Freedom

Tantra style

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.

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.

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.

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.

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