🎙࿇ @joffe_p on tantric Buddhist sex (“karmamudra”). He and his teacher Dr Nida Chenagtsang have been the first to teach this openly, after centuries of Tibetans making a big fuss about how secret it is, for dumb political reasons. Hooray!
@joffe_p ࿇ Tantric sex is one approach to tantric energy practice (“tsa lung”). For dumb political reasons, the Tibetan mainstream narrowed tsa lung to a single system, the Six Yogas, rigidly applied. The Six Yogas are good mostly only for teenage boys.
@joffe_p ࿇ A much broader range of energy practices survived on the margins of Tibet, where the oppressive monastic hegemony of Lhasa barely reached.
Historical research within Tibetan texts turns up many more, and there are similar practices in Shaivism, Taoism, and elsewhere.
@joffe_p ࿇ Different energy practices are functional for different people. Decentering the Six Yogas and discovering diversity provides practical possibilities for many more meditators.
@joffe_p ࿇ Dr Chenagtsang and @joffe_p advocate an exploratory, improvisational approach to tsa lung (energy practice). I believe this is inherently superior to orthodox rigidity, and especially necessary now outside of the originating cultures.
I hope to write about this someday…
@joffe_p ࿇ An exploratory approach seems consonant with Dzogchen (which also preserves a great diversity of specific methods).
As an engineer, I greatly appreciate religious pragmatism. To understand Tibetan Buddhism, though, one must recognize that most of it was pragmatically optimized for the smooth operation of a repressive bureaucratic feudal theocracy.
And adapt accordingly.
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.@vgr’s essay ends with what I’ve called “wizardry.” When you understand the inseparability of pattern and nebulosity, you can weave the flow of energy around and beneath islands of interpretability. Your effective action will appear incomprehensible. breakingsmart.substack.com/p/good-people-…
@vgr Morality suffices to navigate well-defined ethical domains. It fails, and may be worse than useless, when facing “wicked problems”—nebulous ones, in my terminology.
“Being a good person” is the essence of the culture war. Y’all should stop that. It’s profoundly destructive.
@vgr Strong analogy: both ethics and technical rationality fail in the face of nebulosity.
Going through the gigantic _Meaningness_ draft and removing numerous sections that are currently just notes and which, realistically, I will never get time to write.
Most are “archaeology of meaningness,” i.e. histories of where current popular bad attitudes came from.
These are illuminating, but it takes an enormous amount of research to do a good job, and SUPPOSEDLY there are academics whose actual responsibility this is.
Quantum woo is dire stuff, but it’s partly the fault of the original quantum physicists, who were infested with German Romantic Idealism and Hindu monism:
The Tibetan energy practices ("tsa lung," tummo) were adapted from a non-monastic Indian context to Tibetan monasticism, which is the reverse of what's needed in modernity.
“Philosophical beliefs” aren’t beliefs in any normal sense, nor in any useful sense, afaics. This is question #1 in the survey; what could any answer possibly mean?
Philosophy is Actually Bad, and everyone should stop it.
Many lay people apparently adopt “Philosophy!” as a quasi-religion, just as others adopt “Science!” as a quasi-religion.
This is a cultural/social phenomenon worthy of investigation. Studying it sociologically might be meaningful where “experimental philosophy” surveys aren’t.
Is this a surprising outlier, or have things gotten worse than I thought? (Elsevier Science Direct peer-reviewed publication: gene for ESP discovered, N=10). sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Ah, hmm, I see? Elsevier is expanding into the lucrative New Age quackery market? They’re going to face stiff competition from established players, and risk their main market positioning, though.
OTOH, maybe they can see the writing on the wall: scientific publishing is over.