The Tantric Operating System
The Dalai Lama, the Epstein files, and the operating system running beneath the yoga studio, the manosphere, and the golden age your politicians keep promising
A companion essay to my recent podcast conversations with Jamie Hanshaw Dyer
When I lived in Santa Monica, one of the men who taught me partner acrobatics kept a small altar in the corner of his studio. Sandalwood, a brass bell, a photograph of a smiling Tibetan man in maroon robes, and a little porcelain bowl that always had fresh fruit in it. He was kind. His students adored her. He did not strike anyone, ever, as a person who had been inducted into anything dark.
That is the part nobody warns you about. The thing I am going to describe in this essay does not arrive in a black robe. It arrives in a yoga retreat in Bali, in a couples’ “intimacy intensive” advertised on Instagram, in a documentary about a soft-spoken monk who stops the cameras to bless a child. It arrives smelling like sandalwood.
I had a book sitting on my desktop (because I can’t afford $600 books) for almost three years before I worked up the courage to do a show on it. Several people I respected had warned me off it. It’s written by “commie” Germans with an agenda. It’s a literalist reading of figurative texts. It’s unfair to Buddhism. So I let it sit. Then I revisited it, and I called my friend Jamie Hanshaw Dyer, because I did not want to walk into that material alone and I knew she was the perfect person to do it justice. She did not disappoint.
The book is The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, by Victor and Victoria Trimondi. It is six hundred pages long. A physical copy will cost you somewhere around six hundred dollars, if you can find one. There is a reason for the scarcity, and I have come to believe the reason is not the one I was told.
This essay is what I wish someone had handed me when I first picked it up.
