Bhakti Yoga: A Personal Relationship with the Divine

“The nature of spiritual devotion is the supreme love.” – Nārada Bhakti Sūtras1

An endearing aspect of the devotional (bhakti) yogic path is the cultivation of an intimate and personal relationship with one’s chosen deity (iṣṭa devatā). In contrast to other yogic paths that focus on ritual, austerity, or meditation, the bhakti path utilizes the power of our emotions as part of the foundation of this spiritual relationship. The flames of longing for union are intentionally stoked to melt old emotional attachments and forge a new identity in relationship to the divine. A completely immersive and personal love of a divine “other” is utilized to redirect awareness from the miserable isolation of individual ego-identity to an expansive state of unity with the divine Beloved. In a systematic way, the devotee’s tremendous love is shifted from personal to universal until the Beloved is seen in all phenomena, as all beings, and in every experience.

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Mandala of the Divine Dance

Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa are depicted at the center of a joyous group of dancing milkmaids (gopis). The figures are portrayed in a circular dance, known as the rās-līlā, which means “sweet act” or “divine dance.” This celebrated event took place during a full-moon nights, when the milkmaids of Vrindavan snuck away from their households to the forest when they heard Kṛṣṇa playing his flute. There, they danced and engaged in love play throughout the night. Esoterically, this long “night” is the Night of Brahmā, which lasts approximately four billion years! It is a metaphor for the dance of life and for the romantic nature of Bhakti yoga, wherein a devotee falls in ecstatic spiritual love with the deity.

Viśvarūpa: Universal Form

Viśvarūpa (Vish-vah-roo-pah) is wonder, awe, our most expansive mystical experience, shown in traditional artworks as a composite being representing all living beings considered as a whole. His name literally means “Universal Form.” This is the supreme soul manifesting all its forms and attributes simultaneously. It is one of the most popular subjects for sacred artists, one that challenges the imagination and allows for great creative freedom.

Viśvarupa is generally associated with a specific description of Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavad Gitā, the renowned Hindu text. The story is set amidst a civil war; it is an allegory for our own inner spiritual battle, the practice of yoga, and the nature of reality. Bhakti Yoga was described as a distinct spiritual path equal to the other classical yogas for the first time in the scripture.

In this tale, Kṛṣṇa drives a chariot for our hero, Arjuna-a metaphor for allowing god to direct our life when we are in difficult times. Our physical body is the chariot and our senses are the horses that carry us through the world. At one point during the discourse, after Kṛṣṇa has revealed many truths, Arjuna asks his friend to reveal his cosmic form: Viśvarūpa. The awe-inspiring vision is so vast, beautiful, and terrifying that our brave hero is overwhelmed and begs for it to end. So Kṛṣṇa returns to his familiar handsome self, and the story continues.#

Rādhā: Rapturous Love of God

Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, often portrayed as intertwined lovers, exemplify romantic love in Hindu myth. It is noteworthy that Kṛṣṇa is her lover, not her husband; their affair is charged with the thrill of danger and secrecy. This could be an allegory for devoting oneself to spiritual practice even when the rest of one’s family does not. She was a simple milkmaid, but is usually portrayed as an enchanting young girl dressed in scintillating finery, surrounded by flowers and bucolic scenery, symbolizing the passion of her erotic play and zest for life. Rādhā is considered the supreme goddess by her devotees because Kṛṣṇa enchants the world, but she enchants even him! She exemplifies the compelling power of romantic longing, as well as the bliss of union. Her love for him was so deep that she came to see him in every person, all objects, becoming the very embodiment of devotion. She possesses the power to attract the all-attractive personality of godhead, so she is the primordial potency of her beloved. Far from being a servant or a subdued wife, she is jealous and chastises Kṛṣṇa when he strayed or neglected her for too long.

For the spiritual practitioner, the energy of longing for complete union is itself divine, as this impulse inspires one to seek beyond worldly concerns. Rādhā embodies the nature of this divine longing, which is irresistible to the object of her devotion, Kṛṣṇa, who embodies the beauty of ultimate truth.

Peacock Rangoli

This rangoli for Mīrābai features a pair of peacocks, in honor of her dearest Kṛṣṇa, who always wears a peacock feather in his hair. The national bird of India, this spectacular bird is significant for many reasons. One is that its elaborate courtship dance and distinctive matin gcall coincide with the arrival of the monsoon rains. After months of scorching hot weather, the cool rains are a blessing. All of nature springs back to vibrant and colorful life. So peacocks are symbolic of abundance, romance, and fertility-much like the handsome Kṛṣṇa.

During the festivals throughout India, common people make decorative rangolis like this one on the thresholds of their homes or on the ground, to welcome guests, beautify the area, and raise everyone’s spirits. Although the designs are improvised and the symbols may not b e directly related to a specific deity, producing them is a devotional act.

Kṛṣṇa Gopāla: Divine Player

Kṛṣṇa Gopāla (Krish-nah Go-paah-lah) is romance, beauty, play and pleasure. He is the divine musician who plays the enchanting song we dance to in this game of life. As a handsome youth, he participates in the common tasks of daily life, showing that divinity resides even in the most humble of circumstances. Subject of innumerable works of art, poetry, and music, he is among the most popular of Hindu deities. The famous Maha Mantra, known in the West as hare Kṛṣṇa, belongs to him. Most people know only his youthful form, but he grew up to be a warrior, as described in the Bhagavad Gītā. Many Hindus consider him to be a form of Viṣṇu, but to his devotees, he is supreme.

Thank you for reading this article from Tarka Vol. 1, On Bhakti. Vol.9, On Power, will be coming out soon.

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Many consider the yakṣiṇīs to be the ancestors of the Tantrik yoginīs. To trace the goddesses back to them is thus to follow a historical thread that runs from the soil, the earth, and our ecology, to the esoteric heart of non-duality.

Learn more about the yoginīs in these two short videos, taken from Embodied Philosophy’s course on the Matsyendrasaṃhitā with last year.

1. The Yoginīs Explained

In this video, we look at what some consider the pre-Vedic, Dravidian substrate that is believed by some to be where the yoginīs emerge from. We look at their early, antinomian significance and how they were gradually internalized in Kashmir Śaivism as symbolic, grace-bestowing “flying goddesses.”

The video concludes on a detail that seems quite suggestive: Yakṣiṇī, the name of these ecological earth-spirits reappears as the name of that goddess associated with the crown chakra.

Watch the Video on Youtube

2. Chakras and the Seven Yoginīs

For most of their early history, the yoginīs were feared. The Mātṛkās — the “little mothers” — were narrated as fierce and bloodthirsty: divine feminine forms turned dangerous, the archetypal mother contorted into the inverse of herself. And then, over centuries, the tradition integrated them into various maps of embodiment.

This integrative move of leaving nothing out — treating even our most untamed energies as gateways rather than as obstacles — is an essential aspect of the Tantric worldview. It’s also the subject of our second video on the yoginīs.

In this video, we trace how goddesses of sound and vibration came to inhabit the subtle body: the Saptamātṛkās as the source of mantra; the full range of sensory faculties; and ultimately the iconographic expressions of the seven chakras — where the chakra is no longer a “wheel,” but a divine presence to invoke and inhabit.

Watch the Video on Youtube

Thank you for watching!

If this brief introduction to the yoginīs has resonated with you, this is precisely what we will be exploring this July at Heart of the Yoginīs Meditation Retreat in Taos, New Mexico, or via streaming online.

Across the week, we’ll map seven yoginīs onto the seven chakras, engaging textual study, mantra recitation, and deep meditation.

Rather than pathologizing passion or trying to eliminate it from our lives, we’re exploring how the Tantrik tradition refines and transmutes our intensity into clarity in the Heart of the Yoginīs Meditation Retreat. Over seven days, from July 11th–17th, we’ll be working with the yoginī maṇḍala, mantra, and the aesthetic theory of rasa.

The approach is intended to be both rigorous and deeply experiential. No prior Sanskrit or formal meditation training is required.

We start very soon, on July 11th 2026. Now is the time to join if you have not already!

Learn more and join now

There are at least two meanings of līlā relevant to the student of Indian traditions and śāstras. These meanings might be described as “dualistic” and “non-dualistic,” indicating how the supreme playfulness that is līlā is to be perceived and understood. In the dualistic schools of Hinduism, līlā denotes those activities that god participates in with his devotees. In the non-dualistic schools, līlā refers to the great dance of life, the exquisite sport of existence. Exploring both of these meanings will lead us into the larger question of ecology that guides this issue of Tarka.

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I did a five-minute search of “meditation retreat” videos on YouTube, and mostly what I found were variations on the theme of…

“I meditated on a retreat for 48 hours, and this is what I learned…”​

or…

“I meditated all day for 4 days, and I’ll never be the same again.”

There’s a pattern here that is familiar to me, because it reflects a trend I observed when I moved to NYC in 2010. In the early 2010s, it was a fad to approach the “meditation retreat” like many people now do the “ayahuasca ceremony.”

People shared stories about how they “did Vipassana” – describing how “high” they got from the practice and the crazy visualizations they would have. “Was it a hallucination or was it a vision?” they’d often wonder. The excitement was, of course, around how unique these experiences were, by contrast with the drudgery and normality of everyday life.

​Vipassana, of course, has a very long history in Buddhism, but the “vipassana retreat” has a much more recent history. Vipassanā (in Pali; in Sanskrit, vipaśyana) is vi- plus the root /paś means “seeing-apart,” “seeing-into,” in the sense of discriminative or penetrative seeing.

​​Vipassana, of course, has a very long history in Buddhism, but the “vipassana retreat” has a much more recent history. It almost never stands alone, as it does in the context of the modern-day vipassana retreat. It is half of the dyad samatha-vipassanā, equanimity and insight. Samatha steadies and unifies the mind; vipassanā sees the conditioned field of ephemeral awareness.

The locus classicus that modern movements lean on hardest is the four foundations of mindfulness, especially the contemplation of the body. But in their canonical setting these were never a freestanding “technique”; they sat inside a comprehensive training, the full eightfold path, and a holistic cosmology and theory of practice in which awakening was the point.

Back to recent history, in very much the same way that the “ayahuasca ceremony” became trendy a few years afterward, the “I did Vipassana” experience was on the shortlist of must-haves for any hipster or yoga-spiritual type in New York City. The point here isn’t to critique vipassana and ayahuasca, or claim that they’re not legitimate or meaningful for many people. Rather, I’m critiquing the “been there, done that, got the t-shirt” model of modern-day spirituality.

There are, of course, many people thinking holistically within these contexts. People who regularly attend ayahuasca ceremonies (which, full transparency, I have also done myself) will often encourage integration. Those who teach and regularly attend vipassana retreats will also emphasize the importance of incorporating the practice into one’s daily life – after retreat. But, for the majority of people I encountered, this was generally not the norm. It was a box to tick.

This is perhaps because the “retreat” or “ceremony” is approached first as a “peak experience” we first hear about, then something we want to have the experience of for ourselves, and then something we can tick it off the box of spiritual things we’ve done. Ultimately, it becomes an eccentric story we share at a dinner party.

For those that pursue a path of deep sādhana, however, a retreat is something different. Yes, a retreat is an opportunity to go very deep inside. Yes, a wide range of experiences can happen. But the deeper and more sustainable benefits of retreat are the discipline, inspiration, and insight that we cultivate for our lives beyond retreat.

​For those of us who are sādhakas – that is, those who strive to integrate practice fully into our lives – retreat is a kind of ritual. It is a ritual of replenishing the resources of our own commitment, stabilizing ourselves in a clarity about what it is we’re doing in sādhana, and developing a resilience and knowledge around the why of sādhana.

​Like with any ritual, it requires repetition.

​Obviously, many of us can’t all afford to go to a 3-day, 4-day, or 7-day retreat in Costa Rica or some other expensive place. But devoting certain times of the year to practicing more deeply in a container with less distractions, less everyday responsibilities, and perhaps in a place that isn’t saturated with our personality and personal preoccupations, is a way that we preserve the depths of our practice for the times in between periods of deep retreat.

​The retreat helps our practice not become so shallow and ossified that it starts to feel negotiable, optional, or an indulgence we can trade away and engage with just when we feel like it. We are reminded in the depths just how important our connection is to that for everything that happens at the surface.

​While you don’t need a fancy retreat center or exotic ceremony in Peru to develop this kind of ritual in your life, it can help to learn what that kind of ritual looks like and feels like. If we take the time to participate in at least one retreat with a supportive energetic container, we discover ways to organize our lives for the deepening, anchoring, and grounding of our daily sādhana.

Thank you for reading.

This July, grounded in the spirit of replenishing the resources of sustainable householder practice, Embodied Philosophy is running the Heart of the Yoginīs retreat July 11th - 17th 2026, and you are invited.

While live and in-person in Taos, there is also the option to join us online – if it isn’t possible right now for you to travel.

Learn More and Join Now

I’d already finished a full cupful of chilled tandai—and was heading for a second—when my brother-in-law approached me with words of caution. “Don’t drink the green stuff,” he advised. “It’s laced.”

Too late.

Unknowing of what most things are in India, I’d grabbed the green cup. I was thirsty because I’d been dancing all morning with a pack of women I didn’t know in a local park. It was the annual Holi festival and things had already gotten wild. They were about to get even wilder as the “green” started to take its effect.

Famed the “festival of colors,” Holi occurs on the brilliant full Moon in the Vedic “month of flowers.” It’s signaled by bonfires burning up collective animosity in the streets. In our English idiom, we “bury the hatchet.” On Holi, these North Indians burn it up in every neighborhood.

Enemies become friends. Servants and their employers embrace. Children dump buckets of colored water on their elders’ heads. No one minds. It’s great fun to be pummeled with water balloons by three friends on a motorcycle wearing rainbow wigs—or to stalk the neighborhood armed with a water gun hunting for similar prey of your own.

The cause for celebration is the stuff of myth and legend.

Once an indestructible demon—Hiryanakashipu—oppressed the earth. He couldn’t be killed by either god, human, or animal. He couldn’t be killed either in the house, or outside it, either in the day or night. In this way, he eluded all attempts to subdue his evil reign.

Hiranyakashipu’s son, Prahlad was born to defeat him, setting his devotion on Narasiṁha (the half-man, half-lion avatāra of Vishnu) to accomplish his fate. To defeat a demon who lies in the cracks requires a similar foe. Narasiṁha embodies the power of the liminal (the “betwix and between”) as a “third option” to the opposition of right and wrong.

As Prahlad planned to defeat his father, his aunt, Holika, lured him to sit in a burning fire with her. She tricked him into believing that she would offer protection. Instead, she wore a magic cloak that prevented fire from burning her, but left Prahlad vulnerable to the flames.

Prahlad trusted. He didn’t react. Instead, he prayed. As a devotee of Narasiṁha he knew a solution would arise that would produce a surprise outcome.

Just as he was to be burnt alive a miracle happened. A gust of wind suddenly appeared and blew the cloak off Holika and onto Prahlad, burning his evil aunt to ash. As she was incinerating, she begged her nephew’s forgiveness, an emotion in-between love and hate.

Since then, every year on this same full Moon in the month of flowers, people burn up all their old enmities. They forgive all the injustices that have been done to them. They spread the colors of love everywhere. And they shout, “Holi hai! It’s Holi!” in honor of the demoness who was healed by the third option.

The Third Option

As for me, I was really starting to feel the “green” as the drumbeats became more pronounced. The music started to lead those of us on the dance floor to greater heights of group ecstasy. I thought to myself, “This couldn’t get any more fun!”

Then it did.

Two dancers made their way through the crowd, costumed as the lovers Radha and Krishna. I was instantly mesmerized by their expert dance moves, exquisite costumes and heavily made-up faces. I couldn’t tell whether they were men or women. I couldn’t tell if they were human or divine. I’d never seen anything so beautiful as their dance with their theatrically expert facial expressions and perfect hand gestures.

I leaned over to a new friend (who’d just dumped a fistful of pink powder on my head) and shouted over the music, “Who are they?” Delightedly she shouted back, “Kinnar!”

The Sanskrit word, kinnāra, is itself the same question I’d asked: kiṁ nāra, “Is that a man?” The operative word in the query is “that,” referring to someone “in-between,” neither man nor woman, god nor animal. She was referring to India’s community of transgender people commonly (and derogatorily) known as hijra.

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Ardhanārīśvara is a hybridized deity form of Śiva and Śakti and is thus popularly depicted as half-male and half-female. A compound of ardha (अर्ध), meaning “half,” nārī (नारी), meaning “woman,” and īśvara(ईश्वर), meaning “lord,” the name literally means “Lord who is half woman.” Ardhanārīśvara is thus a profound and empowering symbol of the “non-binary” and philosophically represents the non-duality and non-separableness of Śiva (Consciousness) and Śakti (Energy).

There are several references to Ardhanārīśvara in the purāṇas, a genre of Indian literature that details the myths, stories, and legends of the Hindu pantheon. In one tale of the Śiva Purāṇa, the god of creation, Brahmā, creates all beings, who unfortunately all turn out to be male. He instructs them to regenerate and reproduce themselves, but they are – unsurprisingly – unable to do so. Śiva, therefore, appears in an androgynous form, which highlights Brahmā’s error and makes him realize why his creation is not yet reproductive. Brahmā thus engages in intense tapas, and Śiva, pleased by Brahmā’s devotion, separates Śakti from himself so that Brahmā may appeal to her directly. With praise and devotion, he entreats her for the power to create the female sex; Śakti finally agrees, and creation through copulation is born.

For an issue on queer dharma, a tale about the origins of reproduction might strike us as a strange one to include, given the fact that many queer people are unable to participate (and are oftentimes uninterested) in biological reproduction. But queering this myth from the Śiva Purāṇa can offer some fruitful fodder for exploring the role of divine creativity in queer experience. After all, if Ardhanārīśvara symbolically depicts the coincidence and simultaneity of binary sexual energies within the very body of deity, then those queer bodies that transcend the social construction of gender are given a powerful symbol for non-binary experience.

In the aforementioned tale, the creator god, Brahmā, is incapable of fulfilling his creative role with only male energy populating the cosmos. It is only through his recognition of duality-in-unity, the non-dual Ardhanārīśvara, that he discovers the missing piece of the puzzle. Aside from the relatively banal observation that biological women are necessary for reproduction, this story illustrates an obstacle to divine creativity in the privileging of one gendered category. The effulgent upsurge of creativity that characterizes much spiritual insight is blocked by the normalizing of masculine gender to the exclusion of the “other.” It is only by discovering the non-binary within oneself that we discover how that contracted mode of identification that is a self-enclosed “gender” contributes to a limited view of reality itself. Ardhanārīśvara represents an embodiment in which no gender is excluded and therefore in which all such expression is permitted and divinely celebrated.

When I was in my early twenties and just beginning to explore my queer identity, I stumbled upon an image of Ardhanārīśvara on a greeting card in a Seattle bookstore. With no context at that point to understand the iconographic and philosophical origins of this image, I was nonetheless immediately drawn to it for what I took to be an empowering depiction of androgyny and queerness. Years before I began deeply studying Hinduism and Indian philosophy, this greeting card image was the first representation of the divine that made sense to me following my childhood in the Christian church. Ardhanārīśvara mirrored my own experience as a queer person, who grew up being castigated and bullied for “screaming like a girl” and behaving in ways that were considered taboo by the fundamentalist gender binary that was still pervasive in the 80s and 90s.

Needless to say, I bought that greeting card, and well before I had an altar on which I could place my sacred symbols, this mūrti of Ardhanārīśvara was prominently displayed in my apartment. I would gaze at it again and again, subtly prostrating to the wisdom I knew to be emanating from it, surrendering to a mysterious sign that beckoned forth and highlighted the spiritual significance of my experience as a gay man and a queer person. In a culture utterly bereft of divine queer symbols, this living relationship with a meaningful symbol offered my first taste of the significance of queer spiritual iconography. It pointed to my thirst for spiritual images that include, represent, and embrace the divine character of my lived experience. Many years later, I added a brass mūrti of Ardhanārīśvara to my altar, where it continues to inspire and refine my exploration of how queerness and spiritual practice intersect in my life.

Ardhanārīśvara is a potentially empowering symbol of queer liberation for spiritual seekers, as it, in a profound sense, reveals that if god is “them-self” non-binary (or trans-binary), then here is an approach to god that includes us – indeed that illustrates the divine character of queer experience. For many cultures where god is monopolized as a markedly male, cisgender deity, Ardhanārīśvara is a radical subversion of the theological status quo. It is thus an important symbol for a constructive queer theology, a theology in which god is, in a significant sense, queer – insofar as god is the source of all binaries and is therefore non-binary in its very nature.

Thank you for reading this article from Tarka Vol. 5, On Queer Dharma.

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Written by Pranada Comtois

Śrī Krishna Caitanya is an extraordinary person of the sixteenth century whose example of ecstatic embodiment is unique in the world. His contagious spiritual emotions and kirtan flooded the Indian subcontinent and demonstrated the power of bhakti to dispel the deluding power of maya and bring one to love as an eternal state of being.

In Journey to Gorakhpur: An Encounter with Christ Beyond Christianity, Christian theologian John Moffitt writes,

Of all the saints in recorded history, East or West, he [Sri Caitanya] seems to me the supreme example of a soul carried away on a tide of ecstatic love of God. . . . His life in the holy town of Puri is the story of a man in a state of almost continuous spiritual intoxication. Illuminating discourses, deep contemplation, moods of loving communion with God, were daily occurrences.

Śrī Caitanya’s metaphysics and striking, unparalleled ecstasies are delineated in his biography Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta, a work of mature theological scholarship. The descriptions of Caitanya’s unprecedented bodily transformations of divine love are corroborated by numerous other biographers who were society’s elite intellectuals, littérateurs, ministers, and nobleman.

We hear that Caitanya [1486 – 1534] would swoon and lose consciousness for hours simply on hearing the Hare Krishna mahā-mantra. It would take significant effort on the part of his associates to bring him back from these states. These remarkable incidents were not rare events but daily occurrences, and toward the end of his life he was rarely in external consciousness.

Caitanya explained that the names of the Supreme are identical with the Supreme and therefore we can come into direct personal contact with Reality by chanting his names and be transported beyond time and space. Whenever Caitanya returned from his many spiritual trances, he spoke of accessing the realm of bhakti – the world of affection – a realm available to everyone in any position, at any time, without cost, without ritual, and with or without a pure heart – simply by chanting the mahā-mantra in a mood of humility.

When the Raja of Puri first observed Śrī Caitanya’s group kirtan (saṅkīrtana) in the streets of the town, he was amazed. He had never witnessed that kind of kirtan, so full of love and ecstatic dancing. As he ruled over a city that hosted millions of pilgrims annually, he was well acquainted with a variety of spiritual practices. But this kirtan stood out. His brother-in-law Gopinatha said, “This is prema-kīrtana; it is the creation of Śrī Caitanya.”

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Floss, Student Coordinator & Integration Facilitator for Sādhana School, sat down on Zoom to talk to Lee — a yoga and yoga philosophy teacher, and year-long student of Embodied Philosophy’s in-depth programme into the non-dual Tantrik Shaiva-Shakta traditions, Sādhana School — to reflect on practice, philosophy, and the search for depth in yoga.

Floss: Why did you join Sādhana School?

Lee: I had done Jacob’s Matsyendrasaṃhitā practice last summer, and I really loved the way he taught it — this little nugget of knowledge, and then very deep practice. I resonated so much with that style of teaching, learning, practice and study. I hadn’t done a deep dive with another teacher in many years, and I just felt like it was the right time and the right person.

Floss: You described it at one point as almost “college-like,” but in a good way — like being invited into serious study again.

Lee: It’s definitely master’s level. And that’s really what I was looking for. It is so easy to find ways to scratch the surface, but I’d much rather go deeper.

Floss: What was your background before joining?

Lee: I’ve been practicing yoga on and off for probably 20 years. My entry point was actually philosophy — I took a philosophy of mind class in college, and the textbook was the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. From there, so much of it made sense to my internal philosophy, things that I had written before, or understood, or thought. It put some words and language to it. Later I found Buddhist meditation, then yoga studios, and eventually grew as a yoga student and eventually a teacher. I now teach āsana, meditation and yoga philosophy.

Floss: Can you talk about the relationship between theory and practice in Sādhana School?

Lee: I think theory gives language and understanding to direct experiences we might receive through practice. And on the other side, some of these deeper practices — like nyāsa or uccāra — don’t quite make sense without the theory.

With Sādhana School, we get this very deep level of learning and study, and then practices that bring it to life. The Mātrikā term was a really good example: we spent time talking about why sound and speech are so important, and then we did the practices, bringing those sounds to life internally.

At one point I joked, maybe our time would be better spent just practicing than talking about it. But the study matters because it gives us language. It helps us understand experience.

I think if we had just done the nyāsa without the study, it would have been really, really hard, right? Because it would have been like, why am I doing this? As teachers, too, we are always seeking to strike that balance between theory and practice.

Floss: How has your practice changed through the programme?

Lee: I think I always used to think study was going to be the way I moved deeper. But deeper practice, and being in the practice more frequently, has significantly changed who I am and how I understand myself.

Jacob’s push to sit for twenty minutes twice a day — and then Nataraj echoing that — has now become part of my day-to-day. I’m still doing twenty minutes a day, two times a day, which I think was a good push. It brings the practice to an even level with the study.

Floss: What has been the most valuable insight for you so far?

Lee: The Spanda term was really powerful. I feel like I had a direct experience of Spanda, and now I have the language to describe it. I really enjoyed the deep learning: where the teachings come from, the study of teachers like Abhinavagupta and Kṣemarāja, and the context for why we do certain practices.

And then the dance between Jacob and Nataraj as our teachers added a level of softness — a deep breath after times of deep study.

Floss: How have the teachings supported your life and teaching more broadly?

Lee: They’ve helped me give language to my own inner experience, but also to share that language with the people who practice with me.

Rasa is another example. I had heard of it before, but both Jacob and Nataraj have such a love for that idea. Now I can see that flavour, beauty and depth show up in my life and practice in a totally different way.

Floss: Any final reflections?

Lee:

I would just add, I’ve had this connection to Tantra for a couple of years now, but — until now — I haven’t had someone tied to the lineages like both Jacob and Nataraj are.

I think that has been the missing piece to my personal practice. I have found it so valuable.

Thank you for reading.

Interested in tasting the transformative teachings of Sādhana School?

You are warmly invited to join Embodied Philosophy’s 7-day retreat, The Heart of the Yoginīs: Kuṇḍalinī, Cakra Sādhana, and the Liberation of Passion - this July.

July 11th–17th
Join online or in person in Taos, New Mexico

Learn more & register

By Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier

Young Kṛṣṇa among the cowherds is an iconic image central to North Indian Vaiṣṇava traditions of bhakti. Although Tamil South Indian literature and traditions developed and changed some of the elements, the basic characteristics of the narratives remained. For example, stories concerning Kṛṣṇa’s love-play with the gopīs (cowherd maidens) are paramount for understanding Southern Kṛṣṇa bhakti, where the union and separation of the gopīs with and from Kṛṣṇa become the primary material for understanding the devotees’ own union and separation with the divine.

The ancient Tamil worldview can be seen in classical Tamil poetry (called caṅkam), which spans nine hundred years (from the third century B.C.E. to the sixth century C.E.) The poetry is divided into two categories, akam (poetry of the “inside,” dealing with the inner world of emotions) and puṟam (poetry of the “outside,” dealing with the outer world of war, politics, the socius, and even religion).1

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One of the most important aspects of spiritual practice is being clear about our objective.

Now, I will say that our objective, our goal for sādhana, keeps changing. It evolves.

Many of us come to the spiritual path because we could not find the answers we were looking for anywhere else. We faced difficulties, searched for solutions, and eventually turned towards spirituality.

Others may come to spirituality as a way of escaping the world. Whatever our reasons, it is important that we are honest about them from the beginning.

Why are we here? What is it that we actually want?

I have seen, and been through this myself, that many people arrive on the path declaring that they want liberation.

But what even is liberation? What do you think happens after liberation?

You’re still going to have to live your life and deal with all those things you don’t want to deal with. There is no free lunch.

Paradoxically, being clear about what we truly want can actually accelerate the process of practice.

In the Śaiva traditions, this is sometimes described as the path of yoga and bhoga—spiritual practice and worldly experience. There is nothing wrong with approaching practice because we want our lives to improve. There is nothing wrong with saying, honestly, “I want a better job,” or “I want a relationship,” or “I want things to get better.”

There is nothing the matter with that.

But if you come to it with, "I only want liberation," there's a huge possibility of bypassing—not even knowing what we are doing—and then having all kinds of ideas about liberation which are not right.

For this reason, understanding why we are on a path may be one of the most important things we can do.

Thank you for reading!

We hope you enjoyed this article, taken from a recent workshop on The Way of Śrīvidyā with Dr Kavitha Chinnaiyan

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To live a life according to the wisdom of ecology is the most urgent task for humanity today. What can the philosophy of yoga contribute to this critical challenge? How can we develop an environmental ethics according to yogic principles? What would a sustainable ethics based on yoga look like?

Mind in Nature

For science, viruses represent the smallest accumulation and diversity of molecules which is recognized as “life.” Maybe in the near future, when more advanced techniques are employed, we will recognize the sentience of smaller aggregations of molecules. For now, viruses personify the boundary between life and non-life according to science.

According to the so-called Santiago theory, developed by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, the process of cognition is intimately linked to the process of life. Hence, the brain is not necessary for the mind to exist. A worm, or a tree, has no brain but has a mind. The simplest forms of life are capable of perception and thus cognition. For the spiritual sages of India, it is impossible to draw a final line between animate and inanimate beings. According to yoga philosophy, there is “purusha or consciousness” even in the so-called inanimate world of rocks. This type of “consciousness” is dormant, as if asleep, because there is no nervous system in rocks.

Indigenous peoples also experience a kind of spirit or consciousness in the cosmos. In the international best-seller, The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird report that, when killing a tree, some indigenous tribes have a heart-to-heart conversation with the tree. In no uncertain terms would they let the tree know what was going to happen, and finally they would ask for forgiveness for having to commit this unfortunate act of violence.

In the same book, they also documented scientific experiments on plants with a modified lie detector. The instrument would register when a plant’s leaves were cut or burnt. Not only that, when a plant “understood” it was going to be killed, it went into a state of shock or “numbness.” Thus, the scientists explained, possibly preventing it from undue suffering, which again may explain the “warnings” given to trees by some Native peoples.

Such laboratory tests may sound outrageous to materialists, but not to the ancient, animist peoples from all over the world, nor to Indian yogis or Westerns mystics. They have for long informed us that we do not live in a dead and meaningless universe. But unfortunately, nature cannot always express its grief when it is damaged or destroyed. To protect it, we must therefore conserve and properly utilize our natural resources.

If nature — earth, trees, and water — truly experience a form of existential pain or grief, at least when destroyed and polluted, our conservation efforts and our ecological outlook must first and foremost acknowledge this innate suffering. And by acknowledging it, nature becomes part of us. To paraphrase noted psychologist James Hillman — one of the innovators in the new field of eco-psychology — our mind is enlarged to include nature; the world becomes us. And if we destroy that world, out of ignorance or greed, we destroy a part of ourselves. As the Tantric yogi, Abhinavagupta, suggested in one of his texts, the Tantraloka, that the world, as seen from the state of a spiritually enlightened mind, is an expression of our own deep self.

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The idea that “the world is an illusion” and that reality might not actually be as it appears may seem counterintuitive, a topic more at home in fantasy literature and science fiction than in therapy and philosophy. Yet almost every religion addresses illusion, to some degree, and highlights the imagination as an effective tool to engage with it. This suggests that perhaps there is more to truth than what is encountered through objective reasoning. Fantasy, fairy tales, myth, science fiction, sacred geometry, iconography and abstract, impressionistic art all work to communicate truths that run deeper than mere objective, surface analysis. But if imagination binds as frequently as it transforms, how are we to know which forms of illusion are true?

In our daily encounters with other beings, we are continually reminded that though we share certain experiences, we each interpret them differently. This idea is aptly illustrated in the ancient parable from India of the six men who had never before seen an elephant. Each man is blindfolded and led to one part of the elephant. Thus, one man places his hands on the trunk, another on a massive foot of the elephant, another touches his ear, and so forth. Naturally, each man comes away with a different impression of what “elephant,” is. Most of us engage with “reality” on a partial level, even as we may strive to see its fullness. We are each blinded by our implicit biases that are formed through race, religion, class, cultural context, and a variety of other factors. Additionally, algorithms based on our past choices control the type of news and advertisements we receive, thereby solidifying and furthering a particular individual identity and worldview. With consumer-driven technological advances, we risk falling ever deeper into a rabbit hole of our own conscious and unconscious design. “Elephant” is then reduced to a trunk or a foot and we are never graced with the beauty of the elephant’s gentle eyes.

At the same time, the virtual online world is radically expanding our knowledge of others. We are familiar with and deeply care about places we have never been and can cultivate meaningful relationships with people we have never met. Indeed, as Kenneth Rose states in his article for this issue, “The Reality of Illusion,” “Everyday life is rapidly going virtual.” This is all the more significant during this Spring of 2020 and the Covid 19 pandemic. If there is one thing that social distancing due to Covid 19 has demonstrated, it is that we can remain connected even when we are not in the physical presence of other people. The smile through the computer camera is not the same as a hug or a shared meal, but the virtual connection eases the sense of isolation. My ten-year-old son, for example, is not allowed to play with his friends, so in lieu of kicking a soccer ball or jumping on a trampoline, he “meets” with his peers online in a world of virtual gaming – a privilege he was never allowed before the pandemic. He sinks into a computer-generated realm where he imagines himself with superhuman muscles, a cat face, and an ability to jump walls.

I’ve long been wary of allowing kids too much tech. It’s proven to shorten their attention spans and limit their interpersonal skills.1 Yet I now witness a child rejoicing in ever deepening friendships with his cousins and friends who live hundreds of miles away from us – because they play, talk, and laugh together in a virtual world. During quarantine, it feels like a lifeline for a highly social child, but what might be the long-term consequences in a generation of kids who associate friendship and normalcy with virtual connectivity? One thing is clear: technology is a double-edged sword, cutting through myopic viewpoints and isolation, yet at the same time fundamentally changing our mental composition.

With a virtual reality flight simulation, I can experience a bird’s eye view of San Francisco. Heart racing, I soar in between buildings and flinch as I nearly collide with a skyscraper. These kinds of VR-mediated experiences might be the only way to experience life as a bird. Similarly, researchers are exploring how virtual reality experiences can assist the therapeutic process by facilitating types of self-encounters that would not be possible otherwise. In the “Virtual Freud” experiment, for example, the patient narrates his challenges to a virtualized Sigmund Freud, and then is virtually transplanted into Freud, becoming the psychologist himself. From this position, he watches a virtual projection of himself and listens to his previous narrative. This shift of subjective position facilitates a unique affective resonance that would not otherwise be possible. The hypothesis informing this research is that such a newfound perspective could be psychologically beneficial. This and other VR research programs suggest that it is not illusion per se that is the source of bondage, but it is rather how illusion is constructed, framed, and directed that makes all the difference.

The concept of illusion plays an important role in the Buddhist teaching that saṃsāra (the cyclical nature of death and rebirth) is nirvāna (liberation or freedom from saṃsāra).

Saṃsāra is nirvāna when the individual attains a deep insight, sees reality clearly and no longer relates to the world through a process of grasping/clinging that creates dukkha, or suffering. In Hinduism, Advaita Vedānta is famous for its philosophical debates and exploration into the topic of māyā, sometimes translated as illusion or ignorance. Jeffrey D. Long offers a nuanced approach in his article, “The Many Faces of Māyā,” showing that māyā is cognate with the English word magic and indicates the playful nature of the divine, among other things. Not unrelatedly, the use of visual tools like yantras in the Tantrik traditions mediates a connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm. In all of this, the fundamental effort of practice is directed towards seeing the world clearly, without the obfuscating mental filters of ignorance, fear, and desire.

In this issue of Tarka, we engage with the intersection of the modern, virtual world and the legacy of philosophy and contemplative practice that values imagination, dream states, and the significance of illusion. The soteriological basis for almost all contemplative practice is grounded in the idea that reality is not exactly as it appears. Illusion in this sense is not a temporary play on the senses – like walking across hot sand and seeing a distant pool of water that is actually just a mirage made from heat waves. Rather, it is the idea that our everyday waking reality is more like the mirage than our senses are generally willing to let on. Contemplation, in this sense, involves engaging with and accepting the parts of life that are often ignored. What Carl Jung coined “the shadow” is that part of the self that operates on a subconscious level, often unacknowledged, yet yielding a powerful influence upon the individual, their habits, preferences, and health. This concept of the subconscious, shadow, and the knowledge that comes from the dreamstate is central to shamanic practices, yoga (especially within the Yogavāsiṣṭha), and Buddhism and is featured in the articles by Katy Jane, Christopher Key Chapple, Andrew Holecek, Matthieu Ricard, and Isa Gucciardi in this issue.

In each case, it is through delving into the illusive, subconscious or dream state that the individual attains insight and the potential for healing and/or liberation. This analysis of the importance of dreams and illusion in the contemplative traditions demonstrates the value and potential for modern technological advances that similarly play on the imagination and subtle sensory awareness. Contrary to images made popular through films like The Matrix, we are not at the mercy of technology, suffering the disenchantment of waking up in an evil simulation. Instead, the various authors in this issue of Tarka explore the value of illusion and the possibility that new developments in technology can be aligned with the practices and insights of those contemplative traditions that have been inspiring the imagination for thousands of years.

— Stephanie Corigliano

Thank you for reading this introduction to Tarka Journal Vol. 3, On Illusion. Vol. 9, on Power, will be released later this year.

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By Christopher Walling

It was a hot summer evening in rural Garrard County, Kentucky. I watched as what appeared to be an elderly woman was “struck” with such emotion that tears began running down her face; she reached her hands to the sky as I played my tambourine amidst the screaming and shouting that moved in cadence to the rhythm of not only my instrument, but to the call and response of the pastor. It was but a typical Sunday evening, the fish fry was all packed up, and all the folks had gathered back into the church for service. Quickly she yelped and began to speak in a polysyllabic screech that made my ears hurt and began to jerk violently as she then leaped up from her seat and began to bounce from one pew to the next. Everyone’s clapping seemed to keep her afloat. My eleven-year-old brain didn’t know what to make of this, but one thing was for sure—I knew I did not belong. It wasn’t just the spectacle of a holiness revival that had me disconnected; it was the deep struggle for some feeling of connection, of recognition as one who belonged in this “kingdom of God.” I had heard that I didn’t belong in this kingdom of God, at least not people like me, for I knew I was a gay kid – and there was no room for kids like me in this church, no room at their “inn.” I had to seek elsewhere for sure, but until I knew where to go, I would keep playing Sunday after Sunday.

That feeling of being without a spiritual home would consume much of my thinking for two years, until one day, while browsing Netscape (on the dial-up internet at the local library), I found a website that took a different approach, from an organization called the Metropolitan Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky. According to the website, it was a church that was an “example of Jesus and empowered by the spirit” for those who were “fully awake to God’s enduring love,” and particularly to those who were “LGBT.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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