify those bodies to mitigate our deviance from the norm. In other words, one way to enact oppression against members of a particular social group is to characterize them as bodily objects rather than intelligent and sentient subjects, and to simultaneously depict those bodies as uncivilized, crude, ugly, or distasteful. As the multibillion dollar cosmetics, plastic surgeryand weight loss industriesreadily attest, women are prime subjects of such pressures to modify their bodies, but members of other socially disempowered and vulnerable groups are hardly exempt. The elderly are routinely encouraged to retain the appearance and functioning of their youth, as evidenced by an anti-aging products and services market expected to exceed $300 billion, while the effect of widespread and entrenched colorism supports a global market for skin lightening products that is projected to reach $23 billion dollars by 2017.

Of course, the cost of having a body that is considered substandard, deviant or otherwise problematic cannot be measured in dollars alone. Body shame is a significant source of emotional and psychological distress, with consequences ranging from depression and diminished quality of life to social isolation and suicide. For example, body objectification and dissatisfaction are increasingly prevalent among youth; a cross-sectional survey of Brazilian school children found a body dissatisfaction rate as high as 82%, with young girls at particular risk. Empirical research also suggests a relatively high incidence of body shame among gay men and a community-based study found that body fat dissatisfaction predicted higher rates of psychological distress, including depression and social sensitivity. Body image concerns across other sexual minority groups encompass a wide range of issues and are inarguably salient for many within these communities. Critical disability theorists point to the pressures to modify differently-abled bodies to conform to dominant expectations of functioning and appearance, including cochlear implants for young deaf children, surgeries to lengthen limbs for people with dwarfism, and cosmetic surgery to alter the facial characteristics of people with Down syndrome. In short, almost no one is exempt from ongoing, multiple expectations to present our bodily selves in particular ways, and this is especially true for those whose bodies fall outside dominant social norms or whose social position does not afford them the privilege of refusing to conform.

Read more

This article is by Mitch Horowitz, adapted from the introduction to the author’s Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences (Inner Traditions, Nov 8, 2022).

To write on metaphysical themes is to live in a state of constant uncertainty. The simple fact is: we do not know the foundations of reality and when or whether anomalous experiences are “real” or subjective; whether repetition equals validity; and, finally, how to weigh individual testimony. We possess statistical evidence as good as any for the anomalous transfer of information, or ESP, in laboratory settings — but that fact raises more questions than it answers and is rejected by a modernist intelligentsia that regards countervailing evidence to materialism as the catechist does heresy.

Indeed, metaphysics and modernist thought have never fully gotten along. The authors I most admired in my late teens and early twenties were political thinkers Irving Howe (1920–1993) and Michael Harrington (1928–1989). If they thought at all about esoteric spirituality, to which I later dedicated myself, they probably would have considered it trifling, more or less agreeing with Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that “Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.”1

Regardless, by my early thirties my passions for intellectual experiment shifted away from politics and toward the occult. I would like to believe that I took my literary heroes’ critical style, if not their approbation, with me. The factors that drove my shift were both personal and philosophical. My outlook had always included the spiritual, by which I mean the extra-physical. Yet I came to feel that much of modern intellectual culture excluded or neglected spirituality as a legitimate field of inquiry.

The defining principle of modernist philosophy is that life, in all its expressions, results from unseen but detectable antecedents. In politics this might mean economic clashes and inevitable cycles of revolution (Marx); in biology, evolution and natural selection (Darwin); in psychology, childhood trauma and sexual repression (Freud); in physics, time-space relativity (Einstein); in human performance, self-image (James); in health and illness, germs and microbes (Pasteur); and so forth across myriad fields. I believe that the modernist approach must also encompass the spiritual — or, in my sounding, the occult. The existence of nonlocal intelligence and metaphysical influence are not innately opposed to modernist thought. Such concepts clash only with the modernist sub-philosophy of materialism, or the belief that matter creates itself.

Yet materialism, which has dominated our intellectual culture since the Victorian age (and accounts for statements such as Adorno’s), covers fewer and fewer bases of life in the twenty-first century. The natural sciences are increasingly defined by quantum data, interdimensional formulas, and fields like neuroplasticity, which uses brain scans to demonstrate the capacity of thought to alter neural matter. Our ordinary reference points of life are in greater flux today than at any time since Darwinism upended what it meant to be human in the Victorian era.

We like to ennoble ourselves with the notion that every bend in our path is precipitated by some internal epiphany; but we get led by outer terrain as much as or more than private determination. Preceding my shift in focus, I got fired from a conservative political press. They wanted a progressive editor to expand their list and it was supposed to be my “dream job.” I started over as an editor at what was then a backwater New Age publisher. The turn of events seemed random if fleetingly painful. But was there some portent in it?

Rather than view my new job as a springboard to a more respectable position, as many friends encouraged, I instead embraced the self-developmental philosophies I encountered. I grew intrigued with the prospect, alluded to earlier, that the mind possesses causative qualities, a claim often associated with “positive thinking” and variants of practical or therapeutic spirituality. Through the study of related ideas, both ancient and modern, spiritual and psychological, as well as my personal experiments, I came to regard many concepts of practical metaphysics as tantalizing, defensible, and powerful. I came to believe, and still do, that the popular literature of mind power, or New Thought, conceals rejected stones.

In the Talmudic book Pirkei Avos, or Ethics of the Fathers, a student asks a teacher: “What is the best way to live?” The teacher responds: “Find a place where there are no men, go there, and there strive to be a man.” That became my guiding principle within the corner of the spiritual culture I occupied. When I experienced feelings of exile, I took succor from John Milton’s Dread Emperor: “Here we may reign secure, and in my choice.” I would develop and not flee from the uncertain place where I found myself. My interests and personal dedication expanded to the work of philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff; my publishing list grew to include an unusual range of authors, living and dead, from filmmaker David Lynch to esoteric scholar Manly P. Hall to philosopher Jacob Needleman to the intellectual eminence of esoterica (and a personal source of inspiration) Richard Smoley. I strove, above all, to foster a climate where outsider spiritual thinkers could write seriously and be taken seriously.

All of this activity served a greater and, for me, culminating purpose–rediscovering myself as a writer. Writing careers are made by the right marriage of author to subject. For me, that moment arrived when I realized the need to document and defend the lives and careers of the founding lights of modern occultism. If you do not write your own history, it gets written for you, often by people who misunderstand or are unconcerned with the values and driving factors behind your work. This is among the reasons why I disclose myself as a “believing historian” — a designation that actually describes many historians of religion, who often emerge from the congregations they write about.

Whatever satisfaction I feel with Uncertain Places is tempered by an attendant somberness: it is difficult to present a selection of one’s work without experiencing the turning of a personal page. I felt a transition begin to stir within me in the closing days of the first summer of Covid. At that time, I masked up and entered a used bookstore in the Catskills town of Kingston, New York. For the first time, I did not know what section to look in. I wandered, of course, to the occult aisle, filled with golden oldies and names that I love, from Neville Goddard to Carlos Castaneda. Yet I felt oddly unmoved. Where, I wondered, if you will allow me some excess, is the hammer of the gods? This question arose from a conviction that I reached in recent years and to which I allude at various points in this book: the spiritual search is the search for power. It is the reach for expansion. It is not about losing oneself in the numinous whole but finding oneself as a creator. This is true however much we prevaricate over or reject the term “power” for its seeming brutality.

Let me be clear: I invoke power to indicate humanity’s wish to construct, strive, make, and grow. I believe in pursuing my search with reciprocity, the principle at the back of most ethics. Power without reciprocity is force. It is unrenewable. Next to reciprocity, my other key principle is nonviolence, which I mean not exactly in the physical sense, but rather doing nothing to denigrate or dehumanize another person or community, or to deprive another of the search for self-potential that I claim for myself. Finally, I am the sole object of my experiments. No one else’s life or safety is under my purview other than if I am called to its defense.

In the preceding passage, I framed the ethics of the spiritual search as it exists for me. Let me expand on the purpose of the search — on what power is for. As alluded, I see generativity as the essential human need. If one takes seriously the Scriptural principle that the Creator fashioned the individual in Its own image, then it stands to reason that our imperative to create follows from that act. As the Hermetic dictum puts it: “As above, so below”2 The exercise or frustration of our creative impulse determines, more than any single factor, the happiness or despair that mark our lives. If I am right that our existence consists of both physical and extra-physical qualities, it follows that spirituality is a valid path by which to pursue the type of power I am describing.

Everything in life eventually gets taken away from us, from our physicality to our certainties. Since I take seriously the principle of extra-physicality, I assume that something survives death. But I do not know. The one thing that is provably eternal is a question, and I hope I will deepen your questions.

Thank you for reading.

Explore the Print and/or Digital Issues of Tarka Journal in our online shop.

Footnotes

Medieval India

Tantra, as understood popularly in the West, is broadly apolitical; it is held to be a deeply private practice, with private results experienced only by the tantric practitioner themselves.

In its Southeast Asian context, however, it was historically riven by dialectical tensions: On the one hand, drawing its spiritual efficacy from its transgressive and taboo practices; on the other, accommodating itself to local power structures by promising warlords access to magical powers gained thereby.

In this brief essay we will sketch two lines of inquiry. First we will examine the tensions in historical tantra, or, more properly, Śākta-Śaivism, and its relationships with structures of political power. We then will then take a stab at understanding the extremely divergent political understandings of “tantra” in the culture of the colonial world. For as it turns out, the political valence of the tantric tradition is remarkably variable. From origins in the political dropout culture of pre-medieval India, to mercenary black magic available for sale or rent to local strongmen, to a profound and esoteric theory and praxis available only to the educated class; then from a discovery by (and simultaneous invention of) scandalized Anglican colonial researchers, to appropriation by, in turn, American feminist rebels, Italian Fascist occultists, and English satanic jingoists, to eventual incorporation into the broadly “apolitical” new age spirituality movement which, in fact, inherits politics from all these.

In traveling this crooked path through the centuries, we will find further evidence that, as the second-wave feminist slogan puts it, “the personal is political.” Different constructions of the body politic, and various notions of the spiritual implications of private acts, both inform and are informed by political power structures and movements. Thus, the political ramifications of spiritual practice and philosophy are not implicit; they are in flux, open to interpretation, and require struggle.

First, some notes about the Indian historical context. Practices recognizable as “tantric” developed in the subcontinent during the relative stability of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka dynasties. Mass migrations, perhaps ultimately resulting from the construction of the Great Wall of China, brought an end to both these dynasties (as well as the western Roman empire) by the early sixth century CE. Thus ended the “Pax Gupta” and what is considered classical Indian civilization; there followed an extremely complex and unsettled period of political tumult in central and northern India, marked by warlordism, strife, and frequently changing allegiances. These years — stretching from the seventh to the eleventh century, when Ghaznavid invasions precipitated further change — also mark the flowering of the tantric tradition.

The politics of these centuries can be considered feudal: regional lords (in Sanskrit sāmanta (सामन्त)) extracted tribute and provided defense to local strongmen, who in turn extracted from and provided to villagers under their power. This hierarchical dominance structure came to be called a circle of influence or maṇḍala (मञ्डल), which, strikingly, was a political term before it became a religious or artistic one; the beautiful depictions of subdeities encircling a larger central deity, thought by Carl Jung to symbolize and catalyze harmony of mind, represent, in fact, an idealized model of feudal exploitation.1

Also notable in the seventh and eighth centuries CE were increased depictions of fierce goddesses at local and regional palaces and courts, most especially Durgā (दुर्गा). Over these centuries, Durgā and her variants displace the Vedic deities formerly found in regal architecture. As her depictions become more common, her iconography changes, and she is increasingly shown with the insignia of royalty — the scepter, the crown, and the royal battle-drum. Indeed, Gupta and Gombrich report that kinglets in this period were symbolically married to Durgā upon ascending the simḥāsana (सिम्हासन), the “lion throne” — Dūrga, also, is normally depicted astride a lion.2

It appears that over these years of interregnum, Brahmanic ritual specialists, long close to state power and after many centuries of maintaining a relative sinecure, began to encounter competition from a newer breed of Śaivite ritualist, who laid claim to heterodox but effective methods of advancing their patrons in this changed and highly competitive landscape. Foremost among these was the ability to propitiate and command fierce deities; goddesses of disease and catastrophe such as Durgā, Kālī (काली), and the “Seven Mothers” or Saptamātṛkā (सप्तमातृका), all of whom are unknown before the late Gupta period and rise meteorically to prominence thereafter. The Seven Mothers in particular originate as demonesses responsible for illness and death of children, who undergo a transformation, not uncommon in folk religion, from fearful spirits to goddesses worthy of worship.

The mechanism of this transformation in medieval India is the tantric adept, who begins as an ascetic dropout, signaling his devotion to the spiritual path by performing transgressive acts guaranteed to render him ritually impure and unpalatable to mainstream society. The sine qua non of this, in full-blown Kaula ritual, is the consumption of the sexual fluids of the guru and consort; but there are many ways of dirtying oneself. To be impure, to haunt the cremation ground, also put these ascetics at risk of both psychic and physical disease, and thus brought them into proximity with its various demons. Their familiarity with, and sangfroid around, disease, disaster, and death, at some point pivoted from social liability to marketable job skill, as warlords wished not only to protect themselves and their families from such deities, but more importantly, to direct them against their many enemies.

Interestingly, in iconography over time, an eighth is added to the Seven Mothers, simply to fill out the mandala form; the male deity at the center, alone or with a consort, is analogized with the tantric adept, ruling over goddesses of disease just like a duke over eight earls. To this day in the valley of Kathmandu there are several cities, formerly capitals of small Newar kingdoms, which are each surrounded by eight mātṛkā temples; the entire urban mandala is now known as navadurgā (नवदुरगा), “nine Durgās”.3

Further, in feudal India “kingship” was being made over in the image of a heroic male figure whose sexual powers were homologised with his military power and his very ability to fill the royal role.4 Tantric ritualists, being intimately conversant with both sex and death, were able to help here too; contemporary satires poke fun at royals being duped into all manner of extreme practices by Śaiva ascetics who promise to restore their sexual prowess. Such a court tantrika could also be a freelancer; Alexis Sanderson quotes several examples of tantric ritual specialists hired “by the job” to repel invasions.5

Surveying these developments, a picture begins to emerge: Brahmanic religion, with its complex fire sacrifices and well-established caste affiliations, lost its hegemony with the fracturing of the centralized state, producing a power gap into which flowed a formerly outcaste congregation whose outlook and abilities were more in line with the times; extreme circumstances demand extreme measures. As these previously impolite and unfashionable practices became more widely known if not de rigueur, their philosophical implications began to be reimagined by their highly educated new adherents. Samuels6 argues eloquently and convincingly for a trajectory in which Kaula ritual remains more or less the same, while the emphasis shifts from semen and its consumption to the moment of orgasm as an opportunity for insight into nonduality; from the objective, we might say, to the subjective.

20th Century Europe

This is all very interesting — but not that hard to follow. In a time of political stability, peace, and prosperity, a group of dropouts, in antinomian fashion, inverted the religious stance of the dominant culture and its emphasis on purity and propounded a spiritual path of maximum impurity. Later, during a time of instability, war, and uncertainty, these same outsiders found patronage, perhaps in the interests of survival (it is easier to live on the margins of society in times of surplus). Their patrons, in turn, reimagined their practices, in the process rendering them both more palatable and, through the generative dialectical tension of the whole situation, creating a hybrid of incredible philosophical richness.

Change the context, though, and everything changes.

By the twelfth century CE, Persianate Muslim rule in India was more or less total and – perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not – the tantric traditions we have been following began to disappear from view, going underground and being assimilated into the nascent milieu of hatha yoga. Underground it stays, until the arrival of the East India Company and, with English direct rule, a wave of mostly Anglican scholars representing the developing discipline of “comparative religion.” In poring over manuscripts and interviewing local informants, they began turning up seemingly religious texts and practices which, to the Victorian colonizers, seemed highly irreligious if not debauched. Many of these were found in texts called tantra, and our scandalized (and understandably fascinated) scholars began using this word as an umbrella term to categorize these appalling chimerae, so religious in form, so blasphemous in content.

Here our story begins to get even weirder, and the characters we encounter become by degrees less savory. Primary among translators of texts we now consider “tantric,” of course, was the enigmatic Sir John Woodroffe, who wrote under the odd pen name Arthur Avalon. Woodroffe, a barrister, became interested in tantra (so the story goes) after undergoing a psychic attack by a tantrika hired by the defense in a court case he was prosecuting – our earlier investigations should help us make sense of this phenomenon of “black magic for hire.” He proceeded to learn Sanskrit, study meditation under a guru from whom he received several initiations, and translate (with the help of a native accomplice) numerous Sanskrit texts which have been incredibly influential on the popular conception of Indian esotericism, likely the source of most popular explications of kundalini (कुनदालिनि) and the cakra-s(चक्र), for instance.7

This article is taken from the upcoming Tarka Journal Volume 9: On Power, which will be released later this year.

Explore the Print and/or Digital Issues of Tarka Journal in our online shop.

Read more

If you practice yoga, you have probably heard a teacher at least once say, “Practice and all is coming.” Perhaps you have even shared this phrase yourself. This quote, attributed to the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, Pattabhi Jois, reflects the emphasis on consistent, embodied practice that the yogic traditions have continually emphasised throughout history. As the Dattātreyayogaśāstra – the earliest, fully dedicated, and systematised Haṭha Yoga Text (dated to approximately the 13th century CE) – states:

“Success comes for one who performs the practices. How could it come for one who does not?”
(Dattātreyayogaśāstra, 2.25).

But what, exactly, does success mean in yoga or spiritual practice more broadly? What is the purpose of practice?

Hearing quotes like this shared in the modern yoga studio, we might imagine our focus being on achieving ‘hard’ poses like a handstand. If we practice, we will eventually succeed. This very well may be true. But really, the success we are looking for is a deeper kind of transformation. In more traditional understandings of yoga philosophy, the ‘success’ at the end of the road is not just achieving a new pose, but liberation: enlightenment. According to many of the traditional yogic texts, abhyāsa – a regular, committed practice – is essential for success on this path.

Yet there is another side of the coin we often forget about. Yes, yogic traditions have long emphasised disciplined individual practice. Yet practice never occurs in isolation: we are also shaped by – and shape – the worlds and communities we inhabit.

So, while an emphasis on practice can conjure the image of the isolated yogic figure meditating in a distant cave, we would do well to remember that it is not just our individual spiritual practices that create us, but our relationship to a wider whole.

After all, practice not only transforms us; it forms us. But so does the repetition of everyday practice, habits, actions and thoughts. We are not just produced through individual practice, but through our participation in the whole.

I have been reflecting on this topic recently, as here in the UK we have just had our local elections. Alongside some deeply worrying currents in our political climate, I am also sensing a renewed desire for hope and meaningful change, reminding me of something that we all too often forget today in the world of modern yoga: that, in cultures of the past, spirituality and politics – the state of the individual and the collective – were deeply intertwined.

While the word ‘politics’ today can evoke images of ideological division and bureaucratic administration, in many ancient and premodern traditions, the soul of society was understood to be deeply connected to the soul of the individual. For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, “the city is the soul writ large” (Book II of Republic): the macrocosm of the city reflecting the microcosmic psyche of the individual. Central to Indian yogic traditions, we also find ideas about the cosmic order of the whole (ṛta, dharma), expressing a vision of practice oriented not only toward individual transformation, but toward participation in the harmony of the universe.

In other words, these visions depict a view in which individual practice alone is not enough. Rather, practice – and life – always takes place within the context of a greater cosmic and civilisational order. Practice is never a purely individual endeavour; it is one of participation, transformation, and formation in relation to a greater cosmic and meaningful whole.

This cosmic, participatory perspective we find in many of the ancient and premodern traditions fundamentally challenges many aspects of our taken-for-granted modern worldview, including: hyperindividualism – the prioritisation of the autonomous individual above wider relational or communal orders – and ontological flatness – the reduction of reality to a single level of material existence devoid of deeper symbolic, spiritual, or cosmic meaning. Yet this assumed vision of reality forms the context within which much modern yoga and spiritual practice takes place, often reducing the cosmic, transformative, and political potential of practice to an individualised venture of self-improvement and wellness, without consideration of the broader whole.

Yet there is hope. This is the gift that studying yogic and contemplative philosophies gives. Not as fixed doctrines to blindly follow. Not as spiritual concepts with which to superficially garnish our otherwise unchanged ways of living. But as invitations to reorient how we see ourselves, the cosmos, and the work of our practice, from the inside out.

Perhaps, practice and all really is coming – if we are willing to radically expand our understanding of what our practice is all about.

By Floss Harry
Yoga Teacher and Embodied Philosophy Facilitator

Thank you for reading.

Ready to deepen your own enquiry into contemplative philosophy with Embodied Philosophy?

At Embodied Philosophy, we offer main programmes, each designed to meet you at a different level of depth and commitment. You are welcome to join both programmes if that calls to you, and you can join either programme anytime.

Wisdom School is a year-long immersion into the world’s contemplative traditions, bringing together monthly lectures, guided meditations, book clubs, quarterly workshops and meditation practices to support a grounded, structured and expansive enquiry.

Check out Wisdom School

For sādhakas ready to go further, Sādhana School is our in-depth, university-level programme, weaving together theory, close textual study, and embodied practice within the non-dual Śākta–Śaiva traditions.

Check out Sadhana School

This article by Fadeke Castor for Tarka Volume 6: On Spiritual Citizenship.

Our Commitments to Those Who Have Come Before: Reflections on an African Diasporic Spiritual Citizenship

Read more

Tetsumi Kudo, “Fossil in Hiroshima”, (1976)

To my joyful surprise, Asian philosophies seem to be becoming a hot topic in academia. More and more now, in lecture halls and department corridors, I am talking to philosopher-colleagues who are either interested in Asian philosophies or have crossed the line into studying them as part of their academic work. As a graduate student whose teenage philosophical heroes were Dogen and Alan Watts, and who now spends most of his time pouring over Sanskrit treatises, this shift feels like vindication — yet part of me holds back. For some time now, a set of inchoate judgements has haunted my excitement and has given me the feeling — like an idealistic protester observing the new revolutionary guard — that the revolution is being betrayed. This essay is an attempt to articulate this unease, and to show some of the ways in which the academy’s recent embrace of Asian philosophies, important though it is, is being domesticated by prevailing presuppositions. Out of this criticism emerges a positive call: let Asian philosophies be their radical selves and let our openness to them be an openness to a much-needed change in the way the academy does philosophy.

I

The need for profound change has been noted for some time and correlates with a decades-long identity crisis in academic philosophy. Professionalisation, bureaucratisation, and specialisation now define the lives of many within academic institutions. Philosophers today often spend more time hunting for grants than reading and thinking. Confronted with an explosion of literature on any given topic, many have had to abandon their once-expansive ambitions as they retreat further and further into the caverns of specialisation — not exactly the vision of the philosophical life that may have once inspired a Plato-reading youth. Because of this, many people both inside and outside the academy find it difficult to say what the purpose of doing academic philosophy is.

But institutions aren’t totally without a response. Philosophers have seen these trends for a long time now and have developed strategies to claw back energy and relevance. From my perch as a graduate student at Oxford, I see two prominent types of response — let me briefly outline them both before pointing in the direction of a potential third possibility that uses Asian philosophies as a jumping off point.

The first type of response, fashionable for decades now, is the turn to political—and politicised—philosophy. Tracing its genealogy back through Foucault and Nietzsche, this type of philosophising abandons traditional metaphysics in favour of an “ontology of the present”1 that maps how the seemingly neutral intellectual categories we use to understand the world are conditioned by dynamics of social power. One example of this that I often came across in my first years of Religious Studies, is the work of scholars such as Russel McCutcheon (McCutcheon 1997) and Tomoko Masuzawa (Masuzawa 2005), who argue that the word ‘religion’ not only is foreign to many cultures and societies throughout world history, but that the very notion of the ‘world religions’ actually maintains a Eurocentric worldview. By assuming from the outset that they have something called ‘religion’, non-Western societies have been imagined in the image of Europe. And since they were always playing a different game, they end up seeming — especially in early ‘world religions’ discourses — really bad at this ‘religion’ thing which the Europeans have perfected. Outside of religious studies, categories such as ‘race’, ‘sexuality’ and even ‘human’ have been subject to similar types of analysis. For many young people, these kinds of critiques offer a welcome escape from the arcana of analytic metaphysics by offering political significance and ideas with all the glamour of a revolution.

Alternatively, many ambitious young Oxford philosophers are drawn into the world of rational altruism: a family of philosophical movements that force philosophy out of the ivory tower by using data and analytic clear-headedness to assess how best to do good in the world. Rather than debating scholastic debates in meta-ethics, this movement allows young philosophers to feel connected to real ethical questions facing humanity: How can we solve global poverty? How do we prevent the looming AI catastrophe? And even: how do we work now to prevent the apocalypse, such as the potential threat of a world-ending asteroid? There is a spectrum of different kinds of questions that people in these movements ask, ranging from the obviously important to the seemingly ludicrous. In each case, however, they turn to data-driven methodologies — with varying degrees of realism — that offer a sense of control and security in the face of the unfathomable complexity of human systems.

As responses to the perceived irrelevance of much of academic philosophy, these movements have been wildly successful. Donations flood into the Centre for Effective Altruism, and lectures on questions of identity politics routinely fill theatres to overflow (at a recent feminism lecture by Amia Srinivasan, I had to listen from outside!). While I have criticisms of both of these movements, I do not intend to lay them out here, especially when their serious intellectual apologists are often far more interesting than their attention-grabbing moralistic defenders. In fact, both of these movements may (who knows?) be in their twilight hour. Think, for instance, of the 2024 sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried, once a poster boy for Effective Altruism, and the massive success of Donald Trump’s anti-woke election campaign later the same year.

What I want to discuss presently is what I see as a potential third path that philosophy could take out of its crisis of significance. This would be to not just take on new ideas, but to lean into a new conception of the role of philosophy in human life that is made possible by taking Asian philosophies seriously.

To some extent, we have already tried this. Much of the 60s culture of counterculture looked eastward for inspiration: the Beatles, Allen Ginsberg and Transcendental Meditation all made inroads into the popular imagination across the Western world. Yet these developments, although they were varnished with glamour and excitement — perhaps precisely because of this glamour and excitement — were too superficial and did not exhaust the transformative potential of Asian philosophical ideas. The 60s and 70s saw some incredible figures who introduced the West to new ways of thinking (Shunryu Suzuki, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Swami Prabhupada come to mind), yet the era was consumed by larger forces, and the introduction of Asian religious ideas was caught up in the rushing decline of Christianity, the sexual revolution and a new culture of self-affirmation. This concoction meant that Asian philosophical ideas were profoundly diluted, and, most importantly, did not make their way into academic institutions, which would be the natural home for many of these ideas and cultures of thinking. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine a medieval ascetic Brahmin or a Gelug Geshe being happier at Woodstock than he would be at a university seminar.

So, what would a more profound engagement look like? How would the Western world change if some of the foundational ideas from Asian philosophies became normalised in higher institutions and then gradually permeated wider society? The most honest answer is that we don’t yet know, just as, in the words of Amia Srinivasan, we don’t yet know what a world without patriarchy looks like (Srinivasan 2022 xi). Nonetheless, by the end of this essay, I will have hopefully provided a more concrete sense of some of the possibilities for a different way of doing philosophy. For now, as a way of holding your attention, let me hint at some of them briefly.

Some of the exciting possibilities lie in new ideas and new paths for research. Asian philosophies could inspire and aid us in mapping the full terrain of states of consciousness that are possible through philosophical, psycho-physical, and meditative techniques. They could allow us to shine a new metaphysical light on recent scientific findings that the brain actively simulates reality.2

They could help us take seriously the idea — which exists today only on the fringes of academic consensus — that consciousness is fundamental to ontology, if not its fundamental principle. Yet perhaps even more interestingly, Asian philosophies might help change our ways of doing philosophy and enrich our understanding of what philosophy is for. Maybe philosophy can offer us something more than merely theoretical knowledge, maybe it could also serve as a kind of mental training ground that not only changes our foundational beliefs, a la Stoic therapy, but even has the power to change our relationship to belief as such. Thus it could act as a stage on the path of psycho-physical cultivation that leads ultimately to a transformed state of consciousness.

If these kinds of ideas are taken seriously, not only on the level of popular culture but on the level of our higher institutions, they could instigate profound changes across society. Popular mindfulness practices could be more than just a salve for our capitalism-inflicted burns, allowing us to toil away in a world on fire. With the help of new ideas, they could be a way of transforming our basic values by opening up a transformed sense of ourselves. Seeing itself in continuity with this, a new form of philosophising could seek to change the world not by foregrounding the political, empirical, or solution-focused dimensions of philosophy, but by emphasising its inner transformative potential: revolution through respite in an age of anxiety.

II

This opportunity is made possible by a general shift, as I alluded to at the beginning of this essay, toward greater openness and inclusion within Western and Westernised universities to non-Western philosophical traditions. Today, prospective undergraduates who have interests beyond the traditional philosophical canon have more options. Just looking at the UK in particular, Oxford now offers an optional module for undergraduates on Indian Philosophy, and King’s College London offers modules on both Indian and Chinese philosophy. SOAS, ever aiming to be ahead of the game, since 2021 has offered a BA course entitled “World Philosophies” which aims to teach philosophy from a global perspective liberated from Eurocentrism. These new undergraduate opportunities reflect changes in broader academic attitudes. Even at Oxford, an institution famous for its conservatism, 2024 saw the hiring of the first Professor of Indian Philosophy, as well as the first set of the prestigious John Locke lectures given on material from a non-Western philosophical tradition (these were given by Jonardon Ganeri, who will appear again later in this essay). Even some folks with traditional Anglophone analytic philosophical careers are now looking further afield: see, for example, Galen Strawson’s recent references to Buddhist thought (Strawson 2023).

A driving force behind this shifting attitude has been groundbreaking work to deconstruct pervasive misconceptions that non-Western systems of thought are intrinsically unphilosophical, either because they do not conform to the same standards of rigour that have defined the Western tradition, or because they are in some way essentially ‘religious’ modes of thought. I will not spend any time here trying to overturn these misunderstandings, especially when a lot of words have already been spilt on this topic.3

Yet beyond simply correcting innocent misunderstandings, some scholars take a different angle. They aim to reveal pervasive prejudices — Eurocentric at best, racist at worst — that have consciously or unconsciously tried to maintain the traditions of philosophical education in order to bolster the imperial or post-imperial domination of the Western world. Not including philosophers from outside of the so-called ‘West’ is thus a way of maintaining the idea that the West is better than everyone else. The fight against this attitude is thus a part of the broader effort to ‘decolonise’ academic institutions and curricula, with philosophy being one of the most important battlegrounds.4

While it is instrumental in getting non-Western philosophies a seat at the table, in my view, the decolonial attitude can only go so far. For one, we must be wary of treating the inclusion of non-Western philosophical ideas as merely a box to tick, whilst their real content is passed over. Even if we manage to avoid this, what happens when the non-Western philosophies we have just included care nothing for, or are even hostile to, the decolonial attitude that has facilitated their inclusion? Although there is no questioning the importance of recognising how exclusionary power structures are sustained in our intellectual institutions, we must also recognise that many of the most interesting and potentially transformative forms of non-Western philosophy were largely unconcerned with these kinds of power structures. If this is all we care about and think about, we will miss the most interesting parts of these philosophies. Nevertheless, those looking to non-Western philosophies for some form of boundary-breaking and ‘radical’ form of philosophising can take heart: as I hope to show below, many of the most interesting non-Western philosophies were deeply radical, but radical in ways radically different from the political associations the word ‘radical’ has in contemporary philosophy.

Tetsumi Kudo, “Fossil in Hiroshima”, (1976)

III

Whatever the case, non-Western philosophies are now being taken more and more seriously, and that is a really good thing. Yet I began this essay with the idea that many of these philosophies have the power to transform academic philosophy and imbue it with new significance. I now want to flesh this out, and will focus on Indian philosophy as it is what I know the most about — a similar case, I’m sure, can be made for other Asian philosophical traditions.5

What I want to outline in a general way is how Indian philosophies might offer radical alternatives to ideas dominant in the Western tradition. But rather than focusing initially on some classical Indian ideas, I want to do this by examining two philosophical books published in England and France in the 60s: Karl Potter’s The Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. While the first of these is about Indian philosophies, Deleuze’s book is not; in fact, Deleuze may have been opposed to the very idea that India could have produced philosophy.6

Focusing on these two texts, therefore, may seem like a strange way to make my point. Yet I hope with this analysis to offer a sense not only of how Indian philosophies are deeply radical, but also how these radical ideas can build on currents within the Western philosophical tradition. If we want Indian philosophies to transform contemporary academic philosophy, it is not enough just to demonstrate what they thought; we need instead to understand how they can take themes and projects within the Western tradition further, demonstrating that there is a transformative possibility of synthesis that I think is being overlooked by much contemporary work.

Let me begin by considering one of the pieces of writing that got me really excited about the academic study of Indian philosophy: Karl Potter’s 1963 The Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies. The introduction to this influential yet contentious work, one of the first attempts by a non-Indian philosopher to understand the guiding problems of Indian philosophy as a whole, begins with a reflection on the Western philosophical tradition. “Throughout the history of our tradition,” i.e. the Western tradition, as Potter envisions it, “there has been a regular commitment to some notion of the highest good which is the ultimate desideratum of a human being” (Potter 1963, 1). This highest good, Potter goes on to state, has generally been conceived of as the combination of control of the passions and an exercise of the rational faculty in order to know the world and oneself. Plato is the paradigm example, but Potter also cites Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Russell as all fitting into this basic paradigm: the moral life is the rational life, and both morality and rationality are corrupted by the passions, which must be controlled. Once one has achieved this rational and moral balance, one has achieved the highest good in life — there is nowhere further to go.

A dominant way of thinking, yet not without its dissenters. “One is tempted to forget,” Potter notes, “that — running as an undercurrent throughout the history of Western philosophy — there is a strand of thought which glorifies spontaneity and growth, which looks ahead to man’s eventual success in overcoming the bonds which make him temporarily less than divine, and which sees no exercise of power of which man is not in principle capable” (Potter 1963, 2). As representatives of this minor tradition, Potter points to Meister Eckhart, Nietzsche and an unnamed set of ‘recent’ thinkers. While these thinkers have been treated largely with prejudice in the West, Potter looks to India to find an alternative. Where many have previously avoided discussion of India’s basic values, Potter seeks to be radically honest. The “unpalatable” fact Westerners often seek to deny, is that ‘Indian philosophy does in fact elevate power, control or freedom to a supereminent position above rational morality’. Thus, Potter proclaims, “the ultimate value recognised by classical Hinduism in its most sophisticated sources is not morality but freedom. Not rational self-control in the interests of the community’s welfare but complete control over one’s environment — something which includes self-control but also includes control of others and even control of the physical sources of power in the universe” (Potter 1963, 3).

No doubt the details of this interpretation are at best idiosyncratic and at worst based on a profoundly selective reading of Indian texts. Potter conflates power, freedom, and control in his understanding of moksha or liberation, and seems to ignore obvious places in Indian philosophy that contradict his thesis. The legendary German philologist Paul Hacker responds to Potter by noting that Arjuna’s liberation in the Bhagavad Gita comes not from an escape from the confines of morality but through a total submission of himself to his prescribed duty as a warrior. This is aided by his faith in Kṛṣṇa, the Lord of the universe, who is ultimately in control of all of Arjuna’s actions (Hacker 1965, 215).7

We can add to Hacker’s observations the ideal of the Bodhisattva central to Mahāyāna Buddhism, who is defined as the individual who gives up on escaping from suffering once and for all and instead chooses, out of compassion, to stay in the world of birth and death and suffering until all beings are freed from it. Indeed, Potter’s thesis faces a general problem: for many Indian philosophical systems, liberation can only arise when we realise that our perception of ourselves as an autonomous agent is illusory — can such a state of liberation really be seen as the apex of power or control in the usual sense?

Potter’s thesis deserves a more thorough criticism, and indeed many scholars have not been shy about throwing their punches. Yet beyond the specific details of his argument, Potter’s broader approach — attempting to identify fundamental differences between Western and Indian philosophy — has also fallen out of favour. I think this is a shame. Although it may sometimes seem overly bold and generalising to make broad judgements about Indian and Western philosophy, without any such judgements, Indian philosophy cannot truly transform how we do philosophy. It may provide us with new ideas, but unless we acknowledge basic divergences in what philosophy was about, what truth is, and how it is to be attained, we risk assuming that both traditions were essentially engaged in the same enterprise, merely with different content. This, in some very important respects, was not the case, and not acknowledging this obstructs the deeper, transformative potential of taking Indian ideas seriously. So, can we return to Potter’s approach? Although he does not say so explicitly, might we detect in Potter’s Presuppositions one of his own unspoken presuppositions: that he was not merely reflecting Indian philosophy neutrally, but was seeking ways to enrich his own philosophical tradition?

If we read Potter in this light, then rather than dismissing his approach outright, we might ask how we can improve upon his particular conclusions. To this end, it is worth considering another attempt from the 1960s to re-envision Western philosophy — this time by a thinker with perhaps a more profound analysis of the basic presuppositions of his own tradition.

IV

With this, let me introduce Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the most underrated of the Parisian post-structuralists.8

Deleuze differentiated himself from the other French intellectual heavyweights of his day: folks such as Foucault and Derrida, who would go on to become incredibly influential across the humanities. Deleuze saw himself as a totally ‘naive’ philosopher, unafraid to take on classical philosophical questions and unburdened by the need to go “beyond metaphysics” which pushed many of his contemporaries into the realms of history, linguistics and psychoanalysis (Deleuze et al. 1995, 88-9). Yet Deleuze’s project, which he saw as ‘pure metaphysics’, was nonetheless revolutionary and in the spirit of his time. He wanted to offer a “theory of thought,” a new way of thinking about thinking, which mirrors “the revolution which took art from representation to abstraction” (DR 276).9

Deleuze wanted a philosophy in which thought could move, in which the concepts discovered were not simple and static but were dynamic and internally complex. In this, he saw himself as breaking from a major tradition in Western philosophy beginning with Plato, in which the goal of philosophy is to discover laws, ideas and principles that were timeless and determinate.

The great locus of these reflections is in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, five years after Potter’s Presuppositions. This rich philosophical text is seen today as Deleuze’s magnum opus, yet in his preface to the English translation, Deleuze writes that it is “the third chapter which now seems to me the most necessary and the most concrete” (DR xvii). Taking chapter three, “The Image of Thought,” as our jumping off point, I will give a brief account of Deleuze’s analysis of and response to a basic problem in Western philosophy before examining potential links to Indian thought.

Deleuze begins “The Image of Thought” with the problem of presuppositions in philosophy. While philosophy has always sought to eliminate all unwanted presuppositions at the outset, this faces a problem: “whereas in science one is confronted by objective presuppositions which axiomatic rigour can eliminate, presuppositions in philosophy are as much subjective as objective.” Subjective presuppositions are “implicit presuppositions contained in opinions rather than concepts” (DR 129). Not specific ideas, but assumptions about what it means to think; not specific truths but assumptions about what truth means and its relation to thought in general.

For Deleuze, the Western philosophical tradition has been stuck unwittingly in the grip of a set of these presuppositions which he calls the “Image of thought,” and although this image has had “variant forms” (131), a dominant pattern can be recognised, like a repeated motif in a symphony — “a single Image in general” (132).

The body of the chapter seeks to unearth this unacknowledged Image. Deleuze says that the Image presupposes “a natural capacity for thought endowed with a talent for truth or an affinity with the true” (DR 131). We ask the question ‘what is x?’ and apply ourselves, using reason as our guide, to the task of finding an answer. We assume that as long as we do not make any unwarranted assumptions, if we do not slip up in the application of logic, rational thought will naturally lead us to truth by its very nature. The possibility of making a mistake comes from outside of thought. We may be misled by our passions, by our body or by our poor education, but not by reason itself. Thus, the enemy of thought is “error, nothing but error” (DR xvi), which, in Deleuze’s conception, is what happens when thought is attacked by something outside itself. In this conception, reason as such is eternally good-natured and innocent, a totally trustworthy guide across the landscape of knowledge.

The Image of thought also assumes what Deleuze calls the “process of recognition,” which he defines as the “harmony of the faculties grounded in the supposedly universal thinking subject and exercised upon the unspecified object” (DR 134). Taking the tradition of transcendental idealism as his model here, Deleuze sees the Image of thought as presupposing a basic structure or framework in which thinking and knowledge happen. Specifically, philosophy assumes that a subject uses its faculties of knowing (e.g. perception, understanding, etc.) to understand an object. While the specific subject and specific object are different in every case, the basic form is left unquestioned, meaning that experience and knowledge are deemed to always take this structure.

Finally, the Image of thought dictates that once the process of logical analysis by a subject of its object is undertaken, then the result will be a proposition that serves as a solution to an initial philosophical problem. For example, the problem: ‘Is this laptop in front of me real?’ after the process of analysis return the solution: ‘The laptop in front of me is real’. This proposition is a true statement that neutralises the problem. “We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solution… We are led to believe that the activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the search for solutions, that both of these concern only solutions” (DR 158). Problems, therefore, are uncomfortable for philosophy. They cannot be lived with and must be tamed by providing solutions that are intelligible, easy to understand, and make the scary problem leave us alone.

These presuppositions: the affinity of thought with the truth, the potential for error, the process of recognition, and the primacy of solutions over problems, are the primary building blocks of the image of thought.10

For Deleuze, this image of thought has dominated Western philosophy. Although he references many thinkers in this chapter, he focuses primarily on Plato, Descartes, and Kant as its chief proponents. It is Kant, however, whom he holds in particular contempt. In discovering “the prodigious domain of the transcendental”—the realm of the forces and principles that condition the exercise of thought—Kant opened the possibility for a radical critique of the assumed nature of thinking itself. As Deleuze writes, “He is the analogue of the great explorer — not of another world, but of the upper and lower reaches of this one” (DR 135). Yet, frightened by the implications of his discovery, Kant retreats in fear, fashioning the transcendental in the image of common sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he introduces the idea that empirical subjectivity is constructed, and that reason harbours internal problems that give rise to false solutions (the transcendental illusions). But rather than pursuing these radical insights, Kant ultimately sacralises the Image of thought by grounding the empirical subject in a new transcendental subject and asserting that reason can reflect upon itself to avoid its own illusions. In Deleuze’s words, Kant “rediscovers the church” and “rediscovers the state” in the face of what could have been a dramatic revolution in philosophy (DR 136).

But where would this revolution have taken him if Kant had dared to follow it through? Deleuze points to the possibility of “a thought without Image,” which would come at “the cost of the greatest destructions and the greatest demoralisations, and a philosophical obstinacy with no ally but paradox, one which would have to renounce both the form of representation and the element of common sense” (DR 132). Deleuze develops this new theory of thought in later chapters of Difference and Repetition, and I will not lay it out in full here. Suffice it to say that Deleuze envisions a philosopher who does not simply think by naturally extending his common sense, but is instead forced to think by a violent “encounter” with something totally outside of his reason, which forces him to create a new concept. This new concept disrupts prior consensus by distinguishing what was previously considered the same and identifying connections between things once thought different, much like how the discovery of a disease such as polio required a creative doctor to isolate a common thread across the chaos of seemingly unrelated cases.11

The philosopher, then, must be creative, responding to the encounter with an act of sense-making, rather than calmly working her way to truth from first principles.

Tetsumi Kudo, “Fossil in Hiroshima”, (1976)

V

We now have an image of Deleuze’s ‘Image of thought’, but what does this have to do with Indian philosophy? Well, as is often the case with revolutionaries — even so, it seems, in the realm of metaphysics — it is their critique that is of greater interest than their solutions. Combining this critique with Potter’s approach to Indian philosophy, we can construct a better version of the latter’s thesis: a fuller sense of the alternative that Indian philosophy might provide, i.e. a mode of philosophical thinking unburdened by the Image of thought.

This alternative, it must be acknowledged, doesn’t look much like Deleuze’s ‘thought without Image’, which is a kind of new philosophy, exemplified in the raucous and genre-defying philosophical books he goes on to write with Félix Guattari, in which new concepts proliferate.12

Rather, turning to India, we find alternative routes out of the Image of thought. Let me note here a few important examples.

In philosophical traditions such as Advaita Vedānta, we find a worldview in which error is intrinsic to thought as such. While the rigour of rational thought is prized as indispensable in worldly life and philosophical debate, ultimately, the basic structures of language and the basic structures of subject and object that a rational analysis of experience presupposes, obscures rather than reveals the true nature of reality. Reality is pure consciousness that precedes the distinction between subject and object and thus, in Deleuzian terms, is not available to the process of recognition. In fact, for Advaita Vedānta, the appearance of the world and the structures of our thought are like optical illusions which can be compared, to take two classical examples, to mistaking a shell on a beach for silver, or leaping in fear when one mistakes a rope for a venomous snake. Such “minor distortions” can start us “on the path toward becoming aware of a more general kind of distortion that is built into experience” (Doniger 1984).

On the Buddhist side, we find similarly radical positions. The Madhyamaka school, founded by Nāgārjuna in the 2nd century, attempts to systematically deconstruct the very notion of a real object and a real subject. Yet rather than the Advaita vision of a transcendent reality beyond these two, for Madhyamaka, subjects and objects are co-constructed in a web of mutual dependence, like illusions built on top of other illusions. From this, we get a philosophical picture in which metaphysical reductionism never bottoms out, and we end up in a world in which the word ‘reality’ as we usually understand it cannot be applied to anything. The other great philosophical school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Yogācāra, argues that the world is constructed by mental processes in ways that have stark parallels to contemporary theories within cognitive science (cf. Waldron 2023). Yet taking this in a radical and self-referential direction, some early versions of Yogācāra argue that even the notion of the mind itself is ultimately a product of mental processes of construction, meaning that the mind is as illusory as the apparently external world (Chaturvedi 2024).

The intellectual landscape of ancient India was rich, and philosophical schools debated with each other over their profoundly different conceptions of reality, the path to understanding reality, and the role and limits of conceptual knowledge. Yet the three schools I have just cited, along with some others, mostly agree on something: that the true nature of reality is totally independent of conceptual knowledge in general, and that our basic, pre-theoretical sense of ourselves as a subject facing a world of objects is mistaken. The great error we make that prevents our contact with the truth is not on the level of theory but on the level of theorising as such.

This radical move has implications not just for our systematic metaphysics, but also for the nature of philosophical practice, for the role philosophy plays in the human desire for truth. Indeed, I would argue that Indian philosophy contains an understanding of the role and nature of philosophical problems that has been largely unacknowledged in the Western tradition. In this understanding, philosophical problems are neither simply to be resolved in determinate solutions (as presupposed by the Image of thought), nor do they lead to a proliferation of new problems, solutions, and frameworks as they do in Deleuze’s vision. Problems, if engaged with the right attitude, can lead to a transformation of consciousness.

As an example of this, take the practice of neti neti (“not this, not this”), which is a classical and central form of philosophical-meditative practice in the Advaita Vedānta tradition. One is invited to ask the question “who am I?” and to any response that arises in the mind, to reply “not this, not this.” Since pure consciousness is beyond all conceptions, even conceptions such as “pure consciousness,” the practice can be applied to any and all conceptions of identity. Once these are all cleared away, non-conceptual pure consciousness will be the only thing that remains.

As I see it, the practice works because of what we can call the problematic nature of identity itself. Every mental phenomenon has a subject, which invites the question of what that subject is. Yet any determinate conception of the identity of this subject implies a subject of this very conception. Put more simply: the subject, as soon as it is identified, becomes an object. Because of this, our sense of ourselves is always slipping away from us as soon as we try to pin it down — like a slippery bar of soap. Deleuze describes this aspect of self-identity, the self’s inescapable distance from itself, as the “fractured self,” which he expresses through Rimbaud’s famous proclamation: “I is an other” (DR 86). For Deleuze, this gap within the self is a problem that is fundamentally productive, and thus should be responded to through constantly critiquing old identities and creating ever-new ones. Advaita Vedānta, however, takes a different route. This Indian schools claims that if we stick with the problem and with the practice of continuous negation, without resorting to any determinate sense of identity whatsoever, we can be led into a transformation of consciousness whereby we do understand ourselves, we do get a grasp of our true identity, but a grasp that is fundamentally non-conceptual and thus distinct from any ‘identity’ in the usual sense, no matter how philosophically refined. In this mode of doing philosophy, the problem is not solved but is transcended.

It needs to be said that the approaches I have highlighted here do not characterise Indian philosophy in toto. There are many schools within the larger tradition that take far more realist positions and thus might be interesting to contemporary philosophers for very different reasons. There is a lot of contemporary interest, for example, in Nyāya philosophy, which was robustly realist and developed forms of epistemic reliabilism that can be brought into analytic philosophical debates. Yet a couple of swallows do not make a summer — by and large, Indian intellectual traditions have given a far more central role to philosophies that would seem radical, nihilistic, and antinomian through most of the history of Western philosophy. Indeed, the few subversive European thinkers who took steps in a similar direction were often cast in this light, such as Spinoza and Nietzsche.

Thus, Indian philosophies have the potential to offer new inspiration for contemporary philosophy when we acknowledge how thoroughly different they have often been from the theories that have been popular in the West and even from the assumed sense of what ‘philosophy’ itself is. And because they are so different, they can help us rethink the role of philosophy in a cultural moment when such revision is deeply important. Beyond their radical theories, they offer a different attitude to philosophical problems themselves. Rather than a solution-focused approach and rather than perpetual critique — beyond Effective Altruism and identity politics — Indian philosophies suggest that the practice of philosophy can be transformative on a completely different level. While acknowledging we need not turn philosophy departments into monastic ashrams, it is worth considering what further significance and life contemporary philosophy could take on if it were to take a hint from Indian ideas.

VI

So, the possibilities are profound. I began this article, however, with a suggestion that not everyone working in the field shares my precise vision for this revolution. To end this essay, let me now circle back to this point by looking briefly at an article by one of the most celebrated and brilliant contemporary philosophers in the field of Indian Philosophy: Jonardon Ganeri. The aim here is not to single him out, nor to disparage his work in general, which I do not want to do, nor would it mean much coming from myself. One of his articles, however, serves as an interesting microcosm for my general fear that the transformative potential of Indian philosophy is being tamed in the interests of current philosophical norms.

In the article “Mental Time Travel and Attention,” Ganeri uses aspects of Buddhist philosophy — specifically Buddhaghosa’s account of memory — to create a naturalistic theory of self-consciousness. He brilliantly combines the thought of this classical Buddhist thinker with findings in empirical science to construct a theory in which the self is a phenomenological item in the stream of experiences itself, not something outside the stream that possesses or witnesses it. More precisely he uses these Indian Buddhist thinkers to argue that the self is a mere “sense of ownership” that appears within experience, that is brought about by a “discrete cognitive system, one whose function is to implicate the self in the content of memory… it is the mental machinery responsible for inserting an I-tag and injecting a sense of personal ownership” (Ganeri 2017, 363). In this view, the self is neither a witness, nor a specific material object, nor a clearly bounded experiential quale.

Ingenious and important work to be sure, but the scholar John Taber’s review of the book contains an interesting observation. He notes that Ganeri “does not take on what might be called the really hard problem about the self that Indian philosophical literature raises, namely, that the experiencing self is not really who or what you are, or as the Buddhists would prefer, is not a self at all.” As Taber wisely points out, the possibility of transcending the self entirely is a “challenge… that Indian philosophical literature on the self confronts us with, like it or not,” and that from an Indian philosophical perspective, beyond the complex theories of the nature of the illusory self, this radical transformation in consciousness “is the most important thing to know” (Taber 2017, 399).

So, while Ganeri uses Buddhist material to construct a new vision for what the self is, he does so in a spirit antithetical to what the Buddhist philosophers he cites would have advocated. For them, the whole project of philosophising about the self is not to create a new naturalistic theory, but to facilitate the realisation, intellectually and experientially, that the self is an illusion, thus moving us along the path toward a transformation of consciousness. It seems to me that in his use of Asian philosophy for his own philosophical ends, Ganeri is culpable for something similar to what Deleuze sees in Kant: in the face of discovering something unfamiliar and radically different beneath the everyday world we take for granted, a world of vertigo and incredible strangeness that our common sense sits upon like a boat atop unfathomable depths, Ganeri chooses to rediscover the state and rediscover the church, seeking a new way to naturalistically ground the thinking subject. A potentially radical Indian philosophical tradition thus becomes a vehicle for our common-sense assumptions.

To close this essay, let me ask a Deleuzian question to those interested in the contemporary study of Indian philosophy: “What is a thought which harms no one, neither thinkers nor anyone else?” (DR 135-6). To let Indian and Asian philosophies be themselves would be to let them be harmful to our assumptions about what philosophy is and what it is for. Yet the sick patient of contemporary philosophy may need to be harmed in an operation that ultimately leads to new health. While the other responses to the question of philosophy’s relevance ought to be heard, the answers offered by Asian traditions may help expand the range of philosophical approaches that feel genuinely significant and transformative. These traditions can join the countercultural momentum that began in the 1960s and continues to shape the humanities, but they also chart a distinct course. In many of the philosophical frameworks that are travelling westward out of the classical worlds of Asia, we find the possibility of synthesising relativistic and revisionary strands of contemporary philosophy with a renewed quest for truth and a confidence that this quest has a final destination. Rather than simply a water-tight and inoffensive theory of metaphysics, for many Asian philosophies, this ultimate goal of philosophy lies in a transformation of consciousness beyond philosophy itself. Therefore, when the terrain of what is possible for consciousness is expanded, so too is our understanding of philosophy’s role in the pursuit of the good life. And what happens when these possibilities are taken on by our institutions and then ripple outward into wider society? We cannot say yet, but in a world facing a crisis in its guiding ideas and which desperately needs new sources of meaning, it is surely worth trying to find out.

Works Cited

Chaturvedi, Amit. 2024. ‘Is the Mind a Magic Trick? Illusionism about Consciousness in the “Consciousness-Only” Theory of Vasubandhu and Sthiramati’. Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (0). https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.5189.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2014. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Janis Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III. European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism. Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, Martin Joughin. 1995. Negotiations: 1972 – 1990. European Perspectives. Columbia Univ. Press.

Doniger, Wendy. 1984. Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities. University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel. 2007. The Politics of Truth. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Semiotext(e).

Ganeri, Jonardon. 2017. ‘Mental Time Travel and Attention’. Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (4): 353–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/24740500.2017.1429794.

Garfield, Jay L. 2002. Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation. Oxford University Press.

Hacker, Paul. 1965. ‘Reviewed Work: Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies. (Prentice-Hall Philosophy Series) by Kahl H. Potter’. Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 115 (1): 212–17.

Masuzawa, Tomoko, ed. 2005. The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Repr. Univ. of Chicago Press.

McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford university press.

Park, Peter K. J. 2013. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830. SUNY Series, Philosophy and Race. State university of New York press.

Potter, Karl. 1963. Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies. Prentice-Hall.

Smith, Daniel. 2011. ‘Critical, Clinical’. In Gilles Deleuze : Key Concepts, by C. J. Stivale. Acumen.

Srinivasan, Amia. 2022. The Right to Sex. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Strawson, Galen. 2023. ‘Descartes and the Buddha—a Rapprochement?’ In Sophia Studies in Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13995-6_4.

Taber, John. 2017. ‘The Self and What Lies Beyond the Self: Remarks on Ganeri’s “Mental Time Travel and Attention”’. Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (4): 395–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/24740500.2017.1411149.

Van Norden, Bryan W. 2017. Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. Columbia University Press.

Waldron, William. 2023. Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters. Wisdom Publications.

Westerhoff, Jan. 2023. ‘Idealist Implications of Contemporary Science’. Erkenntnis 90 (3): 967–88.

Ziporyn, Brook. 2024. Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond. University of Chicago Press.

Republished with permission from author, Aamir Kaderbhai. Article originally published in Epoché Magazine, Issue #83, July 2025.

Aamir Kaderbhai is a PhD student at the University of Oxford. His interests range from continental philosophy, particularly Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, through to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and Sanskrit poetic literature. His various projects stem from the intention of using a creative combination of philosophy and philology to study classical Indian philosophies and methods of psycho-physical transformation, as well as using this to develop new, (and potentially scientifically informed) forms of speculative metaphysics. He is currently working on a dissertation on the 10th-century Kashmiri epic poem entitled the Mokṣopāya, a unique, unorthodox, and genre-defying philosophical text that makes the ambitious claim of being able to bring the reader to enlightenment. Through his analysis of the way the text seeks to create this transformation, Aamir hopes, amongst other things, to investigate the possibility of the academic study of Indian philosophy taking claims about transformed human subjectivity more seriously while remaining philologically detailed and philosophically rigorous.

Thank you for reading.

Explore the Print and/or Digital Issues of Tarka Journal in our online shop.

Footnotes

To define ecofeminism, it might be useful to look at the terms it synthesizes. Any conversation, in this case, between environmentalism and intersectional feminism, amounts to more than the sum of its parts; relationships are generative. The ecofeminist critical framework “situates humans in ecological terms and nonhumans in ethical terms,” and models itself after the global ecological community it describes. It contains contradiction, allowing for a polyphony of perspectives, taking relativity and context into account. Ecofeminism sees social justice and environmental protection as “complementary, mutually supportive projects.”

Read more

Just a few weeks ago, Embodied Philosophy lost a close friend and teacher. After a decade-long struggle with breast cancer, Susanna Harwood Rubin left this incarnation on Saturday, March 28th 2026.

Susanna was an artist, writer, yoga teacher, the published author of Yoga 365, and an uncompromisingly devoted practitioner. She was a thoroughly bhakta-yoginī — a devotee whose orientation toward practice is one of offering.

Her kind of offering did not require special conditions or a superficially 'yogic' state of mind. It was the kind that included everything — her passions, hopes, confusions, fear, and pain — returning it all to the divine. She made all of her experience – the good, the bad, and the ugly – a form of worship.

For those who followed her on Instagram @susannaharwoodrubin, this devotion was palpable. In post after post, after sharing her refreshingly vulnerable authenticity, she frequently concluded with Oṃ Namaḥ Śivāya and Jai Mā – signaling her unimpeachable vision of reality as divinely embodied in the non-dual expressions of Śiva and Kālī.

Susanna was always transparent about the spiritual truths that gave meaning to her life, and was therefore rare among today’s yoga teachers – many of whom maintain an anxious agnosticism about such things for fear of alienating a secular audience. Susanna had no such anxiety. She embodied a commitment to the path that excluded nothing from her divine life – not even the cancer that she lived with until the end.

Because her many Instagram writings are still online and available, the wisdom she shared remains alive to explore – both for those who are only just learning about her life, and for those of us wishing to honor her memory. In the beautifully rich reflections that she started composing in 2018, she shared honest, vulnerable, and courageously transparent truths about her cancer journey.

During a time when many modern ‘influencers’ were increasingly using their Instagram platform to construct an inauthentic persona for shallow likes and follows, Susanna made a very different choice. She used her platform to process, in real time and in public, a struggle that she faced – always with a kind of clarity and wisdom evident in those who have integrated their spirituality into all aspects of life.

The inspiration and wonder that emanated from Susanna established her in many of our eyes as a unique authority – one of the modern yoga world's rare "wise elders." She showed us a way to talk about deep fears, about our inevitable confrontation with mortality – all the while demonstrating that it is possible to talk about life's hardships through the lens of a spirituality that provides guidance, hope, and acceptance.

Susanna was a modern-day Tantrika and student of Śrī-Vidyā scholar-practitioner Douglas Brooks. She made regular pilgrimages to the Chidambaram temple of Nātarāja in Tamil Nadu, calling it "the home of my heart." She understood the significance of sacred geography and extended that sensibility to the geography of her own embodiment. In my CHITHEADS interview with her in 2019, I was struck by her inclination to reject the languaging around her cancer as one of a "battle" or a "fight." She rather considered it a deep inner conversation with her own body. She chose to see even in this experience a face of the divine and a source of her own Self-recognition. She turned her struggle into a mode of practice – and by inviting others to witness it, she gave us the sacred gift of her example.

I encountered Susanna's impact on the yoga world before I ever met her. When I was teaching at YogaWorks SoHo in New York, there was a small hardcover book available in the gift shop: Yoga 365: Daily Wisdom for Life On and Off the Mat. I picked it up without knowing anything about the book or its author, as a Christmas gift for my mother.

The book is built on a simple principle — one reflection per day, drawn from the concepts and teachings of the yoga tradition. Not a new pose a day. Not a fitness tip. A genuine invitation to understand yoga as a complete way of engaging with experience. The title alone makes the argument: yoga is not something you do three times a week, or whenever you need a good stretch. It is a daily orientation. It is a way of life.

I discovered that Susanna was the author of Yoga 365 after Nataraj Chaitanya recommended her as an ambassador for Embodied Philosophy's first Meditation Resolution in 2018. Meeting Susanna was a small revelation – the kind one experiences when meeting a kindred spirit on the path of spirituality. In a city like NYC, with its endless supply of dedicated yogis, Susanna was one of a small but passionate group of teachers and practitioners bound not exclusively by postural yoga trends but by a shared devotion to the deeper spiritual teachings of yogic traditions.

This is rarer than it might sound. There are many people in the yoga world who know about yoga's liberative aims – although often little more than what they've learned about the Yoga-Sūtras. While Susanna was not a scholar, she studied with scholars who in recent decades have greatly expanded our understandings of yoga's texts and history. She absorbed that knowledge and distilled it through the lens of her own experience. For Susanna, the tradition was not simply a philosophy, worldview, or set of esoteric practices, but a dynamic, living source of insight and transformation.

This orientation showed up in how she taught. It showed up in what she understood to be most urgent and meaningful. It showed up in the personal conversations we shared over the occasional meal or virtual catchup, as she naturally and spontaneously elevated the exchange toward the spiritual wisdom that moves all of us. She "walked the talk," as they say, dancing through life in alignment with her dharma.

Susanna participated in Embodied Philosophy's Meditation Resolution every year for seven years. Across all of the resolution's permutations, she remained a constant power-house: passionate, accessible, capable of distilling esoteric depths without flattening them. There was no contradiction in her between the breadth of her knowledge and the devotion she embodied. Both came from the same place of authentic experience.

The last time I saw Susanna teach, I was struck once again by the quality that had struck me at our first lunch years earlier: the sense that she was not performing the teachings (as so many do), but reporting from inside the coordinates of her own sādhana. There are few things I find more beautiful or admirable in life, particularly in a modern spiritual environment where so many bypass deep spirituality for superficial wellness or self-improvement.

There are passages from within the Pratyabhijñā literature that speak of prasiddhi, the kind of knowing that is so intimate and foundational that it precedes any formal act of cognition. It is the knowing that you already are, before you know that you know it. I am not sure Susanna would have used that vocabulary, but she nevertheless lived inside that orientation. The tradition was prasiddha for her — not superficially adopted but recognized and accomplished, not merely learned but resonantly remembered at the deepest layers of her being.

Susanna, you were so loved, and I wish I had had the good sense to spend more time with you. I'm sorry that – due to my infamously shoddy organizational skills – I had to cancel what would have been your second CHITHEADS interview just a day before your final treatment. While that will surely persist in my personal catalogue of life's regrets, I know that in the next lifetime, we will find each other again on the path of sādhana.

Thank you for all of the blessings you gave us in this life. Thank you for your teachings. Thank you for your radiant warmth, your vitality, and your artful honesty. Thank you for inspiring the teachers and students who learned from you at Embodied Philosophy and everywhere else blessed by your presence.

And, perhaps most importantly, thank you for showing us what it looks like to live a life in pursuit of wisdom, in alignment with liberation, and in sacred dialogue with the divine in its manifold expressions. We will miss you, but never forget you.

In your memory,

Jacob Kyle
Director of Embodied Philosophy

Thank you for reading.

Sign up for Embodied Philosophy’s The Scaffolding Newsletter, and receive a free Yoga Philosophy Reading List in return.

Get the Reading List

Embodied Philosophy, as an organization that was founded and is primarily run by individuals who variably identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, might be considered an experiment in “Queer Dharma.” Queer thinking, practice, art, and devotion has always been a part of the dharmic paths, even while queer individuals have often been marginalized. Today, queer spiritual leaders and their allies have been forging new intersections of ancient teachings with contemporary theories and in turn paving the way for more inclusive spiritual communities.

Religious belonging and queer identity are uneasy bedfellows. What does it mean to have a “queer dharma”? The two terms each signify aspects of identity, belonging, or of not belonging. To be queer, historically, is to be different, even strange. The use of the term was more often pejorative, and, in embracing the term – and in celebrating that difference – the term queer has evolved. It denotes a sense of belonging, alongside others who were historically made to be outsiders. It also presents a necessary and welcome challenge for all binary thinking. A number of short articles within this issue directly define the term “queer” and “queer theory” including work by Jesse Jagtiani, Jacob Kyle, and Marie Cartier. Adam Zmith provides a more visionary, personal narrative with his article “Queer Utopia,” and, in our Practice section, Rae Johnson proposes a method for “Queering/Querying the Body,” that challenges normative assumptions about diverse bodies from a lived, somatic approach. Jeff Hood alternatively looks at Christian concepts of God in a provocative piece titled, “Queer God and a Stiff Peter.” Naming a path “queer dharma implies a kind of agency, confidence, even pride. Yet, as the narratives within this issue reveal, it is a constructive and tenuous path–potent, troubled, and rich with history.

“Queer Dharma” is, in a sense, not new because dharma extends to all of creation, and queer people have always existed. Several articles feature ways that queerness and gender fluidity have appeared in traditional contexts, like the articles on Ardhanārīśvara (a version of Śiva who is half male, half female) by Jacob Kyle and Zoe Slatoff, the article on Harijans (India’s community of transgender people) by Katy Jane, the article “Embracing the Trans Bodhisattva, Kuan Yin,” by Cathryn Bailey, and the visual essay on the annual transgender festival that takes place in Koovagam, India by Jess Kohl. In “The Perils of Becoming a Gopi,” Phil Hine examines the history of the cowherd girl/man who blissfully dances with Krishna in an act of rebellious devotion and the limits that exist for the transgender or cross-dressing men who reinact this role. Iconography and representation, especially in religious contexts, can carry a tremendous impact, even instilling hope and a sense of home despite the heteronormative confines of much of religious doctrine and monastic communities. Examples of this can be found in the articles by Christopher Rzigalinski, Ryan LeMere, and Chris Walling. Each relay aspects of the spiritual, queer journey and the various ways that their individual searches have aligned with contemplative practice and the dharmic traditions.

While a number of the articles already mentioned take up aspects of the dharmic traditions in detail, the broader meaning of the term dharma merits some further consideration here. Dharma is an intercultural concept that connects the various traditions of India and South Asia, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Increasingly, it is also a term embraced by those who regularly practice meditation and/or yoga and who have come to explore the narrative and philosophical underpinnings of these practice traditions. In using the phrase “Queer Dharma,” this issue points to both the history of queer people within dharmic traditions and to the contemporary intersection between queer identity/theory and contemplative traditions.

In Buddhism, dharma, or dhamma, points to “reliable teachings.” It is the fundamental precepts within Buddhism including the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. In the Sikh tradition the term expresses a path and an ideal. Jagbir Jhutti-Johal explains, “According to Sikh teachings, the term dharam refers to spiritual wisdom, righteous living, and responsibility towards God and creation. It is a term that expresses the sense of “duty” and “way of life” that a Sikh aspires towards.” For Jains, dharma is most often aligned with ahimsa, or a commitment to a life path of non-violence. The Ācārāṅga Sūtra, one of the oldest and most authoritative texts within the Jain tradition states:

All things breathing, all things existing, all things living, all beings whatever, should not be slain or treated with violence, or insulted, or tortured, or driven away. This is the pure, unchanging, eternal law [dharma], which the wise ones who know the world have proclaimed.

In Hinduism, dharma has often been translated as “sacred duty.” Svadharma is then one’s individual duty or path. Yet the dharma (in Hinduism) is far from the straight and narrow. It is, as the great Hindu epic Mahābhārata emphatically demonstrates, subtle, complex, circumstantial, and interconnected. The war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas sets central edicts such as ahimsa, or non-violence, alongside ethics of loyalty, honor, karma, and saṃsāra – the great cycle of birth, death, and re-birth. The juncture of this moral dilemma is the content of the Bhagavad Gītā – to surrender in passivity or to fight? Closer to our current era, Mahatma Gandhi famously embraced the Bhagavad Gītā as a text to support his tireless, nonviolent protests. For Gandhi, dharma, the sacred path, was ultimately non-violent and active. Yet the end of the Gītā (and the beginning of the rest of the Mahābhārata) unfolds as Arjuna resumes the bloody battle.

In a short story titled “The Five Women,” the poet and prose writer Mahasweta Devi gives voice to the subaltern widows of the countless foot soldiers who would have fought and died on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Reacting to a reference to the war as a “disaster,” one woman retorts,

Disaster? What disaster? Was this some natural calamity? So many great kings join in a war between brothers. Some choose one side, some cross over to the other. It wasn’t just brother slaughtering brother. We know of quarrels – jealousies – rivalries too. But such a war for just a throne? This, a holy war?! A righteous war?! Just call it a war of greed!

Devi brings her readers to the periphery of the famous epic, expanding the sphere of concern beyond the royal lead-actors and into the grief and practical realities of the unnamed who form the greater context and background of the narrative. What happens when we reexamine foundational texts? Do heroes fall? Or might we come nearer to a wider, more encompassing truth that has lived within the text all along?

In this way, sanātana (eternal) dharma, is at once ancient and ever-evolving. Dharma arrives in the present moment with the fullness of the past. Those who engage the dharmic traditions with integrity must attend to history with a measure of zeal, curiosity, and compassion.

These are texts and traditions forged from bygone eras that continue to ring truth into our present moment – yet, the present moment also offers newly revealed truths and the possibility of liberation in ways previously unimagined. Here enters the constructive project of the queer dharma.

The work of a constructive theologian is different from that of a scholar of religious traditions. It means the scholar locates themselves within a tradition, that they engage with the classical tenants of that faith and practice, and that they participate in the ongoing development of the tradition by showing up with their doubts, struggles, and convictions. It is the personal and political reality of the present moment brought into conversation with the past. The community of the faithful, the sangha, or the members of a particular lineage, ultimately determine how their truth is understood and taught to the next generation. The world over has seen a gradual transformation of the role that queer people play within prominent religious traditions. The work there is far from complete, but the fact that queer leaders openly work as pastors in certain Christian communities, or as rabbis in the Jewish tradition, for example, demonstrates the fruit of constructive theological work. In this way, initiating change within a religious or spiritual tradition is an act of faith and commitment to the greater potential of that community.

Queer dharma acknowledges the violence and bigotry that LGBTQ+ people have suffered and continue to suffer. Alongside that trauma, it locates a spiritual and religious path of hope, healing, humor, and transformation. Offering a touch of playfulness that is able to rise above trauma and petty scorn, the acceptance of queer identities, queer spiritualities, and queer love may, in fact, be a path of reform and redemption that is relevent for all.

Thanks for reading!

Tarka Volume 9, ‘On Power,’ will be released later this year.

Explore the Print and/or Digital Issues of Tarka Journal, including ‘Queer Dharma’ in our online shop.

In many religious environments around the world, being gay, gender-bending, or otherwise queer is considered a surefire recipe for eternal damnation. If your local religion doesn’t have a fiery consequence waiting for you in the afterlife, then the quotidian rituals of bullying, ridicule, and torturous teasing are enough to make daily life a living hell. It is no wonder, then, that for many queer people, the very word “God” is a triggering one, a painful reminder of parental judgments and cultural norms that guilt, shame, and repress the non-conforming expressions of queer identity and same-sex desire. As a result of this, unsurprisingly and unfortunately (from the point of view of these reflections) many queer people throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, preferring, rather than the loaded word “God,” concepts like “divine,” “spirit,” or more generalized references to the “cosmos” or “universe.”

Read more

Anyone who has spent real time on a yoga mat has, at one point or another, been told about Patañjali’s eight limbs. Yama, niyama, āsana, prāṇāyāma, pratyāhāra, dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi. We have heard them mentioned at the beginning of class, in workshops, or in teacher training programs. We have taught them to students – sometimes based on a selective interpretation that extends from our own cultural commitments. Of the vast yoga philosophical material, the eight limbs are what many return to, again and again, as a kind of sacred ladder.

What is less often said is that Patañjali’s eight limbs are only one yoga among many. The Bhagavad Gītā alone offers several — karma-yoga, jñāna-yoga, bhakti-yoga, dhyāna-yoga — and refuses to rank them. The Mahābhārata’s​ Mokṣadharma preserves yogas older and stranger than anything in the Yoga Sūtras. The Upaniṣads speak of a yoga of syllable and breath that predates Patañjali by centuries. The Pāśupatas had their own yoga, as did the Pāñcarātrins, the Jainas, the early Buddhists, the Nāth siddhas, the haṭha traditions that rebuilt the whole edifice around the subtle body.

Each of these is a classical yoga system. Each presumes its own metaphysics, its own anthropology of the practitioner, its own account of what liberation means and how a human life might be oriented toward it. And in eleventh-century Kashmir, in a commentary on a tantra most yoga practitioners have never heard of, Kṣemarāja did something quietly extraordinary: he took the eight limbs one by one and rewrote each of them as a mode of non-dual recognition — producing, in effect, yet another classical yoga, one that absorbs the Pātañjala scheme by reading it from the inside.

In the Netra Tantra’s eighth chapter — the paradhyāna, the “supreme meditation” — yama is no longer the ethical threshold one crosses before practice begins. It is saṃsārād virati — the constant turning of awareness away from transmigratory identification. Niyama is not observance; it is bhāvanā pare tattve, continuous contemplation of the supreme reality. Āsana is not a posture. It is the seat one attains by resting in the central prāṇa and grasping one’s own power of knowing as ground. Prāṇāyāma is not breath retention but the transcendence first of gross, then of subtle breath, culminating in the supreme spanda “from which one never again falls.” Pratyāhāra, dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi — each is rethought in the same key. What we had taken as a technology of suppression becomes a phenomenology of recognition.

This is, in fact, what the Śaiva commentarial tradition does again and again. Somānanda’s Śivadṛṣṭi reads the whole apparatus of perception and agency as modalities of Śiva’s self-recognition. Utpaladeva’s Īśvarapratyabhijñā-kārikā takes ordinary cognition — memory, recognition, the unity of the knowing subject across time — and shows, step by step, that each of these is unintelligible except as the self-disclosure of a single non-dual consciousness. Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka absorbs the entire ritual and yogic inheritance of the Mantramārga — initiation, mantra, mudrā, the hierarchy of the tattvas, the whole architecture of practice — and reorganizes it around the threefold distinction of āṇava, śākta, and śāmbhava upāyas: the same gestures, received at progressively subtler registers of recognition. Kṣemarāja, writing in that lineage, performs the move on a text one might not have expected to yield to it. The Netra Tantra is a ritual scripture. Its eighth chapter, on its surface, offers what looks like a conventional eightfold yoga. What the Netroddyota does is show that this yoga, read carefully, was never a technology of suppression at all. It was always the phenomenology of recognition, articulated in limbs.

In each case, the gesture is the same: the ladder is not kicked away. It is resituated and reinterpreted to align with the perspectives of non-dual Śākta-Śaivism.

Kṣemarāja offers a philosophically precise version of this move, similar to what Abhinavagupta does in āhnika four of his Tantrāloka. Every limb, held up to the light of pratyabhijñā, turns out to have been a figure of consciousness recognizing itself all along. The practitioner does not arrive at samādhi by accumulation. She arrives at it by recognizing that what she has been doing, at every rung, was already saturated with what she was reaching for.

For the yoga teacher, for the long-time practitioner, for anyone who has felt the subtle insufficiency of the eight limbs taught as a sequence of acquired states, this is, I think, what has been missing.

This spring, Sādhana School takes up this reading as a part of a broader exploration of the “third eye” — through the Netra Tantra, the Vijñāna-bhairava, and selections from Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka, across eight weeks of study, practice, and contemplative inquiry.

If you are interested in going deeper into the non-dual Tantric traditions, this could be for you.

Select chapters of the Netra Tantra will be the source of fascinating insight. We will read it slowly, in dialogue with the subtle-body yoga of chapter seven and the comparative contemplative frame that runs throughout. Week seven is devoted to a cross-traditional survey — Christian mysticism, Sufism’s baṣīra, Plotinus, Dzogchen, and the Eye of Horus — led by a guest teacher who situates the Tantrik teaching within its broadest comparative frame. The course closes with a satsang, and an orientation and ritual that integrates what we’ve learned into the life ahead.

The Third Eye: Perception and the Subtle Yoga of the Netra Tantra

Starts Wednesday April 29 2026 | Wednesdays, 9:00–11:30 am ET | 8-week term

With Jacob Kyle & Nataraj Chaitanya

Learn more and join

Historical cities offer insights relevant to current efforts to regenerate an ecologically healthy Earth. The following essay explores the bonds between three soil communities and their cities – Uruk, Athens, and Machu Picchu. These cities illustrate three different relationships to soil – as a Parasite on Soil, as a Disease of Soil, or as a Soil Maker. Based on this research, I urge us to re-member our relation to the Earth by making our habitats soil-generators.

The Seeding of Cities

Six thousand years ago ancient Uruk formed part of a network of settlements that for the first time made urban life possible. Located along the Euphrates River just north of the present-day Persian Gulf, Uruk was the chief cultural center of Sumer and its foremost religious center. In the sacred precinct of the fertility Goddess Ishtar stood her Ziggurat, representing the Cosmic Mountain rising out of the primal chaos at the moment of creation. Her Temple was never surpassed in Sumer in size and richness of architectural details. The terraces of the stepped altar regularly held the vegetable offerings from Uruk’s gardens and date groves, transforming the tiered Ziggurat into a series of “green roofs.”

The duty of the King of Uruk was to embellish and maintain his city. City walls dominated Sumerian urban architecture. Gateways displayed the city’s wealth, impressed visitors, and served as civic centers. To enhance these, King Gilgamesh defies an ancient sacred prohibition against felling cedars growing in the mountains north of the city. He and his companion, Enkidu, kill the protective forest monster. They clear-cut the cedars to construct a magnificent new gate in the city ramparts.

Gilgamesh’s actions anger the supreme Gods, who inflict flood, famine, and sorrow on the inhabitants of Uruk. The Gods also curse Enkidu, who embodies what is ‘wild and untamed’ in the human. He personifies what we recognize today as our alignment with natural systems. Enkidu dies a painful death. Horrified at the possibility of his own death, Gilgamesh seeks immortality. After fruitless wanderings, the King realizes that he can only achieve eternal life through the longevity of what he builds to sustain Uruk. At the end of the tale, he concentrates on maintaining the city walls, canals, gardens, and temple precincts. He concentrates on, what we would describe as sustaining the city’s relation to its ecology…to its place on the Earth.

Modern ecology interprets this nearly five-thousand-year-old tale for us. Clear cutting mountain forests destroys wild nature. It leads to increased water run-off and unexpected, often destructive flooding. Torrential inundations in turn drown crops in the surrounding low-lying lands, creating famine. Cities face the likelihood of demise when their food supply ends. Their citizens have dire choices: starving to death, subjugating foreign territories to supply them with food, being conquered by enemies, or abandoning their city.

Ecological design also illuminates the Gilgamesh legend. Human communities form life-dependent relations with the natural systems of their locality. Through trade, these essential bonds extend to the ecologies of far-distant lands. Sometimes, as in the case of Uruk, cities develop life-sustaining connections with remote territories whose natural bounty they violently seize. The Gilgamesh story, the oldest written record we have, warns us that in order for urban complexes to achieve longevity, city constructors cannot ignore these ecological connections. Instead, urban builders need to develop building practices that treat cities, their surrounding regions, the lands of their trading partners, and appropriated lands as one integrated organism.

History records that the rulers of Sumerian cities did learn to co-exist for an extraordinarily long time within the Euphrates-Tigris river system, just as the story of Gilgamesh suggests. They achieved an urban energetics giving their cities a longevity the Greek polis never obtained. Ultimately, the soils of Sumerian cities lost their viability but only after these settlements survived for nearly four millennia. Can our cities achieve a comparably long life?

Cities Integral to Soil Communities

Contrary to modern perceptions, human settlements are not separate from the natural systems they penetrate or from their neighboring countrysides. Instead, cities form vital relationships within their regional soil communities. British historian Edward Hyams describes the basic characteristics of soil communities and the position of cities within them in his extraordinary Soil & Civilization, a historical study of humanity’s place within the Earth’s planetary ecology. Hyams reminds us that soil is not a dead inert resource but an organism. The rock, humus, bacteria, atmosphere, water, fungi, and earthworms that comprise soil constitute a biological, organic, living community. Humans intrude into these communities by the way we create cities.

Hyams organizes the relational dynamics that cities form within existing soil communities into three energetics: Man as a Parasite on Soil, Man as a Disease of Soil, and Man as a Soil Maker.

In order for us to understand the functional place of green roofs, urban neighborhood gardens, and other similar soil-makers within today’s cities, we need to recognize the ongoing historical consequences of these three dynamics. They continue to constrain life on the Earth today. What follows is a brief description of three historical cities — Uruk, Athens, and Machu Picchu that illustrates the three major impacts of cities on their soil communities.

Cities as Parasites on Soil: Uruk

The success of Gilgamesh and succeeding rulers of Uruk is due in large part to modulating agricultural practices to the cyclical rhythms of the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial river system. Hyams characterizes this relationship between Uruk and the river system as that of a benign parasite to its host. In other words, the people of Uruk fed on the fertility of the river system, much as a few fleas live off a dog, without doing any damage to the canine. As Hyams indicates, the fruitful soils of the Euphrates-Tigris system “do not owe their nearly inexhaustible resources only to stored capital accumulated during countless years of silting, but to annual renewal by present and continuing silting.” Such soils “are capable of supporting a parasitic community for long periods, sometimes almost indefinitely.” For centuries, the parasitic relation of Sumerian cities to this resilient region did no apparent harm. The annual flooding of the rivers regularly regenerated the soil community. The Sumerians used the flooding as the basis of their irrigation-dependent agriculture whose fruits they offered to the goddess Ishtar.

However, the waters of the river system, which were absolutely necessary to Sumerian irrigation, brought not only fertile silt but, after several thousand years of urban occupation, salt. The Sumerians could see the accumulating silt and took precautions against it clogging their city’s irrigation canals. They made dredging and cleaning of canals a top priority. The salt was a different story. It was invisible. Hundreds of years after Gilgamesh first challenged the forest god, the Sumerians gained control of new timberlands, which they exploited. This deforestation exposed expansive areas of salt-rich sedimentary rocks to severe erosion. Devastating floods and rains occurred, carrying salt downstream. The salt accumulated in irrigated farmlands. A serious salinity problem developed because of inadequate drainage that, otherwise, would have flushed the salts out of the topsoil. Non- reversible and increasingly destructive, the salt caused a progressive decline in crop yields, especially barley. After 2000 BC the Sumerian empire crumbled, in large part because of the decline of their food supply. Sumerian rulers subsequent to Gilgamesh had failed to heed the lessons of their own ancestors.

The same story can be told about the civilizations of the Nile, Indus, and Hwang-ho Rivers, which were born on the resilient soils of their river systems. These civilizations, like Sumer, transformed from being parasites on their soils to being diseases of them.

Read more

The Aim of Sādhana

What is sādhana for?

This is not a question with a single answer, but one that opens into layered possibilities — each of which reveals a different facet of the contemplative path. In the popular imagination, the purpose of spiritual practice is often cast in terms of stress relief, peace of mind, or healing from trauma. While sādhana may indeed bring these benefits, they are not its ultimate aim. These are byproducts of a deeper, more radical transformation that sādhana invites.

At its most fundamental level, sādhana is a process of remembering what we are — beneath habit, beneath personality, beneath even thought. It is a turning inward toward the subtle layers of experience, and ultimately, toward the ground of awareness itself. But this turning inward is not an escape from the world. On the contrary, it is a re-entry into the world with new eyes — more intimate, more porous, and more attuned to the living pulse of reality.

In the non-dual Śākta-Śaiva traditions that inspire Sādhana School, the ultimate aim is not to transcend embodiment, but to recognize it as the very expression of the divine. Sādhana, then, is not a ladder to escape the human condition, but a means of sanctifying it — of perceiving the sacred not elsewhere, but here, now, in this body, this breath, this thought, this moment.

Sādhana awakens us to subtle perception. It refines our awareness so that we no longer view reality through the lens of habitual projection or inherited worldviews. We begin to see as awareness itself rather than as the limited self looking out. In this sense, sādhana is epistemological — it changes how we know. It is also ontological — it changes what we take ourselves and the world to be. But unlike academic philosophy, this transformation is not merely conceptual. It is embodied, lived, and felt. It unfolds as the dynamic presence of a clarifying creativity.

On another level, sādhana is a process of purification — not moralistic, but vibrational. We purify not to become “good” but to become clear. To see more clearly. To feel more fully. To act with discernment and power. The obstructions to this clarity are not ‘sins’, but fixations: rigid identities, unexamined beliefs, habitual reactivity, unconscious desire. Sādhana softens these structures not by attacking them, but by outshining them. In its light, we begin to experience spaciousness where there was contraction, fluidity where there was fixity.

And yet, sādhana is not only about liberation from — it is also about awakening into. Into creative participation with life. Into new possibilities of expression. Into love that is not limited to emotion, but radiates as a way of being. Into freedom that does not remove us from responsibility, but infuses it with depth and compassion.

So the aim of sādhana cannot be reduced to a single goal. It is not just about self-realization or self-improvement or spiritual achievement. It is about learning how to live — how to live in a way that honors the subtlety of our being, that allows reality to speak through us, and that cultivates a disposition of reverence in the midst of impermanence.

In this way, sādhana is not a path to somewhere else. It is a deepening into this. It is a sacred reorientation toward the already present — the mystery that waits patiently beneath our distractions, our performances, and our fear.

And so the true aim of sādhana may not be to attain anything at all, but rather to uncover — to become intimate with what has always been here, quietly waiting to be seen.

Sādhana as Pedagogy

Sādhana is not only a spiritual path — it is a pedagogy.

That is, it is a way of learning, a mode of inquiry, a discipline of integration. While the term “pedagogy” often evokes the image of classroom instruction and intellectual curriculum, in the context of contemplative traditions, pedagogy is something far more embodied and existential. It is not limited to the mind’s acquisition of ideas. It concerns the whole being — body, breath, intellect, imagination, desire, and will.

At its heart, sādhana is a curriculum of transformation. It teaches us not through abstract instruction alone, but through direct engagement. Its lessons do not arrive in the form of neatly packaged conclusions. They emerge slowly, through repetition, through friction, through revelation — by way of practice, persistence, and perceptual refinement. Like any serious course of study, sādhana requires commitment and patience. But unlike most modern educational systems, it does not divide knowledge from experience. It aims at wisdom, not just information.

In this sense, sādhana rewrites the dominant model of modern learning. Rather than prioritizing speed, productivity, or quantifiable achievement, sādhana pedagogy favors depth, slowness, and internalization. It does not ask, “How much have you mastered?” but instead, “How deeply has this lived in you?” It does not ask whether you can repeat teachings, but whether you have become them.

This pedagogical orientation is especially important in the context of Sādhana School, where the emphasis is not merely on content, but on transmission. While we study primary texts and philosophical frameworks with rigor, these are not ends in themselves. They are catalysts. The texts become living interlocutors. The philosophical insights become interior provocations. The practices become mirrors, and eventually, thresholds. This is not passive consumption. It is relational education.

In the traditional Indian context, learning was always intimately tied to sādhana. Study (svādhyāya) was inseparable from repetition, recitation, and ritual practice. To learn something, in the non-dual Tantrik traditions, means to inscribe it into the body, to harmonize oneself with its vibration. The teacher is not simply a conveyor of information, but a transmitter of śakti, presence, and a reorienting view. The student does not memorize doctrine but undergoes adhikāra — a ripening of receptivity, a development of capacity. Learning is measured not by output, but by becoming.

This is the spirit that Sādhana School seeks to recover and rearticulate. Sādhana as pedagogy is a reclamation of depth in a time of distraction. It is a call back to the ancient intuition that wisdom is not the result of accumulation, but of transformation through relation — with practices, with texts, with teachers, and most importantly, with the subtle intelligence of one’s own interiority.

And yet, this is not an escape from modernity. Rather, it is a reweaving of the ancient into the fabric of the now. We live in a world of complexity and contradiction. Sādhana pedagogy does not ask us to abandon it, but to meet it more deeply — armed not with answers, but with attuned perception and a refined sense of discernment.

To engage sādhana as pedagogy, then, is to reimagine what it means to study, to learn, and to become. It is to submit to a process that does not flatter the ego, but liberates it from its compulsions. It is to allow the rhythms of practice to educate the nervous system. It is to trust that the body, too, is a form of memory. It is to recognize that the deepest lessons do not announce themselves with fanfare — but arrive quietly, when we have become simple enough to receive them.

In this light, the sādhaka is not merely a practitioner, but a student in the truest sense: one who does not presume to know, but who is willing to be changed by what they encounter.

The Role of the Texts in Sādhana

In Sādhana School, we work with sacred texts not as passive repositories of knowledge, but as living companions on the path of transformation. These are not books to be mastered, conquered, or skimmed for insight. They are mirrors and portals — devices of revelation that speak differently to us depending on our state of being, our ripeness, and our readiness to listen.

To engage a text as sādhana is to approach it not merely for information, but for encounter. In this mode, we read slowly. We linger. We return. We let phrases echo within us. Sometimes the meaning is clear; other times it is obscure. But the obscurity itself can become a site of contemplation. We ask not only, “What does this mean?” but “What in me is reacting to this?” or “What is this passage pointing to that I have not yet seen?”

This is especially true when working with the primary sources of the non-dual Tantrik traditions. These texts often encode subtle metaphysics, poetic allusion, and esoteric instruction in compressed and paradoxical language. To read them as one would read a modern treatise is to miss their power. Their meaning is not exhausted by translation or commentary. Much of their transmission unfolds between the lines, in the silences, in the rhythm of repetition, and in the contemplative state they begin to evoke when held with care.

To approach a text as a sādhanic companion means also to understand that we change in relation to it. What once felt obscure may, months later, feel luminous. What once seemed overly abstract may suddenly strike with the intimacy of personal revelation. In this sense, the text is not static. It responds to our development. It grows with us.

This approach requires humility. It asks us to recognize that the text is not simply something we interpret, but something that interprets us. It shapes our questions. It reframes our assumptions. It may challenge the frameworks we’ve used to organize our spiritual lives.

In the pedagogical structure of Sādhana School, we encourage students to maintain a relationship with the texts that is not extractive but devotional — one rooted in curiosity, patience, and respect. Recitation (pathi) and reflection (cintā) are offered not as separate activities, but as two poles of a single practice: one vibrational and somatic, the other philosophical and analytic. Together, they generate a layered resonance in the body-mind that is the hallmark of deep learning.

The goal, in the end, is not simply to “understand” a text, but to become a person who can stand under it — to allow its weight, its precision, and its view to slowly realign how we perceive the world, how we live, and what we take to be real. This is the role of the texts in sādhana: not to provide final answers, but to initiate the kind of questions that can only be answered through the long intimacy of embodied life.

Thank you for reading.

Ready to deepen your own Sādhana?

Spring Term starts on Wednesday, April 22nd 2026.
Join before April 15th to save $100 on tuition.

Learn more and join

Is the Past Also the Present?

When I was in Australia recently, I became absorbed by the landscape. Away from phones and for the most part WiFi, I was conveniently removed from my customary habits and the draws for my attention. I was able to listen. Not listening to anything in particular or for anything in particular. Just listening. The longer I was there, the more I could sense, hear, feel, as if by listening carefully, I could absorb the landscape into me. The bird calls, their whips, whistles, caws, and bells. The brush of wings. The rustle of dry gum leaves and paperbark. The thump of wallabies and little joeys beside them. Oh, and the cicadas with their endless music. The butcherbirds and gerygones singing the melody and raga of the bush. They grounded the landscape, maintaining it. It wasn’t just sounds I was drawing into me; it was a merging with the lifeblood of the mountain, canyon, and dove white coast.

There were artifacts, some 14,000 years old, in the hills where I was. The presence of the footsteps of these ancestors hung in the air. As I listened, it was as if I could hear them, too. Their remains were part of the humus that softens sound in the wild, their presence still there, still coloring the landscape. My own steps and movements were now also part of the symphony, the echoes of generations past and future, sounding together, all at once. In the dreamtime of the aboriginal people, past, present, and future are all merged into one. In some of the more farout theoretical physics there is a theory of time collapsed into itself, or of time as a process that bends in a three-dimensional motion, more like a sphere or a torus, rather than a line, it moves in a single flow, pouring over and into itself. In some way, this type of seeing does still fit with our dominant paradigm, just interpreted a little differently. Everything is part of a continuum, a whole, a single that cannot be separated into discrete parts. The past sets certain actions in motion, which create certain possible outcomes and eliminates other possible outcomes. Our present reality is influenced and to some extent determined by those outcomes. And our actions similarly shape the future. The past is very much alive in our present, and the future is also directly shaped by every single action now. Is there a way of seeing that takes all this into account viscerally? Not through reasoning or deduction, but through apprehension, through an awakening that illuminates to us a profoundly different sense of time? One that is unitive and filled with the possible.

Realizing there are other valid paradigms and ways to see the world softens the edges of what we take to be possible. It allows for new ways of seeing to emerge. We start to see that our worldview is constructed, agreed upon by the dominant culture, and that it is not the only way of seeing. The way we customarily perceive time, history, causality, or consciousness may not be the deepest, most inclusive way, or the way that gives rise to the highest human potentials.

I am not a romanticist for past worldviews. We cannot go back to an age before technology or literacy. But other cultures were privy to understandings that we cannot discern now. We have indeed forgotten some knowledge. While we can open up to those worldviews, I am not sure that we will be able to authentically intuit that knowledge in its fullness anymore. Times, and our sense of consciousness, have changed too much. But we can become sensitive to alternative and intuitive knowings of life that are more subtle and have different dimensionality than the framework we currently operate in. Our current worldview so bluntly separates me from you, present from past, self from other, human from world. That’s the reality young people today are taught to experience. There are other credible ways to see the world.

In the period after World War I, Alfred North Whitehead moved from Britain to become dean of philosophy at Harvard, having never taught nor taken a philosophy class before then. It was at Harvard that he began to call a more inclusive and relational view “process” and proceeded to articulate a philosophical view of the world that became known as process philosophy. Rather than a series of discrete events, he saw everything as a flow, as experience. Gregory Bateson called this relatedness. Bateson would not see the five fingers on a hand; he would see how they related, the space between them. A worldview that does not harshly divide us in the way the Cartesian worldview does gives us access to very different sensitivities. Individually, when we feel a part of something, part of a whole, we experience safety, release, rest. We feel, intuitively, not so small or alienated as we so often see ourselves in our vast, fast-paced world. With an almost imperceptible shift, where nothing changes, we experience ourselves a non-separate from the newborn, healthy or struggling for her first breaths, or the early humans just learning to spark fire from twigs and tinder, or the technologist plotting trajectories on graphs to program a flight path to Mars.

A process-oriented view has many dimensions and capacities, many ways of looking in. It is different from our own in these ways: First we see that our own worldview is constructed, a set of beliefs that orders reality. Then we see that it is not the only way to see reality. All of a sudden, we find we have allowed ourselves to consider other paradigms and worldviews, to test the waters and let go of our moorings, becoming informed by other ways of perceiving the world around us. Once we consider alternative views, we open the door to creativity, expansion, solutions, and connections.

Read more

Less is more.

We’ve all heard it. The problem with it is that, these days, you’ve got a whole industrial complex convincing folks to take it literally. Somehow or other, they convinced us that in order to live simply, eat clean, and otherwise pull ourselves together, first we need to buy a lot of stuff.

It’s water.

Here’s a story about how even one of our truly essential needs can become warped:

It’s fall, the air feels nice and crisp outside, and you’re shaking off the lethargy of a hot sticky summer. I want to clean out my system, you think. I gotta start drinking more water.

At your local Whole Foods, approaching the water aisle, you get sidetracked by a display of “tonics” in tiny pop-top cans. ENERGIZE reads one label. CLEANSE invites another. Not really sure what half the ingredients are, you toss five or six into your cart and head into the water aisle. Now the choices get serious. Vitamin water. Smart water. Mineral water, sparkling and still. Lime-raspberry spritzer water.

Fifty-seven dollars lighter, you take the elevator up to the roof. Loading your tonics and spritzers into the car, realization hits. Ferchrissakes, I forgot to buy regular water.

Of course, you don’t need reishi mushroom tonic to hydrate your body, any more than you need fancy pants to take a yoga class or a special cushion to meditate. But we’re bored, confused, distracted, and, overall, right where late-stage capitalism wants us.

How can we not only consume less, but also create more? How can we focus? How can we shine?

Ideas Matter. Actions Matter More.

Before I left urban life and all its complicated conveniences behind to create an off-grid permaculture farm in Ecuador (yes, really), I taught yoga for sixteen years. The tenets found in yoga can have profound real-world implications and effects — if we apply them sincerely.

In the Yoga Sutras two concepts address consumption and clutter. Saucha and santosha, commonly translated as cleanliness and contentment, offer a lens through which to see our patterns.

Personal cleanliness in terms of hygiene is just one way to interpret saucha. There’s also cleanliness of thought and action. Imagine how much more time and energy we could harness for creation if we didn’t fritter it away with scrolling.

Santosha, or contentment, can also encompass a sense of satisfaction at having enough. Santosha is the clarity of knowing when enough is enough.

Pare it down.

Ok, but how? How, on this seemingly unstoppable and out-of-control bus called modern life, can we find a sense of satiety, of sanity?

In recent years, having flung myself headlong from the consumption bus to see what would happen, I’ve picked up some neat life hacks along the way.

You don’t have to build a house from mud or raise chickens to be more of a creator. Here’s some very simple methods I’ve distilled that anyone can apply to practice clean living and contentment.

Order What’s on the Menu

Here on the farm, most of my food choices are made for me by what’s currently ready for harvest.

Living in full-on “civilization,” you don’t have these advantages. A common scenario: You sit down in a café and look at the lunch menu. Fried fish and baked chicken are the specials. Served with fries and a salad. Immediately, your consumption-conditioned brain jumps into gear. Maybe I can get the fish, but baked? And substitute sweet potato fries for the fries? Or ask if I can skip the fries but get a double portion of salad?

Hey! Maybe you can eat what’s on the freaking menu? Didya ever think of that?

Because it’s not just one lunch. You have to make thousands of choices every day from the minute you wake up. Some social psychologists have even given this burden a name: option fatigue. And if you are too fatigued to digest your food properly, what you eat hardly matters. So give your brain a break. Order what’s on the menu, eat what’s on your plate, and move on to bigger things.

Work Offline

To access a desktop computer and WIFI, once or twice a week I walk for an hour to a bus stop where a jolting bus picks me up and transports me via a bumpy gravel road to a small town where I sit in a 1999-era “internet café” in a cramped cubicle and get to work. There is no golden milk latte, no vegan cookies, not even coffee. And yowzah, do I get stuff done.

Not having these conveniences has taught me how to focus. Now, you don’t have to go all hard-core draconian about your work space — believe me, sometimes I would love a good coffee while I’m working. But being in a less-than-luxurious environment with limited time really can put a fire under your ass.

I advised a friend who was having trouble focusing to use Airplane Mode and work offline. Not only did he tell me he started creating more content and easily meeting deadlines, but every time he saw the little airplane icon slide into the top display of his phone, his breathing and heartbeat slowed.

In the Sutras, Patanjali also suggests that freedom is felt through the absence of suffering. Not a presence, but an absence. A space.

Do the Thing You Want to Do.

If there’s something you really want to accomplish, focus on that thing. For example, my whole life I could never do a pull-up, despite assiduously practicing various forms of fitness.

A few weeks ago Juan hung a bar from a bamboo rafter in our kitchen. Once again, I tried to do a pull-up. Nada.

Without access to options, I tried something new. Every day I attempted a wide grip overhand pull up. I didn’t do anything else to improve my pull up attempt except try the pull up. Little by little I started to pull myself up to the bar.

Earlier this week, my chin cleared for the first time. The next day, I did two. Yesterday, three.

Lesson: If you want to do something, do the damn thing. Not other things. Cleanliness of action — that’s saucha.

Put Utility Before Vanity

Speaking of exercise goals, if you want to feel more contentment about yours, try putting them in line with living your life in a balanced, enjoyable way.

Instead of spending every day “working out” with weights or yoga or calisthenics, devote at least some of that time to community-based activities. Run a 5k for a cause, get some folks together to do a river clean up, plant a garden on the rooftop of your apartment building. Make a choice to be healthy and useful.

You be with you.

The average “engagement” with an Instagram post is less than half a second. A movie frame is even shorter. No wonder our brains are so damn tired.

Turn it off. Watch the little airplane icon slide into place and breathe. Learn to play the violin, speak Arabic, do algebraic equations. Make art. Absorb yourself in it. Stop fighting with strangers on the Internet. Get off the bus, at least for an hour every day.

The very first lines of the Sutras read, approximately: Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

You don’t have to take yourself out of the world to observe it, or observe yourself. But you do need to slow down, consume less, and stop getting caught up in the storm of material life. You need time to think, ponder, reflect, and create.

And drink more water.

Thank you for reading.

Explore the Print and/or Digital Issues of Tarka Journal in our online shop.

Social and political activism to change some aspect of the status quo has a long history in our world. The form it takes in most societies has been relatively predictable because people within them learn to live by and function within social norms and customs meant to facilitate harmonious interactions, and this often applies to methods for disagreement as well. From time to time, however, situations occur that lead to a significant level of disagreement between people. When a large enough number of individuals align with dissenters, social and political movements are born.

In contemporary America, issues regarding race, gender, climate change, and politics are among those that generate the most attention, intensity, and division. Individuals group together with the goals of “correcting” the problems they perceive. Some find peaceful ways of attempting solutions, but increasingly prevalent and visible are those with feelings of such intense animosity of the “other,” i.e. the people or entities holding opposing points of view, that hatred and violence can become likely tools. This paper looks at some of the people and situations that lead to activism, what forms and methods are taken, and how and if mind focusing practices can help alleviate some of the more volatile situations that arise and inspire instead a sense of dialogue and harmony in place of hatred and violence.

Activist groups traditionally organize around the ideas of a few who speak out about issues they want to change. One can view individuals and groups as being on a spectrum that spans from peace-oriented idealists at one end to fundamentalist ideologues (both religious and secular) at the other, with most finding a place somewhere in between. Idealists or idealistic movements have typically been grounded in non-violence, compassion, and recognition that self-awareness must be a part of all their actions. Common to many who have inspired and led past movements have been a belief in the ultimate goodness of humanity and commitment to a spiritual and/or moral foundation to guide them and their followers. Personal insight and spiritual wisdom have often been a part of their goals. Consequently, many of these have led to positive outcomes, if not in accomplishing goals set forth, but at least in the effects they have had on people involved and those touched by the leaders. Notable examples of past idealistic leaders include Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. A few current examples are the Dalai Lama, the environmentalist Vandana Shiva, and the Hawaiian elders (kūpuna) who in 2019 inspired thousands to spend months camped on Mauna Kea, a sacred mountain, in an attempt to protect it from being desecrated with yet another telescope. All these leaders have taught that positive change happens when idealistic beliefs and actions go hand in hand with ethical commitments for the purpose of improving the lives of all people, not just those who agree with them. They have sought rational approaches to address their grievances as opposed to hatred and emotional outrage. However, such individuals have been rare and many have been relatively unknown because they have not sought personal fame or acclaim as they strive to help make the world a better place for all its residents.

More common, conspicuous, and vocal today are leaders at the other end of the spectrum who demand change at all costs, irrespective of negative consequences on others. They are more monolithic, exclusivist, fundamentalist, and Machiavellian in their actions and goals. They promote a view of reality in which only their own beliefs have validity, while all opposing views and their adherents (collectively, the “other”) are condemned. Because they rarely allow moral or ethical restrictions to limit their chosen methods of action, they tend to attract those who are susceptible to fanaticism, hatred, and violence. In his True Believers (1951), Eric Hoffer discusses common elements of the latter type of movements and the role that a predefined evil “other” plays in their formation and functioning: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil” (Hoffer, 89-90). In this way, the stated goals of a group ultimately matter less than the actual values, motives, and methods that activists align with. A commitment to winning at all costs, irrespective of the consequences, will lead to a far more violent and destructive outcome than a commitment to seeking justice and a positive resolution for all those involved.

Read more

Editor’s Note:

Chris Parkison inhabits two spheres which are often separate – he manages group fitness classes at a popular gym in Washington, D.C, and, for many years, he has also devoted himself to studying some of the traditional practices of yoga, especially those of the Himalayan Vedanta and Tantra, culminating in several trips to India. He wrote these thoughts during his last trip to India, as he reflected on how yoga teachers might be missing out on opportunities to elevate their classes beyond the commonly-known physical shapes of yoga. Since we are focusing on the future of the yoga teacher, his thoughts fit nicely in with our inquiry at EP.

Studio yoga classes must start to incorporate the traditional practices of pranayama, mantra, meditation and kriya into group asana and movement classes if they want to thrive, not just survive, in the fitness industry. Although yoga, considered historically and holistically, is not only “fitness,” one must recognize that most group yoga offerings, especially in a gym setting, crop up on schedules that are also populated by group exercise formats. Many people’s first encounters with yoga take place within this fitness context, even if their explorations ultimately take them beyond that.

The standard vinyasa class has been around for 20+ years and contains some pretty universal components –warm up, some version of sun salutations, standing poses, seated poses, supine poses, savasana. There are varieties for sure- Ashtanga, Iyengar, yin, restorative, ect., but it is all body movement based. There may be a nod to a pranayama technique (Nadi Shodana or Ujjayi Pranayama) but the standard yoga class is mostly asana or physical fitness. Still, even if you get creative, there are only so many ways to move a body, and there are many different gyms and small box studios that cater to people looking to work their bodies.

As yogis we know the human being is more than just the body, as the paradigm of the five Koshas illustrates. It’s time for yoga to evolve beyond the body. If not, yoga classes will soon become a niche, like Pilates, which has had the same choreographies for 50+ years. Pilates studios are rare, and most of them get by on private sessions, not group classes. You might see a few group classes at gyms, but rarely will they be as ubiquitous as yoga.

Vinyasa classes, and studios that offer only asana classes, have been at risk of being relegated to a niche for some time and they are starting to show their age. During the pandemic most asana classes went online, and now you can find nearly any sort of asana class online. So why go to a studio?

One other reason in-person yoga classes are at risk is that they compete with other fitness formats: Barry’s boot camp, Orange Theory, Solidcore, ect. Although yoga teachers typically don’t perceive themselves as such, from the perspectives of many of their students, they are fitness instructors and “stretching” teachers.

Asana is a great option for those who need low impact, mobilizing, full body workouts. Many people go to “yoga” for just that reason- they have a bad back and a doctor told them that yoga might help. Doctors also tell patients with bad backs and bad hips to do Pilates. And if “Yoga” wants to remain the exercise option for a certain segment of the population that desires a low impact workout, then it can.

But if the yoga industry wants to thrive again, it needs to start teaching more than fitness. Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel- all the techniques already exist within yoga’s traditions to offer a class that touches every part of our being. By offering more integrated classes that include pranayama, mantra, meditation and kriya, we can now provide a yoga experience, instead of just yoga poses.

Many competing physical fitness modalities promote and market a psycho-emotional benefit to exercise – take Soul Cycle, for example. The studio is heated, candles are lit and the instructor gives out words of encouragement and wisdom during a 45 min stationary bike ride. People go because it is exercise, but also because the workout is an experience. Whether this leads to long term contentment and joy through a spiritual connection is debatable.

What isn’t debatable is the psycho-emotional and spiritual benefits of traditional yoga techniques beyond asana. There are thousands of years of history and experience that show, that with continued practice, they do lead to long-term contentment, mental discipline and spiritual growth.

Take Pranayama. Pranayama techniques are effective at strengthening the cardiovascular system and reducing stress, and that’s just the physical benefit. We know that pranayama also offers a journey into the subtle energetic body that is at the heart of yoga–a transcending of the mind/body duality we experience in day to day life. Do 30 mins of pranayama a day and your world will change.

If you have done a Kundalini class, you know it takes supreme willpower and physical fitness to attempt many of the kriyas. A seated kriya done for 5 minutes will make a body builder wilt. A standing kriya can move you into a flow unlike any Dancing Warrior series.

Cardiovascular training? Check. Subtle body awareness? Check. Vigorous exercise for arms, core and legs? Check. Conditioning of the nervous system and stress reduction? Check. Total absorption for the mind? Check.

Many pranayama and kriya practices are 2-8 minutes in length, and easily incorporated into a 60-minute asana class so you can still do plenty of poses.

Have bad knees or back or hips? You can sit on a cushion or a chair. Many of these techniques are actually more accessible than the standard sun salutation.

Can you find yoga or unity consciousness through asana? Sure. In my experience this takes daily practice over the course of years, which the general population does not have the patience or discipline for and isn’t likely to develop any time soon. Even now, after years of practice, it takes me 30-40 mins to really find connection with just asana.

With the right teacher, Breath of Fire can move your awareness from distracted and lethargic to totally focused and full of energy in minutes. The effect is immediate and in a culture addicted to instant gratification, pranayama and kriya are (ironically) perfect for working away from stress and distraction and towards unity.

We haven’t even talked about meditation or mantra practices–both of which offer a deeper yoga experience that would set the studio apart from the fitness industry. It must be noted that many studios do in fact offer meditation classes, kirtan, and many other traditional devotional practices. In my experience, those are the studios that flourish.

If studio yoga wants to remain relevant and thrive, it must evolve into something more than the asana class. Otherwise, “Yoga” risks becoming a niche option at gyms with a few studios or worse, a fad that comes and goes. An integrated yoga class that includes traditional yoga techniques provides a physical, mental and spiritual space that Orange Theory cannot. Yoga will no longer be competing with physical fitness options and will be free once again to evolve, like it has been doing for centuries.

Thank you for reading.

Explore the Print and/or Digital Issues of Tarka Journal in our online shop.

Yesomi Umolu, curator and art director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, published “On the Limits of Care and Knowledge: 15 Points Museums Must Understand to Dismantle Structural Injustice” on June 25, 2020. One month to the day after George Floyd’s murder, Umolu put out a call to action demanding museums respond to white supremacy. The article asserts dismantling systemic racism means, “go[ing] beyond token gestures of diversity and inclusion and arriv[ing] at a fundamental rethinking of the role of museums.” Umolu continues by advocating, “Museums must practice empathy and close the gap between themselves and their communities; they must provide space for conversations on the issues that matter to the lives of their audiences, neighbors, and employees.”

Museums and cultural institutions were already under scrutiny in major cities like New York, as major tax-exempt institutions refused to serve as polling places. Their denial exacerbated already tense questions as to whether museums enjoying government benefits had a responsibility to serve as civic spaces to their public. At worst, the refusal distanced museums from their stakeholders’ sociopolitical realities. At best, it was a claim of neutrality. But, as the “Museums are Not Neutral” movement argues, claiming neutrality is often more damaging because it ignores the need for “equity-based transformation.”

Museums can become sites of unity and mend these wounds of division through what I term yoga museology. By embodying the moral principles of Patañjali Yoga’s first two limbs known as the yamas, abstentions or moral restraints, and niyamas, ethical observances in one’s personal discipline and practice, museums can establish socially responsible operations that connect with their audiences and neighbors. The five yamas are a code of conduct for how to treat others. Theyinclude ahiṃsā (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (refraining from stealing), brahmacharya (celibacy), and aparigraha (refraining from coveting). The five niyamas are a code of conduct for establishing a moral blueprint of action within ourselves. These include sauca (cleanliness), santoṣa (contentment), tapas (austerity), svādhyāya(study of the scriptures), and Īśvara-praṇidhāna (devotion to God). The yamas and niyamas are the building blocks necessary for spiritual activism.

Yoga teacher and spiritual mentor Hari-kirtana das distinguishes social action from spiritual activism by motive, citing the Bhagavad Gita as instruction: “If we want to turn our social action into spiritual activism,” he writes, “Arjuna is our role model: we can follow his lead up the yoga ladder to higher levels of consciousness and a correspondingly higher level of motivation.” The lowest rung of the ladder is self interest. Pure motivations result in personal equanimity of mind, body, and spirit. Each rung up the ladder expands our reach and our actions take on more import, thereby making the purity of intent more impactful. We move from individual beings to family members, colleagues, community members, compatriots, members of the human race, contributors to the greater good of all living beings, and many steps between. Near the middle of this transformational path to spiritual activism, on the way to our highest level of consciousness, we recognize the lived experience of how we impact the world around us and how it impacts us. This pivotal moment is an opportunity for museums to actualize their potential as zones of “prefigurative politics,” what scholars Mark Chou and Roland Bleiker define as spaces in which subtle forms of protest and ideologies are negotiated before being implemented into everyday life. Yoga museology is a five-part process of reorganizing museum infrastructure that activates galleries as prefigurative political sites to debunk American cultural hegemony, white privilege, colonial legacies, and primitivist attitudes en route to liberation.

Read more

In Hindu cosmology, we learn about the four yugas – four periods of time, or ages, that repeat cyclically. It is often said by spiritual teachers that we are currently living in the kali yuga, which is characterized by a loss of wisdom and the collapse of traditional authorities, virtue, and clarity. The kali yuga is a time of ignorance, when the knowledge about who we are has been obscured by ethical decline and disorder.

Among the various challenges associated with the kali yuga, one that stands out to me is this idea of authority.

The recent decline of faith in institutions, governments, ideologies, and cultural narratives that during a previous time may have felt natural and normal begs the question of how this has happened, and of course why. Answering these questions seems to first require grappling with how authority is generated and sustained – not from the outside, but from within.

What makes a tradition of thinking, a culture, a mindset, a system of knowledge, or a theoretical disposition authoritative for us? What imbues it with a sense of meaningfulness – not as something heirarchically ‘handed down’ from some patriarchal or paternalistic position, but something that emerges from an inner alignment?

In whatever direction we look, it seems evident that a once-prevailing worldview and scaffolding of knowledge is in decline. To this, we pose a question: what scaffolding of knowledge will take its place? Will the old normality reassert itself, or will a ‘new normal’ continue to be forged out of the rubble of what once was? And who stands to benefit? As a new normal becomes increasingly ‘authorized’ by the naturalizing effects of cultural habit, who will be served?

And perhaps most importantly for contemplatives, what is our role in this process? How do we speak authentically for truth, value, and principle when no one seems to agree on the source from which they derive? What does it mean to know something at a deeper level than what is trafficked in the modern social media economy of ideas and opinions? To put it in an Indian philosophical framing, what is a valid source of knowledge?

For the Pratyabhijñā philosophical tradition of medieval Kashmir, the most important means of knowledge (pramāṇa) is referred to as āgama. Often translated as “scripture,” āgama has a more expansive meaning as that which is “always arriving.” It is the governing intelligence of reality, the primordial Self at the heart of everything that arises spontaneously by means of its own intrinsic dynamism. As such, it is the only authority that never declines – because it is the ground upon which all relative authorities gain traction.

Grappling with how we think about knowledge today – and how we resolve the crisis of authority by anchoring it within ourselves – is to pursue a subtler kind of epistemic ground. If we pursue that ground through ideology or through an imagined consensus imposed by a powerfully vocal few, we risk enabling authority’s externalist shadow – authoritarianism.

While these considerations are philosophical ones, their implications extend beyond a merely intellectual digression. As a student of these tradtions, it might be my own biased view, but engaging with the Pratyabhijñā (and contemplative philosophies more generally) are rich resources for understanding what is happening to our world right now. They bear insights into what personal and collective strategies might be sufficient to the task of responding to current events with wisdom rather than reactivity.

At the end of the day, the subtlest authority is a matter of the heart. As the Tantrik philosopher, Maheśvarānanda says in his jaw-droppingly beautiful text, the Mahārthamañjarī:

“Our only scripture is the vibration of our own heart, in which all modes of awareness collide and gather — a pulsation, a reflexive awareness, a profound wonder (camatkāra).”

Maheśvarānanda · Mahārthamañjarī

This reflection initiates a new Embodied Philosophy “thought experiment” – The Scaffolding. Partly a weekly newsletter to inform our international community of what’s new and what’s coming up at Embodied Philosophy, it’s also intended to introduce a regular cadence of philosophical exploration to the heart of EP’s outreach.

Since we first opened our digital doors in 2015, EP has been deeply committed to exploring how yoga traditions, contemplative practice, and cross-cultural philosophy can help us navigate the challenges of modern life. These traditions still have much to teach us.

Ancient wisdom is not a dead relic or an archaeological artifact. As with any tradition from another culture and time, there are inevitably ideas, perspectives, and practices that won’t fit our contemporary cultural context. However, amidst what appears to be out of alignment with our current needs and commitments, there shines forth an altogether timely and necessary reminder.

In many contemplative traditions, there is a perennial message: connect with that which is most meaningful. While the form that carries this meaningfulness may shift depending on tradition, the essential content of insight remains continous. There is something deeply profound about this life – something magnificently meaningful and infinitely accessible. It whispers to us in every moment, encouraging us toward the blissful repose of its nurturing beatitude.

As external systems of authority rise and fall, the paradoxical persistence of life unfolds anew – offering its nectarean delights to be tasted, relished, imbibed, and embodied. Resting in the authority of this Tantrik truth – that life, at its deepest level, is a kind of rapturous relishing – is not an invitation to escape the problems we encounter in our communities or in the worlds we inhabit. It is an invitation toward a source of knowledge that has always provided answers to the burning questions that drive and animate us.

Toward what authority do we – consciously or unconsciously – direct the questions that strike us as most timely and meaningful? If we direct them toward the “scriptures” of an externalized institution or discourse, the answers we receive may prove to be as unstable as the ground on which such authorities are built.

In a world that demonstrates only one permanence – the permanence of impermanence –, the non-dual Tantrik traditions suggest that we redirect the most important of life’s questions to the scripture of our own hearts. Not to the ego or to the limited personality with its variable likes and dislikes, but rather to the limitless creativity that vibrates within each of us.

I look forward to exploring more questions with you in this first volume of The Scaffolding.

In wonder and curiosity,
Jacob Kyle
Director of Embodied Philosophy

Contemplative Prompt:

Thank you for reading.

Want to sign up to receive the newsletter - and get a free yoga philosophy reading list in return?

Join now

Explore the Print and/or Digital Issues of Tarka Journal in our online shop.