Sublimation-as-Erasure vs Refinement-as-Fulfillment
- White (Kiss of the Yoginī, the four-mechanism sublimation, the sublimation arc) — the critical-historical warrant — vs the practitioner-lineage warrant (Foss / Larsen / Pai / Rao and the living traditions; the high-Tantric and modern-yoga self-understanding) on the same historical sequence: the move from the embodied Kaula fluid-rite to the internalized, gnostic, abstract high Tantra (and modern yoga).
- White (Kiss of the Yoginī, the four-mechanism sublimation, the sublimation arc) — the critical-historical warrant — vs the practitioner-lineage warrant (Foss / Larsen / Pai / Rao and the living traditions; the high-Tantric and modern-yoga self-understanding) on the same historical sequence: the move from the embodied Kaula fluid-rite to the internalized, gnostic, abstract high Tantra (and modern yoga).
White reads the doing → knowing sequence as sublimation-as-erasure: the embodied hard core (the Yoginī, the drunk discharge, the real woman) was internalized, semanticized, masculinized, and substituted until nothing specific remained — the woman erased, the tradition emptied ("everything becomes Tantra because nothing is Tantra"). The fluid keeps resurfacing (in the bindus, the kuṇḍalinī, Bhāskararāya's literalism) — proof, for White, that the sublimation buried (did not transcend) the hard core; the knowing is parasitic on the doing it replaced.
The practitioner-lineage warrant reads the identical sequence as refinement-as-fulfillment: the gross, external, preliminary rite was refined into the realization it was always pointing toward. The internalization is not erasure but interiorization of a truth; the gnosis is not parasitic on the rite but its fruit; the kuṇḍalinī is not the erased Yoginī but the subtle reality the external woman only symbolized. "Doing → knowing" is progress (the means fulfilled in the end), not loss (the real thing buried).
*The same data — the historical move from embodied rite to gnostic realization — is read as erasure (White) or fulfillment (the tradition), and the choice depends entirely on whether the embodied hard core or the gnostic realization is taken as the "real" Tantra.*
The collision is not resolvable by evidence — it is a clash of warrants (what counts as the "real" tradition: the embodied origin or the realized truth). But it may be sharpenable: the fluid-substratum-persists evidence (White's strongest card — the sublimation never fully completes, the body keeps returning) is either proof of burial (White: the repressed returns) or proof of continuity (the tradition: the subtle truth was always embodied, so the body's return is fidelity, not failure). Falsifiable-ish hypothesis: if the sublimation is erasure, the resurfacing fluid should be experienced by practitioners as transgressive/repressed (a return of something excluded); if it is refinement, the resurfacing should be experienced as integral (the embodied pole of a continuous reality). The phenomenology of the holdouts (Bhāskararāya, the Bāuls, the fluid-kuṇḍalinī practitioners) is the test-bed.
- For promotion: a practitioner-lineage source read directly against White, with the refinement-as-fulfillment position stated in its own terms (not just inferred) — and the phenomenological question (do holdouts experience the fluid as repressed-and-returning or as integral?) addressed. This is the master tension of the whole critical-historical vs practitioner-lineage architecture applied to the sublimation — possibly the single most important collision in the eastern-spirituality domain.