Tantra is anti-spiritual | Vividness

According to tantra, the world is fantastic. According to tantra, tantrikas should enjoy sensual pleasures as thoroughly and often as possible. There is no problem with that—if it has no negative practical consequences.

According to tantra, it is possible to enjoy everything .

Nothing in the world can be objectively bad, because there is no external ... See more

There’s almost no word ickier than spirituality. It’s vague, amorphous, somehow very annoying, and it manages to turn off both the religious and the non-religious. And if you gather five people who all say they’re actually fond of spirituality, they’ll be defining the term in five different ways.

Tantra is not intellectual, it is not philosophical. Doctrine is meaningless to it. It is concerned with method, with technique – not with principles at all. The word tantra means technique, the method, the path. So it is not philosophical – note this. It is not concerned with intellectual problems and inquiries. It is not concerned with the “why” ... See more

1. Spirituality is ambiguously inclusive by its nature and cannot be easily defined, but at heart it is about the fact that we are alive at all, rather than our personality or status; it’s about our ‘ground’ in the world rather than our ‘place’ in the world. It is possible and valuable to give spirituality improved intellectual grounding and greate... See more

The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of... See more

Compassion is about having good intentions. Tantra is not interested in that. Good intentions pave the road to mediocrity, self-righteousness, and irrelevance. Tantra cares about effective action, not socially-acceptable sentiments.