Classical Tantra and Near Enemies of the Truth with Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  0:00  

From my point of view, that with people not knowing how different, how deeply different Neo Tantra and classical Tantra are, is that if they don’t know, they don’t bother to investigate and find out, well what, what is going on in classical Tantra?

 

Christine Mason  0:16  

Hey everybody, it’s Christine Marie Mason, your host for the rose woman podcast on love and liberation. And today I have a great treat for you, particularly the scholarly Tantra nerds out there, the people who are really interested in the ancient traditions and how they inform our pursuit of greater liberation today, because I have Christopher Wallis, also known as Hareesh, a man who is a scholar practitioner, and who, many years ago, set out to write the what is now the textbook on classical Tantra for many lay people, he makes very difficult concepts very accessible, and provides a deeper background than is available in Neo Tantra. But more than that, the subtleties with which he understands language philosophy and how it can apply to create more freedom and joy in our lives is really remarkable. It’s a very unusual cat. So I went back and forth with Tim, my editor, on whether to include this preamble conversation we had before we got into talking about the book, and we landed with, yes, we’re going to include it. I start by telling Harish a little bit about you guys, like who you are, demographically, what you’re interested in and what I’ve been covering, and then we drop into the story of sort of what it means to be a teacher at the top of your field but still be committed to growth. So that’s a little bit of a drop in before we get to the main body of our interview. I hope you stay to the end, and I hope you get an opportunity to study directly with Harish or someone of his caliber, and if you are collecting knowledge and material, then definitely get copy of both of his books, tantra illuminated and the one we are focusing on today, near enemies of the truth, and then we can talk about it some more. So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Harish Wallace.

 

My show is reaching about 70% women, 30% men, mostly 40s and up, interested in questions of spirituality and science and and ways to sort of shift their mind a little bit in a direction of more joy and freedom. So I’ve been covering sexuality, psychedelics, consciousness, some health hacks and things like that. A lot of things around institutionalized and internalized oppression, you know, yeah, and I will tell you that when I first met you, I think it was through Mark Whitwell. He introduced us in Berkeley. He said, this, this guy’s a Sanskrit scholar. He should, you should study with him if you’re really interested in going deep on anything. And then like doing your class, which I want to say was 2010 so 2011 and that, that exposure to what is true Tantra as sort of a way of living, as a fragment of the light and reflecting back your embodied experience to divinity was a very big turning point in my own life. I’m very grateful to be reconnecting with you now and extending these teachings to a whole group of people, or awareness of you to a whole group of people that I don’t think otherwise would come across the work I’ve

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  3:36  

grown a lot and changed a lot since we last were crossing paths frequently. So much has happened, and so many further realizations have come online from everything from like, the social stuff you’re talking about, like coming to understand internalized patriarchy, much, much deeper than I ever did. I don’t know what I understood then, but it probably wasn’t anything to deeper developments on the spiritual path like I mean to me, the difference is huge. If I look back to when we were last talking, I’m like, Oh, I was completely clueless. Then, you know, even if I sounded like I knew some things, and maybe I’ll say that in 10 years about now, who knows? Pretty much

 

Christine Mason  4:24  

guarantee you will, because you’re committed to growth. And the thing about growth is every time you turn a corner on a new path, it’s like, whoa, a whole new VISTA opens up. And so that is actually one of the things I’ve been enjoying in the work that you’ve been sharing. And also, I have a feeling you’re having more fun, like more integrated humor coming into the work. It’s not only that the scholarship is deeper, and the all of that and your personal practice is deeper, but you really see more joyful, yeah,

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  4:51  

and less serious. I mean, that is part of the growth right to be less serious, to be less solemn, or take. Oneself seriously. I don’t take myself seriously so much now, you know, and it’s really a different kind of mode, and I’m happy about it. I can just do I can just make my offering or contribution without feeling like I need to think it’s important or I don’t, you know, anything like that, just what’s natural. It’s like just doing what’s natural as opposed to trying to achieve something that’s a big, big shift.

 

Christine Mason  5:28  

I love that. I’d like to honor the whole journey. I’d like to honor the urgent, earnest scholar who had to get it out, because you’ve made such an immense contribution, like basically wrote the textbook on integrative tantric philosophy for many people, which we’re going to talk about and and honor that, and then also, like, honor the, you know, the spark of consciousness that’s helping with whatever growth path is good for your soul and spirit. I love I love it. I love what, what it was, and where it’s going. It’s beautiful. So let’s, let’s talk about that book to start with, I want to say that you were in Bali or Thailand or something, and you were like, I’m writing 10 pages a day, and this book should be done in 302 days, like you had an incredible disciplined approach to completion. And I wonder if you could touch back in with the motivation for writing that book and and sort of where it’s gone in the world, and the contribution that you feel it’s made. I

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  6:25  

mean, way back when I was associated with Anusara Yoga, you know, John friend and the Anusara folks, they like to bring in scholars, scholar practitioners. So I was one of a string of scholars that were brought in, and I was brought in last because I was younger. So after folks like Carlos pomeda and Douglas Brooks and PAUL MULLER, John friend, asked me if I could write this introduction to Tantra. What is Tantra really book? And as I sat with it, I felt, oh my gosh, this is something that sort of wants to come through me. Like I wouldn’t have done it for him, right or for because of his request. But I felt, Oh, this is something that wants to come through me. And I even wrote something to him at the time like and at that time, I was in the mountains of India, right, the Himalaya Mountains of Far North India. I was writing to John Franz saying, if I write this book for you, it’s going to be completely honest. And it’s not going to be for your the Anusara community, or for you, actually, it’s going to be for everyone who wants to get in touch with what Tantra is all about. I’m not going to tailor make it to your your whims or desires or whatever. And I was kind of like trying to warn him, and I don’t want it edited. I don’t want it messed with, you know, fortunately, that’s actually what happened. Like it was all it was all done by the seat of our pants, our being the designer, the editor, like we were essentially all non professional at the time, and since became professional in these fields, but we were just making it up as we went along. And so the book, in a way, wasn’t ever properly edited. But that’s good, actually, because, I mean, over time, I’ve taken out all the typos, or most of them, and made it better and better, but, but it was like nobody could edit it, actually, because it was such a deep dive into the world of classical Tantra that almost nobody knew anything about, you know, and so it was exciting, because still, it’s still the only book that’s an overview, a comprehensive overview of classical Tantra, pre modern Tantra, for a general audience, for people who are not academics, They’re not intellectuals, but written by an academic who bridges those worlds, you know, who? Who’s a practitioner as much as an academic. So it’s still a one of a kind book. The reason I spend some time talking about this right now is because it did actually, then turn out to be, for those who don’t know, incredibly successful even down to the present day. It was published 12 years ago, and somehow, by some miracle, it is still selling hundreds of copies a month, with no advertising, no marketing, nothing, just word of mouth, hundreds of copies a month. It’s the Energizer Bunny of books. And when I talk to people in the industry, the publishing industry, I mean, they’re like, We have never heard of something like that. Ever a non fiction book that just keeps selling itself for 12 years with no signs of slowing down? Never heard of it in the whole industry. So it’s not because I’m such a great. Writer. I mean, I got lucky and did a pretty good job, but it’s mainly because the book met a need, you know, and continues to do so. And people who discover it literally, like they write to me every week and say, This is my new Bible. This is it not because it’s giving me a new belief system, but because it is corresponding. It’s giving words to my deepest intuitions about the nature of reality. It’s giving words to my experience that nobody else could understand. So it’s this phenomenon of like 80,000 people or whatever, discovering the book and being like, you know, finally, someone understands what I’ve experienced or what I Intuit to be true. And there’s this whole tradition which was talking about this 1000 years ago. So there’s all these factors that go into making it this, this phenomenal success, not just in terms of copies sold, but the impact, the cultural and spiritual impact that it’s had. It’s, it’s, it’s amazing. It’s really amazing. And luckily, I was just in the writing process a total servant, meaning I didn’t have something to say of my own. I was just presenting the tradition as clearly as I could. I was a servant of that, and I didn’t have some brand or some idea or some self promotion involved when I wrote that at all, and everything magically came together to make this thing that that works.

 

Christine Mason  11:42  

It feels like the service to the lineage, the service to the ideas and your love of it comes through, because that level of attention and detail is a form of love. And did echo Boomi do the illustrations? Yeah, yeah. So that, and then they’re also beautifully illustrated, which also gives another depth to what you’re what you’re showing or teaching. So I will tell you, like, I did a speech for the American Academy of sexuality educators maybe two months ago, and I went to their Tantra SIG, their special interest group, and, like, hung out there for a little bit, and there was no understanding of classical Tantra. They really thought of it as only sacred sexuality. And I was like, No, you guys, you gotta read this book. Read this one. Add this to your Pantheon, put it into its historical context and understand that why Tantra as it came west, might have sort of wiggled itself into this Neo Tantra, sexuality only perspective, but it really rests in this much deeper philosophy. Can you speak for a minute to that relationship, like, how do you how do you think that happened?

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  12:45  

That is an incredibly complicated story that really starts well over 100 years ago. So I’ll just for the people who are interested, I’ll just give some I’ll just sketch it really quick and give some references so that you can follow up more on your own, because it’s it would take few hours to talk about that in any depth. Basically, there were a couple of super influential figures back in the day, 100 years ago, several that that mediated the the transmission of ideas around Tantra to the west. The least famous, but actually most important, of these figures was a fellow named Pierre Bernard, who started teaching in San Francisco around 1900 thus proving, yeah, everything weird and wonderful comes from San Francisco,

 

Christine Mason  13:41  

okay, the AX, that old axiom,

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  13:45  

no, but really it was a culture back then. People don’t know, but over 100 years ago, in San Francisco Bay area, like there was even then, a culture of openness to new ideas and weird stuff. Pierre Bernard arrives there from the Midwest, and he starts teaching what he calls Tantra. And it’s fun. It’s basically Neo Tantra. Okay? He invented Neo Tantra in in the early 1900s now, what was his basis? Well, he had met a Bengali guru. Was he a guru like an East Indian, right from the region of Bengal in India. Was he a guru? Was he just a interested dabbler? You know, who knows, but he impressed Pierre Bernard quite a lot and taught him some things about Indian Tantra, you know, as the spiritual tradition, including some things about how it didn’t exclude the dimensions of human life that other religions, like Christianity excluded, especially at that time. So it didn’t exclude the sexual dimension of our being. It didn’t exclude any dimension of our being. In fact, consciously. Included every dimension, including the sexual, but not especially the sexual. Now, Pierre Bernard was fascinated by this, and when he started teaching his version of tantra in San Fran in 1900 or so, he was still young at the time, and he taught a version that was essentially designed to get him laid. And this is not so different from, wow,

 

Christine Mason  15:28  

I know a few cult leaders. I’m sorry, is to practitioners. No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. I should not use their actual but they’re still acting that way today. Yeah,

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  15:37  

exactly. So he taught, oh, the highest form of initiation and Tantra is, you know, having sex with the guru, who’s me, by the way, and all this stuff. And anyway, he also taught some very interesting occult things. He mixed what he had heard about tantra with Western occultism and his own sexual desires. And he was the beginning point for all Neo Tantra in America. And not only was he teaching then, but he went on to teach for many, many, many more years. But he changed over time, because he got thrown in jail for, you know, the usual things. And then he changed his approach. He stopped having sex with students. He started teaching physical yoga. He started teaching postural yoga. And people in the 1930s were pretty freaked out about that too, right? They thought that was super weird, but he wasn’t going to jail anymore for having sex with someone’s wife or whatever. You know, then he became an important figure in the early days of yoga, physical yoga in America. And you can read all this in a really wonderful book called The Great OOM, spelled double O M, the great OOM one of the many names Pierre Bernard gave himself. There’s that, and then, then there’s also stuff that was getting started in the UK, Alistair Crowley and his sex magic, very much influenced by things he had heard about tantra, though he didn’t use that word. Then there was Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society, and she was teaching quasi tantric ideas without the sexual dimension, but then, but her ideas, which included ideas about manifestation and accessing the wisdom of disembodied, ascended masters and stuff like that, all that got into The mix. And so already by by, you know, 8090, years ago, all this stuff was in the mix the stuff that we think of as new, new age. It’s, it’s 100 years old. So people involved in Neo Tantra, they have lineage of a kind, right? They, they can say, Oh, I learned this from my teacher, who got it from their teacher, who got it from their teacher, and it fades out rapidly, because it’s oral, primarily oral transmission, and and they have a sense that it’s very old, and they don’t realize it’s it’s 100 years old, not more than that. What is the relation then, of Neo Tantra, what scholars call Neo Tantra, or modern American sexual Tantra, because it is a quintessentially American thing, really, in order, what is the relation, then, of Neo Tantra, the difference between that and classical Tantra is huge, because the original progenitors of this, of this Neo Tantra teaching on So called sake, the difference between that and classical Tantra is huge, because the original didn’t have direct access to classical Tantra, because you needed formal initiation, you needed access to a lineage that carefully preserved and didn’t have direct access to classical Tantra, because you needed formal initiation, you needed access to a lineage that carefully preserved and guarded its teachings, and people didn’t have that. So to be clear, when others like Osho or Rajneesh come come into this mix he also did not have, despite being Indian, he did not have access to a tantric but no actual have access to real Tantra on the part of any of these folks. So they they improvised, or at the verbal remix of everything he had read, but no actual access to real Tantra on the part of any of these folks. So they they improvised, and

 

Christine Mason  19:49  

their improvisation must have had some magic or something to it, because so many people glommed onto it.

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  19:55  

Yeah, it’s not to say that that any of this is bad or wrong. I mean, it just

 

Christine Mason  19:59  

doesn’t. Have the connection back to the classical piece, right? Interesting, whether

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  20:03  

a teaching or practice is harmful or helpful has nothing to do really with its origin. That’s why the great philosopher William James, the originator of much of what we understand about psychology, people think it’s Freud, but it was actually William James. Anyway, he wrote in the early 1900s about the concept of fruits, not roots. That is to say, measure a spiritual teaching or practice or experience by its fruits, not its alleged roots. Measure the value of it, I should have said, by its fruits, not its alleged roots, it is actually a very good guideline, because all kinds of bullshit is justified on the basis of putative ancient roots. You know, there’s, there might be good stuff coming along that doesn’t have such roots. So it really has to be evaluated on its own merits because of the impact that it has. Well,

 

Christine Mason  21:05  

I also like the idea of maybe finding fruits and roots at some point where you have the root understanding of its evolution, because it does have things have that essence inside of them as they grow and spread. And so you know where it’s coming from and how it originally formed. And then you also get to have the direct experience. It also gives a little longevity. Cred,

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  21:25  

yes, yes. There’s that one thing like, the only reason to pay attention to how old something is is because, oh, has it been tried and tested over generations in multiple different cultures? That actually matters if we’re talking about a globalized scenario that we have now, how do you know it practice or teaching is going to work for virtually anyone, anywhere, only if it’s been tried and tested over multiple generations in multiple cultures. And classical Tantra was even before the modern period. It was because classical Tantra spread into Southeast Asia, the whole of the Indian subcontinent, of course, all the way to places like Bali, and then it spread all the way to places like Japan and Korea, Vietnam, so and and it flourished in all these areas over hundreds of years, right? So that is some credibility, right there. But the the main problem, from my point of view, that with people not knowing how different, how deeply different Neo Tantra and classical Tantra are, is that if they don’t know, they don’t bother to investigate and find out, well, what, what is going on in classical Tantra for the same reason I tell people, Look, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is literally the least appropriate central text for modern yoga teacher trainings that you could possibly select. And the problem is, is that if people don’t know that there were traditions and still are that celebrated the body, that taught how to go deeper into embodiment. You know, you don’t bother to investigate those. And you’ve got, you know, people like Patanjali saying, No, the goal is to get out of the body, to transcend. And here’s Tantra, classical Tantra saying, actually we can experience divinity in and as our humanity and yet it hasn’t gotten, at least until very recently, the attention it deserves, because people just don’t know what a treasure trove the classical tantric tradition is for teachings and practices. Last piece on this, just to differentiate them really clearly, in classical Tantra, the goal of practice is always, always radical freedom, freedom from your sociocultural conditioning, where that binds and constrains your experience. Freedom from mind created suffering, freedom from the unresolved experiences from the past that are hanging out in your system, and virtually every other kind of freedom that you can think of, but those are the main ones the tradition is concerned with, and freedom to be completely natural in harmonious flow with the energy of existence, you know, with with the totality of being. That is the goal. In other words, spiritual liberation. The goal is never about how to feel good, how to have better orgasms, how to have a deeper relationship with your partner. So the goal is fundamentally different. Even when Neo Tantra is in its more sophisticated expressions. It’s still usually about how to have a better relationship, how to go deeper with your partner, how to have more intimacy, how to have better sex, energetic intimacy as well. And that’s all beautiful when done well. That’s laudable, but it’s a different goal from. From classical Tantra.

 

Christine Mason  25:01  

I mean, I feel like that would be the side effect. If you were be natural, be in the flow, be unattached to prior stories of suffering. If all those things were happening on the natural your energy would be moving, and your relationships would be better. So I agree it feels like focusing on that is like putting the symptom or the outcome at the heart of it, versus looking at the core cause, exactly, very well said, beautiful. So here we are. You’re bringing this forward at a time when we have the instagramification of every idea of Neo spirituality, every sort of blending of the quantum science that’s being documented in actual physics, with manifestation theology or everything’s memified. And here you come, sort of at this next juncture, and you say, look, there are a lot of good things out there that are in these memes, but you’re not mining the gold. How did this current book, The near enemies of the truth emerge,

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  26:04  

yeah, from observing exactly that that there are some really significant negative effects to not only memeification, but I mean, memification is itself a symptom right of the shortening of the attention span and the commodifying of attention in social media, right? And the deeper issue of as it often is, is a a capitalistic structure in which what sells best wins and what sells best is not necessarily the best thing for people, right? And in this culture of faster, more streamlined and everything, it’s like, oh, let’s boil down things to let’s try to boil things down to their essence. And get these cliches, or these, you know, bumper stickers, or these easy to say phrases, what like be in the present moment? Follow your bliss, speak your truth. Everything happens for the best. The universe is giving me a sign. There’s so many right? And the I became super interested in how people were using these phrases constantly in spiritual communities, not just so called New Age, but in all the alternative spiritual communities and even some mainstream ones, using these phrases without really inquiring, well, what does this actually mean? And how might it be problematic if misinterpreted, because when things are when you try to boil an idea down to a pithy phrase, you almost always end up with a near enemy of the truth. Okay, so just to define that really quickly, something that’s close to the truth, so it’s near, but it’s also an enemy of the truth. In the long run, like it’ll work as a stopgap, it’ll work in some context to help you a little bit, but in the longer run, it’s going to lead you astray. Even though it’s adjacent to a truth, it’s not close enough, right? So for example, to put give very simple examples in Buddhism, they say the near enemy of compassion is pity, the near enemy of love is attachment, right? So those are very simple examples, just single words, but I was interested in the more complex examples, like, if be your best self is a near enemy of the truth, what is the truth in relation to which it is a near enemy? Right? And that’s what the book is about. It takes these 19, I think it’s 19 spiritual cliches that almost everybody hearing the podcast, you’ve said one or more of these with possibly deep conviction, and you’ve heard nearly all of them, probably all of them bandied about as, like, you know, as truth. But they are shortcuts to a deep, inner, contemplative process which is so beneficial. And the shortcut is not the shortcut you know, the near enemy statement, like whatever it is. I’ve given some examples. You create your own reality. That’s another one. It’s like a band aid you’re trying to put onto your experience, or to make sense of your experience or justify something. It’s in these if, when it becomes a truism, it’s not investigated. So what I argue in the book is that all of these statements, there is a deep truth to which they are adjacent, but that deep truth cannot be said in a bumper sticker phrase. So the point is you have to read the chapter to go on a journey. Me, there’s a chapter for each near enemy. And you go on a journey, and you find out, if you do the contemplation and go in the process, you find out what, in your own experience, the deeper truth is, to which the cliched phrase is merely a near enemy. And you realize, Oh, that can’t be put in just a few words because it’s too nuanced, it’s too ineffable. It can’t easily be captured in words. And for good reason, because it has to do with experience, human experience, which is not easily capturable in words. Everything that can easily be put into words is is a concept. Concepts are put into words, but concepts are not what help us go deeper into and more fully, lovingly embrace our human experience. So that’s the idea,

 

Christine Mason  30:55  

yeah, there’s something, there’s something deep in here that that is like this. One in particular, works on so many levels in the culture right now, you’ve got the ideas of like everybody has their own unique truth. Yes, that’s true, right? Yes, that’s accurate. Like we all have our perceptual filters that there is no objective truth. All of that’s true. But I’m more interested in this idea of abstraction layers, like you have your actual embodied experience with all your senses coming in. But even by the time that’s formed as a full thought in the brain, it’s like you’ve got visual perception, audio perception, and it’s all getting integrated in the back of the brain. And even in the integration, there’s line loss, where it’s like co located with a time stamp and turned into a memory you’ve already abstracted away from the initial direct experience in the body. And then you try to summarize that with a pointer or a shortcut, and then you take a picture of that, and then you put metadata around that, and then you share that picture on social media to other people, out of context and and that as each layer of abstraction increases, you’re getting more and more distant from that direct experience, but that we’re being acculturated. Like I went out last night and I was in a really unique and beautiful place, and there was a portion of my attention the entire time, like self narrating and curating what from that moment I could take a picture of and share it public. And that thing, that very sort of extraction and like objectification, parsing of the full scene, to take a picture of one small piece would already completely mistranslate the direct experience to the viewer. And so there, it feels like this. Speak your truth ties deeply into the overarching idea of the book and memetics. You know that in some way, there is no way to fully speak and give a shortcut to the truth. It is utterly, deeply direct experience. Yes, it was a long ramble, but I think I hope beautiful.

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  32:59  

No, that was beautiful. That was amazing, because it’s exactly right how people are are not most for the most part, not not considering how we are, not just one step removed from what we might call direct experience, but but multiple steps removed. It’s the soup of the soup of the soup of the soup, especially when you’re, you know, absorbing through technology. But let me, let me drill down on this a little bit so direct experience, just putting neuroscience aside for the moment, right for in on a in a spiritual sense, when we talk about direct experience, we just mean that which is prior to the formulation of an interpretation or narrative or judgment or even a kind of mental frame, because as soon as you have any of that, that changes the nature of the experience. And because humans in the 21st century, especially, have become such conceptual creatures, they don’t even notice that the interpretation of the experience has now changed the experience, that the experience itself matches the interpretation more because the interpretation has been overlaid onto the experience, and confirmation bias does its work, and other stuff falls away, doesn’t get noticed. Something else gets highlighted because of that interpretation, and then we end up experiencing our concept of the experience, and not even noticing that we’ve that we’ve lost the original. We only have a copy and a copy of a copy, because then you remember it and that it changes every time you know so direct experience is, by its very nature, of course, ineffable. It cannot be described in words. It cannot be conceptualized, because as soon as it is, it’s not direct experience, but it can be a. Entered into through it requires quite a bit of patience, but as a meditative process by which you keep setting aside all the thoughts that are trying to impose themselves, the interpretations that are trying to get in there, the mind’s attempts to understand all of that keeps getting relentlessly set aside. But you have to be patient and gentle. And you keep going into the body. You keep going into the sensual field, until you’re experiencing it so directly that you don’t know what it is like you would honestly say, I don’t know what what body is. I used to think I know, but that was a concept that is

 

Christine Mason  35:44  

such a sensual invitation. It is, like, even, even as you’re saying it, I’m like, breathing into what you’re saying. Like, what does it feel like to not know anything?

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  35:53  

Yeah, and there is still the qualia of experience. So, like, that’s a helpful term, right? Qualia in terms of the the redness of red is there in direct experience, even without any concept, or even without the word, if you were to forget the word red, right? And in the same way, all the qualia of experience are already there prior to interpretation, prior to labeling. And so we do this, like thought experiment, where it’s like, oh, pretend right now. You didn’t have a name. Pretend right now. You didn’t have memories. But everything else is is here. Awareness is here, and experience is here. Without memory and without labels, it actually gets more vivid. Experience becomes much more vivid and visceral and sensual. This is the true sensuality of of Tantra, by the way, going deeper into the sense fields and everything is heightened and everything is more beautiful because you’re not seeing it through a conceptual lens anymore. It’s the ultimate presence. The ultimate presence. Yeah, it’s

 

Christine Mason  37:05  

the ultimate like being present here. I mean, it feels a little overwhelming. Can

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  37:10  

be, it can be, but then the next step in the process is to actually dissolve the false sense of a separate self, because that’s what gets overwhelmed. If you don’t have a separate self. You can’t get overwhelmed.

 

Christine Mason  37:22  

This is okay, okay. This is so beautiful. I’m trying to do it if you’re, if you’re in a place where you can you’re not driving, basically, if you’re not driving. Right now, what would it be like to look at everything around you without any labels, names, knowing of what it is, without naming it, and just to like, see it and see its shape and and feel it like that exercise is what I mean, is like it meet what it’s doing, even as I do it here, and look at my now, I’m not going to label them colored pencils, but I’m going to look at the colors like, and I like, try to, like, really feel them. They fill the space and like the that they become. They pop out in their hyper quality, like all the subtleties pop out. And a few minutes ago, they were just like a background. So I wasn’t here with them, because I’d labeled them pencils, and they were sitting across from me. So I think when I say it’s overwhelming, that bringing in that level of perceptual awareness shuts down a lot of thought. It shuts down a lot of extraneous factors that aren’t right here right now. It literally overwhelms the thought capacity with perception in a good way, with perception

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  38:32  

in a good way. Having done that, then the invitation is to go more subtle with it. And by more subtle, I mean going into dimensions of experience that are not sensual. You practice. You always start with the sense fields, you always start with the physical body, and then you go into these realms of experience that are more subtle. And I’m not talking about the imagined realms of experience that you know people who claim to be psychic or talking about, No, I’m talking about just the experience everyone is having, but they don’t notice that. So the subtler dimensions of embodiment. Because if you go into the depths of the body, it’s a it’s a profound mystery, and you discover these subtle and sometimes not subtle, energies that you didn’t know were there. And they they start, they start expressing themselves, because all it takes is some attention, some awareness. And that is a kind of power directing awareness into the depths of embodied experience and and whatever’s there starts revealing itself and even unraveling itself, which is a great thing. Now, to some people, it might sound, oh, that sounds scary. What if whatever’s in there is not good, but it’s not like that. It’s more like we get stuck. We get stagnant in our habits, our ways of thinking, our behavior pattern. Is, and most importantly, unresolved pieces of experience that are hanging out in our body from the past, and when we go into those and let them reveal themselves, let them express themselves, let them unravel and unbind, then there’s freedom, there’s flow, and everything finds its proper place in the whole system. Some stuff needs to release. Some stuff needs to digest and integrate, you know, and has never gotten a chance to do so, because it never got bathed in the light of awareness. This, this

 

Christine Mason  40:37  

idea, the healing versus digestion question, has been a big part of my journey this last couple of years, that my feeling right now is that all of human conflict and cultural conflicts come down to the inability to hold the completeness of one’s own experience without blaming shaming or spewing on somebody else, and that the entire development of inner peace is a capacity to digest what has already happened and to be in a clean out process, that you can hold whatever is happening. You can hold it without trying to smack the other guy or take their toy or whatever. The emphasis in modern trauma healing, etc, like this idea that it’s going to be wanted, that you’re going to be at an end point and be healed, versus, I have just expanded my capacity to digest experience in real time, and it doesn’t linger

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  41:30  

Exactly. And just a little quibble with language, you know, you can’t hold it all because it’s too much, right? And the set, the imagined separate self isn’t, isn’t, isn’t capable of that the self we think we are and even experience ourselves to be right? So the Q in classical Tantra is more like, at least in the Krama lineage, which I’ve gravitated to more since, since you and I were less talking the Q there is instead of hold space for try to hold it to become the totality of your experience, to melt the apparent separate self into the total field of experience completely. Yeah. And if you become the whole field of experience, then digestion, what we call digestion of emotion and experience becomes a natural process because it wants to digest. It’s just that you’re resisting because sadness or grief or anger or whatever it is, feels uncomfortable. So our instinct that’s trained into us is not to bring it in close, but to try to analyze it or handle that. People say, How can I handle these feelings? And I say, your job is not to handle them. It never was you. Rather bring them in close. Let yourself not only feel the feeling, let yourself become it. Stop being a person, having emotions, just become the energy completely and and the story, the stories about it fall, fall away, because the energy is already pure. Even these so called negative emotions are nothing but pure energy when, when experienced in their real nature, or

 

Christine Mason  43:16  

positive emotion, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, or the positive one, any. So this is interesting. I Please always quibble. It’s one of your great gifts to find like, to like to like, poke at like how the language is is not guiding you into the ultimate Right, right, correct place. So when I say, hold it, there’s a quality to saying I can hold the experience that’s like a discipleship, like, like, a little bit of martyrdom, like, I’m a straw, you know, I see what you mean. I see what you mean. Versus being like, I can, I can receive it. I can, I can unify with it. I can ride the wave of that. I can be with the I can be the wave of that, and then it dissipates. That’s very different. Good. That’s great. Thank you.

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  44:02  

I can, yeah, I can become it. I don’t even need the eye. I don’t need this concept of being a person who’s handling it or or managing it or making it through. That’s right. I can just surrender to experience so radically that experience resolves itself. The mind is scared about this. The mind is like, how could that possibly work? But it does. It does. And the only caveat you need for the listeners, the only caveat you need is that you’re not surrendering to your story. You’re not surrendering to your your belief about the the emotions, you’re just surrendering to the experience. So the contents of thought are not relevant. You know, thoughts are fine, they’re perfectly fine, but their contents are not relevant. Their contents are a made up story, justifying experience, trying to. Blowing away experience. So you don’t ever surrender to your story about experience, because it’s not real. You surrender to experience, and it will resolve itself beautiful. I want

 

Christine Mason  45:10  

to tell people that in the audio version of the book, which you narrate yourself and obviously of this beautiful, deep voice. So it’s such a joy to listen to at the end of those chapters, you actually do a guided experience, a guided meditation to sort of help people explore these topics, these near enemies on their own, investigating their own like have a look inside. How is that for you? You know,

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  45:33  

and by the way, when I read the audiobook, my voice is actually deeper because I’m consciously speaking from the belly. I’m speaking from the heart and the belly, and it changes the quality of the of the voice a bit, you know, goes a little deeper. It can happen anytime, but, but it’s it happens when I read, because I’m trying to, like share, not just the words, but the energy of where those words came from, and trying to share that with the reader or listener. And, yeah, there’s these guided meditations or contemplations practices that really work better in audio format. I mean, you know, get the print book if you want, but the audio, it’s like you can be in the practice and just go with it. Yeah, tell

 

Christine Mason  46:23  

me about your community now. You’re you’re teaching all over the world. You have online community, a lot of people on Facebook. How are people interacting with you? How’s that and what’s your life like day to day in the process of holding the community and holding the teaching? Yeah,

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  46:36  

it’s always changing. But yeah, the community is not on social media so much anymore. We have that. We do have this big Facebook group and and stuff, but that’s we’ve moved the community off there, for the most part, like all the activity is happening in our own educational platform, which is Tantra illuminated.org, so we have at this point, six or 700 really dedicated students, like the ones who are really studying and practicing a lot and are very dedicated. And then we have some 1000s that are very interested, but not necessarily super dedicated yet, so that the kind of ambit of the community in terms of active participants is, you know, maybe something like 10,000 people around the world, in all different countries, all different everything. You know, it’s diverse. It’s wonderful and but most important of all is that when we gather online or in person, you know, our gatherings will usually be like anywhere from 50 to 150 people online or in person, and the vibe, I just feel so blessed and So lucky because this community, they’re the most loving, smart, also good hearted, caring people. They look out for each other. They they support each other. It’s, it’s, I never even would have imagined. It’s possible. It’s just this flourishing community where people who are newer, they get like, looked after, taken under the wing of those who are more experienced and and and so non judgmental, like everyone talks about being non judgmental, of course, in spiritual community, but it’s amazing to see it actually happening where there’s it’s seemingly nothing anyone could say that would make others reject them, you know, or judge them, or whatever. I mean, people might have their feelings, right? They might get upset about something someone else said, but, but that the freedom from judgment in the community is amazing. So I’m just from my perspective, these are the most important characteristics that I that I celebrate. You know, it’s almost like I was an intellectual who realized intellectuality was not going to avail, was not going to get me where I wanted to go. So I was, I got deeper and deeper into practice, more and more into the felt, sense experience, like we’ve been talking about, and somehow I was lucky enough to kind of transmit my journey accurately enough that I attracted people who were on the on the same page, people who who were smart and who’d done all the reading and learned all the things, but they realized, oh no, we need, I need to find a way to go deeper with this. I read the books. Well, how do we live this, you know? And so it’s just, it’s just, yeah, incredible community. We do retreats all over the world, really, from California to India.

 

Christine Mason  49:53  

I think, for for me, this philosophy, I love being in church as a kid when. It was just mysticism, and there were no ideas. And then as an adult, I despised it, because it made my body bad, and it made me want to be out of this world and go to the next world. And there were all kinds of things that didn’t work. And when I found Tantra, it felt like an incredibly healing gesture. And now I am committed to that life, and I’m studying Tamil siddon with Patrick Connor. And that’s like a whole nother, you know, the light in the body. I’ve been spending a lot more time down in Tiru and diving. I was in Sri Lanka at the temple at kataragama in February, and like, look like, right at the fractal, or that sort of descending, imminent light in that philosophy sort of was born, and it’s so beautiful. It’s such a beautiful way to live. I have no doubt that if you’ve got committed practitioners who are like, everything’s holy, it’s all one, you know, we’re here to experience it and love it all that that’s got to have a tremendous vibe.

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  50:56  

Yeah, and here’s the to connect the dots a little this Tamil Siddhant, its origin, historically, is in Shaiva Siddhanta, which is part of tantric Shaivism, right? So a lot of people that don’t even realize that it is tantric, right? Because it’s it doesn’t have these transgressive elements, blah, blah, blah, but yeah, classical Tantra includes Shaiva Siddhanta, which evolved into several forms, one of which is this Tamil Siddhant.

 

Christine Mason  51:30  

I adore you. I’m so glad to see you joyful, yeah, and so glad to see how you’re I’ve been having an experience over the last weeks of reconnecting with many people who are 1015, year relationships where you like, touch you touch base, and you kind of say, how have you evolved? Who have you become? And it’s been so delightful to like, trust your instinct with a person and all of the things that happen, and then to see them and flourish, you know, to see them I haven’t yet to have an experience of reconnecting with someone from long ago where it hasn’t been like, wow, look at the amazing journey you’ve been on it and loving them more. You know, is there anything that you want to make sure we take away before I go into pitching your book?

 

Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis  52:17  

Yeah, just that for anyone hearing this podcast, just know that everything I’ve talked about is explored in in much more detail, in this classical Tantra tradition, and in in the in the things that I’ve written, and there’s much more to discover. Right? If you’re if you’re intrigued, it’s worth digging deeper. And again, it’s not intellectually, it’s, it’s, it’s as as a guide to deeper experience. So whether you check out my platform or go in some other direction, just know there’s, there’s so much for you and so much richness to explore. And what I just want to say is like, don’t waste time with any teacher who cannot make what they’re teaching crystal clear for you, because life is too short, and people spend a lot of time listening to spiritual teachers who sound impressive or mystical or whatever, but when the chips are down, they don’t have the clarity in themselves to get it across to the student with crystal clarity. And that’s what you need. You need to like it’s not about understanding concepts. It’s about understanding the mechanism by which transformation occurs, the mechanism by which we we become free. And that needs to be taught with utmost clarity, so that then the mind relaxes and goes, Ah, okay, now it’s just a matter of doing it, of going deeper into my own experience. Even though it can be scary, like you get, you need to get convinced. The mind must be convinced about how is this going to work? In order to give yourself to it fully, and for that, you need teachers that are crystal clear with integrity, right? We don’t need to do any more of this excusing, excusing teachers of bad conduct or whatever, because, oh, they have something to offer. You know, there’s people who have something to offer out there that are not, you know, screwing around or whatever, and that really care about the well being of their students more than anything else, and so don’t waste time with anything else. That’s what I’m saying.

 

Christine Mason  54:35  

I love that I care about the well being of your students more than anything else. Was I right, or was I right? Is he not an amazing scholar and intellect and also funny? I hope you find his work and join some of his programs, maybe join a trip of his and learn as much as you can about these ancient traditions that inform so much of the way we have brought yoga and meditation. And and other things forward in the world, and it’s also just such a joyful philosophy of how one might live in a body. Now I want to do a little advertisement, and it’s an advertisement for my own companies, and I usually don’t do something like this, but I’ve had a really challenging experience over the last week with radiant farms, and it’s the same exact experience I had seven years ago when we were launching Rosebud woman Rosebud for several years, we would log into our Facebook, our meta platform, log into our ads, and every day, they would be shutting down our ads because I made intimate care products, vulva cream, vaginal cream, menopause products, soothing things for ingrown hairs, arousal creams for people who no longer had feeling down there. And I considered my products women’s health. You know I, I was thinking about them as self care items for your own intimate wellness, like you live with your body 365 days a year for 80 years, and it wasn’t about sex or objectification, although, you know sometimes you want moisture for that, but you also want it when you’re riding a bike or you’re walking down the road or you’re just hanging around and it feels better. So it really woke me up to the idea that these algorithms and platforms couldn’t distinguish between women as a sexual object and woman as an autonomous being with her own needs for intimate health. It took us years of working with other companies to get that difference encoded. In fact, we had to form a nonprofit called the Center for Reproductive Justice with an amazing woman, Jackie Rotman, who has been on the show before leading it, we even introduced legislation to prohibit those kinds of editorial things as discriminatory. So, you know, I’ve been through it. When they finally changed that rule, my cost to acquire a new customer went down by about two thirds, and I estimate that that editorial decision cost me about a million dollars before they fixed it. And you know, even today, you see people having to use what’s called algo speak to talk about subjects that the technology giants deem are inappropriate. So instead of saying sex, they use SIGs anyway you get it. There’s a lot of other things that get editorialized or deprecated in the algorithm that people have come up with euphemisms for to try to hide it from the algorithm. So now I of course, go from doing this company to making plant medicines that are legal, everything is 100% legal that can help with nervous system, wellness, mental health, mood, create really uplifting and joyful moments. And they’re an alternative to alcohol, and there are alternatives to opiate pain relievers, and they come from plants, plants that are grown and have 1000 year traditions behind them, really pure. We know all the growers, and we know the maker organic USDA certified kitchens really beautifully done on all organic ingredients. And of course, this week, not only did our payment gateway shut us down, but also Google Ads said we couldn’t advertise, and then Facebook and meta disapproved our products. I don’t know. I still call it Facebook and meta. I know it’s both meta, but it still seems like the old Facebook to me, and I’m like, these are legal. Why does a technology company get to decide that they are the gatekeepers beyond the legal structures that we have, and even those legal structures can be wrong. They’re probably more conservative than I would be in trusting the plants and the ancient traditions. So I have these five products that are at radiant farms. They’re kava, and that’s a Pacific Island Hawaiian product. It’s a root that helps with general pain relief, systemic inflammation, social anxiety, restfulness in the system. We have a Kana product out of South Africa. Akana is used before the hunt and before sexuality, to remain alert, but with a soft heart. There’s a blue lotus, which is a dream enhancer. It enhances creativity and intuition. It’s a little bit of an aphrodisiac. That’s considered a sacred plant in at least five different traditions. In Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Egyptian theology, there’s all kinds of Goddess that use blue lotus, that carry it as one of their you know the icons they hold in their hands. I have a bobbin sauna, which is a less known plant, but it’s my personal favorite. It’s definitely a mood uplifter, heart expander, and you can read about that on this site. And we have a Ayahuasca vine, only the copy vine, and that if it’s combined with another plant called chakruna, then. It creates this psychedelic experience that you hear about when people do Ayahuasca ceremonies, but when it’s not combined with that, it is just a nervine. It’s a neurogenetic it helps grow nerves and connections in the brain. Synaptic connections in the brain are enhanced. It helps enhance the transmission of information through the brain and the whole body. So it’s isolates harming and harmeline are used for Parkinson’s treatments. And you know, Merck, even in 1927 synthesized some of the core alkaloids in that plant to make a drug called telepathine. So I believe the whole plant extracts are better than the synthesized isolates, because they often have helper alkalis that counteract some of the symptoms that you get, side effects that you can get when you take an isolated molecule. So I tell you all of this because everything that I put out, the intimate care products and these gummies get five star reviews from everyone who tries them. And I feel like the only way this is going to grow in an environment where there’s so much censorship is if we tell others like, I don’t want to say word of mouth, but really word of heart, if you’ve tried something lovely, to share it and tell others about it. And so I would love for you to try the radiant farms gummies and to try Rosebud woman’s intimate care products. They’re super beautiful. I put so much heart and care into the formulations, into the ingredients, and that’s my plug. I will continue to make beautiful things. Our team will continue to make beautiful things, and hopefully, if you love them, you will tell others, so that we don’t have to keep speaking algo speak and guessing. You know, making people guess. This is a vulva balm that re creates resilience and replenishes tissues and solves the problems of thinning skin in the vaginal wall. This is a serum that stimulates blood flow in that part of the body. And because it stimulates blood flow, it creates natural lubrication, plumping sensation for people who don’t have a lot, this is a soothing cream, man or woman, if you have skin that is inflamed or itching or irritated for any reason. It’s got calendula, comfrey, mint, aloe, beautiful herbs to soothe the body and etc, etc, like I really make them work. And whether it’s something that’s coming out of the FDA or something that’s coming out of meta, I’m really tired of having to dance around the pharmaceutical industry and dance around the technology giants when all the information we’re putting out is scientifically accurate, proven and good for people. So you can find those two companies at rosewoman.com and radiantfarms.us, I hope that you’re doing amazingly well out there, and remember that no matter the context you’re living in just like me, that your pure love and your dreams are coming true. Thank you. See you soon.