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Based on Karen Armstrong’s book, this film examines the concept of God in the three major monotheistic religions from the days of Abraham to modern times. Through analysis of historic and holy texts and incorporation of ancient art and artifacts, the program explores the deity written about in the Bible and the Quran. The evolution and intertwining of various Christian, Jewish and Islamic interpretations of God are also addressed.
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
my son wanted to be a super hero this year for halloween
but wanted to make up his own “guy”
he decided he would be “moth man”
moths being “drawn to light” and all
he has a thing for puns
he selected the death’s head hawk moth to be modeled after
his super power was a “cosmic photon laser” that would shoot form his eyes at super villains and “bad guys in general”
this laser would blind them in a darkness to everything but the truth
placing them in a state of reckoning and understanding
he would have no need to fight them
and no need to “call the cops” since the villains would “right themselves”
moth man is also a freestyle rapper…
which you would really just have to hear
quotes above are his words
all his ideas
i just did the work to manifest as best i could
this is a 10 min music mix he and worked on together that basically serve as theme song and fight scene score
he picked out the songs and i mixed them http://www.mediafire.com/?yjmyd2gjn3z
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.
so i thought i would type along while watchin this vid
as i tend to do in a stream of consciousness tag along style
i seriously got a lil scared about 2mins in and decided to leave it alone
but here’s the vid and my type along
edit: and here is the intro he speaks of
http://c0122981.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/090917BananaManIntro.pdf
so he start’s off with the vague, open and loaded question
“are you concerned about what’s happening to our country?”
divisive but loaded to where pretty much anyone would say yes based upon their own ideals and paradigms
but as soon as you internally answer “yes”
he goes off to tag his issues and grievances like we held the same when the question was asked
“god-given liberties”
how does repressed responsibility projected as a space daddy give you liberties
liberty is the right and power to express oneself in a manner of one’s choosing
it is to be free of restriction or control
isn’t that what the religions of abraham do
don’t they have like 10 set-in-stone restrictions
and are you not allowed to choose and control yourself
but must be modeled after a misunderstood and misused palestinian shaman
don’t they have that “sin” shit
and the whole eden guilt trip
tha fuck is mike seaver talkin bout!
and i’m pretty sure kids can pray in public fella
they do it all the time
i think what folk don’t like is when you try to proselytize us in public
yes
they can freely open a bible in school
they can open any book of religion and fantasy they wish
so long as its appropriate and non interfering with school work
which is what you are there to do
don’t you go to school on the weekends for the bible?
in some public places the ten commandments are not wished for or wanted displayed by the public
they are tribal commandments from 15 centuries ago!
they are societal law and civil codes for a specific population
why would the public want such displayed?
to what ends?
what about every other tribe, group, cult, club, justice league or cabal
are we to be privy and reminded of their rules and regulations?
do you think so kirk?
and yeah
the gideons
nor any other religious sub sect are allowed to proselytize at schools
im down for lettin the gideons as long as e let the hare krishnas, pastafarians and ubermensch do the same
you with me there kirk?
yes kirk
most of the enlightened or educated folk in the country do not believe in space daddies or flying monkeys
that would tend to make quite a bit of sense ya
since they have the investigative and educated experience
and kirk
atheism has doubled because paradigms like yours and people like you are the alternative!
it’s really that simple
really
not due to proselytizing professors
um
see
what you’re doing there is projection
you are assuming others do what you do
i would surely say 61% of the students at such a high level of education as you speak of are already atheistic or agnostic
again it comes with being able to think your own thoughts or process information at such a high standard
the brainwashing thing is projection too man
dont worry its very normal and nobody really gets it yet
but like you said
the %’s are rising
so that should soon change
thank god the culture is changing!
are you at all familiar with american history
seriously man
thankfully we are evolving
and everyone is pretty much aware of your “alternative”
or the logic you present as the alternative
it’s not like the evil agnostic uni profs are the only voice in the wilderness
you yourself are already overexposed and hold the unique ability to outshine and actually help keep folk agnostic more than anyone who tries to parody you
you’re better than hal lindsey(p.b.u.h.)
im completely lost on that heart changing shit with the gospel
logic?
see…
in your world
folk thinking for themselves is sin
and
you imagine that is a good thing?
ah i think we’re past 61% now
ok
so now you feel threatened by some fellas theory of evolution
and have decided to hijack his work and add false propaganda
please tell me you get the irony of including hitler into that
right
c’mon now
right
wow
think of the intro we could write for the bible!
everyone who accepts and attends the origin theory over the creation theory has already heard all that about darwin
what with the upper education n all
hitler was also a christian there kirk
i’ll let you think your own thought on that for…
well
however long
as i’m only 2 mins in to this so far…
uh-oh
wait
oh your god!
you did not just use science to discredit your “opposition”
did you really just do that?
!wow!
yep
im out!
smile, dance and think about thought
-j
seriously
i mean
seriously
LOGIC!
anyways
yeah
reminds me of third grade
didn’t have as many laughs then though
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.
Obama Joker Poster Artist Exposed As Liberal-Leaning Palestinian
Since NewsBusters and the Drudge Report first introduced America to the Obama Joker poster — with help from talk radio host Tammy Bruce, of course — most media outlets have speculated the artist was likely white, conservative, and racist.
WRONG!
As reported by the Los Angeles Times moments ago, the up-until-now anonymous creator of the poster sweeping the nation is a 20-year-old college student of Palestinian descent with largely liberal political leanings.
Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up:
Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe’s Photoshop software.
Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he’d found online about how to “Jokerize” portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.
Four or five hours later, he happily had his product. [...]
“After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,” Alkhateeb said. “From my perspective, there wasn’t much substance to him.”
“I abstained from voting in November,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state.” If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
How delicious: Kucinich, likely the most liberal of presidential candidates last year!
Although Alkhateeb claims he was making no political statement with the artwork, he’s plugged into the Washington debate. Though born in the United States, his Palestinian family closely follows Middle Eastern politics.
“I think he’s definitely doing better than Bush was,” Alkhateeb said of Obama. Alkhateeb’s views on foreign relations align with the Democrats, he said, while he prefers Republican ideals on domestic issues.
Alkhateeb’s assessment of Obama: “In terms of domestic policy, I don’t think he’s really doing much good for the country right now,” he said. “We don’t have to ‘hero worship’ the guy.” [...]
Regardless, Alkhateeb does agree with the Obama “Hope” artist about “socialism” being the wrong caption for the Joker image. “It really doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” he said. “To accuse him of being a socialist is really … immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?”
Outstanding.
Now that Alkhateeb has been unmasked, it’s going to be fascinating to see how media outlets besides the LA Times report his Middle Eastern background as well as his political leaning.
Stay tuned.
—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
Joe Rogan and Randall Carlson chat about catastrophe, ancient civilizations, consciousness, DMT, and our future as a species…
http://aiwazzsaying.blogspot.com
aiwazzsaying is an esoteric library blog
by DowneastDem
Tue Jun 30, 2009 at 02:41:39 PM PDT
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/30/748515/-Scientists-Visit-the-Creation-Museum
The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky opened in 2007 to present an account of the origins of the universe, life and mankind according to a literal interpretation of the Bible. The museum is used by many evangelical Christians as a backdrop to attack the moral relativism that they believe is ruining America. Visitors to the museum learn that the universe was created 6000 years ago (in six days) and dinosaurs and humans cohabited the earth.
Yesterday a group of scientists visited the Creation Museum.
- DowneastDem’s diary :: ::
The University of Cincinnati was hosting a conference for paleontologists from all over the world. During a break in the activities, a group of 70 scientists made the short trip to the Creation Museum. While the Americans are accustomed to the general hostility to science among many of their fellow citizens, many of the foreign scientists were shocked at what they found.
Tamaki Sato was confused by the dinosaur exhibit. The placards described the various dinosaurs as originating from different geological periods — the stegosaurus from the Upper Jurassic, the heterodontosaurus from the Lower Jurassic, the velociraptor from the Upper Cretaceous — yet in each case, the date of demise was the same: around 2348 B.C.
“I was just curious why,” said Dr. Sato, a professor of geology from Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan.
Poor Dr. Sato. Has he never read the Bible? Doesn’t he know that 2348 BC was the year of the Great Flood?
Of course, the godless Europeans were also taken aback by the exhibits:
“I’m very curious and fascinated,” Stefan Bengtson, a professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said before the visit, “because we have little of that kind of thing in Sweden.”
It’s fun to laugh at the museum and the people that actually believe in the junk science presented there. But not all the scientists were amused:
“It’s sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn’t it?” said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.
Lisa Park of the University of Akron cried at one point as she walked a hallway full of flashing images of war, famine and natural disasters which the museum blames on belief in evolution.
“I think it’s very bad science and even worse theology — and the theology is far more offensive to me,” said Park, a professor of paleontology who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church.
“I think there’s a lot of focus on fear, and I don’t think that’s a very Christian message… I find it a malicious manipulation of the public.”
More than 750,000 people have visited the museum since it opened. Each day, busloads of children from Christian schools throughout America arrive at the Creation Museum for special guided tours.
Rec list? There is a God!
eh
fanmade teaser trailer
http://marketsaw.blogspot.com/2009/03/major-avatar-set-piece-details-see.html
http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/10/29/jon-favreau-calls-james-camerons-avatar-the-future
Jon Favreau Calls James Cameron’s Avatar ‘The Future’
October 29, 2008
Source: Ain’t It Cool News
by Alex Billington
Jon Favreau is another filmmaker who has really solidified his place in the cinematic world in directing Iron Man earlier this year. He’s returning for Iron Man 2, which is a relief, but looking towards the future, the door is open for so much more. Instead of dwelling on Iron Man 2, though, Quint from Ain’t It Cool News talked with Favreau in a recent interview about nearly everything else besides the sequel. And one area I was particularly interested in was his thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar, since he’s one of the lucky few who has seen a few finished scenes from the film. “He’s trying to present this format in a way where it is a game-changer and in seeing it I think it’s the future,” Favreau explains.
We’ve been covering Avatar very closely for the last year, publishing nearly every last interview that Cameron has done. However, we still haven’t seen a single photo or anything from the film yet, but Favreau has. “I really liked the bits that I saw and I saw all the various stages of finished [footage], but he’s a purist in the way he approaches things, and he’s very meticulous.” Favreau jumps into explaining how Cameron “likes to put on a big show” and strive for cinematic revolution. “He’s really pushing the boundaries on motion capture, he’s integrating live action with motion capture and CGI. It takes a painstaking technical approach to that. And he really wants to make it a very visceral, emotional experience.”
“He’s sort of tireless in how much he invests into it as far as his time and effort. You know, he doesn’t make a lot of movies, so a lot of thought and effort goes into each one. And I think that he’s trying to present this format in a way where it is a game-changer and in seeing it I think it’s the future. I don’t think it’s a flash in the pan. I think it’s going to open up a whole new door and I think more so than the glasses it becomes about how many screens could actually present it in its pristine form.”
“The amount of screens is just growing at a very, very fast rate in the States and I think in Europe as well and I think Avatar is going to be the kind of movie that’s an event that you have to go see and you want to see again just to understand what you’re looking at. And then you still have his very effective storytelling. He really creates an adventure and draws you into it in the hero’s journey sense of storytelling, the Joseph Campbell sense of storytelling.”
Favreau adds that he has learned a great deal from Cameron in regards to motion capture and CGI and will be using similar techniques in Iron Man 2 because the way he made Avatar is such a technical revolution. “It is a game-changer from a production standpoint certainly in the way he’s using motion capture and operating a camera within a volume… the line between animation and live action is blurring in many ways.” He adds that even the typical process of filmmaking is changing due to Avatar. “The way that Jim’s doing it, it’s a much more organic process where post-production, production, and pre-production all sort of roll into one another and you’re moving back and forth between those media.”
I’ve been saying Avatar will be the next big cinematic revolution for years now, just because I believe James Cameron has achieved something truly spectacular. I don’t think any of us can really grasp what it will be like at this very moment. We’ll need to see it to believe it, because we can’t even comprehend what it’s all about until we get our first glimpse, which is why we haven’t seen any photos yet. Hearing Favreau say these kind of things only further solidifies my hope that it will be the next revolution. I just get excited thinking about how amazing Avatar could be and how big of a leap forward it will be for cinema.
Quint’s fantastic interview with Favreau also touches briefly on IMAX and why Favreau doesn’t think it’ll really work for Iron Man 2. He primarily believes that CGI at such a high resolution isn’t entirely believable yet and it’s a pain to lug around enormous cameras on set. I’m not entirely sure I can take his side, only because The Dark Knight looked so amazing, but it sounds like Iron Man 2 probably won’t have any scenes shot in IMAX. Either way, I’m very excited to see Favreau take on Iron Man 2 because it seems like he’s really going to push his own filmmaking boundaries even further than the first one. As for Avatar, I know I’m anxiously awaiting our first glimpse at the beautiful world the Cameron has created.
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Major “Avatar” Set Piece Details – See Through the Eyes of an Alien!
Thursday, March 05, 2009
**UPDATE: March 7 - Jim here, got a MASSIVE update to Michael’s story from a MarketSaw reader by the name of Cremany from Germany. He is claiming to have seen a 3 minute clip sequence of Na’vi running through Pandora! He also says there are 2 more clips involved – check out his quotes from the comments section of this post:
ok… i asked a friend who was at CeBit with me and he saw the whole sequence of avatar (3 minutes)! It was 100% avatar, but it wasn’t a promotion for the movie, it was a promotion for a company which works on the photorealistic enviroment in the movie. The company uses 3 clips from avatar to present the technology.
the clip is in a first-person viewpoint and shows a person running on a a root very fast, suddenly the root ends and the person jumps to another root and start running again. you can see big trees in the size of a skyscraper, it is a very dusty and dark.
a friend told me the second clip shows a convoy drivinig through a canyon and suddenly a few big rocks roll into the canyon and the third clip looks like the inside of a huge mushroom with a crystal in the middle.
the clips are really photorealistic but you can see it’s computer animated… impressiv but not mind-melting. it’s very hard for me to explain because i didn’t give the clip a lot of attention…i didn’t realize that this was from avatar.
it was only first-person, but in the second clip my friend saw a few na’vis.but when i saw the clip i didn’t know it could be avatar before i read the topic here on this site. i wasn’t sure, so i ask my friend and he knew more aboud it and he saw all 3 clips, too. he has also a few connections to the event-management, they confirmed the avatar clips as promotion for a company which works together with panasonic.
This could be the clip we have been waiting for guys! I know there were clips shown in Nuremberg, Germany at the Toy Fair so this makes a lot of sense. CeBit is in Hannover. Keep it here for more updates!
Hi everyone, Michael here. A few months ago, G@BRIEL GR@Y dropped into a discussion here on MarketSaw, where he described what he considered to be the standout visual effects set piece of Avatar: a 12 minute sequence seen through the eyes of Jake in Avatar form as, among other things, he runs through the Pandoran jungle. Now, I have heard from a completely different source, who I can confirm as legit, that there is indeed a first person set piece in the film.
First, here is what G@BRIEL GR@Y had to say a few months ago:
There is a twelve min segment entirely in the first person viewpoint. this as im sure you all could understand is a tricky thing, you`ve seen examples in doom. which look cool….but never felt real. for instance blinking blurring of vision. photoreal is now easy. animateing it to define real is very hard. this most definatly is the money shot of the biggest movie ever conceived.
G@BRIEL GR@Y also posted the following on ComingSoon.net (as reported by MarketSaw reader Darkoo):
I was told about a 12 min segment of avatar where its in the first person viewpoint.and they were having probs making the scene feel real because people blink and have blurred vision. and from what im told they have found a very interesting compromise.
Here is what my source, who spoke to someone who had seen parts of the sequence, had to say to me a couple days ago:
1) He said that ‘when you are running through the jungle of Pandora and their tails are moving in front of your face, your brain will melt.’
2) I asked whether it a return to Tech-Noir form from JC and he said ‘its like Aliens, but from the POV of the Aliens’ :)
3) Big Rock Candy Mountain is supposed to be ‘amazing.’
4) Slightly off topic, the BAA preprod at Lightstorm was ‘very much in line with Kishiro’s artwork.’ Imagine that in 3D? /brain melts
So G@BRIEL GR@Y’s report is almost certainly legit, which is very exciting. The concept of Avatar is very much about letting go of the confines of your body, and experiencing the world through a different set of eyes. I think this sequence will be an incredible way of driving this point home. And, yes, it will certainly be brain-meltingly cool. It will be fascinating to watch Battle Angel continue to develop, too. Mark Goerner’s interview shed some fascinating light on the huge amount of work that has gone into that project so far. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
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http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/james-cameron-not-messing-around-with-his-avatar-trailer.php
James Cameron Not Messing Around With His ‘Avatar’ Trailer
Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 10, 2009
James Cameron takes his craft very seriously. And rightfully so, as Cameron’s upcoming film Avatar has built up some impressive buzz and even mightier expectations. Fans expect that the man who pioneered cool CGI effects with Terminator 2 and took scale to the umpteenth level with Titanic
will deliver something truly remarkable with his next film, said to be another potentially mind-boggling sensory experience. And to live up to such lofty expectations, one must choose carefully when cutting together a trailer — as it can severely modify the expectations, hopes and dreams of his faithful fans.
This is why we are now seeing a report from Market Saw that is claiming that eight trailers have failed to meet Cameron’s standards of excellence. There have been strong rumors from various sources saying that a trailer will play for press and industry folks at ShoWest in Las Vegas at the end of this month, but nothing has been confirmed. There has been some footage shown at various toy conferences in Europe, including a three minute clip of Na’vi running through Pandora that was shown at CeBit in Hannover, Germany. You can read a much more in-depth report about that footage here.
Also notable in the Market Saw report is some new information about how grounded the film will be in real science. For those not familiar, the film follows the story of a Marine (Sam Worthington) who is brought to the distant planet of Pandora, inhabited by a humanoid race known as the Na’vi. As he attempts to settle the planet as an alternative home for humanity, he gets in too deep with the Na’vi and ultimately crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival. And as the report explains, the film will have a lot of hard-science based elements as Cameron and team build up this richly bio-diverse planet. “What Weta and Cameron have done is create a complete alien ecosystem grounded in hard science,” Explains Market Saw
’s source. “If Pandora were real, it would look and feel like what will be represented on screen.”
If true, this “eight trailers denied” rumor gives weight to the immense expectations that James Cameron has for this film, which would be his first directorial work since he made the highest grossing film of all-time, Titanic, in 1997. Also, I am digging the “real science” element of Pandora’s ecosystem. If anything, Cameron’s film will be a very cool experience.
Are you excited about Avatar?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/movies/25avatar.html
Fan Fever Is Rising for Debut of ‘Avatar’
LOS ANGELES — In an old airplane hangar near the beach here, James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that may:
(a) Change filmmaking forever
(b) Alter your brain
(c) Cure cancer
For certain expectant movie fans, the answer might as well be all of the above.
Eight months before its scheduled release on Dec. 18, Mr. Cameron’s “Avatar,” a science-fiction thriller filmed with his own specially devised 3-D technology, is stirring up a kind of anticipation that until now had been reserved for, say, the Rapture.
That might foretell a hit on the order of Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic,” with $1.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales.
Or it might just be a giant headache for 20th Century Fox, which is backing “Avatar” and will have to spend much of the year managing expectations for a film whose technological wizardry is presumed by more than a few to promise an experiential leap for audiences comparable to that of “The Jazz Singer,” the arrival of Technicolor or an Obama campaign rally.
To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron or Fox.
But a number of enthusiasts who have been swapping notes on the message boards at IMDB.com claim to have already seen the movie — in their dreams. “The special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons, but they looked 3-D still,” wrote one “planetshane,” whose particular dream involved a pirated copy of an early version.
“It was the best movie I had ever seen,” the post continued.
Only a few weeks ago, Joshua Quittner, a technology writer for Time magazine, fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora, the morning after he was shown just 15 minutes of the film. Mr. Cameron, Mr. Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual “memory creation.”
Questioned by telephone recently at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., Mr. Quittner said he was still reeling from the experience.
“It was like doing some kind of drug,” he said, describing a scene in which the movie’s hero, played by Sam Worthington, ran around “with this kind of hot alien chick,” was attacked by jaguarlike creatures and was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes.
“You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm,” said Mr. Quittner, who remained eager for another dose.
Executives and producers of the film declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement Fox said: “Jim Cameron is breaking new ground with this film. Like all movie fans, the studio is excited by the prospect of such an original piece of entertainment.”
In a brief interview reported by The Associated Press in December, Mr. Cameron said he was worried that “Avatar” could not live up to the expectations that were building around it. “Whatever they think it’s going to be, it’s probably not,” he said at the time about those who were speculating about the movie on the Internet and elsewhere.
Yet Mr. Cameron has done his share to feed the hype with his repeated assurances that a coming wave of 3-D cinema (yes, it still requires glasses) would have the power to penetrate the brain in a way that movies never have.
Some fans believe that Mr. Cameron and his colleagues have finally crossed the “uncanny valley.” That is a supposed point at which a viewer’s responsiveness to a simulated human takes a sudden drop into revulsion as the image comes close to reality but strikes the watcher as being zombielike, or not quite right.
Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, said it is entirely possible that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2-D movies. One, he said, is a kind of inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world.
“Three-D demonstrably creates a space that triggers this GPS; it’s really very stimulating,” Dr. Mendez said. He added that he had used virtual-reality therapy in working with soldiers at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles — and found himself jarred by his experience with a “virtual Iraq” simulation.
“It was with me for days and days,” Dr. Mendez said.
At ShoWest, a convention of movie exhibitors, a few weeks ago, Mr. Cameron in a short promotional video compared watching “Avatar” to “dreaming with your eyes wide open.” (It was a neat complement to those who have been viewing the movie in their sleep.)
But, sooner rather than later, an increasingly restless group of the fans would like to sample the real thing. And that presents a conundrum for Fox, which will be hard pressed to release a conventional, 2-D trailer online — one of the most powerful ways to promote a movie these days — without undercutting the promise of a transcendental 3-D experience.
“I can’t believe they would spend 12 years developing the technology and telling us in words how great this is, then show us in 2-D,” said T. F. Powell, who runs AvatarMovieZone.com, an unofficial fan site devoted to the film. Mr. Powell recently spoke by telephone from Kansas.
Some fans are already teasing their peers about expecting too much.
“You would think this movie cures cancer,” taunted a skeptical Danny Danger in his “movie preview extravaganza” on a MySpace blog in January.
Typically, studios have given a peek at some of their biggest science-fiction and fantasy movies during the giant Comic-Con convention, an annual summer gathering of the fans in San Diego. But that also poses problems for “Avatar,” in that Comic-Con’s convention hall setting has not been equipped to showcase films in 3-D.
“I can’t imagine we will not have something, but nothing has been confirmed,” said David Glanzer, the convention’s director of marketing and public relations, speaking of the prospects for an “Avatar” moment at Comic-Con.
As for the movie’s release in December, Mr. Glanzer said, “Maybe they should have nurses in the lobby.”
It was a joking reference to a ploy once used by the producer William Castle. He posted fake nurses in the lobby of theaters that showed his own neuron-challenging horror film “Macabre,” while insuring every member of the audience for $1,000 against “death by fright.”
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http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/04/29/steven-soderbergh-praises-james-camerons-avatar
Steven Soderbergh Praises James Cameron’s Avatar
Posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
It seems like every other week now a new filmmaker or studio executive makes a comment about how James Cameron’s Avatar is going to revolutionize cinema. Jon Favreau
has called Avatar “a game-changer” and having seen some footage, he thinks “it’s the future.” Recently Sony head Amy Pascal told Forbes that she thinks Avatar is “going to change the way you consume entertainment. I don’t know that it will ever be the way you see dramas, but I can’t say anymore that it won’t be.” And Steven Spielberg has even predicted that Avatar will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever.
Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh is the latest filmmaker to praise Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi epic: “I’ve seen some stuff and holy sh*t,” Soderbergh told ComingSoon . “It’s the craziest sh*t ever. That could negate everything I just said.”
Cameron’s new film is being treated like the second coming. I’m not sure how the film could possibly live up to all the ginormously hype. But just like all of you, I’m riding on the high buzz and hoping it will be great.
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Cameron’s Avatar a 3D drug trip?
By John Howell 30 April 2009
http://sffmedia.com/films/science-fiction-films/352-camerons-avatar-a-3d-drug-trip.html
They have yet to release a trailer or even a publicity photo from actual footage, but James Cameron and his team have managed to generate some impressive hype for his upcoming 3D science fiction epic, Avatar. His first movie since Titanic has a budget pushing US $200 million and enough hype to power a mission to Mars. Now it appears the 3D technology he created to turn his vision into a reality, the key to the movie’s success or failure, may be habit forming. A technology writer for Time Magazine, after being shown 15 minutes of the movie, posited the movie’s 3D action had set off actual “memory creation.”
“I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real,” he said.
The New York Times interviewed him later.
“It was like doing some kind of drug,” he said, describing a scene showing Sam Worthington running around “with this kind of hot alien chick,” and being attacked by jaguarlike creatures. He was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes. “You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm”.
In the same New York Times article, Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioural neurologist at the University of California, said it is entirely possible Cameron’s 3D technology could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies. An inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world, was one example he gave.
“Three-D demonstrably creates a space that triggers this GPS; it’s really very stimulating”.
He went on to say that he had used virtual-reality therapy in working with soldiers at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles, finding himself jarred by his experience with a “virtual Iraq” simulation.
Cameron himself told Time Magazine that 3D viewing “is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn’t.” Cameron also believes that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten the impact of 3D.
So will we all become addicted to 3D films? I’m not sure reality will ever match the hype, but I’m certainly keen to see how close it comes. The last 3D movie I saw, Robert Zemeckis’s excellent animated feature Beowulf, certainly captured my imagination. I remember certain scenes with an unusual clarity (and not just those involving Angelina Jolie).
The only reason I haven’t watched more 3D movies since is that apart from animated cartoons, like Monsters VS Aliens, big screen productions with serious actors and scripts seem hard to find. Perhaps now that Hollywood appears to have caught the 3D bug on a massive scale, with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson willing converts, we’ll be flooded by addictive 3D productions that will transform our viewing experience forever. Or maybe Avatar will come and go and the 3D hype with it? I hope for the former but expect the latter. Only time will tell.
James Cameron’s Avatar was supposed to be released in May, but the international released date has been pushed back until 19 December.
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.
The ESSWE is a learned society, established in 2005 to advance the academic study of the various manifestations of Western esotericism from late antiquity to the present, and to secure the future development of the field.
Among the activities of the Society are:
- Organising conferences and other academic meetings;
- Generally promoting contacts and programmes of exchange among scholars;
- Promoting publications and rendering services in that connection;
- Stimulating research and education;
- Promoting academic debate, interdisciplinary and critical approaches, and the application of a variety of scholarly methods;
- Co-operating with other scholarly associations in and beyond Europe;
- Encouraging the appreciation of the historical, cultural and intellectual significance of Western esotericism by research institutions, scholarly policy makers, and the general public.
ESSWE serves its members with the following benefits:
- Members can make use of an online e-mail system that allows them to easily communicate with other scholars in the field of Western esotericism generally and/or their specific field of expertise;
- Members can use the ESSWE website to make free publicity for their books;
- Members receive a 15% discount on the journal Aries and a 25% discount on volumes published in the Aries Book Series;
- Members receive a discount on ESSWE conference fees.
For information about how to become a member of ESSWE, see “Become a member“.
The board of ESSWE is currently constituted as follows:
- President: Wouter J. Hanegraaff (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
- Vice President: Jean-Pierre Brach (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris, France)
- Treasurer: Rosalie Basten (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
- Secretary: Henny Homan (Huizen, The Netherlands)
- Antoine Faivre (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris, France)
- Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (University of Exeter, UK)
- Andreas Kilcher (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland)
- Christine Maillard (University of Strasbourg, France)
- Marco Pasi (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
- Mark Sedgwick (University of Aarhus, Denmark)
- Michael Stausberg (University of Bergen, Norway)
- Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Holi, also called the Festival of Colours, is a popular Hindu spring festival observed in India, Nepal, and countries with large Hindu diaspora such as Suriname, Guyana, South Africa, Trinidad, the UK, Mauritius and Fiji. In West Bengal of India and Bangladesh, it is known as Dolyatra (Doljatra) or Boshonto Utsav (“spring festival”).
The main day, Holi, also known as Dhulheti, Dhulandi or Dhulendi, is celebrated by people throwing coloured powder and coloured water at each other. Bonfires are lit the day before, also known as Holika Dahan (death of Holika) or Chhoti Holi (little Holi). The bonfires are lit in memory of the miraculous escape that young Prahlad had when Demoness Holika, sister of Hiranyakashipu, carried him into the fire. Holika was burnt but Prahlad, a staunch devotee of Lord Vishnu, escaped without any injuries due to his unshakable devotion. Holika Dahan is referred to as Kama Dahanam in Andhra Pradesh.
Holi is celebrated on the full moon day in the month of Phalugna or Falguna (Phalgun Purnima), which usually falls in the later part of February or March. In 2009, Holi (Dhulandi) was on 11th March and Holika Dahan was on 10th March.
Rangapanchami occurs a few days later on a Panchami (fifth day of the full moon), marking the end of festivities involving colours.
In Vaishnava Theology, Hiranyakashipu is the king of demons, and he had been granted a boon by Brahma, which made it almost impossible for him to be killed. The boon was due to his long penance, after which he had demanded that he not be killed “during day or night; inside the home or outside, not on earth or on sky; neither by a man nor an animal; neither by astra nor by shastra”. Consequently, he grew arrogant, and attacked the Heavens and the Earth. He demanded that people stop worshipping gods and start praying to him.
Despite this, Hiranyakashipu’s own son, (Prahlada), was a devotee of Lord Vishnu. In spite of several threats from Hiranyakashipu, Prahlada continued offering prayers to Lord Vishnu. He was poisoned but the poison turned to nectar in his mouth. He was ordered to be trampled by elephants yet remained unharmed. He was put in a room with hungry, poisonous snakes and survived. All of Hiranyakashipu’s attempts to kill his son failed. Finally, he ordered young Prahlada to sit on a pyre on the lap of his sister, Holika, who could not die by fire by virtue of a shawl which would prevent fire affecting the person wearing it. Prahlada readily accepted his father’s orders, and prayed to Vishnu to keep him safe. When the fire started, everyone watched in amazement as the shawl flew from Holika, who then was burnt to death, while Prahlada survived unharmed, after the shawl moved to cover him. The burning of Holika is celebrated as Holi.
Later Lord Vishnu came in the form of a Narasimha (who is half-man and half-lion) and killed Hiranyakashipu at dusk (which was neither day nor night), on the steps of the porch of his house (which was neither inside the house nor outside) by restraining him on his lap (which is neither in the sky nor on the earth) and mauling him with his claws (which are neither astra nor shastra).
In Vrindavan and Mathura, where Lord Krishna grew up, the festival is celebrated for 16 days (until Rangpanchmi in commemoration of the divine love of Radha for Krishna). Lord Krishna is believed to have popularized the festival by playing pranks on the gopis here. Krishna is believed to have complained to his mother about the contrast between his dark colour and his consort Radha’s fair colour. Krishna’s mother decided to apply colour to Radha’s face. The celebrations officially usher in spring, the celebrated season of love.
There is another story about the origin of Holi. Kamadeva is a god of love. Kama’s body was destroyed when he shot his weapon at Shiva in order to disrupt his penance and help Parvati to marry Shiva. Shiva then opened his third eye, the gaze of which was so powerful that Kama’s body was reduced to ashes. For the sake of Kama’s wife Rati (passion), Shiva restored him, but only as a mental image, representing the true emotional and mental state of love rather than physical lust. The Holi bonfire is believed to be celebrated in commemoration of this event.
Holi is a festival of radiance (Teja) in the universe. During this festival, different waves of radiance traverse the universe, thereby creating various colours that nourish and complement the function of respective elements in the atmosphere.
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites–oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others–work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.
http://www.lionsgate.com/religulous
Bill Maher interviews some of religion’s oddest adherents. Muslims, Jews and Christians of many kinds pass before his jaundiced eye. Maher goes to a Creationist Museum in Kentucky, which shows that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time 5000 years ago. He talks to truckers at a Truckers’ Chapel. (Sign outside: “Jesus love you.”) He goes to a theme park called Holy Land in Florida. He speaks to a rabbi in league with Holocaust deniers. He talks to a Muslim musician who preaches hatred of Jews. Maher finds the unlikeliest of believers and, in a certain Vatican priest, he even finds an unlikely skeptic. Written by J. Spurlin
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.
Integral Christianity: Theory and Practice.
Part 1. The Relationship of the One and the Many.
Brother David Steindl-Rast
In this dialogue, Brother David and Ken Wilber discuss the concept of Integral panentheism—the belief that God immanently exists within the manifest universe, interpenetrating all that we can touch and see, while simultaneously existing infinitely beyond the universe in timeless transcendence. Contrasted with theistic, deistic, and pantheistic belief systems, Integral panentheism brings new life to traditional Christian practices and doctrine, such as gratefulness, prayer, and the Holy Trinity, while also offering a stable foundation for truly inter-religious conversations in the modern and post-modern worlds.
Who: Brother David Steindl-Rast has been a practicing Benedictine monk for over half a century and was one of the first Vatican-sanctioned delegates to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. He is a recipient of the Martin Buber Award for his outstanding role in building bridges between religious traditions, and serves as a senior member of the Mount Savior Monastery in Elmira, New York.
Summary: As human beings continue to evolve, so do our conceptions of God. In fact, some would go so far as to say that as human beings evolve, God evolves right along with us, and with every small step humanity takes toward wider care and deeper consciousness, God takes another step toward its own perfection and the divinization of the universe. And it is through our very conceptions of the divine that God’s voice can speak to and through us, finding more volume and resonance as the architecture of thought becomes more sophisticated and inclusive.
This is why our theoretical understanding of spirituality is just as important as our actual experiences of God, or Buddha, or Spirit of any name. There is an aspect of God, our selves, and the universe that is best described as being ultimately “One,” and there is an aspect that is best described as the “Many.” And while we may all be looking at (and as) the very same ultimate Oneness, it is our interpretations of that Oneness that determine our relationship with the Many.
Central to the discussion is the notion of panentheism as a foundation to anchor our conceptions of God. This is not to be confused with the idea of pantheism, in which the divine is completely immanent within the physical world itself, but is without transcendent qualities whatsoever. Panentheism also offers a way to step beyond merely deistic conceptions of Spirit, in which God is credited with the creation of the universe but remains eternally removed from it, with no immanent qualities whatsoever—the “great clockmaker in the sky,” as deists often describe the divine, able to be perceived only through the light of reason. Panentheism also frees us from the typically mythological conceptions of God that are found in traditional forms of theism, in which one particular group of people claim an exclusive knowledge of God’s nature—usually a single, monolithic, omniscient God who reveals himself only through faith and revelation, which more often than not resembles the “great superego in the sky.”
Rather than saying “the universe is God,” as the pantheists would, or that “God is beyond the universe,” as the deists and even theists likely would, the panentheistic view would more likely state that “the universe is in God, and God is in everything in the universe.” In this conception, God is the universe, while being infinitely beyond the universe—that is, to borrow terms from Nagarjuna, there is a sense in which God represents Absolute unmanifest perfection, while simultaneously becoming increasingly more perfect in the relative world. It is precisely this divide between God transcendent and God immanent that, in the modern and post-modern worlds, only panentheism can seem to bridge. As American philosopher Charles Hartshorne put it, “panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism” (the synthesis of deism and pantheism, in which God preceded the universe and created it, but is now equivalent with it), “except their arbitrary negations.”
One of the most important contributions Christianity has to offer the world’s discussion of spirituality is the idea of the Holy Trinity: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This unique conception of God as “three persons, one substance” has been a central part of Christian doctrine since the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. And when viewed through the lens of Integral panentheism, the Trinity truly comes alive in our minds as three very different ways of experiencing God:
- The God that is the great, unknowable, Absolute Mystery, from which we come and to which we shall return—God transcendent, or God the Father.
- The God that we recognize in everything that we see, everything that we touch, everything that is—the entire universe as the Body of Christ; God immanent; or God the Son.
- The God that exists through doing, creating, knowing, understanding—the dynamic aspects of God; God as verb; or God as Holy Spirit.
The Holy Trinity is just one of many traditional religious symbols from around the world that take on renewed life, relevance, and significance in the light of a panentheistic conception of the physical and spiritual worlds. As such, the panentheistic model is an almost ideal place to begin any Integral discussion of religion and spirituality, as it not only helps to reconcile some of the apparent contradictions within the Christian tradition (e.g. transcendence vs. immanence), but also provides a common foundation upon which we can begin a truly inter-religious discussion, revealing many of the essential similarities (and important differences) between a multitude of different religions and faiths, as well as with the secular and scientific worlds. In a panentheistic universe, there is no need for conflict between spirituality and science, between God and evolution, or even between consciousness and biochemistry.
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Part 2. The Three Faces of God.
Brother David Steindl-Rast
In the second installation of Br. David and Ken’s dialogue, we explore the concept of the “Three Faces of God”—a remarkably insightful way to approach our understanding of spiritual reality, and one which helps organize and understand all of the various descriptions of the divine throughout all the world’s great spiritual traditions.
Summary: Just as human beings intrinsically possess 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person perspectives of the world, so do we possess those same perspectives in our experience of spirituality. And while these dimensions of the divine can be found in just about any spiritual lineage—Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Islam, etc.—many of these traditions only explicitly emphasize one or two of these perspectives, resulting in one or more important aspects of spirituality often being left out of their conceptions of God.
God in 3rd-person is often described as the “great web-of-life,” and is frequently experienced when observing objects of miraculous beauty such as the Grand Canyon, exquisite music, transcendent art, or the mind-boggling elegance of deep-space photography. Many astronauts returning to Earth have experienced powerful states of transcendence triggered by simply looking at our planet floating in the vacuum of space, the sublime fragility and significance of the human condition clearly reflected in their retinas. As John Glenn said, “To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith.”
Or, consider the words of another NASA hero, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell:
“On the way home from the moon, looking out at the heavens, this insight—which I now call a transcendent experience—happened. I realized that the molecules of my body had been created or prototyped in an ancient generation of stars—along with the molecules of the spacecraft and my partners and everything else we could see including the Earth out in front of us. Suddenly, it was all very personal. Those were my molecules. It was an experience of interconnectedness. It was an experience of bliss, of ecstasy… it was so profound. I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion—was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discreet things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description.”
God in 2nd-person is traditionally defined as the “I-Thou” relationship with the divine, where Spirit is experienced as a living intelligence that we can actually interact with in our own lives. As Ken often says, borrowing from renowned theologian Martin Buber, in the “I-Thou” relationship, God is the hyphen connecting the I and the Thou. And of course, our conceptions of God in 2nd-person evolve right alongside the rest of humanity, growing from magical animistic immersion, to the mythic “old bearded white man in the sky” interpretation, to rational and pluralistic recognitions of divinity within our families, communities, and humanity itself, to the simple intuition that we all exist within the unimaginable Mind of some Supreme Being, by whatever name.
This, as Br. David mentions, is reflected beautifully in the closing lines of a love poem written by ee cummings, titled i am so glad and very:
we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i
Or, from the lips of George Harrison:
It’s been a long long long time
How could I ever have lost you
When I loved you
It took a long long long time
Now I’m so happy I found you
How I love you
So many tears I was searching
So many tears I was wasting, oh oh
Now I can see you, be you
How can I ever misplace you
How I want you
Oh I love you
Your know that I need you
Ooh I love you
God in 1st-person refers to the actual phenomenological experience of God, in the form of satori, kensho, ecstatic reverie, and other sorts of “peak experiences” of the divine. These are most frequently exercised through some form of contemplative practice, such as meditation or prayer, in which we can directly experience consciousness as the “singular to which the plural is unknown”—and the effortless, open awareness behind all of our experiences is recognized as the consciousness of God (or Godhead, as Christian mystics might prefer). In this space, all of our thoughts, emotions, and experiences, as well as the rest of the world around us, are simply and effortlessly witnessed, in much the same way that clouds float effortlessly through the infinite expanse of the sky. And that effortless expanse at the center of each and every moment IS God transcendent, looking at His/Her own immanence through each of our eyes. A wonderful description of this sort of personal experience of and as God can be found in Ken’s book One Taste:
“It is true that the physical matter of your body is inside the matter of the house, and the matter of the house is inside the matter of the universe. But you are not merely matter or physicality. You are also Consciousness as Such, of which matter is merely the outer skin. The ego adopts the viewpoint of matter, and therefore is constantly trapped by matter—trapped and tortured by the physics of pain. But pain, too, arises in your consciousness, and you can either be in pain, or find pain in you, so that you surround pain, are bigger than pain, transcend pain, as you rest in the vast expanse of pure Emptiness that you deeply and truly are.
So what do I see? If I contract as ego, it appears that I am confined in the body, which is confined in the house, which is confined in the large universe around it. But if I rest as Witness—the vast, open, empty consciousness—it becomes obvious that I am not in the body, the body is in me; I am not in this house, the house is in me; I m not in the universe, the universe is in me. All of them are arising in the vast, open, empty, pure, luminous Space of primordial Consciousness, right now and right now and forever right now. Therefore, be Consciousness.”
What is fascinating is that we can see that any spiritual tradition is capable of expressing all three of these forms of spiritual experience—in fact, if you are leaving any of these out, chances are your understanding of spiritual realities is incomplete in some way.
Historically, Western traditions can be said to have largely focused on 2nd- and 3rd-person interpretations, and have often been distrustful of 1st-person reports of God, using them, at times, as the grounds for heresy. On the other end of the pathology, Eastern traditions tend to emphasize 1st- and 3rd-person perspectives, and too often try to deny the existence of any sort of personal “God in 2nd-person.” However, when moving from a 3rd-person description of God directly to a 1st-person experience of God, without the soul-cleansing qualities of extreme humility, grace, and gratefulness that God in 2nd-person bestows upon us, it can be deceptively easy to sneak the whims of the ego into our interpretations of spiritual experience—and, rather than transcending the ego, our spiritual experiences can ironically become the last refuge of the ego.
Strictly speaking, nothing can be said about the true essence of Reality (including that)—but in the finite, manifest domain, the three faces of God appear to be intrinsic to Spirit’s radiant display. And unfortunately, Spirit’s expression as 2nd-person Thou has largely gotten stuck at the mythic-membership fundamentalist level of development. The modern world not only rejected the marginalization and cruelties associated with the mythic god, it threw out God in 2nd-person altogether—and thus a huge baby got thrown out with the bathwater of mythic consciousness: one-third of God’s own ever-present Face. Indeed, one of the key dilemmas for humanity is discovering a way to help the great spiritual and religious traditions grow into their modern, postmodern, and integral forms of being-in-the-world, with all three faces of God shining brightly.
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Part 3. Gratitude, the Listening Heart, and Contemplation-in-Action.
Brother David Steindl-Rast
In the third and final installation of Br. David and Ken’s discussion, we explore some specific practices to help cultivate and stabilize our experiences of gratitude, and to learn how to deal with those darker aspects of our lives we simply cannot feel grateful for, no matter how hard we might try….
Summary: For some, the notion of “God in 2nd-person” can initially seem somewhat confusing, off-putting even. After all, with whom exactly are we communing? The anthropomorphic “personal God” we know from the Western religious traditions? The pantheon of deities and demons we find in the East? Mother Nature? The Great Web of Life? The Flying Spaghetti Monster? There seem to have been so few exemplars in the modern and postmodern worlds to help us understand the “we” that exists between our individual selves and the divine, especially since this crucial “Second Face” of God is so frequently labeled as obsolete, a quaint relic of mythic consciousness.
It is interesting that, while modernity and postmodernity are quick to dismiss the importance of the 2nd-person nature of God, the Golden Rule (“treat others as you would like to be treated”) is widely acknowledged as the common core of all the world’s religions, and is so easily adaptable to these post-mythic levels of development. And what else is the Golden Rule, if not a distillation of the very essence of God in 2nd-person? While it can be difficult to find this sort of devotional spirituality role modeled beyond the mythic stage of development, it nonetheless shows up in everyone’s life—in every act of kindness, compassion, and empathy, in every quiet feeling of gratitude, in every heartfelt “thank you,” and in every intimate connection we have ever felt with each other and with the world. Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, we are in relationship with God every single moment of our lives. And every moment is another opportunity to express the deepest gratitude for this relationship, allowing the love we feel between ourselves and God to fill our hearts—until we feel ourselves overflowing with warmth and limitless light, spilling it into the rest of the world.
Cultivating this experience of gratefulness—or “great fullness”—is the impulse behind all devotional practice, no matter what tradition it is situated in. As such, gratitudeitself represents a unique space in which we can anchor our discussions of the unity underlying all the world’s religions. While our third-person descriptions of the divine often vary greatly from tradition to tradition, and our first-person experiences of Spirit are usually elusive and difficult to wrap meaningful language around, the feelings of gratitude and thankfulness are universal—so universal, in fact, that they form the living bedrock of all the world’s great spiritual traditions, from the beginning of the world until the end of time.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s an ancient deity with a long white beard, a thousand-armed bodhisattva, your guru, priest, or sensei, your friends and family, a stranger on the street, your cat or dog, or the unknowable Mystery behind it all—the point resides within none of these objects of devotion, as they all equally reflect the fractalized perfection of the One. As Martin Buber reminds us once again—in the ‘I-Thou’ relationship, God is not some sort of ultimate ‘Thou’ at the end of the universe, but the hyphen that connects you with everyone and everything in creation. God is the essence of relationship itself, the temple of “we” in which every gesture is a prayer, every kindness a blessing, and every conflict an opportunity to bring even more love into the world.
Buddhism asks the fundamental question: What is life and what is the point of existence? Wade Davis goes on an anthropological and spiritual journey into the Himalayas of Nepal to learn the deepest lesson of Buddhist practice. Parts of this documentary feature H.H.Trulshik Rinpoche and Matthieu Ricard
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.
http://www.transnationalproductions.com
An hour long documentary introducing the cultural, historical and spiritual aspects of Rastafarianism as explained by a group of followers in the City of Miami. The film delivers a message of hope and reconciliation by systematically explaining away the myths behind Rastafarianism as viewed by outsiders, resulting in a clearer understanding of this hybrid culture.
http://atheistblogger.com/2008/02/15/101-atheist-quotes
“The following 101 quotes are some that I have stumbled upon on the web, or seen in books / popular culture. Each quote was either written by an atheist, or is about atheism in general.”
- The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. – George Bernard Shaw
- Faith means not wanting to know what is true. – Friedrich Nietzsche
- I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. – Frank Lloyd Wright
- We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. – Gene Roddenberry
- To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. - Isaac Asimov
- A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. – Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
- Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. – Seneca the Younger
- Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. – Anonymous
- Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. – Woody Allen
- If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. – Isaac Asimov
- Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. – Edward Abbey
- With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. – Steven Weinberg
- I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence. – Doug McLeod
- The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence. – Abu’l‐Ala al Ma’arri
- Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going? – Anonymous
- I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. – Susan B. Anthony
- The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. – Delos B. McKown
- Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer. – Anonymous
- Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. – Francis Bacon
- The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. – Richard Dawkins
- A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified. – Karen Armstrong
- It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image. – Ludwig Feuerbach
- People ask me what I think about that woman priest thing. What, a woman priest? Women priests. Great, great. Now there’s priests of both sexes I don’t listen to. – Bill Hicks
- All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. – Matthew Arnold
- Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence. – Anonymous
- Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. – Richard Dawkins
- What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. – Christopher Hitchens
- In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. – Friedrich Nietzsche
- It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible. – George W. Foote
- On the first day, man created God. – Anonymous
- I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. – Stephen Roberts
- You do not need the Bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate. – Richard A. Weatherwax
- What’s “God”? Well, you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you. – Steve Buscemi (From the movie “The Island”)
- As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, 50,000,000 years of that I’d start to get a little bored. – Rick Reynolds
- Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish. – Anonymous
- Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color. – Don Hirschberg
- God should be executed for crimes against humanity. – Bryan Emmanuel Gutierrez
- To say that atheism requires faith is as dim-witted as saying that disbelief in pixies or leprechauns takes faith. Even if Einstein himself told me there was an elf on my shoulder, I would still ask for proof and I wouldn’t be wrong to ask. – Geoff Mather
- I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. – Mark Twain
- Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men. – Voltaire
- And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence. – Bertrand Russell
- Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? – Epicurus
- I’m a polyatheist – there are many gods I don’t believe in. – Dan Fouts
- If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. – Woody Allen
- A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it. – David Stevens
- Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. – Robert A Heinlein
- I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing. – Douglas Adams
- It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. – Mark Twain
- He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. – William Drummond
- Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family. – Steven Colbert
- Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s? – Friedrich Nietzsche
- Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people. – Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney
- Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea. – Anonymous
- When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. – Sigmund Freud
- They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it’s a good thing. – Steven Weinberg
- Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. – Robert G. Ingersoll
- History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death than the word of god. – Giulian Buzila
- Atheism is a non-prophet organization. – George Carlin
- We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. – Richard Dawkins
- A believer states everything must have a creator but fail to say how he was created. – Anonymous
- “There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes. – James Morrow
- People will then often say, ‘But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?’ This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.) – Douglas Adams
- Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived. – Isaac Asimov
- If all the Christians who have called other Christians “not really a Christian” were to vanish, there’d be no Christians left. – Anonymous
- An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. – John Buchan
- Gods dont kill people. People with Gods kill people. – David Viaene
- If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself. – Alexandre Dumas
- Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. – Sam Harris
- I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose – Clarence Darrow
- No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism. – Annie Wood Besant
- I refuse to believe in a god who is the primary cause of conflict in the world, preaches racism, sexism, homophobia, and ignorance, and then sends me to hell if I’m ‘bad’. – Mike Fuhrman
- Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. – Frater Ravus
- Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have. – Penn Jillette
- Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power but absolute power is corrupt only in the hands of the absolutely faithful. – Anonymous
- Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. – Chapman Cohen
- The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. – Robert G. Ingersoll
- When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. – Robert Pirsig
- I wonder who got the shit job of scouring the planet for the 15000 species of butterfly or the 8800 species of ant they eventually took on board Noah’s Ark. But at least we got that magical rainbow for all their trouble. – Azura Skye
- I have no need for religion, I have a conscience. – Anonymous
- Man has always required an explanation for all of those things in the world he did not understand. If an explanation was not available, he created one. – Jim Crawford
- I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. – Richard Dawkins
- What has been Christianity’s fruits? Superstition, Bigotry and Persecution. – James Madison
- The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. – Penn and Teller
- If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference. – Mark Fairclough
- The finality of death is the coldest truth one must face. Religion makes the perfect distraction. – Anonymous
- Religion is the opiate of the masses. – Karl Marx
- If God created the world, then who created god? and who created whoever created god? So somewhere along the line something had to just be there. So why can’t we just skip the idea of god and go straight to earth? – Ryan Hanson
- If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not. – Sam Harris
- Atheists will celebrate life, while you’re in church celebrating death. – Anonymous
- Animals do not have gods, they are smarter than that. – Ronnie Snow
- I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever. – Daniel Boorstin
- I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk. – Thomas Edison
- Fundamentalism, of any type, due to its prerequisite lack of intelligent thought, could prove to be the worst weapon of mass destruction, of all. – David J. Constable
- To really be free, You need to be free in the mind. – Alexander Loutsis
- Most religions prophecy the end of the world and then consistently work together to ensure that these prophecies come true. – Anonymous
- Jesus hardly made the greatest sacrifice. He knew he would be resurrected anyway. – Anonymous
- Religion is like a virus that affects the behaviour of its host in such a way as to propagate itself further. – Jack Pritchard
- Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing. – Anonymous
- Today’s religion will be the future’s mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever. – Steven Crocker
- The Bible – A Fairytale book of rules brainwashing millions. Obliviously used to help create war, kill, hate, judge and discriminate. – Anonymous
- Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? – Douglas Adams
“Please feel free to comment on these quotes, and inform me of the authors of any I have misquoted or marked as “Anonymous”. There are so many sources for these quotes it’s hard to keep track of who really said what!” -the atheist blogger http://atheistblogger.com/contact
http://www.matiklarweinart.com
Bitches Brew – 1970
Klarwein was born in Hamburg, Germany. His family was of Jewish origin and fled to Palestine when he was two years old after the rise of Nazi Germany. Klarwein grew up in Palestine but in 1948 when the territory became Israel, his family traveled to Paris. There Mati studied with Fernand Leger, after attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Klarwein traveled south to Saint-Tropez and met Ernst Fuchs, who would have a profound influence on him. Leaving France in the 1950s, Klarwein traveled widely and lived in many different countries, including Tibet, India, Bali, North Africa, Turkey, Europe and the Americas. He eventually settled in New York City in the early 1960s.
Much of Klarwein’s most famous work is inspired by surrealism and pop culture, but also reflects his interest in non-Western deities, symbolism, and landscapes. The alleged connection between Klarwein and the so-called psychedelic art of the period is not entirely unfounded, as he has detailed his experience with LSD in his 1988 book Collected Works; however, Klarwein also explains that drugs were never his prime inspirational source, and in one interview, denies their influence entirely. His extensive travels and wide interests (notwithstanding the fact that his style had fully developed before the so-called “psychedelic era”) are further support of his claims. Klarwein claims that his friend Timothy Leary once told him, based on the character of his paintings, that Klarwein “didn’t need psychedelics.”
In his painting Grain of Sand (1963-1965), many disparate images are combined together in one massive, yet oddly coherent work. Klarwein’s own words illuminate the work: “I projected it as a sort of painted musical comedy movie with a sanskrit swinging cast of thousands, starring Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, Ray Charles, Pablo Picasso, Brigitte Bardot, Roland Kirk, Cannonball Adderley, Ahmed Abdul Malik, Wonderwoman, Delacroix’s girl in the cemetry, Litri and his bullshit fighters, Lawrence of Arabia, Socrates, Dali, Rama, Vishnu, Ganesh, the Zork and a Milky Way of playmates.”
Klarwein added “Abdul” (which means “servant” in Arabic) to his name in the late 1950s to express his sentiments about the hostility between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East: he felt that to understand each other better, every Jew should adopt a Muslim first name, and vice-versa. He is not known to have converted to Islam. He removed the name when, in 1960, he approached jazz musician Yusef Lateef after a concert. Lateef, who had previously expressed interest in using Klarwein’s work for a future album cover, saw that Klarwein was white, and turned away without a word.
Despite this unfortunate encounter, during the 1960s Klarwein’s work would be appreciated and utilized on several records by some of the decade’s most progressive musicians. Klarwein’s painting Annunciation (1961) was seen in reproduction by the musician Carlos Santana, who subsequently used it as the cover image of his band Santana’s second album Abraxas (1970). In the following years Klarwein produced comparably striking designs for the covers of two Miles Davis albums, Bitches Brew (1969) and Live-Evil (1971), as well as a portrait of Jimi Hendrix, which was supposed to have been used for the guitarist’s collaboration album with big band leader Gil Evans, which never came to fruition due to the guitarist’s death. His painting Zonked (1970), originally planned for use on a Betty Davis album of the same name,[1] would later be used as the cover of a Last Poets album Holy Terror (1995). (For a complete list of albums which feature Klarwein’s art, see below.) The association of his images with these very successful and widely admired counterculture musicians made Klarwein’s work known outside the circle of lovers of contemporary art. Many of these paintings, and others, were included in Klarwein’s first book Milk n’ Honey (1973).
During the 1960s and 70s, Klarwein would occasionally search for cheap paintings at flea markets and “improve” them, painting over them or adding things at his whim. Klarwein made over a hundred of these “improved paintings” throughout his career.
In the mid-1970s, Klarwein began a series of paintings which he referred to as “real-estate paintings” or “inscapes”. In the late 1970s he collaborated with trumpeter Jon Hassell for a couple albums on Brain Eno’s Ambient label; these albums used several of Klarwein’s “inscapes” on their covers. Klarwein also contributed art to three albums by Per Tjernberg.
Klarwein is still best known for his art of the 1960s and 1970s, with its clear links to surrealism (Klarwein studied with Salvador Dalí and the Viennese Fantastic Realist Ernst Fuchs), popular psychedelic imagery, and religious art from a number of different traditions. He also worked more conventionally across a variety of genres including still life, landscape, and portrait.
Late in this life, Klarwein contracted cancer, which would eventually take his life. He died on March 7th, 2002 in Deià, Spain on the island of Majorca. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mati_Klarwein
“Annunciation is the first painting I painted after my initial New York awakening. I was 28 years old and at the peak of my molecular bio-energy. You can feel the sudden burst of the Big Apple’s electric zap in the composition after all the early years of adolescent brooding over potatoes and eggs and the romantic nostalgia of the preceeding Flight to Egypt.
In those days I had an obsessional passion for the female body that lasted deep into my thirties (to be replaced by rocks ‘n’ stones)..
Years later Carlos Santana saw a reproduction of the Annunciation in a magazine and wanted it for the cover of his all time best selling Abraxas album. It did me a world of good. I saw the album pinned to the wall in a shaman’s mud hut in Niger and inside a Rastafarian’s ganja hauling truck in Jamaica. I was in good global company, muchissimas gracias, Carlito!”
-The text above is edited extracts from Mati’s book ‘Collected Works 1959-1975′. An explanation of the Biblical meaning of Annunciation can be found in Wikipedia.-
Great Pyramid 1976-1977
Time - 1965
Yusef Lateef – 1958
“In the fifties, jazz was the exciting music of the moment – Charlie Parker, Miles, MJQ, Gerry Mulligan. But for me, that which I could identify with most was the influence of arab and african music and culture in black american music – the move toward a separate cultural identity, away from the white trash rectangular music. It started with the substituting of christian names by muslim ones. There was Ahmed Abdul Malek on the Oud with his Jazz-Sahara music, and there was Yusef Lateef, experimenting with flutes, reeds, bottles, balloons, home made string instruments and the use of fake arab words. I would spend hours in Paris and Harlem looking for his records. Here’s another reverse example – instead of a record album using my painting, I use an album cover photo for my painting.
When the painting was completed I sent Yusef a photo of it and signed it with Abdul Mati Klarwein. He replied promptly with a ‘dear bro’ letter, saying he would use it as soon as he could for an album cover. Six months later I found myself in N.Y. listening to him play at the Five Spot. During a break I went over to his table and introduced myself. He looked at me with disdain and hardly greeted me. When I told him I was the artist who did the painting he sneered and turned his back to me, resuming his conversation with a friend. I forgot that love between colors is not always mutual.”
Eve – 1963
“THERE’S SOMETHING I KEEP SAYING about how important it is to remember that flowers are the sexual organs of plants. What I’m usually trying to say is, what could be more ’spiritual’ than the evanescent erotic beauty of, say, stockings or lacy underwear as floral like decoration surrounding the profound mating dance which leads to us being here. Thinking of things this way cultivates an appreciation of art in which false (read: ‘verbal’) contradictions are resolved. Man-made ‘opposites’ like ’sacred’ and ‘profane’ go to bed together and make divine little goddesses who remind us that Nature doesn’t speak in words.”
A film by David Cherniack Productions in association with Global Vision Corporation and Mystic Fire Video Fire on the Mountain: A Gathering of Shamans is a documentary about the connection between consciouness and nature, as embodied in the spiritual traditions of Indigenous Peoples, whose ecological metaphors of the sacred are so relevant to the modern world. We shot the project in 1997 at an historic 10-day gathering of shamans from five continents, who travelled to Karma Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat centre in the Val Saint Hugon in Savoy, in the French Alps, to discuss their concerns with H.H. the Dalai Lama and high-level representatives of the world’s religions. This documentary embodies the wish of these Indigenous People – all traditional wisdom-keepers, shamans and medicine-women – who requested us to communicate their message to the world. The video can be purchased by online mailorder from Mystic Fire Video at http://www.mysticfire.com
Director: Mark Whitney
Cast: Carl Jung, Dr. Marie-Louise Von Franz, Laurens Van Der Post, Barbara Hannah
Rating: NR
In this stimulating biographical documentary, interviews with famed psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung help illuminate the nature of his personal presence as well as some of the underpinnings of his philosophy. Along with these interviews are extensive comments by his friends, family, and colleagues that show how much he had affected their lives. Black-and-white photographs bring back his childhood, life in medical school, and the period he spent as a disciple of Sigmund Freud before he split from his mentor’s school of thought. When put together, these sources provide a well-rounded picture of Jung: his thinking, personality, background, and the people he touched. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
Zeitgeist, produced by Peter Joseph, was created as a nonprofit expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on this site lists the basic sources used / referenced and the developing Interactive Transcript includes exact source references and further information. A Q & A page is also being developed.
Now, it’s important to point out that there is a tendency to simply disbelieve things that are counter to our understanding, without the necessary research performed. For example, some information contained in Part 1 and Part 3, specifically, is not obtained by simple keyword searches on the Internet. You have to dig deeper. For instance, very often people who look up “Horus” or “The Federal Reserve” on the Internet
draw their conclusions from very general or biased sources. Online encyclopedias or text book Encyclopedias often do not contain the information contained in Zeitgeist. However, if one takes the time to read the sources provided, they will find that what is being presented is based on documented evidence. Non-Profit DVDs / Free Video Downloads are available through the Downloads page.
Furthermore, in October 2008 the sequel to Zeitgeist will be presented for free online. This feature length work will address the solutions to the problems presented in the original work. This work is entitled: “Zeitgeist – Addendum”
That being said, It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.
