Introduction

Scholars are practitioners of academia. Many people, initially in the West and eventually globally, have had a millennium to imagine the knowledge and research that are data for academia, which is solely the creation of scholars’ studies. It is created for scholars’ analytic purposes by their imaginative acts of comparison and generalization, and transmitted through teacher-student lineages by people who value the pursuit of truth(s). Specialized research produces an evolution of knowledge that impacts and is impacted by society. For this reason, practitioners, i.e. academics, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness should constitute their primary expertise, their foremost object of study.

But scholars in academia can be in it unselfconsciously and therefore not fully see their practice as it is. So I would like to propose a flip: rigorously interrogate academia to provoke students and faculty alike to contend with the complexity, the ambiguity, and the unwontedness in what we have come to accept as clear and self-evident. The recognition of the strange and enigmatic in things we supposedly know best – nature, our culture, our language, or especially ourselves – induces us to scrutinize them freshly, revise our thinking about them, and reconstruct our knowledge of them for ourselves. Without probing what is native and familiar to us – to see why and how it works as it does – we have difficulty devising the fruitful analogies and suggestive metaphors that disclose the familiar in the foreign. . . . On this model, education . . . is a process of estrangement and appropriation.

Many scholars do not critically reflect on their subjectivity. As insiders to academic practice, they do not fully recognize the “strange and enigmatic” of what they supposedly know best. This exploration blurs boundaries between “scholar~practitioner” and “objective~subjective,” thereby shifting knowledge about academia in new, creative ways.

As part of this flip, I’ll ask a few questions: is academia (like) a religion? Does it have religious qualities? Are practitioners religious even if they don’t recognize themselves in that way? But first, what is religion? Renowned definitions of this familiar category have been offered by theologians, philosophers, psychologists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political theorists:

These definitions collectively show that people identify religion very differently. The lack of consensus can be challenging, whereas the classification approach proposed by Ninian Smart, a founding father of the field of Religious Studies, provides an alternative way to locate “religion” that works well to organize this discussion. He proposed seven dimensions that broaden the category to include a range of worldviews not typically labelled as “religion.” For example, the Grateful Dead, Carolina Panthers, Bernie-ism, and Trumpism could make the cut. The dimensions including the following:

Ritual and Practical: public and private practices and patterns of behavior such as worship, meditation, conversion, initiation, pilgrimage, singing, feasting and fasting

Ethical and Legal: revealed and authored rules, laws, precepts about human behavior such as those that regulate the lives of lay people, monastic communities, and society

Mythic and Narrative: sacred stories and histories, revealed and authored, written and oral traditions, true literally or symbolically, such as cosmogonies, hagiographies, tales of tales of gods, people, saints and demons.

Doctrinal and Philosophical: systematic and intellectual formulations such as statements of belief and faith, analyses of God’s nature, notions of grace

Social and Institutional: community participation and membership, hierarchical and nonhierarchical, people together and in isolation, locally and globally, denominations, study groups, monasteries, state religions, diasporas

Experiential and Emotional: emotionally charged experiences that generate feelings such as ecstasy, love, inner peace, dread, awe; a state of awareness.

Material: sacred objects and spaces; nature, such as land, rivers, mountains; culture, such as buildings, scriptures, sculptures, paintings, jewellery, clothing, foods, body art

Ritual and Practical Dimension

Ritual and Practical: public and private practices and patterns of behavior such as worship, meditation, conversion, initiation, pilgrimage, singing, feasting and fasting

Rituals stabilize social institutions, maintain group ethos, express and resolve social tension, distinguish sacred and profane, preserve social solidarity, and/or create a link between past and present.

Academia is rich in ritual. This isn’t surprising because historically it grew out of the Church. When universities emerged in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as “wisdom’s special workshop.” “The correlation to religion isn’t just symbolic. The historicity of higher education is nested with the rituals of religion.” Both the Church and academia are conservative institutions built on ritual, hierarchy, and authority.

Stabilizing rituals bind academics together through the generations. Following a successful admissions process, graduate students listen attentively to lectures (some sermon-like) given by professors, intellectual giants who are sometimes regarded as leaders or celebrities. After finishing a Master’s degree, people take Ph.D. qualifying exams. Upon passing, they become Ph.D. candidates, a.k.a. ABD (All But Dissertation). Doctoral candidates attend their dissertation defense where supportive and/or unsupportive committee members ask tough questions. Completing that trial, they gather autographs for the signature page. Throughout this time, pilgrimages to conferences reinforce community and support seekers who exchange academic ideas. Gaining funding is another part of the process. One person said, “I use the metaphor of canonization for people who get large grants – it elevates them above the rest of their colleagues and is a mark of distinction that functions as an almost divine approval of their qualities as researchers.” Hierarchy manifests more directly in healthy and dysfunctional advisor-advisee relationships. Former Professor Karen Kelsky explained, “Intense hierarchy characterizes every single academic field regardless of whether the guy is a Marxist or not, or whatever radical bullsh*t he is claiming about himself. The fact is, he holds almost absolute power over his advisees.” “No one says it aloud, but every graduate student knows: This is the price you pay for a chance to enter the sanctum of the tenure track: Follow the leader, or prepare to teach high school.” For graduates, the commencement ceremony is pomp and circumstance with classical music, medieval attire, stirring speeches, and announcements of names and dissertation titles of degree recipients who are hooded by senior scholars. Ph.D. = Doctor of Philosophy.

Academia is replete with formal and informal rituals that mark people’s rise through ranks that confer increased authority. Pressure to “publish or perish” is acute for non-tenured professors. After being awarded tenure, people advance from assistant to associate to full professor, and to an endowed chair. Becoming department head, dean, provost, chancellor, or president are other esteemed positions. Retiring as emeritus professor is the final stage. Throughout their careers, some people look to mentors as venerable sages, occasionally elevating them to savior status (except if they acted like angry gods during the training-as-initiation process). Teachers’ legacies create links between past and present through course content, research interests, and mentoring styles. Entering academia is an extended, transformative journey that involves sacrifice of time, money, romance, job security, and/or sanity. One person said, “academia requires vows of obedience, poverty, and celibacy.” Professors whose ethics stress equity and justice ironically spend their careers jockeying for position in this exclusive, hierarchical environment.

Not everyone in academia stays. Some people go through the harrowing experience of disaffiliation, by force or by choice. During tenure review, a candidate’s research is assessed by colleagues who might determine that the work is subpar. The assistant professor is denied tenure, which is like being relegated to the status of an impure outcaste, cut off from one’s lineage. Excommunication. Others choose to leave, possibly to start a business, join another sector, or raise children. Extricating oneself is a major life overhaul and identity shift.An ex-academic explains this process that mirrors anthropologist Victor Turner’s analysis of rites of passage that have three stages: separation, liminality, and aggregation.

For academics considering the world beyond higher education, the situation is akin to looking at a black hole. . . . [This makes] leaving academia awesome in the word’s original sense: enormous and terrifying. Many people consequently try to keep its event horizon in the distance – preferring the familiarity of the world they know to the risk and uncertainty of being drawn into a different career. I’ve written this book after safely crossing over that metaphorical limit. I was, in fact, transformed by the process.

Ex- or post-academic insiders become new people deployed in the outside world.

Ethical and Legal

Ethical and Legal: revealed and authored rules, laws, precepts about human behavior such as those that regulate the lives of lay people, monastic communities, and society

University ethics focus on inclusion because everyone deserves an education that fosters growth and freedom. Social justice is a commitment to “challenging social, cultural, and economic inequalities imposed on individuals arising from any differential distribution of power, resources, and privilege.” Dedication to economic, political, and social equality is expressed through programming, majors, conferences, and certifications. The quest to support each person considers intersectionality, the interdependent identities stemming from race, class, and gender differences that create systems of discrimination and disadvantage. There’s awareness about microaggression, an “everyday exchange that cues a sense of subordination based on any one of a number of social identities, including: race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, nationality, religion, and disability.” Signage affirms these ethics: “DIVERSE, INCLUSIVE, ACCEPTING, WELCOMING, SAFE SPACE FOR EVERYONE.”

Yet unsafe spaces exist. For instance, sexual harassment is highlighted by #metoophd, #metoofieldwork, and #metooSTEM hashtags. “The sexual predator is merely disguised as a professor,” according to one woman. The website, Academia is Tied in Knots, is dedicated to “visualizing testimonies of sexual harassment in the academy.” In 2018 at New York University, a male student accused his internationally known female professor of sexual harassment, assault, and stalking. After a Title IX investigation found her responsible for harassment, she was suspended. “Less shocking still was the smear campaign that many of her celebrated colleagues launched against her accuser … which resembles the silencing tactics deployed by the Church of Scientology and other cults. These scholars fail embarrassingly to embrace the radical theories on which their careers and reputations rest.” Even when cases are proven by Title IX investigations, offenders sometimes go unpunished. For instance, a University of California, Santa Barbara professor continued teaching until his retirement despite substantiated claims of sexual harassment that he explained as “cultural misunderstanding.”

Economic disparity also compromises inclusion. In the gig academy, about 75% of faculty are graduate students and adjuncts who earn near poverty level wages. The University of California at Berkeley Labor Center reported that “a quarter of part-time faculty members are on public assistance, further foreclosing their options and avenues of escape.” The cheap workforce is employed on a part-time, temporary, and/or contingent basis without benefits or job security. “But many of these people persist as adjuncts because they have been trained to believe that this is the only thing they should do with a doctorate.” This inequity is especially pronounced during the Covid-19 pandemic: cancelled classes means cancelled paychecks. One instructor said, “In addition to no job security, adjuncts are hardly ever (or maybe never) eligible for unemployment due to the way our contracts are written. We fall through the cracks in every possible way.” Another explains, “It’s depressing and scary. No idea what winter semester will bring. It’s all contingent on enrollment numbers.” An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education described professor burnout, but a reader retorted that it’s “moral injury.” Systemic economic disparity ironically persists at institutions where many leaders support dismantling society’s hierarchies that perpetuate privilege and exclusion. The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission addresses this issue that plagues academia.

Another problem is academic fraud. For example, professors who sought to expose what they see as the absurdity of “grievance studies” submitted hoax research to prominent journals. One paper explained that white males in college shouldn’t speak in class and should be asked to sit on the floor in chains. Another paper suggested that men should be trained like dogs to prevent rape culture. Both articles were accepted for publication, and the latter was recognized as exemplary scholarship. This unethical experiment revealed yet another problem: “research” about silencing, chaining, and training humans like dogs was approved by prestigious journals, which defies academia’s purported mission to nurture everyone’s growth and freedom.

Another fraud is people who lie about their race. An associate professor of history at George Washington University whose work focuses on Africa and the African diaspora resigned when her real identity was exposed. She blogged about having “assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” Soon after that incident, an assistant professor of African American history at Furman University resigned because she was caught faking a Mexican heritage. As scholars wonder who among them is not who they say they are, they must ask: what drives academics to commit this kind of criminal deception?

Another ethical dilemma at universities is unchecked anti-Semitism that is at an all time high. The FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics Act report data showed that most religion-based hate crimes target Jews or Jewish institutions. Recent examples on campuses include arson at the University of Delaware Jewish Center. At Columbia University a Jewish professor’s office was vandalized with a swastika and other slurs spray-painted on the wall. After enduring Jew hatred from peers, the Jewish vice president of the student government at the University of South California resigned from her position. The sign at University of Kentucky’s Jewish Student Center has been vandalized four times, and the center’s leader receives phone threats. These incidents occur at alarming rates that compromise academia’s vaunted ethics of inclusion.

To what extent do scholars scrutinize and critically self-reflect on these wide-ranging “strange and enigmatic” ethical dilemmas in “native and familiar” academic spaces that they supposedly know best?

Mythic and Narrative

Mythic and Narrative: sacred stories and histories, revealed and authored, written and oral, true literally or symbolically, such as cosmogonies, hagiographies, tales of gods, people, saints, and demons.

Academia is a calling of mythic proportion, passed down from generation to generation through written and oral testimonies. In the Ivory Tower surrounded by gardens where people eat fruits from trees of knowledge, scholars are set apart literally or metaphorically from the profane world. Truths are pursued, minds are opened, and hearts are awakened. Many seekers are activists who strive to resolve people’s suffering and fix institutional brokenness. The quest for knowledge, growth, and freedom is nurtured by liberal education (“liberal” is from the Latin liber “free,” the Greek eleutheros “free,” and the Sanskrit rodhati “one grows”). As authors, academics touch immortality through their publications that endure forever.

But to what extent is this utopian vision realized? Is it a myth sustaining people’s hope that a more just future will come to fruition? Scholar-practitioners achieve historical insights and scientific advancements. But idyllic academia is replete with privilege, exclusion, and systemic “isms” such as classism, racism, sexism, and educationism (discrimination against less educated people). For instance, meritocracy is the academic dream that people can progress based on their abilities rather than their wealth and other lucky accidents of birth. But it is a “false ideology that has torn society asunder and created a caste hierarchy that simultaneously excludes most people and damages the few that it admits. . . . . Meritocracy, which was initially envisioned as a means to collapse social barriers, thus engenders an impenetrable aristocracy.” High and rising tuition rates that outpace inflation prevent many people from entering the Ivory Tower.

Classism also shows up as exploitation of adjunct instructors. Some impoverished workers reassess their calling to academia and courageously leave dystopia. “The situation is akin to a breakup. . . . . Recognizing that your love will go unrequited is going to hurt.” After walking away, some people use their hard won knowledge to reflect on academic saints and sinners. For example, a man who turned down a tenure track job wrote a book about that experience. A tenured professor became a Ph.D. entrepreneur by starting a business, The Professor Is In, to guide academics through graduate school, the job market, and the tenure process. Ex-insiders offer informative perspectives about academia’s promise of growth and freedom.

Doctrinal and Philosophical

Doctrinal and Philosophical: systematic and intellectual formulations such as statements of belief and faith, analyses of God’s nature, notions of grace

If there’s one doctrinal underpinning that applies across academia’s disciplines, it would be postmodernism and related schools of thought such as deconstruction and poststructuralism. Rejecting a grand narrative, these modes of discourse espouse that truths are socially constructed and framed by personal histories based on racial, religious, economic, cultural, sexual, political and other variables. The standpoint of an observer is determinative. Morality is relative. These intellectual formulations reject epistemic certainty, stability of meaning, and objective Truth, and welcome epistemic uncertainty, instability of meaning, and relative truths. Developed in the mid- to late 20th c., postmodernism influences disciplines including philosophy, history, literature, political science, and feminist theory.

Academics regard founders of postmodernism as sages whose revealed scriptures are gospel. Canonized saints include Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Avital Ronell, Jacques Lacan and postcolonial studies critics such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Postmodernism explains that there is no Absolute Truth except the truth of postmodernist theory. While this doctrine ironically undercuts itself, few scholars ask provocative, self-reflective questions: Are all truths debatable? Is dissent tolerated? Are we in an echo chamber that has become an anti-intellectual enclave? Can becoming an academic be like a conversion experience whereby particular doctrines (re)shape a person’s mind? Are we indoctrinated insiders encoded by popular revelations? Is the student body evangelized by professors whose mission is to awaken young people to choice truths? Are unsuspecting neophytes and intellectual groupies initiated into a dominant groupthink narrative?

Instances of dogma creating an intolerant climate in and beyond academia have become common enough that professors and prominent intellectuals such as Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Steven Pinker, and Salman Rushdie signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” This letter warns about a “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” Several incidents that received national attention reveal intolerance among those who theoretically embrace relative truths shaped by people’s socially constructed vantage points. A glaring example is when Professor, Bret Weinstein, declined to participate in an Evergreen State College Day of Absence. In past years, minority students and faculty had avoided campus to highlight their contributions to the college. In 2017 white people were asked to stay away from campus. Weinstein’s email to an Evergreen email list explained the dangerous precedent set by this proposal: “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles. . . and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” Weinstein held his biology class at a park. Students protested, and a riot broke out. The administration did not ask campus police to deescalate the uproarious crowd, and the professor was warned that his safety could not be guaranteed. Due to this incident, he resigned. He wrote “The Campus Mob Came for Me – and You, Professor, Could Be Next” and has spoken extensively about the intolerant climate where his perspective on a complex issue was not only excluded, but violently rejected. Weinstein’s wife, also a biology professor, resigned and explained what’s at stake: “Those without tenure are at risk of blowback for politically incorrect actions or views. . . . If you do not come together in real life with people with whom you disagree, you guarantee finding yourself in a silo, out of which you can not see. . . . Let us be willing to disagree with respect.” Question: Do scholar-practitioners who champion the doctrine of relative truths create space to debate the distinction between liberating calls to consciousness and oppressive shows of force? Should unpopular dissenters be humiliated, threatened, and silenced?

A 2017 incident at Middlebury College tested the boundary of free speech and became “the saddest day of my life,” according to Professor Allison Stanger. She was scheduled to moderate a Q&A session with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve. Students who think that Murray is racist protested his presence on campus. They shouted him down, yelled obscenities, and surrounded him. Stanger, who does not agree with many of Murray’s political stances, supported the event for the sake of liberal exchange of ideas and productive debate. She wrote, “What transpired instead felt like a scene from Homeland rather than an evening at an institution of higher learning.” Question: To what extent do scholar-practitioners who champion the doctrine of relative truths encourage students to debate viewpoints? Which truth claims, if any, should be forbidden?

Another incident occurred in 2020 at Michigan State University as physicist Stephen Hsu, Vice President of Research and Innovation, was researching deadly force and how to improve policing. Hsu shared findings from a study that found no widespread racial bias in police shootings. These data showed different conclusions than what is commonly reported about this challenging topic. After Hsu quoted the research, he was forced out of his administrative position. He wrote in a blog post, “This started as a twitter mob attack, with very serious claims: that I am a Racist, Sexist, Eugenicist.” Question: Are scholar-practitioners who champion the doctrine of relative truths ironically compromising this ideological value by rejecting inconvenient information instead of scrutinizing (mis/dis)information to possibly revise their thinking? Should bearers of uncomfortable research findings be silenced or lose their jobs, i.e. should the messenger be shot?

It is imperative that scholar-practitioners self-interrogate to determine the extent to which the Ivory Tower is a bastion of liberalism, free speech, and inclusion or illiberalism, silencing, and cancel culture. While some (untenured) concerned, closeted thinkers hesitate to engage this complex issue publically, other people address this open secret. Professor Ramdas Lamb calls out the problem that he sees: “We have to overturn the academic tables that support the ideological insanity currently masquerading as liberal education.” How can professors teach critical thinking if unpopular viewpoints are verboten? A book about campus trends suggests “something unprecedented and frightening. . . . The consequences of a generation unable or disinclined to engage with ideas that make them uncomfortable are dire for society, and open the door – accessible from both the left and the right – to various forms of authoritarianism.” What’s at stake is foundational. Lamb said, “We live in fundamentalist institutions.” Has “academia killed its own muse”?

Heterodox Academy was founded by academics who see a lack of viewpoint diversity on campus. With the tagline, “great minds don’t always think alike,” its vision is the following: “We aspire to create college classrooms and campuses that welcome diverse people with diverse viewpoints and that equip learners with the habits of heart and mind to engage that diversity in open inquiry and constructive disagreement.” Robert George, legal scholar, political philosopher, and Heterodox Academy Advisory Council member, said that “no organization in the history of American academic life has done, or is doing, more to promote the basic freedoms of viewpoint diversity we urgently need in our colleges and universities today.”

Social and Institutional

Social and Institutional: community participation and membership, hierarchical and nonhierarchical, people together and in isolation, locally and globally, denominations, study groups, monasteries, state religions, diasporas

Academia is an amorphous community of scholars who work at institutions around the world. Smaller groups form through departments, fields and subfields, committees, teacher-student lineages, annual conferences attendees, discussion panels, editorial boards, and more. To reinforce connections and enjoy academic culture, people gather in person, through listservs, and on social media.

The Ivory Tower’s tiered tenure system is structured around membership. A tenure-track job offer is a momentous initiation. Teaching and writing for about seven years might culminate in being awarded tenure, a rite of passage that guarantees job security. After working for the next several years, professors take a sabbatical (related to “sabbath,” day of rest), just like every seven years Jews historically took a year-long break from toiling in the fields. Academics, however, use that “break” to research and publish. Becoming a full professor is the coveted entry into academia’s inner sanctum.

In the diaspora of academics who take jobs in faraway places, who’s in and who’s out is also expressed online. For example, Inside Higher Ed invites people to “become an insider” by clicking a button that leads to the membership program. The website, “Rate My Professors,” lists debatably accurate evaluations and was countered by “Rate Your Students.” Hashtags include #phdlife and #phdjokes. Social media groups support intellectual exchange, casual conversations, and Q&A. On Facebook “The Professor Is In” has 117K followers who comment on informative and sometimes snarky posts. “PhD Comics: Piled Higher and Deeper” has 423K followers. The 678K followers on “Shit Academics Say” laugh at inside jokes and vent about issues that make the most sense to people in the university’s orbit:

Unfortunately, I have to reschedule the exam, and I will have to cancel class on Thursday. Against my best wishes, I have been shot and am in the ER. I also have Covid, and the divorce is getting messy. Office hours are still 11-12 M/W, with your TA. If I am alive, the exam will be moved to Monday.

I had to teach my Introduction to Psychology class today to 300+ students from my cell phone while I was trapped in my apartment building elevator with my two young kids. This has to go down as my most surreal and stressful teaching experience.

Holding a journal reveal party for my manuscript.

That Sunday feeling when guilt over not writing and anxiety over next week is punctuated only by the realization that time is a construct but Netflix is real.

Experiential and Emotional

Experiential and Emotional: emotionally charged experiences that generate feelings such as ecstasy, love, inner peace, dread, awe; a state of awareness.

People go into academia not for the money but for the joy of learning, producing knowledge, and “eureka!” moments. Scholar-practitioners work in labs, translate languages, interpret data and texts, and conduct fieldwork. They participate in intellectually riveting seminars held in buildings that may architecturally resemble medieval monasteries. And they study alone in vast libraries with vaulted ceilings. Mindblowing experiences and transformations occur when people are nurtured by liberal education.

Yet the Ivory Tower doesn’t always deliver the dream. The slogan “no justice, no peace; know justice, know peace” pertains as some people experience dread and alienation. For example, a black woman who works at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University explains why she doesn’t feel fully welcome by her academic colleagues.

The school boasts about its depth of diversity, yet members of its faculty have asked me which faculty I provide administrative support for. Some continue to refer to me by the name of another black woman who completed her PhD at the school two years ago. . . . It’s not being mistaken for a member of the support staff that troubles me, but what that mistake means. Whether they mean to or not, my fellow academics are betraying a toxic assumption: Even as I move about a university with a messenger bag over my shoulder and a stack of books in my arms, they refuse to see me as a member of the professional and intellectual community I’ve worked to join.

Material

Material: sacred objects and spaces; nature such as land, rivers, mountains; culture such as buildings, scriptures, sculptures, paintings, jewellery, clothing, foods, body art

Books, e-books, articles, journals, manuscripts, lab equipment, specimens.

Libraries as sanctuaries, some classically designed to look like cathedrals.

College campuses, quads, buildings, classrooms, student unions, dormitories.

Offices decorated with diplomas, awards, honors, fieldwork souvenirs, piles of books.

University ID cards, photographs, websites, social media accounts.

Computers, phones, audio and video equipment.

Academic regalia including cap, gown, tassel, hood.

University logo on clothing, hats, pens, mugs, bumper stickers, face masks.

Conclusion

Is academia (like) a religion? Cult? Wisdom’s special workshop? Secular religion? What is the right category for this enclave of intellectual expression? I asked hundreds of professors these questions. People responded enthusiastically: “Of course it’s a religion. It has a priesthood, occult and esoteric rules, and separate ethics.” “As a graduate student, it was my religion. The library was my church. Research was my ritual.” “Religion, not sure. Cult, definitely.” During a podcast interview, Professor Gary Laderman explained: “My religion is learning and knowledge and trying to intellectually absorb as much as I can. . . . I joked, but I’m also being serious. Learning is where I get my religious meaning.” These responses reflect a broad definition of “religion” and show that what people do culturally can be comparable to religion even when it is not labeled as such. “Everything is full of gods,” as Thales remarked. Academia’s lived expressions clearly exhibit the seven dimensions. However, if “religion” is so broad, it loses specificity. When too much is religion, nothing is religion. So, is academia (like) a religion? It’s a good debate topic.

What is indisputable is that relentlessly interrogating academia reveals more than what’s in its unexamined self-description. The process of estrangement allows scholar-practitioners to revise their thinking and see that the academic quest for truths does not stem from dispassionate objectivity exempt from particular commitments. Scholars are practitioners, insiders who should self-consciously reflect on their academic practice and thereby discover the “strange and enigmatic” within this familiar category. Recognizing the blurry spaces between “scholar~practitioner” and “outsider~insider” serves everyone who seeks growth and freedom for themselves and others.

Final point: I finished writing this article during the American purgatory between our presidential election that ended six weeks ago and legal confirmation of a winner by the Senate. As this article goes to press, a dreadfully dire societal communication breakdown is unfolding in America. True to the foundation of liberal education, academic practitioners should model civility by encouraging active engagement through productive debate. We should energetically seek “dialogue and encounter, give and take, criticism and self-criticism” between people whose viewpoints diverge. Hopefully everyone can co-exist with empathy, liberty, and justice for all.

Thank you for reading this article.

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From Tarka Vol. 9: On Power, by Vinod Bhatia

Antecedents of Devī

Devī is the supreme being in the Śākta traditions and the basis of tantra in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. She is an embodiment of power that represents cosmic energy and is manifested in numerous forms. In Vivekananda’s words, “The Absolute is formless, but energy is female. When the energy takes form, it is called Mother. Mother is the moving power, disturbing into waves the water-calm of the Absolute.” The intertwining of Devī with the Absolute is presented as the union of Śiva and Śakti in Tantra, as puruṣa and prakṛti in Vedic traditions and as brahman and māyā in the Advaitic system. Devī, as the universal energy, is kuṇḍalinī, omnipotent, and once awakened she opens up the path of self-realization. This essay examines the visual representation of the Devī as goddess Durgā, the fierce one in the context of the sixth-century Sanskrit text of the Devī-Māhātmyam. A substantial text that consolidates the Devī cult in different regions of the subcontinent, the folio analyzed in the essay is from the Devī-Māhātmyam set, comprising 173 miniatures from the Kangra school, each 18 centimeters in height, and 26 centimeters in width. The work belongs to the Chandigarh Museum and is dated to the second half of the 18th century. It establishes Devī as an emblem of power and valour and gives insights into the imaginative vision of the Indian painter, to visualize the divine within the Indian miniature traditions of the hill regions of north India.

Within the plethora of Hindu Gods, Devī represents the feminine energy and becomes the central deity amalgamating various female goddesses already existing within diverse traditions. She encompasses the village goddesses worshiped in the Indian subcontinent as local female deities in folk traditions, or as Sarasvati, Usha, Aditi, Prithvi in the Vedic traditions. Devī has innumerable forms and names and yet retains her supreme place in the Hindu pantheon. She is referred to as Shakti (Śakti) or Durgā, one who fights with demons. While Shakti and Durgā are interchangeably used, Shakti refers to the power to annihilate the demons. Shakti manifests the inner force in the absence of which no action can be performed. It symbolizes the energy evoked by the Gods to restore the cosmic balance. On the contrary, one popular etymology of Durgā derives from durg, denoting ‘fortress’: a strong and powerful fortress that protects its inhabitants. According to David Kinsley, “Durga is inextricably associated with the physical world, the world she creates, sustains, and protects in her various forms.” This essay tries to relocate the presence of the Devī cult at the center of the Hindu pantheon, and suggests a contrasting point of view offered by Devī through her association with the feminine, thereby creating a space of her own within the dominance of the patriarchal cults of Viṣṇu and Śiva through her divine and fierce manifestations.

The visual presence of Devī as Durgā evokes an encounter with Vīra rasa in the minds of the adherent. Devī becomes a potent deity, meditating upon her arouses one’s latent power, leading to experiencing victory. Rasa literally means the ‘sap’ or the extract of plants. At a micro level it signifies the non material essence of a thing, and is causally related to bhāva – the ‘mood’ or emotional state of the viewer, audience, or the one who experiences. Bharata proposes eight such moods, each having a corresponding rasa. These are śṛṅgāra (the erotic), hāsya (the amusing), karuṇa (the compassionate), raudra (the furious), vīra (the heroic), bhāyanaka (the fearsome), bībhatsā (the odious) and adbhuta (the marvelous). Another rasa that was added to the list later is the śānta (the quiescent) completing the total to nine, known as the nava-rasas. Amongst all the nava-rasas that appropriates the visual depiction of Durgā in Devī-Māhātmyam is the vīra rasa. The Nāṭyaśāstra states that the vīra rasa relates to the superior type of persons and has excitement as its basis. Utsāha is the sthāyibhāva of vīra rasa referring to the heroic sentiment. The episode of Durgā slaying the buffalo demon Mahiṣāsura from the Devī-Māhātmyam, becomes one such performative moment evoking vīra rasa representations that can be seen across different visual styles of popular, calendar, folk and miniature art traditions.

It also brings focus to the presence of local chieftains of the Punjab hills and their conflicts for power amongst rivals. Devī miniatures from the region reveal the complexity of such relationships of patronage and its association with warrior cults of the northern hills. To conquer wars, one requires power and Devī - as embodiment of power - finds a prominent representation in these geographies demonstrating such territorial conflicts. From Rajasthan to Punjab hills, this control of power leads to the recurrence of Durgā in Indian painting traditions.

According to Vidya Dehejia, “as Jaganmata, or Mother of the universe, she assumes cosmic proportions, destroying evil and addressing herself to the creation and dissolution of the worlds.”

There are several mythological accounts of the origin of Durgā in the Purāṇic period. The Skanda Purāṇa relates that once upon a time a demon named Mahiṣa threatened the world. Śiva requested Parvati to slay the demon. Parvati then assumed the form of a warrior goddess and defeated the demon, who took the form of a buffalo. Thereafter, Parvati was known by the name Durgā, the Mahīṣāsuramardinī.

David Kinsley, in his book Hindu Goddesses: Vision of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Traditions, briefly brings in another perspective of the origin of Durgā and relates it to the goddess cult of the indigenous tribes.

“Durgā’s historical origins seem to be among the indigenous non-Āryan cultures of India. In addition to there being no similar goddess among the deities of the Vedic traditions, many early references to Durgā associate her with peripheral areas such as the Vindhya mountains, tribal peoples such as Śabaras, and non-Āryan habits such as drinking liquor and blood and eating meat.”

In this context the Devī-Māhātmya becomes a pivotal text, reflecting the vast expanse of Devī and its manifestations.

Thank you for reading this excerpt from a longer essay.

To read the full essay get the new issue of Tarka On Power, in print or digital, from the Tarka Journal online bookstore.

About the author: Vinod Bhatia, PhD, is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Design Space, NIFT Haryana. With a Masters Degree in Design and Post Graduate Diploma in Indian Aesthetics from Jnanpravaha, Mumbai. His research inter ests revolve around material and visual cultures, with special emphasis on Indic traditions of image making.

From Tarka Vol. 9: On Power, by Bex Naj

“Power” is a powerful word, suffused with load-bearing and often polarizing meaning. I observe some folks around me wanting more of it, pursuing its accumulation, while others vilify it, pushing it away. But whether we like it or not, power seems to collect, almost of its own volition, channeled through us whether we seek it out or avoid it. Power finds the low spots, the attractor basins, and settles there, knocking things out of balance as it aggregates. It collects and stagnates if we don’t enact strategies to keep it flowing. This could seem daunting on even a local community scale, so let’s start with our bodies. Sensing, feeling, and experiencing power in your own body, allowing it not only to exist, but to also flow freely, underlies the potential reimagining of the new power structures we want to see in our communities, local and global. And in our bodies, we are doing this all the time if we are alive. What we can create as a species is more powerful when borne of the power of coordination, power with, rather than power over.

My somatic proposal is this: can you disentangle the word “power” from any social, moral, ethical, or political assumptions you may have, and feel your own power as an aspect of your aliveness? Can you recall a time when you felt powerful? Not in a social or political way, or by comparison to someone else, though that may have been part of the context, but in the felt sense of your body? How would you describe what power feels like in your body, and does seeking the experience of your own embodied power feel familiar? Does it feel new? Comforting? Challenging? Scary? Taboo, even?

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Power is among the most loaded words in our modern lexicon — at once the name for what we simultaneously fear and desire, what liberates and what oppresses, what creates and what destroys. No single tradition, political theory, or spiritual framework has succeeded in resolving this paradox, and this issue of Tarka does not attempt to do so either. What it does attempt is something more honest and hopefully more useful: to hold the paradox open, and to let a plurality of voices — philosophical, historical, mythological, somatic, and devotional — illuminate its various dimensions and expressions.

What unites the contributions gathered here is less a shared conclusion than a shared conviction – that the question of power cannot be adequately addressed from any homogenous perspective, and that contemplative traditions carry conceptual resources for thinking about power that Anglo-American political discourse has barely begun to reckon with. The Sanskrit word śakti — power, energy, the generative force of reality itself — points toward precisely this under-explored depth. It names not simply the power that dominates and coerces, but also the power that creates, illuminates, and sustains. Yet as several contributors here make clear, even śakti has a history — and that history, like so much history, is not always straight-forward.

The topics that touch on power are as unlimited as the notion itself, but the contributed essays cover a broad and sometimes provocative territory. Like with previous issues of Tarka, Editor in Chief Stephanie Corigliano and Editorial Director have attempted to curate an issue that will hopefully create openings for further inquiry, reflection, and research.

For yoga and meditation practitioners in particular, the issue provides focused explorations of power in moments in history, knowledge systems, and invites readers to consider power in multiple guises: as ascetic discipline and inner attunement, as political and institutional force, as the creative potency of the divine feminine, as the subtle somatics of kuṇḍalinī, as the freedom discovered through devotion, and as the quiet authority we all transmit through our movements both personal and political.

Our esteemed list of contributors includes: Reggie Hubbard, Ruth Westoby, Rebekah Nagy, Trish Tillman, Jacob Kyle, James Mallinson, Christopher Jain Miller, Jensen Martin, Kalpesh Bhatt, Isa Gucciardi, Devora Neumark, Vinod Bhatia, Hap Savage, Téa Nicolae, Matthew Gindin, Allan “Adi” Abril, Igor Kufayev, Stephanie Corigliano, Bex Naj, Devon Harris, and Alba Rodriguez.

The issue is available as a digital PDF or as a beautiful print issue for your coffee table or contemplative library. Order via our online bookstore.

TODAY | TARKA Volume 9, On Power Launch Party

Tuesday, August 11 · 1:00pm ET · Online · Free & open to all

We are delighted to invite you to the online launch party for the newest issue of Embodied Philosophy’s journal, Tarka. On Power is Issue 9, but with counting our ‘zero issue’ (“On the Scholar-Practitioner”), Tarka is celebrating its 10th manifestation in print. Join us today, Tuesday, August 11th, at 1:00pm ET for a free, live gathering to celebrate the newest issue of Tarka — a journal of deep contemplative inquiry and research for scholar-practitioners and intellectually-curious students of contemplative traditions.

During our launch “party” tomorrow, you’ll hear from Jacob Kyle on the history and mission of Tarka, Stephanie Corigliano on why we chose to devote an issue to the topic of power, and a roundtable of contributors in attendance sharing the ideas behind their essays and how power connects to their own field of research and practice. Floss Harry will guide a conversation with contributors, and we’ll close with a look ahead at the future of Tarka and our plans for expansion.

The event is open to the public and will run a little over an hour. Bring your questions and your curiosity. We’d love to have you in the room.

Join the Launch Party

Chants & Mantras of the Non-Dual Śākta-Śaiva Tradition

Embodied Philosophy recently compiled a book of Sanskrit chants for those who attended the Sādhana School Summer Retreat in Taos, New Mexico and Online. We are pleased to make this volume available to the broader EP and Tarka communities.

Song of Sādhana includes chants and hymns of the non-dual Śākta-Śaiva tradition, in full IAST Sanskrit transliteration with fresh translations. The volume includes chants for daily recitation, including the Śrī Rudram (Namakam section), the Gaṇapati Atharva-śirṣa Upaniṣad, the Kuṇḍalinī Stavaḥ, five of Abhinavagupta’s stotras, and several other chants and hymns. Jacob Kyle’s introduction presents the book as philosophy enacted through the practice of chanting.

The issue is available as a spiral-bound print issue or PDF download for your study and personal recitation practice.

Get Song of Sādhana Now

Two years ago, I found myself wanting to learn more about yoga philosophy, and the non-dual tantric lineage I was told modern yoga was derived from. I’d been a certified yoga teacher for nearly 4 years, but I still felt unclear on the philosophical parts. My yoga teacher training was extremely dense and high quality — I could tell you all about somatics, or ideal alignment in any pose — but when it came to a dharma talk or dropping in a bit of insight from the Yoga Sutras, I was very unsure of myself. Every time I thought I had it all figured out, I’d read something else that complicated it, and I’d keep my mouth shut. I struggled to offer energy-focused practices that were genuine and powerful, because I knew so much of what we know about the cakras is muddied with new age thought. The more I read, the more confused I got, as the contradictions piled up. I wanted to clear things up for good.

One day, I saw a video on YouTube where Jacob Kyle explained that svādhyāya (Self-study), one of the niyamas of the 8 limbs of the aṣṭāṅga path of yoga, didn’t actually mean “getting to know your desires, needs, boundaries, and preferences,” as I’d repeatedly seen people saying all over social media, in yoga classes, and even in my teacher training. Svādhyāya is a process of studying not our limited egoic self, but the “capital-S” Self. It’s the study, and recitation of sacred texts. Hearing this lit a fire in me, and I knew my next step in exploring yoga, tantra, and non-dual philosophy.

Unfortunately, as I began reading, I realised I didn’t have anywhere near enough knowledge and context to make sense of much of what I was seeing. I didn’t know where to start to build the foundation. Fortuitously, I got an email announcing the launch of Sādhana School, and I knew it was exactly what I was looking for. I spent the next several months in Sādhana School diving deep into the material, reading the texts, and clearing up the contradictions. The core aspect of the program was, of course, sādhana (daily practice) with one mantra. This is where I struggled to stay engaged.

At the start of Sādhana School, Jacob advised us to practice with the mantra ‘haṁsa’ daily. I’d been introduced to ‘haṁsa’ in my yoga teacher training years before, but as its inverse ‘so’ham’. The mantra translates to “I am That” or “That I am”, with ‘That’ being the divine (Śiva, Śakti, Brahman, the universe, pure awareness). It’s a mantra we’re already repeating again and again, because it’s expressed through our breath: ‘haṁ’ as the inhale, and ‘sa’ as the exhale. By simply breathing, we are constantly reaffirming our oneness with the divine. By centring our sādhana around it, we study and come to know the Self. I thought it was interesting in theory, the non-duality expressed in such a simple mantra tied to each breath, but I found the practice boring. So, during my yoga teacher training, I ended up pursuing Buddhist mettā and vipassanā meditation styles instead.

With our accompanying deep study in Sādhana School, the mantra certainly had some new appeal, but I still found the practice difficult to anchor to. I thought maybe my mind was just too busy for a mantra like this. Perhaps I needed the structure and control of something like vipassanā, which aims to turn away thoughts and feelings to make space for the practice. Instead, tāntrik practice invites in all these experiences, and shows us their non-duality. This felt hard, and I was annoyed at not being able to turn off my thoughts to experience the mantra without distraction.

Despite my struggles and boredom, I did my duty of practicing with it most days, but my practice fizzled out a few weeks after the final term of the first year of Sādhana School. Fortunately, our year-end retreat breathed new life into the mantra as I was finally able to shift my approach from consciously repeating the mantra to listening for it. I experienced profound dreams, physical healing, and a new ability to truly engage with the mantra. It was so intense that it actually left me feeling very disoriented for several weeks following the retreat.

When I was asked to return as a Teaching Assistant for the second year of Sādhana School, I found the curriculum brought even more depth, and yet… I once again became inconsistent with the mantra. Even though I could now hear it more clearly, and had felt its impact on retreat, the boredom and annoyance crept back in. I carried it through the first and second terms, but soon stripped back to only practicing with my initiatory mantra. I had skipped ‘haṁsa’, and its derivatives, for months by the time we reached retreat time.

The profundity of the haṁsa mantra is not lost on me. We’ve explored it in great detail across the 2 years of Sādhana School. From Mary Reilly-Nichols’ passionate expositions, to Jacob Kyle’s intellectual explorations and emotional disclosures, to Nataraj Chaitanya’s poetic waxing on the mantra’s nectar, it’s been made very clear to me how powerful this mantra really is. Intellectually, I get this, and I could even explain it to you in detail. But that doesn’t make it any less boring sometimes! This, of course, is the challenge. To stay with the practice even through seasons of boredom, distraction, contraction, and delusion.

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

I’d love to say that, as a TA in Sādhana School, I’ve always stood to that challenge, but there would be no use in me lying. I’ve absolutely let the practice fall by the wayside to keep space for my initiatory practices. Sometimes Sādhana feels dry, or scattered, or irritating, or like straight up torture. It has its seasons. In those times when it’s been particularly challenging, I’ve reserved that suffering for the initiatory practices I’m obligated to do instead of forcing myself to sit through two additional seemingly fruitless sessions a day on top of them.

Approaching our year-end retreat for a second time, I once again found myself feeling a bit guilty for neglecting the core mantra practice, but this time I was also bracing for the intensity. I’d found new depth in my practice as we explored bhāva, rasa, and longing throughout the last couple of terms. I felt far more connected to the divine on an emotional level, and I wondered if this would make this retreat even more destabilising than the last. I just wasn’t sure I had it in me. I wondered if I’d just end up sitting back and observing, being more of a support as a TA rather than an active sādhaka, simply because I couldn’t weather the power of it. Maybe this was why I couldn’t extract much nectar from this mantra. Perhaps I just didn’t have the capacity to hold its potency yet. I resigned myself to this.

It seems it’s always the times that I stop grasping for a certain experience of the mantra that I can actually go deeper. On retreat, I experienced the mantra like never before. ‘Haṁsa’ was suddenly far more than its translation, “I am that”, an expression of our non-dual nature. It was Śiva and Śakti. The mantra isn’t a simple calling to the divine, but a form of Them. I experienced the goddess through it in deeply intimate ways. I truly felt union with the divine, now for extended periods of time. I found myself longing to get back into practice, instead of dragging myself to the mat, exhausted and bracing for it. While the first few days brought almost overwhelming feelings of ecstatic pleasure, there was a point when that gave way to a profound sense of peace. This was bliss. This was oneness. This was what I had always thought tāntrik meditation was supposed to be like, and yet it was also simultaneously far beyond anything I thought possible. What was uniquely different from the year before is that I didn’t feel destabilised by it at all. I felt so calm, completely at ease, and madly in love with reality.

The work we’d done through the year around longing, bhāva, and bhakti opened the door for a deep relationship with my iṣṭa-devī, and She showed me our oneness in every way. I had visions, I heard Her speak to me. I watched the endless fractal field of reality unfold before me, and I melted into it. I felt my body become pure light, love, divinity. I knew that this is what it always was, that there was in fact nothing that wasn’t this.

If you had asked me what practice would have carried me to this state of bliss, I never ever would have guessed it would be the ‘haṁsa’ mantra. I’d practiced with it on and off for 2 years, and for stints before that as ‘so’ham’, and it was only through my trust in Jacob’s guidance that I kept coming back to it. I try to stay consistent rather than collecting mantras and practices, but there were times that my faith wavered for sure. To think this mantra would be the vehicle to this level of connection, love, and bliss, just as Jacob said… That would have been unfathomable to me just months ago. The mantra has been my anchor every day since.

While I can’t say it always feels easy, and I’m always fully focused and feeling that same peace as I did on retreat, and I’m in constant awareness of the non-dual nature of reality… what I can say is that, since then, I’ve never missed a practice. I never cut back to just my initiatory mantra. I sit, listening for ‘haṁsa’ twice a day, every day. Not because I always feel completely one with Her in practice, but because every time the bell rings at the end of my meditation session, I always think “Just a little more. A few more breaths. Ten more minutes. I want to stay with You longer.” and I feel Her respond “We’re never apart.” And every time, I feel it a little deeper. It seeps a little further into my awareness. And that… That is the essence of ‘haṁsa’. That is the fruit of the practice. Knowing just a little more with every breath that I am unseparate from Her, just as She is (and we are) unseparate from Śiva. I am always fully one with the deepest love imaginable, and every breath is a chance to feel it more fully.

If you’d like to explore the haṁsa mantra and its teachings further, you may be interested in:

Summer Swan Song: a 21-day journey with the Haṃsa mantra.

August 10 – 30, 2026 | 11:00 AM ET | Live Online, Daily

This offering is donation-based, so all who desire to can benefit from the nectar of this simple yet profound mantra.

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From Tarka Vol. 9: On Power, by Dr Christopher Jain Miller

The Jain tradition’s supreme Namokar Mantra (paṃca-namokkāra), quoted here in Prakrit in its earliest known manifestation, gives praise to two orders of exceptional spiritual beings whose knowledge demonstrated that they had the power to destroy all enemies. Jains, devoted as they have been to non-violence (ahiṃsā̄) for thousands of years, have understood these to be inner enemies, that is, one’s own karmas. The two categories of supreme figures found here in the Namokar Mantra who have destroyed their karmic enemies are the Arhats and the Siddhas.

namo arahaṃtānam |
namo sava-siddhānaṃ ||
I bow to the Arhats |
I bow to all the Siddhas ||

The Siddhas, or “perfected ones,” are those “who are flourishing through perfectly purified Cognition and Seeing.” Implied here is the fact that the Siddhas have completely eliminated their knowledge-covering (nāṇāvaraṇijjaṃ) and intuition-covering (darisaṇāvaraṇijjam) karmas, achieved liberation, and now eternally reside at the apex of the Jain universe (loka) as dispassionate observers. Prior to achieving this highly exalted liberated state, however, the Siddhas had gone through a preliminary and much more difficult process of achieving omniscience to become Arhats first.

According to the canonical Śvetāmbara text Mahānisīha-sutta (7th century CE), the Arhats, or “those worthy of praise,” are those beings who are “within the whole world… full of omniscience” due to the fact that they have destroyed the “invincible enemy” of karma. Due to their ability to do so, the synonym “Jina,” from the Sanskrit verbal root √jī, “to conquer,” is also often used to describe the Arhats. In the Jain tradition, omniscience (kevala-jñāna) is indeed the penultimate step to liberation (mokṣa/parinirvāṇa). However, liberation is achieved only when an omniscient Arhat leaves the body at death. Before this final moment, however, he or she, having shown that it is possible to defeat the enemy of karma, remains in the world to dispassionately share Jain teachings with others so that they might achieve the same.

One of the keywords here is dispassionately, as Arhats have, through their austerities, amassed the power to eliminate all of their karma-attracting passions – the seemingly invincible enemies – including compassion, which keep us trapped in the cycle of rebirth and endless suffering. By embodying dispassion, the Arhats model the power necessary to achieve omniscience. This is not to say that compassion is not central to spiritual life in the Jain tradition, as compassion (kāruṇya) is promoted as the appropriate response for spiritual aspirants toward all beings they encounter who are in a state of distress (kliśyamāna), both human and non-human. Experiences of compassion are even often the experience that wakes people up to pursue the spiritual path according to the Jain tradition, such as when they see animals being sent for slaughter in the case of the Jina Neminātha or when they pay close enough attention to the desire of all beings to live, as observed by the Jina Mahāvīra. Ultimately, however, Jains recognize that attachments to feelings of any kind will cause karma and must eventually be completely abandoned to avoid rebirth.

Thus, before advancing to the final blessed state of becoming a Siddha, the Arhat remains fully – and yet dispassionately – engaged with the world until the end of his or her life. He or she disseminates the teachings of non-violence and dispassion and serves as the exemplary model around which the Jain community organizes itself, as each of its individual members works toward embodying the requisite knowledge and conduct necessary to achieve the same.

While embodying such a state that is “worthy of praise” (see above), the Arhat has nevertheless also fully relinquished attachment to exercising power. Thus, unlike yogic conceptions of supernatural powers, or siddhis, which are sometimes purposefully sought after by yogins for worldly gain, the Arhats, having eliminated the inner enemies that might tempt them to do the same, join, after their final earthly breath, the paṃca-namokkāra’s praise-worthy Siddhas eternally free from the karmic bondage effected by attachment to power.

According to Pūjyapāda’s Sarvārthasiddhi commentary on the canonical Tattvārtha Sūtra, we are currently in the fifth of sixth descending cosmic time cycles (avasarpiṇī) that began shortly after the liberation of Mahāvīra (6th-5th c. BCE) and during which the world is predicted to endure significant suffering. Pūjyapāda’s teachings here seem all too relevant, given the interconnected turmoil wrought by political violence, climate collapse, social injustice, animal agriculture, and biodiversity loss that we all collectively face today. All of these issues are undergirded by humanity’s abuse of power, the power that Foucault has shown us is everywhere. But this is also the same abusive human power that the Arhats, who are not predicted to appear again for thousands of years, are said to have nevertheless overcome ages ago.

Until the next ascending cosmic cycle (utsarpiṇī̄), we are left only with the Arhats’ enduring knowledge in Jain texts and in the few remaining embodied examples in the living Jain ascetic tradition in South Asia today. We also find special tribute to their knowledge etched in stone in the Khāravela caves where it has withstood the passing of more than two thousand years:

namo arahaṃtānam | namo sava-siddhānaṃ ||
I bow to the Arhats | I bow to all the Siddhas ||

Thank you for reading.

Tarka Volume 9, On Power, was released in July 2027.

To read the rest of On Power, purchase the volume in print or digital from our online bookstore.

About the author: Christopher Jain Miller, PhD, is Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor of Jain and Yoga Studies at Arihanta Institute; Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich’s Asien-Orient-Institut; and Affiliate Professor at Claremont School of Theology. He is the author of Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge 2024).

From Tarka Vol. 9: On Power

Power is enigmatic, insubstantial, elusive. As we reach for it, try to act through it, it shifts. Power is the ability to do something, to effect a change, to influence or shift or divert a course of events to produce desired outcomes. Like diverting the flow of a stream. To cause others to attend differently, listen differently, think differently, act differently.

In the first millennium historiographic epic the Mahābhārata, yoga is defined quite literally as power (yogabala) (12.289.24). Royal (rāja) yoga, though popularised by Vivekananda as meditation and associated with Patañjala Yoga (1896), in the premodern haṭha sources appears to be power over the physiological functions of one’s own body, power to attract and control other people, and power to subvert the ‘natural’ laws of saṃsāra: power over time, over creation, over life, death, becoming a god (Westoby 2024).

In the tradition that you practice, how would the concept of power be defined?

This reflection on power draws on my background as an Ashtanga practitioner and academic in yoga studies. The first three series of postures in the Ashtanga method of the Mysore palace, derived through Krishnamacharya and popularised by Pattabhi Jois, are yoga therapy (yogacikitsā), cleansing the channels (nāḍīśodhana) and power and beauty (sthirabhaga).

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From Tarka Vol. 9: On Power, by Jacob Kyle

If you’ve spent any time in academia or in progressive political circles, you’ve probably heard the name “Foucault.” A charismatic thinker often cited when discussing questions of ‘power,’ Michel Foucault has acquired a sacred status in recent decades, joining the ranks of the Western philosophical canon. However, with canonization comes the tendency to compress a philosopher’s nuance into doctrine – transforming a body of work into something closer to a catechism than a corpus. In the case of Foucault, the ‘catechism’ that has emerged belies a recognizable political sensibility: one that finds oppressive power everywhere it looks — in institutions, language, bodies, and social norms — and that reflexively interprets virtually every human relationship through the lens of domination and subjugation.

Those who traffic in this sensibility will sometimes invoke Foucault’s authority as they simultaneously speak through a doctrine that was alien to him. Citing Foucault as a formative figure in their political awakening to ‘power structures,’ they reify an ideology that is unfaithful to what Foucault actually thought. As harbingers of a doctrine I refer to in this essay as identitarianism, they have become a consolidating force of intellectual and discursive power in their own right, blithely unaware of just how vulnerable their theory is to the destabilizing force of Foucault’s own thinking. What follows in this essay is less a refutation than a recognition – what is signified in the Sākta-Śaiva philosophy as pratyabhijñā. In the technical way this term is developed by the Kashmir Śaiva philosophers Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, I aim to highlight what was always already present in Foucault’s work, but which has been obscured by the conflation of his legacy with a contemporary doctrine.

Identitarianism is a contemporary ideology that frames all legitimate claims to political authority as matters of identity. In this framing, politics is progressive insofar as it strives toward the emancipation and inclusion of previously marginalized identities – a phenomenon often colloquially referred to as “identity politics.” Given this term’s recent appropriation by right-wing ideologues who have used it as a term of abuse against liberals and leftists, “identity politics” has become a potentially confusing and imprecise category; adding to the confusion, both left-wing and right-wing movements now traffic in their own respective forms of identity politics. I therefore opt for the less loaded term ‘identitarianism’ to refer to what underwrites the moral vocabulary and political doctrine that I analyze below.

While “identitarian” as a term has a long history that extends to the early half of the 20th century, the most politically sober version of its critique comes from thinkers who argue that, when the left organizes primarily around identity categories rather than class, it structurally accommodates neoliberalism rather than challenges it. The argument is that identity-based redistribution operates within, rather than against, existing modes of production. Political theorist Nancy Fraser specifically argued that political mobilization based on identitarian affirmation leads to surface redistribution — redistribution that does not challenge the status quo; a deconstruction of identitarianism rather than its affirmation is thus more conducive to goals of economic redistribution and justice.

The Phases of Foucault’s Philosophy

From the earliest period of Foucault’s corpus, he addressed – initially indirectly – the shifting norms that were instantiated in cultural institutions. His first book, Madness and Civilization, was an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne. Published in 1961, Foucault’s breakout contribution asked the questions: How did ‘madness’ become an object of knowledge? When did it become something to confine, classify, and treat? Rather than accepting ‘madness’ as a perennial psychological category or condition, Foucault traced the ways in which it hardened into a mode of identity – the “mad subject” – and was consolidated through what he refers to as the “Great Confinement.”

In 17th century European society, large numbers of people were newly confined to an emerging institution: the asylum. Groups affected by this institutionalization included the poor, the unemployed, the sexually ‘deviant,’ the criminal, and the mentally ill. Foucault aimed to demonstrate that this institutional marginalization was not rooted in a medical decision, but in a moral and economic one that effectively (re)structured the social order. The new social category of ‘madness’ was predicated upon conceptions of unreason, irrationality, idleness, and vice. What the “Great Confinement” reflected was therefore not so much a benevolent acknowledgment of ‘differences’ that necessitated specialized treatment, but a growing social consensus and institutional conformity around a particular conception of normality. Whatever identity or set of behavioral patterns did not fit this conceptual picture were deemed ‘abnormal.’ As such, they were seen as exhibiting symptoms of a ‘madness’ that society was suddenly compelled to ‘treat’ through a new ‘clinical gaze’ of medicalization, isolation, and scientific discipline. The irreverent and satirical ‘voice of madness’ that was previously represented in the Classical Age was later silenced during the Renaissance period.

While he referred to his first book as a “history” of madness, Foucault soon adopted the term “archeology” and then later “genealogy” to refer to his philosophical method — the latter being inspired by the 19th century German philosopher, Freidrich Nietzsche, and his work On the Genealogy of Morals. In what we’ll refer to as his “archaeological phase” of the 1960s, Foucault was concerned with discourse, implicit rules governing what counts as knowledge, and the historical conditions of possibility that permit various normative statements to arise – grounded in particular notions of ‘truth,’ ‘fact,’ and ‘common sense.’ During this period, he was not explicitly concerned with power relations, but rather with epistemes — the underlying structures that determine what can, must, or should be thought at any given time.

The 1970s marked the beginning of his subsequent “genealogical phase,” which introduced what the archaeological analysis had largely bracketed out: bodies, power relations, institutional practices, and the agonistic dimension of history. He shifted from an analysis of the conditions of discourse to an analysis of the effects of power. He asked questions regarding how socio-political systems emerge through conflict, contingency, and force. To summarize, if his ‘archaeology’ emphasized broader epistemic ruptures extending over long historical periods, his ‘genealogy’ emphasized accidents, struggles, and localized instances of ‘non-necessity’ – his goal being to show that what seemed inevitable was in fact contingent.

In the early 1980s, just prior to his death, he entered what is sometimes referred to as his ‘ethical phase.’ During this short period, something shifted in Foucault’s work. He became interested in disciplines of self-cultivation (askēsis), self-writing, care of the self, and ‘courageous truth-telling’ (parrhesia). He explored power not as something that institutions do to our bodies, but as something that individuals do with, for, and to themselves. The individual subject became a site of practice, a locus of stylization, and a participant in her own process of creative self-formation. While this does not make subjectivity entirely exempt from the effects of power relations and their constraining influence, nevertheless the individual became acknowledged, in these later works, as a unique site of empowerment.

Thank you for reading this excerpt from a much longer essay.

To read the full essay get the new issue of Tarka On Power, in print or digital, from the Tarka Journal online bookstore.

About the author: Jacob Kyle, MPhil, is a meditation teacher, writer, philosophy educator, and the Founding Director of Embodied Philosophy. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, where he researches the Pratyabhijñā philosophical tradition under the supervision of Diwakar Acharya and Monima Chadha. He holds an MPhil in Classical Indian Religions from Oxford (2023), an MA in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research (2017), and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (2007). A student of Kashmir Śaivism schol ar-practitioner Paul Muller-Ortega, Jacob is a devoted practitioner of the Śaiva-Śākta Darśana. He writes overly pedantic essays on the divine, yoga, philosophy, politics, and the dysfunctional relationship between scholarship and mysticism at jacobkyle.com.

The editors of Tarka and its publisher, Embodied Philosophy, are delighted to share this timely issue following an extended hiatus. Tarka Vol. 9, On Power, can now be ordered in print or as PDF at Tarka Journal’s Online Bookstore.

Introduction to the Issue

I. THE PARADOX AT THE HEART OF PRACTICE

The pursuit of power is at the heart of classical yoga traditions. Whether it be power over others, power over the spiritual realm, power over one’s self, or the power to perform acts of telepathy, flight, invisibility, omniscience, or superhuman strength, power is a pervasive feature of the tradition. From the Vedic hymns of the second millennium BCE, when the seers (ṛṣis) sought to harness cosmic forces through sacrificial ritual and inspired speech, to the proliferating global yoga cultures of the twenty-first century, where a wide variety of practitioners seek to harness and enhance their mental and physical prowess, power is found as both an implicit value and intended aim.

At first blush, this may seem at odds with the concept of spirituality – especially considering the many traditions of renunciation and asceticism. In renunciatory traditions, the emphasis is placed on giving up worldly powers – anchoring one’s spiritual practice in a picture of liberation that transcends the world of relative attainments, or in a heavenly paradise defined as one’s ‘true home.’ Situating our efforts in the promise of such transcendent states can inspire the view that acquiring earthly powers is corrupting, ‘sinful,’ or illusory. Yet the variable contemplative practices characteristic of many renunciatory traditions imply the accumulation of at least one relevant power – the ability to control one’s mind. Wielding power in one form or another is therefore a standard byproduct of contemplative practice. And where power is available, it can paradoxically become either a fuel for insight or the cause of one’s downfall.

The Bhagavad-Gītā, among other texts, mentions how difficult it is to control and harness one’s runaway mind. The giving up of material wealth or the sacrifices of austerity are cited as portals to a power that exceeds the mundane. Additionally, one cannot relinquish attachments to ignorance, confusion, and misunderstanding without at least a modicum of discipline and meditative training. Discipline and training thus assumes an implicit role for power. Depending on the tradition, the power that liberates a limited individual from the seductive forces of cognitive error is variably conceived as the ‘power of grace’ (anugraha), the power of illuminative insight (pratibhā), the power of wisdom (prajñā), the power of devotion (bhakti), the power of discernment (viveka), or the power of self-inquiry (vicāra), among others. More than this, the influence of such powers also creates the conditions for more relative powers to arise in the practitioner. In the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, asceticism, or tapas, can lead directly to siddhis, or ‘mystical’ powers. The word tapas itself — deriving from the Sanskrit root √tap, meaning ‘to heat’ or ‘to burn’ — suggests a process of refinement through intensity, in which the practitioner generates an inner fire that purifies, transforms, and ultimately empowers. This is not merely metaphorical.

In the Vedic cosmological imagination, tapas is a generative force of cosmic proportions, with the creator god Prajāpati himself said to have brought the universe into existence through the heat of his own austerity.1 Power, in other words, is not only the goal of ascetic practice — it is woven into its very fabric.

Yet the relationship between austerity and power is morally ambiguous from the outset. The accumulated force of tapas is understood to be neutral — a kind of spiritual energy that can be directed toward liberation or domination with equal facility. Sometimes these spiritual powers are overtly non-righteous: in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, one of the central texts of Bhakti-yoga, the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu performs ferocious acts of tapas — not to purify himself or draw closer to the divine, but to extort from Brahmā a boon of near invincibility, and thereby assert absolute dominion over gods, humans, and worlds alike. His austerities are genuine; his intentions are not.

What is instructive about this cautionary tale is not that Hiraṇyakaśipu’s practice was fraudulent, but that it worked — suggesting that the cosmos itself does not discriminate between the saint and the tyrant when distributing the fruits of sustained discipline. The ethical orientation of the practitioner is a separate question from the efficacy of the practice, and it is precisely this separation that makes power, in the Dharmic traditions, such a charged and carefully regulated domain.

This ambivalence is similarly reflected in the Jain tradition, where the tīrthaṅkaras (‘ford-makers’) accumulate extraordinary powers through lives of radical renunciation — yet these powers are understood as signs of spiritual attainment rather than instruments to be wielded. In Buddhism, the abhijñās (‘higher knowledges’) that arise from deep meditation are acknowledged but consistently subordinated to the pursuit of liberation: the Buddha himself is depicted in the Pāli canon as cautioning his monks against displaying their powers, lest the pursuit of siddhis become a distraction from — or worse, a substitute for — genuine awakening.2

In Christianity (as well as in many of the world’s religious traditions) the promise of salvation, or heaven, is reserved for those who give up possessions and status. As said in Luke 12:33, “Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys”.3 Here, there is seemingly a promise of power at the heart of sacrifice and service.

II. POWER IN THE BODY OF TRADITION: THE SIDDHAS

In many Indian and South Asian contemplative traditions, the presence of ‘accomplished beings’ known as siddhas is pervasive. Because these great yogic beings are referenced in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, they represent a kind of syncretic religious category of empowered accomplishment that is irreducible to the stated aims of any one religious tradition. The yogic sage and siddha, Matsyendranātha (also known as Matsyendra, Macchindranāth, Mīnanātha and Minapa) is considered the auspicious founder of the Nātha-saṃpradāya – a tradition that, widely regarded as formative to the development of haṭha-yoga, combined elements of Buddhism, Hinduism, Classical Yoga, and Tantra.4 As such, Matsyendranātha is revered as a trans-sectarean saint who symbolizes a mode of empowerment that is irreducible to the doctrinal coordinates of any one system.

Often, what distinguishes a system is not the emphasis placed on the siddha, but on the number of siddhas accepted by a tradition. In many Hindu Tantric and Buddhist Vajrayāna sources, there are attested eighty-four mahāsiddhas. In the Tamil tradition, the canonical number is eighteen. In the Nātha tradition, the recognized number of siddhas is nine. Certain siddhas – like the aforementioned Matsyendranātha and his devotee Gorakṣanātha – often overlap, albeit with varying names, depending on the tradition. While these variable enumerations and namings can become canonical and a matter of doctrine, it is perhaps an unnecessary assumption to conclude that the siddha is a foreclosed category. According to the Jains, the siddhas have eight specific characteristics, qualities, or powers: (1) absence of corporeal existence, (2) absence of karmic matter, (3) the state of having accomplished all aims, (4) the absence of rebirth, (5) eternity, (6) incorporeality (7) omniscience, and (8) perfect bliss.5

Characterized in such a way, the siddhas can be considered simultaneously localized beings as well as ever-present symbols for the non-ordinary empowerments that lie dormant within every disciplined practitioner.

It is perhaps for this reason that the traditions housing the siddhas have never been merely antiquarian in their orientation. The siddha is not simply a historical figure to be venerated from a distance, but a living provocation — a reminder that the boundaries of human possibility are far more porous than our everyday experience might suggest. The eighty-four mahāsiddhas, for instance, are deliberately drawn from every stratum of medieval Indian society: among them are kings and outcasts, brahmin priests and fishermen, courtesans and farmers.6 Their diversity is itself a teaching — that the capacity for radical empowerment and liberation is not the exclusive preserve of the renunciant or the sage, but is latent in the full range of human circumstance. In this sense, the siddha tradition anticipates what the Jain enumeration makes explicit: that the ‘accomplished being’ is not defined by the possession of extraordinary powers so much as by the complete actualization of faculties that, in their seed form, belong to everyone. Power, on this account, is not something acquired from without, but something uncovered from within — a recognition that will quietly underwrite everything that follows in this issue.

III. WHAT ARE THE SIDDHIS? ETYMOLOGY, TAXONOMY, AND THE

YOGA-SŪTRA

In the Yoga-sūtra, psychic powers (or siddhis) are said to arise from saṁyama – the combined discipline of concentration (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna), and absorption (samādhi).7 In the bhāṣya (‘commentary’) on sūtra III.45, mastery over the gross and subtle elements (the mahābhūtas and tanmatras, respectively), the three constitutive guṇas (elements of psycho-physical reality: rajas, tamas, sattva), and the purposiveness of objects — mastery over all these gives rise to (1) aṇimā (‘the power to become microscopic’), (2) mahimā (‘the power to expand infinitely’), (3) laghimā (‘the power to become light or to levitate’), (4) prāpti (‘the power to reach anywhere’), (5) prākāmya (‘the freedom of will’), (6) iśitṛtva (‘the power of creation), (7) vaśitva (‘mastery over creation’), and (8) kāmāvasāyitva (‘the power of wish fulfillment’).8 This suggestion may seem at odds with the purported intent of the text itself as defined in I.2, which posits yoga as citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ (“Yoga is the cessation [nirodha] of the fluctuations [vṛtti] of the mind [citta]”).9 Wouldn’t gaining powers, acquiring extraordinary knowledge, or expanding the range of perception amount to more fluctuations of the mind? Would these capacities not reinforce the egoic attachments that the Sūtras appear otherwise at pains to liberate yoga practitioners from?

A resolution of this apparent contradiction can be found in the text itself through a distinction made between the purposive orientation of puruṣa outward toward prakṛti (i.e. other objects) and the puruṣa’s ‘own-purpose’ (puruṣārtha) – entailing the isolation (kaivalya) of puruṣa (‘contentless consciousness’) from prakṛti (‘psycho-physical matter’)10 by means of samādhi (‘absorption’). Within the former orientation toward ‘external’ prakṛti, any object the yogin attends to will ‘subtlize’ during the process of saṁyama and endow the yogin with the powers particular to that object.

For example, in III.24, meditating on the power of an elephant will permit the yogin access to ‘elephantine’ strength. These powers are the inevitable attainment of ‘seeing’ the objects in their prakṛtic nature – first as gross, then subtle, then ‘concealed,’ and finally as their ‘distant’ properties.11 In III.37, however, the siddhis are stated to be obstacles to samādhi even though their attainment is both spontaneous and natural to the process. “These are obstacles (upasargāḥ) to samādhi, though they appear as attainments (siddhayaḥ) in the outward-turned state” (te samādhāv-upasargā vyutthāne siddhayaḥ).12 Arriving in the third chapter (pāda) of the yoga-sūtra (the vibhūti-pāda), discussion of the siddhis is situated between the first two chapters (the samādhi-pāda and sādhana-pāda) that emphasize the disciplines of practice, and the fourth chapter focusing on liberation.13 The powers and faculties that arise as a result of practice could be considered intermediate achievements that have the ability to distract the practitioner from ultimately accomplishing the deeper aims of yogic sādhana. The side effects of practicing deeply include greatly enhanced sensory powers14 that, among other things, might reveal dimensional beings (i.e. various devas and asuras) who deflect the yogin away from their ultimate resolution in the Self.15 In other words, the popular adage ‘power corrupts’16 may apply equally to those engaged in the meditative practices of the classical yoga tradition – a consideration somewhat at odds with the ethical precepts of the yoga-sūtra’s second pāda and with the popular characterization of the yogin as an ethical and moral agent in the world.

The siddhis, in modern parlance, are often quaintly referred to as ‘yogic superpowers,’17 but this translation is not without its share of problems. In the modern secular-materialist imagination, ‘superpowers’ are often associated with the cultural archetype of the ‘superhero;’ to the layperson, superheroes are the stuff of Hollywood fantasy and cultural mythology. Perhaps for this reason, the vibhūti-pāda is often skimmed over (or skipped over entirely) in the yoga philosophy modules of modern postural yoga teacher trainings.18 As the chapter that most strongly contradicts our modern assumptions about reality, the vibhūti-pāda challenges certain preconceived notions regarding what is and is not attainable through yogic practices. For the modern yoga teacher trainer, to suggest that, for example, levitation, telepathy, and the ability to make yourself gigantic will come with sustained practice may feel pedagogically irresponsible – indulging in ‘delusions of grandeur’ that are out of step with the more mundane goals of self-improvement and the moral and ethical instincts that define much of the modern postural yoga world’s self-understanding.

However, if instead of ‘yogic superpowers,’ we translate siddhi in a manner more proximate to its Sanskrit etymology – deriving from the root √sidh, which means ‘to succeed,’ ‘to accomplish,’ ‘to attain,’ ‘to prove,’ ‘to be established,’ or ‘to be effective’ – we arrive at a translation of siddhi as ‘accomplishment,’ ‘success,’ ‘attainment,’ ‘fulfillment,’ or ‘establishment.’ Suddenly, a subtler and perhaps more accessible understanding reveals itself. Rather than reject the idea of siddhis based on specific ‘attainments’ we may find difficult to imagine possible, we can preserve a more modest view that the emergence of new or refined faculties of perception, skills, capacities, and interests are the natural byproducts of many trajectories of contemplative practice, and these fruits are themselves siddhis – commonly and pervasively attested to by many who take up a path of deep sādhana.

It is perhaps for this reason that the yamas and niyamas (ethical ‘observances’ and ‘commitments’) are included as the first two auxiliaries of the famous ‘eight-limbed’ (aṣṭānga) system of classical yoga – to avoid the temptation toward the unethical behaviors of what David Gordon White traces in his provocative historical account, Sinister Yogis.19 Without cultivating an ethical disposition that could channel the inevitable accumulation of subtle empowerments towards liberation, classical yoga can become little more than an introversive process of self-aggrandizement and power-hoarding.20

In other words, practice is neutral: it can attract us toward the seductively subtle worlds we encounter within, or it can be directed toward liberation. Being a meditator doesn’t automatically make you a better person. In fact, as we’ve suggested, indulging in its various fruits can be seductive, and – as with any source of power – what arises from it can be harnessed for either ethical or immoral aims.

Thank you for reading.

To read the rest of the introduction and many other articles and essays, purchase On Power in print or digital from the Tarka Journal bookstore.

About the editors:

Stephanie Corigliano, PhD, is editor of Tarka and lecturer in the Department of History and Religious Studies and Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California. She is a practitioner of Ashtanga Yoga and member of the Tibetan Buddhist Sangha at Gomde, California. She also serves as Vice-chair of the Dharma Academy of North America.

Jacob Kyle, MPhil, is a meditation teacher, writer, philosophy educator, and the Founding Director of Embodied Philosophy. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, where he researches the Pratyabhijñā philosophical tradition under the supervision of Diwakar Acharya and Monima Chadha. He holds an MPhil in Classical Indian Religions from Oxford (2023), an MA in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research (2017), and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (2007). A student of Kashmir Śaivism schol ar-practitioner Paul Muller-Ortega, Jacob is a devoted practitioner of the Śaiva-Śākta Darśana. He writes overly pedantic essays on the divine, yoga, philosophy, politics, and the dysfunctional relationship between scholarship and mysticism at jacobkyle.com

Footnotes

I have been thinking a lot lately about where I would be without practice. When our world is turned upside down, how far can scholarship take us? In times of uncertainty, it is practicing yoga that gives me a sense of stability and calm and connects me to my breath. That connection deepened on my first trip to India twenty years ago, when I began to learn Sanskrit. I fell in love with its sounds and the depths of meaning they conveyed. For me, the study of yoga philosophy has always been practical, from chanting verses to translating texts for my PhD. What inspires me is the link between ideas and a living tradition, in which I participate as a practitioner. As a scholar, I can also see the value of critical distance, but I don’t enjoy pulling things to pieces for the sake of it. Without practice, the deductive nature of scholarship can lead us to essentially miss the point of tradition by focusing on individual pieces and losing sight of the big picture.

Though Sanskrit is often called a dead language, the ideas embodied in its texts help to make sense of this in a vibrant, dynamic way. Modern scholars can get so caught up in details that we miss what happens in the natural process of transmission and invalidate the stories by which the tradition understands itself. This can drown out the deeper truths we are attempting to discuss. There is often an overemphasis on satya, which is a more particular truth, as opposed to ṛta, divine truth. The latter – which is of more interest to practitioners – transcends the fine points that scholars like to debate.

Read more

Queer theory is a theoretical tool which by definition creates a more accurate place of being for individuals.

Let me begin this brief essay with two examples that took place within various spiritual gatherings, in which a utilization of queer theory was absent, and in which its presence would have helped immensely to do just that: create a place of being for myself and those I was with.

Example 1

It was the mid-2000s. I was in a pagan witchy circle, preparing for spring equinox. I had never been in that particular group, but I had been, at that point in my life, in what I thought were similar groups. Everyone was, on appearance, laid back – dressed in spring finery with flowers in their hair, or elaborate braids, or even sporting horns ala the Renaissance Faire, wearing poet shirts, or flowing skirts, wild curls or spiky colored hair, and an abundance of silver jewelry with moons and fairies, or other magical creatures were in abundance. We were a multi-cultural group of different ages and sizes. It was Southern California and what I deemed a typical gathering of pagan practitioners. I was with my then girlfriend; we had traveled to this particular ritual because it was an outdoor sunset ritual, advertised as “all are welcome.”

My former girlfriend today would be called trans-masculine, or maybe gender queer. She called herself butch at that time or as she termed it, “raised by wolves,” in that she brought herself up into LGBTQ+ life in gay bars and was raised by gay men. I, on the other hand, was brought up in lesbian-feminism, feminist bookstores, women’s liberation—and also in gay bars.

So, we were at this ritual. The facilitator asked that we move in to stand shoulder to shoulder creating the circle with our pagan peers, which we did. We were excited by this new group and the beautiful pink and orange sky blooming around us.

Then the facilitator came over and put his hands on my girlfriend’s shoulders and moved her away from me to position her between what he deemed as obvious men. He said to her, “We put the circle together man-woman. You know, boy-girl.” She stared at him and stepped out of the circle. I had been blessed to never be in a circle that did this before, but I now know this can be common.

He said, “We have to balance the energies, by placing ourselves in a balance of masculine and feminine.”

My girlfriend said, “I have masculine energy.”

He said, “But you are a woman and we need to balance the energy.” Today that former girlfriend is going through a gender-questioning phase and is not sure where they will land. But at that time, she was clearly identifying as, while biologically female, undeniably masculine—gender queer. She did not feel comfortable being forced to be placed in the “girl” position, of the required boy-girl placement of the circle.

Eventually the facilitator “allowed” her to place herself between two self-identified women—but it was extremely uncomfortable for us in what we had assumed would be an accepting group of pagans. We did not feel the renewal of what a spring equinox celebrates. And we never went back to that gathering.

Example 2

About five years past the previous example, I was completing a 500-hour yoga training. We were studying traditional Eastern texts, looking at the sutras, and one of my teachers began to talk about gender. There was much written about balancing masculine and feminine, she said, that we must study. She said we all must have this balance in order to be truly enlightened. This was an attitude that was referenced in the yogic literature, and she pointed to it in our study circle. She looked at me and told me that I would not be able to achieve true enlightenment as I was partnered with a woman and my life was therefore unbalanced. However, she added that I should not worry about this, as “many people are gay.”

“If you were heterosexual, your life would be more balanced and you would be in a better place to achieve enlightenment,” she shrugged as if I had to accept my lot as “less enlightened.” I had several instructors during my training and I chose to tune out this particular instructor the times I had sessions with her.

This was not true of all experiences I had where gender and balancing the masculine and feminine was requested. For example, in a Tantra workshop, I experienced the freest expression where the facilitator immediately recognized the masculinity of my girlfriend, now wife, and partnered us as masculine and feminine according to our gender choices, not her perceptions. However, the balancing of one of us identifying as masculine and one feminine was still required.

A recent meme on social media celebrating Transgender Remembrance Day states, “A friendly reminder that you don’t need to understand the nuances of gender identity to know that each individual person knows who they are better than you ever will.”

And what follows is a final example, but not from a spiritual gathering, but a somewhat secular one, at least for me.

In 2012, my future wife and I signed up for ballroom dancing. When we got there, we discovered it was offered by a Bible school and all of the participants were Christians. How did we miss that before we signed up? However, we had paid for the course and I said, “Let’s see if we can make this work.” When the instructor asked us to partner up, I looked at my masculine-identified girlfriend and shrugged.

She took the position of the “man” and we start dancing, switching dance partners throughout the two-hour course. No one questioned us in that Christian circle and we completed the course, with a few laughs, everyone getting used to everyone else. We participated in every class without any discussion of the need to “balance energies.”

I bring up this last example because, in my experience, queerness and spiritual practice have been plagued with this need to “balance” energies, much more in what I assumed would be accepting spiritual geographies, than in this, what I assumed would be the conservative geography of the Christian ballroom class.

Why we should care about queer theory is that it gives all of us a tool through which we can allow individuals to create their own place of being, and help all involved to allow space for that creation.

In contemporary parlance, we are beginning to see the idea that balance can be contained in the person themselves, and that gender balance does not need to be explicated in an outside partnership, or as my initial story suggested “boy-girl.”

Queer theory in practice gives us, as LGBTQ+ people, a theoretical position from which we can counter discriminatory gender narratives, such as those explicated above. Queer theory allows us to put forward the idea that gender is unique to the individual. Spiritual seekers may need to understand these basic tenets, perhaps more than others, because we believe ourselves already to be enlightened, that our rules, including this long-held idea of “gender balance” to be revelatory and embedded in sacred texts.

A hermeneutical examination of “gender-balance” within for example the Yoga Sutras may result in the idea that balance is within the self, and does not involve traditional, conservative ideas of who holds the right to masculinity and femininity. LGTBTQ+ people do not live their lives in service to biological determinism, a life determined by biology. Masculinity and femininity are not owned by biologically designated born males and females. For example, intersex beings exist at birth subverting the entire idea of a foresworn masculine/male and feminine/female created by nature.

What is masculine and who gets to be it? What is feminine and who gets to be it? How can we choose to be neither masculine nor feminine but somewhere in between? For example, non-binary people may position themselves currently as “they,” without both feet in either gender home, neither pink nor blue. Within the ever-expanding gender narrative that is the rainbow of gender identity, there is a place of being for all.

This is the joyous exploration of an embodied life that traverses gender narratives with a basis in queer theory.

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

Vol. 9, On Power, will be coming out soon.

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

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