Institutionalizing Tantra with Western Education

The Institute of Authentic Tantra Education is delighted to announce its cooperation with Ubiquity University. This will allow the graduates of our two-year professional training program to transfer those credits towards the completion of an advanced degree from an accredited university. IATE graduates may now choose to pursue a Master’s degree, a PhD, or a combined MA/PhD through Ubiquity.

We have chosen to align ourselves with Ubiquity University because of the harmonization between their values and ours. IATE brings the insight and wisdom of a well-established, lineage-based tradition to a Western audience in a new way. Ubiquity University has as its founding purpose “to develop learning experiences grounded in the world’s wisdom traditions blended with the practical interpersonal and entrepreneurial skills you need to thrive in a world of increasing complexity and connectivity.”

Both IATE and Ubiquity adopt a holistic approach to education which is not focused on producing prefabricated cogs for an existing (and increasingly failing) machine, but on well-rounded human beings rooted in the wisdom traditions of the past and capable of addressing the challenges of today’s world.

Western academia has been dominated by a particular way of looking at the world. The name for this is logical positivism. It is associated with an emphasis on empiricism meaning that the only things that count are the things that can be counted; if it cannot be weighed and measured then it does not exist.

This particular viewpoint tends to favour “hard facts” and “reason” over emotionality, spirituality, and lived experience. It tends towards an “objective” view of the world which can also be seen as cold, distant, even dissociated.

Frederick Nietzsche refers to this as the “pale, cold, grey conceptual nets thrown over the motley whirl of the senses.”

This form of thinking is associated with several less respectable companions including patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and a host of others. In the historically short period of time that this approach has held sway, it has brought the world to the brink of social and ecological collapse. This is a problem not with the world or with human nature, but with a particular approach to living and being in the world.

As a means of counteracting this mindset, IATE draws upon the insights of Tibetan Vajrayana Tantra as expressed in the Shangpa Kagyu lineage, and Black feminist epistemology as presented by Patricia Hill Collins. Both place value on lived experience over intellectual dissociation. The Tantric lineage which we teach is one of the few founded by marginalized women. The epistemic commitments we hold draw upon the insights and experiences of the marginalized to foster positive change towards greater recognition and respect for the humanity of all.

Given these commitments, our association with Ubiquity University reflects a correspondence of values and is a natural fit.