Am I Religious?

on my relationship with Vajrayana

I’ve been extremely social lately, meeting many new people, and because meditation and Vajrayana have become a large part of my life, I’ve found myself frequently in the position of being asked to say words about how I relate to the tradition. I tend to feel that my answers are unsatisfying, that in many cases I’m doing more dodging than answering. I observe a dissatisfaction on the faces of my interlocutors, and I wish I could do better.

Some people want to know, for instance, whether I’m religious, and whether Vajrayana is my religion.¹ I often feel compelled to say yes, because there is a sense in which that’s true. I have a daily practice, I have an ongoing involvement with communities of practice, I have participated in group rituals, and these are the kinds of things people must partially mean when they use the R-word. Also, I feel a frisson, a shock value in the claim that pleases me. Saying that I’m religious in New York, among secular leftists and liberals, has an effect not so dissimilar from being an obnoxiously vocal atheist in rural Georgia back in the aughts. Makes me feel interesting for a second or two, and sometimes kills a conversation.

Usually I feel compelled to complicate this yes, though, because there is something else that people mean by religion that I don’t relate to so much. For many people, religion refers to a doctrine and a relationship with a doctrine. It’s a set of mildly-to-extremely absurd propositions that the religious person is supposed to “believe,” and defend, and proselytize about. It’s largely a game of language and costly signaling.

My grandparents on my dad’s side practiced this kind of religion. My grandfather was a minister in the Southern Baptist tradition. He was itinerant for a lot of his career, traveling with his wife and five kids to churches all around the Southeast to give his sermons. And once the kids were out of the house, he and my grandmother traveled to Zambia to be missionaries. I remember them telling us a story once over dinner about a tent revival they hosted there, where they converted and baptized hundreds of people in one night. There was a deep pride and emotion in this story. They fully believed that they had saved these people from an automatically hell-bound condition, by convincing them to believe as they did. I think they were also, implicitly, and without much hope, asking my dad to come back to the church, so that his soul would be vouchsafed too.

Buddhists like to claim that Buddhism² is not like this, that it’s a religion not of belief, but of empirical exploration. Simply look directly at your own experience [[in this extremely particular way that you will need a teacher and many books to converge on]] and find out for yourself [[that this long-dead guy’s claims about your experiential reality are true]]. If you didn’t see it yet, totally fine—just look again, a little harder maybe.

As you might be able to tell, I’m skeptical of this framing of Buddhism, though I do think an emphasis on finding out for yourself is useful. I also think it’s perfectly acceptable to deliberately distort your own worldview in any direction you find enduringly delightful and according to whatever evidence you find compelling—but that’s just me.

There’s a view I generally hold about traditions that’s like this: dead ritual, repetition, and performative agreement are a stage in a lifecycle. You’ll never get rid of them entirely, and good luck building anything that doesn’t tend that way. Any word repeated enough times becomes meaningless. Some rando’s conniption of ecstatic poetry, picked up and repeated for its unearthly beauty, will eventually become a liturgy no one can hear. A once-spontaneous dance will eventually become a means to signal obeisance—if it’s lucky.

Religions can survive beyond this hollowing-out process by aligning themselves with economic and political power centers, seeking fresh converts, and murdering rival factions, but I suspect that they can’t survive entirely on such tactics, at least not forever. There has to be some there there, they do have to occasionally point to something meaningful in people’s experience. And this pointing is subtle and contextual and has to be refreshed and renewed with and by each generation, or the whole thing dies. Postmodernity (ugh, sorry) marked a massive disruption in most religions’ ability to adapt in this way—which is roughly why we now think of religion just as the perpetuation of dogma—and we are living in the strange stunned silence of a gap. But I see inklings that some traditions are evolving to meet present circumstances.

Personally, I like a pragmatic view of truth. I read William James in my early twenties and was firmly persuaded a) that there can be multiple environmentally adaptive ecologies of spiritual belief (i.e., the stance known as pluralism), and b) that the question of which ecology to embrace is basically aesthetic and contextual. This was a relief, because it meant maybe everyone around me hadn’t been an idiot, and also that this Truth idea, which had been giving me a lot of trouble conceptually, did not have to be some grand inaccessible mystery. A true belief, say, could be true in the way a wheel is true—it’s been fashioned in such a way that it works reliably, fits the terrain, and, hooked up to various other components, takes you in a direction you want to go.

It took me a good bit of fumbling and searching to find a spiritual tradition and support system that clicked with my aesthetic sense and with my context. But that’s a pretty good description of what Vajrayana has been to me. It doesn’t all the way click. Making it part of my life has required a lot of translation, creative application, testing, conversing, and question-asking (most of which I happen to enjoy). But its views and practices around emotion, energy, and relating have been pragmatically far truer (in the wheel sense) than the ones that were lying around when I was growing up. And a kind of faith has developed out of this—not, ideally, a faith that needs to be sacrificed for and continually espoused, but more like the kind of faith I have in the floorboards of my house. This shit holds weight, at least for now. I trust it mainly because it’s working today and worked yesterday. And because I practice with others and see that it’s working for them. And because my mom says I seem… better. To a degree I couldn’t have predicted beforehand, and in ways I couldn’t have predicted, these methods and views have helped me become happier, more effective, more playful, more embedded.

Usually. One of the core ironies of Vajrayana practice for me has been that a tradition that is most fundamentally about having good relationships can be functionally alienating in my day-to-day life, where most of the people I know are not consciously practicing any such thing. I already alluded to this in the second paragraph, the way that talking about this stuff makes me feel chronically Strange. “This stuff” was, in fact, the term my most recent ex and I often used for Vajrayana and related practices, which I was unhelpfully obsessive about throughout our relationship, subtly thinking of them (with her corroboration) as “my thing.” It was sometimes hard to tell whether “this stuff” was helping me to connect or forming the only major obstacle between us.

Sometimes I think this sense of distance could be avoided simply by making my practice more private. But that would run contrary to my ongoing interest in providing entry points for the interested, not to mention this semi-automatic writing machine that I can’t seem to turn on without first accepting that it’ll spill whatever is top of mind. Anyway it isn’t just the talking-about, it’s also the effects. “This stuff” has helped me learn to relate intensely, to open broadly to the flood of another’s affective warbles and ambiguous facial twinges. I am finding that difficult to even want to shut off or diminish, but I worry sometimes that it makes me too intense to enjoy in large doses, for the average person. Lately I can feel like a dog in a world of cats, or one of those demons that eat people’s feelings. Once when I mentioned my Vajrayana practice to my podcasting client Jim, thinking he might see some alignment with the GameB movement he champions, he said something along the lines of, “That stuff sounds enjoyable, but it’s too fucking weird for me.” I suspect he may have had in mind recollections of hippie-commune tantrikas of the Eighties, but I also felt a sense of relief, actually, to hear him say what other people must be thinking a fair amount of the time.

Having a non-ordinary worldview is a great way to have non-ordinary conversations, but sometimes I yearn to rest in unspoken agreement on the real and obvious shape of reality. There is a pain that comes with practicing different ways of seeing from those I share my time with, even when I can appreciate the differences, even when one view I’m holding is that they and I are deeply okay, and even when I could theoretically adjust my view to be more like theirs. I don’t know if this pain is inevitable, if it stems from some particular framing that will pass away as others have before—but it’s there, and cutting it off feels like a move that is no longer as available as it used to be. When people I know get excited about Vajrayana, as seems to be happening slightly more often lately, most of me is thrilled, but some small part of me wants to inform them of this minor contraindication. Seek not the path of transformation, friends, lest you can stomach transforming into a bit of a weird dude.

Occasionally—rarely—I do wish I could forget everything I’ve learned from this tradition, shutter my sense fields back down to average degrees of openness, and crawl back into the cocoon of consensus reality.

But then I remember that there’s no such place.

[The preview image for this post is a mask of Mahakala, a protector deity in Vajrayana. I found it here.]

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1. I will set aside the thorny issue that what I’m calling “Vajrayana” is a degenerate metamodern cultivar formed out of my practice community, Evolving Ground, that would not be recognized as Vajrayana by most traditional practitioners.

2. It is partially misleading to call Vajrayana a form of Buddhism, but this is a taxonomic exploration for a different kind of essay.