Some reflections on Kleshas – I
“The five kleshas must not be regarded as petty foibles, weaknesses or minor failings or amusing defects which can be considered for a short moment and then dismissed and forgotten. They form the foundational obstruction in Twilight Yoga as in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.”
Dadaji The Exegetikos
I was first introduced to the Kleshas (kleśāḥ) when I was initiated into AMOOKOS 1 in 1986, and under the direction of my mentor, Vishvanath, began to work through the grade papers of the Order, as detailed in the book Tantra Magick. They are:
- Ignorance
- Ego
- Revulsion
- Attachment
- Clinging to Life
The five kleśās, as outlined in Tantra Magick are self-observation practices, aimed at allowing practitioners to examine their opinions about themselves, their opinions, attachments, aversions, and boundaries. Having not really encountered this kind of practice before, I found it very useful and spent about a decade or so meditating, reflecting, and striving to apply the kleśās in my daily life, performing pujas that integrated them in ritual. Following the suggestions given, I tried to reflect on how I established preferences and aversions, for example, occasionally trying to eat foods that I had a lifelong dislike to. Trying things out that I had held back from. Becoming (gradually) aware of the dissonance between my own image of “me” and how I was perceived by others. Such practices had not featured in any of the esoteric practices I’d been involved with prior to my entry into AMOOKOS – western ceremonial magic, Wicca, and some early movements towards Chaos Magic. I also found it very useful to have a mentor who was well-versed in these practices and could help me manage my expectations of how I “should” be progressing. This in itself is an important point. Developing a facility for self-reflexivity can be a boon to a practitioner but these practices also have their downside – the self-judgments and unrealistic expectations of how one “should” be progressing can cause worries and stress. I think a key, yet perhaps understated component of this kind of practice is learning to be gentle with oneself.
Eventually, though, I began to move away from this practice. There were several contributing factors to this. I began to notice, particularly in online exchanges, some people used the kleshas as a means of disparaging other people. Characterizing someone as not having done their “klesha practice” was used to shut down conversations and challenges. Also, I began to reflect on the nature of the “ego”. The idea that the ego is something to be disparaged, dissolved, or overcome is a familiar trope in esotericism and new-age discourse. I began to consider that having a strong sense of selfhood – providing one can be flexible and open to new ideas and possibilities – is no bad thing in itself. Also, the kind of intense emotional experiences that began to arise as my practice deepened did not really square with the notion of ego-dissolution. It seemed to me, at times, that it wasn’t so much that my ego; my sense of personhood was dissolving, but rather, it expanded during these moments of intensity to become everything – I was the sky, the ground, the entirety of existence.
By this point, I’d stopped relying on the AMOOKOS material that formed much of my initial approach to this practice, and begun to engage with Indian tantric and yoga texts more directly.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that I began to study the Yoga Sūtras (YS) of Patañjali and started to understand the kleśās in a different way. When I initially began my practice with kleśas, I perhaps naively, thought that they were a core component of tantra practice. This was very much how they’d been presented to me, and at the time, I did not know enough to doubt it. But as I meditated upon and reflected upon the verses of the YS, some fundamental differences emerged, and as I moved further into my tantra practice, I began to understand some fundamental differences between the representation of both mind and the world – and by extension, the kleśas – within the philosophies of the Yoga Sūtras and those of the various tantric traditions. That will be the subject of the next post in this series.
Notes:
- the Arcane and Mystical Order of the Knights of Shamballah ↩
