What flavor of chips?

I agree, Sienna.

I think it's sort of like walking on a thread lying on the ground. To one side is that beautiful salad bar and to the other side is the Newage/sewage.

It's easy to move to either side of the thread, especially if it's dark. It's more difficult to tell which side you're on.

Namaste!

>>But is that really American Tantra? Or is that a mushy mess of newage sewage?

American Tantra, because the salad bar was invented in America. And so was New Age sewage.

"Exactly my point, TN...who is there to judge and tell you that a path that you have put yourself on, which led you to experience those few informal traditions, is not a valid path? You should be free to pursue that which calls you into it, without fear of recrimination from others on more (so-called) "valid" paths. "

I think there are several points here which are being confused.

One is the validity of a personal path. I do periodically hear people initially claim that bdsm is not a spiritual path, but after talking with me for a while, most tend to back off to a position of claiming that it's simply not for them. It's pretty rare that I hear someone challenge the validity of a personal path and keep doing so for any length of time, or where I hear a large group of people doing so - at least, not around the tantra or bdsm forums. And people who do so tend to get ganged up on pretty quickly.

A second issue is the issue of semantic naming. There are folks who use lax, street definitions for words like "shamanism", "tantra", "buddism", "zen", etc. There are other folks who use, shall we say, more academically rigorous definitions of these words?

In the street definitions, I practice tantra and shamanism. But in the academically rigorous definitions, I can't claim authority on either one because I can't verify or prove that what I'm doing has any relationship to the academically rigorous definitions. Shamb often uses these more academically precise definitions and while I respect those uses, I do think that he is frequently misunderstood to be attacking the validity of someone's personal path when really he's simply trying to call into question either their definitions of the words or their claims to authority over the topics.

In the case of shamanism, there's also the question of cultural respect in the face of a number of claims. Some people believe that their spiritual beliefs or their definitions of the word are sacred, can only be used by certain people, and that use by other groups of people constitutes a gesture of disrespect. While I think those perspectives are worth noticing and listening to, I don't completely agree.

A similar claim has been made about tantra many times as well - that tantra taught in the west to westerners is a priori not tantra - that tantra per se can only be learned from easterners and in the east. I've also heard it claimed that to use the word "tantra" to describe what we here in the west are doing constitutes a sort of cultural appropriation which is sometimes perceived as disrespectful much as white folks claiming to study and/or practice shamanism may be disrespectful.

But again, I think most of these disagreements boil down to semantics. Clearly, many white folks are studying and practicing something at least vaguely akin to tantra in the west and at least vaguely akin to shamanism. Pick some words that are less offensive, if necessary, but the fact that we're doing _something_ seems pretty clear.

In my world view, authority has some value, but it isn't the be all end all. Rather, I figure that truth is generally pretty self evident and that if I can recognize value in someone's teachings, then at least for me those teachings have value.

I happen to like Carlos Casteneda's works. I think it's now been pretty clearly exposed that his works are fiction, not autobiographical accounts as were once thought. However, to me, the truth they contain is in the meaning and transformation that I got from reading the words and stories as metaphor and as thought experiments. The veracity of the events described in this plane of existence is, and always has been irrelevant to me with respect to my value for his work. As for validity, for value, I appreciate his work. As for claims as to whether his work represents any authoritative claims about shamanism - well, it seems to me that if one is even asking the question about authoritative claims then one has already missed several of the major points about shamanism and tantra as spiritual paths.