WHAT IS FAST FIRST
JOURNALS & DIARIES
The Dharmatization of my Artistic and Occult Life
                                                             Russell Thorne

                                   Introduction
Having professional musicians as parents, the study of music for a career seemed natural to me, however despite little background in philosophical scholarship, I had inclinations early to speculate on the origins of creativity and the phenomenon of progress in art. The Western Hermetic science & philosophy (Theosophy in particular)  absorbed my attention up into the 1960's, where my mind slowly turned toward Buddhism. Around this time the keys to the Occult Bookstore were given me; its seeming indwelling spirit accepted me as caretaker for over 40 years and still going. This bookstore, now celebrating its 81st year in Chicago has been my home and ‘temple’ of transformation. However with the good fortune, or maby the detriment of striking friendships with spiritually minded people on a daily basis and having at my disposal a wealth of rare occult books especially on the Western Magical path, my first encounter with Buddhism was met with great resistance. Over time the sheer strength of its logic and reason, and ultimately its truths overwhelmed me. Having been drawn towards aestheticism & mysticism by nature, the two mental attributes I had been taught to regard as inferior were cold reason and dry logic; what did they have to do with the arts or the occult?  The occult is, after all,  filled with mystical thrills, preternatural inspiration, miracles, and the unexplained. The wonder is, that all these things still exist & happen, but how and why they do is the revelation of Buddhist analysis and reason, the Dharma becomming a Feast of Reason. I believe therefore in what has been called the "heroism of objectivity" where mysticism continues but being mystified stops.
The wonderful ecumenical attitude taken by Buddhists when encountering other religions is absent here, though digging out my own wrong essentialist views is not mutually exclusive to desiring worldwide unity. This, however gives me no authority for the reworking of Kabbalah and Gnosticism in these pages, the intent is not to disparage other religious paths but an exercise in self-edification. Studying and loving these subjects early on, I was unable to just drop them, bound to get churned up in the revisioning process, the reader should view them as a shadow-structure of  discontinuity, opposed to a continuity in the light of their tradition. The “Dharmatization” is therefore not presenting Buddhist teachings as such, (one has ample opportunity for  that elsewhere) as it is my personal 'argumentive', modification, and negation of Western essentialisms. Many thanks to Richard Collet who mentored me early on into Buddhist thought and has kept up with encouragement and correspondence over the years with his wisdom and insight. Richard introduced me to Geshe Lhundup Sopa and subsequently membership into the Sangha community at Deer Park in Oregon Wisconsin, where grounding in basics as well as high tantric initiation were given with incredible authority and generosity.
  The entries in this journal started out like a diary where an ordered sequence might develop, but this soon gave way to short essay-type pieces that were copied out of personal journals covering a period of 45 years or more; they could be shuffled around (as could the reading of them) and nothing would be too upset. The lapses in source material, unacknowledged borrowings, quotes gone astray, mistakes in reasoning, and all sorts of other errors in good judgment are due to my own faults and limited abilities.
 
 

"What we need to revive in Gnosticism is not its technical terms but the very quality which provoked its extirpation at the hands of the Church, namely the experimental attitude to religion."
         Rupert Gleadow The Unclouded Eye  Skeffington and Son Limited London 1953 page170
 

"If citizens in a time of decadence are inferior as toilers for the grandeur of the country, are they not also superior as artists delving into the depths of their own souls? If they are ineffectual in private or public endeavors, is it not because they are too skillful in their solitary thinking? If they cannot produce the generations of the future, is it not because the abundance of their refined sensations and exquisite feelings has turned them into sterile yet refined virtuosi of voluptuousness and suffering?"
        Paul Bourget  Baudelaire and the Decadent Movement 1881
 

”The question of the origin of evil, which was raised by the Gnostics many centuries ago, has never been answered”
                                               Marie Louise Von Franz

"Even as a common man one may hear about emptiness and experience an inward joy again and again - his eyes moistened with tears born from that joy, and the hair on his body standing erect. The seed of a perfect buddha's discrimination lies within such a person."
                          Candrakirti:  Madhyamakavatara  The Emptiness of Emptiness   C.W. Huntington, Jr. University of Hawaii Press 1989 page 167

1
Hans Jonas has written "Gnostic emanationism, unlike the harmonistic Neoplatonic one has a catastrophic character... the form of its progress is a crisis." This switches the genesis-paradox from being something exterior to something interior; at least for a reasonable meditator it should, otherwise it would be like reading old newspaper reports. Creation and reproduction as far as god and sex energy is concerned are misnomers. That theater of activity is reoriented and the prana of desire becomes wind flowing upward in an apotheosis of female/male reversing the so-called “fall”. Vaporizing the biun-paradox even temporarily indicates that a technology with proper truth-claims has been found. A perfect reconciliation of antagonistic principles. This is not suppression but making something move, all this can happen merely by an exalting calm moistened with insight.* “Merely!” means that there are no secrets; Buddhist truth claims are not founded on secrets, but revealed through  profound investigation.
* What's implied here is the practice of tranquillity and insight, (samatha & vipasyana).

2
What is Gnostic Negation?  That's something to be uncovered individually,  Pneumatic man/woman cannot imitate an original cause, he/she is the original, is the origin of their own multiple causes, he/she is their own demiurgical creativity.
The Demiurge is an impostor, yes but  the Pater-monad* is the ultimate concealer. I will rip open my heart and find out what was fast first, what is fast first. Such a Buddhist/alchemical ripping does not demonize the God of Israel nor disrespect the mystics extravagances of mythology, but seeks the truth of duality and the true causes of duality.
* See No.100

3
Meta-, prefix meaning between, after, and morph indicates change in form. (example) Metamorphic rocks, rocks altered from their original form; such alteration being caused by heat, pressure, etc.(another example) Metamorphic gods, gods altered from their original form; such alteration being caused by heated mystics, poets and  religious zealots and pressure applied by legislating priest craft.(1) Such gods can be called virtual gods or designer gods, as opposed to Ur-gods which are more stationary and whose believers are naïve in an ancient way that is considered  traditionally ‘healthy’. Rocks can be seen and studied in their altered states, virtual gods however are in the minds that alter them according to mystical, poetical and religious beliefs and therefore take on a multiplicity of forms and meanings. One could contend that evolved gods are no longer real gods, but only gods virtually.(2)What is it that separates them? Perhaps in our time the post-industrial mind can no longer believe in the Ur-god in the old naïve way (ignorance/non-science) of the past. Could the serpent of Eden be telling them something about knowledge again, or is there a third alternative, one that avoids duality and guilt without denying the existence of gods? The Eden/Genesis fable has been interpreted by Westerners, all adding to the rich mystical heritage for centuries. Another alternative may be understanding (not comparing) Buddhist cosmology that's more logic/science-based than myth-based as another application. This is not meant to fit into a mystical category at all, it’s simply my own very blunt Dharmatization.
(1) A very wide scale operation of theological inventions to uphold superstitions including transforming all the Greco-Aryan gods into "semitic devils."
(2) I shouldn't be using the word 'only' in a diminutive way, but salient, salutary, we become what we imagine ourselves to become. This occult doctrine is found in all the ancient Western traditions and characterizes Neoplatonic beliefs concerning the posthumous fate of the soul. Do we actually realize how many valid alternative ideas of God there are? In the Vishnu Purana, concerning the Kali age, the age of dissolution that occurs at the expiration of a Kalpa it says: "Every text will be scripture that people choose to think so: all gods will be gods to them that worship them."

4
When Javeh was first discovered to be limited, it became necessary to expand his powers and so he was pronounced supreme god among many gods. Look how beautifully this was done in Cecil B. de Milles movie The Ten Commandments, “If this was God he would not only be the god of this mountain but of every mountain”. I personally don’t think Moses said that; he was more respectful of Ur-gods.(1) How can you admit that monotheism was of slow growth and not say that man did not develop it? Or that the development of better morals necessitates better gods? Isn't this brought about by man, who then creates the fiction of a mystical and universal geometry around Him?  The God of Moses was suffused with jealousy, the God Akheneton was a projection of empire, both were forced upon beings by a maneuver. Each step toward necessary change was hid under the cloak of projected universals which has been the essential feature of the splitting of peoples and the generation of spiritual pride which has dogged history from the start. What lies are the creeping changes of history written up as laws of essences and eternal necessity?  Whitehead said that the Jews would have criticized history if they had not worshipped its records.(2) There is no accuracy of facts under such demagogy, only a blurring of perspective, and ultimately, terrorism. This view has been worked over endlessly down through the ages. The whole idea of monotheism is dubious, being stained with domination and is no advance over polytheism. But what then? To quote Camille Paglia: "Civilized life requires a state of illusion. The idea of the ultimate benevolence of nature and God is the most potent of man's survival mechanisms", however as Camille says "Judeo-Christianity (monotheism's) never did defeat paganism -nature remains the supreme moral problem [and] sex is a subset to nature."(3) But its not so nicely cut and dried as that- gods are not an illusion; they exist, but not in the usual ways theists or deists(4) realize. The plot thickens, and "Mother natures open thighs and blood depths as our common grave" is even more relentlessly vicious than Camille's heated descriptions describe. But mothers, women, nature or sex are not the enemy.
(1)  See Why Christanity Must Change Or Die  John Shelby Spong, Harper SanFrancisco 1998, page 150 where the author claims such indeleble scenes influence us far more than people realize today. Perhaps Im not using this (Ur) term properly, rather than the 'primal' aspect of Ur, I mean 'local', that is, every culture, tribe, nation has its Ur god. Besides, what Moses? The latest demolition of 'cutting edge modern biblical scholarship' says: "We now know that there is no evidence for monotheism for many centuries after the reported time of Abraham. Nor is there any archaeological evidence for the Exodus, for Joshua's conquest of Canaan, or for the vast united monarchy of David and Solomon." The Bible Unearthed  Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman Simon & Schuster  New York 2001.  See also Archaeology magazine, Oct. same year.  The Tora was "shaped by the creativity" [of several Cecil B. de Milles] "during the reign of King Josiah at the end of the  7th century BCE as a product of the hopes, fears and ambitions", political and/or cinematic. But this doesn't mean anything; the Tora is still a 'family document' to most Jews who live within the narrative of the Bible; and every kabbalistic mystic becomes a hsm ('to draw out'), who lifts himself or herself out of the 'waters' of emotional affliction.  Some kabbalistic mystics feel divine words have an existence independent of circumstances and immediate intention. Such religious irony makes Judaism interesting to me, being the richest in paradox of all mainstream religions.
(2) Durring his reply to a question about the mythology of archetypes Ngakpa Chogyam said: "History is continually being rewritten according to the honesty of the time. Every country writes its own history according to what it needs to feel about itself. From this perspective everything is actually a form of mythology." Wearing the Body of Visions page 232
(3) Sexual Personae  Camille Paglia, Vintage Books 1991
(4)  Gods are not merely projections of the human mind that determine their nature relative to human egos - they exist as discrete entities possessing karma's of their own, migrators just like us. The deists hated priests, priestcraft, mystery-mongering and assaults on common sense, but had notions about a supreme, sovereign God. This produced a great debate in the 17th century, one they were bound to lose. They  describe themselves as the only true Christians of their day. "Calvinists and Arminians might denounce one another as erring brethren; Protestants and Catholics might call one another children of Anti-Christ. But there was in these denunciations a sense that all alike were struggling for the same symbols; all alike, after all, were claiming the exclusive right to speak for the same faith."  Deism, An Anthology Peter Gay, Van Nostrand Co. 1968.

5
This is a quote from The Great Return by Arthur Machen. "I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where fragments of dreams-  they seemed such then - might, perhaps be gathered into the clearness of vision." There is a place in Wisconsin where I lived for a few years called Aztalan that reminds me of Machen's solitary place, extending beyond time and space. Every time I visualize the Jewel Tree of Tibet, the vale of Aztalan with its great rolling grassy meadows, truncated pyramids and the nervous Crawfish river seperating the mysterious eastern bank in the distance would suddenly appear in my vision. Here in this setting the Gelukpa Refuge Assembly Tree would take form. However there's something ominous about this park, something in its past, why no full-bloods will visit it today!*
*Related in conversation with Wisconsin author Jim Stephens. Maybe it has something to do with Aztalan being exactly one third (120 degrees) from Giza if the Egyptian pyramid had been prime zero degrees. As Jim said, all sacred sites show up in 10 degree meridians. Would this explain the ominousness? Maybe, - cannibalism sure would!  I think the use of that vague new term of Rupert Sheldrakes  morphic fields applies here; particular places will have their own memories of previous patterns "habit fields", giving off a morphic resonance, in this case a kind of haunting. Sheldrake suggests that "things are as they are because they were as they were", but he exceeds scientific (and Buddhist) verification when insisting that "memory is inherent in nature" according to his hypothesis of formative causation. Sheldrake was taken to task for this on a Science PBS TV special by the Harvard Professor of Geology Stephen Jay Gould who said "but Rupert, these unconscious patterns are personally contingent, you can't analogize that into external universal ones."  "Why not?" answered Rupert. At that point in the round table discussion the other panelists (well known scientists in their fields) looked down, some grabbing for their cups of coffee. I jumped up in excitement at Gould's point and cheered, nearly choking on my potato chips. Sheldrake, perhaps 30/70 mystic-scientist need not give up mysticism and keep to modern physics which has abandoned the concept of things existing absolutely. Its perhaps cultural, Buddhism is the only world religion that can encompass such a revelation.

                                                           ADDENDUM
The “contingency theory” Gould is talking about, that seemed to annoy Ruppert during that discussion shouldn't be so depressing for him. Gould’s scientific achievements shows a positivism, and without skepticism, his plan for separating religion from science showed  respect for religious belief. This was no shallow relativism. Relativity does not destroy all possibility of knowledge and judgment. Herbert Muller says “Rather, [relativity]  is the outcome of comprehensive knowledge. It enables wiser choices among the possibilities open to us – among goods that are no less real because they are relative, and that are more relevant then arbitrary absolutes.”(1) Accepting Goulds ‘separation’ will be a stretch for ‘creationism’ religions; if they don’t there will always be ridiculous scenes such as the Pope congratulating Stephen Hawking on verifying the “Big Bang” but warning him in advance not to look beyond it. Buddhists, of course would be egging him on. The connecting link between the destruction of one universe and the evolution of the next involves a space which retains the force of karma of sentient beings which acts as a cooperative cause for the next universe. This ‘latent’ karma will ripen into the ‘new’universe being made.
(1) The Uses Of The Past  Herbert J. Muller Oxford 1952. The book, read today seems to comment on present world events. It details the religious prejudice smoldering all over the Christian and Moslem worlds highlighting the sacred sources of intolerance and the deplorable consequences. Why Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Arabia went into the shades out of religious fervor and pride. Muller suggests that the world today needs reasonableness more than it needs fervor.  He says no religion can afford to regard itself as the elect of God -they are not apt to make good neighbors. I believe this is what Stephen Jay Gould pin pointed on a micro-level; that when personally contingent unconscious patterns are used to make analogies about universal patterns, sanctity usually results at the expense of sanity.

6
The great German existentialist Heidegger (1889-1976) wrote "We come too late for the Gods and too early for Being".  35 years ago I can remember thinking this was the most profound thing I ever heard, but now, even though I'm still a 'card carrying' existentialist, which  expresses one-fourth of my world view beautifully, I regard this time now as not too early and not too late but perfectly auspicious. Having a  fortunate rebirth endowed with, as they say, liberty and opportunity, a precious human mind during a time when a living Dharma tradition is widely available, there is nothing about the Gods or Being that can not be known. During the 80s in Wisconsin, it seemed that high Lamas were coming right up to our doorstep and initiating us!

7
At a Hollywood fund raiser for Tibet, a monk in the Dalai Lama's party, commenting in conversation about a movie portrayal of a man snapping, “we all have that rage in us” he said, “its just how skillful we are at keeping it down”.

 I said to Geshe Sopa that its so hard for a sinner to leave sin without the aid of a spiritual path. He said “leaving sin is the path”.

8
The catastrophe theory of the year: “I have toyed with the idea of making a comparison of Mahayana Buddhism & the Tibetan system with the Golden Dawn. They are very similar, there isn’t that much difference” Israel Regardie 1985. How could the G.D. be interpreted or compared to Tibetan Buddhism when it can't even be interpreted as Gnosticism?

9
Moshe Idel quotes Gershom Scholem concerning the use of symbol as "a form of expression which radically transcends the sphere of allegory", and then goes on to say that a "philosopher using allegory and a kabbalist using symbolic expression can metamorphose the same biblical material in order to point to different levels of reality." Kabbalah New Perspectives,  Yale 1988  Page 218. But what can be gained with different levels of reality when symbol and allegory are generally hypotheses; even though they may be levels of mental reality, facts can be falsified by hypotheses. It seems in some cases, instead of making true statements about the world, western philosophers and mystics conclude that truth is a matter of logical coherence of their thought which need not correspond with the facts. "What facts?" they may say. Buddhists would say: "The facts of benefit and harm", or "flowers wither and houses collapse."

10
It is the view of the orthodox that when the Tora was finished and certified in a ‘standard’ version, this meant the end of Gods appearance. God stopped speaking and went into exile.  Christian mystics cope with this surprisingly well. In fact its no ambiguity to them at all. There are several ‘reasons’ how there can be such an all-good God when humans come under sin, death, accident and wars. They say “it is not for us to turn evil into good because if that was necessary God would have done that before”. If God doesn't seem to be doing anything about it, so perhaps that is not the need. It is God that is good not the conditions of things in the world(1)… Then Joel S.Goldsmith quoted "Henceforth know we no man after the flesh.” Moses ben Maimon, said to have made some of the most important contributions to Jewish philosophical thought on God takes another view. He wrote that Gods existence is proved by the world and the whole universe is only one individual so the parts are interdependent, the universe is a macrocosm and thus the effect of one cause.
 Buddhists point out that if the permanent God is causal it must produce all its results at once or not at all, hence a universe that is one individual (God) is permanently static, all forms would be one form and only one thing could continually happen to us all the time. Even if it lasts for a second, Gods creation is a permanent phenomenon; one may ask how can there then be seconds that come and go? It's either karma or creation by other. Can there be a third way? Logically no - only if you present that permanent "one" thing with a loophole that somehow exists within it. But if you do the integrity  of the "one" thing is compromised.(2) This happens when you posit free will within a "one" thing creation making the "Unmoved Mover" theory silly - not silly if you take refuge in 'poetic truth'.
“As it is written in the Kabbalah that Absolute and inerratic Science whereby the intellect of Man becometh exalted unto the Throne of Inflexible and Unerring Godhead"” This is from A Note On Genesis by that Golden Dawn initiate and magical tutor to Aleister Crowley; Allan Bennet,(3) who a few years latter must have realized the profound contradiction of that statement and sailed off to Ceylon to enter a Buddhist monastery.
(1) Omne bonum a Deo, Omne malum ab homine, "all good is from God, all evil is from man".
(2) Why the  Gnostics called such a god a "Dog-faced Demiurge".
(3) "Allan Bennett embodies the "enlightenment" of my title in both its meanings". "Bennett could drop the Golden Dawn and all that it stood for: he had traversed it and understood it, and it no longer satisfied him." Quotes from Joscelyn Godwin's great book "The Theosophical Enlightenment".

11
The admission that an electron only exists as a probability until someone looks at it gives rise to opinions upon the nature of the self/soul: what is behind a creature in the way of origin will determine what is before it in the way of destiny. The largeness or smallness must be in the vital seed (Gods zygote?) before it can be in the foliage of the tree. Therefore if the organic, eternal and original seeds cannot be found through severe absolute seeking analysis, then for the committed Monist it must be imagined as a mystery and sustained through faith. Paradox and mystery are not considered acceptable recourses when faced with internal contradictions like these, Madhyamika is free from paradox.*
What the occultist hears in the West is…"and let it be clearly understood that only by understanding his origin will mankind achieve salvation” on hearing this I can only quote Edward Conze: “non-genesis is safety”.
 * The interesting thing about our modern investigative sciences is that their conclusions are somewhat similar to Buddhist discoveries, especially concerning the fact that everything in the universe dissolves under analysis, there are no indivisible particles. But Buddhism is not denying the relative truth, the phenomenal truth. Even Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle that says "our source of light bombards the atoms we attempt to watch" isn't a non dual realization. Sunyata is not an uncertainty. There cannot be a nirvana outside the individual yogi who realizes and achieves it. Still Scientists and Buddhists are allies..sort of.

"Religious insights do not seem to spring from a microscope. Uncertainty (Heisenbergs Principle) can just as easily lead to a kind of hedonistic self-interest with the norms of society and is the actual ethic of secular humanists: Help your friends, ignore strangers and wreck your enemies." Richard Collett,  private correspondence.

12
"Many scientists view the two worlds (Buddhism/Science) as complimentary rather than conflicting, Buddha could assume several manifestations, each representing one of the deep tenets of Buddhist teaching." "We say that Buddhist tradition makes it easier for us to grasp the duality's and transformations of particle physics".(1) Truth cannot differ from itself; the truth of the scientist cannot contradict the truth of the Buddhist and the truth of the Buddhist cannot contradict the truth of the scientist. "What science finds to be non-existent, a Buddhist necessarily must accept as non-existent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. The general Buddhist position is that we must always accept fact. Mere speculation devoid of an empirical basis, when such is possible, will not do."(2) The contingency theory (evolutionary causality) is scientific and Buddhist, but karmic (contingent) actions that are considered concealed phenomena and are beyond a certain point of verification, science has not yet discovered.(3) Due to the impact of death, transmigration and rebirth our memories of previous lives and the lineage of indirect karmic causes are clouded and forgotten by most humans, but they exist & produce effects. Positing latent causes from the past for present events that otherwise defy rational explanation is perhaps stretching the credulity of most scientists, but its not like we're saying the Grand Canyon was formed in a matter of weeks.*
(1) The New York Times Science June 9, 1998 Malcolm W. Browne reports on the international conference on neutrino particles.
(2) A Policy Of Kindness  The Dalai Lama, Snow Lion 1990, page 69
(3) H.P. Blavatsky made this point throughout her writtings. "But natural Sciences are only one aspect of Science and Truth." What's In A Name? Lucifer, September 1887
* A position of Creation Science; the "inerrancy of the Bible" being its basis. The Earth was created 10,000 years ago, specifically October 22 4004 B.C. at nine in the morning with a complete fossil record, (fake signs of a past just to test man's faith); the first man and women looked just like us etc. Perhaps the real tragedy revealed between the Creationists and the Evolutionists is not that Religion has any scientific basis, but the inability of the scientific skeptics to offer an alternative to offset suffering in the world.

13
Strike some kind of methodology of consciousness, structure my solitude, go outside biology, develop a compulsion for ultimacy. After all, why are renunciatory techniques used to reach inward places if they haven't already worked for thousands of years? Meditate on the  truth that the present, past & future do not maintain themselves in some kind of inherent continuity. They are dependent on each other, therefore my mind now, then and in the future is totally free of any isolated essence that I may have thought had connected them, it is instead empty, transparent, luminiferous and knowing.

14
The Chuang-tzu  butterfly dream: [wakes from a dream in which he was a butterfly-askes himself "am I a butterfly dreaming Im a man?"]  The initial analysis is important, but what if Im inherently neither? Any psychological identity thrives on impairments inherited from former impairments. How about thinking that every psychological identity I have of myself and others exists in order to reveal their fundamental fallacy? Make a habit of doing this even in my episodic trances.

15
Note seen tacked on the door of Dharmadhatu 617 North State Street, August 6, 1969: "Dear person from Lexington were down the street at Hogans Bar."

16
A customer just came in and told me about his Grandfathers practice (circa 1930s) . How he astral projected with verification from distant relatives and ‘the neighbor woman’ horrified that he could tell her about certain birthmarks. However the last time he projected he said nothing and was obviously very upset. His technique was “simple yet complex”. He had practiced yoga for years and told his Grandson that first you must meditate to rid the mind of all thoughts. Then using this empty mind “see an image of yourself outside and there you go". He would stay in deep trances for hours on week ends, but the peeping-tom thing not only upset his wife but was the likely cause of his being “cut off” through fear from that plane.

17
 It seems to me that scholars have given equal depth of respect to literary texts right along side religious ones. One being Miltons Paradise Lost where the Biblical Adam asks the Archangel Raphael ("Doctor of God") to explain creation. The Angel speaks: "From Man or Angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal, and not divulge His secrets to be scann'd by them who ought rather admire." This passage perfectly presents the gulf set (legislated) by institutionalized Western Religions between belief and faith on the one hand and experiencing and knowing on the other. If we can't get any information from Gods Doctor perhaps more will be forthcoming from one of Gods "fallen". In the scene from Goethe's Faust, "Faust's Study" an important passage reads: "In the beginning was the word"(1)  -then Faust says:  "But stop, what about this? I can't rate the word nearly as high as that. I'll have to translate it some other way. Unless I'm mistaken, the true reading is: In the beginning was the mind. Can it be the mind that creates the world?" And a few moments on he says "And now I see the light and set down confidently: In the beginning was the act - the act of "my" (Fausts) mind". Edinger, a Jungian analyst and expert on the Faust-Methistopheles ego/shadow constellation cites this as a key passage and only hints at the profound meaning when he says that Faust "reverses the direction and goal of the Western psyche from heaven to earth making it a revolutionary conclusion". That it is, but its revolutionary because its rational and therefore can be proven. I would think, for Edinger, it would be more contradictory than revolutionary, for Fausts "reversal" isn't toward a "collective", so precious to Jungians, but to individual fact and separate mental continuity. The word (mind) creates, not God in "a" beginning; and as the drama continues it is this realization of the power of the mind as the only creator that Faust reactivates his primordial psyche in the form of Mephistopheles (unconscious dynamism).  Its unfortunate that Goethe stopped this line of reasoning so soon, but we must remember that 19th century German idealism posited a spiritual essence as the "constitutor" of phenomenal reality and the Faust legend was an appendage of Christian myth.(2)This passage was a favorite of Yeats. In his introduction to Patanjali Aphorisms of Yoga he claimed "Goethe alone among of genius has attempted to be wise, as the ancients understood that word". Yeats reiterates, "In the beginning was the act", and finds in those words of Faust a conviction that ultimate reality is the pure act. He goes on to write, (this was in 1937), "If Goethe failed, he failed because neither he nor his audience knew of  any science or philosophy  that sought not a change of opinion, but a different level of consciousness; knowing nothing of white heat he sought truth in the cold iron." Yeats here alludes to the cold iron of Bible creationism and the white heat of Buddhists truth-claims verified through yoga discipline. Now at the turn of this century psychoanalysis and Jungians in particular it seems, are still settling for the cold iron of "collective" archetypes instead of the white heat of meditative analysis which penetrates to the true causal level of existence. The Golden age of Alchemy of the 16th century had to wait four hundred years until someone as keen as Jung revealed its content as psychic actuality and unconscious projection.(3) We won't have to wait another four hundred for modern depth psychology(4)to recognize Buddhist techniques that can transmute, as Robert Thurman expresses it "even the darkest, most dread-filled phenomena of the human psyche into consciously sublimated and exalted states".(5) Perhaps harder to accept will be the Buddhist world view that will make Jungian alchemy fly past the short-term view of one life's "Self-individualization" into a mode of satisfaction deeper than anything else known in the West.
(1) This phrase EN ARCHEY (Gr.), which is translated "first" in temporal sense by the King James version, does not allude to (the) beginning (of the universe) but rather to (the) beginning (of Christianity) when we were "at first" taught the message by Jesus. In John xvi-4 Jesus speaks of EX ARCHEYS "from at first" as being when "I was growing with you." (unpublished translation by Joe Fischer, Chicago).
(2)  Goethe's Faust  Edward F. Edinger Inner City Books Toronto 1990.
(3)  Colin Wilson in his book on Jung, Lord of the Underworld says "his 'discovery' was, in a sense a rediscovery" of the ideas of Mrs Attwood (A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery) and Wynn Wescott (The Science of Alchymy) and Herbert Silberer (Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism), who all understood alchemy as a spiritual/psychological process before Jung.
(4) Psychotherapists have already started "knocking on Buddha's door". See Thoughts Without A Thinker by Mark Epstein  Basic Books 1995. And on a note of irony, Daniel Goleman wrote this in Mindscience :"Can there be the complete eradication of unwholesome mental factors from the mind? I surely never read about it in Archieves of General Psychiatry."
(5) There are positive indications that Freud's definition of yoga: "Obscure modifications of mental life" is being investigated and researched throughout the psychiatric community.

18
I think Im going to start a  class: Classes on Gnostic Escapism presented by the Temple of Self-Annihilation (single or group registration, 43 year course)! Ive bumped into this mistake several times. It always sounds so pumped up as if there were an ‘us against them’, a ‘Mother Nature wants me dead’ sort of thing. Finding the proper target of negation, (what am I escaping from?), is a powerful and humbling first step. But wait, I just received the following bulletin from the Master NUK PU NUK that Ive been admitted into the  College of Kundalini Cardinals!

"The appeasement of dispositions", is the Buddhas 'middle path' avoiding the two extremes of self-destruction and self-indulgence.

19
Alchemy, aside from her elder sister astrology is the only Western discipline free, (somewhat free) from heavy creation symbolism. It focuses on the possibilities of attainment from a ground of working without much a-priori, or ‘source’ cosmology. “Khmi” which signifies black earth as opposed to infertile sand. As early as the 3rd century Zosimos of Panoplis makes it clear the alchemical work must be performed upon man himself (adamic earth, terra adamica), Adamic body. The hermetic elixir perfects nature and the adept is the living stone. Remember what Joseph Campbell said “This process (alchemy) wasn’t practiced for 500 or so years simply to get gold, which never appeared.” There are a few scholars who also feel that at the center of every Gnostic myth is man, not God. The gnostic revisionist* sees the God realms revised, that is, as periods of karmic maturation. In a sense Alchemy already went through a revisioning process when the spagyric was seen as an inner spiritual process (thanks to the Rosicrucians), however a third revision or rather critique of an earlier ontological mistake can now be made. Its not an "original stuff" out of which a Creator fashioned a realistic world that the early Alchemists were looking for; it is the Buddhist emptiness doctrine that reveals the mistake we make as to how things seem to be real that becomes the focus of the Chemical Wedding.
* Im using this term Gnostic Revision to cover my position on just about everything in this journal but specifically to answer what Bentley Layton calls "the classic problem" that no gnostic text attempts to answer.  That being: "why, from a perfect original source (a "first principle") there should ever need to emanate a second, less perfect being (a "second principle") and thence a plenitude of forms." The Gnostic Scriptures Doubleday New York 1987 page 14. Gnostic revisionists discover no source, and refutes a perfect original first principle. We (editorial) are recasting the Gnostic vision of the universe without a creator, therefore without the possibility of 'fallen' wisdom and so without (no need for) saviors sent from above. Such a position leaves me (not editorial) suspect as a commentator in light of Gnosticism's historical roots.
 

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The analogy of alchemically transforming base metals into gold is used several times in Buddhist literature. In the generation and completion stages of Highest Yoga Tantra, gold is referred to the attainment of the Three Bodies of the Buddha.(1) For example the 'gold' of  Sambhogakaya might mean you had attained the body of perfect resourcefulness. Lama Yeshe said bodhicitta energy is alchemical, transforming ordinary actions of body, speech and mind into the gold of altruistic actions that benefit others.(2) In the Kalachakra tantra it is an alchemical substance which allows gold to appear, "the ordinary body is dematerialized so that an empty form body can appear." (3)
(1) Death, Intermediate State And Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism  Lati Rinbochay  Gabriel/Snow Lion 1979 pp26
(2) Kopan meditation course 1983
(3) Highest Yoga Tantra,  Daniel Cozort, Snow Lion 1986  page 127. In  Dzogchen by His Holiness The Dalai Lama,  Snow Lion 2000, the comentary by Patrul Rinpoche on Hitting the Essence in Three Words mentions "the fabled Island of Gold, (where) you can never find ordinary earth or stones, however hard you look, In just the same way, stillness, movement and thoughts all arise now as meditation, and even if you search for real, solid delusions, you will not find any." page 86. In Taking The Kalachakra Initiation  by Alexander Berzin Snow Lion 1997, there is a discussion of Alchemy in the second chapter of the Kalachakra Tantra where "The principal topic is how to detoxify mercury to render it usable as the main ingredient in preparing "precious pills". Page 66.

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Any state of existence that is controlled by the imprisonment of self preoccupation will be suffering. R. Thurman  says "Free yourselves from the ambition to become a God defined as a being that is greater than or different from the universe, or alien gods that have exclusive esoteric knowledge. Even the vastest god in relation to a particular galaxy or universe is still like a tiny mosquito. A god is nothing but a subatomic particle in the toe nail of another god in a different dimension*..." etc. Back in 1968 when I started to work at the Occult Bookstore I met several individuals who remembered their past lives, it seemed they gravitated to a store like this. One aquantience of mine, a large man, a clear Scientologist,  (actually the inventor of the E-Meter here in Chicago) said  that he remembered a past life as a galaxy! I have no reason what ever to disbelieve him, especially now what R. Thurman has said. I introduced him to Hayya one day, later she made the comment; "Galaxies don't like to tuck in their shirts do they?"
* The Jewel Tree Of Tibet  cassette #2 side B, Sounds True, Boulder Co.200l.  In these wonderful and spontaneous metaphors,I think size refers to mind absorption..

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In her Voice of the Silence what kind of “Holy Isle” is  Mme. Blavatsky fortifying? “Build the hedge high around it, build the dam strong, think of it as a precious deer and thoughts as hounds that pursue it - woe to the deer that is o’ertaken by the barking fiends.” A few years of samatha practice and this analogy is perfectly understood.

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Talking to a member of the Jung Society about my meditation practice, he said after a while, knowing I ran a magic bookstore: "yes...finally Jungian depth psychoanalysis has its Has No Hanna."

24
 Vessel in Hebrew is k'lee y lk . "the shattering of the vessels" ,yrvbch ,ylkh  pronounced h-k'leem h-shvooreem. One of the most magnificent visions or new myths of Ari the "Lion of Safad". Isaac Luria (1534-72). Find a vessel, that's easy, broken ones are everywhere, even the new ones unbroken and shinny, there really broken. All phenomenal and nomenal existence is nothing but broken vessels.* The first truth to discover is to recognize this. Everyone's ego-factory is filled up with shattered cosmic glass. Personalities are neat piles of shards from countless shatterings giving the illusion of a polished vase separate and set aside perhaps with a colorful bouquet of flowers in it, hay! you smell good?
* Lets not forget the sparks-of-light imprisoned within them, a crucial paradox that all cutting edge Kabbalists and Gnostics agree on. The question is: what are these sparks of light and where did they originate?

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What is this presumed uniqueness of my unconscious that Jungians keep talking about?  Its not unique in the sense of inherently unique or unique in the sense of sustaining some permanent happiness. Can it annul any transgression of moral law? Can it decrease the karmic weight of a persons psyche? “Unique”egos and subconsciousnesses will always seek to inflate themselves. As long as the ego or subconscious goes unchecked, integrated or not, desires will continue and no finite satisfaction can ever satisfy (especially when given ‘uniqueness’ status), new desires will arise in the place of satisfied ones as new limbs spring out when a branch is cut.(1) The subconscious is probably loaded with an infinite amount of material, but somebody had to put it there. Who do you think? New agers say "turn everything over to your subconscious mind and trust it to bring success." This is like asking a concealed gangster disguised as the 'inner child' to take over your affairs. The question I have is: how am I unconsciously reproducing afflicted behavior? Why would I want to integrate this unconscious material with conscious material into an 'individuation'? That’s just freezing my sins and having them thaw out in future lives. I want to burn them up now.
Even if you interpret Gnosticism as a return to the unconscious as an end in itself, Jung's integration of the unconscious with the ego would be the predicament for the Gnostics. What for Gnosticism was the severance of the link between divinity and matter is the Jungian predicament. Several critics mention that Jung might have misread Gnosticism, I think he may have, but what was his motivation for reviving gnosticism and alchemy? He was treating sick people and making them better for the most part. No matter how temporary the elimination of suffering is, the merit from relieving it is infinite. Nathan Kaz noted in an article for the Tibet Journal Autumn 1977 that “as a psychologist Jung approaches Buddhism more closely than he does as a metaphysical thinker insofar as (he) is describing and healing the disease of ego-centred human existence."
 I don’t think Jung was trying to bring his patients to any sort of absolute level.(2)That would have revealed on Jung’s part disciplines of prolonged introspective experience of direct contemplation of the nature of mind itself. How could any psychoanalyst help others realize the ultimate nature of thought if he has not realized it himself, or at lease had some philosophical tenet system that revealed it?  To improve mental health and interpret dreams leading to a relative ‘individuation’ linked to comfort zones of archtypes, synchronicities and compensatory myth can be seen as stepping stones, useful tools, and the great Swiss Doctor as perhaps a sibling Buddhist.(3) Buddhists see ‘individuation’ and especially in our Western culture the so-called ‘birth of individualism’ in a slightly different light.  Far from being locked in their own point of view, individuals are infinitely divisible, yet to realize that,  Buddhist monasticism is founded on total individuality, as Robert Thurman says "Every individual is the supreme purpose of the life of the whole. Therefore the whole really flourishes individual by individual".
(1)  A bug-a-boo for followers of Aleister Crowley, who tells his deciples to discover their true subconscious will.
(2) "Contemporary psychology is a product of modern civilization. Its main aim is to help the mentally disturbed to greater adaptation to the conditions of our society, to keep them going within it." Buddhist Meditation Edward Conze, London 1956 page 39. Conze goes on to say that the ranges of virtues of Buddhist meditation demand a reformation of the conduct of life which is greater than almost any layman is willing to undertake.
(3) Its clear from his own remarks that Jung was not really interested in Religious goals and certainly not in Buddhism's enlightenment. What interested him was the "insane contradictions" in humans."The man who is only wise and only holy interests me about as much as the skeleton of a rare saurian, which would not move me to tears". C.G. Jung Collected Works 11, page 319. (Italics mine)
 

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I must remember I don't circumvent the ego, I don't even 'just drop it', through Madhyamaka analysis I actually can't find it (because it doesn't exist) and from this non-finding Ill proceed on to the non-finding of the causal, astral, psychic, atmic & monadic self etc. and any other metaphysical 'higher' self I might have invented or been told I have. As these 'selves' are thoroughly refuted, Buddhists do assert however the existence of awareness but are careful giving it permanent sounding terms such as 'soul'. Thinking along theosophical lines I still can generate and believe  these 'selves' exist as relative phenomena, or as mental pathways. In Buddhism (Ge-luk scholasticism), "Even the ultimate is listed as a phenomenon and thus even the final nature of things, noumenon, is a phenomenon."*
* Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism  Jeffrey Hopkins, University of California 1999, page 84. Also in The Dawn of Tantra  Herbert V. Guenther & Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala Berkeley 1975 page 19, we find "Buddhist philosophy does not make the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal. The phenomenon is the noumenon and the noumenon is the phenomenon; not in the sense of mathematical equation, but in the sense that you cannot have one without the other."  These terms can be sticky, for example when you hear of someone having an experience of numinous character or intense "noumenous vision" we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that such experiences are flawed because we know there not inherently existing. Buddhist practitioners don't just let them go however, but delineate them through the sharpness of doctrinal systems.The noumena can and must be delineated. On a darker note, Garry Wills reviewing the Catholic Priesthood scandal says "It is generally easy for religion to move from the numinous to the antimomian, to the idea that believers are above the rules that bind others." The New York Review May 23 2002.

27
Considering that the unconscious is loaded with an infinite amount of material, actually Buddhists say we have 'mountains' of latent karma of all kinds; black and evil karma, white and good karma waiting for the conditions to surface in various realms. A young man came in one day wanting revenge and while he didn't actually want to shot this person he thought I might have something in the Occult Bookstore so evil and bad that he could bury it in this persons back yard. He said: "I want to buy the most evil thing in this store". I looked around, seeing nobody else was there and knowing that mere books and objects were not in themselves evil, I said: "Well,  Im the most evil thing in the store and you can bury me in the back yard." Seriously considering my offer yet looking suspicious perhaps tending toward rethinking his motives (I hoped), I continued: "On one condition; that you leave my head above ground and don't bury me too close to the driveway."

28
Even though the genderized hemispheric interaction carries important mythological weight it is a provisional myth as opposed to an archetypal one that carries ontological status. Otherwise this symbol would be dichotomous and exaggerate hemispheric dominance as a neurological fact. We will not make the error of believing the cerebral functions are distributed unevenly over the two hemispheres – one doing the lion’s share of functions. Practically every neural event is doubly represented and ‘stereoscopically known’. With the visualized image of the  Alchemical King and Queen stepping up and extending their gaze over the corpus callosum we are collecting into oneness the powers of our mind (philosophical mercury born in the vessel of coniunctio) and achieving a point of balance. If this step is enhanced by mythological richness it nevertheless dissolves into a clarity far richer in experience than halting at the metaphorical. When metaphor dissolves into the non-metaphorical real wonder and true occult practice begins and refined mind passes beyond universals and the supposed archetypes that inform them. Hermes writes: “The dragon (elaboration's of inherent existence) only dies when he is killed by his brother and sister at once.”(1)The unexamined assumptions of Jungian archetypes that try's to lead us to accept them as innate, absolute and universal is not the esoteric approach to meditation. Jung’s theory is based on the existence of meaningful coincidences, not meditative insight. The thought of enlightenment is neither male nor female.(2)The Buddha has said: “The one who perceives through the eyes is neither male nor female, nor the perceptions of the ears, nose, mouth, body and mind male or female. Only the virtuous have eyes of emptiness. The one who perceives through emptiness is neither male nor female.”(3)
(1) Alchemy & Mysticism  p438
(2) That women have inferior objectivity by nature or that men have inferior subjectivity by nature are 'noisy academic typos' of projection by metaphysicians whose yoga is perhaps cabinet filing. However gender myth runs deep in all traditions. Why are the Muses women?  Why are Gnostic Sophia and Prajna Paramita women? I believe these questions involve the counter sexual self and how they are shaped within the mental pathways of individual meditators as they unravel myths and the truth claims of religion. Obviously Jung didn't invent the anima-animus entanglements. Theosophists would put this back to the 'separation of the sexes' sometime during the cloudy atmosphere of Lemuria.
(3) The Sutra of Sagara, the Naga King . Chapter 14 p235 Women in Buddhism,  Diana Y. Paul

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In Theosophy to say that the SELF is the ultimate goal of evolution is perhaps overlooking more important goals like ending universal suffering, ignorance and intolerance of others; all of whom may be busy developing such a SELF. How are we going to do that? The beautiful (profound) thing about the Mahayana altruistic intention to become enlightened for the sake of others is that every kind of barrier is broken down and ends in destroying the notion of a separate self (including 'higher' self). Hasn't it occurred to Theosophists that a full realization of the Self  may be one of the causes of suffering and intolerance? Especially when a 'true self' is linked with  a One True God; look how that idea has divided our world!(1) What has their profound conviction of a Universal Brotherhood to do with realizing a individual permanent Higher Self? Higher than what? I've never heard of so many  selves, 'higher' or otherwise. All these "selves" are examined in Theosophy; personal self, hidden self, causal self, divine self, universal self. This I AM the Eternal essential Self identity, an 'autarchy of self-hood', may be the one stumbling block keeping the grand objects of the Theosophical Society from becoming a reality. I never believed it for a minute(2), yet kept reading and loving H.P.B. thinking that this 'higher self' business was her safety-valve, or some kind of  publicity for joining the Society. Who would have joined a Society in the last quarter of the 19th Century that talked about  no-self or Emptiness? Certainly more people were likely to accept Occultism along with a comfortable, safe anchorage concept of a 'higher' self, reassuring a kind of thread that existed from the 'beginning' that flattered their sense of spirituality. But Didn't it occur to them (members of the Society) that when she and Col. Olcott knelt before the huge statue of the Buddha at Galle in 1880, and together repeated after the monk, Bulatgama the words of the Three Refuges and the Five Vows of the Buddhist layman Pansil, that she was whole heartily accepting the doctrine of anatma, no-self? Teachings given by Madame Blavatsky towards the close of her life reveal some insights into how one should study Theosophy; that it's "not to be taken as a necessary correct picture of the universe. It is rather a secondary pattern which is brought into being in the course of an experience of a Truth. Such a Theosophy is intended not to portray Truth but to lead towards it."- "She repeated this latter expression many times."(3)
(1)  See One True God Historical Consequences of Monotheism,  Rodney Stark  Princeton 2001. Last year the Washington Post reported a Vatican declaration which said "other religions are inferior and can't attain full salvation." Also Chicago Sun Times December 6 2000, "Other faiths have defects that make them inferior." Why wouldn't monotheism's take this point of view?- Its only the most unlearned 'new age' enthusiast that would express they all have the same god.
(2) Well, maybe two minutes. I understand that Theosophy was far more Hinduism than Buddhist. The Voice of the Silence stands apart, also the association of the Panchen Lama, 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas with Theosophists brings to mind a very esoteric alliance of sorts; not only did the Society bring out the first book in the west by His Holiness the 14th, but His Holiness wrote a wonderful forward to the Centenary Edition of The Voice of the Silence. Concerning Theosophy and Tibet see The Masters Revealed  K.Paul Johnson SUNY 1994, especially page 203. An extraordinary painting graces the cover of this paperback showing H.P.B. sitting in front of her "mahatmas" as if they were oozing out of her subconscious mind; three "wise old men" animus projections!
(3)  Madame Blavatsky on How To Study Theosophy  Theosophical Pub London 1960. Notes taken by Captain P.G.B. Bowen who was at the time a member of the TS in Dublin. First printed in 1932 issue of Theosophy in Ireland.

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When Andre Breton said “place your goal ever beyond your reach and you will never cease to recreate your desire”, I realized that the perpetuation of cyclic existence isn’t an unsatisfactory thought for artists.(1) Logic and rationalism were straitjackets for Breton. The Surrealists had their own valid understanding concerning the illusive nature of existence.(2)They imposed subjectivity upon the phenomena of change and systematically discredited objective reality by "making the ordinary extraordinary and smudging the line between the real and the unreal." They thereby achieved the denial of the  absurdity  of existence and the 'triumph' of the imagination over reality. Was this a triumph of anti logic? Did it make a grim reality more pleasurable? I have to admit that it did go a way in the elimination of coarse awareness. However as Sartre charged, by their refusal of consciousness (on the pretext that this was a creation of the bourgeoisie) they undercut the basis of all action.(3) From a Buddhist perspective, a refusal of logical thinking methods would not be sufficient to overturn the misconception of inherent existence. In fact 'normal' appearances (dependent arisings) do not obstruct or impede emptiness, and emptiness does not obstruct appearances, one wouldn't need a surrealism to get realism closer to emptiness.(4)  However one could say there are surreal elements in some of the expressions used in middle path analysis (Madhyamika), for example the one of Nagarjuna "Those who assert dependent phenomena as like moons in water are not tricked by views."
(1) Perhaps just Surrealists, but lets give those who committed suicide the benefit of doubt, that it wasn't just one life that seemed intolerable.
(2) "Breton, with whom reality cut no ice, even altered his birth date by one day, to make it the same as that of his first lover. In later times, the prosaic details of Breton's existence were transmuted by poetic mythomania".  Gary Indiana, My Dinner With Andre Village Voice, October 1995.
(3) Michel Beaujour, Sartre and Surrealism Yale French Studies 30,  page 86
(4) "Consequently, voidness dawns to us in the sense of dependent arising and dependent arising dawns in the sense of voidness." The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra  H.H. The Dali Lama, Snow Lion New York 1997 page 159

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I wanted to possess a non ordinary possibility with my ordinary mind; to seize this flow became my reason for making music, but possession of it is clouded by the product of  musical mind, trapped in a cultural nexus which is based on a fear of loss, an expression of  death, (the paradox of Scriabin gaining consciousness realizing he is about to die, cry's: "This is horrible, I must compose something before I die", and struggles toward his piano), when all he has been composing is the non ordinary. Katherine Ruth Heyman ends her great book The Relation Of Ultramodern To Archaic Music with this: "As for Scriabin, with what exultant joy Arch Perrin exclaimed, "And just think - the vulgar never will like him!"

32
Reading an incredible dense book, Guy Newlands The Two Truths. Having trouble unraveling some of the sentence structure, but I’ll stick with it by learning the special vocabulary. I am hoping it will show me how the simultaniousness of the two truths constitute non-dual insight. Duality has been for the West the cardinal item in the minds attempt to understand the nature of existence. The universe and all that it contained was seen by the sages in terms of “twoness”. Alvin Boyd Kuhn a theosophist wrote that “God threw himself apart into a duality” manifesting pairs of opposites, bifurcating into multiplicity. “Biun-paradox”is a term I like to use from  Kennley. This crisis-partition exists in my life everywhere I go, in everything I do. Buddhists list the eight worldly conditions in terms of opposites: Gain/ loss, dishonor/honor, blame/praise, and happiness/misery. These are not suppositions or imaginary but naturally arise together. I manage to function in the midst of this paradox with only a superficial appreciation of the mystery that confronts me. We as humans operate within a maze of unexamined belief, duality's going by unnoticed in an uninterrupted current of relations which condition our existence. When asked earlier in this century if atomic war was possible Jung said “it depended on how many individuals could stand the tension of opposites in themselves.”*
* Active Imagination by Barbara Hannah  p-51.

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Colonel Olcott tells us that Madame Blavatsky when "occupied by one of the Mahatmas  produced improvisations which might well make one fancy that he was listening to the Gandharvas"..."and we have all heard of the marvellous improvisations of the Master K.H. from those of his pupils who have had the privilage of listening to them. From this we may argue that those who have possessed the gift of improvisation to an outstanding degree have been inspired by the Occult Hierarchy either directly or through the Devas."

34
If you can imagine the amount of latent karma's kept within each individuals indestructible drop (seed mind), think what the "black hole" at the beginning of a big-bang carries - all the indestructible drops of all sentient beings from the last universe.*And when conditions are ripe, Bang! another (the next) universe. One can clearly see that there is no such thing as a "new" universe, and this is a beginningless process, Yikes!
* If this idea is too metaphysical think of what Isaac Asimov said in The Collapsing Universe, that "All the atoms within our bodies, except for hydrogen, were once at the core of stars that exploded as supernovas."

Infinite regress is a curious logical development which appears immediately one begins to study self consciousness. The 'big bang' also calls for the glaring regress of previous big bangs. What could stop such an infinite regression? Obviously nothing to regress; clear light, an emptiness and primal clear awareness of untainted consciousness that time does not touch....a vanishment nexus!

35
Hacking the biun-paradox; by going into the deep structures of the brain, reprogram the language-based binary world with both physical and spiritual components at a metaphorical speed of 10,000 m.p.h. This is a hack! I would definitely have to know what was “fast first” to do this. Wouldn't I be fast first? I have a feeling it would be direct cognition of Suchness which isn't necessarily first or last, or now- its all of these, it always has been in the past and will ever be in the future the same as right now- primordial clear light mind of awareness (ab initio, ab aeterno) pure from the beginning.

36
The Alchemists were to my mind the only Western heresy that understood brilliantly the simultaneity of opposites, that is the biun-paradox. The Gnostics, otherwise intensely creative, tended to target some cosmic culprit for it. Modern neo-gnostics are still trying to accuse and prove the demiurges guilt & therefore not able to find true causes of suffering without dragging in contradiction.(1) Greek philosophy (Platonism)(2)still infects Western mind, not satisfied until it, (the Greeks) could have some kind of ideological closure, then when paradox raised its head everything got translated as “unsolved problem”, as if we now have some kind of protective veil or nimbus of ‘unknowing’. Late 19th century Symbolists got confused by this yet proceeded in its face to create an indefiniteness that pushed art forward to become a principle branch of neurology.(3)
(1) Not only in religious life, but this accusation turns up in the arts over and over. For example in Antonin Artaud's Theatre: "There is such a thing as cosmic cruelty, without which nothing can be created." Quoted in Wayne Andrews The Surrealist Parade. Another example is Alfred Jarry, noted for the College de 'Pataphysique, "Man struggles pitifully to survive in a malevolent cosmos directed by The Celestial Bandit." see Selected Works of Alfred Jarry Roger Shattuck  Grove Press 1965.
(2) "Pathological Platonism" is Sartre's term. I can't help quote Diogenes b 404 B.C. "I've seen Plato's cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness". William James reacted to the Neoplatonic Absolute, the One and the Good, by saying that "the stagnant felicity of the absolute's own perfection moves me as little as I move it."  Quoted from Harold Blooms  Kabbalah and Criticism page 18.   Plato born 426 B.C. the cultivated and wealthy aristocrat, but as Brandon writes: "It would appear that the Greek instinct for rational order could not be satisfied with the notion that the universe was basically a chaos of mutual strife. The concept of evil does not seem to even have a word in Greek."  Keibleman seems to think Plato was very arrogant. He wished to burn all the writings of Democritus but was dissuaded because the books had been too widely circulated. Antisthenes reported visiting him once when he was ill. Plato had been vomiting into a basin. Antisthenes looked at it and said; "I see the bile but not the pride." Before we completely trash this Greek philosopher please remember his carrying on the Pythagorean teachings and beliefs "striking similarities" to the Buddha's teachings (they were contemporary), which included rebirth, non-violence, a rigorous spiritual discipline based on renunciation, and a monastic-like community aimed at liberation from birth and death.
(3) (?) Im going to work this out in later essays. See The Spiritualizing forces of Decadence,  in progress on this site.

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Heraclitus regarded the cosmos as continuously existing, but as ruled by chance in all its parts if not also as a whole. It is said he taught this doctrine with extreme confidence contrasted with the circumspect and caution of Plato.
The Neo-Platonists  Thomas Whittaker  Cambridge 1918 Page 272
 

38
In Noel Cobb's fine book Prospero's Island, which suddenly turns Buddhist on page 160 when discussing the dreamspeech, there is this passage: "Plato, in the Symposium, has Alcibiades say of Socrates that he bears a strong resemblance to those figures of Silenus in statuary shops, represented holding pipes or flutes; they are hollow inside, and when they are taken apart you see that they contain little figures of the gods. What Plato doesn't mention, but Nagarjuna does, is that if you look inside the gods, they are hollow too. The gods, the spirits, the archetypes, are just as void in essence as the ego or any other phenomenon."

39
Being in the generation later than Allen Ginsberg I watched  somewhat skeptically  as he seemed to move from one position to another. Then toward the end he revealed his complete openness and transcendent thinking, (yes the new American Buddhist Transcendentalism) that was there all along. Listen to this late interview,(1) luminous with spark and fire when asked if he saw the Earth as being like an organism? "No, no, no absolutely not. None of that bullshit! No Gaia hypotheses, no theism need sneak in here. No monotheistic hallucinations needed in this. Not another fascist central authority.  Who says its got to be One?  Why does everything have to be One? I think there's no such thing as One, only many eyes looking out in all directions. The tendency is to sentimentalize  into another godhead and to re-inaugurate the whole Judio-Christian-Islamic mind trap." Then when asked if he had a personal understanding of God he replied. "Yes,  there is no God, theres no question about it, its a big mistake. It means six thousand years of darkness, it means  monotheistic control systems, it means war and centralization. The concept of God as a state of consciousness is too easy. Why do you need a concept of god when you've already got a concept of a state of consciousness? Its sneaking in a centralized state of consciousness, it's sneaking in a metaphysical CIA." Allen I miss you... A friend of mine just read this and said it sounded too mean spirited. From my point of view, being in some small way like Allen I think Americans will not all show the same face in learning about Buddhism. The ecumenical way taken by scholar-adepts like R. Thurman following His Holiness The Dalai Lama is truly the Mahayana way, the vehicle needing two wings, Compassion and Wisdom to arrive at final liberation. Their are times when the intense study needed to understand all the many lines of reasoning especially in the Gelug tenent system sets my teeth toward debating the religious background, programed biases and essentialist metaphysics that formed my upbringing. But this is all inside work, the fact that its being spilled out on web pages is one way I possibly can grow and encourage others to critique their ideologies and perhaps disgard old cosmologies. Robert Thurman speaks on a taped retreat about the religious cultures of the West that reinforce gut feelings of self centeredness.Using pictures and models to support their work making us feel like members of a chosen religion and to believe in a God who is "the real self centeredness of all time, who supports us in that way".(2) And in his book Inner Revolution p285 writes:"The autocratic One who appears to need no validation, seems to stand outside of all relationship, unaccountable, thundering "I am that I am!" This is the declaration that crates a tyrant." Robert Thurman is the least mean spirited, the most wonderfully joyous American Buddhist Ive encountered, so lets give Allen a break.
(1)  Mavericks of the Mind Conversations For The New Millennium,  The Crossing Press, Ca 1993 This interview just leapt out of the book as the one single star among the consensus of monism's & universal designs the other 'mavericks' hailed. In another interview  just before his death, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review  Summer 1997, Ginsberg spoke concerning the  unconscious mind and the poetic technique of automatic writing, he said: "I don't see it as unconscious. I see it as conscious."  Then he quoted his last guru, the Tibetan Lama Gelek Rinpoche. "My mind is open to itself." I feel this is an important point for those who hold the subconscious as some marvelous and mysterious thing; Buddhist meditation practices dissolve the barriers that separate the unconscious from the conscious and in higher stages ones whole mind is indeed open to itself.
(2) The Jewel Tree Of Tibet, Sounds True, Boulder,Co 2001
 

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If the Universe is Whole then it is limited because it is Whole. Nothing to which one can add something more, can be Whole. Look how this plays out for monotheistic religions. Islam doesn't need the West, Catholicism didn't need heliocentricism, ultra orthodox Judaism doesn't need the State of Israel; they are Whole.

41
Back in the 60s someone wrote that “with psychedelics on one side, quantum physics on the other, our program of rationally understanding of nature has at last been pushed so far that we have reached the irrational core of nature herself.” Buddhists have contended for 2,500 years that worldly ‘natural’ existence has always been out of control.  And yet we continue to ask: “When will inequality be abolished on Earth”?  Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni angrily declares that those very words are a crime: “the first law of nature is inequality, universal equality of intelligence, of mind, of genius would be a hopeless prospect”. Zanoni, P-183 published in 1842.

Sir Thomas Brown  circa 17th century wrote: “This world is no Inne, but a Hospital”. Baudelaire a couple centuries later adds a variation: "This life is a hospital in which every patient is tormented by the yearning to move to another bed."

Seen on a T-shirt Chicago 1995: "I suffer throughout infinity, enslaved to perennial agony". Im looking into this boys eyes and wonder, is this his agreement with existence? It dosn't sound like any counter reaction, more an embrace of chaos.

Here is another quote, this time from Lyttons A Strange Story: ”How can I presume to trace the numberless links of effect up to the First Cause- far off –oh;  far off -out of the scope of reason”. It, (that) is out of reasons scope. Profound wisdom-intuition traces such links to an entirely different location; (locations! individual by individual), and there not far off;  if their deep, because there beginningless, doesn't mean there anywhere outside the individual psyche.

One last quote: "I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than "Mother Nature" was ever perpetuated? It  is because nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror." John Wyndham The Midwich Cuckoos.

42
I had this dream where I was running with hundreds of  children along a vast plane toward the edge of a cliff.  We were chasing a huge beast-like monster moving on three legs with one arm as the fourth. It was Yeldabaoth the demiurge, we were afraid it would go over the edge, yelling at it not to kill itself - we would have no one to blame for our misery if it did fall, then I remember the face of Harold Bloom as one of the children. Modern gnostics (the children) must keep the evil demiurge alive and the unknown God unattainable in order to have a religion, or at least to be an authority on it.

43
"Nothing could be more formal than the performance of a play or a symphony, yet they are more moving on that very account. Spontaneity does not depend on being unprepared. On the contrary, only superficial emotions can be adequately felt and expressed on the spur of the moment"
                 Rupert Gleadow  The Unclouded Eye

 The question WHAT IS FAST FIRST? concerned the concept of "free" music and disappearance, and to discover a deeper metaphysics to the accursed unexamined indulgence of the 'energy solo'. I wanted to attain some kind of performance where people would say: "Look at this genius of negative presence."  I resolved to destroy the so called ‘principle of internal necessity’, which in the past meant some inner need of the subsciousious mind to express itself. My goal at that time was to become free from all human expression; tragedy/joy, personal/impersonal and universal. I had hoped that playing at magnificent speeds overwhelmingly complex music, avoiding naive spontaneity, superseding orgiastic levels of energy I could become omni-aware in an aural windfall of long slow mental stillness. The fastest notes may be the largest in significance to aeon ears. The rapid-fire rushes would summon demonic monsters to feed on the blood of the asymmetrical lines devoid of error, torching my subconscious mind,  permitting no recall, wiping out chance itself. I visualized myself (and actually was at times) turning blue at the uniform speed of .0002 fluidum in discrediting kleshas. It was the determination of what is indeterminate in actual occasions of negation. Such a mind would be measuring the reverse level of indeterminacy; meaning I would see the sameness of all phenomenon. I had resolved to isolate this “Burst”; to formulate Burst proportions, Burst saturation's, ultimately the “Elongation of Burst” (I almost started a band with this name) was to continue infinitely. To my mind I had found out where the “climax” was in music and I intended to extend it indefinitely. Fortunately around this time some persons came to my rescue, and due to their kindness I snapped out of this aura of wrong headed sanctification.* The whole idea disappeared  once aural illusions were put into their proper place and aesthetics put in their proper sphere of influence.  The tendency to lump together, or to stress the role of irrationality, spirituality and mysticism as if they belonged together was put to the lie by Buddhist transcendentalism.
* I have discovered that these strains and flaws, like my pathological extremism can be uprooted even though there deep and encrusted, tangled with hidden karma's. Tibetan forms of meditation are most powerful in this kind of work. The real error here was my exaggerated attempt of self-effacement in a visible act, a caricature imitating absence that created the contradiction of isolation and obscurity needing an audience and perhaps renown! Further, what could be more masochistic that biting yourself, presumably with the intent of eating yourself as in the ouroboros illustration of the snake with its tail in his mouth? Jaws can't devour jaws, the stomach can't digest itself. Yet perhaps its not disapperance as much as it is transformation of desirous energy. The slogans: 'void of friction', 'elongation of burst', 'get rid of rid of, 'vanishment nexus' and the idea of 'turning off the moment you turn on' reminds me of the Tibetan analogy concerning a wood-born insect (worm) hatched deep within a tree, feeding upon the tree, eating the very wood out of which it was born.

                                                       ADDENDUM
During the time of this activity there was ‘in the air’( in the art air) all kinds of similar types. The Destruction in Art Symposium, dropping instruments from 3rd-floor windows, attacking grand pianos with sledge hammers, music manuscripts machine-gunned, “To Conjure Up the Spirit of Catastrophe”,(1) and other extravagant variations of the Dada spirit.  It was as if the twentieth century ethos prescribed negation as its goal.(2) Therewere many things that artists were politically against; on stirring revolution and civil disobedience "why don't you just teach every artist to shoot?" yelled Arshile Gorky. If Duchamps original purpose to destroy the whole academic concept of a work of art was based on the motive to awaken rather than destroy aesthetic sensibility we should have had long by now some kind of post-renaissance Modernism, instead the dominos sped up and toppled over; art movements rushing past too swiftly one on the heels of the next.(3).
There were several ‘peaks’ at this time; pieces that just barely cross the threshold of Art, perhaps visioning a reality too remote and therefore paralyzing it. Cages Silent ‘piece’, Robert Rauschenbergs all ‘white’ paintings, Ad Reinhardts all ‘black’ paintings, La Monte Young’s ideas about  repetition that “didn’t lead to any further growth”(4), etc.  And then later there was Chris Burden.(5)All this was philosophy-driven change where morals, ethics and aesthetics were closely bound. If I knew the exact date that Modern Art fell off the end of the earth Id cast a horoscope of the final demise, in all its solipsistic glory.(6) But it would also show where Modern Art images spoke directly to individuals in their process of recomposing their lives. Perhaps the separation of Art from philosophy seems necessary again if the external world is perceived as being real and distinct enough to be worthy of  investigation.
I don’t like the idea that nostalgia is replacing curiosity; its not my choice. Curiosity means being challenged and as far as nostalgia goes, do I even know what Im nostalgic for? Were now fifty years or so later, technology-driven change is a different kind of challenge  more rigidly delineated. I like what Kerouac said " Let the machines bleed, you bless". The best place to love something is in the present.(7) Loving the past is a memory and the future is fantasy. There will be great art, profound art always, as long as there is rebirth, but I don't want to meet "Art" again in another life no matter how marvelous it might be. Im finished being lead to other vistas, I only want certainties now. There is a poem by Czeslaw Milosz which quotes: "Only the object / which does not exist / Is perfect and pure,". Buddhists needn't remove objects from existence to find their purity, its the momentary human passion rooted in ignorance that grasps at them and takes them as independently existing that causes imperfect objects. Once that passion is understood and treated, objects will be glowing with freedom.
(1) Manifesto of Jean-Jacques Lebel, Life, February 17 1967 P87 The Other Culture by Barry Farrell.  There is yet a scarry twist with a quote from Don DeLillo prior to Sept. 11 2001 who wondered if terrorists weren't "the only true avant-garde artists left, because they are the only ones still capable of surprising people."
(2) The ethos of negation goes back to the late 19th century where I think the vane runs deeper into the mountain yielding more valuable and precious deposits. Here the super dreamers, the  Symbolists renounce a miserable earth and its vain delusions, especially the inferiority of a life of action over a life of solitary vision. Even to live itself would be but sacrilege against their dreams. "Live? our servants will do that for us" cry's Axel, the ultimate symbolist hero of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Written in 1890 Axel was considered a sacred book by W.B. Yeats. Villiers, also a learned occultist recommended Eliphas Levi's Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie to Mallarme and is said to have exerted a great influence on Maeterlinck.
(3) As Robert Morris explained how each movement supposedly more radical than the other, be it Cubism, Dada,  Pop etc.- the “open” positions were very early closed out. As each of these positions were occupied the possibilities were reduced; like a set of theorems following a new and valid assumption, each was a limiting case. What followed after the primary positions had been filled was of course, the tradition. Marcel Duchamp who was not too intrested in artistic creation understood art history as an expression of the mediocrity of an era.
(4) Selected Writings La Monte Young, Mairan Zazeela.  Heiner Friedrich, Munchen 1969
(5) Only two 'pieces' I remember;  One being nailed to a Folkswagon, the other, an opportunity to electrocute him in an art gallery. O yes, & another one about suffocation.
(6)  But there were numerous incarnations of Modernism.  Andre Breton, (born February 19 1896) in his 2nd Manifesto of Surrealism  mentions the conjunction of Uranus and Saturn in Scorpio which took place at his birth, also Aragons and Eluard (Tzara also!) as "a very preponderant "Uranian" influence"  (historians will also notice the Pluto Neptune conjunction in Gemini).  Perhaps some astrologer will set up transits of the 'body' of Modern Art and show the Uranian/Neptunian motive which cut across all the arts in the 20th century influencing the collage principle and radical juxtaposition etc.
(7) Im inclined to agree with Oswald Spanglers life-and-death rhythm of 'cultures'.  At this point "there is more intelligence, taste, character and ability in the technical staff of any first-rate engineering works than in the whole of contemporary music and painting." The Decline of the West  Volume I, 293.

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Occult (the word)
As sound waves coming from various points in the environment are physically additive, that is they combine into single moments of hearing, so two or more characters, objects and phenomenon in texts are all present in an occultist’s psychic wave function, becoming single “wholes”. This is a fundamental quality of occultism and raises empathy to extraordinary levels of learning, teaching and most importantly, tollerance.(1) H.P.Blavatsky held high the “occult” banner for this reason. It is why I never changed the name of the Occult Bookstore despite the slings and arrows of the public and media's maligning of that word. What could be more hermeneutic (interpreting/exegesis) than ‘occult’ and then its uncovering? A few years ago I had a phone call from a prospective customer who was looking for a title, the name told me, by his brilliant deduction, that he knew exactly what we were about. He asked: “do you carry the book One Hundred and One Ways to Hide Something? (2) In the Buddhist sense “occultism” may signify a type of analysis that hopes to uncover or find the intrinsic existence and ‘hidden’ meaning of things. But of course it does not find any inherent quality what so ever. Because of the intensity of the occult investigations Buddhists arrive at the wisdom of emptiness, and with this ‘finding’ nothing stays occult or hidden. In this way wisdom overcomes ignorance and the occult overcomes itself.
(1) Because it overcomes literalism - a much needed exegete in our time as religion continues to motivate war and terror. If journalists can figure out that the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion are animus projections of Dorothy;  if literary critics see the characters Caliban, Sycorax, Ariel, Prospero as 'wholes' or Musicologists see Klingsor, Amfortas, Kundry and Parsifal as 'wholes' and if we can apply this to the worlds "Sacred Books" were not far from diffusing combatants on the world stage.
(2) Apparently there was such a title during the 70’s. I replied to the customer that we didn't have it but that he was on the right track, sort-of.  But wait, could this have been a ‘members only’ text book of the Illuminati? I say this with not much mirth for their secrets are inducements to a fabric of inducement.
 

45
Without the contraries there is no progression, they are mutually self sustaining. Its the Cosmic Drama, but once you say that, you might think somebody made it that way, as in design. Why not Chaos Drama, who made that? Anyone stepping up?  Chaos (ka’os) >chainein, to gape]. How would chaos feel? I hear the phrase “all is relative” or “its all samsara”, this is what someone called "tabloid thinking", but unless we actually ‘know’ it, it isn't relative or samsara. If something is relative its without ultimate foundation. Most of us are constantly in some foundational state of identity, rooted to some perception, conception. If we really did feel relativity or experienced a real knowing of samsara we would be horrified. We would want to get out of it as quick as possible. Samsara means “wandering”. If we could vision the beginninglessness of our states of wandering in all the realms we would say “enough of this senselessness, it must stop now, in this very lifetime”. We would look upon this vicious becommingness as some kind of spoiled food or poison in our stomach and want to throw it up, regurgitate it out. (I heard Geshe Sopa use this analogy at a Dear Park teaching sometime in the 80s.)

 I had a chaos moment once while descending down the basement stairs in total darkness thinking I had one more step reached the bottom & abruptly collapsed into some kind of 4th diminution. Objectivity was completely jarred loose,  my subjectivity felt like an astral-plane chaos.

Milton wrote “Chaos is the womb of nature and perhaps her grave” That’s good. Now the theosophist Mable Collins wrote “We are mentally obliged to provide our Creator with chaos from which to produce the worlds”. That’s nuts.

Other examples of Tabloid thinking (faulty generalizations): The Satanic West, Islamic Fundamentalism, Buddhism is life rejecting, John Paul II. All be-bop musicians smoke dope, my Aunt Jean.

46
In many ways Modern Art explored chaos, ironically its an age old concern. I can think of only one who made us look at it uncontaminated from self manipulation. Ive met professional musicians (members of symphonies) who thought John Cage might have been practicing Black Magic, the way he looked, his seriousness of feasting on the disorder of Satans implicit chaos was actually transcendent blissfullness, ego-distroying, muse-distroying. Chaos is our initiator, She is split open, flowing forth her ambrosia, rendered in two by the jewel of Ratnasambhava, who I say Cage was the embodiment of;  the Buddha of Equalizing Wisdom.
In an interview on Chicago's WFMT sometime in the 60s Studs Turkel asked Cage “where is the discipline here? (referring to his composing by chance), John Cage answered “I am interested in the highest of disciplines”.One would have a hard time to find an 'art' precedent for such spiritual activity in the West. But there is something I found in David Wulstans book: The Origin of the Modes, Studies in Eastern Chant where music is adapted according to a tradition "for the purpose of art was not self expression, but the depiction of an alterego which had a separate existence of its own".(italics mine)

"Many people think that art has to do with understanding but it does'nt. It has to do with experience. All art lacks understanding" John Cage

47
Chaos is just a puzzle. It has pieces that can be put together, not back together because its not so much out of place, as it is the way we look at it. Chogyam Trungpa said "chaos is methodically chaotic",* which I believe understands the puzzle, the method being 'dependent origination' (pratitya-samutpada).
* The Dawn of Tantra  Herbert V. Guenther, Chogyam Trungpa,  Shambhala 1975  page 88
 

48
It is said that Darwinism is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments and not a tale of inevitable progress.* That is because Darwin did not discover as Buddha did, a primordial clear light of mind that is innate in every sentient being. Darwin therefore had to write: "I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists."
* Stephen Jay Gould  The New York Review April 15, 1982
 

49
One of my mentors,(died May 1891) was at an early age a clever linguist, a talented pianist, and a fine artist, yet a fearless rider of half broken horses.
Is there no greater irony than the hurried baptism performed on the weak newborn Helena Petrovna, “lest the child die with the burden of original sin”?  Not to worry, the ‘weak’ tot managed inadvertently to tip over a lighted taper and set fire to the officiating priests long flowing robes just as he was in the act of renouncing the Evil One by thrice spitting upon the invisible enemy.

50
A Gnostic revisionist might make light of Itzach Lurias visionary experience, and say: “If God extracted himself (Tzim Tzum) from the Universe, lets follow him and see where he went!” I personally think that’s possible, not making light of it at all. Through Buddhist meditation technology it can be achieved. One might be sliding up along side Lurias samadhi and ask, “is this really what you were looking for?”
Ari's doctrine of "concentration" (Gods Contraction, fundamental crisis) ,vj ,yj Tzim tzum.(1) Now this is a serious premise (taken up later), Luria had to universalize his personal experience as religious finding. So his personal revelation/samadhi  joins an a-historical collective of religious texts accepted by Kabbalists and scholars as an attribute of God, which it's not. Stretching a God here and there by the infinite possibilities of the disciplined mind is dragging his name into areas he did not produce by his own store of virtuous karma. A tempestuous insight I agree,(2) but it does not rob us of  divine illumination.The values left to us are the infinite powers of the mind for spiritual transcendence and despite Lurias trance-mythic layer of 'Religion', something (a guided pathway) individuals can accomplish. There is no exile for us, be it a self-contracted nothingness - but, for how long do we want to stay in it?
(1)  One may ask why did the Holy One even bother to create this world? According to the Midrash, we are not allowed to ask why.
(2) Not so tempestuous, Allen Bennett (1872-1923) had a similar take on all monistic beliefs. He considered them also stemming merely from someone's meditative absorption, then "interpreted according to their own psychology, religious prejudices, and the needs of their audience for gods" See The Theosophical Enlightenment Joscelyn Godwin, page 371. From the Gnostic Revisionist perspective a meditator in his transcending samadhi either goes there and discovers that's what the god is thinking or he stays their and thinks it himself. For example in Neo-Platonism  the "parent of the entirety" is parent to nothing but himself in his "supremely beautiful object of intellection. Therefore it will eternally think about itself and its own thoughts, and this activity constitutes its ideal form."  from Albinus, second-century text book of Platonist philosophy, (italics mine). Of course the textbook goes on to advance metaphysical conjecture and hypothetical actions to this parent. Not only creator of all but responsible for all good, thus reification and closure from bias invested essentialist notions, causing essentialized categories and building false conceptions of an inherent self onto its devotees ultimately causing egocentric obsession.

51
One can wonder why Gurdjieff held the “religion” of Tibet in high regard. What did he do there? Gurdjieff disguised as “Lama Dorjieff” never exactly said how long he stayed there nor what he specifically learned. Kathleen Speeth thinks that the statements in Life is Real Only Then, When I Am are traceable to his ‘Tibetan teachings’ when he says concerning his thought power “I could from a distance of tens of miles kill a yak”, (or) “In twenty four hours could accumulate life forces of such compactness that I could in five minutes put to sleep an elephant”!  I think Its clear from these statements that Dorjieff never met any Tibetan Lamas. Ive seen serious virtue pursued by Gurdjieff students so I can't go as far as Jack Kerouac* who said that "Anyone incapable of seeing through this charlatan's attempts at being a mysterious seer of some secret oriental wisdom is going to be reborn a novelist or a hare with horns."
* Some of the Dharma Viking 1997

52
The important questions asked by Westerners concerning the ‘self’, the ‘higher self’, the ‘I’ or transcendental ‘I’ are not easy when using Buddhist terminology. One could say “none of the above”. The words ‘god’, ‘self’, ‘I’, even ‘soul’ and sometimes ‘spirit’ are not usually used by Buddhists.(1) They rather speak of the mind. The ‘discriminating force of mind, or the “appearance making mind”, the force which discriminates from wisdom, the “Wisdom Eye”. Its more of a transpersonal witness & not a transcendental Ego, (remember Sartre(2) knocked down Husserl’s transcendental ego using in one instance a near identical reasoning that Prasangika Buddhists used hundreds of years earlier to refute inherent existence of the self). The basic definition for mind revolves around an understanding of what Buddhists call “clear nature”. This is far from a logos fashioned mind or an indwelling of any kind which constitutes the Western metaphysical realm of abstraction and academe. [The Sartre book is The Transcendence of the Ego An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness.  Noonday Press 1957.]
(1) See Rebirth and the Western Buddhist by Martin Willson for the difficulty in using the English word 'soul'. " The principle of Selflessness negates certain deluded views of how such a soul, or anything else included in or imputed upon aggregates exists."
(2) One may wonder why Im invoking Sartre but I believe as Nicolas Calas did that "Sartre's theory of freedom is historically significant because it is the first coherent post-Christian (atheist) doctrine of its kind".   Village Voice Art Journal Nov. 12 1964

Simone de Beauvoir in her autobiography tells of the time she and Sartre were visiting Zen temples in Japan: "All the lamas we met took an interest in Sartre's work, and the nature of their interest surprised me; this one had tears of emotion in his eyes as he shook Sartre's hand", pp272. Continuing this story I can imagine  hearing the monk whisper into Sartre's ear: "You did good -  you found nothingness, now the next step is to find emptiness".

53
An Israeli novelist, (I forgot his name) tells the story when he was a boy of 14 or so in Auschwitz he witnessed a strange event. There were in the camp a few Rabbis, two of which know the Talmud by heart. They desired to have a tribunal on God. Considering the surroundings and history of the Jews, weighing every question for and against in an extremely serious manner. After two or more days of this came the verdict;  guilty. But after the pronouncement, the novelist goes on, they went out and prayed. Ending his story with irony he said “one can only add that, if they did go out and pray it was to a guilty God.”

“I myself try to think that I have made peace with human blindness and Gods permanent
silence"                                                             Isaac Bashevis Singer

54
My Pataphysical Adventure
I carefully took out the wallet size 'diploma' he had mailed me over five years ago, to show the clever addition I had made by gluing on a photo of myself.  There was a moment of panic as he held it close to his eyes, examining it carefully. Was it wrong for me to deface an important document? - at least I was wearing a tuxedo  -I remember taking that picture in a photo booth on the way to that Hotel gig I had during 1965-66 on Michigan Avenue. He scratched at the lamination and a big smile broke the tension, then he said something. "What did he say"  I asked out of the corner of my mouth. In a low measured voice Hayya answered "He says it's very cute". Motioning us to fallow him we climbed up a narrow ladder like stair case to an attic room. There was bare floor boards, improvised beds, plants hanging upside down from the rafters, bookcases filled with a red leather bound set of Jarry's works plus many other French authors, some I recognized. He motioned for us to sit as he made an announcement with the swing of his arms.  Again I asked my Wife "what did he say"? "This is the Collage" she said with amused contempt. We had spent the better part of the day looking for this  place, Hayya's patience I thought was maybe running thin. She spoke perfect French and asked all over the Provence "where is the College?" All I could do was carry on how important this was for me. Now, to actually be sitting here in Vrigny France with Raymond Fleury, General Administrator of the College of Pataphysics was beyond belief. Perhaps Hayya was disappointed that there were no impressive buildings such as a College or University might have - just a house with a big spiral hedge in the front yard in the middle of acres of vineyards. Every time I looked at her a slight sardonic snicker broke out on her lips.  Sitting down at a big desk in the middle of the room, Raymond Fleury immediately started shifting papers. His gaze struck me as extremely esoteric, the way perhaps Dr. Foustroll would look. Here at last I was going to be confronted with some sublime Pataphysical mystery - what I had traveled (secretly) a thousand miles to hear. After all, here was a person in the direct lineage from Alfred Jerry the great French playwright of Ubu Roi, the precursor of Dada and Surrealism, the poet/philosopher who taught the "Science of Imaginary Solutions". I knew that Raymond Fleury could tell what I was here for. Even though I couldn't read a word of French I had been receiving literature from him for years now, including all those wonderful postage stamps with the Pataphysical spiral. I felt a deep aesthetic connection to him, all of my heroes seemed to hover ghostly around him, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Mallarme, I was about to receive a secret from their mouths to my ear. This now was the site and origin of my initiation and apocalyptic vision into French Symbolism. Finally he spoke, every beautiful word bolted me into the chair. He opened a ledger adjusting his sight, than gazing directly at me, spoke something softly as if to grant me admission into a secret society. "What did he say...what did he say?" Hayya's face turned red and tightened up..."I'll kill you...you owe three years dues."

55
For the Buddhist the "I" is no longer the kernal but the husk. There is a point where the ‘I’ no longer even forms a concept. There can be no real or inherent ‘I’-development because it disappears, it vanishes in dispersing configurations (senses, sense consciousnessess and sense objects). It cannot bear analysis by a yogi applying the Madhyamika view (or any Buddhist view), there is only a conventional ‘I’. The notion of an ego or ‘I’ immersed in a pool of cosmic light or its submission to a wider field of consciousness is impossible. There is no need to divide or combine ‘I’-extension with developed awareness. We don’t need an ‘I’ to observe anything. Lets start classifying states of consciousness lacking a 'me'. Things karmically fuse quite naturally into a stream (mental continuum) without a medium of personal identity or transpersonal, as in the popular transpersonal psychology in so far as it assumes the existence of an atman or is associated with a Platonic 'true self' spark of the "One Consciousness". Better to use the term subtle consciousness or subtle mind which helps undercut the habit of clinging to selfish  perspectives.(1) Alchemy has a good term for this: “Whitening”, luster. I find it totally exhilarating to use chemical language rather than contemporary ego infested new-age psychology that attempts to integrate peoples broken psyches into a ‘wholeness’ in order to just cope with worldliness. Oh, but wait a minute, that’s important, we must have healthy conventional I’s not only to cope with ordinary reality but to mount the philosophical attack on its apparent solidity and permanence. The meaning here concerns the acceptance of phenomena on the operational or functioning level. A genuine understanding of voidness (reality) does not undermine emperical phenomena. "Voidness is revealed in the very forms in which the world appears to us." The topic of Mahamudra meditation is the "two levels of truth." The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra H.H. The Dalai Lama Snow Lion Pub. New York 1997.
(1) The point being Buddhas argument that belief in a permanent self would negate the usefulness of a moral life. See The Truth of Anatta Dr. G.P. Malalasekera The Wheel Publication, Sri Lanka

56
A Kabbalistic calculus of the mind; one will be able to write mind: war (rosh) but with different levels of samadhi r1  r2 r3 r4 etc. Within the province of mind there are no limits.

Durring a question and answer period following a lecture by Chogyam Trungpa someone asked, "what is beyond mind?" Trungpa answered: "More mind".
 

57
There was a mysterious evolutionary power within my karmic continuum that demanded I grow some more in this incarnation.  The radical discontinuity of my relationships seemed almost programmed.  Its true, the grief took me by surprise and for 3 years I was a walking tear factory. These tears, rather than embarrass G.S., he saw them as good. With his help I discovered that worldly creativity, excitement & pleasure were & are never a true door to ones deepest feelings. It was grief that brought me in touch with them. He told me to follow that grief downward into renunciation, into a profound reflection & once there, to see others grief as important to relieve as my own.

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."
                                                                                                             Marcel Proust
 

58
If I reflect on my feelings, analyze every fascination, enmity or love and extract from it a portion of  my personality, that is, what part of it is bound to this - where is my libido lodged this time? If I follow this kind of reflection diligently collecting the scattered psyche from the outer  world, tracing the subtle networks that trail back as far as I can, a kind of prehistoric geomancy comes to mind. Where are the deep root karmas of attachment, desire and ignorance? I’m borrowing the phrase “eustasia” from the Britisher Paul Screeton who was the first to grasp the real significance of lay lines.  He rediscovered an ‘unclassified mesh’ which covers the earth in an archaic vibrancy. I can identify that vibrating mesh. I am that mesh, the lays are my very nerves aligned by uncountable births. I wish to lift them out, detach them from the magnetic layers of this planet, once unhinged from karmic gravity the earths scintillating clear empty nature will be revealed to me. The absurdity of the world never existed, it was fated to be no more than the illusion of my own beginningless wandering. With this understanding I will chant the Decadence mantra, "against nature", but not too loudly in public.

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Phenomenology is a term invented by the German 18th century mathematician J. H. Lambert to describe the science of appearances. Wouldn't you think it took some kind of meditating for Husserl to arrive at his "transcending ego"? I wonder at the methods used by Kant to arrive at his "noumenon" or Kierkegaard at his "eternal primus". Doesn't it seem strange that all through the Western philosophical speculative period no one set down a technique, a yoga if you will, of philosophising? Husserl had a process of reduction that was directed to the thinker himself. He analyses mental phenomena into their "parts and moments" separating residual beliefs from purely mental phenomena. This canceling out of external things finally confronted pure mental phenomenon. From there he arrived at what he called "eidetic" reduction. This"ideation" is where he plotted the limits of what can be imagined and at last came upon an "idea" or "essence". This  last mental 'place', the "horizon of potentiality" is what is grasped when all contamination of external things have been removed.  I try to picture Husserl seated in a half lotus, his thumbs and index fingers together resting on his knees, back straight, reducing his mind to such an eidetic state instead of dressed in woolen three piece suite in front of a blackboard, chalk in hand. It helps me believe that perhaps Western philosophers did achieve the mental states they theorized about. But then we can ask why, if they experienced the change which resulted in a shift of consciousness from gross to subtle, didn't they delve deeper into the nature of mind itself? They may have discovered that the mind allows anything to arise in it because it is itself devoid of existing in any intrinsic way.  Perhaps the 'eidetic' was so profoundly blissful he felt that this must be the end to it; but in fact he had fallen back on his romantic predecessors by granting ultimate reality to this "transcendental I" as subject alone. Sartre saw that Husserl was mistaken; his common sense reasoning asked: "By what right does 'I think' get privileged treatment?" Sartre identifies "involuntary spontaneity" as the Husserlian culprit. An owner of consciousness that would bind up into a unity all phenomena in a constituted creation where nothing could escape; a sort of Platonic black hole, a tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators. This would not only be distressing but unfeasible. Sartre says that the individual "me" can do nothing to this transcendental "I" because it flashes into existence every moment identical moments to it; something impossible. We would be produced again and again in the exact likeness of our 'transcendental I'. This same"me" without any change must by definition be the effect and cause fuzed as one, making momentary change impossible. Therefore Sartre says any 'transcendental I' is radically opposed to the consciousness it wants to give rise to. An actual spiritual person would get abstracted out of existence, subtracted from what matters, from practical relevance.
For example if we had a primary structure of consciousness then dread or anguish over fatality would be impossible. There could be no coherent explanation of any kind of ailment. This sounds strikingly close to the Christian Science teachings concerning the inherent nature of producer and the product; they are mutually inclusive. Any empirical contradiction like pain and sickness does not in fact exist!(1)
Buddhist analysis sees that if something inherently existed and caused or produced an effect it would be one entity and no difference could be detected between them in shape, color, taste, or capacity. The example given in texts is that of a sprout and seed, they would not differ. If they are inherently the same nature everything that is true of the seed must also be true of the sprout. Husserlers  'voluntary spontaneity' and the 'involuntary spontaneity' would be one, the only category would be sameness, there would be no category of cause and effect.  This point is crucial in focusing in on the Buddhist wisdom of emptiness. Because there is the category of cause and effect (dependent arising) there would be a 'category' of emptiness which makes it possible for the arising of the fundamental innate mind of clear light or in terms of Dzogchen; the rigpa of all-embracing spontaneous presence.  Whatsoever arises is invariably an effect produced by an antecedent cause. From the immediate instant before "now" back in chronological sequence to indirect and contributing causes in the extremely complex and intertwined succession of past karma. Only Buddha's can see the imprints, past migration paths and fragile homogenic habits that lay in waiting in more latent and occult areas of ones karmic continuum. In other words, there are many levels of natural law that science has not yet discovered and are beyond the comprehension of ordinary beings. Nothing is ever lost, everything only transforms and transmutes. There is not the slightest particle that is inherently existing. If this were not so, how could even a scent of contradiction be avoided? And how could anyone transcend conditioned existence? And lastly, how could Buddhism be different than Hinduism - or Christianity?
(1) At the age of 9 years I witnessed such philosophy/religion at work when visiting my Fathers Sister in St Paul. She stood swatting flies away from a huge open gash on Uncle Antons leg. No doctor was ever called. I remember the sweat and tears coming from his face as he looked up with a scared expression. Aunt Mable then began reading something, Im not sure what but probably Isaiah 41 Verse 12: "The non-reality of matter has now been proved", or some such  thing. Someone said that "Christian Science is Berkeleyism run mad", but I can't be too critical for the best teaching I recieved from my "Scientist" Dad, not only as a young boy but right up to his death in 1989 was that the mind never grows old.

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That which is permanent cannot be done away with. So if I am permanent everything Im doing right at this moment would all be there the next moment with no change. Something like a stone statue. The same with permanent moral absolutes. Reasoning in this manner, perfection cannot produce imperfection. To say that it can, theologians of every age have expressed paradox and contradiction one way or another in the most appealing and appalling manner. I would say the most artistic & appealing would be Luria, the most appalling, Leibniz, and some where in-between, Soren Kierkegaard. In explaining how God choose to become man, Kierkegaard (literally "church yard") calls it the "profoundest incognito, the most impenetrable unrecognizableness that is possible, the infinitely qualitative contradiction".*
* Training in Christianity  Page 131
 

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G.R.S.Mead writes that "the neo-platonic thought is metaphysically, the most mature thought that the European world has seen." Could this be like the juices of that flower with purple leaves? Perhaps what is most mature has as its bouquet, a euphoria with a slight aftertaste due to the submitted seeds that grow in a ground that can never be plowed.

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John Cage, unlike Pollack or the Surrealists did not go beyond conscious intention towards unconscious spontaneity (psychic automatism), he suspected both.  It wasn’t the conscious/unconscious kind of dualism he felt needed rectification. From the perspective of Buddhism the subconscious is just as deluded as waking consciousness, even more so, therefore it has nothing liberative to offer when giving direct expression to it.  Surrealists approach to the subconscious is within the basic principles of the Judeo/Christian traditions, thinking as Jung did, that the idea of God was an archetype of the  unconscious.(1)  Of course they accused him (Cage), of throwing out the baby with the bath water.(2)From the Surrealist aesthetic perspective they were right. Cage saw all causes and effects within the context of suchness, emptiness. I feel he had the high realization that emptiness itself appears as cause and effect.(3)This doesn't mean that emptiness is an autonomous functioning thing or a cause from which things and objects arise, rather all phenomena, as the Buddhists express it  “are of one taste with emptiness”, otherwise cause and effect could not operate or exist. That is why Cage said we didn’t even need to hear his music, we could  go out into nature and open our ears, excepting everything equally.What kind of western musical tradition would this fit into?  None that we know, perhaps its the lost(?) tradition of a Primeval Aesthetic where an essential whirling gaity registers the Natural Justesse and ultimate poise of nature "just because it is exact".
(1) See C.G. Jung and the Religion of the Unconscious in Psyche And Spirit  John J.Heaney,  Paulist Press New York 1984
(2) The criticism leveled against Cage came from all quarters, consciously or unconsciously. "Whoever elevates rondomness to a first principle contradicts all human aspirations and efforts. Liberated chance breaking away is a King of Chaos. Art has its casual fortuities. Casual fortuities never create art." die Reihe 8  Theodore Presser Co 1962 page 68
(3) I marvel at this incredible  teaching Cage has given us; springing right out of our own soil, truly one of the earliest examples of American Buddhism. In the context of tantrayana and especially the practice of Vajrayogini, the yogi is taught in the generation stage to dissolve all phenomena into emptiness and throughout the day regard any sound they hear as the sound of this voidness mantra. See Guide to Dakini Land  Geshe Kelsang Gyatso,  Tharpa Publications London 1991 page 34. This tantric insight into the acceleration of evolution which was the 'gift' of Tibet could be said to have  jumped continents with Cages intuition of a 'clear hearing'.  H.H.14th Dalai Lama has said: "There must gradually evolve a western Buddhism or an American Buddhism" Worlds in Harmony. 1992, page 91. But with such hopeful insentive we should be careful, there will be many pitfalls. "The Karmapa was asked if Western people or Western artists who are Buddhists could or should have a different practice than Tibetans. Do they have a different path? A different kind of meditation? He said, "To design a different kind of meditation I would have to be a Buddha. If I am not enlightened how could I make up a new meditation? If I did I would simply be using my disciples." And  "Without the support of our lineage or relying on our tradition, we would have to rely on our ego. Thus the real source of our understanding would be our ego. Through connection to our lineage transmission we overcome that limitation." (Excerpt correspondence from Richard Collet.)

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"What I think & What I feel can be my inspiration but it is then also my pair of blinders. To see one must go beyond the imagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though in the center of a leap."  John Cage, Silence Wesleyan University Press 1960  page 170

"The philosophers assume that human reason by itself is competent, while the poets rely on the Muses, who once told Hesiod: "We know how to tell lies like the truth"  Early Greek Peotry and Philosophy  Hermann Frankel  Harcourt Brace 1977

Kenneth Mackenzie, a solemn man, unquestionably an advanced metaphysician, author of the Royal Cyclopaedia of Freemasonry, once mistook the tobacco jar of the French occultist Eliphas Levi for a valuable statuette of the Goddess Isis.

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Left Brain Agency……………Right Brain Nuturance
Left Brain Mindfulness…      ..Right Brain Introspection
Left Brain Analysis…………..Right Brain Surveillance
Left Brain Applied Thought….Right Brain Sustained Thought
The androgyny model of meditative attitude where concepts of masculinity and femininity are largely irrelevant, yet gender metaphors that strike and tackle the functions which serve balance and discipline is something that I think is worth exploring.
This is understanding gender as a relation of psychic energy in a specifiable context and a relative point of convergence within the meditators mind. Using this model, for example during the 9th mind of the desire realm (term used in samatha practice) one might be able to assimilate  to ones consciousness more easily such visualizations as Ardhanarisvara, “half-woman god” a form which is half Siva and half Sakti, or the many father/mother images in Buddhist tantra.  However transforming Alchemical imagery (especially the Rebus, Res bina 'twofold') into levels of mind absorption is the most obvious.* This will transform the character of meditative technology and begin laying waste  to obstructions of desirous attachments especially since it assumes the absorption of ones counter-sexual self. The 9th mind has a stillness that is like a presexual state and yet its capacity is at full psychic pansexality having polymorphous energy. The male and female aspects of the mind and their intercourse incubate a depth probe of combined strength in a meditative manner that can actually conquer matter in so far as the meditator reduces physical & mental maleness and femaleness to a cosmetic, a narcissistic inflation. The accomplishment enjoyed at this stage naturally rests upon certain pliancy's that point the way to solving the biun-paradox of phenomenal existence.
* The sexualisation of forces and energies acting on one another is found everywhere in Hermetic writings. Male and female substances mate in the alembic where the body sloughs its mortality and mind becomes the divine alchemical vase itself, known as the Rebus of Thought, unio mentalis the state of psychic matrimony. This is especially interesting when one interprets the 'hermetic' atmosphere of a yogi meditating in his darkened hut, reaching the intense state of samadhi as the loving union of the two cerebral hemispheres. Once a meditator accepts this kind of metaphorical adaptation there's no end to the, literally hundreds of symbols of duality that can be solved; indeed, moving the metaphorical into the non-metaphorical. For example the principles of Apollonian and Dionysian energies used in the works of Neitzche and fine tuned by Camille Paglia. The Meditator respects and activates both Apollo and Dionysus in their discipline - alternately and together as the verbal applied thought and non verbal sustained thought; in the Apollonian iconic keys to the 9 stages of samatha supported by the metamorphic intuitions of Dionysian suspension. Its individual polarity involved in the basically interiorized hermaphrodite mind; the 'beginning and end mind' characterized as the Alchemists Philosophers Stone.

If you classify the right and left hemispheres in terms of brain hardware and the parameters being the coordination of them, it is possible to understand the subroutine of meditation by examining that hardware. It will show that the difference between psychology and physiology is not a distinction between two distinct subject matters. In purchasing some new piece of equipment its better to read the instruction manual than opening up the machine and looking inside, but you can look inside in meditation, at least at the 5th or 6th stage of samatha, one can know and recognize the hemispheric subroutine and therefore develop the hypersensitivity to minimal cues to mount the higher jhanas.

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The “most famous secret of alchemy”, secret because as Jung indicates, it emanates from the individual difference in each case. “Ruland’s lexicon giving no less than 50 synonyms”. Prima Materia is no secret now. The alchemists  “everlastingly contradicting themselves” only shows the genius that brings gnosis to individuals and not everybody at once. How many synonyms would you need to describe Samsara? In an alchemical work attributed to Basilius Valentinus The Golden Tract: "But to be brief, our Matter has as many names as there are things in the world". Actually to bring it into focus the 5 skandhas (contaminated aggregates) complete the meaning for the yogi.(1) Terms such as “Adamic” and especially in the kabbalah the "Old Adam" are describing the ancient kleshes, long lived, beginningless karma. The stone that fell from heaven represents the ancient (pre-cosmic) aspect of the prima materia, “and this stone was also called the Grail” wrote Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival. The stone (an emerald) from the crown of Lucifer fell when he was thrown into the abyss is the distorted allegory masking the luminescent fore’knowledge that this gem represents, cut into the shape of a Wisdom Vase with all the facets of gnosis  bringing liberation.(2)Liberation from what? Liberation from the god realms, especially from the god realms and the limited essentialisms associated with them; fore'knowledge which Lucifer had.(pic)
(1) Perhaps a Dzogchen practitioner would venture the equation: Emptiness=Prima Materia, as the ground of pure awareness, Rigpa, but this would rob emptiness of its power to destroy impurities with the progressive refinement of mind which preliminary practices bring. Looked at from the alchemical/tantric view, the Prima Materia is not emptiness, but the afflicted aggregates which are transformed into emptiness are. It is difficult for the Western Occultist to adapt this individualized view when all of the literature poses a "starting-point of evolution" or as H.P. Blavatsky writes in  Isis Unveiled "at the creation of the prima materia". Nobody prepares our astral anthropology for us, neither Planetary Spirits, the Aour of Moses or Universal Theos, and yet all of these and more, can be allegorized as the karmic working-out tablets of individual salvation for western yogis who vibrate to them.
(2)  Also considered the "third eye" or Ajna chakra, however this Lucifer/Prometheus figure, thought to defy the other gods, steal fire so humans can cook food and warm themselves; also thought to transmit the message " you shall be as gods..." was  actually inspired by total enlightenment (original "light-bringers") whose purpose was to join our minds to the Authentic.This figure representing doubt/questioning brought forth a Great Reason which revealed delusion as the true inner enemy, even a pre-scriptive delusion that extends into the religious dogma/ecstasy of Judio-Christian-Islamic heaven worlds. Everything outside  including gods and goddesses are not the enemy but are objects of love and compassion. I know that Im giving the impression that Lucifer brought Buddhism to the West (Christian fundamentalists would agree). No, he didn't, that's my current delusion, Im just riding on his deprogramming wings for a while, only the Lord Buddha taught that the inner enemy is defeatable.  Perez-Reverte says we only hear about the "fall" from the victors: "Rows and rows of blond angels following orders". Lucifer gave up eternity in Heaven to give humans freedom. One could make the comparison that Buddha gave up a gods heaven and Nirvana without reminders to give us liberation. It makes me ask; where have we heard about the "fall" from those who fell? We haven't. Could it be there really wasn't one?  Its time for Satan and Lucifer to stand up with authority and speak the truth, and not just through the eyes of delirious"truth be damned" hedonists & romantic poets.

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Concerning the difference between Buddhist altruistic love and the worldly, emotional love one feels toward close ones, the later usually conflicted with attachment and therefore change, estrangement and sometimes turning to its opposite, hate. Cole Porter wrote many great songs concerning emotional love, asking “What Is This Thing Called Love?”  indeed what is it if it can change so quickly? Toward the end of his life when he was dying, a very close friend  relates a conversation with Porter in his apartment about all the friends and loved ones he will miss. Porter answered: “Oh I won't miss anyone”, “ Oh Colie, What?” answered his friend  “You won't miss anyone, anything?” Porter thought for a while then said: “ Yes,  you know, Ill miss those Queen Anne chairs.”
 

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The 1st & 2nd century Gnostics were partly followers of a pessimistic doctrine of relativism that saw  worldly suffering wholly unacceptable, at the same they were partly promoters of a theoretical positivism that sought an unknown Father source as generator of a spiritual spark they felt within their hearts. Was there a threat of interiority that kept them from viewing their own minds content? Was their some theistic strain that pushed monistic craving outside? Their cosmologies held out no promise for solitary realization with mind itself as the object, instead frenzied productions stumbled on notions for outside help; saviors turned into critical dogma, culprits turned into scapegoats, literally a battle over the body of creation. Their desperation clung to creationism yet despising its result, never suggesting for an instant that the Demiurge's work was anything but factual. Where was the battle over the Demiurge's existence? This would have acted as a proto-formulation for what our modernity has termed the 'death of god'. The United Gnostic pronouncement of the Demiurge's death would have been a catalyst overcoming the total authorial functions of Hebrew, Christian, Moslem, Egyptian, Chaldean essentialisms including the Hellinistic Mysteries. Then the evil of materiality alone stands. World rejecting is something perhaps an anxiety ridden society could understand. Four million Americans endure a constant state of fretfulness called 'generalized anxiety disorder', another eleven million are phobic. How many of them blame a Demiurge for their nightmarish thoughts and panic attacks?  Far from being gnostics many say its the will of a benign God. Shouldn't we think there was some kind of anxiety disorder with the 2nd century Gnostics? According to Hans Jonas their "revolt against the whole universal scheme decreed abstention from every sense experience in hostility and unwillingness to use the Demiurge's creation."* It would have had to be some kind of extreme panic, some supper serious ailment to disrupt them totally from accepting their physical reality. Worldly nature had no dignity for them, it was contemptible, a deficient mode of being altogether. They had no T.Vs or VCRs, no technological distractions to escape their exploding stress, no clinics with virtual therapy to tame their terrors.
* The Gnostic Religion Hans Jonas  Beacon Press 1963 p-145 I agree with H. Bloom, Jonas' book is the most wonderful and accurate take on Gnosticism. Further on this same page matrimony & reproduction are called "filthiness", "obscenity" in the sense that they prolong our captivity and make it more difficult for the gathering-in. If enlightenment could be attained by 'souls' simply having no more places for rebirth due to unmarried & barren women than Buddha would certainly have told us about this ultra sudden path.

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 From An Autobiographical statement by John Cage.
 “I became an assistant to Oskar Fischinger, the film maker, to prepare myself to write the music for one of his films. He happened to say one day, "Everything in the world has its own spirit which can be released by setting it into vibration."(1) I began hitting, rubbing everything, listening, and then writing percussion music, and playing it with friends.…. I invited Schoenberg to one of our performances. "I am not free." "Can you come a week later?" "No, I am not free at any time."
Many years ago I asked Cage about this idea of Fischingers, if he didn't still believe it and use it in his music. Cage told me  he thought it was a beautiful idea but said  “no, its too spooky”.  Somewhat surprised I went away and for a couple of years held high the ‘spooky’ banner despite Cages ‘warning’, thinking 'spookiness' was some kind of occult perfection.Then one day I suddenly realized what he meant. We Western magicians and occultists love spookiness. In fact every little bit of spookiness gets refied(2) and sometimes blown up to ontological status.  That’s the problem. This  doesn't mean there aren’t spirits in the world, perhaps getting released as objects are struck, their just not self-constituted, not autonomous, their like you and I getting stroked or ticked off. Cage might as well have said “its too ignorant”, because its ignorance to believe in some ‘higher’ or occult level of reality when the nature of  conventional reality itself is left unanalyzed. In the broader sense the Madhyamaka not only sees the "spirit" released from material things as delusional but the material things (elements) themselves not existing in any intrinsic way. Cage perceived bare sound as empty of intrinsic existence therefore being treated symbolically to express human emotions and feeling was for him delusional. A more truthful and enlightening treatment was the use of indeterminant methods (chance) which is how sounds occur to us in nature if we listen with equanimity.(3)  Cage expressed the sophic/aesthetic of chance operations for years, besides the ontological salvific value it holds, this competence in semantics became a language of art understood to be perfect mathematics and qualifies it for research in both pure science and pure art.
(1) Much earlier H.P. Blavatsky wrote in her Secret Doctrine Vol.2 page 239: "Esoteric science teaches that every sound in the visible world awakens its corresponding sound in the invisible realms and arouses to action some force or other on the occult side of nature." She would often demonstrate the endless cycle of reverberations by tapping a pencil upon her desk saying: "Listen, it already has circled our planet and come back."
(2)The mental distortion known as reification is the most fundamental reason for believing in an object independent of consciousness. I was involved once in an occult project where the 'deification of potencies' was considered the most creative adventure possible. This was a reification of ultimate existence to something imaginatively constructed, subjectivity mistaking itself for its (own) object, a practice ruinous to the Buddhist religious discipline. Many kinds of occultism complement the idea of reification, the worst is making speculative truths from all possibility of solution. The strange thing about this is, contrary to the supposed 'cutting-edge creativity' it actually reinforces conformity.
(3) "The attitude that I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical." An Interview with John Cage Tulane Drama Review Volume 10 Winter, 1965.

CAGE AND THE BUDDHIST TWO TRUTHS
Cage was avoiding the extreme of permanence (immortality) by not giving his compositions the ontological stamp of unique status. Cage also was avoiding the extreme of annihilation by letting the natural phenomenon exist in their conventional nature. His ‘art’ therefore mirrors Buddhist (madhyamika) ‘two truths’ by affirming only nominal existence, (letting sounds be themselves) and refuting only inherent existence in renouncing the ‘inspired creation’ by one individual.
 

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Identifying the Materia Prima is “The Opening of the Work” Carefully analyzing the contents of my mind which conceives to desire concrete exterior objects, phenomena or persons either in the present, the past memory, or in the fantasized future. Such contents are my Elementa chemiae. Extract the fire of desirousness with this reasoning mind, realizing they are merely disguises of my projected illusions. Collect my libido back, it has lodged itself in an exterior phenomena and through a charge of psychic energy relays back that it has found something real, when in fact it is a scattered part of my own psyche. Catching this fraud in the act is unraveling highly phony autonomous and unconscious  contents. How many parts are still strewn here and there? Try to count them – there out there in the outer world robbing me and thwarting my conscious will to be the full carrier of my opposites. When I indulge in desirousness & covetousness I give my most precious animus & anima to devils and ghosts. And don’t think they won’t come back and haunt me.

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Carl Jung wrote in his Septum Sermons "The only god that man doesn't impute is the god that isn't a god". Strange sentence, but its wrong, we say: The only gods that man doesn't impute are real gods, and that goes for fairies, elves, ghosts, and sometimes Im inclined to include flying saucers & Big Foot. You may have read that revealing spot in Joseph Campbell's book Myths To Live By where, despite Campbell's own Jungian belief that people just impute gods, shows that the  universal god/design also fits the charge despite the reality of relative pantheism's everywhere. Dr. Martin Buber was lecturing at Columbia University on the Old Testament God, Campbell  in the audience asked him what he meant by the word 'God'.  “Buber's eyes widened and the bearded face came a little forward. "You do not know what the word God means? " I don't know what you mean by God" replied Campbell. "You have been telling us this evening that God today has hidden his face and no longer shows himself to man. Yet I have just returned from India where I found that people are experiencing God all the time."  Buber drew suddenly back lifting both hands palms upward. "Do you mean to compare"......somebody quickly cut in, but we all know what had been almost said."(1) I think this little interchange demonstrates a sensitivity that will always persist in our world where belief in gods and universal intelligence prevail. How many of us would say the God of the Old Testament is not the same God as that of the Hindus? What would we have to know to say it? I think Buber was right and Campbell was being cute but serious, needing to tie all myths into metaphors that neatly fit archetypal patterns wouldn't allow him to admit separate relative gods.
The supposed corollary between belief in afterlife and belief in God or divine source does not hold, however in this world where spiritual aspirations are cast in theological dimensions perhaps a more sure way to the goodness of afterlife for non-Buddhists are within the intimate relationships with a god or goddess. The clear nature of mind gives rise to any experience, and in dependence upon having cultivated sustained meditative absorption of a religious or spiritual discipline there will be a resultant birth in that appropriate realm (heaven).(2) The mind is basically free from any fixed absolutes so the afterlife rewards of all religions are true. Having many religions suit  the various interests and capacities of individuals.(3) According to our karma, rebirth comes automatically even if one doesn't have religious or spiritual realizations, this is why Buddhists say religions are important for the world because they give hope, refuge and paths to higher rebirths. Ive never witnessed any debate concerning belief in God by a Tibetan lama(4). There's an account of the “worlds first attempt at interfaith dialogue” reported by Stephen Batchelor where a Buddhist monk debates with Muslims and Nestorian Christians (they teamed up) that ends with the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire making his choice after hearing the monks reply to the Christian assertion that there is only one God. “It is fools who claim there is only one God. Wise men say that there are several. Are there not great rulers in your country, and is not Mongke Khan the chief lord their? It is the same with gods, inasmuch as there are different gods in different regions.”(5) Darwin in the nineteenth century found that no “life force” was needed to explain the biological evolution of species. In the 5th century B.C. Buddha discovered that no God, or universal design was needed to explain the spiritual evolution of the human mind to reach ultimate liberation from suffering.  Darwin had no clue to the spiritual/karmic evolution; there is much addendum to be added to his theory. Im waiting for Buddhist scholar/adepts to fill in the details.
(1) Too bad Joseph Campbell isn’t around to ask that question of Harold Bloom who also believes God is in exile.  By just writing this I hear Professor Bloom say “Do you mean to compare the exiled alien god of Valentinus to Bubers Demiurge?” See Omens of Millennium  Riverhead Books New York 1996, page 183.
(2)  “A meditative absorption of a concentration cultivated during this lifetime would be causal”  that is “born in the next lifetime in one of the lands of the concentration.” Meditative States In Tibetan Buddhism Lati Rinbochay & Denma Locho Rinbochay, Wisdom Publications Boston 1983. Page 105 and 174.    "I have already shown that the practice of byama-so tayà leads to the Brahma heavens. In short, samatha creates worlds [loki], whereas vipassana breaks them down and sees them for what they are. The vipassan traditions most worried about the loki implications of samatha are the‘dry’-visioned vipassana methods."Gustaaf Houtman. Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics. Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia & Africa Monograph Series 33, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa 1999, Chapter 19, 20,
(3) This fact can be taken two ways.  First. Finding out there were so many religions John Coltrane in an unreleased taped conversation admits disappointment: “One guy could be right,   cause he’s right, somebody else gotta’be wrong… you know… if he is right?” Second.  In 1972 I was sitting with American emigrants in Natanya  while the roar of helicopters flew overhead loaded with casualties from the Golan Hights to hospitals in Tel Aviv. The conversation veered to religion; “Oh there’s no sense quarreling over religions everyone has the same god, there’s only one”. The obvious rebuttal was hopeless & I believe its also hopeless to debate with mystics who tend to say the same thing. Actually when you think about it this "one god" thing might turn out O.K. because the only way to prove it and demonstrate its meaning is for humans to come together as one family and unconditionally love one another in an altruistic display of tolerance and compassion. But you see what really brings this into reality is human feelings, human kindness.
(4)  During one summer session at Deer Park, Kensor Rinpoche was starting his commentary on the Tara Initiation we had earlier, when a person sitting in front of me, not seen at teachings before, asked the question:  “Then what is God, are we supposed to understand karma as God?”    Without looking up Rinpoche replied that there wasn’t that concept of God in Buddhism and went on without the slightest pause. During the whole of the commentary and the initiation before, I had noticed this person took no notes and sat upright in lotus (half) position hardly moving throughout all the teachings. Even though I felt a little snicker inside me when he asked that question I was taught a good lesson in pride and humility for in the final katta presentation he was the only one who Kensor Rinpoche bumped heads with.
(5)  The Awakening Of The West  Stephen Batchelor,  Parallax Press California 1994,  Part 2 number 7.

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In the 1950s on up into collage I was seeking what was 'new' everywhere I could. Some time around 1967 there was an abrupt turn when I  started working at the Occult Bookstore, customers used to come in and ask “what's old”?  This of course meant that you can't improve on ancient esoteric tradition and whatever was ‘new’ merely meant rediscovery, or in most cases inferior understanding. But let's be fair, there is a thing about creativity, insight and inspiration that sheds light on ancient truth. Here in the West one may ask where can hermetic esotericism go, haven't we maxed out in commentary?(1)-what is its future? The Magikal activity in this last century has culminated in a diffuse aesthetic fusion sometimes called ‘creative occultism’ that has tended, first to place imagination and creativity on high status and announce that super alien intelligence (wisdom?)  exists outside the human mental continuum somewhere in stellar space.(2)This testifies to the power of the unconscious mind and the general self exploration of the cosmos, however reifying such activities inflate the mental skandhas causing further contamination and delays the discovery of awakened-omniscent mind where 'super aliens' would become your pupils. Lets not forget, we are creatures capable of amazing the angels, and when the obstructions to omniscience are removed we will teach the gods, the highest gods. "Gods are above the realm of human beings, but buddha-realm is above all existences, and it is human beings, not the gods, that are able to reach this state."(3) Perhaps in the nick of time a new seeding is taking place, a migration of sorts, cross-fertilizing and providing “a vast influx of new energy”. I was delighted to find these words written by Caitlin & John Matthew's in their book The Western Way on page 426. “The seizure of Tibet by the Chinese in 1958 is having an unprecedented effect of sending forth a body of secret teachings in the persons of fleeing lamas who are living exponents of what is a migrating native system into the West. The parallels between this exodus and that of the fabled Atlantean escape routs to the West are not inconsiderable”
(1) Maby on the superficial level, but no, we havent even a translation of the Picatrix, plus many other important texts locked in ancient languages. News flash: Picatrix now available in English, great! now lets finish the French Occultists.
(2)  Writing in Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, page 195 concerning the Thelema based religion; independent of terrestrial mentation through the media of praeterhuman Intelligence's such as Aiwaz, Kenneth Grants understanding of LA=Not=Selflessness=Not Self is short of Buddhist gnosis of Suchness as selflessness. His "Not Self'' is in fact a non-liberating mind state that Buddhist's generate in the Higher Dhyanas. Grant goes on in a later work Cults of The Shadow page 88, associating pure mind with pure NOTHINGNESS IS. It is hoped, by the time another book rolls around such an invigorating writer will become aware of the Buddhist emptiness doctrine. Frater Equilibrus just read this and said I sounded like a skeptic, a secular humanist. I am a humanist but am not skeptical concerning the existence of spirits, daimons, devas, gods, hell beings etc., nor in the belief that we all have been extra terrestrials and even great Brahma gods at the edge of cyclic existence but did not have the wisdom nor direct cognition of Sunyata to 'escape' it.
(3) Buddhist Cosmology Akira Sadakata, Kosei Publishing Tokyo 1999, page 125.
 

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“It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous fagots were thus bound together – that in the agonized womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated?”
                               Henry Jekyll

Was Dr. Jekyll a Buddhist yogi involved in an advanced practice of Chod? (1) The 1996 Movie version of this story called Mary Reilly starring Julia Roberts as the Doctors maid suggests something quite fantastic. Perhaps the Spanish version El Secreto de Mary Reilly has the better title; (John Malkovich plays the Doctor). Lets imagine Dr Jakyll, the respected London “saintly doctor”, experimentalist, a genius with higher knowledge and mysterious powers was willfully exploring the realms of Dukka, (suffering) and the repellent depths and roots of evil. Trying to evoke and materialize his own deep seeded negative afflictions, kleshas(2) and ‘black’ karmas. The story's villainous Mr. Hyde is somehow released from the mind of virtuous Dr. Jekyll presenting two totally different visions of the world. The experiment was successful in so far as Mr. Hyde manifested. Here was voiced the qualities of his dark side(3)  “loosing control is good”, “there is no consequences for actions”, “I am completely free from restrictions” etc. etc. All this shows that Hyde was the embodiment of the six root afflictions; anger, desire, ignorance, pride, wrong views and doubt.(4) Dr. Jekyll claimed “a breakthrough” in his experiments. What was the “unorthodox medical research” he had developed?  Was it a drug (?) (potion) “The transforming draught”(5) described as a  “secret substances to transform the balance of life [that proved] a profound duplicity of life.”? Apparently two potions were needed: one to bring out (up) Hyde and one to restore or reaffirm Jekyll.(6) Buddhist’s need no drug for this operation, their meditative techniques, no less a transforming draught, access regions where desire without constraint arises. The degree to which Jekyll's transformation became a change of state of the most extreme kind “the most racking pangs, deadly nausea [and] grinding in the bones” would indicate the Yogis deep absorption and levels of exposure to afflictions (7) Could someone experience the abysmal blackness of all there past evil deeds -wouldn't they be overwhelmed- wouldn't psychotic episodes and wild frenzies result? Unlike Dorian Gray; “The canvas bears the burden of his passions and his sins”(8), Jekyll’s went inside himself. There is an incredibly gruesome specter in the 1920 Silent Movie where we see Jekyll (played by John Barrymore) lying in bed with the morning sunlight shinning on his magnificent profile. Suddenly a huge gray hideous spider crawls out of him and scrambles on the floor then slowly mounts the bed again and envelops the Doctor.(9) At first Hyde is smaller than Jekyll but each episode he appears to grow larger and more furious. The relation between the human and the bestial was perhaps Stevensons attempt to deal with Darwinian revelations. Could there be a reversion of the species? Or asked a different way: If evolution is a ladder is it possible to move down the rungs? But was the origin of Jakyll’s Hyde merely the turn of a neurological switch causing a violence of the sub-cortex uncontrolled by the frontal lobes? Buddhists would see this degree of human wickedness the result of something deeper seeded than merely slipping back into one’s animal nature where instinctual urges have free reign.(10) When presenting causes for non-virtue Buddhists consider seven types. The first is “predisposition's from former lifetimes”. Considering  Dr. Jekyll’s subconscious display of unwholesomeness this is the one that best describes spontaneous bursts of anger, severe belligerence and murder.  Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer friend suggests that something unspoken from the past may be coming to claim him. What could it be if not his own karma? Hyde is not simply Jekyll's opposite, but something within him.(11) As the story continues the latent malevolent karma exhausts the Doctors strength and he  losses his bearings and control of the experiment. But in the 1996 movie version something is added by the screenwriters representing a sort of mysterium tremendum where poison and antidote are joined together and in the end reveals the Doctors true motivations. We remember that at the beginning of the story  Dr. Jekyll directed his scientific studies towards the mystic and the transcendental which shed “a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members – that man is not truly one, but truly two.”(12)  At the end of the movie when Hyde attacked Mary Reilly, at the point of being murdered she caresses his face with a look of compassion. Hyde falls back and drops his knife. He says, “I knew you would be the end of us.” At that moment a serious look appears on Hydes face –not that he was changing back to Jekyll, it’s rather like he was perched on the brink of a realization with the power to gain consciousness of both sides of himself. But he’s gone too far, he injects the antidote; this time with poison, and in an act of self-sacrifice speaks to Mary “I wanted to be the knife and the wound.” In other words, his real project was soteriological in nature. Finding the source of all evil in himself he became attacker and victim simultaneously. But if Dr. Jekyll wanted to transform, destroy or (cut off) his five contaminated aggregates into an offering as Chod practitioners do, there is a vital element missing; that is the direct cognition of the primordial clear nature of mind which would have been the real weapon against deep sins and antidote to his bifurcation; the uncompounded naked level of mind being beyond the limits of duality. The Buddhist term “afflictive obstructions” hardly seems strong enough to describe Jekyll’s ape-like inner evil monster Hyde, however the “leaping pulses and secret pleasures lusting to inflict pain” are caused in turn by the ignorance conceiving intrinsic qualities and self-constituted existence to persons, objects and phenomena; this is called by Buddhist’s the chief fetter. Afflictions of desire and hatred and all the violent excesses of Hyde depended upon it.(13)  Hyde's depiction is often a mixture of lust and wrath, this ferocious appearance, like Tibetan wrathful deities could help us imagine Dr. Jekyll a Highest Yoga Tantra practitioner. Using lust as the path he could have controlled Hyde's unbridled violence, transforming it into non-dual anger; such a vajra wrath has the power to overcome all obstructions. In Buddhism this vajra wrath is the energy aspect of compassion and may be what Hyde had a glimpse of as Mary Reilly looked upon him with love.
    Someone wrote: “The importance of this book has increased with time.”
(1) The radical practice of invoking “deamons”, requesting them to devour your body in which the Buddhist practitioner experiences them as emanations of the mind, recognizing their true empty nature therefore transforming poison into a remedy. “To consider adversity as a friend is the instruction of chod” is a quote from Machik Labdron of the Chod “severance lineage”. She was an incarnation of Yeshe Tsogyel consort of Guru Padmasambhava in 8th century Tibet. There are several books on this subject; I like Sky Dancer by Keith Dowman Routledge & Kagan Paul 1984.
(2) Afflicted emotions in Buddhism are called kleshas. There are meditations (objects of observation) for purifying specific ones and meditations for separating from all afflictive emotions. Walking Through Walls Geshe Gendun Lodro Snow Lion  Ithaca New York, 1992 page 79
(3) Sexual repression is largely absent here perhaps due to Stevensons Victorian attitude which would preclude admitting the dark instinctual shadow as negative feminine energy; the mythical Evil Woman bestowing bewitching paralysis on the good doctor. However according to some psychology's Mr. Hyde should have been the anima, counter-sexual Mrs. Hyde!
(4) For descriptions of these see Meditation on Emptiness Jeffrey Hopkins, Wisdom Pub. Boston 1996 page 255  An example of Hydes afflicted view would be his exaggerated distinction between self and other causing  “desire for one’s own side the hatred for others” or the  perverse view that denies consequences for  sinful actions, or that good and bad do not even exist. etc.
(5) Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde And Other Tales  Robert Louis Stevenson  J. M. Dent & Sons 1962 page 56. All the quotes are from this edition.
(6) Stevenson made no allusions to Satanic myth or a religious substance which separates good from evil, even though the contents of the phial described in Dr. Lanyon’s narrative: “a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell, and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether” could pass for vinum sabbati. It has been known for the wine used in black masses La Messe Noire adulterated with a variety of both noxious and hallucinogenic sundries. Therefore a vino sacro would revive Jekyll just as the vinum sabbati would call up Hyde.
(7) There’s no easy interface between Stevensons descriptions of Hydes deformities, barbaric rituals and senseless passion and the expelling of afflictions during the yogic preparations and techniques for separating from desires of the lower level, however there are basic divisions and degrees of absorption's. See Meditative States In Tibetan Buddhism  Lati Rinbochay & Denma Locho Rinbochay  Wisdom Pub. Boston 1983
(8) The Picture of Dorian Gray  Oscar Wilde, J. H. Sears & Company New York, page 93. See #...  for analysis.
(9) Dr. Jeckyll And Mr. Hyde, 1920 (Silent) directed by John S. Robertson with John Barrymore and Martha Mansfield.In this movie the 'transformations' are sparked by the hedonist  Sir George Carew. "Your cynicism made me ashamed of my goodness" says Jekyll . Carew told the Doctor he is neglecting the development of his own life by devoting it to others ( Jekyll has a special clinic for the poor). He says: "a man cannot destroy the savage in him by denying its impulses. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." Later in another scene Jekyll muses, "Wouldn't it be marvelous if the two natures in man could be separated - housed in different bodies!"
(10) This is where I believe Paddy Chayefsky’s novel and the Ken Russell movie by the same title Altered States falls short of the truth when dealing with the contents and causes of the “deep mind”. There is a lot science will eventually discover about the ‘history’ of our mental continuums which should then be posited on top of our being 98 percent chimpanzee.  We may have 13 billion-celled brains but should remember that the mind is a brain user and much more complex.
(11). Madame Blavatsky analyses this story according to the occult phenomenon of the “Dweller on the Threshold”. Isis Unveiled  Vol. 1 page 158 among other places. See #....
(12)  Stevenson, ibid., page 48
(13) “In dependence on ignorance, the other afflictions arise, and in dependence on them contaminated actions are accumulated.” Meditation on Emptiness op. cit.

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The question asked by the Sphinx was not mystical; the riddle did not center around an elaborate metaphysical problem or require great theological speculation involving creation enigmas or remote spiritual beings. It cut to the crucial question, implying what was the ultimate object in the spiritual quest. In fact it was very Buddhist, because when you examine the five-fold process of the skandhas you come up with the same answer “Man”. The Buddha said: “In this fathom-long body lie all the mysteries and problems of the universe.”*
*Quoted in Buddhism and Science,  Motilal Banasidasa  Delhi
 

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According to the 1st Book of Enoch the “secret of metals” was first taught to the daughters of man by angles when they mated with them. Doesn't this put sex (coniunctio) at the very beginning of alchemy?

Buddhist teaching on anger: "Being angry at an enemy is like stabbing yourself through the stomach to hurt someone standing behind you with the tip of your sword."

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Concerning the Kunda Mother Goddesses of ancient India, Candani or Kundala is the name of a vein associated with heat found in humans. According to Buddhist text “Seven Instruction Lineage”(1)There was no first Buddha, there always have been Buddhas therefore there always have been humanoids doing this spiritual practice.(2) The Kunda Goddess can be thought of as beginningless, making an appearance everywhere ‘inner fire’yoga is practiced, bestowing simultaneous great bliss on her consorts. The early Gnostic sect Nassen(3) believed they were heirs of an earlier teaching from primordial serpent kings, direct realities on which the structure of the universe is really based. In a teaching on Tantra by Namkhai Norbu  he says that “the Zogqen teaching can be found in thirteen solar systems other than our own” The Crystal Routledge & Kegan Paul London 1986 p-13. Is it far fetched to think that the Kunda Goddess made an appearance in the Garden of Eden? Obviously the composite Esha/Nachas initiated Adam, but kundalini has extreme psychological conflicts to be sorted out. In Parsival she is  the messenger of holiness and temptress, but it is clear from the libretto she has existed throughout history under different names. Klingsor summons her in Act II "Your master calls you, nameless one, primal fiend, rose of hell."  Yogi's know that 'Kundry' is not an individual but the "fierce woman" residing in the lower plexus in all human beings and when fully activated serves as mount for the highest of wisdom's. Mentioning this to a friend (musicologist) during the 2nd act intermission during Lyric Opera's 2002 new production of Parsifal, he looked at me in disbelief, having no idea what I was talking about. But obviously the set designer (Raimund Bauer) know exactly what Kundra meant. When the second act curtain parted an amazed audience saw projected on a huge blue screen the basinlike cavity of a human pelvis with Catherine Malfitano as Kundra (kundalini) protruding from the Pubis region and Klingsor situated higher up on the lumbar vertebra (plexus solaris- Manipura).
(1) In conversation with Richard Collet.
(2)  We cannot forget that Giordano Bruno advanced the theory, that was  known by 'heathen' philosophy and ancient 'heretics', of innumerable inhabited worlds and world systems. Bruno declared the sun to be a star and all the stars to be suns. He relegated the world and man to an obscure corner in space, conceiving the cosmos to be so vast that no single creed could fill it.
(3) This spelling from The Canon William Stirling. Garnstone Press 1974, first published in 1897  mentions the exact numerical values of messiah/serpent which we'll take up later.

                                                         ADDENDUM
Reverse exegesis or revisionary logic begins even earlier than the Gnostics. Eden becoming  temporary, the serpent becoming good, the world that God declared good becoming evil all have their beginnings with unknown adepts and thinkers from the start, I don't believe the logic of deconstruction or revisionism just suddenly appeared in our time. The point is to put a stop to it, finding the solution and cease recycling the problems that could have an infinite amount of variation. Dependent-arising, (said to be "Buddha's slogan" by the present Dalai Lama) or dependent origination is the logical and reasoned solution because it's non-mythical, deflating the mystic extravagance and reification in the play of exegesis. I have worked with the inducement factors of extravagance and reification for many years and had insights that such work would never end. Falling into the clutches of naive idealists turned out to be all parts of myself. Far from being  just cold facts of reasoning, understanding dependent-arising is what ignites bliss in the higher Tibetan yogas, it is the flash-point of the apocalyptic vehicle. Therefore an apocalyptic eschatology which literally means "teaching about the end", the end of suffering within cyclic existence.
 

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What does it mean "There have always been Buddha's?" I am not qualified to answer that, but I can imagine that, for example three hundred million years ago on our planet when in a time of seasonal drought certain fishes left the water and struggled on land to become the first air-breathing animals with a backbone there were Buddha's some where in the universe, perhaps on other world systems. Or, fifteen million years ago when an inquisitive kind of ape left the forest and learned to live in the open savanna there were Buddha's in some realms where other kinds of advanced sentient life existed.

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Eve and the Serpent of Eden are one entity. This is the hidden wisdom- revelation and dynamic message for our frontal lobes and ‘fierce’ practice for our solar plexus! A women, a Sophia-women, not the “fallen” Sophia of the 2nd century Gnostics, (how can wisdom fall?)(1), not the ‘divine feminine’ of the 19th century, pure, lofty, idealized and beautiful from afar, but the Wisdom-Women dense with a diamond-mind, filled with arguments and proofs, giving uncontradictory truth, uprooting exploitative behavior due to paradoxical beliefs that have betrayed us for nineteen centuries. She appears before us as a heroine strewn with kunda flowers extolling the highest virtue, the highest acquisition, the greatest good. Eve/Sophia/Prajna did not recognize the suggestions of the Serpent (called “Accuser” by the priests) to be false, but truth. Of course she can become like gods, but more important –higher. Given the knowledge of the origin of true causes and therefore their possible elimination(2) she can become enlightened, a Buddha. By having knowledge of good and evil the biun-paradox dissolves, the schism is healed and the gods, revealed to be living in cyclic realms are therefore temporary no matter how long lived they might be.(3) This knowledge sounds very forbidden but without it we would be lost to the extreme and false view of eternalism, and Eve would languor in Eden puffed up with self infatuation, not knowing that the Truth would dim her and the gods down like fireflies in the Sun.(4) It will be Gnostic-revisionism that maps this out precisely. But how good is a revised fable- hasn’t Western mysticism relied on them from the start?
(1)  Or sin? Valentinianism has it : "When this world has been born from Sophia in consequence of her sin". In the sense that Sophia in the First Book Of Jeu is the“mother looking down in pity”dosnt mean “fall”in the old Gnostic sense but rather in the Buddhist sense “Wisdom, the womb of Compassion”, Atisha's favorite phrase from Nagajurna. See R Thurmans Jewel Tree of Tibet.
(2) This refers to the Second and Third Noble Truth which answers the eternal question: What is one to do when faced with incomprehensible and apparently gratuitous evil? It's not gratuitous, causes can be precisely known through analysing the actions of body, speech and mind of individuals. The day will soon be over where occult students swallow belief systems that teach them "to drive evil back to the place from whence it came" as if its a "great ancient and focussed evil" aided by some "Black Lodge". (Quotes from Alice A. Bailey  Seven Rays, etc). Apparently not too soon; for Stephan A. Hoellers latest book has us fearing "the noonday devil [and] the terror that walks by night". See Gnosticism New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing  Quest Books 2002 Page 80.
(3) In the sense that God (not a permanent unity) has been found out, or as Baudelaire said "If it is unity become duality, it is God who has fallen." This is not just literature,one may logically follow such simple experiences as "Im having a local compulsion of the Old Adam who could not restrain himself from doing forbidden things. But seeing himself (me) "created" in the image of the "creator" there must be a tendency to do wrong within me - therefore the creator must be limited."  It is true as Kenneth Grant says, following Blavatsky that "this serpent, is not the enemy of Man", but he is wrong, following Crowley that "He, the serpent, made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil."  Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Skoob Books London 1973 p 18. Gods do not know Good and Evil as well as humans do or can, or else they wouldn't be stuck in their samadhi lacking the vital reasoning power to know the true state of existence.
(4) I finally tracked down where I 'heard' this analogy "The gods known as (Shiva), (Indra), (Brahma), (Kamadiva), (Vishnu) and so on -Even they become like fireflies (overwhelmed) by the sun..."  Jeffrey Hopkins, Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism University of California 1999,  p 68.

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Even though he refutes the argument that the pursuit of knowledge "hath something of the Serpent and puffeth up", I don't believe as Roger Shattuck suggests that Francis Bacon was astute enough to leave higher theology to the theologians when he wrote: "the desire for proud knowledge of good and evil betrays our humanity and rivals God - pure knowledge of nature contemplates and glorifies God's work".(1) Bacon has it backwards. Knowledge of true causes (of good and evil) isn't being proud, it's exercising wisdom and being truthful. The supposed good works of god; a dogmatist presumption that is paradoxical is proud, and for us required to have faith in it, is ignorance. Pure knowledge is based on reason and in accordance with Nagarjuna, ultimate truths can be taught only by way of conventional truths,(2) causes and effects (of good and evil).
(1)  Forbidden Knowledge, St Martin's Press 1996, page 32
(2) Which was the position of Dzong-ka-ba and his followers. See  Dependent-Arising and Emptiness, Elizabeth Napper, Wisdom Pub. 1989

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Buddhists do not say there are no gods. They are very realistic concerning the power of virtuous actions taking one into higher rebirths and becoming devas, gods and goddesses. The belief in a Creator god is rejected along with other causes wrongly given to explain the origin of the world but God-belief is not placed in the same category as the wrong views which deny moral efficacy of actions.(1) There is no need for a welter of mystical ideas about gods. Those known gods in World Religions seem to have the kind of urges, emotions and concerns for the world that would set them in the various stages of the Desire Realm.(2) When the Dalai Lama spoke to a large audience at the Madison Field House before giving the first Kalachakra initiation in the West he accommodated Christians by suggesting visualizing the Trinity in a Buddhist setting. Very practically suggesting that the Holy Ghost (most ethereal sounding?) best corresponded with the Dharmakaya, the Son to the Sambogakaya and the Father the Nirmankaya, not thinking in terms of dogmatic theology but more of what sounded in hierarchical order from subtle to less subtle. In Buddhism, consciousness or inner energy is divided broadly into three levels. The grosser level, the more subtle level and the extremely subtle mind which is continuous through all the phases of existence. In the book Violence and Compassion 1996 p152, His Holiness wrote: "The importance given to faith and to a creator god has taken away any reason to examine the mind. When there is a permanent judge (God) of our acts, the role of the mind is reduced". This has not only effected our Western philosophical schools and institutionalized Religions but also the esoteric societies right up to present time. "The prevailing Western view is that the mind is considered to be fundamentally imperfect and 'defiled', capable of development but not perfection. Whereas the fundamental Buddhist assumption, taking into account extraordinary meditative states, is that the mind is naturally luminous and free from defilement's which are merely adventitious".(3) The strong force of the universe is the minds of beings, not one mind or the design of one mind. "All of our minds together, gods and goddesses- minds together, with us, mutually and interactively create the universe."(4)
(1) Buddhism and the God-Idea  Edited by Nyanaponika Thera  The Wheel Publication, No. 47 Kandy Ceylon. The editor goes on to say that "Theism, however, is regarded as a kind of Karma-teaching, in so far as it upholds the moral efficacy of actions. Hence, a Theist, if he leads a moral life, may (like anyone also doing so) expect a favorable rebirth, and possibly one in a heavenly world that resembles his own conceptions of it, though it will not be of eternal duration as he may have expected."
(2) See Meditative States In Tibetan Buddhism   Lati Rinbochay Wisdom Pub 1983, for the type of gods, demigods and devas in this realm. The available material and informed commentary concerning Buddhist cosmology is fairly recent in the west and much misunderstanding still exists. For example the slogan of the Crowley Cult: There is no god but man. Seeing the whole of cyclic existence graphically (mahachakra wheel of life) one views realms in a continuous circle and a gods dwelling is no more than a higher hell when it comes to safty.
(3) Roger Jackson notes this in Is Enlightenment Possible? Snow Lion 1993 p397
(4) Hear The Path to Enlightenment  Robert Thurman & Deepak Chopra,  Hay House Audio tape 2 side 1.
 

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A 'creation' didn't (or couldn't) just hatch out metempsychosis, it has been going on from beginningless time. "Souls"(seed-minds) which move upward or downward from realm to realm as a function of their moral worth due to their previous actions cannot be a creation by something else or someone else. "A" creation has nothing to do with it. There's no question of it being merciless or having to do with punishment or reward by some outside law, design or judgment.(1) If the deeds one committed were horrible enough you could tumble down from the world of humans all the way to the hells. If the deeds were altruistic and virtuous you could progress to the upper realms of gods & devas, everything regulated & corresponding precisely to the degree of merit or demerit on an individual basis. Ethics is a way of maneuvering through the causation of life towards better forms of life. Negative ethics is a way of maneuvering backwards into degenerating forms of life. If its a lower aim, then it will only have a lower result. If we open to the perspective of beginninglessness then we can realize our infinity because of the vastness of our previous existence's in an infinite succession of universes, of Big Bangs.(2)
(1)  Even Theosophy says: "There is no law in the Universe which obliges us to remain where we are". Mathematics Of The Cosmic Mind  L. Gordon Plummer Theosophical Pub.  Wheaton 1970 p 95.
(2)  The last three sentences are paraphrased from Robert Thurmans retreat lecture Jewel Tree of Tibet, who goes on to say that the concept of a first beginning is fruitless. It is an ego centric attempt to reify our own sense of finiteness and project it into the world and feel the world as just as finite as we are, therefore achieving some sort of importance in that world.

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Find out who Xenophon was, contemporary with the School of Athens? He developed the then newly skeptical method and ‘discovered’ that mortal man had created the gods in his own image! How much did this rock the foundations of religious belief at the time? Obviously  not much. He must have been on friendly terms with Heracleitus.
  At this stage of the game now over 40 years of Western occult study and practice  still swelling up in my consciousness - the reasoned refutation of objects namely “pillar & pot” in Abidharma tenant system (Dura) might better be “Pleroma” and “Plotinism” to get at what really needs to be routed out, or rather un-refied in me. This process is generating decisive conclusions. The paradoxical consequences that sprout up in non Buddhist systems are helping me refute the innate self and putting the possibility of a primordial selflessness in my own continuum and not in some archetype or universal design. The most glaring contradiction that gets expressed with many variations and great depth in Buddhists tenant systems is, that permanent things create impermanent things, or non successive entities producing successive phenomena. Without overcoming the main cause of cyclic existence, cyclic existence will continue. The cause could never be overcome if it were permanent. Doing this type of analysis without gathering bitterness nor writing as if Im baiting monotheism's will be a test. Denouncing mistakes does not correct them it removes me from being taken serious, besides their not mistakes in so far as the target of compassion is human beings. If I did otherwise I would be the one with the chop-logic.

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Remember Mme Blavatsky was a Buddhist and remained true to it all her life. In childhood she associated with Kalmuck Lamas in Russia. Her last great work was a Buddhist text. She taught that spiritual attainment is not far away over the mountains of the future- it is relatively a narrow frontier between ordinary life and one of spirituality. However her teaching on racial evolution, when it's taken literally tends to short-circuit the individual achievement of liberation and enlightenment.*
O.K. just how many wounds did she have? Her arm was broken in two places by a sabre. There was a trace of a musket bullet still embedded in her shoulder and another in her right leg. There was a Scar just below her heart where she had been stabbed by a stiletto...continued.....  couldn't you say that bigger wounds are being inflicted on her today, Like being totally dismissed?
* Far from being the "cosmic evolution" Theosophists present, Buddhahood can be attainable in one life time. Persons on individual quests are not locked into racial-rounds.

H.P.B. said in the late 19th century that the West was not sufficiently advanced for the doctrine of emptiness that Nagarjuna recieved from the Nagas of Secret Wisdom.* Yet one can wonder what her understanding of it was, for there's no trace of it in all her collected writtings.
* Secret Doctrine volume five pp287

Authors and video makers,  The Occult History of the Third Reich, who are quick to mention H.P.B. as a direct influence on the Aryan Supreemist ideas forget she taught reincarnation which makes it possible for a 'super' type of individual to incarnate into any race, therefore the obsessive need for racial purity is irrelevant.

The Theosophical Society was intended to stem the current (tide) of  materialism.  Realizing that material industrialism is the systematic exploitation of wasting assets not only on the material plane but the spiritual as well,  the war is not over - long live the T.S. in America.
 

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An interesting dream last night taught me something about  ‘mere appearances’. I was shouting to a friend down a mountain gorge. When I stood at a particular spot there was this strange echo effect coming back tunnel like from below. Suddenly I became half awake realizing that the sound was actually coming from the humidifier fan. I then had a moment of discriminating awareness, an enlightened instant when I discover one thing being really another thing in a between-state of consciousness and the perception that both were an illusion from the perspective of the other. It was a question of which one my mind would take up as real. Try making this ‘thought-experiment’ in daily waking state, my mind can be trained to discern what is real or not. Seeing people, phenomenon and objects not as self-constituted, permanent and solid but merely names, and labels attatched to echoes. Why are they echoes? Because they exist solely on the basis of other factors like direct causes, indirect causes, contributing causes, none of these are essential or inherent. A typical Buddhist analogy is mistaking a coiled rope for a snake. Freedom and individual transformation comes from realizing that true nature, is transparent luminosity, uncreated reality as it is in itself. Dharmakrirti wrote: “all human accomplishment is preceded by correct cognition”. I need continued teachings on this, continued reading and meditation but I know that my own brain/mind is the instrument of deepest wisdom.(1) Insight experiences are not ‘visitations’ from somewhere else.(2) Because my ignorance conceives objects in a distorted manner, wisdom must be directly opposed to them. Only by defeating a powerful enemy can I prove my strength as a meditator.
(1) "Western science tries to understand the brain as if it were a computer because that is our favorite toy right now. (When we had kings, the brain was seen as a king). Mind is not a by-product of the brain; mind is a brain-user in Buddhism." Richard Collet, private correspondence.
(2) "The idea seems to be that anyone coming with a message from "above" is a deceiver and not the real Buddha. The (thus-come one) is himself the direct manifestation of thusness here and now and does not need to bring any message from somebody "beyond". For the ones who have realized this truth, those 'men and gods' come too late anyway. " Alfonso Verdu. Dialectical Aspects in Buddhist Thought p-166.

85
During the 60s if you were reading Wittgenstein or at least had one of his books on your shelf people would give you a slant-eyed affirmation node. I took notes like this one “If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be unutterably contained in what has been uttered”. The second sentence could be reduced  or simplified down to the karma-theory, that nothing gets lost as in the implacable law of compensation. The first, I think says something about what he believed were the limits of language standing for the limits of his world. He wrote: “I have long been conscious that it would be possible for me to write a book: “The World I Found”. That’s true in one sense,  but I think  he could write another one called “The World I Made”.
Reading Wittgenstein is hard for me, but it seems he rejected the essentialist theory* in general which would make him friends, philosophically with Buddhists and explain why R. Thurman speeks of him as a hero.
* "Essentialism equates essence with a special object which exists independently of language and things, essence for Wittgenstein is constituted only in language and in the individual language-games with the corresponding linguistic signs, rules of usage and objects: Essence is expressed by grammer, but also constituted in grammer." p175. "Wittgenstein tries to resist this tendency to [Platonistically]interpret the word "meaning" as if it were a substantive referring to a substance." "(We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substance for a substantive.)" p122  The Foundations of Wittgenstein's Late Philosophy  Ernst Konrad Specht  Manchester University Press 1969

86
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote "A serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes." I quoted this to a Buddhist friend and he thought that the Western philosopher, ("ironists") laughs because their paradoxes evokes defensive joking. Buddhist philosophers laugh he said, because paradox is defeated and their jokes are responses to freedoms delight.

87
One day as I was reading something,  I spoke out loud: “one must give in order to receive” Hayya said, “that’s what Ive been trying to tell you, that giving a toaster to your mother is not giving”. At another time a friend of ours said “a single Jew is considered quite smart but two Jews together are equal to three idiots”, laughing I told Hayya I had to write this joke down so I would remember it, she said “its no joke, but the bitter truth”.
 

88
To criticize Sartre for not seeing the long term perspective of a Buddhist would be unfair, but his existentialism is not complete – its much more vicious than he imagined.  At least in his limited one-life scheme one has to die only once. If he had however incorporated rebirth his cruel realism would be even more anguished and unbearable -he would be even more the “Hated Conscience of His Century”.* Without the Buddha's hope of release we would be bound for ever to perpetual deaths over and over again, truly “No Exit” with a vengeance.
*Sub title of John Gerassi’s new biography, University of Chicago  1989
 

89
When Alfred North Whitehead describes Buddhism as a mystical religion which adopts the attitude “to abandon the immediate experience of this world as a lost cause –conjoined with a program for the worlds abolition by a mystic tranquility” he is leaving a lot out. First, the impression that something is wrong with “the world” is mistaken, however he is careful to say it is the experience of the world that is the lost cause. Second, I wouldn't call Buddhism mystical,* there is no mystification in it.  Calling Whiteheads “mystic tranquility” Buddhist meditation would be like calling 50s Bebop, Rhythm and Blues. "Mystic"  when defined as insight involves the most ardent empirical discipline, and "tranquility”;  meaning the rigorous samatha stabilization one needs to secure it, takes years of practice. In a 1955 interview Paul Desmond asked "Bird" (Charlie Parker) whether his 'fantastic technique came behind practicing or whether that was just from playing....evolved gradually." Parker answered: "Well, you make it so hard for me to answer, you know, because I can't see where there's anything fantastic about it at all. I put quite a bit of study into the horn, that's true. In fact, the neighbors threatened to ask my mother to move once when I was living out West. They said I was driving them crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least 11 to 15 hours a day."
* I forget that many of today's Buddhist scholars are using this word in the highest sense, as well words like gnosis, occult, mystic, esoteric, arcane etc. all staples of Western path magic but obviously not endemic to it, besides mystification and mystic are not mutually inclusive. Just as I accuse the popular media and a few of my tangential bookstore customers of being wayward mystics & occultists, I stand accused.

90
"Grass is green" should read "grass registers as green to most human eyes". "Classical music  is more intelligent than  rock-&-roll" should read "in my present mixed state of musical education classical music seems more intelligent than rock-&-roll. Yes, and this only touches the tip of the quantum non locality iceberg. How about "that comely shape across the street is demon-food"?

The Rosicrucian formula Deus Est Homo "god is man" now reads: god is god | man is man | man becomes buddha | buddha teaches god | god becomes man | man becomes buddha.This is the Arcanum Arcanorum, the Hidden Treasure of the Wise, the Scepter of the Realms that Are... no more Hidden.

91
"The pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth are fundamentally incompatible."
                                                                            Marcel Proust
The work of the eyes is done, now go and do heart-work.
                                                                           Rainer Maria Rilka

Out this morning to Humboldt Part, cross the stream up the hill and see a huge oak on a mound and suddenly the scent in blazing color from the Buffalo garden in the distance makes me shudder with awe tinged with a sadness of philosophical reflection. There is danger in beauty. How I want to be a part of this beauty. Im not the flowers glistening in the Sun, I can't be the trees, especially this one which I can hardly get my arms around. I cant be the beautiful woman I may see and want to love somewhere. I can't get totally into any life because Im another part of nature and will only become part of it as my dead body mingles with the elements. Nature, the beautiful destroyer where emotions are doomed everywhere because I am an object that grows a brain, therefore my fascination with beauty becomes illusory, perverse and wild. This wildness is a weird mixture where Dionysian & Apollonian continuums flash back and forth across my corpus callosum. At one time I feel an immersion in the organic swamp of promiscuous flux, then at a mere turn of the minds camera an aestheticism of  conceptuality and separation  takes over.  Focusing on an object of desire and dominated by "the beautiful" my dharma principal gets out of kilter, a narcissistic personality is evoked by my private ego-centric eye. What crazy privileges am I giving it? O.K go ahead and corrupt my mind?  I must erect an ontological divide between  nostalgia and neurons.
The inconceivable wonders of realizing sunyata happen every moment before my very eyes and are being lost.The actual nature of the world, of reality, is graspable and can be astonishingly made manifest by madhymaika reasoning- never part from it. Discharge "the beautiful" with a bolt of vajra lightning. Emotional love-attatchment is ultimately unhappy and death ridden. All the vivid imaginary scenes of desire and the galvanizing of sexual objects in conceptual mental formality are demonic internal transactions. These give me the unwholesome Dionysian fevers of nympholepsy(1) and will create a spinning into barbarism, while the Apollonian conceptual glorification of the visible will harden into fascism.(2) The two together creating a complex biun-paradox. Curb the dangerous daemonism of sex and nature around me, but remember sex and nature are not the enemy, the enemy is within me  'the inner enemy'. Just this week two friends, young ladies slashed their wrists over broken relationships. One was G. my employs friend the other a neighbor. Both survived, both went to the hospital.
(1)  Nympholepsy? My made-up word for the maladie & corruption induced by the epi-phenonemon succubus; not only the demon lover from "Satan's legions" in the Middle Ages but the more benign illusions illustrated in the story of the two monks re-told by John Cage. "They were walking along one day when they came to a stream where a young lady was waiting, hoping that someone would help her across. Without hesitating, one of the monks picked her up and carried her across, putting her down safely on the other side. The two monks continued walking along, and after some time, the second one, unable to restrain himself, said to the first, "You know we're not allowed to touch women. Why did you carry that woman across the stream? Put her down". The first monk replied, "I did two hours ago."
(2)  Apollonian and Dionysian are terms from Nietzsche, developed profoundly & explosively in Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae where this last sentence is derived.

92
 What does it mean that Nirvana is the goal ? A blowing out - extinction, dying out. An older term, older than Buddhism was used in the Upanishads for perfect self realization. Buddha had a stricter sense of dying out; the extinguishing of the fire of craving, de-parture from that craving. If I refuse to feed the flame of craving the fire would go out for want of fuel, that makes sense. This is standing at the frontier, the vanguard, talk about the avant guard! Liberation from the temporal frame of reference, dying to outworn ideas including any ideologies of self. The finished product is:  no longer becoming. I may write this and in a years time be embarrassed at the thinness of it. The point is to keep drilling deeper into Wisdom. Wisdom has infinite depth and dosn't stop intellectually in crafted wording, or in my case jumbling words from different sources, even though the memorization of load-bearing words are essential. You can mount various mind plateaus where a focused drilling results in intense realizations. For example the 9th mind of the desire realm where troublesome interference is pacified and the mind stabilizes and is made serviceable. Or as one progresses, the fourth dhynani or 'concentration' said to be the best mental basis for the "path of seeing" where consciousness can directly realize emptiness.*
* Walking Through Walls  Geshe Gendun Lodro,  Snow Lion Publications Ithaca, New York,  page 324

93
The apocryphal Orpheus plays his phorminx (7-stringed lyre). He ruffles the winds that will inspire poems centuries to come. The fallacy of fresh lines of poetry are in fact older lines struggling to revive, reminiscences only, as Yeats said "all must copy copies". In what way is this true? "What is an apocryphon" asks Blatvasky?  "Simply a secret book (to hide), never meant for the profane, every mystic-adept carries his own. An inner eye is generated which enables  him/her to "die" in the physical body and still live consciously as Blavatsky writes "died in their personalities as yogis die to the world". Thus Orphic poetry, with the invention of negative logic becomes the theme, the image of their solitary wisdom where poets down the ages face toward their own knowing in the condition of infinite regressiveness, never finding a logical beginning. In the inability to find an unalloyed originality, a pure absence of dependent existence, the poets Orphism represents the failure and tragic impossibility to locate a reality other than in relation with something which for ever remains other, with the Other as absence and mystery. Poetry becomes a suicide, an annulment. The Orphic internal annulment at work in every poem in the image of his severed head floating away on the blue astral sea. Jean Delville's Orpheus(1) symbolizes 'away', that is the fading notes of his lyre, anteriority mistaken for an advanced guard, originality, a lie, 'forgetting' being the crucial factor in the creation of 'orginial' art.
Modern art has tried to bring about the least lack of dependence, (that is, trying to be original) with the 'chance' collision of objects. The simultaneity of incongruous objects creating a void of "never-before" seen or heard events. But under analysis such "simultaneity" turns out to be older than the oldest rocks (moon rocks?), a simultaneity that has been dead millions of times and perhaps no longer fancies perpetuating the idea of shocking people.What we are talking about is not history or tradition. Perhaps the human mind even invents history, or as one proud Modern painter(2) has it "tradition dosn't influence me, I influence it". But this painter cannot possibly be transmitting something original without profound modifications within his act which belong to a whole network of influences none of which are lasting, and all of which trail back to uncharted antiquity. Aliens appearing before a 20th Century avant guard concert or gallery would immediately recognize everything there as perfect examples of ordinary humanness. To be "new" one would have to remove the component moments leading up to the event and if one could do that the whole would not be able to exist.  To me what typifies that event of impossibility is the severed head of Orpheus which to artists everywhere can  only mean reminiscence, and when  artists chose experimentation they beautifully progress toward their own self annihilation which makes them all wonderful sibling Buddhists fabricating an unconscious emptiness. Is this whole artistic trend a deep cultural evolutionary impulse to find a fabricated emptiness, or is it some ghastly lie to find a autonomous archetype in nature?  "Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve".(3) This, I think is the reason why 'Modern Art' vanished in our generation, became extinct right before our very eyes and ears precisely because of its high velocity quest for 'originality'. The positivist and universalizing aspects also helped board up the 'secret' passages found by the late 19th century Symbolists. What excites me now about 'art' is when I get phone calls from young witches asking for books on the fairy realm,  perhaps  going to the land of Fairy Sleep and its poetic ecstasy that Crowley and Yeats talked about is the real frontier of art for now, but then in perhaps more realistic ways, Wallace Stevens has these lines:  "And why the poet as Eternal chef d'orchestre? / Air is air, / Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere. / It's sounds are not angelic syllables / But our unfashioned spirits realized / More sharply in more furious selves.(4)
(1) 1893 oil on canvas by the great Belgian Symbolist/Rosicrucian. Walter Kaufmann reports that there was an ancient "play on words that was dear to the Orphic sect: The body (soma) is the soul's tomb (sema). This means that the soul is buried in the body, that life is one long exile and that salvation is to be found only in death. To be a self is to be a stranger." Alienation Richard Schacht,  University Press of America 1984 page xxx
(2) I believe this was Willem De Kooning
(3) George Santayana
(4) The Collected Poems Page 136

94
I can't discover any cultural-revolutionary gestures today. The avant-garde has become part of everyday life. Society got caught up, mass culture has adopted all of its achievements, an avalanche of commerciality has destroyed the thin line that used to seperate the experimental from the ordinary.
For a full blown essay on this see The Triumphant Shipwreck of Dada and Surrealism by Andre Codresque

Minimalism at its inception around the 60's however was highly interesting. LaMonte Young and others rediscovered in practice a very precious element that had been almost forgotten in the West, that being: "stasis in contrast to climax"(1) as he expressed it. In presenting "repetition as a very objective strategy to produce a subjective effect" Young created a unique situation; a music that was rightly viewed avant-garde in synch with its eidola of measureless antiquity. But how long did (or could) anyone keep doing this? “Minimalism became Gregorian with a constant hickup”- I don’t remember who said that, but its clever. Something Emerson wrote indicates the same thing: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds!"
There are other ways to vent creativity. Invention recreates the concept (concetti)(2) in sensible matter but this process founds not an aesthetic but a techne. Using the magical 'impresa', (a term from the Renaissance), one can carry the concept (concetto-idea to be expressed) toward thought; one then draws it away from art. In this way a productive agency becomes more powerful than its products and an artist can alter real space in such a way that one literally bumps into pure idea.
(1) Climax is another western invention, like firearms for gunpower, which the east had invented centuries earlier but found little use for. Eastern stories are picaresque, horizontal chains of incidents - little sense of an ending. See  Sexual Personae  Camille Paglia Random House  New York 1991 page 7, 31.
(2) See Form And Meaning Writings On The Renaissance And Modern Art,  Robert Klein Viking Press 1979

94
I dont know how long Western Magickians will be plagued by the 'English' idiotic ideas concerning yoga and suffering. Probably for a long time, especially when the beloved Austin Spare(1)holds the current high ground. He wrote these words in 1947: "Yoga has no contexture with the true function of life - which is fuller life, beauty, pleasure by every social means. Most of these wretched Eastern 'isms' simply desire the safety of the womb or the sterility of a brick. They are afraid of life and run away from it." That's not to say we don't have examples of misknowledge from our contemporaries. Look at what Terence McKenna says: "I think of Mahayana Buddhism is the most sophisticated psychology, but Im not willing to climb aboard the Buddhist ethic because Buddhism says suffering is inevitable. That's not a psychedelic point of view."(2) Therefore McKenna opts for some kind of plant-Shamanism that "brings one to the doorway of the starship at the threshold of a strange new partner".(3)A strange 'new' partner! I heard about beings in the Form Realm, their very beautiful. They make the most comely human of the Desire Realm seem unbearably ugly. But perhaps McKenna has an entirely different and more spiritual idea of what this partner is. When psychedelics are involved the word 'strange' usually means something individually marvelous. Could I perhaps meet one of these partners without taking psychedelics?  I probably couldn't convince the 'partner' to realize its own illusive character let alone get it to convince McKenna that its marvelousness is really disguised suffering, the inevitable suffering of all self-centric life states and constructed things in Samsara, so let it go. At any rate if McKenna sees the Mahayana as 'sophisticated psychology' he should already know that such kinds of phenomena posses limits and at some point they will cease.
(1)  Kenneth Grant says that Spare's "supreme indifference" raised him above the Abyss to the lofty Grade of Magister Templi. See Zos Speaks! Fulgur Limited 1998 page 38.
(2) Buddha said that an unlightened existence is suffering. Realizing that "suffering is inevitable" within conditioned existence one moves on to the next three noble truths.
(3) Archaic Revival page 83.
 

96
In Buddhist Sutras it says: "If you wish to see the illusions of a (stage) magician as magic you must not allow yourself to be fooled by them. So also the Wise in Perfect Enlightenment know the three worlds* to be like a magic show."
* Desire realm, form realm & formless realm.
 

97
An ideology of archetypal essences or a reification of spookiness can serve an infinite number of excuses for human failings. Putting yourself on a plane where no reproach can touch you since, as Sartre says “what I really am is my transcendence.”* A charged transcendency which glues the mind down with facticity to the present, like when I go out to Aztalan park with my mystic friends who are quick to spot fairy circles around every tree.  Would I say anything to ruin this transcendence - that their merely impressions left in the grass from yesterdays mowing?  To play the mystical bad-faith game is fun, more artistic than mystical. The so called “Creative Occultism” of the last quarter century is suffused with it.
* “I am too great for myself” from  Sartre's essay Patterns of Bad Faith  reminds me of the Bibles “Everything is possible with God”; definitely allows for no debate of any kind nor does it put any restrain on inflating coercion.
 

98
It is the revision of Gnosticism & to a lesser extent Alchemy, both rooted in the essentialisms(1)of Hermetic Philosophy that redefines individual mind as wholly responsible for the conflict between the rational spirit and the chaos of nature. This doesn’t question the 2nd century Gnostics original and true insight concerning our prisoner status in worldly existence, but it does challenge the basis of their model, which I will dramatically express using their own paranoid thinking, to uncover the covert crime of essentialism and its mistaken plot against us, (thus giving essentialist status to essentialism! an error Buddhists do not commit). No doubt it was apocalyptic times which historically fed their anxieties; what less anxieties have we now in the 21st century? Enough for some Buddhist scholars to easily lift that word out of the past and effectively use it to describe the Tantric path.(2) Suddenly the Gnostic today is freed from the false creationism and his long history of continual exposure to  the dualistic category system contrived by Aeonic planetary corruption's fashioned by a Demiurge. Some may think that contemporary gnostics would have psychologized this away long ago and left it to computer game and movie makers to exploit, but then why haven’t they also psychologized the far away spark of an unknown father?(3)  Shouldn't you keep one if  you keep the other, or in our case discard both? Perhaps its easier to vision this than ones own predisposition's of karmic contamination's from a beginningless past. Its more Western to see causes imposed as appendages from an original upheaval back in historical time, or attain deliverance from an entity before historical time. The torpor of Saturn, the wrathfulness of Mars, the concupiscence and greed of Venus and lust of Jupiter  etc. are somehow more real. But its ignorance indeed to blame an Aeon for afflicting us with its mythic negative attribute; what did we do to the planet-Aeons for them to afflict us? When one reads the old Gnostic texts you are led to believe that something of that order took place; myth substituting for true causes. For the 2nd century Gnostics the successive cosmic Aeons in a massive complex of circumstances veiled an Autopater (true god) “in the beginning” who ultimately was the “original cause”.  No matter how much they wanted to liberate him from the miserable deed, he can't hide, no matter how far back they put him out of sight, so hidden behind the “unknowable”, “without opposites”, “no form”, “unbegotten”,  but still “source of the universe”, “incorruptible”and “everlasting” he is still a He, and this veils a paradox that few scholors have addressed.  If you are sent so far away, not having to back up moral requirements then you’re a meaningless projection of philosophically challenged individuals seized by poor logic.  How could this evolve into a Religion? which is exactly what the early Church Fathers asked: “We need a King of Kings not an Absentee Father”. But then what if that absentee father expresses for intelligent men and women a spiritual longing more deeply imbedded in their lives than any other western successful institutionalized religion can? I think it does, but how it got there and what it is, cries out for revision.
(1) The term 'essentialist', or substantialist view is the belief in a permanent and eternal self or universal substance upheld by monistic absolutists which Buddhism refutes. Gnostic soteriology is explicit on the point of Nature being the outcome of an 'error' or cosmic corrosion found outside individual control making the discovery of suffering confounded with essentialist views. Karl Popper called essentialism the root of all evil, "that those who know should command those who do not".  Isaiah Berlin said that no better excuse or reason has ever been propounded for unlimited despotism. "Unbridled monism, as I call it - some call it fanaticism, but monism is at the root of every extremism." The New York Review May 14 1998 page 58.
(2) Vajrayana translated as the Apocalyptic Vehicle in Wisdom And Compassion The Sacred Art of Tibet,  Abrams, Inc. 1991.
Its also understood that Gnosticism originated out of the failure of the apocalyptic hopes. Elsewhere Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University uses the phrase 'controlled apocalypse' meaning the vehicle of immediate revelation and  transformation, where the religious attitude is infused with an all-pervading sense of urgency which converts ideas into instant action; simply, Buddhists alter their eschatological views, shifting the "end of time" period to the next moment!
(3)  I respectfully submit two names, Gnostics of our own age, Harold Bloom  and Stephen Hoeller who have expressed faith or hope in such a 'far off spark', as Hoeller explains it: “A secret fire, a ray of light emanating from the true, the ultimate Deity -- that distant, yet mysteriously ever-present Stranger, who in a paradoxical way is also our only true friend in our condition of exile.” A GnosticView of the Future. Hoeller in another place quotes Harold Blooms book Omens of Millennium (1996) . “If you know yourself as having an affinity with the alien or stranger God, cut off from this world, then you are a Gnostic, and perhaps the best and strongest moments still come to what is best and oldest in you, to a breath or spark that long precedes this Creation.”

                                                       ADDENDUM
Its as if we are trying to  learn to accept the possibility of the 'indescribable' as a drawing nearer to God, since then we no longer can insist that we should understand him, no longer measure him by the standards of  rational/intuitive mind therefore no longer criticize him, no longer deny him. This strikes me as even mystically cowardly, its saying that our greatest possible clarity is based on a human inadequacy, that is our affinity! Such Gnostics will be surrounded by mystery, yes looking that mystery in the eyes (which is its intensity) but without demanding an answer to it. How can intensity be a substitute for incompleteness and how long can  Gnostics go on replicating the mysteries, ciphering and deciphering creating new mysteries, all images of the beyond & indescribable?  Besides, if two things are truly incommensurable, they cannot be in relationship. That 'relationship' between a hidden god and the believing subject would be based on  fictionality & approximation. And finally, if the gnostic feels that he or she is already a god, but a god in exile trapped in dreariness, shouldn't that dreariness be analyzed by a tradition that seeks and offers perfection?
Harold Bloom has a wonderful word for all of this; 'belatedness' a philosophy profound and wide ranging, accounting for the west's esoteric arcane including poetic mythology, but as he says its a "shared problematic of belatedness".* If I can  put it bluntly "were all too late". 37 years ago I went to refuge to Paradox, I refuse anymore to go to refuge to Belatedness no matter how addictive its swooning mysticism. I now go to refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha which has taught me not to accept the 'indescribable' and has shown me that my mind (& all minds) can have the greatest possible clarity.
* Lying Against Time: Gnosis,Poetry, Criticism.  in Valentinian Gnosticism, pp68  Brill Leiden. I think Blooms 'belatedness' simultaneously forges ahead with its conscious wish of return into realizing that god as well as the self is not logically something other than appropriation. Subtle notions which memory glorifies, it is MEMORY GLORIFIED stroked with the wings of nostalgia the gnostic enthusiast puts his finger on the trick of the mystery until it finally articulates itself: "Don't ask, I am inexplicable", and at that moment the absurdity of an illusion studying an illusion, even they cannot properly constitute successive states of a single process.

99
It wasn't as if I needed a refuge during the 30 or so years I was searching. It was more of a thirst, a quest for more knowledge, as George Harrison (died yesterday Dec.1 2001) said; finding out why were here, where we came from, where were going should be the most important thing "highest priority" we do.* As I get older I understand more what refuge means. Finally taking refuge in reality (shunya) feels good, for all  the archaic and arcane symbolism I studied, all the gnostic allusions and the noumena of ultra-phenomenal worlds & beings got blown over by the howling winds of more study, more wisdom. Reality (emptiness) endures because it is uncreated- not made by anyone, any god, any world soul - it lasts, therefore it can give refuge.
* "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being." Socrates

100
Some light on the masculine Logos:(1) Gnostic revisionists with Buddhist inclinations rescue the “pater-monad’ from his impossible act as “first cause” and realize that this Father energy, realistically is the human compassion that wells up in all individuals. The Altruistic thought of Illumination; logos spermatikos(2) is present as bodhicitta in all sentient beings; the interior reality which underlies all relational states in existence. We can experience the large scale thinking that was supposed to be the sole gift of ‘creator’ gods, by acting on the world and the universe, lucidly identifying real causes of suffering and happiness. The altruistic aspiration identified in Buddhism as (upaya) masculine bodichitta bears fruit in a totality over which no arrogant ‘creator god’ could ever exert its influence. The masculine logoi in contemporary cultures are becoming part of an obsolete religious language more and more harmful to the human race as the horror of Judeo/Christian/Moslem terrorism continues. Heavenly “fathers” fabricating a race of sentient beings, literally constructing creatures from scratch, is to the 21st century intellect preposterous. This even bothered religious mystics of the past who actually became apologetic. Yet the more hypostatic, mysterious and ineffable their cosmologies and emanational systems became the more the contradictions grew. Ultimately the paradox of “first cause” was pushed back as 'Higher Gods' conceptualized as ‘ancient of days’, “concealed wisdom” “Unknown”, even pushing “him” out of the picture altogether by an extraction (tzim-tzum) from the universe in the hope ‘He’ would be exempt from reason. In their stead were propped up demiurges, ‘fallen’ women and serpents that shouldered the contradictions and blame for the sins, evil and general imperfections of a conditioned universe.
 By reaching out with the singularity of “skill in means” (upaya) and Wisdom (prajna) our potential is unlimited and ever expanding in its practice. The two powers in one consciousness define the 'awakeness' capacity of human beings, a capacity, in the case of the historical Buddha that reached out to the ‘creator god’ himself and became his teacher.
(1) The Greek Logos has many specific meanings according to context. The best translation of Ho logos (Gr.) from the Gospel of John has been “the message” having to do with the “account” or “charge” of religious motivation. Hebrew Davar rbd corresponds to the Greek Logos and is used in the sense of “message” (word) but also as “thing” or “matter” in the Torah. See How it Grows According to John by Joe Fischer, Chicago and Four Gospels by Tolstoy.
(2) Im using this term in the same context as Giuseppe Tucci,  The Theory and Practice of the Mandala  Samuel Weiser New York 1978 page 15

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Having no original cause doesn't mean individuals have inauspicious origins, after all the auspiciousness is beginningless! Isn't that auspicious enough, do you need one big ‘Father’  (or ‘Mother’) in heaven? Even more astonishing than having just one heavenly Mother, because of the beginninglessness of existence it logically follows that all sentient beings have been our Mothers at one time or another (a traditional Mahayana teching).
 

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Using our expanded awareness of the infinite causal continuity of life and the evolutionary connection of all beings we can realize that everyone has been related to us at one time or another, in one life or another. Of course we can’t recover specific memories but we can reasonably imagine the possibility of everyone having been our Mother. This is obviously a very hard thing to do, and less glamorous than imagining in a past life we were Cleopatra or Cagliostro, but its not fantasy, rather it’s based on cosmological fact. One of the profound methods Buddhist’s have to develop altruism is aspiring to view everyone as having been our Mother. Contemplating this deeply, our hearts will generate a sense of gratitude and wish to repay them for their discomfort & pain through carrying us in their womb and bringing us into birth, also for their care, protection and love during the formative months.(1) In one Buddhist teaching I read somewhere, there was a reservation about this in America, that we should use our Grandmothers instead of our Mothers, seeing how some children have horrifying memories plus the gruesome newspaper reports of babies being thrown into dumpsters. Still, despite personality conflicts we owe our lives and early nurturing to our Mothers, therefore the wish to repay their endearment for us should generate a heart felt gratitude. A growing sense of equanimity toward everyone including our enemies and those that are completely neutral will begin to manifest; it will have to be practiced, but will be a wonderful acquired wisdom where our world view becomes orientated towards the needs of all sentient beings and not solely on our present self absorbed needs or what we may think we are going to be needing in the future. Slowly decreasing our attachment to the beloved, decreasing the irritation and fear of the unloved and the hated, decreasing the disinterest in strangers, we develop an equanimity free from desire and hatred. Our progress toward Buddhahood is for the sake of all “Mother sentient-beings”(2) and in preceding this way our needs will be fulfilled which is to become enlightened in the quickest time possible. This won’t happen until our interest in renunciation peaks and we realize that a life of self absorption is doomed for achieving lasting happiness. This is Buddhist realism.
Now if such an outlook and world view is too far fetched and unreasonable a practice, lets give an example of another type of behavior (an extreme opposite kind) and see which one is filled with more logic and wisdom. “Reaching his hotel in New York City Raymond Roussel wanted to take a bath and the idea gave him a certain satisfaction. Then he learned there were 3,000 bathrooms in the hotel and that 2,999 travelers could take a bath at the same time as he. At that news his pleasure vanished: you can only enjoy yourself if you win first prize– the happiness of others can only cause suffering.”(3)  How far is this example from the kind of irritation we sometimes experience?  At a teaching in Melbourne Jeffrey Hopkins was asked the question “If compassion isn’t inherently existing in the world why is compassion good?"  He said that its built on the simple recognition that everyone wants happiness and doesn't want suffering, also on the recognition of the fact that, because of the kindness of others towards us in other lifetimes we are experiencing happiness in this life. Finally, because others are so many and oneself is only one, and, if its worth while for us to achieve happiness and get rid of suffering then there’s that much more worthwhileness when applied to all sentient beings.(4) The causes and conditions for Roussel to be in New York, having enough money to rent a nice hotel room and contemplate the pleasure of a bath were created, odd as it may seem, by his own acts of generosity to others in the past; the nice hot tub didn’t just suddenly appear out of nowhere. Apparently a significant lapse occurred for him to be acting this way. As this extreme situation shows, Roussel’s  self cherishing or absolute self emerged, the unconscious self habit, gut feeling which is beyond relationally. You can see by this example that the ‘absolute’ could not be relative, they are opposites. If something is absolute it cannot relate to anything, it cannot come into existence, cannot be destroyed, it is lacking all the properties that relative things have. That’s why an absolute self and its monistic metaphysical corollaries are dangerous and ultimately result in irritation & suffering. This absolute self is what the Buddha took completely apart, every kind of autonomous monism dissolved under analysis. There is no absolute self, no monistic universal that serves as an escape from relational states. Everything comes from others, there's nothing about us that doesn't come from others; look around you now, what item, thing, idea, hasn’t been produced by others? Starting to think like this will lead us into the radical concepts of bodhichitta and emptiness. Altruism is very logical and at the same time, in an evolved evolutionary way, very occult. Thinking that others were taking away his pleasure, Roussel, nearing a state of crystallized paranoia was enclosed in his self-preoccupation and intern being controlled by it. His own narrow egoic perspective was pitted against the universe, a battle (we) will always lose.(5) Isn’t it better to join in, and effect the infinity of everyone’s happiness, so when they have happiness, its our happiness, their taking hot baths is our bliss? This is our social strength, fulfilling our humanness. Once we live in this kind of empathy we can optimize our interrelations with all beings and understand the high intention of  the Bodhisattva vow to become a Buddha in order to help others achieve happiness.(6)We engage ourselves in this 'mind-reformed tradition' not merely from some sentimental compassion or pity but proceed by recognizing the fact that self preoccupation will always be unsatisfactory.  Even though we all have a huge  investment in what we believe is our absolute self, especially when it rises up  like a tidal wave of blind intuitive instinct when we are threatened, its basis is  ignorance and will ultimately result in the narrowing and closing up of our being.(7)
Right in the middle of our American culture of self-absorbed media, I watch  the Vulcan's on the Star Trek TV series and it brings to mind the logic of consistently controlling our emotions and developing a kind of Buddhist equanimity, that in Spocks words refutes the absorption of self-centered existence: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”. A human created the Vulcan characters so its a human potential to respect the sameness of human beings, all being members of the human family.  Even though they are likely non-Buddhist, at times I feel it would be good to be reborn on the planet Vulcan and submit to their extraordinary regimes of discipline. But of course that place is make-believe, better to practice as diligently as possible on this planet now and elevate my credentials as a moral being and maybe acquire another human body with the good fortune to be born into a Dharma family.
(1)   D.W. Winnicott writes that mother and baby constitute a single unit, without a facilitating mother the individual was doomed, only the mother figure is capable of meeting unspoken needs. In the 1940's, the psychologist Rene Spitz studied human babies isolated from their mothers. Thirty four out of 91 died. In other foundling homes, the death rate was even higher. In some, it climbed to a devastating 90%. A host of other studies have shown the same thing. Babies can be given food, shelter, warmth and hygiene, but if they are not held and stroked, they have an abnormal tendency to die.
(2)  The three main causes of becoming a Bodhisattva is developing the mind of compassion, non-dual understanding, (shunyata), and the altruistic mind of enlightenment (bodhichitta). Compassion In Tibetan Buddhism  Jeffrey Hopkins. Rider & Company 1980
(3)  The Surrealist Parade  Wayne Andrews,  page 118. Its not an intention of mine to keep bashing Surrealists.  Reading Surrealism in the 60's sparked breakthroughs in thinking which otherwise would never have occurred.  Leonora Carrington, who visited the store in the 90's spoke of the excellence of Tibetan meditation. Carrington was a prominent figure in the original Surrealist group.  On page 128 of Andrews book its reported that a Tarahumara Indian told Artaud “The mind of man is tired of God”.
(4)  Approaching The Tantras  Jeffrey Hopkins,  Snow Lion Tapes Ithaca, New York 1986
(5)  Some of the wording in this piece is influenced by Robert Thurman's tapped retreat lecture Jewel Tree of Tibet  which I can't stop listening to and appreciate for its magnificent spontaneous outbursts of dharma teaching.
(6)  "I think it is clear that a Bodhisattva can be a person of any religion, or even of no religion. Certainly anyone devoting his life's search to the elimination of suffering for all living beings can be called a Bodhisattva."  H.H. Dalai Lama  1985.
(7)  Chogyam Trungpa says compassion is "environmental generosity, it implies larger scale thinking, a freer and more expansive way of relating." "We could say that compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an anti-poverty attitude, a war on want."   Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism Shambhala Berkeley 1973 page 99.
 
 

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The 9th mind of calm abiding is characterized by spontaneity. What does that mean? What is the reverse of spontaneity? The accepted common meaning would be arid calculation or intellectualism. However both of these types of mind which are the opposite of spontaneity are used in the early stages and eventually get transformed into spontaneity. Merely as an exercise in analogy lets associate our left and right brain with inhaling and exhaling , with mindfulness and introspection. When we exhale we are stimulating our right brain, we are drawn to the negative space around us, not being trapped by the details and component parts of our body, attention becomes more extensive, thoughts tend to dissolve into the background and our brain waves operate at a low modulation. If we could keep on only exhaling we would find our selves moving perfectly toward a vanishment nexus, but also towards a coma. To reach a real vanishment we cannot reject the objective thought and verbal orientation of the left brain inhalation. The two cerebral hemispheres must work together just as we must inhale and exhale the breath in order to keep on living. They are of equal importance and complement each another in the gradual ascent up to the ninth mind of the Desire Realm. In the Hermetic Museum it is stated that the Alchemists dignity is concentrated in his bellows."The bellows are purified, the lead is consumed in the fire for the wicked are plucked away" (this is a variation on Jeremiah vi 29).
 Our mind will be gripped by strong emotions and a break in concentration will occur sometimes without us even knowing it. The right brain functions momentarily forgets the whole meaning of why we are meditating and automatically carries us and our temporary lapsed left brain off. If we override this right brain reverie with its imaginal properties, and wake up the left brain examination and mindfulness, we can analize how a thought produces a picture and from a picture comes a story and from a story comes strong emotions. The whole thing will burst like bubbles or vanish like a mirrage. We need the left brain to do this kind of analysis. To isolate the components of wandering thought and recognize them as distractions and eliminate them. These are ongoing short-term projects for the left brain, where as the right brain views the issue of isolation, restraint and abandonment from an overall (gestalt) view and keeps it stable. That is why the antidote to laziness is faith in the virtues of mental absorption (right brain qualities) and therefore generates the enthusiasm to attain them. The deep heart-felt implied meaning of words should blend with the mathematical skill of meditational strategy. The form (left brain) and content (right brain) will meld in the higher jhanas and produce a perpetual coherent resonance. That's what it means to have spontaneity, it becomes effortless, such synchronization brings this clear stillness to the mind.

"Now, for a while, until your split minds are whole, parting will seem like separation. Be Happy! When your split minds are one, you and I will be reunited. May good fortune and happiness be everywhere."  Lady Yeshe Tsogyel, A D 817 (From her last farewell -Parinirvana), Sky Dancer  Keith Dowman, Routledge & Kagen Paul London 1984  page 186

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I would like to make an analogy between the training involved to make a successful adult career as a concert violinist or pianist and becoming a master of meditation. First, there is a sense that he or she has to start out as a child prodigy. He/she must train fingers, arm, and other body parts to do some highly unnatural things and assume some very unorthodox positions for long periods. This must be done when the muscles are young and easily trained. If you wait until 10 or 11 years before starting this process, it is already too late, if your goal is a solo career. Meditation masters are usually Rinpoche's (prodigy's), that is, their taking up the practice from  previous lives. In the article A New Generation of Tibetan Lamas,* Zong Rinpoche states the importance of starting young. "If you want to be good at meditating, you will have to meditate for like thirty years, and if you're 50 or more I don't think you can, but when you start young then later you will experience the benefits".  In music such a late start is fine for someone who simply wants to play for his own enjoyment and for the love of music; but for those intent on serious careers, an earlier start is essential. Evgeng Kissin the Russian pianist at the age of six, his talent then obvious, could, without reading music play anything but he didn't know anything (indicating past life ability - Rinpoche's recognize objects, phenomena etc. from past life.) As Kessin's studies began a regime similar in many ways to a monks life emerges. Anna Kantor, Kissin's early teacher says "He has stripped from his life all the things that kids today waste time on - he doesn't really want to watch television - and he kept only the things that are important to him, musical and otherwise. His life is condensed."
* Mandala Sept-Oct 00

105
Fantasy with fantasy and fantasy without fantasy, the first gives the transparency of hiding bitter truths behind a veil of pleasant illusions, or actually not knowing bitter truths in the first place and just presenting a veil of pleasant illusions. This is lyrical truth. Morphing unwashed  devils into singing angles,  helping reconcile peoples dreams with  their observations. In Buddhist terms it would amount to actually seeing horns on a rabbit if that’s what pleases you, poetry as the structure of enhanced reality for a trans-virtual human civilization.
Fantasy without fantasy consists of raw world data served up on a decorated plate, a realistic setting which evokes an irrational content or it could be an irrational setting which evokes realistic content. This is dramatic truth.

106
 I had a theory of art that included only two categories: Fantasy with Fantasy and Fantasy without Fantasy. When I heard Alexander Berzins translation of sunyata: "absence of the fantasized" durring Serkon Rinpoches commentary on the Kalachakra in 1982, I walked around for several days with a vacant feeling inside me - slowly turning to joy.

107
Alchemy has six Secret substances of perfected trance: Electrum, that it radiates like an antenna and has bells which tingle towards the prized; Sulfur, that it separates the mundane images and drives them away or swallows them whole; Salt, that it preserves ones willing nature to subsist without motion; Gold, that it can hang malleable, suspended before a monstrous dragon or illustrious transparent syzygy; Nubes, that it brings a brilliant vesture from the nourishing moisture of tears; Orpiment (guma paradisi), that it causes familiarity to return.

108
I am fascinated with late Romanticism. What was the major preoccupation of Romantic artists? They wern't Buddhists as we know them, they didn't meditate as we know meditation practice today, yet they churned up trenchant and deep-seated layers of horror and confusion the way modern Buddhists uncover their own deep seeded kleshas and black karma. For example in Klimts ceiling paintings of 1900.* He touched defilement's and sins of body and mind,  and a sense of world weariness, torment of passions that were all presented in a wandering ornament of ignorance, darkness and death. This was not just brooding thoughts and groundless anxieties of a maniac, but Romantic mind touching the human nerve that strikes at the deception of desire itself, struggling fruitlessly for satisfaction in a totally unsatisfactory existence. It wasn't egoism that aimed to promote its own interest, but a response to the egocentric predicament itself. This Romantic predicament cried out for a spiritual technology to strangle that ego. No such methodology existed at that time. Therefore  the aesthetic experience was kept in a virtual state only becoming actual with tragic consequences as those sensitive  artists refused to be spectators of suffering any longer, following introversion to the limits of indurance, interred various forms of depression or worse. Others pursued the psychological development of their aesthetic attitude as some kind of autonomous subplot for their personal histories, but when the moral implications were examined their "poetic truth" & "art for arts sake" shriveled with no soteriological value. I can feel as Gaston Bachelard that "the poetic act has no past" and know it as a phenomenological description for 'the beautiful'  but remain skeptical as such archetypal psychology nears ontological status. If any object or living creature had no past, enjoyed an independent existence no other factor could influence it, relations would not exist, so the drive for an uncomplicated enjoyment of life through this concept of art is to wish away our human sensibilities. As a Buddhist in progress Im living the decadent phase of Romanticism now, I find myself all over its terrain of visionary despair. Yes Buddhism offers an escape, but from what deep furrows of pessimism  plowed through, this Romantic quest uncovers old shards and deep latent seeds I could never find from more optimistic and therefore for me, weaker aesthetics.
*One shouldn't have to travel to Vienna to see Buddha's First Noble Truth painted on a ceiling. Refering to the controversial panels for the University of Vienna. "Klemt had dared to interpret the theme of Philosophy not as a formal celebration of the faculty and its noble endeavors, but as a study in mysticism and pessimism".  Austrian Expressionism   Patrick Werkner, SPOSS California 1986. The Ministry of Culture (in Vienna) as that of most non-Buddhists explain optimism and pessimism simply as an adequate or inadequate vitality, as the existence or absence of adaptability, as health or illness. Klimt proclaimed and depicted the unity of life and death not as instinctual vitality but as mankind totally lost in space.

109
The  new "Super String Theory" (many dimensions) may theoretically prove heavens and hells.

It is difficult to prove assertions there are higher and lower realms. For example; that torturous hell realms exist under ground, or that pure and joyous lands exist high in heavenly transparent space. But its obvious to most persons that there are great differences of mentality in human beings, showing intense kinds of suffering and anxiety, contrasted with carefree pleasure and indulgence. The Hermetic axiom "As above so below" perhaps should read "as in the middle so above and below."
 

110
Theosophical writers such as Alice A. Bailey used various Yogas as euphemisms for evolutionary periods. The first nearly physical race on Lemuria used Hatha Yoga which brought into conscious use and manipulation of various organs, muscles and other parts. Laya Yoga, the yoga of the centers was used in Atlantis to produce a stabilizing of the etheric & astral bodies and the psychic nature. In the development of the so called Aryan race, Bhakti Yoga was used to increase the devotional attitude and Raja Yoga for taming and evolving the mind. The latest in this 'yoga unfoldment', following along the lines of Theosophical thinkers would be  Quantum Yoga or Emptiness Yoga which began during the last half of the  20th century* in order to reveal reality and the void nature of mind!
* What am I saying here? historically, its actually 2,500 years old, but definitelly 'new' to the West.

111
sym sy yesh may yesh:"Something out of something","from what there is" or "from the left overs", a doctrine not to be found in orthodox Kabbalah or heretical Kabbalah because it is  contrary to ]yam sy yesh may ain "something out of nothing".
 

112
It is astonishing to Noam Chomsky that three quarters of the American population believe in miracles, believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that etc.* But Buddhists say miracles do happen without believing in God. You don't need God doing this and that for miracles to happen, in fact they happen because the wide range of phenomenal life is free of fixed ideas like God. This is an area that science hasn't discovered yet and Christian fundamentalism see as heretical. Looked at in this light, Naom Chomsky and Pat Robertson are both scary people.
* The Prosperous Few & the Restless Many  page 78

113
 The Hebrew 'Creation out of nothing'  (yesh m'ain) one could say is the direct cause of the Christian Via Negativa. Seeking a deeper vision Via Negativa, opening up to the divine depths, allowing pain to be pain, sorrow to be sorrow letting silence be silence, letting nothingness be nothingness.(1)Yet according to Matthew Fox(2) quoting Jung's comparison of Loyola to Eckhart, the church has been without a Via Negativa for three hundred years, (the modern period). No wonder their in so much trouble, that was the most beautiful, most engaging occult part of Christianity, diving into nothingness! (fruitful for Art and Mysticism yet  fruitless for absolute solutions). As Fox notes when the Via Negativa is ignored, the prophetic mystic voice is invariably silenced.  We don't have to go into what the church may have  substituted for it, but merely present this equation, this dialectical,  bringing Fox's wording into a question: How can a depth of nothingness be directly related to the experience of everythingness? How is our joy and ecstasy related to somethingness and our pain and sorrow related to nothingness? Fox's 'cataphatic God' of something and 'apophatic God' of nothing "are, after all, the same God"! This would seem to be the number one candidate for our biun-paradox, but we can't inter it into the category of duality  because it doesn't make any coherent sense, its not only a confused concept, its misknowledge, there can be no tension between nothing and something, something can not go in or come out of nothing. Scurrying around world religions and creation myths to find a more  acceptable cause of pain and sorrow and running into the same confused concept, I finally was shown the Wheel of Dharma which none of the so called World-Creator Gods could turn, in fact the four-faced Brahma and thousand-eyed Indra praised Buddha for finally coming up with something they could understand, Buddha became the teacher of the Gods. I don't think hvhy was around at the time. Luria probably pushed (H)im so far into a contraction mode (primordial exile), (H)e may not be able to hear the Dharma for a few more Aeons! This of course is wrong, Luria pushed his own samadhi into contraction, but as far as this self-banishment concerns creating something, it still is within cyclic existence, therefore ultimately temporary.
(1) Some say the via-negativa derives from Asiatic nihilism. I can't give examples of this. Jerome Edou in his book Machig Labdron page-26 writes "The reasoning by negation in the Heart Sutra is said to present features analogous to the scholastic tradition of negative theology of Eastern Christianity."  For Dionysius the Areopagite divine darkness is unknowable, dark to mans intellect. There is a long tradition for this use of a negative to express a supposedly supreme positive. References to darkness are therefore cryptic references to light. "Divine gloom" spoken of by Dionysius as "sublime ignorance penetrates to sovereign knowledge" Mystic Theology. Someone said that Kakfa was unable to distinguish betweeen the deus absconditus and the devil. If taken literally, one wonders how else he could have written "The sweetest voices are those that come from hell." Also see Scotus Erigena, Areopagites disciple, the great theologian of the 9th century where God is the being without attributes, nullity. But it was the Kabbalists who sharpened this down to a fine contemplation, especially in the thirteenth century where we find works describing Primal Darkness and something called Darkening Darkness. See The Books of Contemplation Medieval Jewish Mystical Sources  Mark Verman, Suny 1992.
(2) Original Blessing  Matthew Fox, Bear & Co. 1983 p-123.

                                                       ADDENDUM
Concerning the incommensurable and unnegotiable gap posed by the absence of an immanent God. The gap between the Buddhist two truths (conventional & absolute) or between clear light mind free from the contaminated aggregates or the 'discordant appearance-making mind' of conceptuality; these are not unnegotiable. Nor are they incommensurable the way the dilemma of the absence of an immanent god is to monotheism. Buddhists do not need to refigure failure as a measure of success in the way religious poets have done in the west.

114
 Pseudo-Dionysius, the "Pseudo" derives from the fact that his life was shrouded in obscurity, but it could as well mean how any stated knowledge of God will be accepted. For Dionysius only total negation, the complete emptying-out of language can express the characteristics of God. Joel Kovel in his History and Spirit  Beacon Press 1991, says that such negation spurred the philosophy of Martin Heidegger but goes on to say that Heidegger somehow didn't attend enough to its strictures, a lingering positive ground  inflated to the level of an ultimate was just enough to fall in rapport with German Nationalism.

115
Something can't be born or produced out of nothing. The latent mind continuums of karmic propensities, no mater how complicated or condensed into what one might falsely project as "beginnings" are very precise in their having previous causes, from previous universes, previous big bangs etc. Nothing can be spontaneously born without causes. It  sounds too grandiose, possible only in science fiction.(1) Who imagines a great slight of hand magic, producing something out of thin air is not a clever trick? The deep sounding latin term "create ex nihilo' serves as a mystifying prologue to manifest life, an impossible deed by Western religions vital first principle. "Samsara is proven to be beginningless because it is not reasonable that sentient beings are newly born without previous lives. The mental as consequence can not result from the non-mental, there must be previous mental cause at conception namely a mind-moment associated with a previous life."(2) At a Deer Park teaching Summer 1986 Lati Rinbochay said: "Somebody in the past was responsible for all my traits, so somebody will inherit my mental continuum in the future". One of the examples used in Buddhist texts concerning inferential cognition (cognizers) is: 'A new-born baby's mind must have arisen from its previous continuum of awareness because it is a mind.'(3)The elementary insight one should get from this is the inexorability of causal connection and the infinite continuity of life specifically shaped by positive and negative experiences.
(1) And I might add with respect, in the minds of Jungians.
(2) This point made in Is Enlightenment Possible by  Roger Jackson, Snow Lion Publications Ithaca, New York 1993.
(3)  Understanding The Mind  Geshe Kelsang Gyatso  Tharpa Publications London 1997 page 54

What other causes for Athena's birth from the top of Zeus's head could there be; other than the obvious mystical allegories we already have? Perhaps the etymological  derivation of her name in Aramaic gives us a clue ynal yna "I came from myself." That is, from her previous mind, in Zeus's head! That's not unusual, what's unusual is a birth from "forethought". Then, without changing a letter we turn the self into its unfindable true nature yna= ]ya and have the mind taking voidness as its object; selflessness.

116
Naturally  Luria would use the creature/creator language of the rabbinical element to express his  zero-experience samadhi. He was fixed in this ideological network which carried strong cultural ties to Judaic tradition. His contraction meditation validated the theology which he identified with, but his zero-experience as real mind absorption weakened step by step as he subordinated it to the articles of Jewish faith and its peripheral  kabbalistic trappings. The sheer autonomy of the tzim-tzum absorption is value free, it shows the mind itself as the real source of revelation, in this case camouflaged in God-talk.

How did Luria do it, where are the tech-words without all the worship? One will look in vain for objectless concentration but get clues from the formulas: Eser s'firot blee-mah, the primordial O-tee'ot  pointillist irredescences and the Olam-Nekudot(1) . He left no traces like these because his modus operandi was to wrap in mystery the primordial subject-object emergence, to save God the embarrassment of a botched creation. For a more western 'wrapping'  see Aleister Crowley's "Wrong of the Beginning" Liber LVX Ch IV v-56 also see Sothis Vol.1 No.V. Of course the grandest 'wrappings' are from the early centuries of our era even though seen in radically different systems; Valentinian & Basilides they uniformly invision the "return of all things to what they were before the flaw in the spheres of the AEons". If  their "things what they were" was absolute, uncreated, unrelated, undestroyed it could not possibly be in any kind of contact with relative things like the Aeons and retain its absoluteness let alone generate a 'flaw' if ever so remotely or even by proxy. Having the feminine Sophia act as the flawed one (taking the wrap) is the ugliest feature of historical Gnosticism suggesting perhaps that these 'men' weren't interiorizing  their dramatic visions fully.  On the other hand if liberation is possible with the interiorized treatment of these 'energies' whose origins are really inside individuals, where is the need for the insoluble fixed absolute & creation cosmology with flaw?(2) Gnosticism teeters this way between Monism and a more Buddhist understanding of suffering in the world. Actually one has to push it hard in the direction of the latter. I understand that if one keeps pushing, the myth (cosmology) will be destroyed.
(1) These are phonetic spellings for "Ten numbers (countings) without-what" (not from nothing), "letters", and "the world of points".
(2) Were the Gnostics exegesis a kind of substitute yoga methodolgy to overcome negative instincts? Do we have any record of how well this worked?

117
Overheard outside a Synagogue Safad, Israel 1973: "I was born into the Temple of Original Commencement  followed  immediately by an Original Concealment".

118
Then there's the one John Cage liked to tell. "When asked why, God being good, there was evil in the world, Sri Ramakrishna said: To thicken the plot." One wonders by this remark if Ramakrishna didn't have Jewish blood in him.

119
 Ive never found  a coherent explanation of "non-being" or "nothingness" in philosophical or occult literature. When I am told that the conception of "I am not" must of necessity follow the conception of "I am" as surely as night follows day, I think Im now hearing it from a deconstructionist/scientist and not a Neoplatonist. First of all lets excuse the scientist who posits non-being as being dead, occultists know there are no dead people. Nobody is ever dead and therefore are never in a state of non-being.When Buddhists say "non-self" they don't mean non-being, selflessness is not nothing, nirvana is not nothingness.* If nothingness were the goal then it would have nothing to do with morality, in fact 'nothingness' would be hindered by good and bad deeds. Something like this surfaced in Tibet during the 8th century. A Chinese monk, a follower of the 'sudden school' of Ch'an (precursor of Zen) spoke of liberation as the product of one who does not think anything, no thought, no mind, nothing. He was debated by Kamalasila who replied that such a 'no mind' would lack wisdom (prajna) which is gained through conceptual activity.  Renouncing wrong views and gaining insight into right views involves incontrovertible knowledge, conclusive reasoning and inescapable logic. Apparently the Tibetan King shared this incisive (cutting to) understanding and expelled the Chinese monk.
* The mistake repeated  in the Kabbalah is to confuse the two, as in  J.F.C. Fuller's book The Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah where he says on page 126: "No-Thingness as the ultimate object of the Messianic Act is to re-establish this Nirvana". This book was written several decades ago. More recently popular Kabbalists are proposing "the final goal is to attain the consciousness of Nothing." The Chicken Qabalah Lon Milo Duquette  Weiser Books 2001. Meditators or 'ritualists' following these non-Buddhist traditions attain all states of the realm of desire, form and formlessness and mistakenly take them to be the ultimate.The culprit 'nothingness' crops up also in a leading Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion published by Shambhala Boston 1994  saying the "naked deep blue body of Samantabhadra symbolizes nothingness".
 

120
[ We need to critique nothingness just as we need to delineate the noumenon ]

a.) Parmenides 500BC in the attempt to prove that change was unreal said "Nothing can come into being in addition to what is. There is no empty space in which something other than what is could arise. We already have started with everything that is." This seems right for theology but hairbrained for reason.The monistic view of the universe affirms reality as a whole cannot change. God cannot be concieved as changing, such change on his part would argue an imperfection in God as he now is.
b.) If 2=0 then renounce the 2. If 0=2 then also renounce the 0.
c.) "Nothing from nothing comes".
d.) "At the end of time we'll all wind our clocks" (for everybody their plenty wound except Buddha superiors) Why would we want to wind them if they are wound down? Thats like the question asked of Zurvan* "Why did you go out when you were already in?" Ray, a street person just came in as I was typeing this. I asked him "Why did you go out when you were all ready in"? He said, " I just got here!" Come to think of it thats a far more rational answer than the one most Kabbalists give for God (One) becomming (Two): "I was alone and bored." Or (with respect) worse : "I desired". Or perhaps more silly (with respect) Meher Baba's "Original Whim".
* A good example of the paradox in beliving there was nothing before something. If Zurvan existed before there was anything else who or what did he offer sacrifice so that he might have a son? (note) To see Zurvan swallow the black serpent of time (existence) for me is close to seeing him already Buddha-ized.
e.) "Creation out of nothing is imaginary though unimaginable, that is to say, our imagination both creates and annihilates it at the same moment." Joseph le Boucher.
f.) Then there's C.E.M. Joad, head of the Department of Philosophy University of London circa 1940s . On Leibnitz a priori & contingent things: "There must, he says in effect, be a first cause to originate the series of contingent things. But this cause would either be inside the series or outside it. If inside, it must be itself contingent and therefore have a cause; if outside, it cannot be related to the series in the way in which its postulated causation of the series implies. In Fact, it cannot cause the series at all." Guide to Philosophy 1946
g.) "But nothing can be got out of a thing which is not in it."  Basil Valentinus. circa 120-40 AD
h.) "From the beginning, there has never been a thing"  Hui Neng
i.)  "No one was Enlightened from the beginning."  Geshey Ngawang Dhargyey
j.) Obscurum per obscurius "explaining the obscure by the more obscure".  "beginingless beginning", "rootless root" etc... The Hermetic Traditions or H.P.B.s "Sourceless Source".
k.) Nihil est quod perstet in orbe -"There is nothing in the world that does not change". Ovid's Metamorphoses
l.) "The atom is a bottomless pit"  Jacob Bronowski
m.) Here's a good one: The reason action painter Jackson Pollock drove fast on narrow crooked roads asking for death, and the reason Gorky, Rothko and other abstract painters commited suicide, the latter opening his veins into the kitchen sink, was because abstract painting creates from nothing, and that activity is reserved only for God. (from a book called Theology and Painting page 104)
n.)  Talked to two people today who showed signs  of nihilophobia (fear of nothingness).
o.) "In the depths of his nothingness" ]yah yqmi a favorite expression of 13th century Kabbalists. Without taking anything away from this profound description (omkay h-ain) I believe it is an attribute of mystic rapture. Realizing that the Dharma is a technical subject because it deals with mind states which requires an exact & technical approach, 'nothingness' is an achievable mental state within the Formless Realm. It is causal in the sense that if cultivated during a lifetime a practitioner would be born in the next lifetime in the 'lands' of the Formless Realm.* The Hasidic bittula ha-yesh "the annihilation of somethingness' would fit into this category. Their prayer far from merely 'influencing the upper worlds', creates them.
 *See  Meditation On Emptiness Jeffrey Hopkins Wisdom Publications. Boston page 277."an action of meditative stabilization projects, or provides the power for, a happy migration in a Form or Formless Realm",  also Meditative States  Lati Rinbochay, Wisdom Advanced Book Blue Series.
p.) "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing" Proverbs xxv.2   Even the religious person with faith would have to wonder: Why would it be?
q.) “The true essence of things is a profound illusion."  F.W. Nietzsche …. (He should have said the apparent true essence of things is a profound illusion, for the true essence of things is reality, i.e. their emptiness of intrinsic existence).
r.) From the New Jewish Version faithfull to the traditional (masoretic) text it reads: "When God began to create", as apposed to "In the beginning God created" which the standard and Catholic versions reads."The Hebrew text tells us nothing about "creation out of nothing" (creatio ex nihilo) or about the beginning of time." The Jewish Publication Society of America 1962 edition. pp xv.
s.) "And this reminds us of the Tao Te Ching, that after the original goodness was lost the word "goodness" was invented."  Richard Collet
t.) "In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes."   Milarepa
u.) "Su duo dicunt idem, non est item" [if two people say the same thing, it is not the same thing].
v.) "I thought: 'It isn't through mere conviction alone that Alara Kalama declares, "I have entered & dwell in this Dhamma, having realized it for myself through direct knowledge." Certainly he dwells knowing & seeing this Dhamma.' So I went to him and said, 'To what extent do you declare that you have entered & dwell in this Dhamma?' When this was said, he declared the dimension of nothingness. "In this way did Alara Kalama, my teacher, place me, his pupil, on the same level with himself and pay me great honor. But the thought occurred to me, 'This Dhamma leads not to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to stilling, to direct knowledge, to Awakening, nor to Unbinding, but only to reappearance in the dimension of nothingness.' So, dissatisfied with that Dhamma, I left."Maha-Saccaka Sutta Translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkh
w.) You can produce a temporary nothing (not) ]ya but a nothing cannot produce a mind - or anything else.We can see that such a concept was built up by Kabbalistic meditators and tacked on as Deity attributions, but its a yogic accomplishment. Can one imagine perhaps such meditators sitting out millenniums of earth civilizations, coming back as a pussy cat lounging on a silk pillow before a warm fire in the plush of a 50th century? As a revision-commentary we agree with  Frater Perdurabo (Aleister Crowley) ]ya is The Fool's Knot "Is a kind of knot which, although it has the appearance of a knot, is not really a knot, but pulls out immediately." * But as mentioned above its a place to get stuck in for aeons..all you have to do is pull it out and it will come undone. That's what nothing (not) is. I heard that there is a time when Bodhisattva's have to tap on the shoulders of those Arhats that are complacent to pull it out.
*Book of Lies  The Haydn Press Devon 1962 page 132.

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In "How The True World Finally Became A Fable"(1) Nietzsche wrote: "The 'true world'- an idea neither good for anything, nor even obligatory any longer, -an idea become useless and superfluous; consequently a refuted idea: let us do away with it." Then he asks: "What world is left? Perhaps the seeming? But no! in doing away with the true we have also done away with the seeming world!" This is where Nietzsche makes a mistake and falls into nihilism. A world that is 'seeming' still has functioning things where consequences result from actions. "Through refuting only inherent existence [Nietzsche's "true world"] and not mere existence the Prasangikas avoid the extreme of annihilation....and "Affirming only nominal existence [Nietzsche's 'seeming world'] and not affirming inherent existence they avoid the extreme of eternalism."(2) Now we can read the next passage from Nietzsche: "Noon; the moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; climax of mankind; [emptiness is a phenomenon that can be know by humans (mankind), not mere verbal descriptions but realized directly] "Zarathustra" is not "incipid" but triumphant.
(1) From  Twilight of the Gods
(2) The topic of the two truths by Gelukba writers is taken up in several books published by Snow Lion..

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In an article My Mother: Madame Helene de Hahn,(1) Blavatsky is quoted as saying that to meditate is to create, and to contemplate is to gather certain mind material with which you can create with. Then blessing this collection she says, is doing meditation. Also what she called The Hidden Gnosis involves Satan appearing in the guise of Tempter that leads Sophia into the insight that it is better to "fall" into human mind in order to become higher than god, than to stay with god and finally fall into lower births with no knowledge.
I suspect this is why certain Kabbalistic magicians who study the allegory concerning  Rabbi Akiva and the three companions who entered paradise and faced spiritual truths and esoteric knowledge unattainable by ordinary consciousness, ended up becoming adepts of Elisha Ahir, the third companion who "cut down the saplings, pulled up the roots" (of his religious tradition) and became a heretic, ]ym=min. It would be hard for a Jewish religious scholar, in this case G. Scholem(2) to even imagine a reaction such as this, but he goes on to say that the "rejected mystic is descended from the worshippers of the Golden Calf"!  I was never an official member of the Golden Dawn but if the opportunity came  to join the Order of the Golden Calf,  I would, as R. A. Wilson has it, "the adoration of the gold statue of a calf is described as "the first victim of monotheistic bigotry".
(1) Im sorry but the Theosophical periodical which was the source of this article is lost. There is another quote from the Collected Works Theosophist Nov 1887, Tetragrammaton. "However there are angles who aspire to incarnate as men in order to become higher than the gods". Even Eliphas Levi said "The angles aspire to become men; for the perfect man, the man-God is above even Angels". But Levi's "man-God" thing is more romantic-french soul talk than truth, why would man want to become a god when he can become awake?
(2) This is related in Scholem's Jewish Gnosticism p15, also in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism p52

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One can find the sonic symbol for the Kabbalistic Kav b'Emsa (middle line) by listening to the simultaneous production (equal volume) of two full music sources.*  Standing in the middle so to speak, first notice the 'highs' of the melody of each source, its most perceptible coloration, speed and so on. Next notice the middle voices (range) that becomes indistinguishable from the two peaks of melodic force. Every recognizable direction of each separate part now dissolves. This indistinguishable void of harmonic blur is the 'inbetweeness' one can grasp on to. Its this blur that sets our course. The mere realization of the blur of life situations is first finding the chaotic element in phenomena then fabricating it as voidness, being careful not to fall into the extreme of leaning to either side of the melodic direction but staying within the in-between experience and becoming aware of the utter uncreated nature of it, (all things). This realization is paradoxically analyzable because the force of momentariness in all its simultaneous splendor is not undetermined but very dependent in a much speeded up mixture, therefore an aural non-inherent existing experience. Its the Elongation of Burst, a climax mode, the 'ficta loca' enabling the analyzer to see everything turned off at the moment it turns on.
* I actually got this idea from John Cage who first suggested it concerning how he would like to experience  a rock and roll  concert. As he explains it, by blurring the beat and creating the irrelevance you increase the rhythmic interest and notice the fact of time .

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"When will you regain your liberty?"  "Tomarrow," replied Apollonius (in chains), "but this instant if I choose."

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Once I was reading out loud a passage from H.P.B's works concerning the Holy Gospels: "Oh the energy wasted on this book which now we can prove was a forgery". Hayya interrupted me and said "Oh come on! - its not only that - look at all the trouble it caused."

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"A successful magician cannot afford to be successful in the real world. He had been greedy; he loved both realms too much."    Vernor Vinge True Names

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The universe is a stream of perpetual change according to Bergson.(1) If time attaches only to our conscious states, each one of us will live in his own time, and there will be no unique sense in which two events can be simultaneous.  Bergson’s theory of time states that the mind projects psychological time onto space thus making it appear to be a successive and continuous reality.  In fact, it is nothing but an illusion for there is no true succession in things since one state has entirely disappeared when another appears (something like sneezing, a between- moment making enlightenment  possible!). So he writes: “Doubtless exterior things change, but their moments only succeed one another with respect to a consciousness which remembers them”. "A consciousness which could experience two identical moments would be a consciousness without memory." One of the most ingenious of Bergson’s similes is his comparison of the intellect to the cinematograph which takes snapshot views of objects later presented to us by the intellect as a ceaseless flow and therefore false view of reality. Edward Conze believes Bergson was influenced by the Buddhist system of thought reproduced by Arthur Schopenhauer who had in the early 19th century a few original documents.(2) Thinking along these lines one may begin to view Jung's “acausal principle” in a more critical light. When you assert that something exists inherently and autonomously you are asserting that they do not originate in dependence on causes and conditions. One would have to contend that the causes themselves are abstracted from what they cause. Even neo-Jungians will admit that there are an infinite number of archetypes. If they were autonomous, fixed and permanent how could they appear? Buddha's are omniscient, it is said they can tell the minute causes even in the separate strands of a peacocks feather. According to Zong Rinpoche(3) they know the number of atoms in the universe. Such a mind would easily discover the causes of Jung's beetle appearing on the window sill,(4) or the causes of all the so-called 'syncronistic’ examples given by R.A. Wilson(5) without jumping to the conclusion of an ‘acausal connecting principle’. By the way, isn't that a contradiction in terms - how can anything that hasn't been caused and therefore will not cause anything connect something? Nothing has causal power in isolation. A more strict Buddhist reasoning says that if there was acausality, anything could cause or rise from anything, since what is acausal depends on nothing, an example might be corn growing from rose bulbs.(6)  I do believe in causally composed entities with profound ‘meaning-bearing’ qualities. These are circumstances that makes a situation portentous. An archetype discovered in which significance and appearance would coincide. Knowledge-synchronicity, wisdom-synchronicity, if they were acausal there would be no way to repeat them. If synchronicities are virtuous and can produce wholesome, insightful understanding and behavior we should be able to cultivate them, not just shake our heads and say “they cannot be conceived under the category of cause and effect”.  This may be O.K. for Taoists but not Buddhists.  It is possible in deep meditation practice to produce evolutionary experience that seems timeless. Nothing comes to me either in the shape of a gross body or a mysterious occult phenomenon without it having been effected by causes and conditions, there are no loopholes. Therefore using this reasoning I can produce the result of increasing or removing phenomenon and gross bodies, ultimately arriving at the clear light nature of my mind which is a positive phenomenon. The emptiness of inherent existence of my mind is a negative phenomenon, and thats good because there won't be any acausal synchronicities left flying around anywhere. The Buddha's Lion Roar (dependent origination) calls for a difference in things momentarily. “What we experience as sense perception is a continuum of moments of consciousness apprehending a continuum of moments of an object which is also disintegrating moment by moment”.(7) Even before Bergson this intuition cropped up in the West, peaking through the heavy over brush of theological discourse. An example is a principle of Duns Scotus that  says we must coordinate the different acts of our comprehension with the different moments in things, a thesis that is said to be traced back to Avicenna, who according to H.P.B. will disclose himself to the profane at the end of a certain cycle!(8) It is clear from this theory that all our psychic acts are unextended. One could say ‘it is impossible to have a yard of thought’.(9) This dosn't refer to memory where yards of thought can be retrieved, only to inherently established thought in and of itself. Such thought would never relinquish their own characteristics, arisal and cessation would become impossible, Jungians like to call this noumenon,(10) thinking its some kind of permanent entity. Noumenon/phenomena (spirit/matter)are separated in the west, in Buddhism they exist together on the side of conventional (concealer) truths, neither have autonomy or self-nature ( but having interdependent origination) therefore compatible with emptiness, absolute truth.
(1) There has been a long way to this essay, most amazingly through Zurvanism with its "Hyparchic Future" and the incredible Fravarti (the "angels that go ahead"). Multiplying beyond themselves always sending out another angel ahead infinitely. This was the way the Zoroastrian revisionists saw moment to moment existence.
(2) A Short History of Buddhism Edward Conze, Oxford 1980  page 144. For example Schopenhauer said "we have willed this life before we were ever conceived."
(3) Mandala Sept-Oct 00 p63. There are three general levels of understanding the law of cause and effect. The first is obvious to the senses, the second relies on reasoning, the third category involves impermanence, sunyata and the twelve links of interdependent origination. With a Buddhas full understanding "one is able to determine the causes of any condition, no matter how many aeons ago they were produced." Tibetan Tradition of Mental Development  Geshey Ngawang Dhargyey,  Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, Dharamsala
(4) Actually there were two parts to the Jung incident which seemed to be the main catalyst for his theory: The dream of a golden scarab and later a beetle “scarab” flying in through the window. Synchronicity  p21.  Buddhists say that to apprehend empirical phenomena as existing apart from conditioning factors is to assume they inherently exist and is an extreme of eternalism. See Two Truths Guy Newland
(5) Coincidence  New Falcon Pub. 1996 pp149.  H.H.Dalai Lama says in Gentle Bridges Shambhala Boston 1992 "Its very important to recognize that the Buddhist usage of the term phenomenon includes everything that exists." For a discussion of the Three divisions of phenomenon: 1 obvious, 2 hidden, and 3 extremely hidden see pages 33, 48-49 and 243.
(6) Or 'babies from barren women'. The one I like best is "chocolate from pea pods".  Physicist Richard Feynman writes "When Charles Darwin returned to England after his famous trip to the Galapagos Islands, he showed the finch specimens he found there to distinguished zoologist John Gould. But Gould didn't know how to interpret them. Thinking the way he had been conditioned to think, he assumed that, since God made one set of birds when he created the world, the specimens from different locations would be identical." In other words Gods one time creation makes no provision for variation. Similar errors in good sense result from occultists harboring acausal synchronicity principles.
(7) Debate in Tibetan Buddhism Snow Lion 1992  Daniel E. Perdue p292
(8) Theosophical Glossary page 45
(9) John Duns Scotus  The Catholic University of America Press  Washington, D.C.  1965
(10)  Edward F. Edinger uses numinosum in his Goethe's Faust.  The Platonic "world of old"  or "things that are" defined so as to be incapable of proof or disproof describes classical Gnosticism/Neoplonticism: The "knowledge of  things that are" means things which are uncaused.This translated into Gnostic Revisionism would be, using the phrase of Alexander Berzin: "things which exist in impossible ways". Stephen Hoeller seems to think that the "cold hard" facts of causality will take the mystical religiosity out of the noumenon and open the matter of "the divine unknown" to debate, (his taped Lecture on Theurgy). Such debate is long overdue, but instead of losing mystical religiosity it will bring us closer -right up close to the divine and the unknown.

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The  presentation of the Book of Revelation by one of Blavatsky personal secretaries, James M. Pryse concerning its symbolism of channels and wheels first penned in 1910 remains an interesting esoteric discourse. At that time no clue could be given to its practical application, but the theosophical mode of interpreting phenomena in Western scriptures as narratives of yogic accomplishment was Blavatskys spearhead achievement and one reason why she still should be read and studied. Some of us ceremonial magicians who think along the lines of Dion Fortune that Hindu-Buddhist yoga is not suited to our "hermetic" practice are mistaken and backing away from the one avant guard movement of occultism which honored a yoga that focused on the actual target of exegetical analysis.

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 "Not recklessly do they praise a God of senseless (vanished) earth" The Sibylline Books. Bk.V.
afouoj  ="Vanished"

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Chuang Tzu (a favorite of John Cage), after being noticed strangely dazed and inert replied to a students questioning "When you saw me just now my 'I' had lost it's 'me'."

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A man attracted to Buddhism had this dream: "Dreamed last night of a battle, a phalanx of Oriental persons was in the center protected by a shield covering. In the end, when the shields were dropped, no one was there." He was able to interpret this for himself as: "Buddhism holds nothing for me, it is as an empty shell."      Quoted from Sleep On It  1979, by Janice Baylis.

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One wonders,  Timothy Leary, Ph.D. talking about the limited ambitions of so many, us hive members, as he moves toward the Violet Whole at Galaxy Center, could not or would not read from the Tibetan Book of The Dead as requested by the dying Aldous Huxley. Why, was it because he didn’t believe its literal message?(1)  They were going to freeze his  brain (Learys not Huxleys) hoping  for future transplant into a more political correct black woman's body, but he did leave us his ‘facsimile substitute  yoga’ (his take on traditional yoga was “monotony and isolation from hive pressure”) in all those slick phrases: Reality-tunnel, Gaia-Egg wisdom, Wo-Man circuits, Post-terrestrial neurological reality, High Orbital colonies, Futant Freaks..etc,(2)but after the thrall of this hip neuro-technology there  is something spurious, irresponsible and frivolous existing within these effusions; this isn’t technology at all, there’s an element of deepest irony here which thwarts the understanding of even the hipest reader. Without a tradition of yoga, without the monotony and isolation, not from 'hive pressure' but from conceptualization and fabricated images, one will not achieve the mind states Leary seems to be referring to, or perhaps there not mind states at all, just nuts and bolts, frozen neurons. When a fellow scientist asked him if he didn’t agree that meditation could similarly affect biochemical transformations, he responded, “Well, meditation can certainly slow your heart rate, but that’s the body, Im talking about the brain."(3)The brain transformations of the “scientific optimist” means extending life, war against aging, eliminating death, eliminating genetically carried diseases, sexual liberation, a leisure society, precisely the  ideas in Huxley’s Brave New World, far from being a totalitarian nightmare as Michel Houellebecq writes,(4) “is precisely the world we have tried – and so far failed to create.” Why?  Maybe its the question still asked by scientists: “What is the relation between brain and mind? Its still a wide open question. We scientists believe that the mind is an emergent property of the brain. Without the brain there is no mind. Beyond that – what that means – we don’t know.”(5)Buddhists say the mind exists without the brain, in fact the pure, primordial empty nature of the mind, the ‘indestructible drop’ is found in the heart and not the brain!(6) Therefore the mind allows anything to arise in it because it is devoid of existing in all those impossible ways optimist scientists, (or pessimist scientists) think. Buddhist meditation is the effort to transform the process of consciousness, not its content, as Daniel Goleman says, this is where East and West start to diverge.
(1) Leary offered his own version of the  Tibetan Book of the Dead as The Psychedelic Experience 1964  (an esoteric guide to the use of drugs). Ironically dedicated to Aldous Huxley, when it came time Huxley really needed help with his postmortem continuity Leary balked. See Prisoners of Shangri-La Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Chicago University Press 1998, chapter two.
(2) The Game of Life  Timothy Leary, Ph.D New Falcon Publications 1993
(3) Quoted by Lin LaBarba Harris in her review of The Great Leary-Liddy Debate, Nice Scary Guy vs. Scary Nice Guy. Village Voice May 1982.
(4) The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq  Knopf
(5) Extropy #16 1st Qu. 1996  Neuroscience pioneers p28  Extropy Institute Marina Del Rey, CA.
(6) "You need an illuminating element. The material of the brain, the meat of the brain as you might say is not an illuminating element."  Two Views of Mind  Christopher deCharms, Snow Lion 1998 Page 105

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This discussion brings up important questions which were addressed to the Symbolist poets circa 1850(1) and to my mind makes relevant again the cry: "Against Nature" in the words of Baudelaire: "The first business of an artist is to substitute man for nature and to make a protest against it.”(2)
Putting this in Buddhist context we know now what 'nature' their talking about (or should have been talking about) and can link hands to those yogi's without yoga, spell-casters without grimoires, rosicrucians without christ, and invoke through the lens of gnostic revision the 'satanic type romanticism' anew.
(1)  This was an aesthetic reaction to science and naturalists' mechanistic physiology, neuroscience pioneers of their day.
(2)  Baudelaire and Nature  F.W. Leakey  Manchester 1969. Instead of the harshness 'against nature' it should be understood in alchemical terms "Opus Contra Naturam"  as "nature can overcome nature" or "nature unaided fails".
 

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Long before Learys slight on yoga there was Dion Fortune who probably more than anyone influenced Western occultists against yoga, recommending what I believe were poor substitutes. Flatly stating that "Yoga as taught in the East is impractical in the West; utterly unsuited to it and utterly unsympathetic", thinking that "to achieve the greater power of yoga one would sacrifice his mental balance."(1)  It should be noted however that Fortune does give helpful advice on a generic Western type of meditation, but fails to realize the benefits of mounting a formal practice based on ageless classical traditions. One would think her "unreserved dedication to unite the soul to the Godhead" might involve a mind which remains stable and single pointedly focused on the object. I know of only one method that can actually do that.  We will profit by learning about other cultures, but we profit most by learning  about ourselves from them.(2) There are intuitions that will arise in the West where the necessity for developing such a mind will naturally emerge. Look at the extraordinary description (and irony) of "Eastern" karma (dependent arising) by Dickens,(3) the man who said "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet". The Haunting of Ebenezer Scrooge was in fact the arising of a consciousness that discerned true origins of evil, that is, the causes of suffering. "You are fettered" said Scrooge, trembling, "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life" replied the ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard." And then at the conclusion of Marley's appearance when Scrooge is led to the window and looks out: "The air filled with phantoms wandering hither and thither in restless haste and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few were linked together; none were free." This is not fiction but refers to the contaminations of desire, hatred, and ignorance we 'forge in life', which 'fetter' us in future states of existence.  Im reminded of an incident up at Deer Park where a young person filled with new age idealism's of 'truth' eventually asked Elvin Jones, "Well then, tell me what you think is truth?" "If I were to tell you the truth" said Elvin, "you would run screaming out into the night."(4)
(1) These excerpts are from Applied Magic and Aspects of Occultism, Aquarian Press 1987. Lets not forget this gem by Crowley to Grant: "After all, if you went to a Guru in India your first seven years would be solely devoted to delousing the Holy Man from time to time."
(2) This cool insight must have come from someone other than me.
(3) Dickens was a reformist. In the face of the complex evils of the world, and apposed to orthodox religion, he was aware that a spiritual continuum had a pre-natal as well as a post-mortem existence. His novels for the most part are dark and morbid, presenting the truth of suffering in earthly life as "a vale of tears" or "a battlefield".  He founded a home for 'fallen women' calling it  Urania Cottage.
(4) This was told to me by Sanga member Gina Litherland. Ven. Elvin W. Jones, a great scholar of Western traditions as well as Buddhist, served as Geshe Sopa's personal secretary and was Deer Parks Associate Director.

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Western theologians who ever, from Nicholas de Cusa to Bruno all had theories of how contraries coincide in God. Lets say that Bruno revealed that the unity of opposites required no Prime-mover or external transcendent force, could I say then that Bruno's concept of mind had the same void nature as Tsong-kha-pa's? Or as Joseph Campbell suggested, because Nagarjuna lived in the same century (2nd) as the Gnostic Basilides the doctrine of emptiness was sort of “circling the globe” and  because the Gnostic propounded a ‘nothingness' type deity(1)  he just picked it up, as it was “in the air”? Certainly these would be considered naive pronouncements, not based on any kind of serious study.(2)This doesn't mean that scholarship and mysticism are incompatible; saying as Joseph Campbell does, that the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment was the same tree on which Christ was crucified leans a little toward the latter. Some time ago when I was living on and off  in Israel I was privileged to talk with Gershom Scholem, I naively asked him if Ain Soph meant the same as Nirvana. His answer politely kept to the fact that the Kabbalah was a unique Jewish phenomena.
 Just as gold seekers in the 15th century rummaged for old alchemical texts I can imagine that naive discovers of a Kalachakra completion sadhana in the 22nd century might build three transparent tubes filling them with 1800 mustered seeds stacking them up and 1800 down over a hot stove with the intention of actually making a diamond jewel the size of a human brain, which they could then use to buy a skyscraper or at least live in one.
(1) Ouk On Theos -'non-being God'
(2) Oh really! Does that mean I take my 'gnostic revision' only sort of seriously? Hippolytus describes the Perates: "There is nothing to say of any secondary creator (or primary one) their serpent continuously descends and ascends of itself - imprinting and releasing in a fluent round" (like Ouroborus). Perates, derived from the Greek _______"on the opposite side" could be equivalent to the sanskrit prajna paramita or "wisdom of the yonder shore". It is true, both were active exactly in the same period of world history, but as Stephen Batchelor writes in The Awakening Of The West  page 29: "If, either knowingly or unknowingly, he (Basilides) included Buddhist ideas, he did so as a committed Christian in search of a coherent philosophy of salvation".

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There could be a case made for Jung in his later years coming around to believe that the spirit hypothesis (hungry ghosts, disembodied spirits etc.) could better explain metapsychic phenomena than "in your head point of view"(collected unconscious) but of course the Buddhist confronts such phenomena as spirit hypothesis and as "in your head", but how it is in your head is crucial to understanding the difference. The question Im asking now is; where is Jung's subjective factor in Valentinus, in Basilides? These men were equally suspect of the objective factor and the subjective factor; they were seeking escape from 'being' itself.  It is not clear at all that the Gnostics, as Jung claims "were nothing other than psychologists".(1)This is all psychological hindsight from the perspective of 19th and 20th century ideology. I would rather heed Harold Blooms position that "no scholar ever will define precisely what gnosticism was or is; but its negations are palpable".(2)We will become blind to what the Gnostics are saying if we impose only the psychological interpretation. We will lose their edge - we will smother their nihilism and distort their anger and revolt. The radical Gnostics hated the creator god and all of creation, they despised the earth, the universe (a very "suspect splendor" as Jacques Lacarriere has it) and everything connected with it. Making them nice mystics seeking the wholeness of individuation is ludicrous and erases their most pertinent questions concerning anguish, terror, suffering and death. The fact that Jung's contemporary depth psychology was "strongly influenced by his explorations into gnostic literature"(3) had everything to do with theViennese milieu and his sick patients and little to do with the "men who know" of the 2nd century. Without the radical philosophical under pinnings of Gnosticism it merely limps into our world, a weak and castrated remnant, fueling the specter of the new age 'Gnostic Bishops' with their irrelevant variations of post-Platonic philosophy.
(1) Seeing Through the Visible World  June Singer p99
(2) Palpable indeed, Blooms significant insight shines over other scholars and gnostic 'adepts' who back away from this solipsistic doorway. Far from shutting ourselves up in a pessimistic world, we exult Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Alfred Kubin, Fernand Khnopff, Cioran, Beckett, Artaud, Brockman et al and all others who haven't caved (or didn't cave) into an optimism that passes for wisdom which drags along paradox and unknowns. Pessimism and humanism (compassion) do not exclude each other. "European nihilism", someone said "is not a bad thing but perhaps the one dark crack in Romanticism that bears watching."  When read with Buddhist inclinations, it is the Gnostic negations that are its supreme advantage, tearing at failed monism, defeating universalist designs and arriving at the Middle Way view of Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti. (At least this is where it led me)! This is not an anguished solipsism but a 'mind that walks on high' through stopping ordinary appearance making.
(3) Ibid (Singer)

In an article called Gnosis And Psychology Gilles Quispel recounts how enthuastic Wolfgang Pauli was in 1953 when the Jung Codex was made public. "This negative theology, that is what we need. As Schopenhauer said, he [god]cannot be personal, for then he could not bear the suffering of mankind. This is it, the Unknown God of Gnosis."

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Why shouldn't we assume there wern't Gnostic Saints whose piety made it possible to desert the limiting earth and attain spiritual flight on the wings of their pneumatic spark, an ineffable freedom? But why wouldn't any one of them return and explain to us that the ineffable reality isn't unknowable but knowable, a true Gnosticism? Then we would have our real knowledge and not a puzzling hidden alien god. Bloom asks why miracles and angels have ebbed away in human nature? Is time really the agent of that estrangement or is it neglect of mental development and investigation of the capacities of our mind?  I suspect it is the gnostic poets preference for universal (archetypal) revolutions in the future and the belief in them in the past that ebbs away miracles and angels in the present. Who can believe in them? - They were and are phony revolutions that never took place and never will take place outside imaginal  mind, esoteric societies dogmatizing them are not permitting the radical point of view. "What is best and oldest in you" as Bloom keeps on writing "is already open to us"(1) but he, as the Gnostic Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas never states how to achieve it. It is these tiresome implications, never summed up that become exasperating. So Jesus goes off alone with Thomas: "And he took him and withdrew and spoke three sayings to him". Thomas comes back and says if he ever spoke what Jesus said, he would be stoned as a blasphemer - not only that but "fire will come from the rocks and consume you". (Stoning is a Jewish punishment for blasphemy). Bloom states that these three solitary sayings are the "hidden heart" of the Gospel, why? Is it because we like the idea of a safe "hidden" with no obligations? What could he have spoken to be stoned to death? Considering the context of Biblical condemnation of idolatry or of making God in his own image I believe the Gnostic Jesus knew God was no creator at all and told it to Thomas, "the enlightened doubter". Doubt being the central key here, doubt in creationism altogether, doubt in divine cause. He pushed Thomas' understanding a bit deeper, destroying the iron laws of the past that have falsified the patterns of causality down the ages, he opened up philosophy's oldest and deepest questions, supplying radical answers.(2) Of course Thomas would have been stoned, what else could he have spoken not to be?  Blasphemy indeed!
(1) Omens of Millennium pp253.
(2) The third thing Gnostic Jesus probably told Thomas, which logically followed the first two, was that he also could become the 'anointed one'.

"You can fill your grave with resurrections" the spirit 'Death' tells Victor Hugo on Jersey Island 1854.

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Dream: I was led upstairs by Theosophical officials to the room where Madame Blavatsky was. Here I asked her permission to be exempt from going into the army. She was very accommodating and joyful and said: "Oh sure, of course, I will do this".  Her head was down - or was mine? for I don't remember looking into her face. After I awoke: This scene was a replay of my experience in Minnesota during the 50s when I was leaving the National Guard to go into teaching. I couldn't remember if this dream was last night or years ago and Im just remembering it now. Perhaps it was triggered by my Theosophical/Scriabin web surfing yesterday where I printed Blavatskys picture and excerpt: "Thou canst enter the path until you become the path" and  pasted it in the store window. It should be pasted inside my head. I tried to get back into the dream and get a glimpse of her eyes. I wanted to see her face to face and tell her I loved her, I wanted to prostrate in front of her, hands together and reaffirm my solemn vow. From lust springs grief. As I stand naked before the mirror say "now take off your skin" and imagine blood and pus flowing out in ugliness. The emotions of shame and remorse are superior to lust, maybe so but unless one can skillfully realize emptiness they could still help construct a soul that doesn't inherently exist.
 

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When desire is present it narrows the minds capacity and causes it to contract in expectation of a single goal. The basis of curbing is wisdom. While I have the impulse of curbing desire, its back-up is the wisdom of impermanence. Wisdom, which is stronger will cut the continuum of desire which is weaker. The non-abiding together of two consciousnesses means the non associated compositional factors* like Crow and owl, they cannot abide on one basis without harming one another- they contradict one another.
Like hot and cold, light and darkness, they cannot abide together without harming the others continuum. Self grasping and the wisdom which realizes selflessness cannot abide together without harming the others continuum. The one which is stronger will cut the continuum of the weaker.
 * This teaching, here roughly paraphrased from Ven. George Churinoff Du-ra lectures on tape offered by Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa Italy, Wisdom Tapes 1983.

                                                 "The more flesh the more worms"
                                                                                                            Rabbi Hillel  Pirke Abot
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As far as desire is concerned my envelopment determines the limits within which real modifications of interest are possible. This implies that a chipping away the foundation of craving is a proper way to start. Set up my neurotic need for affection as one of the "Great of the Great" afflictions which begin the entry into the First Dhyana concentration. Those bitterly needed sexual contacts and relations with others. Applying Shantidiva's technique of pealing back the smooth skin of my glamorous object of affection to reveal the repulsive reality is an excellent visualization which unfailingly shows the shallow state of my allure.* Remembering the great (torrid) affair between Clark Gable, then in middle age, and the young Grace Kelly, who desperately wanted to marry him. He merely had to take out his false teeth and giggle them in his whisky glass for the affair to completely shut down.
* Bodhisattvacharyavatara (A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life) chapter eight, page 216 in Meaningful to Behold  Geshe Kelsang Gyatso  Wisdom Publications 1980

        Sutra:"get rid of"
      Tantra:"get on rid of"
 Dzogchen:"get rid of rid of"

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Locvs Soune Spiritus: We know what simultaneity is. Reading books by John  Cage taught me to listen for them; their suddenness sometimes puts me into another mode of thinking. Hearing them as seeming autonomous events serves as a corridor to altered consciousness(1). I try to observe them whenever I can, but have learned that I set myself up already in that mode by preparing for one because it brings a sense of anonymity & simplicity. Its like they say about ceremonial magic; the preparation for a ritual is the ritual. Momentariness comes closer to my ears and when it becomes an objective encounter, say for example out on the street, the ‘multiplicity of the near’ turns talismantic.(2) Because of the non sequential nature of this phenomenological reflection our minds easily inter into an astral counterpart which fuels the making of telisma or some other mystic devices. If it is possible to demonstrate this in isolation (without outer simultaneity) it seems to me we could call it ‘the night of simultaneity’. Primitive myths all date from the darkness.(3)The starting point is on the night side of phenomena, hence the earliest reckoning of time was by nights; so many darks were counted rather than so many dawns. The coming of darkness is felt by certain mystics as the nearing of spiritual trance states, which shows the instinct they have for taking to the higher grounds of mind after sunset, as if conscious that a deluge is rising round them.
(1)  "But Cage used to talk about a lot of things going on at once and having nothing to do with each other. He called it the autonomous behavior of simultaneous events." Postface, Dick Higgins, Something Else Press New York 1964 page 51.
(2) Try not to be crossing streets when this happens.
(3) King Solomon rhapsodized  this as: “Darkness is older than light” Wisdom of Solomon 7.29 Oxford Apocrypha

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"Artist you are Priest! Magician! King!”(1) If one were to try and figure out any of the esoteric practices of Sar Paladan, given all the occult rhetoric of the order “Catholic Rose+Croix” and the brilliant phase in art which he helped promote we might start with the androgynous model. Those Symbolists strove toward an ideal of mystic self-sufficiency which was symbolized as androgynous. But before we tear down the Byzantine design curtains and robe ourselves as bi-sexual Gymnosophists, lets get some historical perspective. We're not in the final decadent phase of a dying culture, we've passed on into the cold winter, ossified in dead forms. It’s the 21st century not the late 19th. A hundred or so years ago occurred what is known as “The Second Religiosity”. “Here, as if a brief period of warm Indian Summer has appeared in late Fall, the first Springtime archetypes of a culture appear once more to us.”(2)  It would be ridiculous to materially revive such a phase- an unconscious trend already has; it came with piercings and tattoos! No, we must do it mentally now; their symbolist paintings are landscapes for our pathway minds, their chthonic undertow our depth probe. We will put on all the masks of late Romanticism, but the one which travels most freely and is equipped to open every door to the demonic lair is the androgynous; not just a mask but the state of our minds.
(1)  "No more line, color and form, with only nuance and suggestion which alone can marry a dream to a dream." From a manifesto of the French Catholic magician Josephin Peladan. The Catholic Rose+Croix in Paris as well as the Theosophical cult "Sons of the Flames of Wisdom" in Brussels, where Alexander Scriabin, Jean Delville and others worshiped Prometheus/Lucifer, are two flash points around the turn of the century that needs investigation. Seemingly buried, I sometimes invoke Jean Cocteau's attitude: "Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them."
(2) Following  Richard Colletts reading of Spangler, private correspondence

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To chose one thing to quote in the books by H.H. the 14th Dali Lama would be impossible, but this passage stands out in my mind. "Cyclic existence is achieved through the power of actions, and actions are achieved through the power of afflictions. Since this is so. Ceasing actions meets back to ceasing afflictions. Ceasing afflictions meets back to ceasing conceptions. Ceasing conceptions meets back to ceasing elaborations of inherent existence which are ceased only by a mind cognising emptiness."

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H.P. Blavatsky wrote in the Theosophist Vol IV 1883 how “eminent men in Europe [are] endeavoring to hammer out the meaning of Buddhism.”  Sometime around 1885, leaving Europe for the last time she showed the dichotomy, if not a vacillation in her thinking. In the Collected Writings vol. VI we find her saying: “But the Ain Soph cannot be the direct creator, for he has neither will, intention, desire, thought, language nor action, as these properties imply limit.” And then, recalling the logic of a Gelugpa monk on the debating ground she says: “Besides the circumscribed nature of creation precludes the idea that the world was created or even designed by him, who can have no will nor produce anything but what is like himself boundless and perfect.” This shows a certain perfection of analytic reason with definitive meaning, “circumscribed” meaning the impossibility of 'perfection' creating 'imperfection'. Then in the next moment, as if her world view suddenly split in two, she writes: “on the other hand the design displayed in the mechanism, the order shown in the preservation=destruction and renewal of things forbid us to regard the world as the offspring of chance, and force us to recognize an intelligent design.” H.P.B. is now writing like a Wiccan nature mystic. Seeing incessant destruction and renewal as ‘intelligent’ – seeing the out of control samsaric mechanism as ‘designed’, perhaps the handiwork of deity, might make one question Edward Conze’s belief that  Madame Blavatsky was the reincarnation of Tsong kha pa! One would think that such a confusion in cosmology betrays a flaw in the intellectual enterprise of such a society, but then it was 1883 and “hammering out the meaning of Buddhism” was in its infancy. The “eminent men” we have now, referred to as “scholar-adepts of North America”(1) have much heavier hammers, even lasers to reveal the meaning of Buddhism. The atmosphere of Dharma study couldn't be more supercharged and ideological dissent can take highly reasoned approaches in the work of discarding outmoded cosmologies.
(1) Prisoners of Shangri-La  Donald S. Lopez, Jr. University of Chicago. p178

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Modern gnostics realize the anxieties of their 2nd century ancestors, those anxieties coincide with our feelings of world weariness. We feel empowered by their vision until we hit snags with their exuberant and operatic cosmic maps. We are left with no other course than to broaden the model, if that's possible. Its been a thousand years -  there's plenty of snags to untie. Full incorporation of the Religion of Valentinus or Basilidies goes beyond any ascent to intelligence. Some would say their world models are not hypothesis but agendas for living practices, but when a modern gnostic is serious about checking out ‘evil in the world’ he finds that, its not the case that evil was ‘put’ there (here). Evil is no longer an uncheckable problem; bad theories (demiurge) collapse early. Their theory of being also collapses simply because its limits (unknown-autopater) cannot be defined in advance. Modern gnostics entering into the ‘heat’ with their 2nd century ancestors know the experimental attitude needed. A god of gnosis that is unavailable to man is misknowledge. The 'impenetrability' and 'inexpressibility', the 'unthinkable brilliance', 'farness' and 'hiddenness' of a gnostic god must become known. What was really unthinkable in the 2nd century was that the mind could be at the center of the perfection they sought. Let’s let thought collide with the 'unthinkable'. We’ll find its possible with Tibetan techniques, not only that, but it (the unthinkable) will make a home for us, perhaps for aeons. But we really don’t want to stay in 'impenetrability' for long; 'farness' and 'hiddenness' may be good for a long rest, but the revisioning of gnostic cosmology won’t allow such slackness.

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An experience of Coniunctio (minor). To hold, simultaneously the opposites that pull me apart. Such an experience could come upon me in a moment of time. A gnostic consciousness that willfully reduces impulsive behavior or desirous projections to a balanced energy, an androgynisation. Seeing clearly the opposing positions of my mind, seeing two things and choosing the perfect expression; Conversion. Such action involves a reversal of values in an instant modification of mind. I become doubly potent due to my compounded and primitive intuition in the face of an ineffectual 'wholeness' of nature. By going inside and finding the moral sexlessness in the neuter epicene image.

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If, as it says in the Sufi tradition that Alchemy is the Sister of Prophecy, can't it be said that the Gymnosophists of old are the Brothers of samatha/vipassana meditators?

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 “I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorance”
                                                                      Christopher Marlow (&/Or) Shakespeare

"We have receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible"
                                                                      The same(!)

Even though, as Frances Yates contends that Shakespeare must have been concerned with the fate of John Dee in the court of James I, esoterically his final play The Tempest reveals more to us than a defense of this controversial (great) magus or his connection with “Rosicrucianism”.(1) Seeing as how the play was written in the time of the Golden Age of Alchemy which takes things apart to find their inner being, its no wonder a keen poetic psyche should not discover something about the nature of reality.

Buddhism does not give Western magic “the mere touch of cold philosophy” their “charms[do not] fly” away nor does it “clip an Angel’s wings” and certainly does not unweave rainbows, rather it generates more of them in the light of primordial mind of pristine awareness. What Keats is immortalizing in these lines from “Lamia” are not threatened but welcomed, just as the Worldly gods and goddess welcomed the Buddha’s message, the great Brahma petitioning him to teach! No, what Keats was referring back on the night of December 28 1817 was scientific analysis that he thought would destroy all poetry by reducing a rainbow to its prismatic colors. Even with the modern alliance of Science and Buddhism, poetry cannot be threatened. What convinced Newton in his simple, elegant experiment was that colors do not belong to things but to light. Buddhists go much further and see things do not belong to things –so much more to generate poetry and make magic – don’t you think? Angels wings will endure as long as they fly; that is - on their karma wings!