Tantra 101: Holding Complexity

I think we would all agree that the world is a complex place. Some would say it is more complex now than ever. We feel overwhelmed, we scramble to make sense of destruction, to understand the widening divides, and for many, to find simple and peaceful answers to the eruption of problems. Yet, it seems that we are continually falling short. Our demands for understanding of others don’t offer solutions, and our intense devotion to simplicity leaves us failing, feeling disappointed and dejected as the problems mount and grow.  Though we understand theoretically that the world is complex, and possibly impossible to fully comprehend, we continue to demand that it be reduced to manageable parts, and knowingly or not, contribute to transforming the complexity into complication.  Learning to hold and honor the complexity helps to minimize the complications that arise from our personal resistance and creates space for more rather than less.  

Lessening and reducing the whole is often expressed as the impetus to control, reduce, and diminish.  When we feel overwhelmed by the more, we crave the experience of less.  We long to decrease the intricacy, to mitigate the multitudes, and to contract or hide from the differences.  However, more means more.  When we strive to have a direct experience of this agreed upon complexity rather than reducing it to something more manageable, we step into MORE and all that it brings.  More life, more joy, more complexity, more complication, more frustration, more.  And in a resilient life, we grow our capacity to hold more, and all of the complexity that comes with it, this is what Tantra teaches us.

Recently, I’ve been wondering a lot about perspective and its relationship to truth and facts. Every person on the planet “sees” from a very individual perspective (Sva in Sanskrit). A way of “seeing,” experiencing, feeling that is unique to each individual.  Yes, there is overlap based on shared history, culture, and experience, but even these aspects of perspective can ever and only be perceived individually by the one perceiving. I don’t mean this to sound too complex (here we go already), so let me try to give an example.  I am at the market buying apples.  I pick up an apple and based on a host of factors including what I’ve been taught a good apple looks like, feels like, and smells like, as well as what I’ve learned about the place and growing conditions of that apple, I determine which apples are best to purchase, and I put them in my bag. A dozen other people come to the apple bin and go through a similar process of choice, but each one aligns their choice with their own unique set of variables based on their individual experience, learning, and beliefs. This process could have all of us agreeing on what a good apple is or completely disagreeing, but the understanding that underlies all of our arguments is unique and exclusively our own.

It’s fascinating, really, how truly diverse (defined as showing a great deal of variety; very different, by Oxford English Dictionary) our perspectives are on the same concrete things.  As a species, we are infinitely unique and complex. We are a living, breathing expression of more. Yet, rather than recognize this beauty, we often desire to get everyone to see the world through our eyes, something that they can’t nor will ever, be able to do. We use arguments, pleas, admonishment, and insult.  We use coercion, manipulation, demand, and “proof.”  We pull out all of the stops to bring the “other” into our way of seeing the world rather than make room for the complexity of others’ perspectives.  Holding more rather than reducing to less is a highly refined skill of resilience, and in Tantra it’s called the resolution of opposites.  It equates with making space for a variety of opinions, idea, and even contradictions, allowing for us to “see” things differently without making one perspective wrong and another right. Though perplexing, Tantra says when dealing with complexity, the practice is to engage with the contradictions that emerge and permit these contradictions to exist simultaneously and together. When we recognize that our way of seeing the world is simply 1 out of 7 billion possible perspectives, we have the opportunity to hold more than our single perspective allowing us to become more flexible and receptive to the vast scope of viewpoints and experiences.

Now, if we can lean into the possibility that no one views the world in exactly the same way, we can begin to loosen the grip on the need for everyone to see it one way. We can begin to stretch the edges of our own personal perception to allow for more, more questions, more curiosities, more contradictions, and more doubt and frustration too.  We can stop trying to get everyone on the same page, and instead increase the size of the book.  We can open to MORE and watch with interest our tendencies to simplify as a means to evade the discomforts of a widening horizon.  Maybe we can even challenge our own fixed ideas in a way that opens us to more possibility, more creativity, more understanding. 

Rather than shielding and sheltering our highly sensitive natures (that “feel” the world around us), we might begin to see it as a superpower, a threshold of opening that expands our understanding.  We can transform our empathic natures into the tools that we use skillfully not to protect ourselves or demand change from others in order to alleviate our discomforts, but instead to broaden our perspectives and increase our own capacity. We can begin to move through the world as a dance of differing perspectives,  yielding, swaying, and meeting each one as a part of the whole, as well as stepping on each others toes, having missteps, and making mistakes.  The intensity of the rhythm dictated only by our willingness to hear, wonder, meet, receive, and LEARN. 

I don’t imagine that this approach will “fix” anything.  It might not make anyone feel more comfortable, most especially YOU, but it might make space for all of our discomforts to coexist.  It may open the possibility that everyone’s perspective has a place in the story, and when that happens, maybe we won’t have to shout so loudly to be heard. Living with (and AS contradiction) is the nature of Tantra.  This contradiction is all in each of us, and its what makes us terribly wonderful and unique. We are all BOTH that which is “right” and that which is “wrong” on the inside.  When we stop trying to exile any of those parts, and instead cultivate the capacity for togetherness within, we may find a greater willingness to hold all things together and at once outside of ourselves. We may find greater capacity, more space, more consent, more acceptance, or we may not, and we can have space to hold that too.