A Brief History of Traditional Californiaism
The Seven American Tantras are related to those characteristics which Americans seem to be blessedly the most life-positive compared to other cultures: money, fame, beauty, sex, power, vitality, and heavy machinery.
In the religious tradition of invented traditions, I view California 1970’s spirituality as a near-vanished stream with many lessons reclaimable for the contemporary moment.
Christian and Jewish youth, coming off of the psychedelic tail of the late 60’s, encountered the more rococo Hinduisms and Buddhisms in the context of post-modernisms which were then still serving to augment modernism.
This occurred most centrally in Coastal California, from Los Angeles through the San Francisco Bay Area.
What did each element bring to the table?
Christianity and Judaism brought the possibility of making this world a better place, as in the tradition of charity, good works, and tikkun olam. This did not require explicit observance, but was simply the cultural milieu that people had grown up in.
Post-modernism brought structures that could continuously be revised. Back then, it was often called “post-structuralism”, and its essence was the idea that all social structures were contingent and could be otherwise (and hence fluid); to be distinguished from what happened in subsequent decades when the “post-” became detached from the “structure”, yielding mere structurelessness (pure contingency).
Hinduisms brought energy Tantra: the possibility of interactive, responsive flow. This was found most centrally in the Kashmir Shaivite school of Hinduism’s entrance into America.
Buddhisms brought transgressive Tantra: the possibility of seeing everything as intrinsically without problem. This was found most centrally in the Vajrayana school of Buddhism’s entrance into America.
The psychedelic afterglow allowed for the annealing of all the above traditions, as fixed patterns of thinking had been softened and new patterns were broadly able to be metabolized by youth culture.
In one statement: Californiaism is the life-positive spiritual tradition embracing the inseparability of inner and outer, with core principles of realizing no intrinsic existential problem and responsive interaction with the world, expressed in particular through the seven American Tantras of money, fame, beauty, sex, power, vitality, and heavy machinery.
These tantras are opportunities for unlimited participation in life as the free, full, flowing and boundless movement of energy.
While this may vaguely sound like some particular variety of Hinduism or Buddhism, the religion of Californiaism embraces the Seven American Tantras described below as having clear capacity for the highest spiritual potency, which the Eastern religions do not.
The Seven American Tantras
To talk of the Seven American Tantras, we must first look at the basic energy flow in this context: reception, assimilation, release. Here, these appear with the qualities of wholesomeness, integrity, and possibility-without-limitation.
Reception: to receive an energy into the body. Reception is a pre-requisite for assimilation, as food cannot be assimilated without taking it into the body.
Assimilation: to integrate the energy into the body, so that the body is re-organized to incorporate the energy in the same way that food is completely assimilated and integrated into the body’s existence. Assimilation is a pre-requisite for release.
Release: first, release of what is unassimilable, or that which does not serve the body to assimilate. Second, from a fullness-unto-overfullness, release the free gift of the excess energy to others. By analogy, the assimilated nourishment of food provides a fundamental fuel for bodily activity. Release in this tantra does not include release-unto-emptiness: it is a magnanimity that requires something to give.
The themes of concern to American Tantra may prima facie evoke resonances not part of these themes here. American Tantra is a specific cultural approach: reception of fame, for example, is not to achieve attention from a large audience, but further to do so in an entirely wholesome way, with integrity, and without constraint; thus, fame here is under the aspect of trust not attention, where trust evokes the presumption of impersonal care by the other.
Tantra often has mantras. Here, we could find seven:
Money, as a wholesome endeavor, engaged with integrity and without constraint: free, full, flowing and boundless
Fame, as a wholesome endeavor, engaged with integrity and without constraint: free, full, flowing and boundless
Beauty, as a wholesome endeavor, engaged with integrity and without constraint: free, full, flowing and boundless
Sex, as a wholesome endeavor, engaged with integrity and without constraint: free, full, flowing and boundless
Power, as a wholesome endeavor, engaged with integrity and without constraint: free, full, flowing and boundless
Vitality, as a wholesome endeavor, engaged with integrity and without constraint: free, full, flowing and boundless
Heavy Machinery, as a wholesome endeavor, engaged with integrity and without constraint: free, full, flowing and boundless
Let us explore what reception, assimilation, release means in each case. These are not definitive statements, but gestures in general directions, as your lived context is the circumstance where details are filled in.
Money Tantra
In American Tantra, money is understood as crystallized life force: it is generated by doing what benefits others that others cannot easily find a substitute for and can be liquified again to be deployed for further transformation of the world.
Reception: reception of money requires continuous discovery of how you can benefit others in a way that others cannot easily find a substitute for, due to your distinctive capabilities.
Assimilation: assimilation and integration of money is the building of patterns of uses of money where it flows in aesthetically pleasing patterns of spending, saving, and investment.
Release: release of money occurs with fullness. This fullness need not require great wealth; it is the fullness of fundamentally “having enough”. Intimate release of money includes creating events and building circumstances that benefit people, in addition to investing in visions one has a passion for.
Fame Tantra
In American Tantra, fame is understood as crystallized trust: it is generated by doing what benefits others that few others can do and can be liquified again to be deployed for further transformation of the world.
Reception: reception of fame requires being trustable to make something distinctive happen.
Assimilation: assimilation and integration of fame is to experience it as community trust given over to your body for safekeeping. While this trust is located in one’s person, it is a loan from the community as a whole.
Release: release of fame occurs by using one’s fame to elevate other’s projects, especially those who have less fame. One sees fame as a positive-sum game, and thrills to the possibility of a gift of fame launching someone to greater heights of fame than you possess.
Beauty Tantra
In American Tantra, beauty is understood as a free gift of delighting others via physical presence. A free gift is a gift given freely, with no sense of obligation to give or implications for not giving.
Reception: reception of beauty requires being engaged in activities that make one’s physical presence (whether via bodily form, clothing, countenance, or mere quality of moving-through-the-world) a delight to others.
Assimilation: assimilation and integration of beauty is to experience this delighting of others as free gift co-created between self, society, and others. In this respect, it is neither personal nor impersonal. There is beauty without any felt sense of necessity.
Release: release of beauty occurs in displaying beauty to the delight of others. The other’s appreciation contributes to the atmosphere in toto, as opposed to being for the sake of personal accumulation.
Sex Tantra
In American Tantra, emotional-sexual activity is understood as joining bodies into a connected interactivity: it is generated by doing what benefits others in the form of infusing their body with heart-warmth and pleasure and creates a foundation for the deepest form of cooperation, where we value each other’s flourishing pre-conceptually.
Reception: reception of emotional-sexual is to open one’s heart to intimate warmth and one’s body to sexual pleasure.
Assimilation: assimilation and integration of emotional-sexual is for the body to frequently be full of warmth and sexual pleasure, without the necessity for any particular object of them.
Release: release of emotional-sexual is to diffuse bodily (psycho-physical) emotional-sexual energy to create mutual intimate warmth and sexual pleasure with others.
Power Tantra
In American Tantra, power is understood as crystallized cooperation: it is generated by doing what benefits others (1) which would not have happened if not for your contribution (2) that requires cooperation and can be liquified again to be deployed for further transformation of the world.
Reception: reception of power is to take on more and more transformative projects, ever-broader in scope and magnitude and requirements for cooperation between individuals, and (generally) to make them real (and occasionally, realize that the projects must pivot or die).
Assimilation: assimilation and integration of power is the capacity to make things happen, via the means of coordinating cooperation, that, without your action, would otherwise not have happened.
Release: release of power is to distribute one’s power, giving others opportunities to exercise and develop power.
Vitality Tantra
In American Tantra, vitality is understood as crystallized bodily capability: it is generated by doing what benefits the individual as a body and can be liquified again to be deployed for further transformation of the world.
Reception: reception of vitality is to engage in activities that create flourishing of the body, such as intelligent use of diet, exercise, contemplation, and rest.
Assimilation: assimilation and integration of vitality is to allow degrees and flavors of vitality to come and go as they will, experienced primarily as bodily textures. While reception is an active process, the current bodily texture of vitality is allowed to be as it is.
Release: release of vitality is the use of body in beautiful and useful ways, engaging in activities that both require vitality and diminish it.
Heavy Machinery Tantra
In American Tantra, beautiful and functional heavy machinery can be sacred objects. This could be the sacralization of vehicles such as personal automobiles, railroads, airplanes or construction machinery; this could be the sacralization of large infrastructure such as dams or electricity production plants. The co-appreciation of natural wonders and large-scale mechanical wonders is a rare virtue, as most cultures either sacralize nature over the works of man or sacralize the works of man over nature.
Reception: reception of heavy machinery occurs by participating appreciatively in cooperation with it, caring for it, and perhaps imbuing it with personification. For many in this era, automobile ownership is an access portal.
Assimilation: assimilation and integration of heavy machinery occurs when the heavy machinery becomes “ready-to-hand” in Heideggerian language: in operation and participation, it has a felt-sense no different than any other integrated part of the body.
Release: release of heavy machinery is to orient the heavy machinery for the benefit of others: for an automobile owner, that may be to give rides or let a friend borrow the car. For someone who cares for a factory, this might be orienting it toward the “Swiss dairy farm” aesthetic of “everything clean and functional”.
In Praise of Traditional Californiaism and the Seven American Tantras
Californiaism is the life-positive spiritual tradition embracing the inseparability of inner and outer, with core principles of realizing no intrinsic existential problem and responsive interaction with the world, expressed in particular through the seven American Tantras of money, fame, beauty, sex, power, vitality, and heavy machinery.
One question that I ask about a tradition is: what sort of world would it be if everybody embraced it?
Here, I think the answer would be: a world of enjoyment, a world of diverse aesthetic beauty, and a world that materially becomes a better and better place to be.
And so, I come in praise of Californiaism.
What‘s the opposite of American Tantra?
What’s the evil twin?
What’s the half-assed version?
Holy shit I absolutely love this. I could also imagine a Tantra of ownership (and maybe a dichotomous Tantra of the commons?). It lines up with the heavy-machinery Tantra but is more broad.
Its reception would be the upkeep and transformation of things we own, be they trinkets, tools, machines, homes, spaces, into things which are beautiful, useful, enabling.
Its assimilation would be similar to you're heavy machinery Tantra, where things we own become an extension of our capabilities.
And its release would be the making available to others the things we own and our skills with them: making a useful craft for a friend, letting someone borrow your lawnmower, hosting a delightful house party.