Recent comments

I am almost finished making my own Kangling! Your article was extremely helpful and I don’t think I would have even thought of making my own if I had not seen it. Thank you!

I acquired a human femur from Osta International (www.osta.ca).
If your in Canada, The Bone room isn’t able to ship up here.
I used Deer Rawhide which is very very stretchy and shrinks alot! I sourced it from a First Nations Drum supply store.
My Kangling isn’t nearly as grizzly and macabre looking as yours! Would you like a photo?

It has been a very interesting process to say the least! Thank you!

David, the “stealth dharma” link is broken due to your moving of the websites. Please, is there another way to access it?

That’s kind of confusing to me… Did you really have this bizarre meeting or was it just your imagination?

Anyways, James’ comment reminded me of Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” and his/her profile picture along with his comment brought South Park’s “Imaginationland” to my troubled mind…

Are we all living inside a fiction?

Thanks, I’ll check them out.

I just hope I won’t be cursed by the kangling for the refurbishment. I think it may prefer it’s current state.

Thanks! I did note the H2O2 comment. However, I was wondering if you might have another idea, since the H2O2 will likely tarnish the metal. Maybe acetic acid?

I recently came across an antique one of these. I was wondering if you had any advice on cleaning it? It’s got metal filigree set along the bone. I’d like to clean the inside and outside because who knows where it has been…

Fascinating. I’m of course reminded of Phillip K. Dick’s experience of living out a minor plotline of one of his stories, after he had already written it. Then he told his priest, and his priest pointed to a remarkably similar incident in the book of Acts.

It’s always unnerving when some mythical/narrative pattern or other wanders out of its natural habitat in the human psyche and plays out in the external world.

I think it is curious to use the nazi as example, with this kind of ethics, it would be easy to excuse the nazi for persecution of the Jews, since every evil in this world have some dirty Jewish finger: from the atomic bomb to Monsanto, from the white sex slavery to organs traffic, from the Palestinian holocaust to 9/11 attacks.
Don’t forget also Churchill and the British Empire attack and genocide of Tibet and India, the nazi were big friend of Tibet and India.
I just don’t get why liberal try to be Buddhist, if Buddhism is against every liberal belief, like democracy and women empowerment. Even Machig Labdron affirmed the empowerment of women as a sign of degeneration.

On a first instance, I argue that this is a clever guide to become the Nietzschean Übermensch through Sartrean authenticity.

Wow, Disgust really is relative! Ardbeg is a delicious member of the Islay trinity, Lagavulin, Laphroaig and Ardbeg and all three are smoky peaty Amritha.
Really enjoy the Blog.

Please do not criticize Buddhism. You have the liberty of choosing weather to accept lord Buddha’s teachings or not. You also have the right to share your opinions and your views with the public but you should not disrespect a religion or a religious leader. Lord Buddha has preached not to blindly accept anything told by anyone including him. “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense”.You can agree or disagree but you should not disrespect. Dear David if you are a Buddhist as you claim you must know this. According to the Dhamma every Karma has a Vipaka you can’t escape it just like a cart follows the bull which Is tied to it. So no one need to send any death threats or any other such things but you will face the vipaka for this in the due future. And at last for all this people who are interested in Buddhism do think less of this religion just because of people like this David but experience for yourself. I am a Sri Lankan who is proud of his religion. (And please forgive for any grammatical errors)

“Explaining subtle practices in vampire-ese—as I attempted in 2010—adds to the difficulty.
Nevertheless, let us press on, splashing first into the sulfuric acid lake of loathing. “

With your careful questioning of modern “inner self” psychology and Romanticism, why not write a Vampire novel where Romanticism is the “betraying usurper” or whatever the hero is compelled to battle? Rousseau is a bit fancy pants for that role, maybe resurrected with more Puritan self discipline ( Solomon Zero ? ) he’d make a better opponent for your protagonist. I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting better horror novels, whether electronic or printed.

The least we can do it opt out and become vegetarian. That’s only the first step, of course…

I wouldn’t fret over the Romantic origins of the vampire tale for your novel. Those writers rarely knew what they were doing, and when they had flashes of insight, like Coleridge finishing “Christabel” or attempting to complete the ol “Mariner”, they hurriedly scrubbed the depth-full monsters from view. One reason I love Ligotti, even though he’s more postmodern than most Weird writers, is that he plunges into the dark waters where Coleridge hurriedly swam away at the first sight of terrible glowing things. Of course, having some troubles in one’s belfry is an occupational hazard in that line, but it’s better than caning the bad medicine in nightclubs every weekend (not to imply that’s why your serial remains unfinished! )

Is the Tibetan book of the un-dead for purchase? or is there a pdf file i can find?

I didn’t say he didn’t have children. Bly wasn’t a primary caregiver and given his travel and work schedule after he divorced the mother of his children in 1979, it wouldn’t have been possible for him to do much caregiving at all. He just doesn’t know very much about children other than himself, something that is true for many people and most men in the West.

The idea that all or even most children pay that much attention to non-abusive parents is pretty lol from my perspective as someone who spends all day with kids, who for sure don’t think beating on their siblings affects my love for them.

Children can, however, be instantly and deeply affected by the opinions of their peers. What peers think is acceptable is of much greater consequence than parents.

So that’s what I think is mistaken - kids don’t care what non-abusive parents think very much because they have a rocksolid, egocentric assumption of love. The first experiences of basic non-acceptibility as a person, in our culture, come from peers (again outside a context of abuse, and other cultures are different). The shadow, in our culture, is not constructed from parental rejection; it’s constructed from peer rejection.

And now I will ask you, why did you think that Robert Bly knew anything about kids?

I got around reading this part quite late, as I have been busy with Ph.D. stuff, and did not want to read it when too conceptually tired.

Reading you piece, reminds me of a personal practice experience, which I thought I could share for the benefit others.

Until fairly recently, I used to suffer from frequent moments of monstrous anxiety. Noticing that anxiety, I would retreat from it, to not see it, to make it not me. This would naturally lead to depressive mentality, especially as the arising anxiety was very frequent occurrence.

However, after having very consistent meditation practice of the Four Naljors, I could start become aware of that anxiety when it came up in life circumstances. Catching it early on, it was possible just suddenly just look at that terrifying “chaotic storm of bright hot plasma” - as it felt - to allow it to be there without judgement. Suddenly it was not that bad.

What happened next cannot be satisfyingly described, but after a while just letting that energy be there, it would somehow just loosen itself up. The anxiety would vanish, and suddenly there is truckloads of energy for activity which was not experienced like that before.

Anxiety of course might still come some other time, but recently it seem it has been possible to repeat the same process reliably.

Which is nice. Kélpa Zang!

For someone who disavows political correctness, you are quite eager to embrace its tenets when applied to the intellectual domain, i.e welcoming postmodern gender theory to find where “the West went awry”. Is Plato’s great ‘sin’ his eternalism, or the concept of Higher and Lower, metaphysical hierarchies, leading to the development of medieval Christian ‘Chain of Being’ ? The assertion that modernity was about finding “ultimate” justifications for rational systems is a strange reversal of Nietzsche, Marx, or indeed, Heidegger’s project of detonating all the transcendental “dross”, and painfully tunneling downwards into “prima materia” in search of radical “new beginnings” ( rather easier to do now, when Logos is damned as unfortunate chauvinist superstition, both by hyper-rational liberals and Black Sun besotted memekids in the internet sewers; talk about nihilism!) . How is your project of “encouraging tantra without teaching it” more dhammic ( or tantric ) than another modern attempt at the “new beginning”, or do you see the modern trajectory as fulfilling the tantric practice? Pardon if I misstate your aims, or the goals of tantra, I practice in one of the milquetoast ‘Consensus’ circles, which I’m glad you criticize. Nothing more deadly to the inner life than comfortable security.

“When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy.
One day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: “Can’t you be still?” Or “It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.”
Behind us we have an invisible bag, and to keep our parents love, we put the part of us that our parents didn’t like in the bag.”

lol, written by someone who’s never taken care of any kids.

A great mystery is why people listen to stories about the meaning of childhood from people whose only knowledge of childhood is half-memories of their own.

“I does it!”

Haha, this is great. It also gives me a hint about what “the tantric attitude” looks like and why it’s valuable.

Of the people I know who I can imagine telling this story, most of them are… Quakers? I wonder why!

I continue with commenting now that I progress through your text. :)

She is a confident, take-charge person, and I love that about her… but after a half-dozen times, I found myself wondering what it would feel like to enter the code myself. I found myself increasingly resenting her selfishness. She was having ALL THE FUN of pushing the buttons, and I never got a chance.

I had to laugh for a moment when I read this, especially as I have a some mental image of you both from when I have met you in person. I could see it with my mind’s eye. :D Also, it is a nice example of how these things can be really subtle.

Reading this I came up with two examples of things I admitted to myself to enjoy after a period of time spend practising the Four Naljors and appreciation of the senses, but was afraid to before.

First, I realized that I like Black Metal music, you know that kind which goes into the whole church burning Satan worship mode. It was something I did not want to admit to myself when I was a teenager. You know, at the time (late 90s) a Satanic panic descended on Finland through some fringe Christian groups, much later than in the English speaking world. Those days, I had to even explain that my favourite power metal band was not Satan Worship. Nowadays, there is no shame any longer - despite that Black Metal is still a quite lunatic fringe thing in the end, although it has gained some hipster popularity.

More recently, I had to admit to myself that I like moe anime. Liking cute anime girls with all the bright rainbow colours and whatever, is really against all proper male self image in my culture. Even in some “cultured and refined” circles of the anime fandom, moe is seen as a questionable thing, as men should only like Akira and Berserk or something. I even once wrote a vajrayana inspired blog post once about a moe anime. Sadly I have not continued with it, as the further points became really difficult explain, and some life happened.

It is really peculiar to notice that one has had internal blockages about liking things which are not harmful to anyone really. I hope you can appreciate the contrasts with these two examples. When put together, it does not seem like a “proper” combination at all. Just think of this big biker-looking man in black leather (as I often am) appreciating some kawaii stuff. ^_^

I think that the consideration that hunting the shadow is a long process is a good one. Probably even one of the worst things to do would be to force oneself to go beyond the limits, as it tends to cause back-reactions and collateral damage. In addition, I found the example of the gender identity rather helpful. My moe remark connects with that a bit.

Hi David,
Great piece! It’s refreshing to see reference to Bly and a creative reworking of Tantric themes. I have to start out by saying though that there is one truly nonsense claim in your text that I wholeheartedly disagree with :)

“ As you can see, I should leave the teaching of the ultimate practice of Vajrayana Buddhism to qualified professionals!”

I have a few thoughts to share but can’t help but think that from this we are pulled once again to the big challenge in front of us: How to create, establish facilitate functional if temporary communities of willing participants in this sort of ‘deep’ work.

The topic I wish to comment on concerns the need for others to help us with the various phases you lay out. You mention Vajrayana professionals but I have met few of them capable of providing context for the practices and processes you lay out. Although I appreciate your generosity towards the ‘pros’ and your exercising of humility in downplaying your ability/knowledge, I strongly believe that we need more of the sort of work you have carried out here. It can certainly be done without it turning into an act of self-aggrandizement which most Buddhists consider to be evil. That’s just shadow stuff anyway and reflective of the general Buddhist distaste of or paranoia over power.

The process you lay out is extremely challenging and the tricks of avoidance are many and varied. In most cases, another human being or beings is/are required, which I am sure you are aware of. That was one of the great contributions made by the Men’s Movement when it functioned, in that it supported men in eating the collective western archetypal male shadow. This is further illustrative of the point you make about our stuff being part of the world, or collective stuff. There is actually a contemporary version of such a movement in the form of Family Constellations, which seems to have overcome the gender divide that ended up becoming important for a lot of men and women after Bly became less fashionable and the limits of men working on themselves became more visible. I don’t know a huge amount about Family Constellations but from friends that have taken part I have surmised that through a sort of theatrical playing out of family dysfunction, participants eat chunks of their shadow while the other participants bear witness and feast with them thereby eating potential chunks of their own shadow in the process. This could provide a model of sorts for this type of work within a Tantric theoretical Buddhist framework.

Although I agree with the spirit of your critical take on looking inside yourself, the expression should be recognised as being a place marker for a whole bunch of stuff, much of which is far from the New Age, romantic call to solidify or find the sacred self and its universal wholeness, etc, etc. You’re right in part in your criticism of it but miss out a lot of the good that comes from shifting focus from the external or superficial to the inside, which for many simply means connecting to layers of avoided feeling or non-feeling in the body, which is strongly connected to the practice you lay out later in the text. Depending on the depth of dysfunction and avoidance at play, it can require a hell of a lot of work so that metaphorically speaking; a person is deep mining into layers of feeling or non-feeling ‘within’, which is to say within their limited sensorial perception. A huge amount of work in psychotherapy obviously revolves around this.

The point you make about finding the shadow’s tracks in your interactions with others is great but only works if they represent a change to the status quo of your well-trodden social tracks or if you are facilitated in experiencing them differently with the help of an outsider. That said couching the process in terms of reclaiming bits of the world is very, very positive. This is an essential point to make as so much of the therapeutic environment reifies the self and is based on the idea of a true self. This actually points to the feelings of inadequacy that drive the New Age and its never-ending supply of self-help seminars and books. People are looking for a non-existent final answer.

I think there are shortcuts in the shadow eating process that can be functional if a person is reasonably emotionally robust and curious enough to experience the unknown and challenge themselves. They would also need to be attracted sufficiently to the idea of experiencing destabilising spaces in which they are exposed. This would be sped up by group dynamics that solicit such transformational potential in a safeish space made up of consenting adults. This is rare and difficult to find and explains in part the willingness of so many folks to hang out with dodgy gurus for longer than might be wise. They instinctively know that something powerful is happening and they may not find it again so better to suffer and maintain absurd beliefs than lose the magic. I don’t think that gurus have to be done away with, however. As an aside, the work you describe comes very close to the shamanic world I inhabited for years, which assisted participants in taking the processes you describe very far indeed. It was only made possible by the quality of the teachers, however, but one significant feature was that the teachers refused the role of guru and had a code of honour of sorts which prevented an individual from becoming the all-knowing, powerful, wise one. These codes are not so difficult to craft.

I’m of the view that consensual alternatives to top down guru dynamics can be established that would facilitate work like this but the facilitators would need to be very capable and have gone through enough of the process to participate fully without losing their shit. They could incorporate the steps you lay out and add in opportunities to confront limitations, experience the forbidden, play out taboos and be witnessed while doing so. There is something quite liberating in being seen and receiving permission from others to experience the taboo and express our darkness, or monstrosity as you define it. Additionally, participants would benefit greatly from engaging fully in sensorial activities of a radical variety and taste that solicit very strong feelings on the spectrum of repulsion and lust.

Your liberating perception section is great but presents challenges for those arguing from a purely theoretical perspective. I have mentioned theatre and performance a few times in recent posts and I think that might be a way to facilitate greater openness to participation for the intellectually enamoured. Religion, new and old, tends to frame this sort of work in grandiose terms or package it in highly symbolic, culturally rich forms, which can make it very powerful for believers but utterly unappealing to everyone else.
As for the fear part, I agree and think that it helps enormously to play with the divide between self and society. There are incredibly dark impulses to be absorbed. I wonder to what degree the individual shadow is the shared shadow and to what degree we must consumer our part of it to help reduce its collective power. That sounds very newageish I guess but it’s an open question I continue to explore.

Matthew

The irony in this is that the simple appreciation of the sense experience is something that in principle could be explained without any weird doctrines, rituals or religiosity; but this also makes it very difficult.

I guess this is the big joke of Dzogchen - everything truly interesting is too near, too obvious and too natural to pay attention to. Like, you are living as a character in an absurdist situational comedy without actually noticing it.

Good to read these two articles! I also enjoyed the Terry Pratchet reference from the previous commenter. :)

You make a case how difficult these things are to communicate, particularly in writing. Having received some teaching on these things from my personal discussions with Aro gTér teachers, I have at least some grasp of the subject, but I have big difficulties communicating the attitude to others.

For example, I spend a chunk of my free social time nowadays with people involved in the Finnish black/death/doom metal scene and also with people in science fiction/fantasy/anime fandom (And here I notice how I am one of those pesky Millennials living in mixed subcultural matrix). As my attitude towards any kind of art is now heavily influenced by the Vajrayana view, I come often into situation where I just realize that my attitude differs strongly from many of the “fans”. In these situation, I have absolutely no useful tools to open up my perceptive. Naturally, I can participate in the conventional talk, but some of the most interesting things cannot be talked about.

For a typical “fan”, to generalize, it seems, the primary attitude for art is not as much what one genuinely likes, but what solidifies ones sense of identity, safety and obsessions. To such attitudes, the ambiguity which is connected to active appreciation creates anxiety. They just blanc out, even though we would be talking about something that all of us supposedly enjoy.

Sometimes I have fantasies of just hitting people to the head with “a vajra hammer of instantaneous illumination”, but then I remember that I have no capacity for such wrathfulness. I just have to try to be gentle with them.

Excuse my reflections. This is likely not a proper comment.

It is only by reawakening the senses that you can get beyond a closed system of concepts about what everything means, and therefore what is acceptable and what is not. There are two ways of understanding this. One is extremely basic... The other is extremely subtle.

Any chance you could elaborate on the extremely basic meaning? The principle seems straightforward to me, but I can’t tell if that’s because I’m only understanding the basic version, or if it’s because I’ve spent a long time with Vajrayana-influenced teachers.

My take is something like: “the world as you actually experience it is a frothy mixture of map and territory, and you could probably stand to pay more attention to the less mappy parts.”

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, adults who meet Death usually manage to convince themselves they’re not seeing a walking, talking skeleton, because that would be indecent. Witches are not so hung up on decency:

‘’Tis the First Sight and Second Thoughts ye have, and ’tis a wee gift an’ a big curse to ye.’ ‘Don’t you mean second sight?’ Tiffany queried. ‘Like people who can see ghosts and stuff?’ ‘Ach, no. That’s typical bigjob thinking. First Sight is when you can see what’s really there, not what your heid tells you ought to be there. Ye saw Jenny, ye saw the horseman, ye saw them as real thingies. Second sight is dull sight, it’s seeing only what you expect to see.’

—The Wee Free Men

I shifted gears from soul sucking genocidal gas cloud to whimsical schizotype dream time shaman and this whole other view to “how can I think I am the living dead, or death itself?” presented itself.
The berdache thing is sort of intriguing. Especially in the instance of a contra-lateral gender associated split between feeling and reason/left right brain resulting in libido being split and turned against itself, rather than back at the self object or image. Perhaps this is the distinction between classical narcissism and the bizarro theory of “anti-narcissism”. Stewing in ones one juices frantically substantiating negative self image rather than ideal, becoming anti-matter.
And yet, I can relate. I feel like “I” am more a festering “battery”, always whipping up rage and revenge as a fuel, than the machine I operate my body as. I seem to be very attuned to acidity and corrosiveness in my way and in everything I consume.
And yet I feel I’m coming out of it. I wonder what an fMRI would reveal right now…How big a deal is it?

Ha, you’re the first INTP I’ve encountered since I became aware of the MBTI. That was only like a year ago and was a real eye opener. I mean, I’m 43 and I really needed to see a whole system laid out to get the whole “theory of mind” thing and bring it to belief that not everyone thinks like I do and we’re all of the same mind (mine) anyway. No boundaries.
I actually had to teach someone a process today at work, which I did, but there’s still this underlying part of me that like “why don’t you just see it?”. I’m tons of fun to move a couch with me in 10 words or less. I think I got really hung up at Lacan’s whole mirror phase, and the names of the father thing. They say INTPs tend to gravitate to primitivism. And then there’s the whole “Demon Function”, Introverted Feeling. I read something funny on a forum “what’s the cure for being INTP?” One answer was “Hang out with an INFP”. I am finding this to be true. Today my INFP friend said “you came out broken”, making fun of me for being left handed. Funny I had just alluded to forceps birth, which no one takes seriously except Otto Rank and a few people in Australia. Oh and Grof with his perinatal matrices.
Anyway, lots of great stuff in this thread. I’ll have to read it like a thousand times to get it past my “everything is bullshit filter”. Other ones that are great for this are “The Narcissists Time” by Superstar Sam Vaknin and “Values of People With Schizophrenia” by Stranghellini. Really good descriptions of how one gets outside of space and time and refuses to be taught anything from without.
The Cotard thing is really a thing unto itself IMO. People will speak of deadness in an “as if” way for any number of reasons from depression to dissociation or what have you, but this is a real ego syntonic checking out in total incredulity of being. It’s like being a self made “empty set” waiting for an answer to everything that some part of you splits off in search of, and in the mean time it’s like life hasn’t started yet. The prefatory quote to Vaknin’s essay the “Delusional Way Out” describes this perfectly. Or the Lowen/Reich description of “schizoid/dreamer” character on Michael Samsel’s site. Permanent postponement. Apocalypse Dudes Interrupted. It does actually create a weird “doomed to (boring) immortality” sense of things.
And yet its just some dum dum double bind tavern puzzle in the mind that some part is just too stupid and primitive to give up on....right?

Wow, am I glad I found this page and that it’s still recently active. I have had suspicions that I have Cotard’s for years and seem to have been debating the problem of qualia for years in my own autistic schizotypal way that never arrives at belief in my own conclusions or that there is any such thing as “consensus reality”. I don’t know where to begin to describe my “experience” or “lack of lack” of it as it were and I tend to be a major graphomaniac in my attempts to make up for a total lack of affective resonance with a lot of words.

I seem to be someone who has retained a state of prenatal and somehow adversarial object relations. Klein’s bad parts of self in full bloom. I was born with forceps and think I may have “opted out” to isolated schizoid withdrawal, narcissistic mortification at birth, and then pretty much flunked every subsequent developmental phase, other than to grudgingly acquiesce to “acting” more or less appropriately; never understanding why all the bother about “having a life” or a “narrative”. I seem to inhabit a negativistic “view from nowhere” with a sort of Shiva complex that has been attributed to INTP types, which I am. I seem to have been “born against”, but at a scale where it is not humanity I have it in for, but the very idea that precedes them. Pan Galactic straw boss, quantum psychopath or something. lol

I have had several calamitous episodes of trying to emerge from this. Totally ungrounded, full of rage at society and the necessity to “push objects around in this shit world” and yet full of giddy glee to subversively show everybody the error of their belief in the “real”. I have actually had the “body without organs” experience where food seems to vanish from the back of one’s mouth.

I am presently right on that threshold again. This time I have somehow managed to clear some major blockages and feel sensation in my body all the way down to my feet. Curious to see where it goes…