Subtle Embodiment is a Political Act
Vertical Causality, Political Theory, and the Dawn of a Contemplative Politics
My earliest foray into philosophy was through the lens of political theory.
After getting “discontinued” from a musical theatre BFA at Ithaca College (a tale for another day), I switched my degree to sociology and politics — which soon landed me in a class on Marxist Political Theory with Professor Zillah Eisenstein.
This single class shifted my whole relationship toward life and view of the world. I encountered an orientation that made so much sense to me as a compassionate approach to human interconnectedness – one that Karl Marx, throughout his early philosophical writings, referred to as the “species-being” of which we are all a part.
I started my undergraduate degree two weeks before 9/11, and for the four years I was at Ithaca, the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent war shaped a potent activist fabric throughout the college. This environment plus courses that renewed my outlook on life led to an inspired period of activism regarding the Iraq War. I retained no friends from my two years of musical theatre training, but the ferocity and vitality shared among my new friends participating in this activist milieu bonded us in a way that continues to this day.
My passion for the transformation of ideas through political theory then led me to study a masters in Political Theory at the London School of Economics. It was throughout this experience that I discovered my passion for writing and my inspired commitment to philosophical thinking. So a few years later, I decided to pursue another masters program – much to the dismay of my student debt.
After completing the masters in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, I became disillusioned with academia and enrolled in a yoga teacher training that transitioned my work from waiting tables during grad school to teaching modern postural yoga full time.
On the surface of things, it might look like my transition was a kind of radical departure from my original political and academic commitments. After all, so many people perceive yoga and meditative practices – wrongly, in my view – as connected to a navel-gazing obscurantism that leaves the world and its problems behind. Given such a perspective, one could easily think that I became exhausted and exasperated by political struggles and took a bypassing turn toward personal self-improvement and cheesy wellness practices.
I see the relationship between politics and spirituality differently, however, and I sometimes mention in classes that I see what we are doing when we are studying contemplative traditions and practicing meditation as forms of political engagement.
Renunciatory vs. Householder Perspectives
It isn’t altogether incorrect, however, that some spiritual traditions invite us to bypass the world – electing to see its issues as fundamentally illusory and therefore best ignored in the service of focusing on more “spiritual” matters. These traditions are often referred to as “renunciatory” traditions.
Renunciatory traditions imagine the ephemeral changes of the world as un-real and therefore distractions that obscure the truth of things. They are therefore intimately connected to a “dualistic” view of the world: there is spiritual truth and reality, on the one hand, and then there is the illusory world, on the other. The traditions of classical sāṃkhya and yoga, some schools of Vedānta, and others, are examples of dualistic systems that posit this metaphysical distinction. Even some schools that refer to themselves as “non-dualistic” end up defaulting to a dualistic view of things through the very gesture of seeing “dualism” as somehow bad – thereby positing a somewhat ironic dualism between “dualism” and “non-dualism.”
By contrast, there is another set of contemplative traditions that was less known to the spiritual world until relatively recently, that we refer to as “householder” traditions. These traditions don’t negate the world and its problems, but see contemplative study and practice as an affirmation of the world and of life — through a transmutation of our perception of it. The problem, from the perspective of these traditions, is not “dualism” per se, but rather ignorance. And there are two species of ignorance referred to by Abhinavagupta in his Śākta-Śaiva texts: intellectual ignorance and spiritual ignorance.
The Two Forms of Ignorance
Intellectual ignorance (or bauddha-ajñāna) is characterized by the various forms of limiting belief, understanding, and thought constructs that arise from a limited intellect (or buddhi). It causes misperceptions and false interpretations of reality. It is the ignorance that reflects how we understand the world, reality, and the mechanisms of consciousness – an ignorance that is overcome through the process of refining our conceptions and acquiring a more expansive knowledge (vidyā).
Spiritual ignorance (or pauruṣa-ajñāna) is the foundational ignorance that constitutes our understanding as being a limited, individuated self. It's the root of the sense of separation and limitation – that feeling of being a separate individual distinct from others, the world, and the encompassing consciousness itself. It's not merely the absence of knowledge, but a contracted or limited state of knowing. The Tantrik tradition says that this type of ignorance can only be removed by an interior shift referred to as śaktipāta – the “descent of grace” caused by the freedom of reality itself (svatantrya).
Pauruṣa-ajñāna is therefore an ignorance about the very nature of the Self – expressed through the assumption that there is no Self at all. And because there is no Self to be realized, so the thinking goes, it makes sense that reality would be seen – as it is by so many – as “nothing but” a parade of atomic particles interacting with themselves. The wonder and amazement inspired by a consideration of how this could be possible or sustained at all is largely ignored. And from the perspective of this meaningless, mechanical-materialist monism, scientists then try to resolve the “problem of consciousness” – ignoring the evidence available (even to scientists) that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter, but rather intrinsic to it.
A culture that is embedded in a mood of cosmic meaninglessness therefore becomes a political problem, because what happens when an entire planet of individuals becomes entirely cynical and loses their capacity for wonder? What happens when meaning-making is domesticated to the space between your ears, through cultural assumptions and intellectual biases about the nature of reality?
As traditions that affirm life and provide tools to expand the meaningfulness of it, the Tantrik householder paths are extremely amenable to the socio-political dimension. But by taking them seriously, they do require us to situate politics within a different worldview and an alternative epistemological framework.
A New Political Imagination — Horizontal and Vertical Causality
Our socio-political imagination is presently rooted in a materialist metaphysical worldview, while simultaneously disavowing the spiritual impulse toward fulfilment that is evident within it. This impulse is equally present in both conservative and progressive political perspectives – albeit at opposite ends of a linear historical spectrum. Put somewhat simply, the conservative seeks fulfilment through the return to an idealized past, while the progressive posits that fulfilment in an often vaguely defined utopian future. What unites them both is a deferral of imagined fulfilment to another time – whether it be in the past or the future.
It would be a somewhat cringey cliché to say that this split of deferred fulfilment between either past or future is resolved by “being in the present moment.” But of course – as with many such modern spiritual clichés – there is a deeper set of insights that can be unpacked from this platitude. The insight has to do, I think, with a conception of causality that our culture is presently animated by – a billiard-ball, horizontal causality that imagines time, history, and experience on a straight line extending from past to future.
This is not the only conception of causation available for reflection, however; indeed, Aristotle spoke of four species of causation (material, formal, efficient, and final). For our purposes, it can be helpful to distinguish between two forms of causation – horizontal and vertical.
If horizontal causation is the exteriorized conception of historicizing causation that shapes the structure of our cultural and political assumptions, then vertical causation is an interior conception that works with techniques and practices that allow for alternative dispositions and faculties to arise within us. This is, in my view, one of the most significant and profound insights we can derive from many of the world’s contemplative traditions. There are certain fault-lines of possibility that are regulated by our attachment to a narrow view of causality, as well as how fulfilment is imagined, and how knowledge is conceived.
The Political Implications of Vertical Causation
From the perspective of the Non-Dual Śākta-Śaiva traditions, our relative degree of ignorance is proportional to the range of resources available to us as we show up and interact with each other and the world around us. We address both forms of ignorance through a synergistic process of study and practice.
If we accept this premise, then it follows that without modes of contemplative study and practice, we are likely to be existentially tighter, less resilient, and more easily capsized by the various negative tendencies of life. Living from an exteriorized horizontal causality alone can easily lead us into misunderstanding, because the potential for deep understanding requires an expanded imagination. And being pushed along by the waves of exterior causality ultimately constrains our imagination, because a compassionate understanding arises not simply from the acquisition of knowledge, but also from the emotional flexibility we develop through an alignment with vertical causation. As a result, we become reactive rather than responsive.
We can bring more energy, clarity, and creativity to our socio-political commitments and collective projects when we steep ourselves in those modes of self-inquiry that soften, subtelize, and refine our knowledge systems. By contrast, those lacking in such efforts will often project their own psychological challenges, fears, and tensions onto others – a phenomenon and tendency that has, in my view, deeply damaged the space of public discourse. Our approach then becomes quite the opposite of another species of the dreaded “spiritual bypassing” – we become more capable and effective in the face of socio-political challenges when we devote time and effort to aligning with vertical causality.
However, it would be a mistake to interpret this as suggesting that we must first do the contemplative work before we enter into politics. Again, this view collapses our consideration into another expression of horizontal politics. We study contemplative traditions and engage in subtle embodiment practices at the same time as we show up for our various community responsibilities – just as we brush our teeth every morning and go to work the same day. In instances of both contemplative and political processes, the results can accumulate over time. However, the position I’m suggesting here isn’t that we flip the script and start privileging vertical over horizontal causality. We need both, because they compliment and reinforce each other in the same way that study and practice compliment and reinforce each other.
We can simultaneously work in the service of a future world that is kinder, more compassionate, and animated by an empathy for the less fortunate, while also acknowledging that there is a certain kind of fulfillment that exceeds these commitments – a fulfillment that is cultivated through an encounter with the ever-present dynamism at the foundation of our interior world.
Going Deep
Just as there are times when we are called to be in a more focused and intensified relationship with political activity – whether in election cycles or various forms of activism –, similarly there are times when we are called to be in a more intentional, focused relationship with our contemplative study and practices. The process of engaging in annual retreats – multiple times per year, for some – is a highly effective way to derive greater benefits from practice and to replenish our resources and commitment to the contemplative process. Indeed, retreats can be an opportunity to deeply remember why we do this work in the first place. Because the palpable resonance that accumulates over the course of deep retreat is experienced as self-validating in its value and efficacy.
I therefore see retreat (and indeed all contemplative practice) as a form of political activism. From an individual perspective, there is perhaps nothing more transformative than showing up in the world with our wits about us, our tensions in check, and our resilience in tow. Contemplative practice — in both its daily expressions and in an intensified retreat format — is a radical act of deepening and expanding one’s resources and imagination. It allows us to see things differently. And, as a result, we begin encountering a newfound capacity to tell new stories, to persuade more effectively, and to write new political theories — ones that might hopefully help get us out of this mess we’re living in.
We Need New Dreams
I recently saw a memorial post following the passing of Ralph De La Rosa – a prominent dharma teacher in the Buddhist tradition who collaborated with Embodied Philosophy in the early years. This writer critiqued some of his parting words: “see you in the next dream.” They didn’t like this sentence, apparently, claiming that they would not get on board with seeing anyone in the “next dream;” because they are committed to living in the “here and now” without spiritual bypassing.
While I get the essence of what they wrote, I find this kind of simplistic distinction between “waking” and “dreaming” a bit unpalatable. It was also an unsympathetic and unimaginative interpretation of what Ralph was saying, and I didn’t find it particularly classy to offer a clapback at Ralph immediately after he had left this world.
There is no such thing as living in a world without dreams. We dream in our sleep as much as we dream while we’re awake. We dream about what we want to accomplish each day. We dream about the future and the past. And we are constantly creating new dreams within which we live and through which we perceive our reality. To suggest that there is some kind of “realistic” attitude toward the world that is exempt from all dreaming is simply the ideological byproduct of another kind of dream. However, I would say the dream of this person is more akin to a nightmare.
To separate the process of dreaming and imagination from one’s conception of political progress is to cut off your nose to spite your face. Without dreams and imagination, we would never come up with anything new. And if there is anything more apparent in politics right now, it is that the old ways are no longer working. Instead of opening up to a flexible, creative vitality that could allow us to bring new forms of human relationship and community into being, many of us are instead hardening into sanctimonious ideologies that do little more than divide us.
If the situatedness of the world is partially determined by the dreams and nightmares that are non-different from how we perceive the world itself, then contemplative study and practice is to 1) become cognizant of the dreams and nightmares that are shaping and informing our perception, and 2) take our agency back with regards to our own power in bringing a more compassionate dream into being. While the power structures that have solidified on the plane of horizontal causality do constrain and affect material, social, and psychological forces, the pratyabhijñā philosophical tradition infers that there is a limitless range of imaginative resources accessible through our relationship to vertical causality.
No structures of oppression or affliction can touch the spaciousness born of that verticality — an experiential attunement with which will make us more effective at responding to these structures.
In the end, the call to contemplative practice is not a retreat from the world but a radical invitation to perceive and participate in it more deeply. To engage with vertical causality is to reclaim the dream as a site of agency and imagination — where new forms of collective life become not only thinkable but possible in this lifetime. A contemplative politics begins when we recognize that interior transformation and external action are not separate domains, but mutually intersecting and reinforcing movements of the same pulsation of reality itself.
Subtle embodiment, then, becomes not just a spiritual commitment but a political one — where the revolution begins within, but never ends there.
Interested in joining the Kuṇḍalinī Retreat?
In today’s spiritual marketplace, “kuṇḍalinī awakening” has become a familiar phrase — often flattened into vague talk of “energy” or sensationalized as a mystical event. But within the non-dual Śākta-Śaiva traditions, kuṇḍalinī-śakti is not merely something we experience. She is the living axis of vertical causality — the power by which consciousness awakens to itself, revealing new depths of meaning, perception, and possibility.
This retreat explores kuṇḍalinī not as a spiritual spectacle, but as a subtle and dynamic principle of creative unfolding. Together, we will recover the philosophical richness and ethical implications of these teachings, while cultivating a somatic and contemplative language for engaging kuṇḍalinī as a vertical movement of self-recognition — one that empowers greater clarity, resilience, and presence in the world.
Kuṇḍalinī & Subtle Embodiment Retreat
July 10th–16th, 2025 | Live Online via Zoom | Most Recordings Available within 24 Hours
9:00–11:30 AM & 1:00–3:30 PM ET Daily (Afternoon Times Subject to Change)
Interesting piece, especially the horizontal vs vertical causation. Cool way to put, would like to collab write about it!
Very much enjoyed the perspective this simulated and I would agree. Thank you for expressing and sharing it Jacob 🙏🏾💖