Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation

(with apologies to Jess Stearn; an introduction to a work-in-progress)

As I write these words, the Dalai Lama is preparing to die.

I attended a presentation he gave at Temple Emanu-El in Miami, Florida on October 26, 2010, which was prefaced by one of my old professors who remarked that the Dalai Lama was practicing a form of yoga that would ensure his postmortem survival.  One might call it “death yoga” but that would be a little on-the-nose. 

Known as phowa it is a practice whereby one identifies one’s spiritual essence (one might say “consciousness”, but it is both more and less than that) as residing in the body along the central pillar, or suṣumna, familiar to those who practice any form of yoga. One then practices raising that ball of consciousness up the suṣumna to a spot on the crown of the head, controlling its egress from an indentation that forms on the skull.  In fact, that indentation becomes palpable to the extent that one should be able to insert a stalk of grass in it so that it stands upright from one’s cranium.

This practice is not unique to Tibet or to South Asian Buddhism but is also known in China where it is a familiar motif in Chinese alchemical literature.  In the Chinese context, this ball of consciousness takes the form of an infant and is a kind of homunculus: an artificially created human being into which one shifts one’s consciousness.  It is perhaps the kind of idea that would attract men (rather than women for whom the creation of a human being comes naturally) and may be heir to “men’s mysteries” traditions all over the world that mimic menstruation and giving birth. 

The creation of a homunculus is a thread that winds its way through many popular and esoteric traditions.  Frankenstein’s monster was a kind of homunculus.  So was the Golem of Prague. In the twentieth century, the notorious magician Aleister Crowley wrote a small treatise on the homunculus.  Centuries earlier, the alchemist Paracelsus did the same.  The animation of lifeless matter was a dream of alchemists and magicians alike.  Even the iconic “voodoo doll” is a type of homunculus: a stand-in for a human being that nonetheless is connected to that human being through organic material, such as a hair or fingernail clipping, so that manipulation of the doll equals manipulation of the human.  Even poor Geppetto’s marionette, Pinocchio, was a kind of homunculus.  Today it’s robots, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

Putting some of the obvious criticisms aside for a moment, it is important to understand the implications of the practice of phowa in a more general context.  It lives at the intersection of religion and politics, of gender and spirituality, for what the Dalai Lama is doing is ensuring his reincarnation – his spiritual, political, hierarchical, and cultural continuity – outside of the control of the People’s Republic of China.  This is where religion, politics … and surrealism … meet.

And the Chinese government takes all of this quite seriously.

The Chinese government has said that it alone has the power to recognize the next Dalai Lama.  After all, they have done this already with the Panchen Lama: a leader second in authority and prestige only to the Dalai Lama himself.  The person of the Panchen Lama who was recognized as such by the Tibetan leadership was kidnapped and hidden away somewhere in China while a candidate selected by the Chinese government was placed in his stead.  The Chinese intend to do the same thing once the current Dalai Lama has died.

But the Dalai Lama has found a way to de-legitimize any attempt by the Chinese to do so. He has stated that he may reincarnate in a person born outside of Asia, and thus out of China’s control; perhaps (gasp!) in a female child; or maybe not at all until some far future year to be selected by him and identified to the world before he dies.  He will make that announcement, he says, when he reaches the age of ninety-five (he is now, as of this writing, eighty-seven). 

The Dalai Lama, known as Gyalwa Rinpoche to his followers, is the fourteenth in line to hold that title.  This lineage goes back to the fifteenth century, with the Dalai Lama considered to be the human incarnation of Avalokiteṣvara: the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In China, this bodhisattva is characterized as the female goddess Guan Yin. It would therefore not be completely inappropriate for the Dalai Lama to be reincarnated as female.  But then there is not only the question of sex, but of gender.

The Dalai Lama is celibate and has remained so for his entire life so far.  Thus, a casual observer would have no grounds for assuming his sexual preferences as he has not acted on them in any way, as far as we know.  He may be straight, gay, bisexual, asexual, or even harbor transsexual desires. We have no way of knowing any of this.  The two most widely-recognized spiritual leaders on the planet – the Dalai Lama and the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church – are both life-long celibates.  (Judaism and Islam have no such “popes” and neither embrace celibacy nor have monastic orders.)  The Pope is the successor of the Chair of Saint Peter and represents Peter (the first Pope) in much the same way the Dalai Lama represents both Avalokiteṣvara as well as the previous thirteen Dalai Lamas. This idea of preserving a succession of individuals has its resonance with the lineages of monarchs.  But whereas the successions of Popes and Dalai Lamas are spiritual ones, those of the monarchs are based on bloodlines. Neither Pope nor Dalai Lama can generate bloodline successions, regardless of their sexuality or absence of same. Legitimacy in their case is determined by conclave and spiritual signs.

Yet … the Dalai Lama is presently involved in deliberately fashioning his own spiritual successor using the ancient phowa technique.  He is reproducing himself by himself.  It will not be a successor of blood, nor of ethnicity or even gender.  But whoever is chosen (or ‘recognized’) as the next and fifteenth Dalai Lama will be expected to live the way the previous Lamas did.  They will spend their life in spiritual training, in celibacy, and in the perpetuation of the ancient Tibetan rites, and they will do so at some peril from the attentions of the Chinese government who view such a person as a political threat to the regime.

He will have to keep the identity and location of his future incarnation secret, known only to a handful of ministers, for if the Chinese find out they will go to any lengths to seize the Incarnation before the Tibetans do.  Imagine the scenario:  eight teams of Seekers sent out into the world with instructions on where to find the fifteenth Dalai Lama, but only one team has the real address.  The others are all decoys.  The Chinese would have to track all of them and manage to kidnap the little kids before the Tibetans do, or maybe snatch them en route as they make their way to India.

But there’s another problem.  What if the kids don’t want to go?  Let’s assume they may not be born into Tibetan Buddhist families. If we credit Buddhist ideology on the subject, race and ethnicity would be immaterial to the vessel chosen by the super-human soul.  It could conceivably reincarnate anywhere, in any country, in any person. Such an incarnation has already taken place, according to the Tibetans, in Minnesota to a young man named Jalue Dorje, identified as the reincarnation of an important Tibetan lama.  And it occurred again more recently, a few months ago, with the identification (by the Dalai Lama) of a young Mongolian boy born in the US as the reincarnation of Mongolia’s spiritual leader.  So far, the incarnations have been ethnically consistent with their predecessors (which is, itself, rather curious, considering; one might expect a little more diversity from the Compassionate).

Perhaps that’s just as well.  After all, how do you tell the parents of a little Ethiopian girl – for instance – that their daughter is the next Dalai Lama, the former leader of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and present incarnation of a bodhisattva … and will spend the rest of her life in a monastery, meditating, learning Tibetan and Sanskrit, and remaining celibate forever, dodging Chinese assassins and spies, and initiating people all over the world into Kalachakra Tantra?

(It gives a whole new meaning to the term “cultural appropriation.”)

This is discussed here in order to underline the political relevance of spiritual processes using a modern example with which we are all familiar. No matter what we think about the Dalai Lama, or Tibetan Buddhism, or Chinese history and politics, or about esotericism, the fact that an international incident can take place in the near future over a claim involving the reincarnation of a celibate monk, with implications for peace in the Asia-Pacific region as well as global repercussions, gives us pause.  The Dalai Lama will soon surrender his present body to the elements, replacing it with another body yet to be born, and this scenario begs a response from philosophers and occultists alike, particularly from philosophers who consider themselves heirs of the post-modern tradition, as well as occultists who consider themselves heirs of Thelema: the system of theory and practice developed by Aleister Crowley.  Why Thelema?

In 1917, Crowley penned an occult novel that deals with some of the same issues that are facing the Dalai Lama.  Entitled Moonchild, it deals with the efforts of a lodge of magicians to invoke a spiritual force into a woman so that she would give birth to a savior of sorts.  As Crowley writes:

While the true soul reincarnates as a renunciation, a sacrifice of its divine life and ecstasy for the sake of redeeming those who are not yet freed from mortal longings, the demon seeks incarnation as a means of gratifying unslaked lusts.[1]

Crowley’s reference to the “true soul” reincarnating to “redeem those who are not yet freed from mortal longings” is a precise summary of the Boddhisattva Vow, taken by the Dalai Lama (among others) as a promise not to attain the supreme stage of union until every sentient being has already done so.

In Crowley’s lifetime, he believed that one of his followers was attempting to duplicate the rituals described in Moonchild in an effort to incarnate the Thelemic goddess Babalon.  This follower was the rocket scientist Jack Parsons, a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he was assisted in this by L. Ron Hubbard, who would go on to write Dianetics and establish Scientology. 

So, you see, there is a cross-over between weird ideas about sacred sexuality and esoteric means of human reproduction and the world of science, armies, and politics.

Many sober-minded individuals will object that such nonsense doesn’t deserve consideration as this is nothing but superstition and mumbo-jumbo.  But if we have learned nothing else in the years since postmodernism reared its crazed and anxious head from the battlefields of World Wars One and Two, it’s that there is a method to the madness. A kind of Stanislavsky Method, to be sure: an invocation of the Zeitgeist into one’s own body, an animation of the limbs in shuddering response to muscle memories long suppressed, a rummaging around in the body-without-organs, or weird organic responses to the stimuli of Greek and Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, Sumerian and Sanskrit chants ejected into the middle of the midnight darkness of the barroom bardo: that intermediate realm between the living and the dead, the drunk and the sober, the spirit and the body, and between consciousness and matter.

The Dalai Lama is preparing his soul to leave his body under conscious control, and to re-insert it somewhere else.  Probably not in Tibet.  Maybe not even in Asia.  Maybe in the house next door to you, gentle and unsuspecting Reader.

Consider a maternity ward in Gary, Indiana or Ashland, Kentucky, or Bogota, Colombia, or Kinshasa, Congo replete with the sounds of mewling infants and one, cautious, deadly serious little child. Someone whose first word will not be MA but OM.

Because in a makeshift temple somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe, or Midwestern America, or on an island in the Caribbean, there had been a pre-gestational Gnostic Mass – that cisgendered celebration of unfettered fecundity crafted by Crowley himself – performed in private as the Priest and Priestess decided to consecrate the Elements the old-fashioned way and maybe the Dalai Lama decided that’s as good a place as any and a strand of that viscous substance escaped the voracious maw of the Priest and remained safely within the humid Vessel of the Priestess and nine months later the Dalai Lama is born as a result of this union of Thelemic ecclesiastics even though the Priest has long since left the Order to become a Libertarian and the Priestess, an out-of-work Wiccan.  She leaves the infant creature in her mobile home or maybe it’s a Brooklyn Heights basement or a cardboard box on a street in Los Angeles or a tiny room with a tin roof in Leogane and goes out to scrounge for incense money and cigarettes and the infant creature rests peacefully in its swaddling clothes and waits for the Magi that will never come.

When the creature is four or five years old, though, a delegation from the East – following the sidereal signs and geolocating the most likely point of incarnation on the planet according to lunatic equations and mathematical formulae found in Tantric manuscripts and an old Witches Almanac – will show up, bald-headed, sweaty, dressed in badly-fitting western suits over their eastern paunches and will array an assortment of knick-knacks, gewgaws, and notions in front of the creature to see which ones will be chosen.  A skull cup.  A trumpet made from a human femur.  A bone necklace.  An old box camera from the 1940s.  Heinrich Harrer’s SS tattoo.  Bruno Beger’s calipers.  No gold. No frankincense. No myrrh. They have come not to worship but to seize. To kidnap.

And the creature, a sick smile twisting its lips in a contortion of resignation, of existential despair, of pre-pubescent but nonetheless teenaged angst, will select the right knick-knack, the right gewgaw, the appropriate notion, and the monks will know they have found their Dalai Lama.  They will leave some banknotes behind, a short letter, a picture of the Buddha for the mother to cherish, as they abscond with the creature on a plane bound for Dharamsala and begin training their young charge in the ways of ancient Tibet, of the Kalachakra Tantra, of Vajrayana Buddhism, of spirit mediums, Chinese spies, and the politics – oh, the politics! – of experience.

Leaving the methods of identification aside, though, let us focus on the core issue of Thelema (or, at least, of their fellow travelers, Chaos magicians, Satanic edge-lords and, by extension, of many New Age groups and crystal-loving Yoga teachers some of which have adopted distinctly right-wing Q-ish political positions such as antisemitism and white supremacy) which is the interpretation and application of human sexual reproduction within a spiritual or esoteric context.  This was Crowley’s main contribution to the popular idea of what Thelema is all about, at least as referenced by its heavy-handed heterosexual metaphors and allusions and rituals, and yet is the least understood and the most abused by its cadres.

The idea of human sexual reproduction with its attendant spiritual analogues as an avenue to spiritual growth is a much more complex and much more intensely articulated concept than one grasps at first touch.  One cannot discuss sexual reproduction intelligently or esoterically without a firm understanding of the processes of the human body, and one cannot understand those without realizing that the human body is as much a mystery as the human soul or spirit.  There is a long and distinguished literature on the subject of the body seen as a mystical venue, as a machinery of joy and of the obliteration of the Self, as a construction by venal old gods for their own amusement, as slaves of non-terrestrial beings, as nodes on an invisible matrix of matter and mind.

The Gnostics believed that our bodies are the prisons of our souls. The post-moderns suggest that our souls are the prisons of our bodies. 

If we are truly living in a New Age – a New Aeon – then we must measure up to the requirements of an environment that by its very nature should confront every preconceived idea not only of spirituality and sexuality, but of the human organizations that are based on those ideas.  “Thelema” is used here as a placeholder for a field of concepts and attitudes represented not only by the personality of Aleister Crowley and his writings and actions, but also those of his followers and interpreters, and buttressed by studies and scholarship and a variety of artistic productions.  Crowley’s ideas about sexuality and spirituality were not new, but their novelty lay in their method of expression and their condensation into a handful of rituals and esoteric works. A new religion, created for a New Age. Yes, it was about sex; but when we invoke sexuality, can ideas, polemics, and anxieties about race be far behind?

There is little evidence that Crowley was intellectually engaged with much that was taking place in the world of ideas outside of esotericism in the immediate post-World War One period. Had his work been better known on the Continent, and had he been better acquainted with the artistic, political, and philosophical movements taking place there, he might have realized that his path through the wilderness might well have been embraced by them and he likewise would have celebrated their advances into his own territory.  His central scripture, the Book of the Law, reads in some places like a Surrealist tract, and in others like an esoteric version of the Communist Manifesto. The infamous third chapter is a Cri de Coeur that could have been written by a Congolese slave in Carolina or by Boukman in Haiti, by a Bedouin in the Rub al ’Khali before the arrival of Islam, or by an aboriginal shaman in Australia. Most Americans and Europeans read it as nothing more than a blasphemous tirade against organized religion; its anti-colonialist message is often overlooked by those for whom colonialism is second nature as they focus instead on what they consider the “demonic” or “anti-Christian” aspect, thereby automatically equating freedom with satanism:

Throw away the image of the God of the whites who thirsts for our tears. Listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts.[2]

These are sentiments that an Antonin Artaud or a Charles Baudelaire or even a Nietzsche could get behind. They could have appeared in Crowley’s Book of the Law, but they were uttered by Dutty Boukman (c. 1767-1791), priest or houngan of Vodou and a leader of the Haitian slave revolt against France, more than a hundred years before Crowley was born. 

As it stands, however, with a few exceptions, these two areas – New Age occultism and postmodern philosophy – exist in separate worlds.  There is a distinct drive towards Traditionalism in western occultism and New Age thought, a yearning for a Golden Age, a looking-backward through time with the wisdom of the Ancients identified with antique social and political structures where everyone knew their place.  It is a yearning for pre-modernism, because modernism (not to mention postmodernism) is scary and threatening and hard to understand. Sadly, this implies that our modern magicians are wimps.

There have been occultists who embraced postmodernism, very few, but most couldn’t handle the visions or the voices and retreated to the comparative safety of armed militias and edgy, gnomic statements, shouted loud enough to drown out the nervous, speed-frenzied whispers in their anxious, shrunken heads. Strangely, those who survived and even thrived on their engagement with postmodern ideas became artists as well as magicians, knowing that words alone could not reproduce an experience that is, basically and almost by definition, ineffable. Predictably, these are the very individuals who are shunned by New Age types and doctrinaire Thelemites.

Thus, it might be through an investigation of sexuality, human reproduction, the human body, and their role in esotericism that the worlds of religion and politics will come together and interpenetrate, so we can transcend “Traditionalist” ideas and their Neo-platonic silos of race, ethnicity, tribalism, political and economic structure, and violence. This will happen not only through discovering common ground in ideas, but through language, image, science, math, and ritual. Through what they used to call “magic”: engaging with the mad and their hallucinations, taking the gibbering dictation of unseen ghouls in the dark and mapping the logical structures of the rats in the walls, running numbers and numerology on the streets of the City of the Pyramids, translating the messages of alien visitors who might be extraterrestrials, ultra-terrestrials, or sub-terrestrials, angels or demons, gods or ghosts running machines sekret and secrete, as we weather threats of heresy and perversion, demonism and atheism, capitalism and schizophrenia.

You know.  The good stuff.

In the words of David Lynch’s Little Man from Another World: “Let’s rock.”

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[1] Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, Samuel Weiser, NY, (1929) 2002, p. 272.

[2] Dutty Boukman, in Tickner, Arlene B. and Blaney, David L. (2013). Claiming the International, Routledge p. 147.