Repackagings
2008-07-05 17:41![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexibeastThe New-Age-ification of Tantra is, i feel, a good example of the tendency of contemporary Western society to take non-European philosophies out of context, remove many or most of the aspects which might make Westerners uncomfortable, and produce a thus 'sanitised' philosophy which trades on Eurocentric perceptions of the 'exotic', annexing the name of the original philosophy as the name of the new philosophy, despite the significant differences between the two.
The reality is that there's no homogenous philosophy called "Tantra". There are, in fact many different schools of Tantric thought, with some more connected to Buddhism and some more connected to Hinduism. Many of them have perspectives that would shock or appall those Westerners who think that 'Tantra' is basically about learning to be deeply intimate with one's partner, partly so as to have beautifully spiritual sex, er, 'lovemaking'1. Take, for example, the Niruttara Tantra, part of the Kula tradition, which, in addition to focusing on Kali and having a liberal attitude towards women's sexual freedom, also discusses sexual rituals with girls as young as 12, who are regarded as embodying the Goddess Bhairavi. Or the Prajnopaya-viniscaya Siddhi, which allows for sex between mother and son, brother and sister or father and daughter. Or the Kumari Tantra, which advocates human sacrifice. i suspect not the sort of things that would induce warm'n'fuzzies in many of the Westerners who attend "Tantric workshops".
This context- and complexity-deprived repackaging of spiritual systems such as Tantra and Kabbalah2 is hardly surprising, given that it seems that Westerners are often not particularly interested in long-term learning and development. We tend to want the quick fix, the psychological and / or spiritual equivalent of fast food. Declare Jesus Christ to be the Lord your Saviour and all your problems will be solved! Of course, this attitude is hardly limited to the area of spirituality and psychology: many people expect to become knowledgable and skilled overnight in fields like computer programming ("Teach yourself C++ in 10 days!"), resulting in surreal situations such as the one i read about a while ago where a person thought that programming simply involved starting up Notepad, writing something like "Draw something cool on the screen", and then 'running' that Notepad file. Thankfully, we still seem to have some boundaries: one of the few complex systems which people generally respect as something requiring substantial learning effort is the human body, so that we haven't - yet :-P - seen book titles such as "Teach yourself heart surgery in 10 days!"
It's nice to think that perhaps these Westernised repackagings encourage people to take some time to learn about the source spiritualities they've derived from, to give themselves at least some perspective and context in which to evaluate and make use of the repackagings in question. But although i'm pretty sure that happens some of the time, i also strongly suspect that most of the time it doesn't, and that these "temporarily filling, but lacking in nutrition" repackagings often leave people with false impressions of various spiritualities.
PostScript. The joys of synchronicity: after having posted this, i read this article on historical attitudes towards sexuality in India, which has some great quotes regarding the Western Tantra package:
1. Although i do feel this is a lovely-sounding term, i tend not to use it and its cognates, as to me it a) has a rather euphemistic feel to it which i'm not fussed about, and b) seems to imply that i'm not 'making' love outside of the times i'm having sex.
2. Such as the repackaging of Kabbalah by the Kabbalah Centre, famed for its links to people such as Madonna, and whose vision of Kabbalah includes selling things like "Kabbalah Water". Apparently a good critique of the Kabbalah Centre can be found in Jody Myers' book Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America.
The reality is that there's no homogenous philosophy called "Tantra". There are, in fact many different schools of Tantric thought, with some more connected to Buddhism and some more connected to Hinduism. Many of them have perspectives that would shock or appall those Westerners who think that 'Tantra' is basically about learning to be deeply intimate with one's partner, partly so as to have beautifully spiritual sex, er, 'lovemaking'1. Take, for example, the Niruttara Tantra, part of the Kula tradition, which, in addition to focusing on Kali and having a liberal attitude towards women's sexual freedom, also discusses sexual rituals with girls as young as 12, who are regarded as embodying the Goddess Bhairavi. Or the Prajnopaya-viniscaya Siddhi, which allows for sex between mother and son, brother and sister or father and daughter. Or the Kumari Tantra, which advocates human sacrifice. i suspect not the sort of things that would induce warm'n'fuzzies in many of the Westerners who attend "Tantric workshops".
This context- and complexity-deprived repackaging of spiritual systems such as Tantra and Kabbalah2 is hardly surprising, given that it seems that Westerners are often not particularly interested in long-term learning and development. We tend to want the quick fix, the psychological and / or spiritual equivalent of fast food. Declare Jesus Christ to be the Lord your Saviour and all your problems will be solved! Of course, this attitude is hardly limited to the area of spirituality and psychology: many people expect to become knowledgable and skilled overnight in fields like computer programming ("Teach yourself C++ in 10 days!"), resulting in surreal situations such as the one i read about a while ago where a person thought that programming simply involved starting up Notepad, writing something like "Draw something cool on the screen", and then 'running' that Notepad file. Thankfully, we still seem to have some boundaries: one of the few complex systems which people generally respect as something requiring substantial learning effort is the human body, so that we haven't - yet :-P - seen book titles such as "Teach yourself heart surgery in 10 days!"
It's nice to think that perhaps these Westernised repackagings encourage people to take some time to learn about the source spiritualities they've derived from, to give themselves at least some perspective and context in which to evaluate and make use of the repackagings in question. But although i'm pretty sure that happens some of the time, i also strongly suspect that most of the time it doesn't, and that these "temporarily filling, but lacking in nutrition" repackagings often leave people with false impressions of various spiritualities.
PostScript. The joys of synchronicity: after having posted this, i read this article on historical attitudes towards sexuality in India, which has some great quotes regarding the Western Tantra package:
According to White, by "presenting the entire history of Tantra as a unified, monolithic 'cult of ecstasy' and assuming that all that has smacked of eroticism in Indian culture is by definition Tantric," Western peddlers of New Age Tantra are guilty of distorting and appropriating the original rituals by bringing together "erotic art, techniques of massage, Ayurveda, and yoga into a single invented tradition.... New Age Tantra is to medieval Tantra what finger painting is to fine art."and
This original, demon-propitiating Tantric sex clearly stands at an unimaginable distance from the cozy modern world of Western Tantra fads, with their celebration of aromatherapy and coitus reservatus, described by the French writer Michel Houellebecq as "a combination of bumping and grinding, fuzzy spirituality, and extreme egotism."
1. Although i do feel this is a lovely-sounding term, i tend not to use it and its cognates, as to me it a) has a rather euphemistic feel to it which i'm not fussed about, and b) seems to imply that i'm not 'making' love outside of the times i'm having sex.
2. Such as the repackaging of Kabbalah by the Kabbalah Centre, famed for its links to people such as Madonna, and whose vision of Kabbalah includes selling things like "Kabbalah Water". Apparently a good critique of the Kabbalah Centre can be found in Jody Myers' book Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-06 05:32 (UTC)LOL I hope not!
That's an interesting perspective on the term "lovemaking." I'll be thinking on that a bit.