The Corpse of Borrowed Concepts
Saturday, March 18th, 2006Now and then, a reader writes to me and asks why the commenting function is not enabled on Living Tantra.
Some of you are groaning already, I bet.
Not to disparage anyone’s sincere attempt to learn about Tantra, but there is plenty of “commenting” out there already.
Every now and then, I dip into one of the online discussions about Tantra. The amount of misinformation being delivered in the most authoritative tones is truly staggering.
I love hearing from the readers of Living Tantra. Honest, I do! But I just don’t have the time to do my duty and sift through daily online comments to figure out which ones are appropriate for this website.
When I was first looking for a lineage teacher, the Internet was a much smaller world. No Yahoo Groups. No Tribe. No nuthin. Yeah, there were the old Usenet discussions, but they had not yet been gobbled up by Google, so they were not so readily searchable. Google? What’s that?
Can you imagine? And no blogs, of course.
Even so, I still had to wade through plenty of beside-the-point stuff before I finally did locate my lineage. And then, it was still difficult to get information about how and with whom to begin practicing. But that’s a whole other story…
The crux is that this experience was my motivation for starting Living Tantra. I hope to make it a little easier for people to find reliable information about the tradition.
Of course any View is conditioned by body, speech, and mind. We are human, until we get recycled as squid. (Pass the garlic sauce!) View is always limited. But, I do my best to present authentic, embodied understandings, either those that I have arrived at through my own practice, or that have been arrived at through practice by other, more expansive human beings.
Embodied understanding is the fruit of all sadhana. “Embodied understanding” means that the fruit of your practice shows up in every area of your life: waking, sleeping, and dreaming. You feel, look, behave, eat, and play according to the fruit of your practice. Embodied understanding comes out of your entire being, not just your mouth.
Not only on the Internet, but universally, students, and even teachers, trade in what Shibendu Lahiri calls “borrowed knowledge.” What frees you, he writes, is not borrowed knowledge, but direct perception. By the way, “The Corpse of Borrowed Concepts” is his phrase.
Borrowed knowledge derives from any aspect of View, method, or fruit that you hear about from your teachers or others, or read about. Borrowed knowledge is often a collage of what just “sounds right” to you. Borrowed knowledge is conceptual. You have not actually integrated this knowledge into your life, but you profess it to others as if it were your own embodied knowledge.
Borrowed knowledge can be delivered in the form of helpful advice to fellow practitioners, pronouncements or musings made in the course of discussions, fantasies or exaggerations about our spiritual practice, or actually taking up the mantle of the teacher or Guru. Borrowed knowledge becomes an identity construct. It shores up “I” or ego.
Most of us “try on” borrowed knowledge during the course of our practice and, if we are diligent, it actually becomes embodied knowledge.
But oftentimes, borrowed knowledge remains a defense mechanism of small self, preserving ego and assuaging our fears and insecurities. This kind of borrowed knowledge is a great hindrance to real openness.
In order to grow, we must look deeply into what the Daoist tradition calls our “treasury of worms.” We have to face up to our own fears and tensions in order to relax them. Borrowed knowledge prevents this process from unfolding naturally.
Letting go of all the ways in which we build fortresses out of borrowed knowledge means being willing to encounter openness and drift around a bit.
We think of openness, without the support of our concepts, beliefs, and convictions, as scarily insecure. Openness scares us, at the same time that we long for it.
But the longing we feel is really our best friend, our true Guru. Our longing for “something” is precisely our embodied understanding. And it’s calling out for us to stop talking so much and relax into not knowing so real understanding can arise.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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