Fantasy and Spiritual Life
How not to construct yourself so seriously and be more free
Padmasambhava gave this advice to his disciple Yeshe Tsogyal: Do not fabricate even so much as an atom.1 I have carried this teaching with me like a gem and a beacon since I first read it many years ago.
Most of us are twenty-four hour a day factories of fabrications. We exhaust ourselves fabricating concepts, histories, and narratives that attempt, and ultimately fail, to control the flow of time and cobble together a self that feels more coherent.
Our human fantasies and fabrications are aspects of impermanence. They come and go. When we become attached to our effortful self-constructions and explanations, they are always in the way. They block intimacy. They block skillfulness. They block compassion. And they are useless when it comes to spiritual life and self-realization.
Linear time fantasies
Think of how much time some of us spend each day imagining what might happen in the future, or even projecting strong expectations of future circumstances. If the future is where you live, you spin mental narratives and generate emotions about what will happen later today, next week, next year, or in a decade.
You compulsively construct future conversations with people and fantasy outcomes based on your karmic habit patterns. When you do this, you are shutting down your availability to what is actually presenting itself to you. You might imagine doom or success or triumph, but all of it amounts to anxiety about your value, about being successful, and about your mortality.
Or perhaps the past is your thing. You spend much time reliving past events and interactions and rewriting them. This activity is deployed to ward off feelings of shame and loss.
Or perhaps you are engaged in compulsively worrying over and imposing limits and concepts on what you are doing and what is happening right now. This is an attempt to gain control over the inexorable flow of time and avoid encounters with life’s vastness.
Linear time is one of our main “stages” for our mental and emotional fantasies. And we spend a lot a lot of our lives on that stage.
The coherent self as internalized colonialist fantasy
Now consider how many of our cultures train us to strive mightily to construct a coherent sense of self. The learned concept that we should work to “know who we are” in an ordinary way and be able explain ourselves coherently causes a tremendous amount of suffering and is based in socially normative expectations and forms of life.
Explanatory narratives and categorization are the main vehicles that we, as obedient subjects, use to construct a sense of coherency. But we don’t have to be doing this. We have inherited our deadly categorizing and explanatory narrative habits from 19th and 20th century European psychology and its roots in colonialism.
The colonialist algorithm
Modern colonialism functions on a system of pseudo-scientific categorizations and explanations that depend on the construction of faux histories.
The colonizing entity devises bogus histories for why certain people and places must be dominated and their resources plundered. It justifies or supports its actions with pseudoscientific physical and mental markers, classifying subject cultures into inferior “types.”
For instance, while late 19th and early 20th century Zionists were developing plans to colonize Palestine, they polished up a religiously-inflected back story for Jewish people that supported Jewish claims to a “right of return.” They then fantasized Palestine as an empty landscape with a few “nomadic Bedouins” rambling about the desert.
In reality, the Palestine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was comprised largely of indigenously owned agricultural lands with pockets of an expanding cosmopolitan strata. Palestine’s rich and ancient culture was evidenced in its universities, architecture, agricultural innovation, libraries, languages, religious traditions; vibrant music, art, and literary scenes; and complex social relations and family lineages.
Freud for the finish
At about this same time, Freud, a middle-class Austrian Jew, was developing his psychoanalytic method. His method borrowed a lot from that of the colonizer. In fact, at that time, white, Euro-American colonizers deemed themselves heroic, the finest flower of civilization, and “colonialist” was high praise.2
No wonder that a Jewish man who was anxious to gain a foothold in upperclass, white Christian society should want to “colonize” his subjects in his own field. Freud was using the master’s tools to gain entrance to the master’s house.
Freud’s basic method was to create closed, explanatory narratives of his patients’ “delusions”. In fact, he often ended his case studies with a statement such as “I believe I have explained everything correctly or fully.” In many instances, the patient’s self-explanations were discounted or re-interpreted.
The very act of coherent narration was assumed to be curative without any questioning of that assumption. But reading Freud’s case studies in an undergraduate class, what struck me most was his triumphal tone and his attachment to closure.
Freud went on to create a map of the human psyche that located human problems within human individuals. People and their personalities were essentialized. They had psychological problems, not social-cultural problems. Sound familiar?
In fact, like a good colonizer, Freud’s dream was to ground psychology in biology, the final walling off the mentally challenged individual from any community or political concern.
Freud also devised a proto-DSM, the catalogue of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These included the broad categories of neurosis and psychosis that were broken down into subcategories. Most of Freud’s categories of mental illness are not in use today. Could that mean that most of the categories we use today might also fall into disfavor?
The maniacal attachment of large swathes of Euro-Americans to self-narration, categorization, and explanation emerges out of this lineage from colonialism to Freudianism to us.
Cosplay in the gap
From the perspective of Trika Shaivism, the self is an infinite event without borders or closure. It is both not available to explanation and categorization, and it is the origin of the experience of all categories and explanations.
When we practice, we are trying to relax into what is called in Sanskrit the sandhi. The sandhi is an in between or open, liminal zone where the experience of linear time and self-concepts, narratives, and categories are at least temporarily sloughed off. Here, the pristine self of limitless creativity and what is called “great time” or the “supreme moment” can make itself known in the gap.
Eventually, we want to be living in this more relaxed, improvisational condition, meeting whatever arrives with senses wide open and without fantasy concepts or projections.
However, this doesn’t mean that explanations and categories are always useless. For a variety of reasons, too numerous to elaborate here, we might continue to deploy them. The difference is that a more realized person will not be compelled to seriously identify with them, but will hold them more lightly and inhabit them more skillfully and even humorously.
I was struck a while back by some remarks made by Chenjerai Kumanyika, a journalist, media producer, and Assistant Professor of Journalism at NYU. Kumanyika was a frequent guest on the Seeing White series on Scene on Radio. Seeing White explored the questions such as Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?3
Here’s Chenjerai Kumanyika:
I identify a lot of ways, based on political causes I'm involved with. But one of the ways I identify is Black, and you know I'm proud of my Blackness because African people who were grouped together under Blackness have survived and resisted. And the cultures—and that's definitely plural—of African people have given us so much of the science and innovation and creativity that structures the world.
Yeah but, I have to be honest. I'm proud of Blackness, but I've come to see it less as my, you know, an identity, and more as, like, a technology: Yeah, it’s kind of a weird word, but I see it as a technology because I see Blackness as not something that is hardwired into our biology, that just determines who we are. Instead it’s something that we use.4
Kumanyika goes on to give the examples of Blackness being a useful category to deploy as a source of “political clarity and joy and possibility” or when we want to drive resources to Black communities or counter the use of racial categories as weapons.
But Kumanyika’s historically-grounded understanding here is that racial and, by implication, other categories are basically made up. They are powerful fictions with real-life consequences, but they are not who we are in essence. And so we can hold them more lightly and wield them or cosplay them for various purposes, including resistance and pleasure.
Loss is gain
I sometimes joke with my students that I have no red lines in my mind. There is no place that my mind won’t go, at least for a peek, and no question I will not ask. This is a kind of freedom that sometimes has gotten me into trouble. But it has also led to great sobriety.
When we are lost in fantasies of the past, present, and future, or are over-identified with explanations and categories, by default there are structures, circumstances, and landscapes we never see and questions we will never ask. We won’t risk the destabilization or dissolution of our fragile, cobbled-together sense of self.
The result will be that we cannot see what is or see the possibilities that live just outside of our fantasies. We have traded a fuller expressivity, a fuller range of motion for what feels, temporarily, like a safer prison of projections.
It’s valuable to properly locate our fantasies, categories, and explanations so that we can begin to lessen their power over us. They are extremely potent, but we benefit when we recognize them as aspects of the upsurge of impermanence. They come and go. And in an ordinary sense, they are generally shaped by particular cultures at particular points in their histories, also aspects of impermanence.
Moving away from the grip of a life lived in fantasy does entail loss. Sometimes friendships break, and we find that we have to stop “towing the line” in significant ways. We may find ourselves asking questions that some people don’t want to hear.
But for all of us who are in service to what is, in service to the wisdom of the heart, in service to others, for our love and compassion to be of actual value, we must be willing to lose what needs to be lost. We don’t have to rip things away. But when the time for loss arrives, we won’t fight it.
Fantasy is ultimately not nourishing. I’ve written this because I dearly wish for all of us that we will discover the courage and the means to step out of fantasy and that the longing to be expressive and loving, receptive and free will overtake any attachments we may feel to a life more narrowly lived.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
Padmasambhava. Advice from the Lotus-Born: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal and Other Close Disciples (p. 26). Rangjung Yeshe Publications. Kindle Edition.)
Rashid Khalidi. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: a history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917-2017. Metropolitan Books, NY. 2020. See especially chapter one.
I am following Seeing White’s convention of lower-case “whiteness” and title-case “Blackness.”
Scene on Radio. Seeing White, part 8. December 2017. Transcript retrieved on February 8, 2024.
very nice!
This is an excellent practice, inspired by your comment:
"Most of Freud’s categories of mental illness are not in use today. Could that mean that most of the categories we use today might also fall into disfavor?"
*****
In fact, if you go from the original DSM to the present, quite a surprisingly large number of categories are no longer in existence (in fact, the idea of a continuum of characteristics is being suggested as a replacement for the very notion of categorical illness).
Am I a man, a woman, a Jew, Greek, white, black, American or Indian (or both or neither or both and neither)? Well, I'll be dead one day - but is even that true?
I remember several decades ago, standing in line at the registrar waiting to get papers to begin my first semester of clinical psychology. Someone asked me - possibly seeing my ripped jeans - "Are you a music major?" I remember I was so proud to hear that - and remember how much I clung to that identity,as the boring image of "clinical psychologist" grew stronger and stronger.
How much we need categories and boundaries and labels - even as I set foot here and whisper, "But I'm an Aurobindonian...." wait, what?