Links for Wednesday
April 24, 2024
Great piece by Hindu Tantra scholar Hareesh on misconceptions regarding the chakras. Two points stood out — 1) the psychological associations we ascribe to the chakras comes from Jung, and not traditional sources 2) chakras are prescriptions, not descriptions - i.e. practicing as if chakra is located in a specific place and has specific associations causes certain results to arise, but that doesn’t mean they have independent reality.
Interesting first hand account of practicing the jhanas with the Jhourney people. Like many “open awareness” type practitioners, I have some skepticism that focusing on specific states of meditation is a useful goal for practice. At the same time, a lot of folks report finding them beautiful and useful as a waypoint to greater insight and transformation. It’s worth noting that even hardcore jhana advocates would not argue that these states are the final destination. This debate is basically as old as Buddhism itself.
The below essay about demonic possession in IFS (“unattached burdens”) is generating a lot of discussion on twitter. The basic premise is that in doing parts work, people can encounter entities that seem independent of the people in whom they seem to reside. What to make of these beings? When I was in graduate school studying human judgment, we had a long discussion of the “satanic panic” in the 1980s. My professor, Robyn Dawes, a genius advocate for rational judgment, was extremely harsh in his assessment of clinicians who fomented this panic. He pointed out all the damage caused to families torn up by false recovered memories of satanic rituals and demonic possession. Channeling his spirit (heh), I think he would say that even in cases where the clinician is extremely careful not to incept the idea of spirit possession into patients, patients can incept themselves just based on their cultural environment. The ontological status of these beings is less interesting to me, however — my question is more pragmatic. Does allowing people to reify these entities and exorcise them actually lead to better outcomes and healthier functioning for patients under some circumstances? The answer might be yes. How can we determine whether any specific case is such a circumstance? I’m not at all sure.
