I have described throughout this series the core of Tantric philosophy as an underlying commitment to a single principle. That principle has two functions. On the one hand, it is a principle that underlies everything that exists. And, on the other hand, it creates everything that exists.

If you put these together, you end up with the rather difficult-to-understand idea that this single principle is everything that exists. The entirety of human experience, and the entire universe that human beings experience, is a single thing that unfolds as a single thing from a single principle.

Tantric philosophy is, in large part, an attempt to describe this difficult idea in a myriad of ways. It uses gods and goddesses, complex communal rituals, the discipline of contemplative and meditative practices, reflection on the most mundane elements of ordinary human experience. It uses basically anything that it has to hand, to try to explore this one elemental idea: everything is one thing.

When you consult with the Tantric masters themselves, there are only a few concepts that might be able to capture the simplicity and difficulty of this proposal and make it immediately obvious and digestible.

One of those recurring ideas is freedom.

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But freedom, in its Tantric sense, is not what you think. It has little to do with contemporary obsessions like “free will” or American ideals about the individual being free to do whatever they want to do.

It is not fundamentally about freedom from things like rules or moralities, although this is certainly there in the outworking of Tantric philosophy.

Nor is it fundamentally about freedom for things like self-expression or personal authenticity, although, again, this is definitely one possible outworking of the basic philosophy.

Freedom, in its Tantric sense, is really freedom to see things as they are. It is the freedom of recognition, of insight, not freedom of choice or action.

The Sanskrit word that is translated as “freedom” in this sense is the word svatantrya.

Ultimately, this word describes the way in which the underlying principle works to create the world and our experience of the world. It does not apply, really, to how any individual within that operates.

It is perhaps easiest to understand this if we bring back to the stage one of the greatest actors in the tantric drama - the god Shiva. One of the best known representations of Shiva in Hinduism is Shiva Nataraja, Shiva the great dancer. The idea is that the universe as we know it is created by the spontaneous, unpredictable, even capricious movements of Shiva as he dances ecstatically, randomly but generatively, throughout the universe.

He is free to manifest whatever he chooses. You are free only insofar as you arise spontaneously, you are the consequence of his freedom.

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Another way that the Tantric masters talked about this had to do with the relationship between the Shiva principle (consciousness) and the Shakti principle (energy). In typical Tantric fashion, this is a thought experiment taken to its extreme. The idea is - what if we just assumed that there was no such thing as causation? What if everything that happens, at each and every moment, in the entire universe, has no prior cause? What if, each moment can only be traced back to the union of Shiva and Shakti as principle, rather than the series of things in the observable universe that we might otherwise take to be the “cause”?

In this case, they argued, we would have to say that the universe freely manifests itself as precisely what it is at least one thousand times per second.

The point is this: the unfolding of the universe, and of human experience of the universe, is caused by the free action of the universe itself. It arises internally, spontaneously, for no “reason” whatsoever. So from an outside perspective, the “god’s-eye view”, it is spontaneous, free and uncaused.

But. That has nothing to do with how the universe, and all of its component parts, experience themselves. From the outside, from the god’s-eye view, it is free and spontaneous. From the inside, it is something else entirely. It is experienced as fate. As inevitability.

In other words, the only thing that you are truly free to do, at least from this perspective, is to see this truth and, in response, to love only what is, and to hold no fondness or yearning for what is not.

In Tantric philosophy, this is perhaps most clearly captured by a particular school, the Pratyabhijnya (“recognition”) school.

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But this idea is not limited to Tantric philosophy. It is one of the most ubiquitous ideas, I think, in philosophy. You find it in ancient Greece, in the concept of amor fati, the love of fate.

In fact, I have tattooed on my arm some German words. They come from the great European philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. They translate as:

“I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them - thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful.”

I didn’t feel like I had room on my arm for the rest of this text. Nietzsche goes on:

“Amor Fati: let that be my love from now on! … all in all, and on the whole: some day I want only to be a yes-sayer!”

The question that Nietzsche, and Tantra, put to us goes something like this.

Are you able not only to accept yourself and life itself as a piece of fate, a fatality, as Nietzsche somewhat humorously puts it? Can you move beyond acceptance, resignation or resentment in facing your own fatality?

That is, can you love yourself, not as free, as someone who creates consequences. But as a single piece of a puzzle, as unique and unreplaceable, and also as inevitable?

And, perhaps far more challengingly, can you love everything and everyone in exactly that same way? This is crtiical because, in Tantra, there is fundamentally no difference between everything out there and you in yourself.

If you want a philosophy that allows you to be positive towards yourself, and positive towards life, then there is a real catch. You will be required, by that very same affirmative and affirming philosophy, to love not only the good, the pleasurable, the positive. You will be required to love everything.

This is the heart of Tantra.

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It is also the heart of other affirmative philosophies, like Nietzsche’s. So I find myself in an odd but rather enjoyable position. In closing this series on Tantra, I will give Nietzsche the final word:

The heaviest weight. — What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

(I tried to make an AI song about this text - here is the link)

Neil

In a recent trip to India I had the honour of participating in a contemporary reconstruction of a 1000-year old ritual called the Trika Pūjā. Trika means “triad” and Pūjā means “worship.” This ritual is about the worship of three goddesses, who together form the holy trinity of Tantric religious practice.1

I was in an underground temple amongst the tea plantations of Kerala in southern India. I was with my beautiful wife and a small group of young Indians who are Tantric practitioners.

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This ritual, the Trika Pūjā, had essentially been lost until the scholarly work of Mark Dyczkowski. Markji, as he is affectionately known by these people, was a man who spent his life in India working to recapture the Tantric traditions. He passed away in early 2025 and so the enactment of this ritual in contemporary settings is, to some extent, a way to honour his legacy. Markji’s work has allowed practitioners to reconstruct the medieval style of worship of these three goddesses.

And so we were treated to the ritual. The liturgy was read by a Sanskrit scholar named Sachin who had come down especially from Kashmir. It was enacted by a yoginī, that is, a woman who has been initiated into the tradition.

The ceremony peaked with the offering of sacrifices to the five senses. I found this really striking, both symbolically and personally. This highlights something profound about Tantrism as a spiritual and religious practice.

In this tradition the point of religious devotion, of heightened spiritual awareness, is not otherworldly. It is not in a “somewhere else.” It is not in a “beyond.” It is right here, all the time, brought to you by sight, hearing, touch, taste and scent.

Downwards

In my last post I described this tradition’s sense of the “beyond,” of the “somewhere else.” This is the upward path, away from the body and its senses and towards an experience of ultimate reality in which a person is able to experience something tremendous and otherwise inaccessible, namely, the experience on monism, where everything collapses into just one thing.

I think that this is the kind of spirituality most people are comfortable with. The great spiritual heroes are often depicted as monks and nuns in solitude, on mountaintops and in caves, shunning the world and its pleasures, rejecting the body and its needs, pursuing these kinds of deep insights, insights that are beyond words and well out of the range of ordinary daily experience.

The Tantrikas of the Trika tradition call this the path of liberation, the way of moksha. A person on this path even had a title. They were a mumuskhu.

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This path is also the path of the renouncer, of renunciation. Usually we think of this as the hardest path - to walk away from the world and pursue insight instead. But for them this was sometimes thought about as the easy path. Initiation as a mumukshu was relatively straightforward and relatively quick.

The other spiritual path is the way of bhoga. This is the path of enjoyment. A person on this path also had a designation. They were called a bubhukshu.

This is the downward trajectory, away from the ultimate, disembodied, un-selfed and undifferentiated union of peak insight. This is the journey down into the self, into the ego and, ultimately, into the body and its five senses.

It is a little difficult for us to understand that this journey into the senses, into the body and all of its pleasures, was sometimes talked about as the difficult path. Initiation into this path was demanding, rigorous, time consuming and required great sacrifice.

This is the way of the householder, of the ordinary person pursuing spirituality, who does not renounce the world but instead, wholly embraces it.

The tradition that I am most interested in is a kind of stream within the Trika school, called the Kaula lineage. For a Kaula, these two are not alternatives. Both are considered essential. They are, in the end, just two sides of the same thing. They interpenetrate each other, you can’t have one without the other.

You are asked, therefore, to do both things, simultaneously - the pursuit of direct insight of a pure indescribable character. And you are asked to realise the fruits of this sublime experience in the cut and thrust of ordinary life. You are asked to bring the most profound mystical experience that you can imagine to bear on the moments of ecstasy, of boredom, of love and of hatred, that constitute a day-in-the-life.

At long last, Tantric sex

Now, I’m going to do something in this post that I have studiously avoided in over two years of public writing about Tantra. But maybe it is time to talk, just a little, about Tantric sex. It makes, sense, I guess, to place that in a post about “enjoyment.”

There are basically two camps on this topic and I belong to neither of them. There is the camp of classical Tantra. These are people who focus on the spiritual practices and religious texts from the authentic Indian traditions. And then there are the neo-tantrics, people who operate within the new age alternative spiritual movements. They tend to see the Tantric emphasis on enjoyment and pleasure as a way to reclaim a shameless and effortless enjoyment of the human body, especially as experienced in sex.

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Ne’er the twain shall meet. The classical tantrics think the neo-tantrics are apostates, appropriating and distorting a beautiful and venerable tradition to pursue hedonistic sexual desires because of a Western cultural obsession with sex. And the neotantrics see the classical tantrics as prudish and conservative, disconnected from the living experience that their teachers are pointing towards.

To explain my position on this, let me take you back to that Trika Pūjā. The climax of the ceremony, as I have said, was to offer sacrifice - to worship - the five senses.

Back to Your Senses

The reasons for this are profound and I will not be able to explain it in full here. But I will just say this, and it is very hard for people raised in post-Judeo-Christian cultures to fully grasp what I am about to say. For the ancient and medieval Tantrikas, consciousness and its capacity for self-awareness were divinity in and of itself. There is no concept of god here that is separate from the consciousness that you experience every day as a conscious being. Any conscious experience is, by definition, direct experience of the divine.

And it is a simple fact of human experience that sensory experiences are processed, by an large, by consciousness. It is quite difficult to understand what it would mean to talk about a human consciousness in the complete absence of sensory experience. The moment a smell, a sight, a sound, a sensation, a taste arises in consciousness, consciousness itself becomes apparent, vivid. And so … to have a peak experience of the divine is to have a peak experience of consciousness is to have a peak experience of the senses. That is Tantrism in a nutshell.

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I asked my Indian friends about this problem, the problem of Tantric sex. One of the things they said was along these lines: if worship means honouring the five senses, then there are only a few things that the human being can do that consume, immerse, hijack, and intensify all five senses at once. And one of them is sex.

And so, for this reason amongst many others, sex does hold a particularly sacred place in Tantric spiritual practice, and both the neotantrics and the classical tantrics can, I think, at least agree on this. It has the capacity to produce in a person’s consciousness an especially heightened sensory experience. And this, for the well trained Tantrika, is by definition an especially heightened and intense experience of divinity itself.2

The Tantric challenge, however, is not to limit the experience of the divine to such obviously intensely sensory and ecstatic experiences Tantric sex. The reason the downward path is the harder path is because you are being asked to transmute all sensory experience into an ultimate experience of divine ecstasy.

If you wanted to start down this path, you would begin with something relatively easy to divinise. Maybe it is an exquisite glass of red wine, or a perfectly cooked rump steak, or a perfect chocolate cake, or a simple but beautiful ripe raspberry.

And if you can master this, the challenge is to go even further. What about that feeling of rage or hatred or sadness? What about the boredom of doing the dishes? What about the disgust of the midnight nappy change?

Yes, even here, the Tantrikas ask you to find god…

Neil

When I was a much younger man, I was really, really into mysticism. It was mysticism of a Christian variety, characterised by endless hours spent in prayer and study of Christianity’s sacred texts, and by many thousands of words handwritten in journals to analyse these texts, and, of course, to analyse my soul. I loved the Romantic and Metaphysical poets, I loved to play spiritual songs on my guitar.

I loved every search for anything transcendent.

Like most good mystics, I found in this search some experiential rewards: those moments of ecstasy, of stepping beyond the ordinary, those glimpses beyond the vagaries of change and decay, beyond the material limits of the body and the intellectual limits of the human mind.

But because my path towards transcendence was shaped by a conservative form of Christian belief, it included a negative stance towards the human experience. This can be captured by one word: “sin.”

If you approach Christian mysticism with an interest in the textual traditions of Christianity, “the Bible”, I think you have to confront a troublesome proposition of the Christian faith. This is the idea that every human is broken in a basic way. According to conservative Christian belief, everyone is born sinful and this sinfulness has something to do with a body that needs taming and a mind that needs cleansing.

Don’t take it from me. Hear it directly from Saint Paul, the original Christian, a man Friedrich Nietzsche characterised as the “greatest of all the apostles of revenge” and as a great hater:

We know that the law is spiritual and that I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin […] when I want to do good, evil is right there with me … I see another law at work in the members of my body … making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death!” (Romans 7:15-24)

This negative stance towards the ordinary human experience is not unique to Christianity. It might be labelled differently elsewhere, but in almost every religious and spiritual tradition there is a mystical strain that seeks to escape, cleanse, transform or avoid the material reality of the human as both body and mind.

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Upward and Inward

This is one way to think about spirituality, as a kind of liberation from mundane human experience. But, thankfully, it is not the only way. There are mystical traditions that take a different approach. The Tantric traditions of South Asia are in this category.1

Here, liberation does not mean liberation from anything. It does not involve escaping or cleansing, it does not involve denial or rejection.

In the Tantric traditions, liberation is achieved through and for the body and the mind.

I prefer to think of this, as many do, as a kind of ‘ascent’ towards a spiritual insight. I prefer to think of it as an inward movement. This is because in spiritual circles the “ascent” is often confused with escapism and frequently ends up with some negative implication towards what is below.2

We can avoid this by thinking about liberation as a journey inward towards a direct realisation of your own true nature.3

Think of it like a set of Russian Babuschka dolls. The outermost dolls are the body and its senses. The more you pay attention to them, the more focused you are on what they bring to you, the more likely you are to realise that there is something inside. Another doll.

And this one is your mind. Again, the more you pay attention to it, the more you practice what the Tantrikas call “one-pointedness,” the more likely you are to find that there is something else inside it this one too. Another doll.

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And then, at least according to Tantra, you find that hidden at the heart of all of this, within the body and its senses, within the mind and its constructs, is something else again. Another doll, but this time it is something universal. They called this thing at the heart of every human ‘shiva/shakti’, that is, absolute, unlimited and undifferentiated awareness and energy.

At the moment when you enter into the heart of this universal awareness, you have a particular type of experience. The Tantrikas had many ways of talking about this experience. The one that I like is called pratyabijña, translated as “recognition.” Here, spiritual awakening or enlightenment is simply a moment of recognition, where you see yourself for what you are. And that is, you are a specific instance of a universal thing: the combination of consciousness and energy.

This journey of liberation from the experiences of a particular human body and specific mind to a experience of universal awareness is not an escape from either of them. It is, instead, an intensification of, and immersion into, the full range of experiences that body and mind offer, until we get that moment of breakthrough when we see them for what they really are.

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Em-bodied and En-minded

In Tantra, the highest point of the ascent is achieved by going deeper and deeper into the body and the mind. By developing a deeper appreciation of what they really are. The more you experience them the closer you get to the heart of reality itself. And this means that Tantric spiritual practices are immersive and not escapist.

I think this is quite a profound shift in what we think spirituality is. I frequently hear spiritually minded people denigrating both the body and mind. Even when they are not rejected as sinful, they are often downgraded to the status of a mere tool, a temporary necessity that can be either discarded or disregarded as the occasion permits.

People talk about their bodies as “meat suits” that we can somehow abandon when we want to. People talk about their minds as places of distraction and noise, that we aim to make silent and empty. People reject the notion that their actual personhood, their entire identity and existence is tied to the specificity of their particular bodies and their particular minds.

This is not the Tantric way. In Tantrism, it is only by more complete embrace, more total identification with body and mind, that true spiritual insight arises.

Let me pause there. I find that when I talk to people about these matters, they very quickly rush to think I am somehow mistaken. That I may have misspoken. Have I not heard the importance of stillness, of emptying, of the void, of calming and synchronising the nervous system, have I not understood meditation and the quiet observation of thoughts as they pass by. Have I not grasped the signal importance of quietening the chatter, of non-attachment with the ego, and on and on it goes.

Let me assure you. I have understood those things. And I think they are misguided. Absolute identification with the particularity of body and mind and the intensification of experience offer an alternative approach for anyone who finds these other more mainstream approaches to spirituality tedious and unfruitful, as I do.

This has profound effects on what you might think spiritual practice is. Here, it doesn’t have to be the pursuit of a quiet mind. It can, instead, be complete immersion in the noise and clamour of a busy mind. In fact, your spiritual practice might require you to intensify and exacerbate the dreaded so-called monkey mind. Give them chimps bananas, produce for them both friends and enemies, and refuse to put them in a cage.

This also has profound effects on what you might hope for in your emotional life. The endless pursuit of equanimity, of non-attachment, of the extinction of desire, falls away. The continually frustrated hope that you might experience peace, love and compassion for the world reveals itself as just another desire.

The Tantric practice, perhaps best exemplified by the terrifying Aghoris, is to go the other way. The idea is to fully experience your hatred, your contempt, your disgust, your enmity, your jealousy, your rage, your fear. The Aghoris went to great lengths - sitting on corpses and drinking blood, urine, semen, faeces and wine from hollowed out human skulls - all in an attempt to get to the extremity of experience and find out what it revealed. Here, in either extreme equanimity, and extreme disturbance, true spiritual insight can be gathered.

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And finally, the experience of the body. Tantric yoga is not as health-focused as other forms of yoga might be. At least in the sense that moderation is not a thing for Tantrikas. The whole idea that you don’t drink, you don’t do drugs, you eat well and live pure - this is not necessarily the Tantric way. It might be your path, which is fine. But if you want to get drunk and live in debauchery, indulging every sense in every pleasure and every pain, then that can be a perfectly legitimate and deeply spiritual path.

The archetype of spiritual attainment, Lord Śiva himself, is portrayed in these two contradictory ways: the supreme ascetic in perfect stillness, and the drunken, ash-smeared Kāpālika wandering among cremation grounds. You don’t have to choose which is better. According to Tantra, they are ultimately exactly the same.

Perhaps you can see where this is going? Next week we’ll talk about the path of enjoyment…

Neil

I remember as a young child growing up in South Africa a particularly close call with electricity.

My father was replacing the plug on his electric drill. I’m not sure exactly why, but this process produced a metre long black electric cable with a functioning set of prongs to plug into the wall, and two orange copper wires poking out the other end.

Spotting this, I immediately took the plug-end, marched over to a wall socket, and plugged it in. As it happens, the copper wires were resting loose against the skin of my thigh. I remember the exquisite power of that jolt, and the cable falling from my leg, and the entire house going into darkness.

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It is not obvious what the electric outlets in a suburban house, the way that the thigh muscle of a human being contracts, and, say, a lightning bolt kilometres high, have in common. Many of us will think it’s obvious, but that is because of what we have learnt in school about physics.

If you dropped all of that underlying cultural and scientific k…

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there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming… all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt, text…

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak §119

I had an uncomfortable dream last night. I was in a church, about to deliver a sermon. But I was in my dressing gown and I was having real trouble keeping it tied up. I guess it was the preacher’s version of that dream where you turn up to school naked.

And, what’s more, I had not had time to prepare properly. My notes were a mess and I was struggling to make sense of them. I started to speak several times, losing my train of thought while having to awkwardly retie my gown.

Finally, just as I was finally about to launch into it, two people from the congregation rose to their feet, came up to the pulpit, and started heckling me. They jabbed their fingers at me and poked me, even calling me names.

One of the interesting things about dreams is how you don’t know when you’re in …

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It’s not so easy to understand how the world works. For starters, “the world” is a big place. And, what’s more, there’s no reason to think that the world owes us any kind of explanation. The way the world actually works might be completely inaccessible to us, it might make no ‘sense’ whatsoever to human beings.

And yet the quest persists. People - scientists, philosophers, theologians, electricians, landscape gardeners - continue to insist on figuring out what works and how it works.

This isn’t always a quest for a grand theory of everything. Sometimes the quest has modest goals - like how to build a retaining wall that lasts. But it seems to me that no matter how grand the ambition is, the quest is always the same: we start with what works, we understand why it works, and then we extrapolate from there to some broader theory so that we can succeed with that thing in new situations.

And every now and again people stumble across things that seem, just, well, strange. Unthinkable. And in t…

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It’s good to be back and writing after my summer holidays. Taking a break has given me the chance to step back and reflect on what I’m doing here and why I’m doing it.

I started Provocations when I was finishing my PhD. I suppose I wanted a way to keep writing and to keep learning. Writing these weekly philosophical musings definitely keeps me thinking and reading.

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In the last few years, though, it has morphed into something else. I have become more and more interested in what I could write that would actually he helpful to you, the reader. Especially as my philosophical interests started to evolve and I began my research into the spiritual traditions of medieval India, most particularly the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism.

This year I plan to continue this work. My hope is to bring you philosophical insights that are helpful and practical. And yes, I hope to continue provoking you too.

To start off, I plan to write a six week series, starting Saturday, covering six of the most basi…

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But if you love dance/funk then check out Dirty Loops, if you want to see the three sisters who are singlehandedly recreating hard rock, then go check out the Warning. I can’t believe Spiritbox, the biggest new band in metal right now didn’t make it here. And there’s no “real” metal here either, no tech death or otherwise extreme music. So it’s been a strange year….

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But these 13 songs are the ones. They’ve been on all my playlists, and been with me through all the highs and lows of 2025. And they’re the one’s that kind of go together into a playlist that has a beginning, a middle and an end.

So here it is. My Top 13 playlist for 2025.

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…Slowly We Fell Into Slumber and I Held You Until the End of Time

Urs…

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There’s a good chance that this will be my last post for 2025. If I post again, it will be to give you my annual playlist, my top 13 songs for the year.

I started publishing my annual top 13 playlist here a couple of years ago, because “Life without music would be a mistake.” This collation of musical enjoyments is an annual ritual. I have “Top 13” playlists going back to 2012. It’s a sure sign that another year is ending, and another about to begin, when I start to curate the orgy of music from a calendar year into this all-too short format.

As it happens, I have spent most of 2025 thinking and reading about ritual.1 Rituals, it seems, have many functions. Daily rituals, for example, reduce stress by increasing predictability. Communal rituals create a sense of community by binding people together through shared experiences.

Codes or Portals

But these are not the aspects of ritual that fascinate me, as important as they might be. I’m interested in the way that rituals have a particular k…

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I was at the Sydney Opera House a couple of weeks ago. It was not the usual Opera House crowd: I was surrounded by a sea of dark T-shirts decorated with the spiky indecipherable fonts of death metal bands. We were there to see the Swedish death metal band Opeth.

We found ourselves somewhere to sit and eat, just next to a young man with long red hair that framed his face. I noticed that his face was trembling and his eyes were filled with tears. His feet, clad in black and white Converse shoes, were twisting together like mating snakes.

I asked him if there was anything he needed. He said “No it’s OK, just anxiety.”

It made me wonder what kind of trauma this young man had experienced to produce this kind of extreme anxiety.

And then I put my philosopher’s hat on. Many philosophers and philosophies find themselves deeply interested in how people think and feel, and what can be done about it.

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The concept of Samskara

Last post I talked about the Tantric idea of vikalpas - thought constructs o…

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I’m sure we have all been there.

Those midnight sessions when your mind is racing. Unable to control your thoughts and get to sleep, frustration builds. And now you’re awake and frustrated, further from sleep. There seems to be no way out, except to stop your mind.

Or that moment when intrusive thoughts start to win.

I remember a time in my life when I was under stress. Extreme stress. My marriage was falling apart (thanks to meeting the love of my life). My career as a church minister was ending (thanks to incipient atheism). I was trapped, and I had nowhere to go, I could see I was about to lose everything.

It seemed obvious that one way to silence the mental noise was to take a knife from the kitchen bench and draw it across my shoulder. Eventually, after months of enduring the dissolution of my life as I knew it, it started to seem obvious that there might be another way to silence these thoughts.

I started to have intrusive thoughts about how to end my li…

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I love the fact that my interest in classical Tantric philosophy and spirituality has brought an incredible number of new and interesting people into my life. I have attended many events and workshops in the world of alternative spirituality, and even had the chance to teach a bit of Tantric philosophy at some of them.

One of the features of the new age Tantric scene is the intense desire that people have for healing. This desire manifests in many different ways, but especially in the desire for healing from psychological problems and wounds.

And there are plenty of people offering help. Whether it is simple meditation practices or the more out there wu-wu of past life regression or quantum field therapy, there is no shortage of offerings to help with psychological healing.

I’ve been wondering whether classical Tantric philosophy and spirituality has anything to say about this kind of healing.

Mapping Consciousness: Where Do Your Thoughts and Traumas Live?

Thankfully, the medieval Tantric…

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In the late 1990s I was living a rather difficult life. Well, at least by comparison to the one I live today.

I was in a a smallish coal city, Newcastle, just a few hours north of Sydney. It was difficult for an Arts graduate majoring in Linguistics to get a full time job, so I was pulling things together as best I could with a range of odd jobs - lawn mowing for a friend’s business, casual work in a CBD petrol station, and part-time outreach work for the local Baptist Church.

All of these jobs involved odd hours. Mowing lawns started at 7am, graveyard shifts at the petrol station start at 10pm, and my outreach work the Church started at midnight because the people I was trying to help were the local street people - sex workers, heroin addicts and mobsters.

It’s fair to say that my consciousness, my waking experience of life, was filled with tension, stress, and various deprivations of diet, sleep and exercise.

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In the midst of all of this, I had one of the most elevated experiences of my …

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I’m back from a 2 week hiatus. I’ve been on a work trip to Greece and India in search of education and technology partners.

I spent about ten days in India and during this time I had the immense privilege of a weekend at a place called Rythmbhara.

Rythmbhara is a commune set amongst the tea plantations of the Western Ghat ranges of Kerala in southern India. The commune has been established to support and promote the spiritual and philosophical tradition of Trika (or Kashmir) Shaivism. Regular readers will know that I have been obsessed with this spiritual tradition for the past few years.

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It was an exceptional experience that I feel very privileged to have been afforded. Not only were we hosted with great kindness and generosity, we were also invited to participate in the spiritual and intellectual life of a small group of people who are immersed in this tradition.

One of these experiences was a ritual called the Parapuja. This is the central ritual of Trika Shaivism, which, after being l…

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One of the things I do in my day job is to work with technologists on AI. I have really one overarching goal with this: to figure out how to use AI for good in education.

So this means I think a lot about what’s happening with AI. And, being a philosopher at heart, I can’t help but think about it philosophically.

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is a theory called “dead internet theory.” This is the idea that the internet is mostly just the internet replicating itself with AI. There’s very little that is original in the majority of internet content.

And, with the increasing sophistication of AI tools, our ability to rely on digital content is rapidly diminishing. It is very difficult to tell if images, videos and text have been produced by humans or bots.

So where does this leave us, philosophically speaking?

To answer this, I will turn to the philosophy of mind/consciousness that you encounter in Trika Shaivism, from 11th century Kashmir.

Embodied Minds

One relevant question, I t…

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Wondering about spirituality, and what it means for everyday life, has been a pastime of mine for my entire life, just about. Even when I was a hardcore materialist atheist, I was still kind of exploring spirituality. Just from an anti-spirituality perspective.

As many of you will know, I’ve been studying some of the spiritual traditions of India for the last couple of years. It struck me the other day that, at least in the traditions I’m studying, there is no gap between theory and practice.

This is most obviously true in the more extreme sects. The Kāpālikas, for example, were pretty extreme. They did all kinds of weird and wonderful things - drinking blood from hollowed-out skulls, hanging out in cemeteries and smearing themselves with corpse-ash, and on and on it goes.

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The thing about the Kāpālikas, though, is that these extreme acts were underpinned by a philosophical theory. This theory was to do with life-force energy and the idea that, ultimately, everything was one. So it didn’t…

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I had an interesting experience this week at work. I had submitted a PowerPoint presentation for my executive colleagues to review. It was an important presentation that I was developing for the university’s governing Council. I was unsure about how to present my ideas, especially as it is my first time presenting as an executive to a governing board.

What’s more, I knew it was totally rushed and undercooked but I had no time to refine. So I just sent it in and hoped for a good discussion.

Which is what I got. The discussion was helpful and everyone took my half-baked presentation in the spirit that it was intended.

But there was one interesting moment. At one point in the presentation I included some ideas that used the words “larrikin”, “rebel” and outlier.”

One of my colleagues - very respectfully and graciously - objected. These words, she said, are problematic when used to describe a university. They were problematic, in her view, because they are “masculine.”

Immediately, I could …

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If you’ve spent any time on social media going down pop psychology or alternative spirituality rabbit holes, you will probably have come across the concept of the mantra.

In pop psychology, a mantra is a phrase that you say out loud to give yourself some encouragement or to try to change something about your life or mental state. It’s a little bit like cognitive therapy where you gain some kind of positive impact by changing the way you feel about things, by changing the way that you talk about them.

In alternative spirituality, mantras are often Sanskrit words or phrases that are chanted or intoned. This might be part of an overall approach to meditation or breathwork, or it may be more religious in character. The more religious version is where the mantra is there to invoke a specific deity and bring their powers into your life for some material benefit.

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As many of you will know, I’ve been studying classical Tantra for the past few years. In particular, I’ve b…

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I was unfortunate enough to log in to my social media accounts just after American conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered this week. This means that I now can’t unsee that image: a man bleeding to death on stage at an event to discuss ideas.

I don’t normally write about current events or politics. But I have had some thoughts brewing for a while, and now feels like the right time to share some of them.

What strikes me most about politics at the moment is the depth and complexity of the issues that are at stake. I don’t think it is as simple as “polarisation,” which is what I hear a lot of people talking about.

For me, there is a complex interaction unfolding, where political lines are hardening into polar opposites and disappearing at the same time.

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One of the enduring images from Ancient Greece is the image of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail. It feels to me that traditional “left” and “right” politics are both eating their own tail. This creates a complex an…

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I don’t know what it is about me but I like contrarian points of view. Or, failing all-out contradiction, something that is deeply counter-intuitive. There’s something that contradiction provokes that makes me feel alive.

A topic that is ripe for contradiction and counter-intuition is spirituality. My wife and I have both, in our own ways, spent our lives circling around this question. What is spirituality? And is there an answer to that question that has a material and practical effect on everyday life?

There are four major influences on my thinking in this area.

Firstly, Christianity. I spent the first thirty years of my life exploring various flavours of Christian belief and practice, from the deeply conservative to the wild and whacky.

Secondly, Friedrich Nietzsche. The German philosopher, deeply atheistic and anti-spiritual. I suppose, given my penchant for opposition and contradiction, this was an obvious leap: Christian faith to atheistic materialism.

Thirdly, sci…

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