The Tantra of Barbie

When I walked into Saturday’s screening of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, donning pink lipstick, sparkly pink eyeshadow and bohemian pink earrings in honor of the occasion, I definitely did not expect to see Tantrik philosophy expressed in the film. Obviously, I don’t believe that this was the filmmakers’ original intent. But as a practitioner of Tantra, I cannot help but to see the universality of the tradition’s objectives. They simply are not limited to the actual lineage or the Indian subcontinent. My belief is that once Tantra is truly understood, it is seen everywhere. Ultimately, Tantra is about the human’s journey to freedom. The seeds of Tantra exist in stories told around the world, particularly in stories that talk about the power of the imagination.

In Tantrik philosophy, the world is a mysterious appearance of God’s shakti, or God’s creative aspect. Why the world appears, no one can ever know. Perhaps the only satisfactory explanation we will ever have is that it is the play of God, much like the imagination of a child playing with Barbie dolls. It is a type of make-believe, or a dream reality that in Tantra (and many other Eastern philosophies) is known as maya. At the center of this maya, God goes on imagining everything, and every imagined creature shares the strange paradox of being that one God, somehow undergoing myriad experiences of the same reality. The fun part is that God seems to deceive…