The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does  not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.

The perils of positive thinking (1)

Self-help philosophies are big business. The amount of shelf space devoted in bookshops to titles expounding the power of positive thinking is quite astonishing. You all know the kinds of book I have in mind. It is a genre which spans new age and traditional spirituality, applied psychology and business. Alongside the authors are the coaches and therapists, all of whom make a living from doling out lifestyle advice and running therapy sessions and workshops based on the same principles.

On-line the situation is no different. Indeed, many phenomena of this kind have really been boosted by the power of viral marketing. Let us take just one example which is probably familiar to many – “The Secret”, a self-help film produced in 2006 by one Rhonda Byrne. The wikipedia article is here. The central message is that believing in yourself sets in motion a positive dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing, leading to happiness and success – a cosmic law dubbed the “Law of Attraction”. Another classic of this genre is Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, an all-time bestseller, published, astonishingly, in 1937 and still hugely influential today.

I first encountered this phenomenon within what was then called the “house church movement” in the 1980’s. This neo-Pentecostal movement was in its origins quite ascetic, but became increasingly, and to my horror, pervaded by quite different notions coming from the American “TV evangelists”. God wanted you to be rich and successful and, if you weren’t, it was only that your faith was insufficient for the task. (This doctrine never sat well with the evangelical precept of saving grace, but seemed subjectively appealing to many because it chimed with their self-doubt and perception that there had to be a “quantitative” element to salvation, a notion of course familiar to Catholics and Orthodox).

In its secular form of the Law of Attraction, I believe it expresses, albeit very crudely, something quite true, but at the same time it misses something equally fundamental.

What is true is expressed in the popular adage “success breeds success” and has been identified by many teachers. Jesus is reported, somewhere in the gospels, as saying “to he who has, more shall be given; but to he who has not, even what he has shall be taken away from him”.

Funnily enough, though, few if any of the real spiritual teachers I can think of ever ended their days in wealth and comfort; and Jesus himself was crucified. So what’s going on? Was Jesus just talking of “spiritual wealth”, perhaps, something quite different from, and perhaps opposed to, worldly riches?

Of course Jesus did indeed call on people to forego worldly riches on occasion, though only when an obstacle to spiritual growth. Still, I do not think that spiritualizing perfectly down-to-earth utterances is a proper hermeneutic. Rather, the “Law of Attraction” itself implies a duality of destinies, paths either up or down, virtuous or vicious circles. Not only does success breed success, but failure begets failure. This duality is found back, equally, in the salvation doctrines of probably all world religions (though it may be a somewhat simplistic framework within which to interpret the soteriology of Buddhism or some nature-religions, paganism, Shamanism and so forth, which also suggests it may have a lot to do with the role of institutionalized religions in legitimizing the established social order).

This “either-or” of destiny implies that there are two communities and two poles to which individuals gravitate – a pole of success and a pole of failure. Strictly speaking, there is a “Law of Attraction” at work at both ends; and the closer you are to one, the more difficult to break out of its gravitational field into that of the other. Between the two, though, there is also a “Law of Repulsion”. Individuals gravitating towards the upper pole find themselves spending more time with others who are on the same path, and separate out from them by a process of reverse osmosis. This process is analogous to the processes of self-organization giving rise to order in the cosmos notwithstanding the tendency to entropy expressed by the second law of thermodynamics. On the side of those to whom fate has been less lucky, who are in the vast majority, envy and anger develop and are directed towards those more fortunate. For this reason, prophets, even if they seed a new level of consciousness in the human spirit, are almost always martyrs.

So much for the Law of Attraction as a law. As a self-help program, however, there is much more to be said; I will return to this in my next post.

Our love affair with nonsense

One advantage of undergoing depth body psychotherapy is the anger that it releases; from which my readers can surely benefit. Here goes a rant, therefore

I am of the view that tantra is nothing more or less than an exploration and acceptance of who we really are as sexual, spiritual beings.

To embrace tantra is therefore to rebel against thousands of years of repression and manipulation of our identities by others, and to reclaim the bodies that we live in for ourselves. It’s a revolutionary engagement; nothing can be more revolutionary.

I could also add to my definition the mystical heart of tantra, which is the doctrine of non-duality. But it is not really a doctrine; it is really an evidence, if you know yourself.

To realize this evidence and to enact this rebellion, no-one needed to invent something called “tantra”. Humankind has been doing this forever, in a multitude of cultural forms. I do not believe that anyone, in any period, in central/south Asia had access to any unique insights regarding this problem. At best, it was locally possible in some periods to go further in exploring this path than others elsewhere had done. Nonetheless, this truth of the human condition is around every corner and accessible to everyone. It is a pure evidence, and it has become even more so as scientific knowledge has accumulated.

Being doctrineless, tantra is wonderfully compatible with all forms of authentic knowledge that exist, both scientific and spiritual. A movement calling itself “tantric” can reinvent itself constantly and is perfectly justified in doing so, since its practices are judged only by the canon of utility, and not of  truth. Collectively, I believe we have discovered much about what is useful on the path of self-development; I believe we have discovered nothing about what is true.

It is, of course, understandable, indeed inevitable and even (maybe) desirable, that tantra – like other spiritual movements - manifests itself in movements and communities with a concrete form, and which develop allegiances, language and rituals of their own. This development both aids the spiritual growth of community members and is necessary to the propagation of the message and methods of the group. I have nothing, even, against its “branding” and I am very tolerant of quirkiness in its self-conception and self-expression.

But let’s remember that the very nature of non-duality implies that no doctrine can be “right”; all language is metaphorical and contingent. Nothing is more than a pathway to self-knowledge, and an infinite number of such pathways exist.

Which makes me wonder why so many self-proclaimed tantrikas give such a damn about lineages, ancientness of traditions, Hindu deities and so on; and even when they don’t, still path lip-service to a host of tantric myths and try to anchor what they are doing in the authority of the past.

That seems to me paradoxal, since tantra is all about living in the here and now…

This attachment to form, ritual and myth raises some more fundamental questions about what the nature of tantra is, and about the spiritual marketplace we inhabit, within which movements identifying themselves as tantra compete for attention.

It won’t have escaped the attention of even the most casual observer that this marketplace is unusually crowded, with numerous generic, branded and even patented therapy methods, bodywork modalities and spiritual practices competing with each other in terms of the hyperbole of their claims of efficacy.

The most successful (in terms of the following they attract) are usually those that promise the most for the least effort, or which particularly suit the personalities of the would-be disciples : notably in terms of those individuals’ desire to avoid personal responsibility for their spiritual path (or physical or emotional healing or well-being) and cast this on to the willing shoulders of ego-driven gurus.

Why is this so?

In my view and experience, leaving aside exogenous life events like illness and bereavement, and solitary practices like prayer and meditation, there are only two things which can effect long-term positive change in personal behavior. These are (i) love and (ii) work designed to release underlying tensions in the bodymind.

Furthermore, as far as love is concerned, I am convinced of its power but I am unsure of its duration if it is not accompanied by abreactive work.

Tensions in the bodymind being manifested physically (although they are not purely physical in their etiology), a physical dimension to such work is indispensable.  That leaves a broad panoply of activities which are not without value, though their relative value may be discussed (and may vary from person to person). However, it excludes, at the same time, a vast bunch of stuff which is of little value, no value at all, or quite negative in terms of its value because it distracts people from real solutions to their problems. For example, Tarot, numerology, mandalas, angels, mantras, crystals….It also puts into perspective the possible value of other modalities whose only reasonable mode of effective action is through the love and acceptance they communicate (though also limited energetic effects as well as autosuggestion are possible). In this category I would place, for example, reiki (see here for a review of its clinical effectiveness). I would be still more skeptical about other physical methods which do not involve significant manipulation, such as sophrology.

All of these modalities, apart from competing with tantra in the aforementioned spiritual marketplace, are, perhaps surprisingly (at least to me) actually embraced by many people who practice tantra, as a complement to their own practice.

This is, I believe, very damaging for the credibility of the practitioners concerned and for the layman’s understanding of what tantra has to offer, which is nonetheless so brilliantly set out in books by Osho and others.

At my last workshop with Advaita, I was particularly pleased to hear two spiritual myths debunked, myths with which many tantra practitioners coexist quite happily.

One was the notion of karma. According to Advaita (I paraphrase her), this is an immoral notion designed to encourage resignation in the face of violence. We are born with no form of original sin, whether Christian or oriental. On the contrary, we are born innocent and we are corrupted by parents, teachers and society. I entirely agree with this important, and objectively indisputable, moral standpoint.

A second was the zen notion of emptiness. According to zen, one should strive after emptiness in order to feel compassion. I think I understand this one and for me I have no problem in embracing that notion. Yet when Advaita says that we can only feel compassion from plenitude, it is a vastly more helpful conception to normal people. What prevents us from feeling compassion is what prevents us from feeling ourselves. And the search for emptiness can all too easily become a quest to repress feeling and emotion.

Having brilliantly debunked these concepts, though, why stop there?

I don’t doubt that it’s profitable to peddle the kind of nonsense you can find on www.schoolofawakening.com, for instance; but is it helpful to the soul? And therefore, is it ethical?

In any case, tantra it is not.

Premature ejaculation

Taizé

Taizé is coming to Brussels for its annual youth New Year celebration – I’m excited (see http://www.taize.fr/en_rubrique45.html)

From tantra to Taizé? Or rather, in my case, the other way round.

I attended the new year meetings in Prague in 1992 and Budapest in 1993. On both occasions there was an electrifying atmosphere – a combination of the still-new feelings of freedom after the Cold War, so much youthful energy, and so much love.

I would have been the last person to believe anyone could breathe new life in the 20th century into the moribund, authoritarian, patriarchal irrelevance that was and is the catholic church and other mainstream Christian denominations.

Yet without any particular knowledge or analysis of Brother Roger’s theology and pastoralism, it was clear to me, and immediately tangible, that here was an authentic spirituality.

I had the same experience, very much later, with Thich Nhat Hanh (http://www.plumvillage.org/).

Although the symbolic world of Taizé is entirely Christian, and of Plum Village entirely zen Buddhist, Taizé, Thich Nhat Hanh and Tantra all have a lot in common and all, ultimately, lead to the same place. This is because all liberate themselves from dogma and the ego in favor of encounter, love, awakening and transcendence.

My experiences in Prague and Budapest were an important stepping stone in my moving beyond the narrow evangelical fundamentalism in which my spirituality as a teenager had initially been expressed towards the beginning of a far more generous spirituality.

Cultivated within the neo-pentecostal tradition, and at the same time by disposition a rationalist and skeptic, ecumenism was for me an anathema – either there was only one, revealed truth or there was not, as I could conceive, any at all. Ecumenism was the thin end of the wedge of relativism and spiritual and moral disarray. And I do not have a lot of interest, still today, in baroque efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable and achieve doctrinal unity amongst Christian denominations. I simply couldn’t care less about the unity of the church or the church as an institution at all. I believe that even to persons within a Christian spiritual tradition, the church has become largely or totally irrelevant – it is the last place one would expect to find persons sharing your own sensitivities to the spiritual insights achieved by Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton or John of the Cross.

Yet I now see that whilst this may be an obsession or the source of painful heart searching for many within the Taizé movement, it is neither its point nor the source of its strength and the movement cannot be contained within it.

The beautiful songs of Taizé with their prodigious multilingualism and sense of community and of the possible energize the spiritual nature of those who witness and participate in them regardless of their denominational self-identification. I am sure they speak at a deeper level to persons having been brought up in a Christian tradition or at least in a post-Christian culture than to other persons who may find their language unfamiliar and difficult to relate to. Still also such people will recognize and identify with the love and energy they find.

There is a good reason why Taizé is a youth movement. It speaks to the deepest motivations of young people – to discover the real meaning hidden within the sterile forms of religious practice; to reach out to the other; to experience love and union.

Taizé, in other words, is driven by, and is a sacred celebration of, sexual energy.

By itself this is sufficiently evident merely in the rituals and in the music. It is, of course, much more evident in the interactions which surround such an event and primarily motivate the participants who, much as Jérôme in Gide’s La Porte Etroite or Renzo in i Promessi Sposi, naturally find their romantic and spiritual quests intertwined, indeed inseparable.

I remained standing next to her, whilst she continued kneeling. I was quite unable to express this new longing of my heart, but I pressed her head against my heart and against her forehead my lips, through which my soul slipped away. Drunk with love, with pity, with an uncertain mixture of enthusiasm, denial and virtue, I appealed to God with all my strength and made an offering of myself, unable to conceive of any other purpose to my life than to shelter this child from fear, from evil, from life. Finally I fall myself to my knees, full of prayer, I hold her against me…

My Lord, you know that I need him in order to love You. Give him to me, so that I may give unto You my heart. Forgive me this impardonable prayer, but I am unable to remove his name from my lips, nor to forget the suffering of my heart. Even were I not to formulate my prayer, would you be any less aware of the burning desire of my heart?

If these young pilgrims believe they can bring something of this passion back to their church communities, reinvigorate them and through them reach out to the world, they will be almost invariably disappointed. But if they allow the passion which they discover to change them from inside, to lead where it may lead, then there is hope for the world, for true religion must always lead to authenticity and love, and love knows no doctrine, dogma or bounds.