Every moment, like a figure drawn in water, disappears as it appears. 

(Dzogchen saying)

Machig Labdron "The Mother of Chod"

 

Carl Jung wrote, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." 

That sentiment is embodied in the Tibetan Buddhist practice called Chod, which amounts to "Face your demons, and cut through your reaction to them." Machig Labdron was an 11th-century yogini who systematized the practice. 

Hold Your Own

Kate Tempest is the bomb. The atomic bomb. She blows me away. 

There are Tantric Buddhist Chod elements to this poem, such as her encouragement to not resist the demons that we feel.  

Smells like New Age

Today I read a flyer for a workshop on sacred sexuality that made this claim:

"We can create an Infinite Orgasm whenever we choose---literally, not metaphorically---and actually resonate at the frequency of cell division."

When words flee the boundaries of meaning, they no longer queeko bar ne cha-cha-cha.

"The Tao is not human-hearted." Lao Tzu

 Photo of a nearly microscopic tardigrade (AKA water bear or moss piglet).

"Not human-hearted" means you can't shrink the Tao to your own limited view. 

Gautama was a Buddha, not a Buddhist.

 

Lyrics in search of a melody

FIRST VERSE

I was naked, I was helpless

As a newborn in Kentucky

I’m still naked, I’m still helpless

This disguise just makes me lucky

We act like we know something

But be honest, how much? How deep?

We act like we own something.

But what can we really keep?

REFRAIN

Not everything’s here to please us.

There’s enough to make you cry.

Even if you believe in Jesus

Gotta ask yourself, “Who am I?”

SECOND VERSE

Lotta lies to uncover

“You oughta do it our way”

One after the other

Found out, it’s all hearsay

My old heart sees clearly

Exactly what it’s made for

The view has cost me dearly

Ain’t no thing unpaid for

REFRAIN

Not everything’s rhyme and reason

There are birds that cannot fly

The faithful call it treason

But go ask yourself, “Who am I?”

Jane Shankara and Peter Wittgenstein in the library...

 

 

When I taught world religions at FSU and a student would begin, "I was born Christian..." I'd interrupt and say, "Actually, you were born without any religion. You were naked, covered with amniotic fluid and blood from your mother's womb."

Reality check

It's not about what or (how much) you've been studying; it's whether you can put it into practice now (and now). 

 Tenzin Gyatzo, the current (14th) Dalai Lama (b. July 6, 1935)

Emptiness here, Emptiness there,

but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes.

Infinitely large and infinitely small;

no difference, for definitions have vanished

and no boundaries are seen. 

from Trusting the Heart-Mind, by Seng-Ts'an, 

Third Chinese Patriarch of Chan (Zen), 7th Century

 

I recommend Douglas Harding's book On Having No Head, which is all about seeing that awareness is "a transparent eyeball." 

May we all feel deeply connected to Gaia.

 

Another avataric adventure begins.

 

 

From Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Look closely and you can see the "pale, blue dot" of Earth against the rings of Saturn (photo taken July 19. 2013 by Cassini spacecraft). Look even closer and you can spy Earth's moon.

Universal Grammar of Religions

I have read a number of textbooks on comparative religion. Easily the best is Huston Smith's World Religions. He writes in the introduction that such textbooks often bog down in what he considered the boring details, but he wished to elucidate the major IDEAS, and to discover their common themes. 

Years ago, I wrote Smith a letter, telling him that when I was 18 and a freshman at Boston University, we used his textbook. I went on to say that I was now 53, and I taught "Introduction to World Religions" at Florida State; and I had never found a textbook that even came close to his in its clarity of writing and understanding. 

Smith wrote back to say, "Your letter arrived on my 90th birthday, and I could not have gotten a better birthday present!" 

A sweeping glimpse of the micro- , meso- , and macrocosm

There are inconceivable numbers of stars and most of them have orbiting planets. We've already discovered more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in nearly 4,000 planetary systems within our own galaxy. Those statistics suggest that, extending across the cosmos, there must be a huge number of Earth-like rocky planets, with liquid water, in "Goldilocks" orbits around their stars (or Earth-like moons orbiting gas-giant planets).

1. Do they hold life?

2. Intelligent life?

3. Technologically intelligent life?

If we are not the only sentient beings in the cosmos, that's mind-boggling!

If we are the only sentient beings in the cosmos, that's mind-boggling!

Archetypes and Synographs

The sky starts at my feet

On the sand

Beside the “wine-dark sea.”

 

The moon rises

Where my head would be

If I had one.

 

Now the sky is gently raining

Inside me

Raindrops merging with the sea.

 

“I am the sweet smell of the moistened earth,”

Said Lord Krishna.

Nice. I am the salt-smell of the rolling sea.

 

I am no thing and each thing.

 

This aging body

Is breathing, breathing

Until it drops.

 

I widen my eyes

Which are eyes 

Until they’re not.

 

I hold up my hands

Which are hands.

Meditation flash mobs

"Alternate facts" are not lies or fraud. "Alternate facts" are simply an alternative to the data that are, like, FACT-facts. Understand?

We live in an anti-intellectual, post-factual society where opinions are just as important---no, MORE important---than facts. I partly blame religious indoctrination, where mere belief without evidence is not only tolerated, but given supreme value: the greatest worth is given to one who believes without proof, without facts, without sign. 

Import: Say you're an expert in tropical ecosystems and you present hard evidence that global warming is destroying specific flora and fauna species in the rainforest. The scientifically illiterate will feel perfectly justified and correct in retorting, "Well, that's YOUR opinion!" In their minds, their own contrasting opinion has rendered your scientific evidence worthless.

 

Memento mori.

 (Born 1865, Yeats died in 1939.)

 

Who have you loved your whole life long?

 

I first came across the conception of the divine as Mother when I was 19 and I read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. It struck a deep chord in me that has never stopped reverberating.  

Maybe that is why, even though I had practiced zazen for 22 years and had never performed any kundalini yoga techniques, the life-energy ignited in me spontaneously when I was 41, while simply standing on my balcony musing about the divine. For several months, it took me on an irrepressible tour of the so-called "subtle body," and kundalini (or whatever one might call it) has been easily triggered to tangibly flow in my body-mind ever since. 

I turned to the study of kundalini yoga retrospectively to understand my own psycho-physical process. At the same time, I have remained grateful to my Western scientific heritage; that is, I have not abandoned the facts and metaphors of science in favor of the facts and metaphors of yoga, but have tried to glean the knowledge in both descriptions of reality.  

When I was 50, I took a graduate seminar in Tantra and Shaktism with the late scholar, Kathleen Erndl. She defined Shaktism as “the worship of Sakti, the primordial power underlying the universe, personified as a female deity who is the Supreme Being, the totality of all existence. As such, it stresses the dynamic quality of the deity as both deluding and saving power.” Shakti is both the power that deludes through identification with its endless forms, and the power that reveals the emptiness of all forms (and the mysterious identity of form and emptiness). 

Erndl explained Goddess theology as "a kind of monism in which matter and spirit are not differentiated but are a continuity subsumed within shakti, the dynamic feminine creative principle…Shakta theology understands sakti, identified with the Great Goddess, to be the ultimate reality itself and the totality of being.” 

The greatest gift that Shakta traditions offer us, in my opinion, is this vision of the unity of consciousness and world. Not the doctrine that reality is merely reflected in the universe, which makes of the universe a phantom, an illusion, a stepped-down imitation; but the intuition that Reality is being the universe, which enjoys the whole universe as the body of spirit, the incarnation of the Beloved. Put another way, the former view (expounded in Advaita Vedanta, etc.) generates a longing for return to reality (as if the purpose of life is to return to its source.) Whereas, in the latter vision, source is never absent, but only present. Therefore, there is already no dilemma, and we are free to love this. As they say in Zen, “Just this much.”

This brings to mind a Hasidic tale of a poor woodsman who fell in love with the King’s daughter when he came upon her bathing in a river. He declared his love to her with such passion and sincerity she was moved to tears. “Lover,” she said, “it is only in the cemetery that I will one day be able to join with you.” She meant, of course, that only in death could a princess and a woodsman become equals. Nevertheless, the young man, beside himself with adoration, took her words literally and went to the cemetery to wait for the princess to appear.

Day after day, as he waited, he thought of nothing but his beloved, contemplating her lovely form and qualities. This led him to feel grateful to her ancestors, who had made possible her birth, and to meditate on all the elements that supported her life. His appreciation expanded to include vaster spheres of being that gave life to the woman he loved, until, at last, it seemed to him that the One who was his Beloved was the very universe itself.

Kabir points to this understanding when he asks in one of his songs, 

“O tell me: Who have you loved your whole life long?”

Along these lines, Erndl wrote in Victory to the Goddess of “the worldview that the Earth itself is considered sacred and the (transcendental) deity embodies herself in earthly form.” She then commented, “This paradox defies distinctions between monotheism and polytheism, spirituality and materialism, ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions.” 

Seeing spirit as matter, and consciousness as inseparable from every natural process, it becomes easy to agree with Neem Karoli Baba’s saying: 

“The best form is which to worship God is every form.”

Zen Standard Time

 

May All Beings Be Well!

 

Life Energy

 

For decades, I've been interested in spiritual paths that give attention to the luminosity or inherent brightness of our being  (called Shakti in Sanskrit). Kashmiri Shaivism and (Tibetan) Dzogchen are two such paths to awaken the whole body-mind to its living, radiant source.

WARNING!  Before importing an ancient, foreign tradition into your modern American mind, first boost the power of your critical thinking, for you will encounter heaps of horseshit from the pre-scientific, superstitious, isolated, feudal, patriarchal cultures that are the tradition's homeland. 

I'm always wary of the clock striking 13. For example, I'll be reading an English translation of, say, a Dzogchen text, and I'll come across an insight into some psychological process that will give me a thrill of recognition, and then in the very next lines, I'll see something like, "Recite this mantra of protection, Queeko, Queeko, Queeko, then set a ghost-trap at the Eastern Gate." Yep. 13 o'clock. It's like Alan Watts said: you have to be already enlightened to get anything useful from the world's scriptures.   

Emptiness Illuminated

 

Buddhism analyzes two indivisible aspects of the nature of reality: emptiness and luminosity. Most Buddhist paths emphasize the realization of so-called "emptiness," and neglect the aspect of luminosity, or radiance, or energy. 

The Sanskrit word translated as "emptiness" is shunyata. Shunya is the term for "zero" in Indic mathematics, and shunyata literally means "zero-ness."

The "emptiness" or "zero-ness" that Buddhists yak about refers to our indefinable, ungraspable, insubstantial, unknowable condition. But such words as "emptiness" (or "nothingness" or "void," etc.) are misleading, because they seem to connote an absolute absence, while at the same time reifying such a void, turning it into a solid, conceptual thing -- as if you could walk into an empty room and say "I met Mr. Emptiness." 

Here, we have run into the inevitable problem of trying to "eff" the ineffable. What can't be said, can't be said; and it can't be whistled either. 

Too much focus on awakening to the "empty" nature of all phenomena easily leads to nihilism, or what Zen calls "void sickness." There's a Zen tale about a student telling his teacher that he has fully understood the empty nature of all appearances. His  teacher grabs his nose and pinches hard. "How empty is this?"

"Emptiness" is not an inert void, a deadness at the very heart of the cosmos. "Emptiness" is the pure potential or perfect aliveness that is the source of every passing moment, now and now. Emptiness is plenum. Emptiness is glorious. Emptiness is form; form is emptiness. 

Most Asian spiritual paths tend toward asceticism and can readily become nihilistic and fatalistic. (If Buddhism were not inclined to psychological/social withdrawal from the world, there would be no need for the corrective: "Engaged Buddhism.") 

In truth, there is no substantial, permanent thing. All is flowing. You don't have to wait until your dying moments to realize, "You can't take it with you when you go." ALREADY, you own nothing; ALREADY there is no solid "you." That's the fact of emptiness.

But while recognizing our freedom from thing-ness, let's not neglect our potential to shine, shine, shine! 

"Mindfulness" is not the only way to meditate.

I highly recommend this poetic translation of the Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra, a text of Kashmiri Shaivism, written circa 7th to 8th centuries CE. 

Framed as a discourse between Shiva in his terrifying form as Bhairava, and his consort Bhairavi, it briefly and poetically presents a few more than 100 meditation methods, which include variants of breath awareness, concentration on chakras, non-dual awareness, visualizations, and meditations that make use of the senses.

These practices are said to lead to the recognition of the "awesome" nature of Reality (vijñāna means "recognition," and "bhairava" means "terrifying," "tremendous," "awesome"). 

Lorin Roche has been teaching meditation for more than 45 years. He makes it clear in his introduction that meditation is a spontaneous and natural human experience, that there are many doorways into meditation, and that it is helpful to follow the meditation techniques that suit oneself. 

 

Stoned Ape Hypothesis

 

I'm agnostic about the Stoned Ape Hypothesis --- Terrence and Dennis McKenna's notion that the extremely ancient, sustained consumption of psilocybin mushrooms played a catalytic role in the evolution of the human brain, particularly in the development of human language and culture. 

I lean toward dismissing the idea, but I often marvel at the vast gap between homo sapiens and the great apes, a chasm that Darwinian natural selection can't satisfactorily explain. Yes, chimpanzees also make and use tools ---they strip leaves from a stick to gather termites --- while I'm typing on a computer and posting my musings on the World Wide Web! What happened? How'd we get to be so wonderfully and disastrously smart? 

Maybe physicist David Brin's Hugo-Award winning "Uplift Series" provides the answer (advanced species in the galaxy act as patrons of lower species, uplifting them through genetic engineering). 

I made the above diorama in my Zen garden. Below is an alternate version of the Stoned Ape Hypothesis, which I'll call Stoned Ape Hypothesis B. 

 

BY FAR the best meditation app available! 

I'm a lifetime subscriber. I've recommended the app to my family and friends, and if I were still teaching comparative religion at Florida State, I'd promote it to all my students. It communicates the free heart of the contemplative traditions, particularly Buddhism, without dragging along the pre-scientific, mythological baggage. 5 Stars! 

"Spiritual" males in the locker room

"Spiritual" males in the locker room 

I’m standing naked next to a 50-something dude in the men’s locker room, where two rules always apply: 1) Talk only about sports, 2) Don’t eye each other’s genitals. 

The guy has got an exotic language tattooed on his right shoulder and I read it aloud: “‘Om mani padme hum,’” I say, “In Tibetan.”

“That’s what it says,” he agrees, “but it’s not Tibetan. It’s Sanskrit.”

“The words are Sanskrit,” I say, “but that script on your shoulder is Tibetan.” I flash my left shoulder tattoo at him, to show him a true Sanskrit Om. “The Uchen script in your tattoo was developed in the 7th century, based on an Indic alphabet. That’s why it looks a bit like Sanskrit, but you can see it’s not the same.” I point to my right shoulder, upon which is tattooed the Sanskrit syllable Hrim. “Compare the letter ‘H.’” I point to the Sanskrit “H” on my shoulder and then to the Tibetan “H” in the word Hum on his shoulder. “See?” My pointer finger does not penetrate his zone of personal space, but it hovers dangerously close. 

The guy glares at me. We were supposed to be chatting about football, and now I’ve unintentionally challenged his manhood. Besides, any man as hairy as I am should be incapable of articulating more than bearish grunts. Is it too late to ask, “How ‘bout them Seminoles?”

“My root guru is Avalokiteshvara,” he tells me, in an attempt at one-upmanship.
“The Buddha of Infinite Compassion,” I say, defeating his secret code almost before the words have left his lips. His eyes turn downward. My Kung-Fu is stronger than his. He retreats to the shower. 

It’s a good thing we weren’t talking about football; I don’t know a damned thing about football.

Singularity

Consciousness IS perfectly whole -- the Only Presence -- yet it never can be reduced to a graspable self (self-as-object). 

Or, as put by the British theater producer and Taoist, Terrence Gray:

"I AM, but there is no 'me'."

Go with the Flow

(from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu )

Stephen Mitchell's translation is the best of the dozen I've read. 

Does a kitten have Buddha nature?

If you answer "Yes" or "No" you miss your own Buddha nature. 

Evidence of panpsychism: Sentient jelly!

 Unretouched photo!

 

Does a dog have Buddha nature?

 "If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went."

Will Rogers

 

Mahadevi ("Great Goddess ")

You can't escape Her, so learn to love Her! 

This doha (Tibetan spiritual song) "Queen of Great Bliss" will help.

(Lyrics by Traktung Rinpoche)

"The Great Way is not human-hearted; the sage is not human-hearted." 

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Pith instructions: Four words!

   

Neglect the body, and "Buddha mind" soon loses energy and clarity. 

 

 

 "It's not that things change, but that changes are things."

French philosopher of phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty