The Tantric Woo-Woo of Christopher Wallis, Part 1

This article is my response to Christopher Wallis’s 2017 book “The Recognition Sutras: Illuminating a 1000-Year-Old Spiritual Masterpiece.” This book, which is a translation and explanation of Tantric master Ksemaraja’s “The Essence of the Recognition Philosophy” (Pratyabhijna-hrdaya in Sanskrit), has, so far, received nothing but glowing five-star reviews at Amazon (but this will change when I post my review). According to the book’s description at Amazon: “Pratyabhijna-hrdaya is one of the primary sources for the study and practice of nondual Tantrik Yoga, and it has never been accurately translated or fully explained until now. Christopher Wallis, author of “Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition,” expounds the subtleties of this spiritual and philosophical classic.”

I’ve read two other versions of Pratyabhijna-hridaya, so I was already familiar with Ksemaraja’s work before reading Wallis’s translation/explanation. While I have plenty to say about Wallis’s translation/explanation of this nondual Tantric Shaiva text as it pertains to Yoga practice and philosophy, I’ll leave that until Part 2 of this two-series article. In this Part, I will focus on Wallis’s “marriage” of idealist monism (which asserts that all that exists is Consciousness) and quantum physics, which he uses throughout his discourse to elaborate Ksemraja’s text. In short, I take umbrage with Wallis’s “marriage” because I believe it not only misrepresents what nondual Tantric Shavism is really about, but also provides a warped view of idealist monism and quantum physics. Wallis has a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley (his doctoral dissertation focused on the role of spiritual experience within Tantric Shaivism), and he is probably the most prominent living exponent and expositor of nondual Shaivism. Given his status and popularity and my disagreements with his exegesis of nondual Tantric Shaivism, I’ve been moved to write this article.

In this Part of my article I focus on countering Wallis’s statements pertaining to idealist monism and quantum physics. I quote Wallis from his book, and then provide my responses. Herewith are the quotes and responses:
WALLIS: As quantum physicists have now thoroughly demonstrated, it is meaningless to talk of the existence of even a particle of matter without an observer; before observation, there is only probability, potentiality. Observation is creation.

GARDNER: Physicists have not thoroughly demonstrated this, and many debunk it. And even if it were true on the quantum level, it is not true on the macroscopic level. Nobody can create anything in the visible world through observation. Here is a statement from renowned Oxford physics philosophy professor Dr. Simon Saunders debunking the role of observation in quantum physics and in creating reality:

“Patriotism has been called the ‘last refuge of a scoundrel,’ and for good reason. But over the last few years, I’m afraid that phrase has become outdated.

“Patriotism is now the second-to-last refuge. Quantum physics has become the last refuge of the scoundrel.
“In conclusion: no, reality is not determined by our observation of it. The universe does not magically know when it’s being watched. Reality is not stuck in a contradictory state of superposition and paradox, waiting to pop into existence once somebody opens their eyes. Or, as Einstein put it, “I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
“You cannot create your own reality just by willing it so. There is absolutely no data which suggests consciousness plays any role in collapsing the wave-function.”

WALLIS: There is only your consciousness manifesting the various qualia of your experience. Thus, focusing on something is actually manifesting it in more detail.

GARDNER: Focusing on something does not make it manifest in more detail. You simply notice more detail because you are focusing on it.)

WALLIS: Your assumption that things exist without a perceiver to perceive them is just that: an assumption. It cannot be proven.

GARDNER: Everything is not being perceived in every moment, yet things continue to exist when they aren’t being perceived. Moreover, cameras and scientific instruments prove this. Scientists have dated the earth and universe, and they existed before living beings perceived them.

WALLIS: In other words, the very fact that it [an object] is manifest within Awareness and known only through being illuminated by Awareness demonstrates that it can be nothing but Awareness.

GARDNER: No, it doesn’t. It only demonstrates that awareness is necessary to be aware of an object.)

WALLIS: There is no reality to whatever you are aware of apart from your awareness of it.

GARDNER: Yes, there is. Only someone suffering from extreme cognitive dissonance believes that there is no reality apart from one’s awareness of it.

WALLIS: The fact is, such a universe exists only as a figment of our imagination. All that we have direct evidence of, all that can be properly called real, are the phenomena that arise from the union of perceivers and perceived.

GARDNER: This would mean that Wallis and his book, which are part of the universe, are also figments of imagination. So why would anyone want to pay attention to such figments?)

WALLIS: Wake up to the truth that what you think and believe is not that important, and it doesn’t define you. It doesn’t point toward reality, because reality is nonverbal and nonconceptual. If you explore your mind, your only discovery will be what you have been conditioned to believe. The mind is, prior to awakening, just an organ that regurgitates conditioning.

GARDNER: It is absurd to say that what you think and believe is not that important. The Germans believed in Hitler and Nazism and exterminated 6 million Jews along with starting World War 2. More recently, the people of Venezuela believed that Marxism was the answer to their problem, and the Marxism they voted for has decimated their economy. If the mind, prior to awakening, only regurgitates conditioning, how is it that scientists have made so many new discoveries and inventors have invented so many ingenious Inventions? I have explored my mind, and unlike Dr. Wallis, I have discovered things I haven’t been conditioned to believe, but, to the contrary, which I have learned by de-conditioning my mind.)

WALLIS: Loving your own being; fully accepting yourself; accepting what Life wants to do through you; releasing your ambition to transform yourself into someone or something else, some imagined ideal; and, at the same time, fully allowing and making space for your natural process of transformation to unfold— this is the heart of the spiritual life.

GARDNER: The heart of spiritual life is not loving and fully accepting yourself. The heart of spiritual life is Divine Yoga—permanently uniting your soul (or consciousness) with Spirit (or Light-Energy). Moreover, bad people should not love and fully accept themselves. Moreover, it is insane to think that evil murderers, sadists, and torturers should love and fully accept themselves.

WALLIS: Everything is a reflection of the self, and the self is a reflection of everything.

GARDNER: The ceiling I’m gazing at is not a reflection of myself, and I am not a reflection of it. And the same can be said regarding my relation to other objects. It takes a vivid imagination and a disconnection with reality to believe that every being and thing are reflections of each other.

WALLIS: But the apparent common sense of that assumption has now been deconstructed by the most advanced branch of science we have, that of quantum physics. It has demonstrated that the belief in observer-independent reality is nothing other than that: a belief. And one without any evidence whatsoever to support it. Kṣemarāja reveals this truth in these words: “Whatever one is aware of in this world, its nature is nothing but that awareness.” Another way of saying the same thing is: there is no reality to whatever you are aware of apart from your awareness of it. “But wait a second,” you say. “If I experience a specific thing, let’s say a tree, and then when I’m not there my friend experiences the same thing and reports it to me, surely that proves its existence is independent of my awareness?” No— it only demonstrates that perceivers are coordinated, which we discussed back in Chapter Three. They agree on the tangible aspects of reality because their awarenesses co-create that reality, giving rise to the illusion of objectivity. But perceivers are and must be coordinated simply because they are all instantiations of a single underlying Perceiver.

GARDNER: It has not been demonstrated by quantum physics that the belief of observer-independent reality is nothing more than a belief. Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said, “Nature does not know what you are looking at, and she behaves the way she is going to behave whether you bother to take down the data or not.” Whatever one is aware of is not that awareness, and it has reality even if you are not aware of it. And the idea that perceivers co-create the same reality, giving rise to the illusion of objectivity, is absurd. Moreover, perceivers do not always perceive the same reality.

Per Wikipedia.org under the entry Observer Effect (Physics):
“The need for the "observer" to be conscious has been rejected by mainstream science as a misconception rooted in a poor understanding of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process.”

WALLIS: Perception is creation, and that you— what you really are— are the creator (and sustainer and dissolver) of everything you experience.

GARDNER: Your cat and dog perceive you. Did they create you? You aren’t the creator of everything you experience. I’ve never met anyone who can create even a lowly flea or cockroach, let alone an elephant or a whale.

WALLIS: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer, in fact, is indisputable: it cannot make a sound, because ‘sound’ denotes the experience a perceiver has when a vibration moving through the medium of air strikes the eardrum. It denotes the coming together of all those factors within the field of awareness. It is meaningless to talk of ‘sound’ otherwise.

GARDNER: Sound does not denote a perceiver to hear it. Sound waves are measurable waves of pressure that can be measured and recorded when no perceiver is present. If one plays back the recording of the tree falling, one hears it. Even if no one plays it back, proof of the sound is available on the recording instruments.)

WALLIS: Furthermore, in the equations of physics, which have now described the nature of the physical universe to quite a precise degree, there is no intrinsic difference between the past and the future (since nearly every equation in physics works the same in both ‘directions’)— which seems to support the Tantrik notion that past and future are mental constructs.

GARDNER: The third law of thermodynamics, entropy, provides the forward “arrow of time” that incontrovertibly differentiates the past from the future. Per a NASA scientist at the NASA website: “In all time travel theories allowed by real science, there is no way a traveler can go back in time to before the time machine was built. I am confident time travel into the future is possible, but we would need to develop some very advanced technology to do it.” Time slows down in spacetime as one accelerates toward the speed of light, but because one cannot exceed the speed of light, one cannot reverse time. Hence, the two are hardly the same. Because change is not the same in both directions, neither is time, which is relative in the sense that it measures change according to a standard, which becomes quite protean in four-dimensional spacetime when space, location, mass, and velocity are significantly altered. But this “bending of spacetime” does not allow for time reversal. Try telling an evolutionary biologist that the past and future have no intrinsic difference. Moreover, it couldn’t be more obvious to anyone who lives in the real world that the past and future are intrinsically different. Anyone who thinks that aging is just a “mental construct” needs to get on meds. Tantra does not teach this.)

WALLIS: We may observe that all objects of awareness are relative and dependent: they are created by your (and others’) perception of them and don’t exist independently of that perception… There is no reality to whatever you are aware of apart from your awareness of it.”

GARDNER: It is beyond absurd to believe that objects don’t exist independently of the perception of them, and that perception creates them. This belief is a perverse application of the (fallacious) idea that consciousness has primacy over existence in the plane of Maya.)

WALLIS: The sense of free will that your mind and body have is illusory... the you that you think you are has no free will.

GARDNER: If one has no free will, one can’t choose to practice, and then practice, the meditation exercises in Wallis’s book. If people have no free will, it’s time to stop blaming, arresting, and punishing criminals, because they can’t help themselves. It's time for Sam Harris to stop ragging on radical Muslims, because they can’t help themselves from being terrorists. The problem with “intellectuals” such as Dr. Wallis and Dr. Harris is that they don’t understand that human free will exists on a continuum commensurate with the will power that an individual can consciously exercise at any point in time. None of the experiments cited by Wallis or Harris refute this. (And many experts in the field of cognition don’t interpret the experiments the way Wallis and Harris do.) From my perspective, such experiments simply point out that most of the time people operate on “automatic pilot” in response to subconscious conditioned responses, and in such cases, don’t exercise free will. To anyone with a clear brain (which many professors, such as Wallis and Harris, lack), it couldn’t be clearer that free will (to varying degrees) is not an illusion, but a reality.)

WALLIS: More importantly for our purposes is the assertion that the fifth and most contracted form of the Power of Knowing is the Impurity of Differentiation (māyīya-mala, the name being derived from māyā). This refers to the cognitive error by which the objects of consciousness (including other people) are seen as separate from oneself.

GARDNER: Judging from Dr. Wallis’s rejection of separation between objects (reducing such separation to a “cognitive error”), my guess is that he might have a problem with walking into walls—and, painfully, discovering that he can’t walk through them. Wallis’s problem is that he doesn’t grok Maya. In Maya, there are real separation and differences between objects. Maya means the measurable universe that has been “measured out” from the Immeasurable--and this universe is not an illusion, but a reality. Transcending Maya, and mayiya-mala, is not a matter of denying the reality of manifest separation and differences; it is a matter of yogically Realizing the Unmanifest as the Condition of all manifest objects.)

WALLIS: As an attitude that is beneficial to all [Dr. Wallis recommends opening up to] the wonder and aliveness of not knowing anything for sure.

GARDNER: In other words, Wallis recommends cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t matter if there is incontrovertible evidence that something is true, such as the fact that Donald Trump is the president of the U.S. and that Hillary Clinton is not, it’s beneficial to be ignorant or skeptical of it, and in a state of foggy “wonder” instead.