Borges used to say that we are nothing but the sum of the people that we meet, the books that we read, the places that we visit. I do agree with him on that; it's just that those are fictions, therefore so are we: a sum of ficitions that have been passed from time immemorial by other fictions.
I often tend to think about two things: fiction and murder. They are intimately related, you see. Premeditated murder is, in my experience, focused on a fiction of a better life for us.
The boss that's a pain, the spouse that's hindering us, the bad neighborhood; statistically (at least, according to the FBI) if you murder, you're going to murder someone you know.
Which makes sense, if you buy my theory; that people murder in order to have a better quality of life.
Which brings us to the Acolyte, the new Star Wars show. I'm going to discuss it a bit, so
The show problematizes the Jedi order. Not only can they be misled, like in Episode 1. The show's best idea is that it suggests that the Jedi's position can lead to rigidity and in the end, murder to improve one's life.
The Jedi master Sol starts by following what he wants (a disciple) to the point where he ends up murdering people and kidnapping children, and then covering it up since owning it would cost the Jedi political standing. You can make a good argument that the revenge plot that kickstarts the series is someone trying to get justice.
And that's what I think is worth for people training in Tantric Sorcery to think about. The idea of Justice, and the Idea of Balance.
I'm not the one who makes that relation; the idea of Justice being a balance goes back to Aristotle, who maintain that justice results from the objective, law-based aspect (called dikaion) and the more subjective aspect of a person's behaviour (dikaiosynê). This has often been glossed as a balance between the written law and a person's circumstance and history.
The Jedi are obsessed with Balance, too. The Balance of the Force, the light-side vs. dark-side themes run constantly. This idea has an underlying concept: that they are two sides to everything, just two. And if the two sides are equal, that's the best situation for everyone and that the cosmos will be just, and fair.
A lof of people who come in to practice Tantric Sorcery also have this idea. To live harmoniously with Nature. To balance oneself and one's Shadow. This idea of a dynamic equilibrium comes also from Aristotle and his system of bodily humours.
And, as everyone who lives in the 21st century ought to know, it's bad fiction. But it's a particular kind of fiction. What do you call fiction about two things, only two things that fight and become balanced?
You call that genre dualism.
We live on a planet irradiated by the dying screams of a star whose ghosts haunt us in loops. The pollution of our planet is not something we are creating; pollution implies a pristine, 0 state. And yet, the petroleum that we use to pollute is the bones of the dinosaurs that were killed in catastrophes. We power our engines with corpses and fight over the words of ghosts. There's no life, and no death. There's no light side and dark side.
Dualism fiction wants you to believe that you can live forever. That you can be young and healthy and have an energetic sex life with hot beings that will love you and you will feel perfect, if you just get the balance right. Non-dualism, that mode that is Tantra, tells you that no, you will die. You are dying right now, like the Sun, like the universe itself. And that's ok, since you were never alive in the first place.
Fictions. I had luck, you see? Instead of getting Star Wars EU books, in Argentina we had the Minotaur press (another Borgean specter) translating Moorcock. I had seen Star Wars (I'm old enough to have seen it on the cinema) and of course I took to reading about the Eternal Champion, that figure that fought for the balance between Law and Chaos.
But it took me years, as I was growing up, to understand that the figure is tragic not because it fights against Chaos and mostly loses, but because it fights at all. Moorcock's genius, his slow burn, was creating a figure that through repetition became tired and finally understood, as I the reader understood, that the problem was the Balance itself.
In the never-possible promise of achieving perfect Balance, it ensured unending struggle. The Eternal Champion's quest becomes one of being liberated from that Samsara, that struggle.
He eventually does it. But there's a series of adventures, on one of his characters called Corum (based on Welsh mythology) that has a liberated god, a kind of proto-tantric deity with its own Samaya, called Kwell. Corum helps Kwell repair his Samaya and enlists his aid to fight Chaos.
But Kwell correctly assesses Corum's situation: the problem is not the fight with Chaos, but that there should be a fight at all. If the quest for the Balance remains, Corum will be pulled in one direction or the other. So, he does the skillful thing: he kills the Chaos gods, but he also kills the Law gods and tells the Balance to sod off. And with that, Corum is free to have a happy life.
That fiction contributed to form me; that is also why I practice the path I practice. If I had gotten other fiction, I'd be a conservative slave to Balance too. I'll be worried like a Jedi about the balance of the force, instead of asking myself why I need a balance at all.
Fictions. They're subtle traps. They can help us grow, but they can also entrap us.
In Tantra, we need to cut through all of that.
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