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Divine Horsemen: the Voodoo Gods of Haiti
“Divine Horsemen: the Voodoo Gods of Haiti,” Lyrichord. Recorded in
1947 on a wire recorder with the microphone attachted to a post in
the middle of the ceremony by Maya Deren in the filming of her
documentary of the same name. No Hollywood silly business here, this
is the real deal: a trance/possession ceremony where participants are
actually possessed by the Rada Loa (the pantheon of voodoo gods, the
ancient gods of the East African Fon): Deren says, “There are moments
when the voices of the loa can be heard talking and singing on this
recording.” Astonishing and intricate drumming, powerful almost
beyond comprehension; you’ve never heard anything like it. Regards,
Face A
1. Legba
2. Damballah
3. Agwe
4. Erzulie
5. Ogoun
6. Litany
7. Ghede chant
Face B
1. Invocation to azacca
2. Azacca possession
3. Ghede
4. Azacca
5. Congo cult
6. Petro cult
7. Banda dance for ghede
8. Rara festival
9. Mardi gras carnival
all propers to nauma over at black star liners
-
download the video: Maya Deren Divine Horsemen
or watch @guba.com
i couldn’t get sutostart turned off to embed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Horsemen:_The_Living_Gods_of_Haiti_(film)
Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985) is a black and white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian vodou that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1952 and edited and completed by Deren’s third husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren’s death. Most of the film consists of images of dancing and bodies in motion during rituals in Rada and Petro services.
Deren had studied dance as well as photography and filmmaking. She originally went to Haiti with the funding from a Guggenheim fellowship and the stated intention of filming the dancing that forms a crucial part of the vodou ceremony.
The film that resulted, however, reflected Deren’s increasing personal engagement with vodou and its practitioners (Wilcken, 1986). While this ultimately resulted in Deren disregarding the guidelines of the fellowship, Deren was able to record scenes that probably would have been inaccessible to other filmmakers.
Deren’s original notes, film footage, and wire recordings are in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archive Research Center
nice
i mean NICE doc on “this subject”
angles
ideas
perspectives
vid will mostlikely not play here
but will open to the tudou page proper
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/W6Rjkr3Olvk
Interest in the Mayan Long Count Calendar and 2012 end-of-the-world prophecies is increasing rapidly with about four years left to the target date of December 21, 2012 (or thereabouts).
A significant number of new books, as well as reprints of older ones, on the topic of 2012 are being published, some becoming legitimate bestsellers, including: Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End by Lawrence E. Joseph; Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 by John Major Jenkins; and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck.
On the fiction front, Whitley Strieber’s latest novel, 2012: The War for Souls, is slated to be a Michael Bay-produced (and possibly directed) film at Warner Bros. Pictures.
An increasing number of mainstream publications are writing about 2012. The New York Times Magazine ran a feature on the topic, focusing on John Major Jenkins, in its July 1, 2007 edition; USA Today published an article entitled “Does Maya calendar predict 2012 apocalypse?” on March 28, 2007; and Publishers Weekly ran a story about the large number of new books on the topic on March 26, 2007. A second PW story ran in the September 3, 2007 edition with a quote from a well-known editor saying that 2012 “has practically become its own category” of books; and proving that the trend is only strengthening, a year later the September 22, 2008 issue of PW in its cover story stated “publishers agree that New Age readers can’t get enough prophetic 2012 literature,” and “sales on this topic have been through the roof.”
Perhaps most significantly from a mainstream awareness perspective, Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC) is directing a new tent-pole film for Sony Pictures entitled 2012. It is set for wide theatrical release in July, 2009.
The Disinformation Company specializes in publishing articles on topics surfacing in the culture on its popular website at www.disinfo.com and publishes books by authors writing in this and related fields. (For instance, Disinformation author Graham Hancock’s bestselling book Fingerprints of the Gods was one of the first to focus on the Mayan calendar and its end date in 2012, and will be one of the bases for the Roland Emmerich movie.) Of course, in addition to its publishing division, The Disinformation Company also produces and distributes documentary films.
Producer Gary Baddeley recognized that interest in 2012 was on a fast track into the zeitgeist in 2007 and initiated the process of planning and producing 2012: Science Or Superstition with director Nimrod Erez. The Disinformation team, including co-producer Ralph Bernardo, contacted and arranged interviews with multiple experts, often obtaining speedy access due to more than ten years of working with them or colleagues in their fields.
Interviews were conducted in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Palenque and also shot on location in Mexico and Egypt. Co-producer Bernardo worked with NASA to obtain illuminating footage of our solar system and galaxy and was able to locate leading astronomy professor Anthony Aveni, a cornerstone of the film’s balanced approach. Director Nimrod Erez worked closely with animators to illustrate the sometimes complicated concepts discussed in the film, allowing the viewer to see visually, the hard to grasp phenomenon of precession.
In accord with the Disinformation style of documentary filmmaking and publishing, the producers attempted to highlight multiple views of the subject matter and to interview experts who address the issues from varying and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The goal was to present the viewer with a balanced look at the 2012 phenomenon, allowing him or her to form an independent opinion on the debate about what the December 21, 2012 date means to all of us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=magazine
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.
THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.
Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.
A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists.
Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture at the time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young family, a thriving private practice and a big, elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to teeter and slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a life-altering crisis.
What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”
He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”
Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.
What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”
Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.
Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”
And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.
STEPHEN MARTIN IS a compact, bearded man of 57. He has a buoyant, irreverent wit and what feels like a fully intact sense of wonder. If you happen to have a conversation with him anytime before, say, 10 a.m., he will ask his first question — “How did you sleep?” — and likely follow it with a second one — “Did you dream?” Because for Martin, as it is for all Jungian analysts, dreaming offers a barometric reading of the psyche. At his house in a leafy suburb of Philadelphia, Martin keeps five thick books filled with notations on and interpretations of all the dreams he had while studying to be an analyst 30 years ago in Zurich, under the tutelage of a Swiss analyst then in her 70s named Liliane Frey-Rohn. These days, Martin stores his dreams on his computer, but his dream life is — as he says everybody’s dream life should be — as involving as ever.
Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin is unapologetically reverential. He keeps Jung’s 20 volumes of collected works on a shelf at home. He rereads “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” at least twice a year. Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”
The first time I met him, at the train station in Ardmore, Pa., Martin shook my hand and thoughtfully took my suitcase. “Come,” he said. “I’ll take you to see the holy hankie.” We then walked several blocks to the office where Martin sees clients. The room was cozy and cavelike, with a thick rug and walls painted a deep, handsome shade of blue. There was a Mission-style sofa and two upholstered chairs and an espresso machine in one corner.
Several mounted vintage posters of Zurich hung on the walls, along with framed photographs of Carl Jung, looking wise and white-haired, and Liliane Frey-Rohn, a round-faced woman smiling maternally from behind a pair of severe glasses.
Martin tenderly lifted several first-edition books by Jung from a shelf, opening them so I could see how they had been inscribed to Frey-Rohn, who later bequeathed them to Martin. Finally, we found ourselves standing in front of a square frame hung on the room’s far wall, another gift from his former analyst and the centerpiece of Martin’s Jung arcana. Inside the frame was a delicate linen square, its crispness worn away by age — a folded handkerchief with the letters “CGJ” embroidered neatly in one corner in gray. Martin pointed. “There you have it,” he said with exaggerated pomp, “the holy hankie, the sacred nasal shroud of C. G. Jung.”
In addition to practicing as an analyst, Martin is the director of the Philemon Foundation, which focuses on preparing the unpublished works of Carl Jung for publication, with the Red Book as its central project. He has spent the last several years aggressively, sometimes evangelistically, raising money in the Jungian community to support his foundation. The foundation, in turn, helped pay for the translating of the book and the addition of a scholarly apparatus — a lengthy introduction and vast network of footnotes — written by a London-based historian named Sonu Shamdasani, who serves as the foundation’s general editor and who spent about three years persuading the family to endorse the publication of the book and to allow him access to it.
Given the Philemon Foundation’s aim to excavate and make public C. G. Jung’s old papers — lectures he delivered at Zurich’s Psychological Club or unpublished letters, for example — both Martin and Shamdasani, who started the foundation in 2003, have worked to develop a relationship with the Jung family, the owners and notoriously protective gatekeepers of Jung’s works. Martin echoed what nearly everybody I met subsequently would tell me about working with Jung’s descendants. “It’s sometimes delicate,” he said, adding by way of explanation, “They are very Swiss.”
What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung family who work most actively on maintaining Jung’s estate tend to do things carefully and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum and are on occasion taken aback by the relatively brazen and totally informal way that American Jungians — who it is safe to say are the most ardent of all Jungians — inject themselves into the family’s business. There are Americans knocking unannounced on the door of the family home in Küsnacht; Americans scaling the fence at Bollingen, the stone tower Jung built as a summer residence farther south on the shore of Lake Zurich. Americans pepper Ulrich Hoerni, one of Jung’s grandsons who manages Jung’s editorial and archival matters through a family foundation, almost weekly with requests for various permissions. The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red Book — which on one hand described Jung’s self-analysis and became the genesis for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange enough to possibly embarrass the family — held a certain electrical charge. Martin recognized the descendants’ quandary. “They own it, but they haven’t lived it,” he said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it.” Even the old psychiatrist himself seemed to recognize the tension. “Thank God I am Jung,” he is rumored once to have said, “and not a Jungian.”
“This guy, he was a bodhisattva,” Martin said to me that day. “This is the greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells the story of his inner life.” He added, “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book, but for him that made it all the more tantalizing. His hope was that the Red Book would “reinvigorate” Jungian psychology, or at the very least bring himself personally closer to Jung. “Will I understand it?” he said. “Probably not. Will it disappoint? Probably. Will it inspire? How could it not?” He paused a moment, seeming to think it through. “I want to be transformed by it,” he said finally. “That’s all there is.”
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND and decode the Red Book — a process he says required more than five years of concentrated work — Sonu Shamdasani took long, rambling walks on London’s Hampstead Heath. He would translate the book in the morning, then walk miles in the park in the afternoon, his mind trying to follow the rabbit’s path Jung had forged through his own mind.
Shamdasani is 46. He has thick black hair, a punctilious eye for detail and an understated, even somnolent, way of speaking. He is friendly but not particularly given to small talk. If Stephen Martin is — in Jungian terms — a “feeling type,” then Shamdasani, who teaches at the University College London’s Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine and keeps a book by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus by his sofa for light reading, is a “thinking type.” He has studied Jungian psychology for more than 15 years and is particularly drawn to the breadth of Jung’s psychology and his knowledge of Eastern thought, as well as the historical richness of his era, a period when visionary writing was more common, when science and art were more entwined and when Europe was slipping into the psychic upheaval of war. He tends to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he deems guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally unsentimental attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him, at times, awkward company among both Jungians and Jungs.
The relationship between historians and the families of history’s luminaries is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side works to extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls. Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s literary executor and last living heir, has compared scholars and biographers to “rats and lice.” Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri recently told an interviewer that he considered destroying his father’s last known novel in order to rescue it from the “monstrous nincompoops” who had already picked over his father’s life and works. T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Fletcher, has actively kept his papers out of the hands of biographers, and Anna Freud was, during her lifetime, notoriously selective about who was allowed to read and quote from her father’s archives.
Even against this backdrop, the Jungs, led by Ulrich Hoerni, the chief literary administrator, have distinguished themselves with their custodial vigor. Over the years, they have tried to interfere with the publication of books perceived to be negative or inaccurate (including one by the award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair), engaged in legal standoffs with Jungians and other academics over rights to Jung’s work and maintained a state of high agitation concerning the way C. G. Jung is portrayed. Shamdasani was initially cautious with Jung’s heirs. “They had a retinue of people coming to them and asking to see the crown jewels,” he told me in London this summer. “And the standard reply was, ‘Get lost.’ ”
Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.
While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”
For about two years, Shamdasani flew back and forth to Zurich, making his case to Jung’s heirs. He had lunches and coffees and delivered a lecture. Finally, after what were by all accounts tense deliberations inside the family, Shamdasani was given a small salary and a color copy of the original book and was granted permission to proceed in preparing it for publication, though he was bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. When money ran short in 2003, the Philemon Foundation was created to finance Shamdasani’s research.
Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade, Shamdasani — who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz — these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only very recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him this summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was just adding his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.
The footnotes map both Shamdasani’s journey and Jung’s. They include references to Faust, Keats, Ovid, the Norse gods Odin and Thor, the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, the Greek goddess Hecate, ancient Gnostic texts, Greek Hyperboreans, King Herod, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, astrology, the artist Giacometti and the alchemical formulation of gold. And that’s just naming a few. The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.
“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red Book. Creating the book also led Jung to reformulate how he worked with clients, as evidenced by an entry Shamdasani found in a self-published book written by a former client, in which she recalls Jung’s advice for processing what went on in the deeper and sometimes frightening parts of her mind.
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
ZURICH IS, IF NOTHING ELSE, one of Europe’s more purposeful cities. Its church bells clang precisely; its trains glide in and out on a flawless schedule. There are crowded fondue restaurants and chocolatiers and rosy-cheeked natives breezily pedaling their bicycles over the stone bridges that span the Limmat River. In summer, white-sailed yachts puff around Lake Zurich; in winter, the Alps glitter on the horizon. And during the lunch hour year-round, squads of young bankers stride the Bahnhofstrasse in their power suits and high-end watches, appearing eternally mindful of the fact that beneath everyone’s feet lie labyrinthine vaults stuffed with a dazzling and disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth.
But there, too, ventilating the city’s material splendor with their devotion to dreams, are the Jungians. Some 100 Jungian analysts practice in and around Zurich, examining their clients’ dreams in sessions held in small offices tucked inside buildings around the city. Another few hundred analysts in training can be found studying at one of the two Jungian institutes in the area. More than once, I have been told that, in addition to being a fantastic tourist destination and a good place to hide money, Zurich is an excellent city for dreaming.
Jungians are accustomed to being in the minority pretty much everywhere they go, but here, inside a city of 370,000, they have found a certain quiet purchase. Zurich, for Jungians, is spiritually loaded. It’s a kind of Jerusalem, the place where C. G. Jung began his career, held seminars, cultivated an inner circle of disciples, developed his theories of the psyche and eventually grew old. Many of the people who enroll in the institutes are Swiss, American, British or German, but some are from places like Japan and South Africa and Brazil. Though there are other Jungian institutes in other cities around the world offering diploma programs, learning the techniques of dream analysis in Zurich is a little bit like learning to hit a baseball in Yankee Stadium. For a believer, the place alone conveys a talismanic grace.
Just as I had, Stephen Martin flew to Zurich the week the Red Book was taken from its bank-vault home and moved to a small photo studio near the opera house to be scanned, page by page, for publication. (A separate English translation along with Shamdasani’s introduction and footnotes will be included at the back of the book.) Martin already made a habit of visiting Zurich a few times a year for “bratwurst and renewal” and to attend to Philemon Foundation business. My first morning there, we walked around the older parts of Zurich, before going to see the book. Zurich made Martin nostalgic. It was here that he met his wife, Charlotte, and here that he developed the almost equally important relationship with his analyst, Frey-Rohn, carrying himself and his dreams to her office two or three times weekly for several years.
Undergoing analysis is a central, learn-by-doing part of Jungian training, which usually takes about five years and also involves taking courses in folklore, mythology, comparative religion and psychopathology, among others. It is, Martin says, very much a “mentor-based discipline.” He is fond of pointing out his own conferred pedigree, because Frey-Rohn was herself analyzed by C. G. Jung. Most analysts seem to know their bloodlines. That morning, Martin and I were passing a cafe when he spotted another American analyst, someone he knew in school and who has since settled in Switzerland. “Oh, there’s Bob,” Martin said merrily, making his way toward the man. “Bob trained with Liliane,” he explained to me, “and that makes us kind of like brothers.”
Jungian analysis revolves largely around writing down your dreams (or drawing them) and bringing them to the analyst — someone who is patently good with both symbols and people — to be scoured for personal and archetypal meaning. Borrowing from Jung’s own experiences, analysts often encourage clients to experiment on their own with active imagination, to summon a waking dreamscape and to interact with whatever, or whoever, surfaces there. Analysis is considered to be a form of psychotherapy, and many analysts are in fact trained also as psychotherapists, but in its purist form, a Jungian analyst eschews clinical talk of diagnoses and recovery in favor of broader (and some might say fuzzier) goals of self-discovery and wholeness — a maturation process Jung himself referred to as “individuation.” Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people in midlife. “The purpose of analysis is not treatment,” Martin explained to me. “That’s the purpose of psychotherapy. The purpose of analysis,” he added, a touch grandly, “is to give life back to someone who’s lost it.”
Later that day, we went to the photo studio where the work on the book was already under way. The room was a charmless space with concrete floors and black walls. Its hushed atmosphere and glaring lights added a slightly surgical aspect. There was the editor from Norton in a tweedy sport coat. There was an art director hired by Norton and two technicians from a company called DigitalFusion, who had flown to Zurich from Southern California with what looked to be a half-ton of computer and camera equipment.
Shamdasani arrived ahead of us. And so did Ulrich Hoerni, who, along with his cousin Peter Jung, had become a cautious supporter of Shamdasani, working to build consensus inside the family to allow the book out into the world. Hoerni was the one to fetch the book from the bank and was now standing by, his brow furrowed, appearing somewhat tortured. To talk to Jung’s heirs is to understand that nearly four decades after his death, they continue to reel inside the psychic tornado Jung created during his lifetime, caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics and between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency to judge and rejudge its own playmakers. Hoerni would later tell me that Shamdasani’s discovery of the stray copies of the Red Book surprised him, that even today he’s not entirely clear about whether Carl Jung ever intended for the Red Book to be published. “He left it an open question,” he said. “One might think he would have taken some of his children aside and said, ‘This is what it is and what I want done with it,’ but he didn’t.” It was a burden Hoerni seemed to wear heavily. He had shown up at the photo studio not just with the Red Book in its special padded suitcase but also with a bedroll and a toothbrush, since after the day’s work was wrapped, he would be spending the night curled up near the book — “a necessary insurance measure,” he would explain.
And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically. Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.
The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled.
ONE AFTERNOON I took a break from the scanning and visited Andreas Jung, who lives with his wife, Vreni, in C. G. Jung’s old house at 228 Seestrasse in the town of Küsnacht. The house — a 5,000-square-foot, 1908 baroque-style home, designed by the psychiatrist and financed largely with his wife, Emma’s, inheritance — sits on an expanse between the road and the lake. Two rows of trimmed, towering topiary trees create a narrow passage to the entrance. The house faces the white-capped lake, a set of manicured gardens and, in one corner, an anomalous, unruly patch of bamboo.
Andreas is a tall man with a quiet demeanor and a gentlemanly way of dressing. At 64, he resembles a thinner, milder version of his famous grandfather, whom he refers to as “C. G.” Among Jung’s five children (all but one are dead) and 19 grandchildren (all but five are still living), he is one of the youngest and also known as the most accommodating to curious outsiders. It is an uneasy kind of celebrity. He and Vreni make tea and politely serve cookies and dispense little anecdotes about Jung to those courteous enough to make an advance appointment. “People want to talk to me and sometimes even touch me,” Andreas told me, seeming both amused and a little sheepish. “But it is not at all because of me, of course. It is because of my grandfather.” He mentioned that the gardeners who trim the trees are often perplexed when they encounter strangers — usually foreigners — snapping pictures of the house. “In Switzerland, C. G. Jung is not thought to be so important,” he said. “They don’t see the point of it.”
Jung, who was born in the mountain village of Kesswil, was a lifelong outsider in Zurich, even as in his adult years he seeded the city with his followers and became — along with Paul Klee and Karl Barth — one of the best-known Swissmen of his era. Perhaps his marginalization stemmed in part from the offbeat nature of his ideas. (He was mocked, for example, for publishing a book in the late 1950s that examined the psychological phenomenon of flying saucers.) Maybe it was his well-documented abrasiveness toward people he found uninteresting. Or maybe it was connected to the fact that he broke with the established ranks of his profession. (During the troubled period when he began writing the Red Book, Jung resigned from his position at Burghölzli, never to return.) Most likely, too, it had something to do with the unconventional, unhidden, 40-something-year affair he conducted with a shy but intellectually forbidding woman named Toni Wolff, one of Jung’s former analysands who went on to become an analyst as well as Jung’s close professional collaborator and a frequent, if not fully welcome, fixture at the Jung family dinner table.
“The life of C. G. Jung was not easy,” Andreas said. “For the family, it was not easy at all.” As a young man, Andreas had sometimes gone and found his grandfather’s Red Book in the cupboard and paged through it, just for fun. Knowing its author personally, he said, “It was not strange to me at all.”
For the family, C. G. Jung became more of a puzzle after his death, having left behind a large amount of unpublished work and an audience eager to get its hands on it. “There were big fights,” Andreas told me when I visited him again this summer. Andreas, who was 19 when his grandfather died, recalled family debates over whether or not to allow some of Jung’s private letters to be published. When the extended family gathered for the annual Christmas party in Küsnacht, Jung’s children would disappear into a room and have heated discussions about what to do with what he had left behind while his grandchildren played in another room. “My cousins and brothers and I, we thought they were silly to argue over these things,” Andreas said, with a light laugh. “But later when our parents died, we found ourselves having those same arguments.”
Even Jung’s great-grandchildren felt his presence. “He was omnipresent,” Daniel Baumann, whose grandmother was Jung’s daughter Gret, would tell me when I met him later. He described his own childhood with a mix of bitterness and sympathy directed at the older generations. “It was, ‘Jung said this,’ and ‘Jung did that,’ and ‘Jung thought that.’ When you did something, he was always present somehow. He just continued to live on. He was with us. He is still with us,” Baumann said. Baumann is an architect and also the president of the board of the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht. He deals with Jungians all the time, and for them, he said, it was the same. Jung was both there and not there. “It’s sort of like a hologram,” he said. “Everyone projects something in the space, and Jung begins to be a real person again.”
ONE NIGHT DURING the week of the scanning in Zurich, I had a big dream. A big dream, the Jungians tell me, is a departure from all your regular dreams, which in my case meant this dream was not about falling off a cliff or missing an exam. This dream was about an elephant — a dead elephant with its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a suburban-style barbecue, and I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled around with cocktails; the head sizzled over the flames. I was angry at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher because she was supposed to be grilling the elephant head at the barbecue, but she hadn’t bothered to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke up.
At the hotel breakfast buffet, I bumped into Stephen Martin and a Californian analyst named Nancy Furlotti, who is the vice president on the board of the Philemon Foundation and was at that moment having tea and muesli.
“How are you?” Martin said.
“Did you dream?” Furlotti asked
“What do elephants mean to you?” Martin asked after I relayed my dream.
“I like elephants,” I said. “I admire elephants.”
“There’s Ganesha,” Furlotti said, more to Martin than to me. “Ganesha is an Indian god of wisdom.”
“Elephants are maternal,” Martin offered, “very caring.”
They spent a few minutes puzzling over the archetypal role of the kindergarten teacher. “How do you feel about her?” “Would you say she is more like a mother figure or more like a witch?”
Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a complex quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes time. The process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always immediately evident. In the following months, I told my dream to several more analysts, and each one circled around similar symbolic concepts about femininity and wisdom. One day I was in the office of Murray Stein, an American analyst who lives in Switzerland and serves as the president of the International School of Analytical Psychology, talking about the Red Book. Stein was telling me about how some Jungian analysts he knew were worried about the publication — worried specifically that it was a private document and would be apprehended as the work of a crazy person, which then reminded me of my crazy dream. I related it to him, saying that the very thought of eating an elephant’s head struck me as grotesque and embarrassing and possibly a sign there was something deeply wrong with my psyche. Stein assured me that eating is a symbol for integration. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s horrifying on a naturalistic level, but symbolically it is good.”
It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at a crossroads?)
Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”
“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed the book was on fire.”
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”
The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience.
Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both Jung’s fans and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just months after it is published. As far as he is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”
After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it will move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of Jung’s descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the Rubin Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the book would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out they were potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of the struggles of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book, he said, “the question would again have to be asked, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”
Stephen Martin too will be on hand for the book’s arrival in New York. He is already sensing that it will shed positive light on Jung — this thanks to a dream he had recently about an “inexpressively sublime” dawn breaking over the Swiss Alps — even as others are not so certain.
In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into “a fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.
Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”
The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 20, 2009
An article on Page 34 this weekend about Carl Jung and a book he wrote about struggling with his own demons misspells the name of a street in Zurich where, before it was published, the book was held for years in a bank safe-deposit box, and a correction in this space on Saturday also misspelled the name. It is Bahnhofstrasse, not Banhofstrasse or Banhoffstrasse. The article also misstates the location of Bollingen, the town where Jung built a stone tower as a summer residence. While it is on the north shore of Lake Zurich, it is south of the Jung family home in Küsnacht.
“Why Are We Here?”
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“Are We Real?”
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“Are We Alone?”
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The Pharmacratic Inquisition DVD – Official Online Edition
1:51:19
How deep does the rabbit hole go? Gnostic Media is proud to present the official online edition of The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007. If you enjoyed “Zeitgeist – The Movie”, you will love this video; the creators of this video are listed as one of the sources for the Zeitgeist Movie. The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007 is a video version of the book, “Astrotheology & Shamanism” by Jan Irvin & Andrew Rutajit. The painstakingly detailed and heavily footnoted research in the book comes to life in this video and is now available to you for FREE! For further research of the claims made in this video, please read AstroTheology & Shamanism – this book is available to order as a combo with the DVD. Thousands of years ago, in the pre monarchic era, sacred plants and other entheogenic substances where politically correct and highly respected for their ability to bring forth the divine, Yahweh, God, The Great Spirit, etc., by the many cultures who used them. Often the entire tribe or community would partake in the entheogenic rites and rituals. These rites were often used in initiation into adulthood, for healing, to help guide the community in the decision process, and to bring the direct religious experience to anyone seeking it. In the pre literate world, the knowledge of psychedelic sacraments, as well as fertility rites and astronomical knowledge surrounding the sun, stars, and zodiac, known as astrotheology, were anthropomorphized into a character or a deity; consequently, their stories and practices could easily be passed down for generations. Weather changes over millenniums caused environmental changes that altered the available foods and plant sacraments available in the local vicinity. If a tribe lost its shamanic El-der (El – God), all of the tribe’s knowledge of their plant sacraments as well as astronomical knowledge would be lost. The Church’s inquisitions extracted this sacred knowledge from the local Shamans who were then exterminated…It is time to recognize the fact that this Pharmacratic Inquisition is still intact and destroy it.
http://aiwazzsaying.blogspot.com
aiwazzsaying is an esoteric library blog
The Theory and Practice of Mutational Alchemy Begins.
At the Apex of Hermetic Science stands the Formula of Abrahadabra.
☵ The Abrahadabra Institute ☲
Every Man and Every Woman is a Star…
The Abrahadabra Institute is an organizational nucleus for the ideas set forth in Abrahadabra.com.
It is not affiliated with the OTO, Golden Dawn, or any other Ritual Magickal Organization.
The purpose of the Abrahadabra Institute is to establish an independent platform around which the principles of Mutational Alchemy and the Magickal Formula of Abrahadabra can be researched, developed and disseminated without reliance upon or commitment to any other religious, philosophical or metaphysical influence. It is solely committed to facilitating a clear understanding and effective methodology surrounding the phrase “Every Man and Every Woman is a Star”.
Historically, alchemical proofs have often been published in the form of visual graphics and this is largely the form I am following in this instance, though I am beginning to move more in the direction of actual education. Alchemical Mirrors are similar in many respects to Eastern Mandalas of which it has been said that the mere gazing upon such images is sufficient to increase a person’s awareness, even without fully grasping the principles contained therein. In almost all cases, meditating upon these visual proofs and cross-referencing them against other existing information that can be found will reveal vital clues pertaining to the nature and physics of Star Anatomy as outlined in the formula of Abrahadabra itself.
While this theory makes extensive use of the binary and ternary mathematics of Hexagrams, it should be noted that the specific arrangement of these systems is entirely unique to this particular theory and is not in any way, sense or form intended as a redefining of classical systems as they already exist historically. The Abrahadabra arrangement of the bigrams, trigrams, tetragrams, hexagrams, etc are completely unique and therefore not intended as a rewriting of the Fu Hsi (Inner World) or King Wen (Outer World) arrangements on any level. This is vital to a clear understanding of what is transpiring in this immediate elemental logic. It is highly recommended that serious students of these most ancient and noble cosmologies take the time to study them independently and not rely upon the arrangements I have outlined as representative of them in any way. I abhor historical revisionism and caution against it all the time. Mutational Alchemy makes use of a certain physics whose roots stretch back 5000 years that we know of. The physics itself is universal but the interpretations of that physics have varied from period to period. Any skillful conceptual syncretist knows better than to try to assert modern ideas as ancient ones. Parallels certainly do exist but the essential logic being outlined here is contemporary, not “traditional” per se. There are independent strengths and weaknesses in all of these ancient arrangements depending upon your particular application in the moment, so they should be studied independently.
The Abrahadabra Institute is not involved in any form of public outreach other than the development of this website for the time being. It has come to my attention however that the dissemination of information in itself is often simply not enough to make its applications clear, so I am in the process of compiling a series of lectures and also investigating options with regards to actual classes in Beginning, to Intermediate, to Advanced Body of Light work. Initially this will have to be limited to a local area but there is always a good chance that this may change very quickly.
The Alchemical Model I am attempting to lay out in these pages amounts to a system of meditation unlike anything I have ever seen anywhere in the world, yet it comprises principles from all points compass. It has parallels everywhere and yet is nowhere spelled out in the kind of detail I am attempting to disclose here. Its long-range ramifications are staggering. We have the makings of a system here that may ultimately make it possible for us to take charge of the Body of Light on a neurogenetic level using all of our logical faculties in the process without stifling anything. It is unfortunate in many ways that I am not more skilled at fundraising since there are practical applications in great abundance in this system, particularly inasmuch as it not only increases and harmonizes energy at the physical level but is also extremely good for creativity itself and sharpens the mind while energizing the body. This is not your average feel-good meditation system by half. This is something powerfully concentrated and very very strong. I can’t even begin to estimate all the ways it may make a difference in things but I have enough time into it to know that I am not simply imagining anything.
I was born to an abysmal personal circumstances and have never been in a position of strength economically, to say the least. I am in many ways a displaced physicist working in an enigmatic branch of topological science which has been hastily brushed aside by modern academia and holds no possibility of financial recompense whatsoever. Yet, despite this, it holds an astonishing degree of promise in terms of hidden knowledge itself. The millennium we are just now embarking on promises to be the most awe-inspiring the world has ever seen and things which only a few years ago were just a dream are fast becoming accessible realities. As humankind gradually begins hedging on high-orbital space it is going to find itself very much requiring a more efficient means of maintaining physical and mental equilibrium that can be quickly applied by anyone on a personal level at whatever degree of intensity may be required. There are things we will have to have mastered internally to be able to equilibrate nature on an extraterrestrial level. We have simply never really had to contend with these issues as urgently as we will in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, there are many potential benefits right here and now to being able to access the Body of Light more efficiently than ever before. What we have largely lacked is a working model of transhumanistic property that actually makes practical sense in lieu of everything we can toss at it. This immediate model rises to meet that challenge and does so not so much by asserting an external technology as an internal one that has been with us all along. If its assertions are correct (and I believe that they are), then we have been laboring under a number of disastrously false assumptions about ourselves and our innate potentialities.
I have always hoped that it might eventually be possible for the Abrahadabra Institute to be self-supporting, and indeed this day may yet arrive. But it has taken a lifetime commitment on my part and required sacrifices I could hardly afford to make to be able to keep pace with this model as it has systematically unfolded before me. I always thought surely something this profound would be taken up by others, yet as the years have passed and the model has continued to evolve, virtually no one has ventured into these waters at all. I am compelled at this point to at least draw some attention to what I remain convinced is the single most important body of modern alchemical knowledge to be found anywhere. I will accept donations to this work, but experience has shown that people are typically very hesitant to throw their support to anyone who doesn’t play the game the way they like it to be played. It would be an easy matter to cloak this work in the kinds of ridiculous theatrics so many others do…to tell you that I received this information by special instruction from an alien race of beings who informed me that I was the reincarnation Hermes Trismegistus and yadda yadda yadda. I have sifted through this pathetic drivel my entire life sorting out fact from fiction and could spin a load of hype with the best of them. There might even be a grain of truth to all of it but it’s a game…a game that has been played ad nauseum and only serves to detract from the legitimate science potential involved. You will have to content yourselves with having no earthly idea who I might really be and deal with the constructs I have to present on their own merits…constructs that will force you to think and may even make you a bit uncomfortable but this is the only way to present this model in its proper frame of reference.
I teach the royal science of Trigrammaton itself, which no one has completely mastered yet but I have made astonishing inroads, uncovering many things never before addressed. Now it is time to begin a public dialogue that will pull others into the mix along with whatever unique skills and talents they have to share. We have to work together on this to some extent or it will simply fail us all. This is a complex and unexpected tantric technology of the highest order which has its roots in the most ancient past and is a direct descendant of all those diverse branches of arcane wisdom that have come before it. Much of this wisdom has been lost to us through time, while other bits were never properly secured to begin with. Technology itself has opened up whole new vistas and for the first time in a very long time, we are suddenly in a unique position to resume that original momentum, yet people generally prefer to follow frauds and phonies who cater to their wish-fulfillment fantasies at a price. It is a fairly narrow window of opportunity we are approaching and there are more chances for us to completely miss this target than there are chances for us to sync it. I will admit openly that I am not terribly optimistic about the odds anymore, but it is my intention to disregard these misgivings as much as possible and simply focus on the establishing of a proper dialogue. If it fails, then it fails, and perhaps this is how it must be. But evolution often works through mysterious quantum leaps and it only really takes a few key players to successfully redefine the future.
Perseverance Furthers - I Ching
m1thr0s
Welcome to Global One TV, an online social network broadcasting Spiritual Television 24 Hours a Day awakening the Divinity within.
(we are having some trouble getting this to load w/o auto-playing, hopefully it won’t auto-play and all you need to do is click on the video box and perhaps the “on-air: box to activate it, let us know how it’s working for you)
At any moment your heart could stop beating and it could all be over. The brain-body organism that thinks it is you would cease to exist.
If you can truly be with this thought for a moment, the body will produce sensations of fear that the intellect will have a hard time trying to combat. And this is how religion is born.
The era that has spanned for thousands of years – one that is rooted in fear, causes division, promotes superstition – that era is ending now. This is the dawning of a new age.
We no longer need to invent imaginary friends or a jealous father who lives in the sky. We can know who we are without all of this.
In order to be moral, we don’t need a list of 10 things or the threat of burning in a pit of fire for all eternity.
In order to be good, we don’t need the promise of eternal paradise dangled in front of us.
We, as a race of intelligent beings are in a stage of maturity. We no longer require the parental supervision of Popes, Rabbis and Mullahs.
We are free to seek the Divinity within.
We are free to seek the Divinity in all things.
The spiritual realm is no longer a place that is roped off, only to be visited by special people with special powers. It is everywhere, at all times in all places and yet it transcends place and time – just as we transcend place and time.
You are not your story.
You are not only the brain-body organism which you currently inhabit. You are so much less and so much more.
We as a society can now take off the training wheels of organized religion and awaken to “religiousness”.
Let us give up our jihads, our crusades and take a quantum leap in our consciousness toward radical spiritual evolution. Using the power of Collective Intention we can make this possible and it begins right now.
Peace,
The Bible tells us that God created Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago, by some fundamentalist interpretations. Science informs us that this is mere fiction and that man is a few million years old, and that civilization just tens of thousands of years old. Could it be, however, that conventional science is just as mistaken as the Bible stories? There is a great deal of archeological evidence that the history of life on earth might be far different than what current geological and anthropological texts tell us. Consider these astonishing finds:
The Grooved Spheres
Over the last few decades, miners in South Africa have been digging up mysterious metal spheres. Origin unknown, these spheres measure approximately an inch or so in diameter, and some are etched with three parallel grooves running around the equator. Two types of spheres have been found: one is composed of a solid bluish metal with flecks of white; the other is hollowed out and filled with a spongy white substance. The kicker is that the rock in which they where found is Precambrian – and dated to 2.8 billion years old! Who made them and for what purpose is unknown.
The Dropa Stones
In 1938, an archeological expedition led by Dr. Chi Pu Tei into the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains of China made an astonishing discovery in some caves that had apparently been occupied by some ancient culture. Buried in the dust of ages on the cave floor were hundreds of stone disks. Measuring about nine inches in diameter, each had a circle cut into the center and was etched with a spiral groove, making it look for all the world like some ancient phonograph record some 10,000 to 12,000 years old. The spiral groove, it turns out, is actually composed of tiny hieroglyphics that tell the incredible story of spaceships from some distant world that crash-landed in the mountains. The ships were piloted by people who called themselves the Dropa, and the remains of whose descendents, possibly, were found in the cave.
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The Ica Stones
Beginning in the 1930s, the father of Dr. Javier Cabrera, Cultural Anthropologist for Ica, Peru, discovered many hundreds of ceremonial burial stones in the tombs of the ancient Incas. Dr. Cabrera, carrying on his father’s work, has collected more than 1,100 of these andesite stones, which are estimated to be between 500 and 1,500 years old and have become known collectively as the Ica Stones. The stones bear etchings, many of which are sexually graphic (which was common to the culture), some picture idols and others depict such practices as open-heart surgery and brain transplants. The most astonishing etchings, however, clearly represent dinosaurs – brontosaurs, triceratops (see photo), stegosaurus and pterosaurs. While skeptics consider the Ica Stones a hoax, their authenticity has neither been proved or disproved.
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The Antikythera Mechanism
A perplexing artifact was recovered by sponge-divers from a shipwreck in 1900 off the coast of Antikythera, a small island that lies northwest of Crete. The divers brought up from the wreck a great many marble and and bronze statues that had apparently been the ship’s cargo. Among the findings was a hunk of corroded bronze that contained some kind of mechanism composed of many gears and wheels. Writing on the case indicated that it was made in 80 B.C., and many experts at first thought it was an astrolabe, an astronomer’s tool. An x-ray of the mechanism, however, revealed it to be far more complex, containing a sophisticated system of differential gears. Gearing of this complexity was not known to exist until 1575! It is still unknown who constructed this amazing instrument 2,000 years ago or how the technology was lost.
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The Baghdad Battery
Today batteries can be found in any grocery, drug, convenience and department store you come across. Well, here’s a battery that’s 2,000 years old! Known as the Baghdad Battery, this curiosity was found in the ruins of a Parthian village believed to date back to between 248 B.C. and 226 A.D. The device consists of a 5-1/2-inch high clay vessel inside of which was a copper cylinder held in place by asphalt, and inside of that was an oxidized iron rod. Experts who examined it concluded that the device needed only to be filled with an acid or alkaline liquid to produce an electric charge. It is believed that this ancient battery might have been used for electroplating objects with gold. If so, how was this technology lost… and the battery not rediscovered for another 1,800 years?
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The Coso Artifact
While mineral hunting in the mountains of California near Olancha during the winter of 1961, Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell found a rock, among many others, that they thought was a geode – a good addition for their gem shop. Upon cutting it open, however, Mikesell found an object inside that seemed to be made of white porcelain. In the center was a shaft of shiny metal. Experts estimated that it should have taken about 500,000 years for this fossil-encrusted nodule to form, yet the object inside was obviously of sophisticated human manufacture. Further investigation revealed that the porcelain was surround by a hexagonal casing, and an x-ray revealed a tiny spring at one end. Some who have examined the evidence say it looks very much like a modern-day spark plug. How did it get inside a 500,000-year-old rock?
Ancient Model Aircraft
There are artifacts belonging to ancient Egyptian and Central American cultures that look amazingly like modern-day aircraft. The Egyptian artifact, found in a tomb at Saqquara, Egypt in 1898, is a six-inch wooden object that strongly resembles a model airplane, with fuselage, wings and tail. Experts believe the object is so aerodynamic that it is actually able to glide. The small object discovered in Central America (shown at right), and estimated to be 1,000 years old, is made of gold and could easily be mistaken for a model of a delta-wing aircraft – or even the Space Shuttle. It even features what looks like a pilot’s seat.
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Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica
Workmen hacking and burning their way through the dense jungle of Costa Rica to clear an area for banana plantations in the 1930s stumbled upon some incredible objects: dozens of stone balls, many of which were perfectly spherical. They varied in size from as small as a tennis ball to an astonishing 8 feet in diameter and weighing 16 tons! Although the great stone balls are clearly man-made, it is unknown who made them, for what purpose and, most puzzling, how they achieved such spherical precision.
Impossible Fossils
Fossils, as we learned in grade school, appear in rocks that were formed many thousands of years ago. Yet there are a number of fossils that just don’t make geological or historical sense. A fossil of a human handprint, for example, was found in limestone estimated to be 110 million years old. What appears to be a fossilized human finger found in the Canadian Arctic also dates back 100 to 110 million years ago. And what appears to be the fossil of a human footprint, possibly wearing a sandal, was found near Delta, Utah in a shale deposit estimated to be 300 million to 600 million years old.
Out-of-Place Metal Objects
Humans were not even around 65 million years ago, never mind people who could work metal. So then how does science explain semi-ovoid metallic tubes dug out of 65-million-year-old Cretaceous chalk in France? In 1885, a block of coal was broken open to find a metal cube obviously worked by intelligent hands. In 1912, employees at an electric plant broke apart a large chunk of coal out of which fell an iron pot! A nail was found embedded in a sandstone block from the Mesozoic Era. And there are many, many more such anomalies.
What are we to make of these finds? There are several possibilities:
- Intelligent humans date back much, much further than we realize.
- Other intelligent beings and civilizations existed on earth far beyond our recorded history.
- Our dating methods are completely inaccurate, and that stone, coal and fossils form much more rapidly than we now estimate.
In any case, these examples – and there are many more – should prompt any curious and open-minded scientist to reexamine and rethink the true history of life on earth.
Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to UNC in 1988, after four years of teaching at Rutgers University. At UNC he has served as both the Director of Graduate Studies and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies.
A graduate of Wheaton College (Illinois), Professor Ehrman received both his Masters of Divinity and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. Since then he has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity, having written or edited twenty-one books, numerous scholarly articles, and dozens of book reviews. Among his most recent books are a Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press), an assessment of the newly discovered Gospel of Judas (Oxford University Press), and two New York Times Bestsellers: “God’s Problem” (an assessment of the biblical views of suffering) and “Misquoting Jesus” (an overview of the changes found in the surviving copies of the New Testament and of the scribes who produced them).
Among his fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus, the early Christian apocrypha, the apostolic fathers, and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
Professor Ehrman has served as President of the Southeast Region of the Society of Biblical literature, chair of the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society, book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and editor of the monograph series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers (Scholars Press). He currently serves as co-editor of the series New Testament Tools, Studies, and Documents (E. J. Brill), co-editor-in-chief for the journal Vigiliae Christianae, and on several other editorial boards for journals and monographs in the field.
Winner of numerous university awards and grants, Professor Ehrman is the recipient of the 1993 UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, the 1994 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching.
Professor Ehrman has two children, a daughter, Kelly, and a son, Derek. He is married to Sarah Beckwith (Ph.D., King’s College London), Marcello Lotti Professor of English at Duke University. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
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Fresh Air from WHYY with Terri Gross. Terri discusses with Bart about the book his books,
“Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them)” -> audio
“God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” -> audio
“Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend.” -> audio
“Misquoting Jesus’ exploring how scribes — through both omission and intentio — changed the Bible.” -> audio
“Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew.” -> audio
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Heyns Lecture Series: Misquoting Jesus
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Conversations With History – Bart D. Ehrman
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How the Bible was changed
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The Colbert Report
http://www.gnosticmedia.podomatic.com
Download the Podcast
Today we discuss oo-koo-he, ayahuasca, habit and novelty theory, Terence McKenna, plant communication and the future of psychedelic research. For the last thirty years, Dennis McKenna has pursued the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He is co-author, with his brother Terence, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (Seabury Press, 1975; Citadel Press, 1991), a philosophical and metaphysical exploration of the ontological implications of psychedelic drugs which resulted from the two brothers’ early investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971. He received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. His doctoral research focused on ethnopharmacological investigations of the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two orally-active tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. Following the completion of his doctorate, Dr. McKenna received post-doctoral research fellowships in the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology, National Institute of Mental Health, and in the Department of Neurology, Stanford University School of Medicine. In 1990, he joined Shaman Pharmaceuticals as Director of Ethnopharmacology. He joined the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota in 2001 as a Senior Lecturer and Research Associate. He is a founding board member and Vice-President of the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit scientific organization dedicated to the investigation of therapeutic applications for psychedelic plants and compounds. He was a primary organizer and key scientific collaborator for the Hoasca Project, an international biomedical study of Hoasca, a psychoactive drink used in ritual contexts by indigenous peoples and syncretic religious groups in Brasil. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brasilian Amazon. He has served as invited speaker at numerous scientific congresses, seminars, and symposia. Dr. McKenna is author or co-author of over 40 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, European Journal of Pharmacology, Brain Research, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurochemistry, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Economic Botany, and elsewhere.
http://www.csh.umn.edu/csh/about/centerstaff/mcKenna/home.html
Halexandria is a Synthesis of new physics, sacred geometry, ancient and modern history, multiple universes & realities, consciousness, the Ha Qabala and ORME, extraterrestrials, corporate rule and politics, law, order and entropy, trial by jury, astronomy, monetary policy, scientific anomalies, religion and spirituality, and a whole host of other subjects ranging from astrology and astrophysics to superstrings and sonoluminesence to biblical and geologic histories to numerology, the Tarot, and creating your own reality.
(BTW, for those with Internet Explorer, ialexandriah is written in the form that shows an attempt at bridging of the Age of Pisces (i, capital H) and the Age of Aquarius (h, small i ). Otherwise the fonts don’t quite translate. Sigh.)
ialexandriah is, in essence, putting all of the pieces together. It is based primarily on fact and documented evidence, with a liberal dose of rational, logical speculation, as well as several diversions into reality-based fictional treatments. In all cases, ialexandriah makes the assumption — an assumption which will be mathematically proven within these pages — that all aspects of the universe are connected and that there are no limits to what we can possess or what we can become.
This then is the Pharos, the lighthouse to attract the wandering net-surfer, to encourage the browser to view one after the other the scrolls (pardon the pun) of this modern, compacted, esoteric library akin in design or aim to that of Egypt’s ancient Alexandria and its famed Library, Mouseion and center of wisdom. From hence, one can choose a variety of options in which to rush in where angels (and used car salesmen) dare not tread.
http://www.meta-religion.com/World_Religions/Taoism/taoism_and_self.htm
Taoism and Self-Actualization
by Gary S. Toub, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Denver, Colorado
From C.G. Jung Page
SUMMARY
Seven key principles and ideas from the ancient Chinese philosophy, Taoism, are discussed in terms of their relationship to self-actualization: the Way, fasting the mind, following impulses, assisting nature, yin and yang, who knows what’s good or bad, and the usefulness of the useless. Examples from clinical practice and concepts from Jungian psychology suggest that Taoism’s venerable messages can be applied to contemporary Western life. While Taoism itself is not a form of psychotherapy, Taoist spiritual teachings can be valuable tools in psychotherapy practice, especially when therapy focuses on self-actualization.
INTRODUCTION
For over 20 years, I have studied and practiced a wide variety of psychotherapy techniques and spiritual disciplines, from behaviorism to Jung, Judaism to Buddhism. In retrospect, this slow intermixing process was like preparing a big pot of stew with lots of ingredients–a cup of this, a pinch of that–until the flavor and consistency matched my distinctive taste and style. On the other hand, I also have the sense that it was actually me who was being cooked and transformed in the process. In either case, it is the ingredient of Taoism I will examine here.
I became interested in Taoism in the late 1970’s. Having already had some background in Eastern philosophy (mostly Hindu and Buddhist), my curiosity was peaked when my analyst, Jeff Raff, pointed out numerous Taoist images, themes, and teachings in my dreams. I was intrigued, and began studying the writings of Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu to see for myself. The more I read, the more engrossed I became–and the more at home I felt with many of the teachings, especially viewed in the light of Jungian psychology. My continued fascination with Taosim eventually led to a dissertation comparing Jungian and Taoist ideas (Toub, 1985), completed under the advisorship of Jungian analyst, John Giannini. In this article, I delineate some of the key principles and ideas I have drawn from Taoism–and how I apply them in the practice of psychotherapy, especially as it is focused on self-actualization.
THE WAY
If I have even just a little sense,
I will walk on the main road and my only fear will be of straying from it.
Keeping to the main road is easy,
But people love to be side tracked.
–Lao Tsu (1972)
In contrast to spiritual teachings based on doctrine or divine revelation, the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism is based on thousands of years of observing nature–particularly patterns of change and transformation. Over time, the Chinese came to see these patterns of change as resulting from a universal creative spirit, or energy, which they called the Tao.(1) Dynamic and everchanging, the Tao was likened to the currents and vortices in air or water. Sometimes it was depicted as tightly coiled lines or threads; other times, as undulating horned dragons, flowing along wave-like lines of change, or dragon veins (Rawson & Legeza, 1973).
The Tao has also been described as a road or way, suggesting that the everchanging dragon veins form a path along which one can act or move. According to Chung-yuan (1963), the oldest form of the Chinese ideograph for Tao consists of three basic parts, representing a human head, a human foot, and a road. The character for the head (shou) has been given various interpretations. Bolen (1979) connects it with heaven, the sun, and masculine, yang energy, while Cooper (1972) equates it with a leader, principle, or beginning. Both Cooper and Watts (1975) also take it to mean intelligence, albeit not of the rational mind. It is clear that both interpret the head to mean a suprapersonal, higher form of intelligence. Jung (1967) proposes that the head symbolizes consciousness.
The foot (ch’o) is associated with the earth and feminine, yin energy (Bolen, 1979). It may also be taken as a sign of movement or progress. The foot and road, considered as a unit, allude to stepwise movement along a path, or as Watts (1975, p. 39) puts it, “going and pausing,” or “rhythmic movement.” This suggests a type of movement where pauses are taken to think or reflect before the next step is taken. According to Chung-yuan (1963), the foot may also signify following.
Combining the three images of the ideograph for Tao results in three principal meanings. First, it can be taken to mean intelligent or conscious movement along a path. Watts (1975, p. 40) suggests “intelligent rhythm.” Jung (1967, p. 20), on the other hand, prefers “to go consciously, or the conscious way.” A second interpretation is that the ideograph represents a pupil following a master, or guiding principle, along a path. Chung-yuan (1963) for example, sees it as a leader and follower united in finding a path. Third, the ideograph may represent the path of wholeness, symbolized by the union of the head (heaven) and the foot (earth).
I have come to understand this idea of the Way, or Main Road, as describing a way of being and course of action that is in harmony with the suprapersonal wisdom of the Self. Its meaning corresponds to Don Juan’s “path with heart” (Castaneda, 1968) and Campbell’s (1988) “following your bliss.” In Jungian terms, it characterizes individuation, the unique pattern and process of life unfolding in each individual, both moment to moment, and over a lifetime–in accord with the wisdom and direction of the Self. Of course, as Lao Tsu (1972) points out, a person may or may not be following this path. One may stray from it, or even get lost.
When psychotherapy clients come to me, I wonder what the Tao is for them, and whether they are living in harmony with it. Chances are, they are not. Experience has taught me that much of their suffering comes from being out of Tao. Usually, I find they have lost their way, or they have been blocked, diverted, or seduced to follow a path other than their own. Their symptoms seem to me like distress signals, as though their psyche knows that something is out of balance or not right. As I see it, my task as a psychotherapist is to assist them to rediscover their Tao and support their living it.
I have found that there are usually four steps in this process. First, it requires opening up the mind and heart to the sometimes subtle signals and markers of the Way–discoverable through intuition, feelings, inner vision, and dreams, as well as art, body signals, and synchronistic experiences. Then, it involves allowing the images and impulses to express themselves more fully. Techniques such as dream interpretation and various forms of active imagination (e.g., imaginal dialogue) can be especially useful for this. The third step is identifying and confronting the inner and outer obstacles and adversaries to the living of one’s Tao. Finally, it necessitates bolstering the courage, strength, and integrity required to bring one’s truth into the world.
Case Example: To Be a Caribbean Woman
Jo was a 32-year-old, white, married woman, who came to me with problems of anger, irritibility, and moodiness. She was afraid of “going nuts,” she told me. At her first session, Jo came across as polite, sincere, and business-like. She was neatly and conservatively dressed, bright and articulate.
Over time, I realized that Jo often felt harried; she habitually rushed around, attempting to fulfill the many tasks of a mother of two, as well as a housewife. This was in addition to working two part-time jobs. Overdoing, I discovered, was typical of Jo. She tended to run herself ragged trying to do a million different things. “Busy, busy, busy,” “rush, rush, rush,” and “work, work, work” were the phrases she often used to describe her weeks. The more we talked, the more I realized that these behaviors were linked to a pattern of self-denial, perfectionism, and harsh self-criticicism.
At one level, I could see that Jo was simply the product of an out-of-balance culture that valued activity, productivity, and hard work. I could also see in Jo the imprints of both her parents: a critical, domineering, and meticulous mother who often preached about the proper way to do things, and a contained, business-like father who rarely expressed his emotions.
In my work with this client, the Tao or Way expressed itself over and over again in dreams that pointed to a more natural, joyful, feminine way of life. For example, early on in therapy, Jo dreamed that she was sailing on a ship to the Caribbean. On the ship, an evil slavemaster was being overthrown. Some time later, she dreamed that she was dressing up in clothes like someone from the Caribbean.
As we explored the image of being Caribbean, I learned from Jo that this would be a new and very positive experience. With it she connected water and sun, green, lush, and tropical. The Caribbean was also associated with simple people, easy going, and less industrial.
I realized that for Jo to be in Tao, she would first need to emancipate herself from the negative taskmaster in her psyche who denigrated and enslaved her. Once doing that, she could begin integrating her Caribbean nature, an exotic, instinctual way of living that was simple, easygoing, less industrial, and closer to nature (i.e., her instincts). This was much of what Jo and I focused on in therapy– traveling on the Main Road of the Tao and integrating the many aspects of her feminine Caribbean nature.
FASTING THE MIND
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted, you will act royally.
–Lao Tsu (1972)
According to Taoism, keeping to the Way requires openness and flexibility. In Lao Tsu’s aphorism, we are told that to act royally (i.e., in harmony with the Tao), we must possess an open mind and heart–an attitude of receptivity that allows unconscious signals and guidance to reach consciousness. Chuang Tsu (1974) elaborates on this principle in a delightful story about Yen Hui, a young man who consults a Taoist sage (in the guise of Confucius) about his plans to save the people of a neighboring state from the careless despotism of their ruler. After listening to Yen Hui’s elaborate plans, Confucius remarks:
“How could that work? You have too many plans. They are fine but not appropriate. These preconceived ideas probably won’t get you into trouble, but that is as far as they go. How can you possibly influence him? You are still too rigid in your thinking.”
Yen Hui said, “That is all I can think of. May I ask what to do?”
Confucius said, “You must fast. I’ll tell you why. Is it easy to work from preconceived ideas? Heaven frowns on those who think it is easy.”
Yen Hui said, “My family is poor. I have neither drunk wine nor eaten for many months. Can this be considered fasting?”
Confucius replied, “That is the fasting one does for sacrificial ceremonies, not the fasting of the mind.”
Yen Hui said, “May I ask what is fasting of the mind?”
Confucius said, “Your will must be one. Do not listen with your ears but with your mind. Do not listen with your mind but with your vital energy. Ears can only hear, mind can only think, but vital energy is empty, receptive to all things. Tao abides in emptiness. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.” (pp. 67-68)
Confucius closes with the following statement to Yen Hui:
“If you are open to everything you see and hear, and allow this to act through you, even gods and spirits will come to you, not to speak of men. This is the transformation of the ten thousand things, the secret of the wise kings Yu and Shun, the constant practice of Fu Hsi and Chi Chu. It is even more useful for ordinary men.” (p. 68)
In Chuang Tsu’s story, Confucius is telling Yen Hui to go ahead and follow his desire to assist the people of the neighboring state, but not to rely so much on rigid plans and preconceived ideas. Instead, Yen Hui is counseled to proceed with an open mind–a state of inner quietude out of which, at the proper moment, right actions can emerge spontaneously.
As a psychotherapist, I see fasting the mind as critical in two ways. First, it describes the attitude with which I try to work with my clients. It is tempting to categorize and pigeonhole psychotherapy clients, to preprogram my thinking about them and the techniques I should use. After all, I have years of experience and a myriad of theories to choose from. However, the Taoists are pointing out that all this planning and theorizing gets in the way of being fully present to the reality of the moment and the individuality of the human being I am with. The more I focus on my clever ideas and plans, the less likely I will be able to flow with the process that is occurring–the Tao of the psychotherapy relationship. I have, therefore, tried to cultivate a “beginner’s mind”–to follow Jung’s (1966a) advice to set theories aside and discover psychology anew with each client. Practicing in this manner, I have to be willing to not think I know the answers or even where things are headed; instead, I must trust the wisdom of following the Tao.
Case Example: A Mad Housewife
After arriving for her appointment, Liz told me that she did not have anything to talk about or work on that session. Then, half joking, she said to me, “Why don’t you think of something!”
After pausing a moment, I felt the impulse to take her up on it, so I said, “O.K.,” and taking the first thing that popped into my head, I asked, “Have you read any good books lately?”
“As a matter of fact,” she replied, “I have! I’ve been reading Diary of a Mad Housewife.”
“What’s it about?” I queried, deciding to go ahead and trust the Tao. Liz then described the plot of the novel, which centered around the terrible plight of a harried housewife. The more she told me about it, the more Liz realized that her own life was very much like that of the protagonist in the novel, and that just below the surface, she was feeling quite upset and angry with her husband for all the tedious housework he expected of her. We subsequently spent the remainder of the session sorting through the emotions with which she had gotten in touch.
In this case, by fasting my mind and following my irrational impulse, Liz and I were brought into contact with the dragon vein of Tao, where Liz’ unconscious issues were cooking. At the beginning of the hour, neither Liz nor I knew what she needed to work on. By trusting the impulse, we got in touch with the Tao, which for Liz was processing her anger about being an overburdened housewife.
I have found that fasting the mind is equally important for my psychotherapy clients. They too tend to follow old habits and programs, rather than remain open to the Unknown. If they are to learn to follow the Tao, they, too, must quiet the ego’s constant chatter so the less audible voice of the Self can be heard. For example, a 30-year-old man with a keen intellect and a propensity for planning things ahead of time had the following enlightening dream:
I’m playing some kind of game. It’s the game of life. I’m asking people around me how to play–I want to know all the rules before we begin. They tell me, however, that the only way to learn the rules is through playing the game, learning them as I go.
On another occasion he dreamed:
I’m in a large building, trying to work myself through a long, complicated maze. As I’m going along, I keep wondering how I will ever know when I get to the end. Suddenly, it occurs to me that there is no use worrying about it ahead of time; I will recognize the end when I get there.
It is clear to me that these dreams, like the Taoist teachings, are not telling my client to become an empty-headed fool, never planning or thinking ahead. Rather, I understand the message as a compensation aimed at balancing overreliance on rational thought and planned action. The point, it seems, is to learn balance–and to be more trusting of the spontaneous wisdom of the Self.
FOLLOWING IMPULSES
The superior man goes through his life without any one
preconceived course of action or any taboo. He merely decides
for the moment what is the right thing to do.
–Li Chi (Yutang, 1942)
Imagine a whole community of people whose aim is fasting the mind and living spontaneously, acting only when it is in harmony with the Way. Such a group actually existed in China around the third century A.D. These creative, unconventional souls were the Ch’ing t’an Taoists–otherwise known as the Pure Conversationalists (Chan, 1963; Welch, 1965).
One of the central tenets of the Pure Conversationalists was that a person’s integrity depended on allowing the spirit to wander freely, which, among other things meant following one’s impulses. This practice of trusting impulses is illustrated in a Taoist story about Wang Hui-chih:
Wang Hui-chih . . . awoke one night to find that it had snowed. Getting out of bed, he began to pace up and down his room, and to recite poems about paying visits to hermits. This reminded him of Tai K’uei. He dressed, took a boat, and started down the shore. Tai K’uei lived far off and it was not until dawn that he reached his house. But just as he was about to knock on his door, he turned and went home. Someone who found out what had happened asked him why. Wang Hui-chih said: “I came on the impulse, and when the impulse ended, I returned. Why had I to see Tai?” (Welch, 1965, p. 125)
In following his impulses, Wang Hui-chih was attempting to keep within the flow of change by allowing the Tao to fluidly express itself through him.
The Taoist approach to following instinctive impulses is similar to the thinking of Jung (1959), who also advocates living in accord with our instincts. While cautioning that they must be handled correctly, Jung proposes that the natural impulses we find in ourselves are not arbitrary, but are connected to a divine inner authority. With these ideas in mind, I have for some time practiced following my clients’ impulses in psychotherapy with amazingly fruitful results.
Case Example: Not Working on Anything
Clare was a 39-year-old woman who had been in therapy with me for two years. During one of her sessions, she began by informing me about a number of events that occurred since I last saw her, as well as several dreams she had. Since she mentioned so many things, I asked Clare if there was anything in particular on which she wanted to focus during the hour. To this, she replied that she was feeling tired and worn out, and did not want to work on anything. I decided to follow this impulse and see where it might lead, so I asked Clare what it would be like to not work on anything.
She responded immediately, “Well, I would be an accountant like my husband!” I suggested she go ahead and do that, and act like an accountant there in our session. She then role-played being an accountant going over my books, all the while acting controlled, intellectual, and unfeeling. After a while, Clare stopped role-playing and announced with astonishment that she was feeling a lot better–alert and full of energy.
It appears that by following her initial impulse to not work on anything, Clare was able to get in touch with the energy she had been lacking at the beginning of the session. Along the way, she discovered a cool, objective side of herself that she had been projecting onto her husband, but which she needed to integrate into her own life. In so doing, Clare was able to put herself in harmony with the Tao.
ASSISTING NATURE
Silently I contemplate
The myriad forms
Spontaneously brought forth
By nature’s hand.
–Ch’^ng Hao (Blofield, 1978)
The principle of assisting nature is expressed by the Taoists’ extraordinary reverance for nature and their unique approach to landscaping (Blofield, 1978). The principal goal of Taoist landscaping was to create guided wildness–to lend nature a hand by subtly modifying and improving upon her natural artistry. Great care was taken to avoid artificiality. Rocks were often cunningly arranged to resemble a mountain landscape, as if they had lain undisturbed for thousands of years. Any hint that painstaking care and work had gone into creating the landscape had to be carefully concealed, the goal being to make the setting look totally the work of nature. However, one could lend nature a hand by bringing out and highlighting those shapes, textures, and colors that were inherent in the setting or object on which one was working.
Following this approach, a square shape could not be rounded, but a relatively round one could be made rounder. Similarly, a shrub could be trained and trimmed to resemble a stork only if the shrub already possessed the natural form of the stork in the first place. As Blofield (1973) puts it, the Taoists’ aim was “to assist nature to do what it might under more favorable circumstances have done for itself” (p. 118).
I believe this Taoist approach to landscaping provides a guiding image for the way human consciousness can harmonize with and aid instinctual life energy. Basically, the Taoist landscapers are saying, “By and large, nature knows what she is doing, and we do not want to interfere. Sometimes, though, she needs a helping hand. This is where we come in. We try to see what nature is doing and help her along a little.”
This image also describes the basic idea behind psychotherapeutically assisted self-actualization. Like Jung (1966b), I view self-actualization as a totally natural process of growth and differentiation of the personality. By working with dreams, body symptoms, and other unconscious signals of psychotherapy clients, I am mainly trying to see how my clients and I can assist the process.(2) Together we investigate the ways in which the Self is expressing itself. We then concentrate on consciously assisting what the Self is indicating. Earlier, for example, I described how a female client’s dreams made her aware of needing to cultivate her Carribean qualities. I have found that exploring clients’ feeling states can be equally valuable for discovering the Tao.
Case Example: Feeling Blank
Audrey was a middle-aged woman who came to me suffering from severe depression. After several weeks of therapy, she came for an appointment announcing that she had not had any dreams and did not have much to talk about. “My week went O.K.,” she said. “Nothing much is going on.”
When I reflected back what she said, Audrey added that she was feeling somewhat blank. Taking that as the Tao of the moment, I decided to follow up on it. “How does it feel to be blank?” I asked.
Audrey responded by telling me that it was a nice, pleasant feeling. She then asked what I thought she should do during the session–where she should begin. I suggested she begin with just how she was feeling: blank. I encouraged her to go ahead and just allow herself to be blank, as blank as she could be, to assist whatever natural process was trying to occur.
She did this for a few moments, then suddenly burst into tears. After sobbing for several minutes, she calmed down and was able to talk about her sadness. I learned that hidden within Audrey’s feelings of blankness were life and death issues surrounded by pain and sorrow. She told me she had lost her old reason for living and feared not finding a new one. Audrey also needed to come to terms with a near death experience she had earlier in her life.
Although she felt consciously that nothing much was going on, by focusing on and amplifying her feelings of blankness, Audrey was able to get in touch with the Tao. In this case, it brought to her awareness the major issues behind her depression.
YIN AND YANG
The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces.
–Lao Tsu (1972)
One of the central tenants of Taoist philosophy is the principle of polarity–or opposites–portrayed by the concepts of yin and yang (Watts, 1975). According to traditional Chinese symbolism, yin and yang represent the shady (north) and sunny (south) sides of a mountain, and by extension, all paired existence. Like two sides of a coin, they are considered interconnected poles of nature that cannot be separated from one another. Though opposite, they are interdependent and mutually arising, meaning one cannot exist without the other. Chuang Tzu (1980) is quite clear on this matter:
Those who would have right without its correlative, wrong; or good government without its correlative, misrule,–they do not apprehend the great principles of the universe nor the conditions to which all creation is subject. One might as well talk of the existence of heaven without that of earth, or of the negative principle without the positive, which is clearly absurd. Such people, if they do not yield to argument, must be either fools or knaves (p. 164).
As the Taoists see it, yin and yang are complementary parts of a whole, so if we choose one and try to block out the other, we upset nature’s balance. What results, as Jung (1963) points out, is restricted adaptability and, in many cases, physical or emotional illness. From the Taoist perspective, to be whole and follow the Tao, we must be willing to accept our dual nature and integrate the opposites.
As did Jung, I consider the integration of opposites to be of primary importance for self-actualization. In working with my clients, I inevitably come across areas of one-sidedness or imbalance that need to be addressed. Sometimes, it might be doing that is valued over being. Other times, it is thinking over feeling, or control over abandon, just to name a few. Whatever the case, I never presume to know ahead of time, nor do I impose a preconceived notion of what constitutes being balanced or whole. Rather, I have learned to take the lead from the unconscious, and to follow its labyrinthine path towards wholeness. I therefore make extensive use of clients’ dreams and other unconscious signals to guide this process of reconciling the opposites and restoring the individual to Tao.
Case Example: Uniting Heaven and Earth
At age 33, John came to me lost and confused, unsure of what to do with his life. He was recently divorced and jobless. Over time, I learned that John had never had any kind of steady work, let alone a career. He had, however, pursued a spiritual path for some time.
Following a series of religious experiences, John had decided to become a monk. He visited Catholic, Zen, and Benedictine monasteries, where he enjoyed the time for solitude and inner reflection. Each time he was asked to make a commitment, however, he would leave.
As our sessions proceded, it became increasingly clear that John’s self-actualization process hinged on integrating his spiritual, inner life with material, outer existence, or in symbolic terms, uniting Heaven and Earth. More specifically, John needed to ground his spirituality–or at least complement it–with the demands of concrete, everyday existence.
John definitely preferred the life of a recluse. He liked being alone and communing with nature. He was fond of meditation, tai chi, and other spiritual practices. But in so doing, John was not whole; he was not expressing the fullness of his being. In his dreams, the unconscious was quite clear: John’s wholeness depended on him learning about the everyday world, especially the areas of work, responsibility, commitment, and relationships.
The unification of these opposites was depicted over and over again in John’s dreams. It was initially portrayed as a bird (spirit) with a stone (earth) in its beak. The dream showed John needing to retrieve the stone, which was being carried away by the predatory bird–symbolically, his strong spiritual inclinations.(3)
As John began making progress with this issue, other images appeared. On several occasions, he dreamed of Native American villages, where religion was integrated into everyday life. Another time, his dream depicted a Catholic Mass being moved from a church to a marketplace. Slowly, through our work together, John began finding a firmer, more balanced integration of his spiritual side. He found a good job, decided on a career direction, and started graduate school. He also moved out from his parents’ house and began living with a woman he was seeing. It was during this time that John had the following dream:
I am chosen to be an astronaut for a space mission. The space craft is powered by an Atlas rocket. I have doubts about being able to perform this task. I’m sure it will go wrong. Nevertheless, the woman in charge tells me I will do fine. She is confident I can fly the space craft. She explains that I will receive all the information I need to fly the space craft from the ground station.
This dream confirms John’s newfound ability to soar to spiritual heights while remaining connected to the ground. Though still lacking confidence, John is told he is able to occupy the intermediary position between Heaven (outer space) and Earth (ground control), thereby uniting these two poles of his being.
WHO KNOWS WHAT’S GOOD OR BAD?
Other men are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Other men are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
–Lao Tsu (1972)
In addition to seeing yin and yang as interrelated and mutually arising, the Taoists recognized the absolute relativity of the opposites. No single value or perspective can be considered universally superior or correct, for in another instance, the opposite might be the case. The relative ease with which the opposites may change places is expressed in the ending of a Taoist story about a farmer whose horse ran away:
His neighbor commiserated only to be told, “Who knows what’s good or bad?” It was true. The next day the horse returned, bringing with it a drove of wild horses it had befriended in its wanderings. The neighbor came over again, this time to congratulate the farmer on his windfall. He was met with the same observation: “Who knows what is good or bad?” True this time too; the next day the farmer’s son tried to mount one of the wild horses and fell off breaking his leg. Back came the neighbor, this time with more commiserations, only to encounter for the third time the same response, “Who knows what is good or bad?” And once again the farmer’s point was well taken, for the following day soldiers came by commandeering for the army and because of his injury, the son was not drafted (Smith, 1958, p. 212).
As the story suggests, at times one might be better off withholding immediate judgment as to what is good or bad, and instead going along with the course of things.
Applying this Taoist teaching in my work as a psychotherapist has been extremely valuable. By suspending my opinion as to what is good or bad, I have been better able to assist my clients explore and process the meaning of their experiences–including those that are normally considered symptoms.
For example, rather than help an anxious female client relax, I invited her to let her anxiety be fully present. She closed her eyes and spontaneously visualized an ancient woman shaman, with whom she later dialogued. In this case, I did not assume the anxiety was good or bad–simply that it was the Tao. This approach has proven fruitful over and over again in my practice.
Case Example: Taking the Lid Off Anger
Patrick was a tall, middle-aged professional who came to me with a long history of depression. The first thing Patrick and I worked on were his pent-up emotions about his girlfriend, Leona, ending their relationship. After sharing with me the details of what had happened, Patrick was able to cry openly and freely, painfully grieving the loss. I responded empathically, acknowledging the intense pain he was going through, a process that continued over a number of sessions.
One day, Patrick broke the pattern by telling me he had been lying to himself. “How so?” I inquired.
“I keep thinking the reasons Leona gave me for breaking up were lies,” he said. “I don’t think she told me the truth.” Patrick then explained that he really did not believe Leona would lie, but that for some strange reason he could not let go of thinking she had. This seemed totally irrational to Patrick, and he wanted to put a stop to it.
I agreed with Patrick that what he was doing seemed destructive, but suggested it might be worthwhile for him to learn more about this irrational side of himself. Rather than try to stop it, I recommended to Patrick that he continue lying to himself a bit more so we could discover what it was about. Patrick agreed to give it a try, and continued talking about Leona lying to him.
After a while, I realized that lying to himself was allowing Patrick to verbalize, for the first time, his anger and hatred toward Leona. This session proved to be a stepping stone that in later sessions allowed Patrick to express more freely his anger toward his father, toward me, and toward his pent-up condition.
THE USEFULNESS OF THE USELESS
Everyone knows the usefulness of the useful,
but no one knows the usefulness of the useless.
–Chuang Tsu (1974)
Taoist philosopher Chuang Tsu was fond of telling stories lauding seemingly useless hunchbacks, cripples, and lunatics, suggesting that their very uselessness has hidden virtues.(4) In one story, a knotted and gnarled oak tree appears in a carpenter’s dream and reveals its secret:
“What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with useful trees? There are cherry, apple, pear, orange, citron, pomelo, and other fruit trees. As soon as their fruit is ripe, the trees are stripped and abused. Their large branches are split, and the smaller ones torn off. Their life is bitter because of their usefulness. That is why they do not live out their natural lives but are cut off in their prime. They attract the attentions of the common world. This is so for all things. As for me, I have been trying for a long time to be useless. I was almost destroyed several times. Finally I am useless, and this is very useful to me. If I had been useful, could I have grown so large?” (Chuang Tsu, 1974, p. 82)
In his characteristically exaggerated style, Chuang Tsu makes the point that the more useful we are to the world, the more we are in danger of living bitter, dissatisfying lives–lives that are fractured and incomplete. To grow to our full potential like the large oak tree, Chuang Tsu believes we need to cultivate our uselessness.
Self-actualization requires that we integrate all aspects of ourselves. This is difficult to accomplish if we are simultaneously trying to fulfill the roles projected onto us by others and prescribed by the culture. The more we live as average, useful members of society, the more likely we will deviate from our own individual nature. As Chuang Tsu puts it:
[The stupid] are unable to take their law from Heaven, and are influenced by other men; they do not know how to prize the proper truth of their nature, but are under the dominion of ordinary things and change according to the customs around them–always, consequently, incomplete (Van Over, 1973, p. 118).
Chuang Tsu’s wisdom is this: to realize our wholeness, we must free ourselves from the suggestive power of the surrounding world and be willing to be–or at least appear–useless.
When psychotherapy is focused on self-actualization, I am less interested in my clients’ adaptation to the everyday world than the development of their unique qualities and wholeness–even if the world has no use for them. Paradoxically, it is only through such an individuation process that I feel my clients can contribute creatively and authentically to the world. In dealing with their suffering, most of my clients must begin by discarding their previous identity built around being useful, and rediscover what it means to really be themselves.
Case Example: Liberating the Inner Child
When Harold first consulted me, he was so depressed he could hardly talk. Slowly, I was able to piece together his story. He was 51 and had lived an upstanding life as a devoted husband and father. He had overcome an indigent background and had worked hard to support his family. Harold had also served society for 30 years as a diligent, dedicated law enforcement officer. Something was the matter, though, and he had no idea what it was. Among other things, I suggested to Harold we look at his dreams. The next week, Harold reported two dreams:
I am interviewing a family of Russians, but we cannot communicate because of our language differences. I feel very frustrated.
I am walking down a country lane and come across a sheep and a lamb lying just off the path. I think that maybe I should go over and talk to them. The sheep runs off, but the lamb stays. The whole sequence seems to happen twice.
In the first dream, Harold connected Russians to unhappy, frustrated people. “They feel held back and oppressed,” he explained. This led me to believe the dream was talking about how frustrated and oppressed Harold felt, and that he was having a difficult time understanding these feelings. However, considering his past, I wondered if the oppression from which Harold suffered was being too useful to the world–performing duty and charity at the expense of his own nature.
When I asked Harold about the sheep in the second dream, he suddenly perked up. With obvious excitement, he recalled being a boy of 11 or 12 and playing with the sheep in a stockyard. A devilish grin appeared on his face as he explained how he would disobey his parents and climb over the fence into the stockyard.
I began to see that the images connected to Harold’s depression were not only of being held back and oppressed, but also of breaking free and overstepping boundaries. The second dream encouraged him to reconnect with his inner child energy, especially that of play and adventure. It also put him back in touch with breaking rules and following his natural impulses. From the Taoist perspective, Harold had become overly civilized and useful during the course of his life. Consequently, he needed to break out of this collective identity by liberating his inner child and becoming an individual again.
CONCLUSION
When Taoist philosophers Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu speak of giving up contrived, artificial living, and riding the unbounded sea of Tao, they utter a timeless message applicable to contemporary Western life. Like the early Taoists, we live amidst social, economic, and political instability, our lives often feeling chaotic and out of order. Taoism describes an alternative–a way of living with meaning and in harmony with the totality of life.
By following practices such as fasting the mind, embracing the opposites, and becoming useless, the Taoists are asking us to surrender to the larger order of the universe. They tell us, in effect, to live simultaneously in two realms–the ordinary sphere of human life, and the transcendent reality of the Tao. To Taoist thinkers, this is the highest task of human life.
The philosophy and way of life of Taoism is comparable in many respects to the Western concept of self-actualization, particularly as it refers to the process of living one’s day-to-day life in accord with the Self. While Taoism is clearly not a form of psychotherapy, I have found the spiritual teachings of Taoism to be valuable tools for my own psychological growth and in the therapy I provide clients. This is especially the case when working with dreams, irrational impulses, and other unconscious messages, towards the goal of self-actualization.
NOTES
1. Scholars agree that there is no single definition for Tao–its meaning is said to go beyond words, even in Chinese.
2. For processing unconscious body signals, I have relied primarily on the methods developed by Mindell (1982, 1985).
3. The stone could also be seen as a symbol of the Self, indicating that John’s spiritual tendencies take away his wholeness.
4. For a further explication of the theme of uselessness, see Toub (1987).
REFERENCES
Blofield, J. (1973). The secret and sublime. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Blofield, J. (1978). Taoism: The road to immortality. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications.
Bolen, J. (1979). The tao of psychology. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. New York: Doubleday.
Castaneda, C. (1968).The teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui way of knowledge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Chan, W.-T. (Trans. & Comp.). (1963). A source book in Chinese philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Chuang Tsu. (1974). Chuang Tsu: Inner chapters (G.-F. Feng & J. English, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Chuang Tzu. (1980). Chuang Tzu: Taoist philosopher and Chinese mystic (2nd ed.) (H. A. Giles, Trans.). London: Unwin Paperbacks.
Chung-yuan, C. (1963). Creativity and Taoism. New York: Harper & Row.
Cooper, J. C. (1972). Taoism: The way of the mystic. New York: Samuel Weiser.
Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage Books.
Jung, C. G. (1966a). The psychology of the transference. In R. F. C. Hull (Trans.) & H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The practice of psychotherapy (pp. 163-323). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1966b). Two essays on analytical psychology. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., & H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire, Eds.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1967). Commentary on “The secret of the golden flower.” In R. F. C. Hull (Trans.) & H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), Alchemical studies (pp. 1-56). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lao Tsu. (1972). Tao te ching (G.-F. Feng & J. English, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Mindell, A. (1982). Dreambody. Santa Monica, CA: Sigo Press.
Mindell, A. (1985). Working with the dreaming body. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Rawson, P., & Legeza, L. (1973). Tao: The Chinese philosophy of time and change. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Smith, H. (1958). The religions of man. New York: Harper & Row.
Toub, G. (1985). The way of the sage: Taoism and the individuation process. Unpublished diploma thesis, Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts.
Toub, G. (1987). The usefulness of the useless. Psychological Perspectives, 18 (2), 363-374.
Van Over, R. (Ed.). (1973). Taoist tales. New York: New American Library.
Watts, A. (1975). Tao: The watercourse way. New York: Pantheon Books.
Welch, H. (1965). Taoism: The parting of the way (rev. ed.). Boston: Beacon Press.
Yutang, L. (1942). The wisdom of China and India. New York: Random House.
http://www.sphinxproductions.com
Mushrooms – we put them on our pizza and steaks and in our soups and salads, we marvel at their variety and are sometimes repelled by their grotesque beauty when encountering them in the bush. And yeah, some have even sampled their more exotic possibilities and asked the question: “Do mushrooms come from a far away planet?”
Still, others have asked: “Can mushrooms save the planet?”
The world of fungi and their integral relationship with the health of the planet have only recently been appreciated. The oldest and largest living organisms recorded on Earth are both fungi. And their use by a new, maverick breed of scientists and thinkers has proven vital in the cleansing of sites despoiled by toxins and as a “clean” pesticide among many other environmentally-friendly applications.
Inspired by a chance conversation with fellow filmmaker and mushroom buff Jim Jarmusch, Mann set off to the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival in Colorado. It was there he encountered the unique sub-sub-subculture surrounding fungi that includes an unlikely assortment of nerds, nuts, hipsters, tripsters, artists, chefs, musicians, foodies, foragers, and seekers all paying homage to the mighty mushroom.
KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.
Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place… with extra cheese…
CONSUMER WARNING: Don’t Go Into The Forest Without This Movie!
“Caps off to ‘fun guy’ Ron Mann, who delivers another wildly entertaining, mind-expanding film.”
- Jennie Punter, Film Critic
From the award-winning director of COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL, GRASS, GO FURTHER and a host of paradigm-shifting films reappraising the backwaters of popular culture, Ron Mann investigates the miraculous, near-secret world of fungi with his newest piece of cinema, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS.
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Gary Lincoff’s mushroom trip from KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS, the upcoming documentary by Ron Mann.
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Canadian Director Ron Mann sits down with CBC Radio Q host Jian Ghomeshi to talk about his new film ‘Know Your Mushrooms’.
http://www.talismanicidols.org
There is an Esoteric Agenda behind every facet of life that was once believed to be disconnected. There is an Elite faction guiding most every Political, Economic, Social, Corporate, some Non-Governmental or even Anti-Establishment Organizations. This film uses the hard work and research of professionals in every field helping to expose this agenda put the future of this planet back into the hands of the people.
Kymatica is the sequel to Esoteric Agenda by Ben and Daniel Stewart from Talismanic Idols. Kymatica ventures into the realm of Cymatics and Shamanic practices. It offers insight into the human psyche and discusses matters of spirituality, altered states of consciousness and much more! Featuring Interviews with Bruce Lipton and Henrik Palmgren.
A mathematical theory places limits on how much a physical entity can know about the past, present or future
By Graham P. Collins
Deep in the deluge of knowledge that poured forth from science in the 20th century were found ironclad limits on what we can know. Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision regarding, say, an object’s position inevitably degraded the level of certainty of its momentum. Kurt Gödel showed that within any formal mathematical system advanced enough to be useful, it is impossible to use the system to prove every true statement that it contains. And Alan Turing demonstrated that one cannot, in general, determine if a computer algorithm is going to halt.
David H. Wolpert, a physics-trained computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, has chimed in with his version of a knowledge limit. Because of it, he concludes, the universe lies beyond the grasp of any intellect, no matter how powerful, that could exist within the universe. Specifically, during the past two years, he has been refining a proof that no matter what laws of physics govern a universe, there are inevitably facts about the universe that its inhabitants cannot learn by experiment or predict with a computation. Philippe M. Binder, a physicist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, suggests that the theory implies researchers seeking unified laws cannot hope for anything better than a “theory of almost everything.”
Wolpert’s work is an effort to create a formal rigorous description of processes such as measuring a quantity, observing a phenomenon, predicting a system’s future state or remembering past information—a description that is general enough to be independent of the laws of physics. He observes that all those processes share a common basic structure: something must be configured (whether it be an experimental apparatus or a computer to run a simulation); a question about the universe must be specified; and an answer (right or wrong) must be supplied. He models that general structure by defining a class of mathematical entities that he calls inference devices.
The inference devices act on a set of possible universes. For instance, our universe, meaning the entire world line of our universe over all time and space, could be a member of the set of all possible such universes permitted by the same rules that govern ours. Nothing needs to be specified about those rules in Wolpert’s analysis. All that matters is that the various possible inference devices supply answers to questions in each universe. In a universe similar to ours, an inference device may involve a set of digital scales that you will stand on at noon tomorrow and the question relate to your mass at that time. People may also be inference devices or parts of one.
Wolpert proves that in any such system of universes, quantities exist that cannot be ascertained by any inference device inside the system. Thus, the “demon” hypothesized by Pierre-Simon Laplace in the early 1800s (give the demon the exact positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, and it will compute the future state of the universe) is stymied if the demon must be a part of the universe.
Researchers have proved results about the incomputability of specific physical systems before. Wolpert points out that his result is far more general, in that it makes virtually no assumptions about the laws of physics and it requires no limits on the computational power of the inference device other than it must exist within the universe in question. In addition, the result applies not only to predictions of a physical system’s future state but also to observations of a present state and examining a record of a past state.
The theorem’s proof, similar to the results of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing’s halting problem, relies on a variant of the liar’s paradox—ask Laplace’s demon to predict the following yes/no fact about the future state of the universe: “Will the universe not be one in which your answer to this question is yes?” For the demon, seeking a true yes/no answer is like trying to determine the truth of “This statement is false.” Knowing the exact current state of the entire universe, knowing all the laws governing the universe and having unlimited computing power is no help to the demon in saying truthfully what its answer will be.
In a sense, however, the existence of such a paradox is not exactly earth-shattering. As Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts it: “That your predictions about the universe are fundamentally constrained by you yourself being part of the universe you’re predicting, always seemed pretty obvious to me—and I doubt Laplace himself would say otherwise if we could ask him.” Aaronson does allow, though, that it is “often a useful exercise to spell out all the assumptions behind an idea, recast everything in formal notation and think through the implications in detail,” as Wolpert has done. After all, the devil, or demon, is in the details.
Editor’s Note: This story was originally printed with the title “Impossible Inferences”
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=limits-on-human-comprehension
Featuring Noted Experts – Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Russell, Professor Al-Khalili, York Dobyns, Robert Anton Wilson, Dean Radin, Richard Alan Miller, Michael Talbot, Gregg Braden, Professor David Deutsch, David Wilcock, Khemp Yurmed Tinly, Nassim Naramein, John Hagelin, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, David Bohm, Bill Hicks Consciousness, Mind, Brain, Reality, Atoms, Quantum, Parallel Universe, Light, Particles, Space, Time, Hologram, Entanglement, Superposition, Duality, Observer Effect, Energy, Words, Illusion, Ego, Perception, Infinate, Senses, Science, Information, Digital, Vibration, Imagination
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http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com/en…6_55-08_00.mp3
Griffths-Mystical.pdf (307.4 KB, 0 views)
In May 2006 a Johns Hopkins University study on psilocybin (the active ingredient in Psilocybe varieties of mushrooms) was published stating that the religious experience had been proven through the use of the active ingredient in psilocybe mushrooms. The article by Dr. Roland Griffiths, et al, is titled: ‘Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance’. It found that:
“…when administered to volunteers under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences and which were evaluated by volunteers as having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.”
A follow-up study by Dr. Griffiths, et al, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in July 2008 confirmed the first study’s findings. It found that:
“At the 14-month follow-up, 58% and 67%, respectively, of volunteers rated the psilocybin-occasioned experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; 64% indicated that the experience increased well-being or life satisfaction; 58% met criteria for having had a ‘complete’ mystical experience. Correlation and regression analyses indicated a central role of the mystical experience assessed on the session day in the high ratings of personal meaning and spiritual significance at follow-up. Of the measures of personality, affect, quality of life and spirituality assessed across the study, only a scale measuring mystical experience showed a difference from screening. When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences that, at 14-month follow-up, were considered by volunteers to be among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives.”
I’m happy to present the author of these studies – Professor Roland Griffiths from Johns Hopkins University.
The Greek meaning of the word “ecstasy” is “outside oneself”, and most of us understand the ecstatic state as being some kind of altered or trancelike condition allowing us to transcend ordinary consciousness and reach a heightened state of awareness. Scholar Coleman Barks puts it well in reference to the ecstatic poetry of the famous Sufi mystic Rumi when he says:
“Rumi’s ecstatic poetry is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity … Like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral … What Jesus referred to when he said, ‘the Kingdom of God is within you.’”
In this episode of Global Spirit, host Phil Cousineau explores the ecstatic state – a global phenomenon found in all kinds of spiritual, religious, and wisdom traditions. Cousineau is joined by guests Sobonfu Somé, author and teacher of African spirituality, and Andrew Harvey, a British scholar specializing in the works of Rumi. The discussion is interwoven with video segments taking the audience on a journey inside different cultural expressions of “ecstasy”, asking why and how ecstatic trance is practiced around the world, and why so many people today are fascinated by it.
This episode includes unique video footage of a sufi Zikr ceremony in Turkey – the practice of “remembrance” that brings participants to an ecstatic connection with Allah – along with powerful scenes of traditional and modern day trance rituals which uncover the altered state experience which people seek through dance, trance and spirit possession. The program features Orisha priestesses from Nigeria and Brazil, and shaman healers from the Kalahari and Korea, all pulsing to a provocatively similar beat with thousands of young people “losing themselves” at an all-night techno dance party in an Australian forest.
Aghora (literally, “non-terrifying”) is the spiritual path that seeks to negate all that is ghora (“terrible, terrifying”) in life. The ghora
encompasses all those experiences that most people find intolerable, for almost everyone is as ready to enjoy life’s pleasures as they are to avoid misery. Most spiritual advisers admonish their devotees to shy away from the ghora, but aghoris (practitioners of Aghora) embrace the ghora fervidly, for what most terrifies an aghori is the prospect of becoming mired in duality. Aghoris go so far into the ghora that the ghora becomes tolerable to them; diving deeply into darkness, an aghori finally surfaces into light. No means to awakening is too disgusting or frightening for an aghori, for Aghora is the Path of the Shadow of Death, the path that forcibly separates an individual from attachment to every ordinary self-descriptor.
Aghoras temple is the smashan (cremation ground), where aghoris worship death, the Great Transformer, with a savage, all-consuming love. Those who are enslaved by their cravings think aghoris mad for displaying such ferocity in their quest for knowing. They condemn Aghoras outwardly repugnant practices because they cannot see beneath their ritual skin. If they could but peep into an aghoris heart they would find there an ache for Reality so fierce that no means could be too extreme to achieve it. This ache drives the divine fury, the passionately unrestrained non-attachment to absolutely everything, that is Aghoras hallmark. Aghoris earn their illumination by
incinerating themselves moment by moment in their own internal fires, laughingly consuming any substance and performing any activity that might further enkindle their awareness. They seize every moment of life that God offers to them, even a trip to the toilet, as a fresh opportunity to surrender to the One. Good aghoris takes their temples with them as they wander the world, ceaselessly amazed to witness the universe consuming itself in the fires of an ongoing cosmic cremation.
Aghora like alchemy substitutes for a set recipe of self-development an outline whose details differ for each practitioner. Each aghori and his customs are unique, and in truth all one aghori has in common with another is their degree of intensity and determination. Aghoris become so desperate in their quests that they channel their every thought and feeling into a super-obsession, a single-minded quest to achieve the Beloved. They endeavor eternally to dismember their restricted selves fully, that God may have a free hand to re-member them completely. They die day by day while they are still alive, that by dying to their limitations they can be reborn into the eternal life of Reality.
Aghoris achieve laser-like focus by learning to awaken and cultivate that evolutionary power that the Tantras call Kundalini. Vimalananda comments, “Ahamkara, your ‘I-creating; faculty, continuously remembers you by self-identifying with all the cells in your body and all the facets of your personality. Ahamkara is your personal shakti (power); she integrates the many parts of you into the individual that you are. You develop spiritually when you can cause ahamkara to realize, little by little, that she is actually She: the Kundalini Shakti. This growing realization gradually awakens Kundalini, and as She awakens She forgets to self-identify with your limited human personality. Then She is ready to recollect something new.”
After his Kundalini was awakened during a midnight ritual performed atop a human corpse, the Aghori Vimalananda developed a wonderfully fresh and vital recollection of reality. Kundalini took for him the form of Smashan Tara (“The Savioress of the Cemetery”), the Tantric goddess Who causes the living to cross the frontier that separates them from the reality of death. After incarnating within him as Smashan Tara Vimalananda’s Kundalini traversed the boundaries of his ordinary human awareness, and created within him a multidimensional personality.
Ever the iconoclast, Vimalananda never permitted himself to be pigeonholed, even as an aghori. A stereotypical aghori is an wild-eyed madman skulking about the cremation ground, cooking his food in a human skull, flinging filth at anyone
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who might dare to disturb him. Vimalananda, who spent part of his life playing that role, eventually became so conversant with the aghori frame of mind that he came to be able to drag it along wherever he went. While ordinary aghoris define themselves by the external smashan, superior aghoris like Vimalananda create a smashan wherever they sit, that they may maintain simultaneous awareness of all versions of reality. After choosing who to be at a given moment, Vimalananada would portray that self with consummate skill, transforming all the while his every act into a sadhana, a spiritual discipline.
Vimalananda’s peers acknowledged him as an expert in astrology, medicine, cookery, horseflesh, dance, vocal and instrumental music, and wrestling. Beneath the mundane accomplishments of his versatile erudition, visible only to a select view, simmered his striking spiritual attainments. Genuine aghoris crave only to fill their hearts with tears for the Beloved, and count external appearance as nothing more than “the dressing up of a corpse.” To some this means swathing themselves in human ashes; to Vimalananda it meant wearing whatever costume a situation called for without ever becoming fixated on that dress. Whether leading his brave troops as a gung-ho army officer, toiling next to his workers as a hard-working quarry owner and dairy farmer, playing the equine game as an avid owner of thoroughbred race horses or roving the countryside as a naked ascetic, Vimalananda donned the right skin for the job. He threw himself wholeheartedly into each role, becoming “as hard as diamond and as soft as wax” as required, the yearning within augmenting all the while. ,.,.Aghoris live to overdo, and the events of Vimalananda’s life document again and again how readily he overdid in his search for his Beloved. He really overdid things on the day he lost his temper with his penis for disturbing his sleep with its regular erections, and read it the riot act with the help of a thick layer of green chili paste. What a fiery lesson that was! Most people would think him as insane for trying such a stunt as he thought them insane for obsessing over everything except the One Thing in life that is worth obsessing over.
Vimalananda found divinity’s highest expression in the Motherhood of God. Kundalini was to him his Ma, his Beloved Mother Who consented to protect and preserve Her child from all dangers, no matter what errors he might commit, so long as he remained safe within Her lap. That his sex organ healed scarless after its chili massage is tribute to how cockeyed Mother Nature was to him. Like a good aghori he always followed his spontaneous ardor, and like an indulgent mother She always protected him from his own fervor.
He knew well, however, that he was protected by the intensity of his devotion to Her, and that few others who tried to imitate his actions would escape unscathed. Year after year of sitting in the Divine Lap taught him to love every plant, animal and rock in the universe as his own child, and to wish for all beings only what was in their best interests. No matter how fanatical Vimalananda the aghori became about his sadhana, Vimalananda the maternal mentor never permitted anyone to slavishly emulate his practices
A man of action who cared little for the opinions of others on what Aghora might or might not be, Vimalananda resisted all attempts
to paint him as a ‘classical’ aghori. He ignored all recognized Aghora sects as assiduously as he disdained all organized religion. When asked his creed he would reply, “None! I believe in sampradaha (incineration), not sampradaya (sect). All sects have limitations, and what is really necessary is to cremate all your limitations, to burn down everything that stands in the way of your perception of Reality.” He valued practice over theory, and instruction from a guru over textual injunction. He accepted approved Hindu doctrine whenever it pleased him to do so, or he would cheerfully remix it until it did, even when such experiments (such as performing devotional worship after consuming intoxicants) dismayed the puritanical.
Wherever he looked Vimalananda saw both God’s imminence in every morsel of the universe (the One-in-All) and Gods transcendence beyond every material concretion (the All-in-One). He knew that, there being but one Reality, any distinction between the
mundane and the spiritual can only be one of degree. When the orthodox questioned his purity and sincerity he would tell them in response, “Show me where God, and thus purity, is not!” Aghoris
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know how to worship in the ways that conventional priests worship, but they also learn how to go beyond convention. They learn to make “gutter water into Ganges water,” transforming even human brain or feces into a sacrament by so consecrating it with their devotion that it too becomes redolent with the fragrance of God.
But Vimalananda refused even to limit himself to this sort of definition, and turned all his energies into a quest for the holy grail of continuous, God-fired self-redefinition. Never did any ego-promontory resist within him for long being eroded by his devotion, for he counted no aghori successful until he or she had gone so far into sadhana that nothing remained but love, the devotion (bhakti) that was the source of all his power. Vimalananda followed even the most grotesque of sadhanas to its bitter end, and donated whatever shakti he obtained from them to the Great Shakti Who sheltered and nourished him. He climbed to the apex of aghoridom and stood there, dissolving and recoagulating himself moment by moment, his motto an eternal shout of navinam navinam, kshane kshane (“Newness, newness, at every moment!”).
Genuine aghoris have always been far fewer than their imitators, people who blacken Aghora’s name by performing garish ceremonies in public to attract the attention of the gullible public. Vimalananda never sought to capitalize on his capabilities by soliciting public recognition. Instead he so successfully promoted his anonymity that many of his oldest compadres never even suspected that he had any interest in spirituality.
Hw Would Say “Never take what I say as gospel truth,” he would say. “I am human, which means that I make mistakes. Always first try out what I say, experience it yourself, and then you will know whether or not it actually is the truth. Because you are human you too make mistakes; that is inevitable. Just always make sure that you make different mistakes each time. Then you will never cease to progress.”
Making mistakes is usually easier than coping with their consequences, particularly in a world in which Tantric information which once remained unspoken because of its potential for misinterpretation is being freely published, often wholly shorn of context. To grab such lore and seek to wield it indiscriminately is to invite calamity into your life. “If you give a monkey a razor,” Vimalananda would ask, “do you think he will shave himself or chop his neck?” To preserve your neck while performing Tantric sadhana a good guru is indispensable. Such a mentor will evaluate your personal temperament and capacity to comprehend before tailoring a program specific to you. A compassionate Tantric guru never speaks knowledge that can be misused to people who are not truly qualified to manage that wisdom well.
A good guru rather dedicates himself to task of extricating his disciples from bondage to the Ashta Pasha (“Eight Snares”). These are the “nooses” that bind us to the world of karma: lust, anger, greed, delusion, envy, shame, fear and disgust. Free yourself from these snares and you will find yourself well down the path to union with the infinite.
The guru comes only when the disciple is ripe enough to love him or her without any limits or preconditions. (Robert Svoboda) - http://www.drsvoboda.com
http://yoga2ayurveda4healing.googlepages.com/aghora
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Video Review: India’s Holy Men
By Ravi Peruman, California
“Sadhus: India’s Holy Men” are three distinct films, each an individual 50-minute glimpse into one facet of our always rich, often misunderstood, sometimes stark, yet thoroughly captivating religious heritage.
“The Living God” offers a rare-even once-in-a-lifetime-look at life in and around Kanchipuram, focusing on the life of Jayendra Saraswati, 69th Shankaracharya of Kanchi Peetham in South India. Naresh and Rajesh Bedi have captured history, witnessing the kanakabhishekam (offering of gold coins) of Sri Chandrasekharendra, the 68th Jagadacharya of Kanchi Mutt on his 99th birthday, and, in the wake of Ayodhya, documenting the first face-to-face meeting of all four Shankaracharyas in 250 years. The film peeks in on life in the Kanchi Mutt, from its brahmin boys-in-training, to the devotion of the millions of Hindus for whom the Shankaracharya is divinity embodied, to the steady, daily stream of Hindus seeking a few precious seconds of darshan of “the Living God.” And then, in a rare opportunity for the film-makers, the Bedis witness and record the aftermath of Sri Chandrasekharendra’s mahasamadhi, the abhishekam to his remains and preparations for his interment.
“The Rolling Saint” documents the indomitable willpower and awesome penance of Lotan Baba, a sadhu who undertakes what is eventually a 2,400-mile pilgrimage from Madhya Pradesh to the Himalayan shrine of Vaishno Devi, not by walking, but by rolling sideways. During the sadhu’s six-month journey he rolls sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly and agonizinglythrough monsoon rains and desert heat, through blisters and ecstacy, amid adoring crowds and speeding traffic, compromising his route only to avoid the most dangerous territories of the Punjab. While his support crew squabbles, Lotan Baba blesses, embodying the determination all souls must one day demonstrate to ascend to the highest spiritual heights, and transmitting the blessed side-effect of purification for souls in proximity to a sadhu performing tapas. For Lotan Baba, his journey ends up standing humbly in the queue to enter the cave-shrine of Vaishno Devi. While an unusual portrait of sadhana and of a proven sadhu (Lotan Baba had already performed the penance of standing for seven years), “The Rolling Saint” is also an unusual opportunity for the viewer to accompany such a soul on this arduous inner and outer journey.
“Living With the Dead” is by far the most haunting, literally, of the three Bedi films. It chronicles the sadhana of an Aghori, a radical sect of sadhus. Living for 12 years among the burning bodies of India’s cremation grounds is the challenge of the Aghori, eating from a human skull whatever Lord Shiva provides. Spiritually, for Aghori sadhu Ram Nath, the tantric challenge is to be reviled, to face disgust, to slay ahamkara and in so doing to become both ego-free and mystically empowered. His life of taking warmth, clothing and food from the dead, meditating in the earliest morning hours when no one else dares be among the ghosts of the burning ghats-all this and more is captured by the Bedi brothers. If disgust is what Ram Nath craves, there is ample opportunity for viewers to feel it, but through it all comes a mysterious respect for a sadhu said to be among only ten alive today who follow the extreme Aghori path. Unlike the other programs, this is not one for children.
The Bedis’ trilogy is a recommended record of India’s living holy men. The tapes are not commercially available yet, but inquiries can be made directly to: Bedi Films, E-19, Rajouri Garden, New Delhi, 110 027, India. -http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1995/1/1995-1-04.shtml
Magical Death Projection
A film about a great shamen named Dedeheiwa and how he manipulates the hekura spirits for both good and evil.
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http://www.biroz.net/tricksters/six.htm
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Under the dark canopy of the tropical Amazonian forest of Brazilian-Venezuelan border country live the Yanomami, a people renowned in the anthropological literature for their fierceness, their generosity and their unique culture. Living in round, communal villages called shabonos, these people live cheek by jowl with each other in one of the most biodiverse regions of the planet. In the Yanomami jungle, there are said to be more species of trees in one quarter mile area than can be found in the whole of Western Europe .
But, in the minds of the people who live there, the forest is not merely filled with plant and animal life. The trees are also teeming with what might be termed spiritual life. Every single plant, vine, tree, and every single animal from mouse to jaguar has a vital living soul.
But most important of all are the shamanic spirits, the hekura. These tiny glowing lights which live in the wilds of the mountains and distant uninhabited jungle can only be contacted by the use of the hallucinogenic snuff called ebene. Prepared from the bark of the virola tree, this snuff is used by shamans of the tribe, as well as a large percentage of the ‘layman’ Yanomami population.
On most afternoons, when the day’s work of hunting, gathering or tending to the fruit gardens is done, they gather in their shabono to socialise, using a combination of songs, dances and ebene to entice the hekura down from their distant homes to enter their bodies. Once they have entered, they begin to ‘shamanise’ the person in whom they are dwelling, which causes them to sing the healing or harming songs of the spirits within them.
A shaman can furthermore be initiated so that the hekura start to live permanently inside his body. Using very large amounts of ebene and extremely strong strains of wild tobacco, the spirits are contacted and eventually housed inside him, from where an almost permanent shamanic communication can begin. The Yanomami envisage entire communities of hekura inside the shaman, living in symbolic houses, villages, mountains and rivers within his body.
Keeping the hekura satisfied inside them is a priority for most shamans of this tribe – this is maintained by the regular use of tobacco, ebene and ceremonies – and by using on the power of the spirits within him, and understanding the quality of that power, the shaman can heal an ally or harm an enemy at will.
It appears from much of the literature about these people that the hekura, and the use of ebene to contact them, forms the vast majority of Yanomami religious practice. It might be said that the Yanomami are a profoundly internal people who prefer to communicate with aspects of the ‘inner’ world rather than entities such as ‘gods’ or ‘deities’.
We might thus consider that the Yanomami have made these living, powerful spooks the centre of their spiritual lives. It is clear that they value the magical aspect most strongly, and as shamanic allies, they determine the course of major political events such as inter-village warfare, in which the hekura-derived shamanic power is recruited to harm enemies, and trade, which is often concluded with a generous measure of ebene to cement the new relationship.
Furthermore, the Yanomami believe that the souls of the dead eventually become hekura, as do the souls of animals that the Yanomami have killed to provide themselves with food. At funerals and great feasts, ceremonies are often performed – again with the shamans and their hekura power presiding – to ensure that this transition – from living, to dead, to hekura – takes place in the natural order of things.
These shamanic allies, then, not only have a magical power, they also function as a kind of ancestor remembrance, and by allowing them into their bodies, the Yanomami recycle and remember the wisdom of the past, gathered by all that have died before them. More than this though, the hekura are overtly political in a way that the kami of Japan or the Taotao Mona of Guam could not be.
By taking up residence within a shaman’s body, they become agents for the furtherance of that particular shaman’s aims – whether he is a sorcerer who desires to control large populations across a wide territory or a weapon of war who wishes to protect his village from attacks from shamanic enemies. In fact, inter-village warfare is often begun out of a desire for revenge for some (imagined or real) shamanic attack on a tribal member.
The hekura are spooks par excellence. Taking centre stage in the spiritual and political life of the people, they are the most complex of the spooks we have seen so far. But of these it also appears that they are the most ancient.
The Yanomami speak a language which, according to most linguists, is related to no other currently spoken tongue. They are often considered to be an isolate people in the northwest Amazon, who remained in their mountains as many of their sister cultures were supplanted by incoming Carib and Arawak peoples from the north (*8). Thus it is likely that the Yanomami have been living in their present lands for several thousands of years. And in turn, it is likely that the mandala of culture relating to the hekura is just as ancient.
The Yanomami represent what Joseph Campbell refers to as a primitive planting culture, that is to say one that has turned to some extent towards the planting of crops for sustenance, but still maintains a healthy respect for hunting traditions, including shamanism. While in Japan , we see an almost aesthetic tradition typical of a civilised people, here in the Amazon we seem to be witness to an older substrate of spook, one that still maintains a profound magical power strong enough to inspire shamans and coordinate political and tribal events.
And as we turn to a place further back in time again, to a people who never knew the cultural innovations of planting crops but remained as hunters, we see the spooks returning even more to their central places – as the very Creators of the Dreaming Universe itself.
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com
Today I interview Professor John Rush regarding his new book Failed God: Fractured Myth in a Fragile World. This is the first academic book since the publication of John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) that argues Allegro was correct – and provides ample support for the mushroom foundations of Judeo-Christianity. This is a very interesting interview, so don’t miss it!
John Rush is Professor Anthropology, Sierra College, Rocklin, California. He teaches Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion, Physical Anthropology, and Physical Anthropology Lab. He’s
Naturopathic Doctor and Medical Hypnotherapist in Private Practice. His specialty areas of study are Human Communication, Systems Theory, and Symbolism; Cults (He participated in a cult for three years – asked to leave); Tattooing and Scarification (He’s gone through 400 hours of tattooing); Herbs both medicinal and hallucinogens (He maintains a large herb garden full of legal magical herbs.); Clinical Anthropology – the use of anthropological concepts/models in clinical settings. His books include: Witchcraft and Sorcery: An Anthropological Perspective of the Occult, 1974; The Way We Communicate, 1976; Clinical Anthropology, 1996; Stress and Emotional Health, 1999; Spiritual Tattoo, 2005; The Twelve Gates, 2007; Failed God,
http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com/entry/2008-10-28T14_02_00-07_00
Time Machines is Coil’s landmark drone music album, released under the alias Time Machines. It consists of 4 tracks which are composed of a single tone, called a drone. Each tone represents a certain hallucinogenic chemical (see track titles). It is similar to Brian Eno’s early ambient albums, but more functional in that, instead of creating an atmosphere of calm, it facilitates time travel, according to band founder John Balance. Each tone was tested and retested in the studio for maximum narcotic potency. John Balance described the album as an attempt to “dissolve time”
The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge – Terence McKenna
Binding: Audiobook CASSETTE
Publisher: Sounds True
ISBN-13: 9781564552068
ISBN: 1564552063
Languages: English
When Terence McKenna passed away in early 2000, we lost not only a brilliant and daring writer on the nature of consciousness — but one of the most entertaining speakers of all time. The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge was McKenna’s magnum opus — an in-depth series of public talks covering his lifelong investigation into our 20,000-year relationship with visionary plant substances and their impact on our species. With this new edition of The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, a legion of McKenna’s fans gain the opportunity to hear these inspired talks for the first time — as he transports us from our prehistoric roots, across today’s digital landscape, and into the awe-inspiring events ahead that he predicted for humankind.
Brief History of Dzogchen
Alexander Berzin
November 10-12, 2000
November 10-12, 2000
Introduction
Dzogchen (rdzogs-chen), the great completeness, is a Mahayana system of practice leading to enlightenment and involves a view of reality, way of meditating, and way of behaving (lta-sgom-spyod gsum). It is found earliest in the Nyingma and Bon (pre-Buddhist) traditions.
Bon, according to its own description, was founded in Tazig (sTag-gzig), an Iranian cultural area of Central Asia, by Shenrab Miwo (gShen-rab mi-bo) and was brought to Zhang-zhung (Western Tibet) in the eleventh century BCE There is no way to validate this scientifically. Buddha lived in the sixth century BCE in India.
The Introduction of Pre-Nyingma Buddhism and Zhang-zhung Rites to Central Tibet
Zhang-zhung was conquered by Yarlung (Central Tibet) in 645 CE. The Yarlung Emperor Songtsen-gampo (Srong-btsan sgam-po) had wives not only from the Chinese and Nepali royal families (both of whom brought a few Buddhist texts and statues), but also from the royal family of Zhang-zhung. The court adopted Zhang-zhung (Bon) burial rituals and animal sacrifice, although Bon says that animal sacrifice was native to Tibet, not a Bon custom. The Emperor built thirteen Buddhist temples around Tibet and Bhutan, but did not found any monasteries.
This pre-Nyingma phase of Buddhism in Central Tibet did not have dzogchen teachings. In fact, it is difficult to ascertain what level of Buddhist teachings and practice were introduced. It was undoubtedly very limited, as would have been the case with the Zhang-zhung rites.
Guru Rinpoche and the Introduction of Nyingma Dzogchen
The next major figure, Emperor Tri Songdetsen (Khri Srong sde-btsan), was cautious of the Chinese and paranoid of Zhang-zhung, most likely because his pro-Chinese father had been assassinated by the xenophobic, conservative Zhang-zhung political faction in the imperial court. In 761, he invited the Indian Buddhist abbot Shantarakshita to Tibet. There was a smallpox epidemic. The Zhang-zhung faction in court blamed Shantarakshita and deported him from the land. On the abbot’s advice, the Emperor then invited Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava) from Swat (northwestern Pakistan), who drove out the demons who had caused the smallpox. The Emperor then reinvited Shantarakshita.
Guru Rinpoche left in 774, without having completed the full transmission of dzogchen. Seeing that the times were not ripe, he buried some texts as buried treasure texts (gter-ma, “terma”). They were exclusively texts on dzogchen.
Samyay Monastery and the Bonpo Exile
Samyay Monastery (bSam-yas) (the first monastery in Tibet with the first seven Tibetan monks) was completed shortly afterwards. Chinese from the Chan (Jap. Zen) tradition, Indian, and Zhang-zhung translators worked together there. Buddhism became the state religion in 779, probably because Emperor Tri Songdetsen needed an alternative culture to Zhang-zhung for unifying the country. The Emperor appointed three families to support each monk.
Tibet conquered Dunhuang (Tunhuang, a Buddhist oasis on the Silk Route northwest of Tibet) from China in 781. Yet, the Chinese emperor sent two Chinese monks to Samyay every other year from 781, to maintain his influence.
Shantarakshita died in 783, warning of trouble from the Chinese, and advised inviting his disciple Kamalashila to debate them, which the Tibetans did.
The next year, in 784, a grand persecution and exile of the Bonpos (followers of Bon) took place. Most went to Gilgit (northern Pakistan) or Yunnan (southwestern China). According to the traditional Bon account, Zhang-zhung Drenpa-namka (Dran-pa nam-mkha’) buried the Bon texts (all categories, not just dzogchen) at this time for safekeeping.
Historical and political analysis reveals that the reason for the exile was suspicion that the xenophobic conservative Zhang-zhung political faction might assassinate the Emperor for being pro-Indian, as they had done to his father. Moreover, the state kept the Bon burial rituals and sacrifices. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that it was a persecution of the Zhang-zhung political faction, not a persecution of the Bon religion.
For this reason, several Western scholars assert that the term Bonpo (followers of Bon) in this period had primarily a political rather than religious reference. It was used for the Zhang-zhung political faction at the court and their followers, rather than for the spiritual leaders who performed the Zhang-zhung religious rites at the court and their followers.
Vairochana, Vimalamitra, and the Samyay Debate
Emperor Tri Songdetsen sent Vairochana, one of the seven original Tibetan monks from Samyay, to India for more texts. He brought back both dzogchen and Buddhist medicine tantras, and invited the Indian dzogchen master Vimalamitra, who brought more texts.
The Samyay debate was in 792-794, between Indian and Chinese Buddhism. The Indian side, led by Kamalashila, won; the Chinese, led by Hoshang Mahayana (Chinese for “Mahayana monk”), were expelled from Tibet. The Tibetans officially adopted Indian Buddhism and Indian Buddhist medicine, although they kept some Chinese medicine influences combined with it.
Shortly afterwards, the Tibetan Vairochana was exiled after Indian abbots slandered him for revealing too much, so he buried more dzogchen texts, as did the Indian Vimalamitra.
The Three Divisions of Nyingma Treasure Texts
From the treasure texts buried by Vairochana and Vimalamitra and those buried earlier by Guru Rinpoche, the dzogchen teachings were later divided into three divisions.
- semdey (sems-sde, mind division), emphasizing pure awareness (rig-pa) as the basis for all (kun-gzhi, Skt. alaya),
- longdey (klong-sde, open sphere division), emphasizing the open sphere aspect (klong) of pure awareness as the basis for all,
- menngag-dey (man-ngag sde, personal instructions division), also called nyingtig (snying-thig, heart essence division), emphasizing pure awareness being primally pure (ka-dag).
The first two derive from the treasure texts buried by the Tibetan monk Vairochana and are not practiced much today. The mind division comes from Indian texts that Vairochana translated; the open sphere division from his oral teachings. The personal instructions division has two sections from the two Indian teachers, one from Guru Rinpoche: Kadro Nyingtig (mKha’-'gro snying-thig, Dakini Heart Essence Teachings) and one from Vimalamitra: Vima Nyingtig (Bi-ma snying-thig, Vimalamitra’s Heart Essence Teachings).
The Persecution of Buddhism
Emperor Ralpachen (Ral-pa-can) (a Buddhist fanatic), in 821, after signing a peace treaty with China (complete with animal sacrifice) made the Samyay abbot the head of the State Council. He decreed that each monk in Tibet be supported by seven families. He also formed a council to authorize terms to be included in a large Sanskrit-Tibetan compendium of translation terms he commissioned, Mahavyutpatti (Bye-brag-tu rtogs-pa chen-po, Grand [Lexicon ] for Understanding Specific [Terms.]) No tantra terms were included. The Emperor and his council decided what was translated and allowed practice of only the first two classes of tantra.
Most likely due to the excesses of Emperor Ralpachen, his successor Emperor Langdarma (gLang-dar-ma) closed monasteries and persecuted monks from 836-842. The Buddhist libraries and the ngagpa (sngags-pa, tantric) lay tradition, however, were preserved.
The first buried Bon treasure texts were recovered by accident at Samyay in 913.
The New Transmission Schools
Atisha was sent for from India in late tenth century, to clear up misunderstandings of Buddhism, especially about tantra, concerning sex and sacrifices. New translations were made from Sanskrit, starting with the work of Rinchen-zangpo (Rin-chen bzang-po).
During the early eleventh century, the Kadam (later became Gelug), Sakya, and Kagyu traditions developed as the Sarma (gSar-ma, New Transmission, New Tantra) Schools. In contrast, Nyingma is the Old Transmission or Old Tantra School.
Bon also revived at this time, but now its contents are very Buddhist. Bon texts were codified in 1017 – mostly non-dzogchen texts in the main categories of the Buddhist literature. Later in the eleventh century, Nyingma and more Bon dzogchen texts were found, often by the same person.
The Southern and Northern Treasure Text Lineages
In first half of fourteenth century, the Sakya master Buton (Bu-ston Rin-chen grub) compiled the Zhalu Manuscript, which was the forerunner of the Kangyur (bKa’-'gyur, the words of the Buddha). He did not include any dzogchen materials in it, or any of the Old Translation Period translations of the tantras.
Buton’s contemporary, Longchenpa (Klong-chen Rab-’byams-pa Dri-med ‘od-zer). put together Kadro and Vima Nyingtig into Zabmo Nyingtig (Zab-mo snying-thig, The Profound Heart Essence Teachings), and collected and organized the dzogchen texts available at his time. From him derives the Nyingma Southern Treasure Text Lineage (lho-gter).
Bon codified its equivalent of the Kangyur in the second half of fourteenth century, which includes dzogchen.
The Nyingma Northern Treasure Text Lineage (byang-gter) was started in the late fourteenth century by Rigdzin Godem Jey (Rig-dzin rGod-ldem rJe dNgos-grub rgyal-mtshan), a descendent of the early Tibetan kings. The head of this lineage is called Rigdzin chenpo (rig-’dzin chen-po).
Compilation of the Nyingma Canon and Major Texts
In the early fifteenth century, Ratna Lingpa (Ratna gling-pa) compiled the Nyingma Gyubum (rNying-ma rgyud-’bum, Lakhs of Nyingma Tantras), the collection of all dzogchen texts and all the Old Transmission translations of tantras, expanding on Longchenpa’s work.
Jigmey Lingpa (‘ Jigs-med gling-pa mKhyen-brtse ‘od-zer), in the late eighteenth century, revised Longchenpa’s Zabmo Nyingtig and made it into Longchen Nyingtig (Klong-chen snying-thig, Longchenpa’s Heart Essence Teachings), the main Nyingma dzogchen system practiced today. His disciple, the First Dodrubchen (rDo-grub chen ‘Jigs-med ‘phrin-las ‘od-zer), wrote a ritual text of preliminary practices for it, Longchen ngondro (Klong-chen sngon-’gro).
The Rimey Nonsectarian Movement
In the next generation, of the three main founders of the Rimey (nonsectarian movement): Kongtrul (Kong-sprul Yon-tan rgya-mtso), Jamyang-kyentsey-wangpo (‘ Jam-dbyangs mkhyen-brtse dbang-po), and Mipam (‘ Ju Mi-pham rgya-mtsho), the latter wrote the main Nyingma commentaries to the major texts.
In the next generation of disciples, Peltrul (rDza dPal-sprul ‘O-rgyan ‘jigs-med dbang-po) wrote Guideline Instructions from My Totally Excellent (Samantabhadra) Spiritual Mentor (Kun-bzang bla-ma’i zhal-lung, Perfect Words of My Excellent Teacher, Kunzang Lamey Zhellung). This is the most elaborate Nyingma text on the equivalent of lam-rim (graded stages of the path) and on the preliminaries for the Longchen Nyingtig.
Peltrul and Jamyang kyentsey-wangpo’s disciple, the Third Dodrubchen (rDo-grub-chen ‘Jigs-pa’i bstan-pa’i nyi-ma), wrote the clearest commentaries on dzogchen -Dzogchen Cycles (rDzogs-chen skor) and Miscellaneous Writings on Dzogchen (rDzogs-chen thor-bu) – putting dzogchen in the context of the other traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. These are the commentaries that His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama strongly relies on as a source for his explanations of a unified theory of all four Tibetan traditions.
Is Dzogchen Buddhist or Bon?
Is Bon Buddhist or non-Buddhist? Both lead to enlightenment, and use the term Buddhahood. The seventh-century Indian master Dharmakirti said that if a work accords with the main themes of Buddha, it is Buddha’s teaching. Thus, both Nyingma and Bon dzogchen are clearly Mahayana Buddhist teachings because both have shared features with the Mahayana sutras. Each, of course, also has its unique uncommon features. Furthermore, whether we say dzogchen is a division of tantra or beyond the divisions of sutra and tantra, Nyingma and Bon dzogchen also share features in common with the various tantra classes.
Since Nyingma and Bon both claim the origin of dzogchen and that the other copied it from them, there are three possibilities:
- Dzogchen developed very early in Buddhism and Bon received it through the early spread of Buddhism in Iran and Central Asia, through Zhang-zhung. Thus, Bon dzogchen had a Buddhist origin, but not directly an Indian Buddhist one.
- Bon learned of dzogchen from Guru Rinpoche at Samyay and buried it when the Zhang-zhung Bon faction went into exile in 784, mostly to Gilgit (northern Pakistan).
- When the Zhang-zhung Bonpos went into exile to Gilgit, they learned of it there, separate from Guru Rinpoche.
It is not possible to come to a decisive conclusion about which possibility is correct.
Dzogchen in the Kagyu Traditions
Dzogchen is also found in Drugpa Kagyu, coming from its late twelfth-century founder, Tsangpa Gyaray (gTsang-pa rGya-ras).
The Third Karmapa (Kar-ma Rang-byung rdo-rje) introduced dzogchen into Karma Kagyu in the early fourteenth century and wrote the Karma Nyingtig (Kar-ma snying-thig, Karmapa’s Heart Essence Teachings). He studied dzogchen with Kumararaja, the same dzogchen teacher as Longchenpa had. Thus, Guru Rinpoche is visualized in the Second Karmapa Karma Pakshi’s heart in the Karma Pakshi practice. There is also a Karma Kagyu practice of Guru Rinpoche.
Dzogchen and the Dalai Lamas
In the mid-seventeenth century, the Fifth Dalai Lama had pure visions of dzogchen. He compiled them into Bearing the Seal of Secrecy (gSang-ba rgya-can) and introduced these dzogchen practices to his Namgyal Monastery, which otherwise mostly practices Gelug.
Guru Rinpoche prophesied that if the line from the early Tibetan kings – whose descendants, the line of Rigdzin-chenpos, were the heads of the Northern Treasure Text Lineage – discontinued, it would be detrimental to Tibet. Thus, the Fifth Dalai Lama transmitted his dzogchen lineages also to the Rigdzin-chenpo of his times. Consequently, the Northern Treasure Text Lineage also practices the Fifth Dalai Lama’s dzogchen teachings.
The next Rigdzin-chenpo transmitted the Fifth Dalai Lama’s dzogchen teachings to Nechung Monastery, the monastery of the state oracle, Nechung (gNas-chung). The Nechung oracle was appointed at Samyay by Guru Rinpoche to protect Tibet. There has been a personal connection between the Dalai Lamas and the Nechung oracle since the time of the Second Dalai Lama, when he moved from Tashilhunpo Monastery to Drepung Monastery.
The Fifth Dalai Lama also appointed the throneholder of the Nyingma Mindroling monastery (sMin-gling khri-can, “Minling Trichen”) the head of the Southern Treasure Text Lineage. Thus, the Fifth Dalai Lama supported both major Nyingma lineages. There has been a close connection between the line of Dalai Lamas and the Nyingma tradition ever since.
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The Need for Dzogchen
Dzogchen (rdzogs-chen, the great completeness) is an advanced system of Mahayana practice that brings enlightenment. It is found primarily in the Nyingma and Bon traditions, but also appears as a supplementary practice in some of the Kagyu traditions such as Drugpa, Drigung, and Karma Kagyu. Let us speak here of dzogchen as formulated in the Nyingma school.
To reach enlightenment, we need to remove forever two sets of obscurations:
- emotional obscurations (nyon-sgrib) – those that are disturbing emotions and attitudes and which prevent liberation,
- cognitive obscurations (shes-sgrib) — those regarding all knowables and which prevent omniscience.
These obscurations bring us, respectively, the suffering of uncontrollably recurring existence (samsara) and the inability to be of best help to others. They are fleeting (glo-bur), however, and merely obscure the essential nature (ngo-bo) of the mind and limit its functioning. In essence, the mind (mental activity) is naturally pure of all fleeting stains. This is an important aspect of its Buddha-nature.
In general, to remove both sets of obscuration requires bodhichitta (byang-sems) and nonconceptual cognition of voidness (stong-nyid, Skt. shunyata, emptiness) – the mind’s natural absence of fleeting stains and its absence of impossible ways of existing (such as inherently tainted with stains). Bodhichitta is a mind and heart aimed at enlightenment, with the intention to attain it and thereby to benefit all beings as much as is possible. Removing obscuration also requires a level of mind (or mental activity) most conducive for bringing about this removal. Dzogchen practice brings us to that level.
Sem and Rigpa
Mental activity occurs on two levels, with limited awareness (sems) and pure awareness (rig-pa). Since many Western students are already familiar with the Tibetan terms, let us use them for ease of discussion.
- Sem is mental activity limited by fleeting stains.
- Rigpa is mental activity devoid of all fleeting stains of obscuration.
Sem may be conceptual or nonconceptual and, in either case, is always stained. Rigpa, on the other hand, is exclusively nonconceptual, in a purer manner than is nonconceptual sem, and is never stained by either of the two sets of obscurations.
Since mental activity, whether limited or pure, is naturally devoid of fleeting stains, rigpa is the natural state of sem. Thus, rigpa, with its essential nature of being devoid of all stains, can be recognized as the basis of each moment of our cognition.
Dzogchen, then, is a method of practice, grounded in bodhichitta and nonconceptual cognition of voidness, enabling us to recognize rigpa and stay forever at its level of mental activity free from all obscuration. In this way, rigpa’s “great completeness” (dzogchen) of all enlightening qualities for benefiting others becomes fully operational.
Equivalency in Non-Dzogchen Systems
The non-dzogchen systems of Gelug, Sakya, and Kagyu analyze three levels of mind or mental activity:
- Gross mental activity is sensory cognition, which is always nonconceptual.
- Subtle mental activity includes both conceptual and nonconceptual mental cognition.
- The subtlest mental activity underlying them all is clear light ( ‘od-gsal), which is exclusively nonconceptual, but subtler than gross or subtle nonconceptual mental activity.
Sutra and the lower classes of tantra employ subtle mental activity for the cognition of voidness. Only anuttarayoga, the highest class of tantra, accesses and uses clear light mental activity for this purpose.
Parallel to this presentation, sutra and the lower classes of tantra in the Nyingma system employ sem for the cognition of voidness. Only dzogchen accesses and uses rigpa for this purpose.
The non-dzogchen systems explain that subtlest clear light mind manifests at the moment of death. A facsimile of it manifests for an instant when experiencing orgasm, falling asleep, fainting, sneezing, and yawning. At such times, the grosser energy-winds (rlung, Skt. prana, “lung”) that support gross and subtle mental activity temporarily cease (dissolve), thus temporarily stopping these two levels of mental activity and enabling the clear light level to function.
To gain stable control of clear light mental activity, however, requires accessing this level in meditation. We accomplish this with anuttarayoga complete stage practices (rdzogs-rim, completion stage) of working with the body’s subtle energy system to dissolve the energy-winds. As a cause for success on the complete stage, we imagine the dissolution process on the generation stage (bskyed-rim), modeled after the stages of death, bardo, and rebirth.
With the dzogchen methods, we recognize and access the subtlest mental activity – in this case, rigpa – without need to dissolve the energy-winds as the method for gaining access. But, how to recognize rigpa?
Definition of Mind
Mind, in Buddhism, refers to mental activity, not to a “thing” that is the agent of that activity or to a “tool” that a “me” uses to engage in that activity. The definition of mind describes the activity from two points of view. Thus, the two aspects of the description are simultaneous functions, not sequential:
- the mental activity of producing or giving rise (‘ char-ba) to cognitive appearances (snang-ba),
- the mental activity of cognitively engaging (‘ jug-pa) with cognitive appearances.
The former is usually translated as clarity (gsal) and the latter as awareness (rig).
Cognitive appearances do not refer to appearances of things “out there,” which we may or may not notice and cognize. They refer to how things appear “to the mind” when we cognize them. In a sense, they are like mental holograms. For example, in nonconceptual sensory cognition such as seeing, colored shapes appear, which are merely mental representations (snang-ba, mental semblances) or mental derivatives (gzugs-brnyan, mental reflections) of one moment of colored shapes. In conceptual cognition, a mental representation appears of the conventional object, such as a hand, that the colored shapes in that moment are the visual sensibilia of. A sequence of mental representations of a hand each second one inch further to the right appears as motion. In other words, cognitive appearances exist only within the context of mental activity. They do not need to be clear or in focus.
Moreover, cognitive appearances do not refer merely to the images that appear “in the mind” when cognizing visible objects with our eyes. They also refer to the cognitive appearances or arisings (shar-ba) of sounds, smells, tastes, physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, and so on. After all, it is mental activity that makes a sequence of consonant and vowel sounds arise as words and sentences.
Note that the expressions “things appear to the mind” or “in the mind” are merely manners of speaking particular to the English idiom and reflect a dualistic concept of mind totally different from the Buddhist model.
Cognitively engaging with cognitive appearances may be in any manner, such as seeing, hearing, thinking, or feeling them, and does not need to be conscious or with understanding. It may include ignoring something and being confused about it.
The definition also adds the word mere (tsam), which implies that mental activity occurs without a concrete agent “me” making it happen. It also implies that fleeting stains are not the defining characteristic of this activity. The superficial (kun-rdzob, conventional) nature of mental activity is merely producing and engaging with cognitive appearances; its deepest (don-dam, ultimate) nature is its voidness.
Further, mental activity is individual and subjective. My seeing of a picture and my feeling of happiness are not yours. Moreover, Buddhism does not assert a universal mind that we all are part of, that we all can access, or that our mental continuums (mind-streams) merge with when we achieve liberation or enlightenment. Even when enlightened, each Buddha’s mental continuum retains its individuality.
The Differences between Mahamudra and Dzogchen
Whether on the gross, subtle, or subtlest clear light level, the nature of mental activity remains the same. Mahamudra (phyag-chen, great seal) practice, found in the Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug/Kagyu traditions, focuses on this nature. The Kagyu and Gelug/Kagyu traditions have both sutra and anuttarayoga tantra levels of the practice, while Sakya only an anuttarayoga one. In other words, Sakya mahamudra focuses only on the nature of clear light mental activity, while the other two traditions include focus on the nature of the other levels of mental activity as well.
Rigpa shares the same nature as the three levels of mental activity analyzed by the non-dzogchen schools. Dzogchen practice, however, is exclusively done on the highest level of tantra and deals only with the subtlest level of mental activity. Moreover, dzogchen does not focus merely on the conventional and deepest natures of rigpa, but also on its various aspects and facets.
The Differences between Rigpa and Clear Light
Further, rigpa is not an exact equivalent of clear light. Rather, it is a subdivision of it.
Different Degrees of Being Unstained
- The clear light level of mind is naturally devoid of grosser levels of mental activity, which are the levels at which conceptual cognition and the fleeting stains of disturbing emotions and attitudes occur. Before enlightenment, however, clear light mental activity is not devoid of the habits of grasping for true existence, which may be imputed or labeled on it. Nevertheless, when clear light is manifest, these habits do not cause clear light activity to make discordant (dual) appearances of true existence (gnyis-snang), nor do they prevent it from cognizing the two truths simultaneously (appearances and voidness), which they do when grosser levels of mind are active.
- Rigpa, on the other hand, is devoid of even the habits of grasping for true existence. It is the totally unstained natural state of the mind.
Difference in Terms of Recognizability
Clear light mental activity and rigpa are similar in the sense that when each is operating, grosser levels of mental activity are not functioning simultaneously.
- To access and recognize clear light mind requires actively stopping the grosser levels of mental activity, through dissolving the energy-winds that support those levels.
- Rigpa is recognizable without actively stopping the grosser levels of mental activity and of energy-wind as the method to recognize it. When recognized and accessed, however, the grosser levels automatically stop functioning.
Difference in Terms of Reflexive Deep Awareness
- The non-dzogchen systems, particularly Gelug, differentiate object clear light (yul) from cognitive (yul-can, subject) clear light. Object clear light is the actual void nature (chos-nyid) of clear light, while cognitive clear light is clear light mental activity itself, a phenomenon that has object clear light as its nature (chos-can).
Clear light mental activity is not necessarily aware of its own void nature, for example the clear light mind experienced at the moment of ordinary death. Even when the fifteenth-century Gelug master Kaydrub Norzang-gyatso (mKhas-grub Nor-bzang rgya-mtsho) explains that clear light mental activity naturally gives rise to a cognitive appearance resembling that which arises in nonconceptual cognition of voidness, still it does not automatically arise with an understanding of voidness, also as in ordinary death. Moreover, even when reflexive deep awareness (rang-rig ye-shes) of its own void nature is presented as a natural quality of clear light, as in the Sakya and Kagyu systems, still it is not always operational, also as in ordinary death. Therefore, anuttarayoga practice aims at achieving, in meditation, cognitive clear light that is fully aware of its own object clear light nature.
- Rigpa, on the other hand, is innately aware of its own void nature. When we access it, it automatically is fully aware of its own nature. In dzogchen terms, it knows its own face (rang-ngo shes-pa).
Effulgent and Essence Rigpa
On the path, we try to recognize two types of rigpa: first, effulgent rigpa (rtsal-gyi rig-pa) and then, essence rigpa (ngo-bo’i rig-pa) underlying it.
- Effulgent rigpa is the aspect of rigpa actively giving rise to cognitive appearances.
- Essence rigpa is the cognitive open space (klong) or cognitive sphere (dbyings) that underlies and allows for actively producing and actively cognizing cognitive appearances.
Both types of rigpa are still rigpa, meaning that both are mental activities: the naturally pure, unstained awareness of something.
The Relation of Cognitive Appearances and Rigpa
Cognitive appearances are the play (rol-pa, display) of essence rigpa. When cognized with sem, they appear not to exist in this manner, and thus appearances are deceptive.
Here, appearances as the play of some type of mental activity does not mean:
- that appearances arise due to the karma collected by the mind, or exist merely as what can be mentally labeled by the mind, as in the Gelug usage of the term play of the mind,
- that all phenomena exist only in the mind, as in the extreme position of solipsism,
- that the cognitive appearance of a table and the visual consciousness of it come from the same natal source (rdzas) – namely, the same karmic legacy (sa-bon, seed, karmic tendency) – despite the fact that the table is still made of atoms and has true unimputed existence (it is not merely an imagined table), as in the Chittamatra explanation.
Rather, it means that the cognitive appearance of the table is something that rigpa gives rise to as its functional nature (rang-bzhin). In other words, what rigpa naturally does is to spontaneously establish (lhun-grub) cognitive appearances and, in this sense, cognitive appearances are a play of the mind.
Unlike the Chittamatra formulation, however, according to dzogchen, the table itself has its own natal source – for example, the wood and atoms that comprise it. Moreover, the table lacks true unimputed existence (bden-par ma-grub-pa). It exists as a table inasmuch as it can be validly mentally labeled a table. Ultimately, however, its mode of existence is beyond words and concepts, as in the non-Gelug Madhyamaka explanation.
The dzogchen formulation of appearances as the play of the mind often employs Chittamatra terminology, such as alaya (kun-gzhi, basis for all) and eight types of consciousness. However, it does not explain them as existing in the same manner as the Chittamatra system does. The usage of this terminology derives from the fact that Shantarakshita and Kamalashila, the two earliest Indian masters of Buddhist logic to teach in Tibet, who provided the sutra philosophical basis for Nyingma, taught a form of Madhyamaka that uses Chittamatra terms. The Gelug tradition calls this form “the Yogachara-Svatantrika-Madhyamaka school.”
Voidness Meditation
The void nature of rigpa is its essential nature (ngo-bo) and is called its primal purity (ka-dag).
Various Tibetan traditions of dzogchen, and masters within each tradition, have explained the primal purity of rigpa in terms of self-voidness (rang-stong), other-voidness (gzhan-stong), or both.
- Longchenpa (Klong-chen Rab-‘byams-pa Dri-med ‘od-zer), for example, made no reference to other-voidness.
- There are two interpretations of the position of Mipam (‘Ju Mi-pham ‘Jam-dbyangs rnam-rgyal rgya-mtsho), made by two wings of his disciples. Botrul (Bod-sprul) and Kenpo Zhenga (mKhan-po gZhan-dga’) present Mipam as asserting self-voidness, while Zhechen Gyeltsab (Zhe-chen rGyal-tshab Pad-ma rnam-rgyal) and Katog Situ (Kah-thog Si-tu) present him as asserting other-voidness. The first group is mostly at Dzogchen Monastery (rDzogs-chen dGon-pa), while the second is mostly at Zhechen Monastery (Zhe-chen dGon-pa). There is no pervasion, however, that all masters at each of these monasteries share this interpretation and assert the corresponding view.
Moreover, they have given varying definitions of self and other-voidness. Let us stay with the most commonly accepted definitions in Nyingma.
Self-voidness is the absence of an impossible way of existing, such as true unimputed existence and, beyond that, existence that corresponds to what words and concepts imply.
Other-voidness is the absence from rigpa of all grosser levels of mental activity and tainted stains.
Thus, the presentation of primal purity in terms of self-voidness is roughly equivalent to the non-dzogchen systems’ presentation of object clear light. The presentation in terms of other-voidness is roughly equivalent to that of cognitive clear light. Regardless of in which way it is presented and what terminology is used, primal purity is both self and other-void.
Meditation on the primal purity of rigpa, whether or not presented in terms of other-voidness, entails direct focus on rigpa as a cognitive state devoid of all grosser levels and of all fleeting stains. It is innately aware of its own primal purity.
Thus, voidness meditation in dzogchen does not entail analytical meditation on self-voidness. Neither does non-dzogchen object clear light meditation, for which we merely recall our understanding of self-voidness previously gained through analytical meditation.
Dzogchen meditation, however, does not entail even direct focus on the self-voidness of rigpa. Although analysis of self-voidness comprises part of the training required before attempting the practice of dzogchen, self-voidness is only indirectly understood at the time of rigpa meditation. We indirectly focus on self-voidness when we focus on cognitive appearances being the natural play of rigpa. If they are the natural play of rigpa, they cannot exist in the manner that the words and concepts for the appearances imply. Words and concepts imply that things truly and independently exist in fixed concrete boxes as “this”s and “that”s, but this is an impossible mode of existence. There is no such thing.
Rigpa Is Complete with All Good Qualities
Basis rigpa (gzhi’i rig-pa) is the working basis of pure awareness. It is unobstructed and all-permeating (zang-thal) in the sense that it permeates all sem without obstruction, like sesame oil permeates sesame seeds, despite the fact that we do not recognize it. Thus, rigpa is an aspect of Buddha-nature and, according to dzogchen, it is complete with all good qualities (yon-tan, Buddha-qualities), such as omniscience and all-encompassing compassion. Rigpa is analogous to the sun, and just as the sun cannot exist separately from the qualities of the sun, such as light and warmth, similarly rigpa does not exist separately from the Buddha-qualities.
Thus, when we access essence rigpa in meditation and it becomes operational, we do not have to add on top of it the Buddha-qualities. We do not need to actualize on top of it a mind of omniscient awareness or of all-encompassing compassion. It is naturally and spontaneously (lhun-grub) there.
Comparison with the Gelug, Sakya, and Samkhya Positions
The Gelug and Sakya explanations of Buddha-nature assert that the Buddha-qualities exist now merely as potentials (nus-pa) of clear light mental activity. They are like seeds, which are different from the soil in which they are found. We need to cultivate them so that they grow.
Although the non-Buddhist Samkhya school of Indian philosophy does not assert Buddha-nature or Buddha-qualities, a Samkhya-style presentation of this point would be that omniscience is ultimately findable already functioning in clear light mental activity. It is merely not manifest presently.
The dzogchen position is neither of these. We cannot say that rigpa in its present obscured state is operating as an omniscient awareness. Presently, rigpa is obscured by fleeting stains and flowing together with an automatically arising (lhan-skyes) factor of dumbfoundedness (rmongs-cha, stupidity, bedazzlement). Because of dumbfoundedness, rigpa does not recognize its own face and, consequently, it is not operational. It functions instead as an alaya for habits (bag-chags-kyi kun-gzhi) – foundational awareness for the habits of grasping for true existence, for karma, and for memories.
Therefore, dzogchen emphasizes the importance of preliminary practices (sngon-‘gro, “ngondro”) and of strengthening the two enlightenment-building networks of positive force and deep awareness (collections of merit and insight) as strongly as the Gelug, Sakya, and non-dzogchen Kagyu traditions emphasize them. The purpose, however, is not for building up good qualities or for actualizing potentials for these qualities, but for eliminating obscurations that prevent rigpa from recognizing its own face. The “face” of rigpa is characterized as Samantabhadra (Kun-tu bzang-po): literally, all-excellent. Such recognition will not happen all by itself, without any causes.
The Meaning of Rigpa Being Permanent
When the dzogchen texts assert that rigpa is an unaffected (‘ dus-ma-byed, unconditioned, uncollected) permanent (rtag-pa) phenomenon, we must understand the meaning carefully. Unaffected, here, means that it is not created anew each moment and does not organically grow from something, as a sprout does from a seed. Thus, it is uncontrived (bcos-med) – not made up or fabricated, under the influence of causes and conditions, as something temporary and new. Moreover, its having good qualities does not depend on causes and conditions. It is permanent, not in the sense of being static and not performing a function, but rather in the sense of lasting forever, as do its qualities.
In each moment, however, rigpa spontaneously gives rise to and is aware of different objects. In this sense, it is fresh and clean (so-ma). Although its nature never changes, these aspects change. Focusing on this feature, Gelug would assert that rigpa is nonstatic (mi-rtag-pa, impermanent). There is no contradiction, however, because dzogchen and Gelug are defining and using the terms permanent and impermanent differently.
Those Who Progress in Stages and Those for Whom It Happens All at Once
There are two types of dzogchen practitioners: those who progress in stages (lam-rim-pa) and those for whom it happens all at once (cig-car-ba). This differentiation regards the manner of proceeding to enlightenment for practitioners once they have realized essence rigpa. In other words, it regards those who have become aryas (‘ phags-pa, highly realized beings) with the attainment of a seeing pathway mind (mthong-lam, path of seeing) and the true stopping of the emotional obscurations.
Those who progress in stages proceed through the arya bodhisattva ten bhumi levels of minds (sa, Skt. bhumi), one by one, gradually removing the cognitive obscurations.
Those for whom it happens all at once achieve a true stopping of both sets of obscuration all at once with the first realization of essence rigpa. Thus, they become aryas and Buddhas simultaneously.
Although dzogchen texts usually speak more of the second variety, only a tiny fraction of practitioners is of this type. Their elimination of both sets of obscuration with the first realization of essence rigpa is due to the enormous amount of positive force (merit) they have built up with bodhichitta and dzogchen practice in previous lives. That positive force may also enable them to proceed through the stages before achieving a seeing pathway mind more quickly than most. Nevertheless, no one asserts the attainment of enlightenment without the buildup of vast networks of positive force and deep awareness, from intense practice of preliminaries, meditation, and bodhisattva conduct – even if the majority of this has occurred in previous lifetimes.
Therefore, when dzogchen texts refer to the recognition of rigpa as the one that cuts off all for complete liberation (chig-chod kun-grol, the panacea for complete liberation), we need to understand this correctly. For those for whom it happens all at once, the first realization of essence rigpa is sufficient for cutting all obscurations for the complete attainment of enlightenment. This does not mean, however, that realization of rigpa is sufficient by itself for attaining enlightenment, without need for any preliminaries, such as bodhichitta or strengthening the two enlightenment-building networks, as the causes for achieving that realization.
Contrast with Gradual and Sudden Enlightenment as Asserted in Chinese Buddhism
Several traditions of Chinese Buddhism differentiate between gradual and sudden enlightenment. The two do not correspond to the dzogchen distinction between the manner of practice for those who progress in stages and those for whom it happens all at once.
- Gradual enlightenment (tsen-min) entails working, in graded steps, with samsaric mental activity to gain liberation from samsara.
- Sudden enlightenment (ston-mun) derives from the view that it is impossible to gain liberation from samsara by using samsaric mental activity. We need to make a total break from that level and break out “all of a sudden.”
Various schools of Chan in China (Jap. Zen) assert sudden enlightenment. The methods for suddenly breaking out of samsaric mental activity include working with paradox (Jap. koan) to stop all conceptual thought, just sitting (Jap. zazen), or simply stopping all thought. Dzogchen does not employ any of these methods.
Dzogchen Explains from the Point of View of the Result
According to the early twentieth-century Rimey (nonsectarian) master Jamyang-kyentzey-wangpo (‘ Jam-dbyangs mkhyen-brtse dbang-po), the four traditions of Tibetan Buddhism may be differentiated according to the point of view from which they explain: basis, path, or result.
- The Gelug tradition explains from the point of view of the basis – in other words, from the viewpoint of ordinary practitioners. For example, such persons are capable of perceiving appearances or voidness only separately, although the two are inseparable. Therefore, Gelug explains appearances and voidness as the two truths and thus deepest truth is self-voidness alone. Consequently, Gelug presents the svabhavakaya (ngo-bo-nyid sku, body of self-nature) of a Buddha as the voidness of a Buddha’s omniscient awareness.
- The Sakya tradition explains from the viewpoint of the path. Although clear light mental activity on the basis level, for example at the moment of death, cannot be said to be blissful; nevertheless, it is made blissful on the anuttarayoga tantra path. Speaking from that point of view, Sakya asserts clear light awareness as naturally blissful.
- Nyingma and Kagyu traditions explain from the resultant point of view of a Buddha. For example, Buddhas nonconceptually cognize appearances and voidness simultaneously. Therefore, Nyingma and Kagyu – and thus dzogchen – explain deepest truth as inseparable voidness and appearance and, consequently, they present svabhavakaya as the inseparability of the other three Buddha-bodies.
Thus, when dzogchen texts speak in terms of the natural state beyond karma, beyond the categories of constructive and destructive, they are speaking from the resultant viewpoint of a Buddha. This presentation does not give free license to practitioners on earlier levels, who are still under the influence of disturbing emotions and attitudes, to commit destructive acts. Such persons still build up karma and still experience its suffering results.
Break-Through and Skip-Ahead
The dzogchen literature includes much discussion of the stages of practice called break-through (khregs-chod, “tekcho”) and skip-ahead (thod-rgal, “togel”). These are extremely advanced practices, equivalent to the final stages of the complete stage of anuttarayoga tantra.
On the break-through stage, once we have been led to recognize rigpa by our dzogchen masters, we are able to access essence rigpa and thus stop all sem, as the subtle energy-winds automatically dissolve. In other words, we are able to stop all grosser levels of mental activity – the levels at which the fleeting stains of disturbing emotions and attitudes and conceptual cognition occur. With this, we attain aseeing pathway mind and become an arya. Unless we are practitioners for whom it happens all at once, we are not yet able to remain forever at the level of essence rigpa. After meditation, we revert to sem.
On the skip-ahead stage, we gain increasing familiarity with essence rigpa. Moments of sem are the immediately preceding condition (de-ma-thag rkyen) for our experience being comprised of the five aggregate factors (phung-po, Skt. skandha). The more frequently and the longer we are able to remain with essence rigpa, the more we weaken the force of an immediately preceding condition for experiencing five aggregates.
Without a strong immediately preceding condition, our five aggregates fade, including our ordinary bodies, and we arise in the form of a rainbow body (‘ ja’-lus). This occurs because among the natural qualities of rigpa is that it spontaneously establishes the appearance of five-colored rainbow light.
The rainbow body is the obtaining cause (nyer-len rgyu) which transforms into the rupakaya (gzugs-sku, form bodies) of a Buddha. The equivalent cause for a rupakaya in general anuttarayoga tantra (excluding Kalachakra) is either an illusory body (sgyu-lus) in father tantra or a light body (‘ od-lus) in mother tantra. The equivalent in Kalachakra is a devoid form (stong-gzugs). Although dzogchen sometimes uses the terms light body and devoid form for rainbow body, and general anuttarayoga sometimes uses rainbow body for light body, the types of bodies achieved and the methods for achieving them in general anuttarayoga, Kalachakra, and dzogchen remain distinct.
The Necessity of Mahayoga and Anuyoga Practice before Dzogchen
It is impossible to attain the break-through and skip-ahead stages without prior practice of mahayoga and anuyoga – if not in this lifetime, then in previous ones. For this reason, atiyoga, a synonym for dzogchen, usually appears in the form of maha-atiyoga, meaning a union of mahayoga and dzogchen.
Mahayoga
Mahayoga practice emphasizes the equivalent of the anuttarayoga generation stage, in which we work with the imagination – in other words, conceptually. Although rigpa is beyond words and concepts, nevertheless we rely on an idea of rigpa that we use as a facsimile to represent rigpa in meditation before we are actually able to access it.
We visualize ourselves as a Buddha-figure (yidam, deity), such as Vajrasattva. This acts as a cause for the five-colored rainbow light that is a natural quality of rigpa to appear in the form of a rainbow body Vajrasattva and, ultimately, as the network of enlightening forms or rupakaya of a Buddha. Although the nature of rigpa is spontaneously to establish appearances with five-colored rainbow light; nevertheless, without a previous cause as a model, it is not likely to establish the appearance of a rupakaya.
Moreover, we visualize ourselves as a couple in union, experiencing simultaneously arising greatly blissful awareness (lhan-skyes bde-ba chen-po) – blissful awareness arising simultaneously with each moment of rigpa. This acts as a cause for eliminating the obscurations that prevent the spontaneous establishment of rigpa’s natural quality of bliss.
Anuyoga
Anuyoga practice emphasizes the equivalent of the stages of general anuttarayoga tantra complete stage practice prior to the attainment of actual clear light awareness and a seeing pathway mind. Thus, it entails working with the subtle energy-system with its energy-winds, energy-channels, and energy-drops (rtsa-rlung-thig-le). Such practice, in a sense, “greases” the subtle energy-system so that the energy-winds will more easily dissolve automatically at the break-through stage.
Basic Procedure of Dzogchen Meditation
Moments of conceptual thinking (rnam-rtog), specifically moments of verbal thinking, simultaneously arise, abide, and disappear, as does writing on water. No effort is required to dissolve them, which is the meaning of the term automatic liberation (rang-grol, self-liberation). Thoughts automatically free themselves, in the sense of disappearing simultaneously with arising. When we abide in this state of simultaneous arising, abiding, and disappearing, we abide in the “natural state of the mind.” It is sometimes described as the space in between milliseconds of thought or as the open space underlying thoughts.
When the texts describe that this level of mental activity does not make distinctions into “this”s and “that”s, they mean that it does not make distinctions into truly existent “this”s and “that”s. They do not mean that this level of mental activity lacks distinguishing (‘ du-shes, recognition) of what anything is. It merely lacks the conceptual cognition that actively labels something with a mental construct, such as “table.” It cannot be that rigpa knows nothing. After all, when fully operational, rigpa is the omniscient awareness of a Buddha.
The dzogchen presentation here does not contradict the Gelug-Prasangika assertion that things conventionally exist as “this”s or “that”s merely inasmuch as they can be validly labeled as “this”s or “that”s. Nothing exists inherently in something, making it a “this” or a “that” by its own power. Nevertheless, an object can be correctly labeled as “a table” by a valid cognition of its superficial (conventional) truth and this object has the ability to perform the function (don-byed nus-pa) of a table.
Differences between the Dzogchen, Vipassana, and Mahamudra Meditation Methods concerning Conceptual Thought
Vipassana
Vipassana (lhag-mthong, Skt. vipashyana) meditation within the sphere of Theravada Buddhism entails noting and watching the arising and falling of moments of conceptual thinking, but not through the “eyes” of an independently existing “me” as the observer. Through this procedure, we realize the impermanence or fleeting nature of conceptual thought and of mental activity in general. We also realize that mental activity occurs without an independent agent “me” either observing it or making it happen.
Dzogchen meditation, in contrast, focuses on the simultaneous arising, abiding, and disappearing of moments of conceptual thinking – not simply noting or watching it. This allows us to recognize first effulgent rigpa – the aspect of rigpa that spontaneously establishes the appearance of simultaneously arising, abiding, and disappearing thoughts. It then allows us to recognize essence rigpa – the aspect of rigpa that serves as the cognitive space underlying every moment of mental activity and allowing for the spontaneous establishment of simultaneously arising, abiding, and disappearing thoughts.
Moreover, vipassana deals only with the grosser levels of mental activity, whereas dzogchen accesses the subtlest level, rigpa.
Mahamudra
One of the main methods of mahamudra meditation in the Karma Kagyu tradition is to regard moments of conceptual thinking as dharmakaya (chos-sku) – the network of omniscient awareness of a Buddha encompassing everything. If dharmakaya is likened to the ocean, then moments of conceptual thinking are like waves on the ocean. Whether the ocean is calm or churning with waves, still the waves are water. Thus, without consciously seeking to quiet the waves, we focus on the ocean, which is never disturbed in its depths, no matter how large the waves on the surface may be. Consequently, the conceptual process naturally quiets down.
In the Gelug/Kagyu tradition of mahamudra, we regard moments of conceptual thinking to be like fleeting clouds that temporarily obscure the sky. They arise and disappear in the sky, but are not in the nature of the sky.
Both mahamudra and dzogchen deal with the subtlest level of mental activity, mahamudra accesses it by dissolving the energy-winds and the grosser levels of mental activity, whereas dzogchen accesses it by recognizing it within the grosser levels, namely sem.
Contrast between Dzogchen and Chan (Zen)
- Chan (Jap. zen) is exclusively a sutra practice, whereas dzogchen is exclusively tantra and, specifically, the highest class of tantra. Thus, dzogchen works with the subtlest level of mental activity, whereas Chan works with grosser levels.
- Although Chan does not explicitly teach that all good qualities are complete in the mind, nevertheless it implicitly implies this point, particularly concerning compassion. Chan has only minimal emphasis on cultivating compassion as a method to eliminate the obscurations that prevent innate compassion from shining forth. When we reach the natural state, compassion will automatically be part of that state. Dzogchen, on the other hand, not only explicitly teaches that all qualities, not only compassion, are complete in rigpa, but entails extensive sutra and tantra meditation practice for cultivating compassion.
- Chan practice does not require beforehand the common and uncommon preliminaries of sutra study and meditation and of a hundred thousand repetitions of various practices, whereas dzogchen practice requires both sets of preliminaries.
- Chan practice does not require receiving an empowerment (initiation) beforehand, whereas dzogchen practice does.
- Although enlightenment requires the subtlest level of mental activity, Chan neither explains this level nor presents explicit methods for reaching it. Moreover, it does not discuss the subtle energy-system. Nevertheless, focus on the area below the navel (Jap. hara) in various Chan practices undoubtedly causes the energy-winds to enter and dissolve in the central channel, which brings access to this subtlest level. Dzogchen accesses rigpa through being led to recognize it by our spiritual masters, after we have “greased” the subtle energy-system with prior anuyoga practice.
- The Chan method, specifically in the Rinzai tradition, for stopping the conceptual process is “profound doubt” – doubting all conceptual statements – and koan practice, often entailing paradox. Dzogchen stops the conceptual process through focusing on the simultaneous arising and disappearing of thoughts.
- In Chan, the cause for actualizing a rupakaya, especially in the Soto tradition, is sitting in the perfect posture of a Buddha. In dzogchen, the causes are rigpa’s nature of spontaneously establishing appearances, rigpa’s innate feature of shining with five-colored rainbow light, and prior mahayoga practice of visualizing ourselves as Buddha-figures. Chan does not have any discussion or presentation of Buddha-figures.
Concluding Remarks
Dzogchen is an extremely advanced and difficult practice. When described as effortless (‘ bad-med), this does not mean that as beginners, we do not need to do anything – just sit, relax, and everything will happen all at once. Effortless refers to the fact that thoughts automatically disappear simultaneously with their arising: we do not need to make an effort to make them disappear. Nevertheless, we need to recognize and realize this fact. Effortless also refers to when we realize essence rigpa, then, based on prior mahayoga and anuyoga practice, the energy-winds effortlessly dissolve and an appearance of ourselves as a rainbow body in the aspect of a Buddha-figure effortlessly arises.
Thus, although the dzogchen literature primarily speaks from the points of view of the resultant stage and of those for whom it happens all at once, we need to gather the causes for success before we are able to practice dzogchen successfully. In other words, we cannot dispense with practicing the common and uncommon preliminaries, receiving empowerment, keeping the appropriate vows, and practicing a certain amount of mahayoga and anuyoga meditation.
Now, however, we may practice a facsimile of dzogchen meditation to familiarize ourselves with the method. Focusing on the simultaneous arising, abiding, and disappearing of thoughts, on whatever level we can, is helpful for overcoming anxiety, worry, anger, and so on. However, we need to try to avoid fooling ourselves into thinking that this is the actual, deeper level of dzogchen meditation. We need to try to avoid the mistake of thinking that everything is already perfect and so there is no need to change destructive patterns in our attitudes or behavior.
In the late 1960s, human experiments with psychedelic drugs were brought to a halt. Government reacted to the anarchy of the hippy counter-culture. The drug-crazed Charles Manson slayings came to symbolise public fear of the street use of LSD. Funding ceased, and the few researchers who battled on were ostracised. But lost in the blanket ban were remarkable research projects in the field of psychiatry that held out new hope for the treatment of schizophrenia and alcoholism. Bill Eagles’ extraordinary film tells the story of a handful of dedicated scientists who have struggled to make psychedelic research respectable again. In the USA, psychiatrists Rick Strassman and Charles Grob, and neuroscientist Deborah Mash each quietly began investigations with unknown psychedelic compounds, to avoid the alarm bells of LSD. Strassman pursued the Federal Drug Administration for permission to do safety trials of DMT. Mash works on treating cocaine addicts, achieving success with Ibogaine, a psychedelic derived from a West African plant. Their success hinges on the patient having a ‘peak’ experience, entering the realm of the mystical or religious. The early researchers had spotted this. Now it was dramatically reinforced by unique new evidence from Brazil. Unable to work in the USA, Grob visited Brazil to track down the ritual use of Ayahuasca, a leaf rich in the powerful DMT. For centuries it has been used amongst the shamans of the Amazon. But today, in urban Brazil, tens of thousands of men, women and children are taking the drug as part of an ecstatic Christian cult experience. The Brazilian Government asked Grob to look at long-term damaging effects of the drug. Instead, he found no evidence of toxicity or brain damage, and also that long-term users functioned better in their community. In 1992 Brazil legalised ritual use of Ayahuasca. The FDA took careful note. Then in the early 1990s, leading lights of the US computer industry began admitting that many breakthroughs in Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s had been inspired by regular psychedelic drug use. Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, and founding father of Microsoft, Bob Wallace, reveal on camera the psychedelic influence on their creativity. This anecdotal evidence raised support for the psychedelic researchers. Now Strassman has received approval from the FDA for research into LSD itself.
Maybe Logic “is” a hilarious and mind-bending journey into the multi-dimensional life of Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Featuring video spanning 25 years and the best of 100 hours of footage thoroughly tweaked, transmuted and regenerated, Maybe Logic follows the ever-open eye of Pope Bob as he penetrates human illusions exposing the mathematical probabilities and spooky synchronicities of the 8 dimensions of his Universe.
The feature-length documentary features Tom Robbins, RU Sirius, Ivan Stang, Paul Krassner, Valerie Corral and Douglas Rushkoff.
The soundtrack includes music from Boards of Canada, Animals On Wheels, Tarentel, Funki Porcini, The Supplicants, Pullman, Matt Elliott, The Cinematic Orchestra, Ognen Spiroski and Amon Tobin.
