Mutually Assured Distortion
The spiritual-industrial complex and the theater of internet authority
A note: The Field has a new brand and website, made in collaboration with my friend, designer and writer Frank Chimero. The question we kept returning to was whether online Buddhist design could carry strong typography and practical clarity instead of the usual incense-and-gold aesthetic. Check out what we made. Enrollment is also open for Everyday Awakening, a small, renewing Dzogchen-focused cohort for people who have practiced for years and still feel the distance between understanding and embodied experience. Details at thefield.us.
I see some wack shit on the internet. When it comes to political and plutocratic agendas, I’ve been sanded smooth, and I tend to tune it out. But when I’m exposed to self-styled experts expounding their authority on the right way to engage with spiritual practice—which I consider to be simple, conscious participation in the endless stream of experience—I bristle.
The writer is often someone who has sat retreats, romped with machine elves, and received a few transmissions. These credentials don’t relieve them of that beautifully obvious human habit: projection. They’re talking about themselves. They’re working it out. The admonitions can be well-meaning; they’d probably be more effective directed at the person writing them. Whether as a cover for deeper vulnerabilities or as instruction for the novice, the rants hang in a standing wave of enshittification. One of their main practices is explaining how other people are doing spiritual practice wrong.
Where would I find enough leather
To cover the entire surface of the earth?
But with leather soles beneath my feet,
It’s as if the whole world has been covered. – Śāntideva
The genre has a consistent template. The image is a thangka detail or prayer flags in fog. The note opens reasonably, even generously, walking through a well-built philosophical argument, and that turns out to be the anesthetic, because somewhere around the third paragraph the surgery begins: if your practice isn’t rooted in an authentic lineage, you’re not practicing authentic dharma, you’re doing self-improvement—and self-improvement is saṃsāra (posting about saṃsāra on social, apparently, does not count). The evidence is rarely the author’s experience; more often it’s the testimony of a saṃbhogakāya being I’ve never met and can’t cross-examine.
I take the visions, the transmissions, and the instructions whispered down the centuries as possessing real value. Often the revelation is a seismic reordering of a personal or cultural worldview. I’m all for tantric theater, and I think recapitulating experience in a ritual context can have rich rewards. Yet I chafe at the downstream effect, where a lineage’s reading of an anomalous encounter gets treated as case law. Someone had a vision in a cave in 1350, and I am now expected to produce my papers.
Jeffrey Kripal’s “thinking-with” offers a necessary third way: honoring the experience as real while holding every interpretation of it lightly. When we stop treating the visions of Longchenpa or Patrul Rinpoche as one-to-one schematics of reality, their work becomes far more accurate—and considerably more provocative.
The purists are pointing to one specific expression of spiritual materialism: unconsciously substituting the goal for our immediate experience. I’m with them on the concern; it’s the aggression behind the enforcement that loses me. Trying to feel transcendent right now is almost always a fantasy, because we’re not there yet and don’t really know what that experience is. It isn’t wrong so much as inaccurate, and the inaccuracy has consequences: the more we go for cessation, transcendence, and escape, the more bewilderment, anxiety, and disembodiment we generate, tightening the cocoon we’re already tangled in.
Broadcasting orthodox alarms to social‑media consumers who don’t yet have stable access to the view being pointed at and lip‑syncing it in the authoritative language of Buddhist patriarchs (with a capital P) likely breeds more confusion than curiosity, and lands the listener—who is probably already self‑aggressively striving to “get it right”—deeper into the exact substitution the warning was meant to dismantle.
Patrul Rinpoche is a favorite source quoted by the authenticity brigade, which gives me a chuckle. The man vowed to live out in the open and kept company with some marvelously macho tantric masters like Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje. The likelihood of a modern saṅgha tolerating a gun-toting souse like Do Khyentse is nil, and the “old dog’s” writings that online writers brandish were underwritten by an outrageously austere life. Everyone will quote Patrul’s sentences; nobody sleeps in the weather that produced them. And since he spent much of his ink ridiculing well-fed lamas and their brocade thrones, it’s hard to imagine any of us, in these fortunate modern circumstances, having the mettle to return his gaze, let alone carry out his dharma instructions.
I know, I know, the agita is caused by my own preferences, I get that.
In my personal and professional work, I side with what works rather than what’s right. We need our working picture of things to be accurate enough, or errors pile up and make a mess. But that’s different from thinking that any ideological view is going to capture the complexity of reality. As Bruce Tift suggests, “as far as I’m aware, nobody can prove there’s a correct way of being human.”
Naturally, some of this critique is my own projection. I'm reactive to policing because I police myself. I learned early to defend my ideas and values in advance, armored against disapproval I anticipated before it arrived. The reflex is still active; it's part of what's roaring in this essay.
Gone Unfolded
Spend enough cycles around serious practitioners and you watch rigidity set in. Someone receives a set of instructions from a particular teacher and over time, the instructions stop being a method and quietly become the method, every variation considered a dilution of it. This is understandable. The instructions open things up, but if gratitude hardens into orthodoxy, it drains the thrill from the unmediated play of exploring an unknowable world.
The “authentic dharma” is the retrospective effect of continuous revision, and lineage is a documentary record of those adaptations. The fundamentalist project is a restoration, returning the dharma to a former greatness, and it has the problem all restorations have: the original never existed, and the tradition’s own claim is that nothing was ever missing, which leaves the zealot’s compass with nowhere to point.
The open, uncertain, free nature is already here, and it’s the evolution and iteration of transmission that keeps the practice life-giving, which the conservative reflex resists. Its methods have been revised in every century of its existence. That is what has kept it from the fate of traditions that harden around a ritual form or a cultural aesthetic and grow less legible over time. It takes conscious experimentation to nurture the living core of these practices without stripping them of their context for secular convenience.
The restoration thesis has its scholars. “There is no way to improve Vajrayāna. It was taught by sambhogakāyas to mahāsiddhas, realized by yogis, commented upon by paṇḍitas, and brought to Tibet by translators like Vairocana and Rinchen Zangpo.” That’s the translator Malcolm Smith, and the sentence means to settle the question of adaptation. The one unverifiable link, celestial authorship, comes first and carries all the weight; everything after it—realization, commentary, translation, importation—is mediation, and commentary and translation are revision by definition. The closing witness, Rinchen Zangpo, inaugurated the new translation period (sarma), a movement founded on the conviction that the tantras already circulating in Tibet were garbled and needed reformulation. The mahāsiddhas at the root of the tradition were its heterodox innovators: Tilopa held no credential, Nāropa exhausted the environment of the university and walked away, Virupa stopped the sun in the sky rather than settle his bar tab. The case that Vajrayāna cannot be improved rests on a chain of people improving it. His worry about extraction is one I share; we just disagree on whether adaptation and dilution are the same act.
One of the earmarks of the great traditions of Buddhist practice is that out of the ground of personal responsibility and discipline we discover the possibility of challenging compulsivity. Every time we do a rep of relaxing into immediacy, staying embodied without reactivity, or not following a thought into a state of self-absorption, we’re flexing our adult capacities and strengthening our tolerance for open experience.
Meditation, everyday ethical discipline, and other contemplative practices are one way to do this. We intentionally practice exactly what we’re avoiding and find out it’s not annihilatory to feel bored, hurt, anxious, or angry. We may never enjoy ordinary discomfort, but we’re no longer investing in the old formula: reflexively reaching for an out-of-date response. As we start to have more experience of choice, we’re recognizing some open middle ground. We can no longer take sides and say one way is the right way to be. Out of that, then, comes a more conscious practice of holding and tolerating contradictory experience with no fantasy of resolution.
The urge to proclaim authority and stand in the light of righteousness is another such reflex. When it comes, note ye its shadow. I think taking that position is about surviving avoidance of primal and tender feelings. The more those feelings get activated, the harder we defend a position instead of feeling what’s underneath it: “Don’t be exposed,” “don’t get caught being wrong.” Spiritual authority makes a particularly effective home for this strategy, because it dresses self-protection in the language of transmission, and almost no one thinks to question it. Dzogchen is one of the traditions most difficult to pervert, but god knows, people try.
Mahāsandhi, goodness, how can people consider Mahāsandhi as a cult? Everything that is not Mahāsandhi is a cult. Mahāsandhi is the only thing that is not a cult. - Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Dzogchen is a wide field of lineages, revelations, and revisions. Its earliest layers reach back to the dynastic period (roughly the seventh to the ninth century), but from the eleventh century onward Mahāsandhi proliferated, branching into entirely new cycles of practice. Before it was a monastic trademark it lived in clans and tantric households, where the pointing out of awareness was treated almost as a family inheritance, and in wandering yogis (kusāli) with no institution behind them at all. Its systematization came in stages over the following centuries: Longchenpa’s fourteenth-century synthesis, the great Nyingma monasteries that rose from the seventeenth, and later the scholastic study of Mahāyāna philosophy. Each gave the tradition rigor, and together they gave it the appearance of a single elite orthodoxy it never originally possessed. Much of what suited those earlier, looser associations, intimate and informal, was obscured as that orthodoxy consolidated, and much of what has reached Western saṅghas comes filtered through the same institutional frame.
Whatever people think they're buying when they buy the clean, spacious, unencumbered Dzogchen, isn't what shows up in the eleventh century. The earliest collection of the Seminal Heart is the Seventeen Tantras, which David Germano calls thanocentric. Dzogchen was was obsessed with dying. The instructions are full of charnel grounds and relics, corpse rites, the signs of impending death, and the unfolding of the intermediate states: here we see the echoes of the sky-going ḍākinī erotica of the Kaula charnel encounters. That same material is drenched in the senses: listening to the sounds of nature, tasting and touching and smelling the elements, an elaborate system mapping all of it onto the body, the lamps, the channels, the chamber in the skull. The corpse and the body were the same instrument.
Longchenpa, working in the fourteenth century as a kind of encyclopedist, preserved that older material but quietly shifted the register, tilting the tradition toward thögal and a vision of an awakened mind. Jigme Lingpa leaned further still, into sādhana and deity yoga rather than elemental theology. Mipham spent his energy fitting Dzogchen’s philosophy alongside the other Tibetan schools. And Yangti Nakpo grew up as its own current around dark-retreat practice, which Germano flags as a later development. Today people tend to define the whole thing narrowly: ngo-trö (pointing-out), trekchö, thögal and little else, but the historical record is a far wider field of contemplative approaches, emphasized, forgotten, and re-emphasized across centuries. Dzogchen has always been protean, more octopus than obelisk. Assembled, contested, re‑edited, and re‑founded so many times, it makes stasis inconceivable.
Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy
Tantra runs current through whatever is charged in a given culture at a specific time. Offerings like meat, alcohol, and sexuality were taken as opportunities to regard transgression as nondual. What was a live wire in eleventh-century Brahmanical India may not carry the same charge for people in these times of devotion to materialism and reason, and a practice built to provoke another culture’s hang-ups can feel quaint in a world that makes a spectacle of these behaviors and attitudes. The charge has moved into money and status, into the scientific reflex that needs everything verified, into the hang-ups we inherit from our families and our optimizing culture.
Before the monasteries got hold of it, tantra was practiced in cremation grounds. The yoginīs of the early Kaula lineages were ravenous, flying women who had to be fed, and what they were fed was sexual fluid. David Gordon White spends an entire book on this: the power of flight is transferred through the exchange of blood and semen, and the circular yoginī temples, roofless and open to the sky, functioned as landing fields and launching pads. Practitioners drank from skull cups, wore human bone, and consumed what the village considered untouchable, and none of it was symbolic. The fluids were power substances. They were consumed because they worked. White’s finding is that the earliest Kaula sources on sexualized ritual almost never mention pleasure, let alone bliss.
This is Śaiva material, not Buddhist. But the two approaches grew up in the same charnel grounds, traded technique for centuries, and argued bitterly about who took what from whom. Neither tradition owns the repertoire. It was a contested field, not a sealed transmission descending intact from a saṃbhogakāya.
Around the eleventh century a scholasticizing trend in Kashmir, led by Abhinavagupta and aimed at conformist householders, took the entire point of Kaula practice and made it a by-product of something more presentable: a blissful expansion of consciousness. That revision is the tantra that got handed down, refined, translated, and is now defended online as the authentic article. The purists are guarding a sanitized reading that was itself the first distortion, produced by the original generation of people worried about what the neighbors would think. ‘Authentic’ doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Tantric material is promiscuous. Kripal takes the yoginīs who feed on sexual fluid and reads them as evidence that abduction encounters are durable human experiences recurring across centuries and continents, so a Sanskrit manuscript and a Brazilian farmer in 1957 turn out to rhyme. The Vajrayāna Buddhist approach takes the same yoginīs and builds the inner offerings, where the fluids and the charnel ground become the substances of an internal alchemy performed within the shrines of the subtle body. Neither of these is a misreading. Both are conscriptions, and the material lets itself be conscripted, which is what rich material does. The comparative move is a solvent, and a solvent has no opinion about what it dissolves. Aimed at an institution’s pretension to a pristine original, it works beautifully, which is why I keep reaching for it. Aimed at anything else, it will dissolve the grain of a tradition until every vision is an instance of every other vision and no lineage has anything particular to teach anyone, which would leave me with nothing to teach either.
Similarly, the Indian Sanskrit stories draw on millennia of mythical exempla and philosophical thought on the experience of human deification and the identification of seminal retention and superhuman power (siddhi), powers which traditionally include and indeed foreground the spiritual or physical power of flight. We will return to that superhuman power of flight, big-time, in our last chapter. There it will become actual, physical, realist, historically inescapable. Historians will still try to avoid it. They always do. - Jeffrey Kripal
I think of contemporary transgressive behaviors as a tolerance for boredom, being ordinary or unremarkable, honoring mortality, being devoted without hope of reward, and investigating and staying embodied with the disturbance of our human messiness. One approach is to investigate compulsivity and avoidance through the cultural mores we’re fused with until they become transparent enough that we act from choice instead of from culturally or biologically sanctioned formulas.
I have this new worry about, you know, very moralistic, ethical, mindfulness, vegetarian, non-violent Buddhism that is slowly flourishing in the world in general and especially in the West. It’s amazing, you know. All my childhood, we grew up hearing how the West is so immoral. You know, the Tibetans: oh, the West is so immoral. Pornography magazines, the violence. It’s just the opposite. - Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
We tend to canonize practice instructions into convenient formulas, instead of treating them as context-dependent guidance meant for particular people in particular situations. The instructions matter, and they have to be learned step by step and experienced in the body, the way you learn a craft. Understanding and metabolizing the instructions is not the same as freezing them in place. We master the fundamentals and feel them in our bones, deeply enough to become dexterous and fluid in our expression.
As my readers know, I think about it the way a musician thinks about a jazz standard like “Body and Soul.” You can perform standards faithfully, yet they sound inert when played by rote. You can also skip the years of study and call undisciplined noise freedom. Generative fluency is a third path, where you have internalized the fundamentals so completely that you can improvise something genuinely new that is still, unmistakably, a product of tradition. That is what these lineages likely did when they were wildly proliferating, and it is what most of them have grown reluctant to do now.
It’s probably accurate to say we are guaranteed to distort any teaching or standard. Highly realized people still make short-sighted, human choices. That isn’t always a blemish (though when it is truly a product of dominator culture, then the mistake can be a whopper). The Dzogchen tradition regards mishap as an ornament. We all live messy human lives, and mistakes and confusion are a medium the whole game unravels within.
If we want to turn people on to spiritual work, I think all you can ever do is say, look, I’m presenting my understanding of some very complex teachings, and anybody who has a different intuition about this should respect that and go pursue it. That’s it. You just tell people what’s true for you and you stop entertaining yourself with “am I distorting it?” Because of course we are.
Most of what reaches us today comes through the monastic channel, carried by remarkable teachers—Mingyur Rinpoche, Anam Thubten, Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche, and my teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche—who have given their lives as stakeholders in this transmission, and I have zero interest in changing their traditional style. I have been a grateful beneficiary for my entire adult life. My interest is in what happens away from the shrine room. The practice isn't complicated: embodiment, kindness, curiosity, and enough stability to tolerate intimacy with our experience. What gets complicated is everything that has calcified around tantric practice. Most of the people I work with don't struggle with the method. They struggle with the accretion, and with the distance between what they understand and what they experience. Closing that gap doesn't require renouncing the world; it requires meeting it, in traffic, in a marriage, on a deadline. That is where the eleventh-century yogis were working too, improvising for their own time. We can make the effort to craft our own methods and our own lexicon of insight.
It is well established within the Inner Tantric tradition that texts reveal only the outer meaning and that the inner meaning is conveyed to the practitioner directly by his or her teacher. In old Tibet, this transmission occurred when the teacher whispered the secret oral instructions into a disciple’s ear through a hollow bamboo tube. - Bhaka Tulku Rinpoche
Sit enough group retreats, and you will eventually be in the shrine room when it happens. Twenty people settled into stillness, the bell’s resonance still haunting the silence, and somewhere in the back row, a cataclysmic fart resounds. Emaho! This is really happening right fucking now, and it’s incredible. It isn’t whispered through a bamboo tube; it requires no empowerment. It arrives the way experience arrives: uninvited, complete, and comically awkward to the person it passes through.