Monthly Archives: April 2016

De-calcifying your Pineal Gland, and other New Age Literalisms

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“It’s not you…I just don’t think our pineal glands are in the same place right now.”#NewAgeDatingProblems

A while back, I was kinda bored and for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I made this meme. I thought it came out quite well.

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I was just going to post this meme here, but then it got me thinking. Jokes aside, I find the idea of doing something like ‘de-calcifying your pineal gland’ quite fascinating. The concept is one of a panoply of New Age lifestyle/purificatory options, which rely at least in part on a veneer of scienc-i-ness for their legitimacy. Continue reading →

Economies of Curiosity: The Dalai Lama’s email inbox, the Foreign Researcher in Mcleod Ganj and Artaud Syndrome

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(Antonin Artaud, gazing upon the summit of interiority)

So, McLeod Ganj, India where I am living, ‘Little Lhasa’, or the Tibetan capital in exile, is a funny kind of place. It’s really only a very small town, but its few streets and rural mountain town feel belies its cosmopolitanism. It is a junction point for a virtually unceasing stream of Tibetan and foreign visitors, for news and information from all over the globe. Besides formal support from the Tibetan government in exile, and informal flows of money from friends and family – everything from transnational remittances, informal/illegal trade, community saving unions, personal support structures centered around people from the same home regions in Tibet and exile, from common Tibetan exile or Indian school graduating groups, or shared monastic colleges – many Tibetans rely on tourist dollars to survive.

I have often said that this town exists for better or worse in the midst of overlapping economies of curiosity. Romantic stereotypes and Tibetans’ global reputation precedes them. One silver lining about this curiosity or global gaze is that it can at least be turned into a source of continued survival and livelihood for exile Tibetans, who let it not be forgotten, remain by and large stateless refugees living deeply precarious lives.

Continue reading →

Paranormalizing the Popular through the Tibetan Tulpa: Or what the next Dalai Lama, the X Files, and Affect Theory (might) have in common

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This most recent essay of mine on Savage Minds also took place as part of a running conversation with popular media and representations. I think that it does a decent job of re-iterating and extending some of the ideas that came up in the Tibetan aliens and singing bowl essays about the sometimes bewildering cross-fertilizations between Indo-Tibetan esotericisms, Western occultism, and popular culture.

There’s a lot more to be said in all this about Continue reading →

Tripping on Good Vibrations: Cultural Commodification and ‘Tibetan’ Singing Bowls

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This was also a piece I did not expect to write. Popular media, and reactions to popular media however, got me thinking more about issues of commodification and cultural appropriation, and the singing bowl turned out to be a particularly useful entry point into a lot of these.

I find it quite surprising that so little academic material has been written about singing bowls and their history, despite them being such iconic and familiar New Age objects. Continue reading →

Secrets of the Sex Magic Space Lamas Revealed! Tibetan Buddhist Aliens and Religious Syncretism

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tibetan aliens

This was probably my favourite of the four October essays to write, probably because it involved so many things that I love to think and talk about, but was also something I never, ever imagined I’d be writing for an anthropological audience, or maybe at all.

Years ago I was warned by a lovely acting HoD in an anthropology department to be careful of pursuing the study of esotericism Continue reading →

My Mother was a Rock-ogress Yeti Monster: True Tales of Dharma, Demons, and Darwin

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Despite the ridiculous title, I get the feeling this next Savage Minds essay was a little less widely read. This may have something to do with the fact that the technicalities of Tibetan exile secularism and school curricula have less of a wide appeal than some of the other subjects I’ve covered. Whatever the case, I think that this particular Tibetan origin myth Continue reading →

Tantra and Transparency, or Cultural Contradictions and Today’s Tibetan Buddhist Wizard

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Here’s my second piece for Savage Minds, and the first of the four-part guest-blogger series I did during October last year.

This essay offers a brief overview of my current dissertation research project on ngakpa and ngakpa lineages in exile and outside of Tibet. I tried to make this piece a useful summary of some of the dimensions of ngakpa/ma histories, orientations, practices, and lineages that I thought were of interest, especially for an anthropological audience perhaps less familiar with Tibetan societies and Vajrayana. Continue reading →

Angry White Buddhists and the Dalai Lama: Appropriation and Politics in the Globalization of Tibetan Buddhism

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Since I’m just now launching this blog, I thought I would re-post links to my earlier Savage Minds blog essays for readers, with some additional comments.

This is the first piece I put out on the Savage Minds blog, and deals with the controversial Western Buddhist organization, the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT). This was a modest piece on my part. Continue reading →

The Social Life of Magic: Memories of Hoodoo in Detroit

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In occult ‘scenes’ you find a lot of people identifying as magicians. Of course, this makes sense: if you do magical rituals, especially if you do them professionally for clients, then why not call yourself the rusty, graveyard dirt-smeared spade that you are?

Still, discussions about self-identifying as a contemporary practitioner of magic and the supposed implications of this, can potentially distract from the fact that magic isn’t just something people say they do or are, it’s something that merely exists as part of the everyday rhythms of many people’s lives, and that’s ok. In a beautiful piece, Kenya Coviak reminisces about growing up in Detroit and reflects on the ways that Hoodoo was literally a part of the scenery, furniture, and foundations of her daily life.

Continue reading →

Everything is fake in China: Treasure-revealers, False Prophets, and the Miracle of Community Belief

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fake terton post

(Not sure why this picture is so small, but hopefully at the top you can see some of the photos of the allegedly fake Golok terton Drolma Thar, on the bottom left, Pema Lingpa, and on the bottom right a pensive Jesus Christ)

Tertön གཏེར་སྟོན་ or ‘treasure revealers’ are visionary prophets or saints in Tibetan Buddhist tradition. They are understood to be reincarnations of the original disciples of Padmasambhava or Guru Rinpoche, the Indian tantric master or ‘Second Buddha’ who established Buddhism in Tibet. Before he dissolved his 8th century physical form, Guru Rinpoche is said to have hidden various ‘treasures’ or terma གཏེར་མ་ all over Tibet and the Himalayas, with the intention that these treasures would be discovered by appointed persons at a later date. Guru Rinpoche left various treasures for safekeeping with guardian spirits in the sky, under the earth, in rocks and caves, and in the mind-streams of his closest disciples. Centuries after his time and into the present, certain individuals have claimed to have had powerful visionary experiences and past-life memories which have convinced them and others that they are reincarnations of Guru Rinpoche’s elect. Attending to these visions, insights, and memories, these individuals have been able to follow the clues to unearth treasures left specially for them across space and time by Guru Rinpoche and his partner the great female Buddha and queen Yeshe Tsogyal. Continue reading →