Tantra Technologies for the Cremation Grounds

As a Tantric yogi, I work with ancient wisdom lineages to try and navigate the world of Now. Modernity of this nature, where absolute destruction of the sweet nectar that makes us human seems to be the power structure’s end game, requires a special kind of bodhisattva to guide us through the chaos. Not that I’m any special sacred warrior or anything, but I studied and am now embodying (or, at least on my good days) the lineage I chose to pursue.

I work with Tantra as a technology. But this wasn’t always the case. I came to yoga several times since my 20s, but didn’t connect with the wisdom of yoga until about a decade ago. I turned to yoga as a way to anchor my day as I was running my web production studio and learning crypto and infosec at a local hacker space. Yoga helped me find a place to plant my feet and stay connected with the Earth. A practice that had nothing to do with technology but that enabled me to step into my body and find peace.

Fast forward to now. I sought the wisdom keepers of ancient lineages through Naropa University and stumbled into the exact yoga that my soul was seeking, but had no frame of reference to understand it. This lineage exists in ancient texts, translated by white men of the colonial days and still translated by white men of the modern era and is passed down through various teachers who embody the essence of the practice. I landed in the middle of the wisdom keepers of Non Dual Shiva Tantra and my yoga teacher’s personal and academic area of expertise is Vamachara, the left-hand path.

Not to lose the thread here in technicalities, but a little context will probably help our conversation. We’re talking classical tantra here, not the modern Western version that positions this as playing with sexual energy to find enlightenment. All of that bullshit is wellness theatre designed to sell workshops and books and allow people to bypass the reality by seeking an unattainable enlightenment.

The Left Hand Path, Vamachara in Sanskrit, is essentially the practice of embracing the unorthodox to shock the complacent out of their stupor and show a pathway to spirituality through the transmutation of afflictive emotions.

Non duality in this context means that we’re no longer buying the patriarchal story of a vengeful Father in the sky as a “God” who is judging us constantly from some external place that may or may not exist. Non dual Shiva Tantra embraces the belief that the divinity of God, however you define that word, is within us. And our karmic goal in this lifetime is to uncover the inherent divinity that already exists within. Our divine nature has simply been masked by the social constructs we have spent our lives ensconced within.

Now, here’s where it gets rather spicy and mad scientist like. Ancient Tantric Yogis are trained to work with Kali and her flames of destruction. We hold the ability to stand in the center of destruction and make sense of the chaos. We are trained to comb through the ashes of the cremation ground, gather the bones that need to be resurrected and sing them back to life.

We are trained to show society that within the destruction lies the key to tomorrow. The path to a world that’s not possible until the old guard burns in the flames of Kali. She doesn’t destroy for the sake of destruction, she burns to the ground that which no longer needs to exist. And our mission here is to take the surviving embers, the heat of destruction and breath life into what’s left.

Tantrikas are the stewards of destruction and creation. We take the lessons we find in the flames and translate them for the world to find solace as they witness the burning.

We have the strength through our practice and our own divinity to drive an anchor deep into the Earth and create containers where people can breath and return to themselves. Co-regulating in community and transmuting the energy of destruction into a life-force of creation.

We transmute the bullshit into beauty.

When I completed my 1000 hours of yogic training in this lineage and entered the corporate crypto world, I naively thought I could build community containers for devs under the corporate logo that would help bake compassion into the code. Teach devs empathy and self-awareness at the beginning of their careers and maybe they’ll make different choices than the broligarch class of tech billionaires that came before them and all the devs that baked their inhumane philosophies into the code that is now fracturing society.

I was very, very wrong. Yes, my team and I built the containers and yes, the devs flourished– but the corporation only wanted extraction. Shocking, right? Well, what’s shocking is I thought I could change the system. I’m that type of delusional optimist.

But what I discovered during the past 3 years of corporate > startup crypto land is that what the corporate structure is actually designed to do is suppress truth and force compliance out of labor from the top down. And large crypto organizations embrace the same patriarchal leadership that squeezes every ounce of life from labor and discards the human once the life-force is fully consumed by the institution. Or once the worker stumbled onto the dead bodies and starts to blow the whistles. Once truth is exposed the workers whose eyes are now open are purged from the system and replaced. And those who “thrive” in these environments are those who made compromises to their mission and integrity along the way to maintain their salaries and positions in the power structure.

That’s not a judgement. I fully embrace that this is the system we live within and when the poverty level for a family of four hits above 6 figures, such survival mechanisms become necessary. And that's by design (but late stage capitalism and the structural failures it forces us all to absorb is a different article all together).

Here’s the thing about the trauma of corporations and working in technology as a Tantrika. I see the full scope of the system because I was trained to do so. And most technical founders and leaders have blind spots for (or have been trained to ignore) the impacts of their actions on the human layers that sustain the corporation. Nothing new here, a story we've seen on repeat since capitalism was invented.

I can see the dark triad powers that take what seems to be a likable human and place them into a container that breeds a criminal monster who thrives on the games of manipulation and destruction to 'secure’ their own survival in this Hunger Games of emergent tech. It may take me a while to uncover the full scope of the system I’m within, usually because I take people at their word and my desire to manifest a mission clouds my judgement. But at some point, my body sends out a warning signal if I continue to ignore the danger barrelling at me.

I’m currently closing out a two year cycle of devastation on my mission to bake compassion into the code. I can’t really talk about the full scope of it all just yet, but right now I’m existing deep within a vortex of trauma, chaos and well, hope. I’m living the book The Body Keeps the Score in real time, which is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that I am now able to sense danger and tension in my body and ACKNOWLEDGE IT faster so the transmutation process is quick and impactful. The curse is that my body is holding the consequences of working with monsters for too long. And, well, that shit hurts.

In this cycle of closure something else is rising up– Love as a Verb, co-creation fueled by soul connection, a direct channel between my mind and my heart that is more powerful than any technology I’ve ever worked with in the past. And the ability to use AI as a tool of acceleration to compost trauma and transmute the negative into a direct tantric technology we can create impact with.

At The Human Layer, this is the work Tayken and I are bringing to life. We started this experiment a year ago. And we are fully in the cremation grounds now. Sifting through the ashes of destruction, identifying the lessons and beliefs we need to carry forward and translating them for our community of listeners and impact weavers to find solace and fuel for their own missions.

Tantra as a technology is not a new concept. Yoga has many protocols and systems that reach back thousands of years and pulses through the heart of many ancient civilizations. Most wisdom traditions carry these protocols baked within their myths.

We need to pull our ancient wisdom lineages into the context of Now so we can all move forward from a place of connection and shared action to preserve what needs to carry forward for the next generation. And we need that ancient lens to know what we must allow to burn right now and to find the strength to let the flames grow until regeneration can occur.

We must take these ancient lineages and create new myths. Society has always found connection and action through story and now is the time to take the wisdom of our elders and bake it into the modern myths of Now so our children can navigate the period of regeneration that always rises once the flames die out.

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