Primordial Being

Part One

"I'm just going up into the loft before breakfast" I announced assertively to the long-suffering lady who has chosen to live with me over the years. She looked up from the bits of mango she was in the process of cutting up, a barely-concealed quizzical look on her face. "I'm looking for something connected with Buddhism" I volunteered not altogether helpfully. She shook her head slowly, before returning to the fruit.

Single-minded passion. Focussed enthusiasm. The King of Wands in person. Some people might call it obsession, but I know better. Whatever. It was this energy that drove me to get out the ladder and crawl around amongst the bags and boxes (mainly my wife's, in my defence) before breakfast time."It's not there" I pronounced, as I retreated, dusted myself down and sat down to yogurt and fruit.

A few days later, a thought appeared. The garage! Rusty lock is prised open, wobbly black door swings creakily wide, and I enter. Barring the way is the never-used bicycle. Having negotiated its immensity, I look at the array of boxes, containers, and cartons stacked up before me. That large one's full of decorating and repairing materials that I hope won't be needed before I die. The enormous green plastic thing from Poundstretcher is chockerblock with photos and miscellaneous other stuff of my wife's from the time she lived in France twenty-five years ago. Ah, that's the one. The damp, musty box with the dodgy bottom contains file upon file of notes on lectures, seminars, and study groups on Buddhism. Plus a few books from the era: Protestant Buddhism. Ah yes. The Duties of Brotherhood in Islam. Hmmmm. Everything except what I am looking for. As the box is put back in its rightful spot, the bottom falls out, and years of lectures go tumbling over the floor. "I must get one of those nice new boxes I saw in the loft to replace it" I muse as I slowly close the garage door again.

Dorje Chang. The first time I made a personal connection with any Buddha-type figure was with Dorje Chang. I had a poster, black and white, of a beautiful Dorje Chang while I was still living in Oxford, well before I got 'properly involved in proper Buddhism'. Where it came from I cannot recall, in the same way that I cannot remember why it is not to be found in the loft or the garage - I suppose it was yet one more unwitting victim of my occasional fits of renunciation, always a cause of eventual regret.

I surmise that my meeting with Dorje Chang was not an 'accident'. The encounter was a receptacle of meaning which, even today, continues to unravel. Dorje Chang (or Vajradhara in Sanskrit) is the Primordial Buddha, or Adi Buddha. He embodies the naked essence of reality (naked literally in his equivalent in other systems of Tibetan Buddhism, Samantabhadra). Various types of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism enumerate three 'bodies', kayas, of Buddha. The first, which manifests through the form of Dorje Chang, is the Dharmakaya, the pure unified experienced essence of reality. Then there is the Sambhogakaya, the archetypal manifestation. Then there is Nirmanakaya, reality manifested on the plane of flesh-and-blood: Buddhamind Jimmy Smith queuing up at checkout in the supermarket in Huddersfield.

It has always made me laugh. Dharmakaya, the scholars and Madhyamika purists tell us, is beyond description, representation. Cue cosmic, abstract, 'wow'. Yet the meditators, the imagination-saturated artists, can't resist. So there is Dorje Chang, there is Samantabhadra, embodied manifestations in their indescribable magnificence. And they appear either alone or, quite frequently, in yab-yum, ie with female consort in full sexual embrace.

So why did I feel the sudden urge to look for Dorje Chang in the attic and the garage? And, for that matter, what on earth is he doing turning up here at all? The answer, in brief, is that Dorje Chang seems the closest that the Buddhist traditions have come up with to what I was trying to get at in my most recent post: the sense of the God that is not at all like the counterfeit God who appears in the mainstream God-based religions. The source of all emanation, the ground of being. Dorje Chang bridges the gap. Maybe.

Part Two

Like a number of other Buddha archetypes, Dorje Chang manifests wielding a vajra (dorje in Tibetan) and a bell. These are his implements of magical transformation, his spiritual/existential weapons, even. What is special about Dorje Chang is the way he holds them. The bell (his love, compassion, the water element, chalices in Tarot), and the vajra (wisdom, seeing through and into, air, the sword of the Tarot) are held at total ease and in complete equipoise across his heart. There is no fluff around the edges, no qualifying, no theorising the likes of 'you develop the wisdom and the emotions come along for the ride later'. Nope. In Dorje Chang the two rest together, in total harmony. They are, in truth, part and parcel of one and the same experience. Twin aspects which manifest simultaneously, undifferentiated. It's a bit like a balloon bursting. You may experience it as a sudden, loud noise, or as a piece of rubbery stuff suddenly shrinking. Either way, it's the same thing, experienced differently yet simultaneously.

At the same time, they are the primal differentiation, the first splitting, of the undivided primordial wisdom as it breaks up en route to eventual everyday humdrum experience. Bell and vajra; heart and
mind; feeling and mentation; action and reflection; love and seeing. The basic oppositional moment. In tarot it's the twos. The aces manifest the primordial beingness of Dorje Chang; if they turn up, there's not a lot you can do with them. But one step 'down' you have the twos. basic polarity. Most of us fail to live in Dorje Chang world very much, so the essential opposition of the twos, of the bell and vajra, is where our work begins to effectively take place.

Vajra without a bell is a bit useless; likewise, bell sans vajra. I wrote enough about mind with a deficit of heart back in August and September, in my own 'liberation is no liberation' series. But heart without mind is pretty useless too. Dangerous, even. Bell needs vajra. The problem with stand-alone feelings is that they are extremely vulnerable to dirty influences. The person based on emotion is easily manipulated; easy prey for those who would prey. Appeal to their feelings and you've got them! This, sadly, is what I appear to see all around me: well-meaning, good-hearted people who are continually being 'had' by dint of their bells without vajras. Blind - blinded by feelings - and constantly and relentlessly taken in by tales, often tall. Stories in the mainstream media, for example. People's feelings perverted into weird confections through appeals to their sense of Justice, maybe (Crowley wisely replaced 'Justice' card in the Thoth Tarot with 'Adjustment'), or Equality (what does that mean, precisely?).

Vajra does not suggest forming opinions, however intelligent or articulate they might appear to be. Most 'thinking' is just this: points of view based upon frequently unconscious feelings. The people who are 'had' the worst are just these, the articulate, typically 'well-educated' ones, who pride themselves in their clarity of thought. I know, because many of my acquaintances fall into this camp. Vajra denotes more - far, far more - than this. It is original thought, an emanation from the primordial, deceived and deluded by nothing and nobody. It is looking at the warped, distorted mirrors held up to us by religion, politics, culture, science, history, and the rest, chucking the vajra at them full-force, and watching them shatter into a million splintered pieces. More disturbing, world-and-ego destroying, than any revelations of 'inner realities' is the realisation that the world-as-presented is a fiction, a made-up story, in good part specifically designed to deceive.

To realise that you've been led up the garden path by the school, the BBC, the newspapers, the stupid bishops, silly Brian Cox and the rest - that's really uncomfortable. No wonder few people still go there. It's part of the esoteric aspect of vajra work. And at a moment like this the vajra needs to be passed on from peaceful Dorje Chang to a raging wrathful deity. Maybe Vajrapani himself, Wielder of the Vajra. I occasionally get it as I'm lying in bed early in the morning. A fury begins to rise up from near the solar plexus centre. It's a total rage, destructive and indestructible, a power that's unshakeable. Its aim: to burn up and smash through all the crap, the nonsense, the lies told my myself and by others. After a while it dies down. But I remember.          

Images:  Dorje Chang (Keith Dowman)

              Two of Swords from Wild Unknown Tarot

              Vajrapani              

    

Supreme Being

Part One

Maybe. Maybe. Just maybe. Maybe...... maybe I've been wrong all these years. That is to say, for most of my life. Worse yet: maybe I've been had. Duped. Deceived. Well and truly. Hook, line, and sinker. You see, maybe there is a God after all. It's just that the real God has nothing - and I mean literally nothing - to do with the God popularly believed in and paraded in the Abrahamic religions of our mainstream cultures.

When I was a wee boy, I was quite a fan of baby Jesus. This, at least, is what I'm told by my sister. Say a bad word about the baby Jesus and you'd get your knuckles religiously rapped. I must have been seven or eight when I started to seriously dismiss the entire thing as nonsense. You don't require overmuch intelligence to work it all out. There were all these stories about Jesus, Moses, prophets, disciples, and the like, dished out as truth but with no reason to believe them. Nobody bothered to explain to me why I should give any more credence to these often bizarre and unpleasant Bible narratives than I should 'Noddy and Big Ears' or 'Thomas the Tank Engine' (both of which were peopled by far more likeable characters than those who turned up in the 'Good Book'). The Bible was this foreboding piece of reading that was invariably bound in sombre black, and you just had to believe it as true. Most strange.

Similarly, this God of the Christian religion. I saw no evidence. Nothing in my feelings or instincts resonated with the notions presented to me by believers. There was, instead, an instinctive turning-away: it did not feel right or true or healthy. This God was a twisted fantasy, nothing more. People who based their life around this make-believe character had to be a bit deficient.

Aged ten I won the Scripture Prize at school. This was more a reflection of the other kids' total lack of application in class than anything to do with me. The short walk onto the school stage to receive my prize - a Bible, of course - was one of the most uncomfortable experiences in the life of the young me. "You've made a horrible mistake. You've got the wrong man. You don't understand." The protests resounded through my mind.

Life as presented appeared to offer a simple choice: Christianity or the rest. This 'the rest' consisted largely of variations on a theme of secular humanism, scientific materialism, atheism, rational agnosticism, and similar. I think you get the picture. I didn't fit into this group very well, either. Despite my outright rejection of Christianity, I felt no kinship with the flat, restrictive, claustrophobic premises of this lot, who left no room for acknowledging the centrality of fantasy, imagination, crazy wisdom: the sort of stuff that's always turning up on Pale Green Vortex.

Years later, I fell in with Buddhism. And Buddhism kind-of took its place quite neatly in this category of 'the rest'. Firstly, it boasted no can't-see-him-anywhere God. Then it didn't require faith in a whole load of beliefs and stories which generally seemed twisted and unhealthy - not the sort of stuff you want to follow in the first place. Finally, Buddhism appeared to be practical and pragmatic. It had a range of practices that you could actually follow, in a suck-it-and-see way. If it works, do it; if it doesn't, move on. Meditation, in particular, stood out as a technique for knowing oneself. I took to it; it seemed to work. Buddhism as working with direct experience seemed brilliant. As the years passed, I came to see that it wasn't quite that simple. But still....

Part Two

Around five years or so ago, I began to more consciously and systematically undertake a process akin to what the alchemists of old might have called 'purifying the vessel'. This involves removing, dismantling, chucking out, those contents of ones consciousness, as Jung would put it, which are preventing the pure open space of awareness from manifesting. 'Adventitious defilements' is one term that appears somewhere in Buddhism which relates to this phenomenon. A catalogue of attitudes which are generally considered necessary for successful functioning as a human being were investigated and experimented with; some, as a result, were consigned to the dustbin and kicked out. I was forced to face head-on the anxiety which, as an undercurrent, has been my constant companion over the decades. I looked deep into its nature, its inappropriateness, its falseness, and more-or-less eliminated its obscuring activity, on one level at least (I see that it lurks still, but as a totally existential entity).

As a result of these and other endeavours, the space began to clear. There was less separate 'me', distinct from the ebbs and flows, the comings and goings, the unique magic of the sensate moment, than there once was. And, as this space began to clear, two new elements unexpectedly made their presence known.

Firstly, I found a channel of communication opening up with 'Something Else'. At first it was a bit of a secret between 'me' and 'it', almost like a clandestine love affair. What this 'Something Else', this 'Other' is precisely, I have been in no hurry to attempt to define. Higher Self? Holy Guardian Angel? Sophia, Shekinah, Universal Mind? Whatever. An intermittent two-way communication started up, with 'Something' that is both rigorously personal to me and completely impersonal. And before any Bible people get too excited about a Christian awakening on Pale Green Vortex, this 'Something Else' seems to be female, or at least to have a focal feminine component.

The other 'emergence' was the existence of intent in the universe. Through a variety of events involving especially synchronicities I found it increasingly difficult to escape from the sense, the feeling, that there is intent in the universe. Through the various experiences of non-duality and similar that I had had over the decades, intent - purpose - had never come into it. Clear your personal space enough, however, and the universe begins to take interest - as in the previous paragraph, an interest simultaneously highly personal and impersonal - and begins to present signs, challenges, nice experiences and nasty experiences, all with the aim of showing the way, helping you along. The universe wants us to 'grow'. The universe wants everything to grow. The universe needs everything to grow in order to achieve its own fulfilment.

This all sits rather uncomfortably with both sides of the dichotomy that I grew up with: Bible and the Christian God on the one hand, and the rest, including no-god Buddhism, on the other. I am in no mood to attempt a neat reconciliation these days. There are actually aspects of Buddhism which resonate with the experiences I have described -  the notion of Universal Bodhicitta is one such - but it seems to me that these have become increasingly marginalised. Western practice of Buddhism has veered in the direction of rationalistic, mental sides to its multifaceted jewel. All too often, Buddhism in modern times is the refuge for those who identify with thought, the rational; in Jung's typology, introverted thinking types. Not the kind to take easily to the notion that the universe possesses purpose.

No. I am left with the feeling - the horrible feeling - that I've been had. For most of my life I've been victim of a false dichotomy. Maybe those crazy Gnostics were right after all. The Christian God, they claimed, is a false god. He is the demiurge, an impostor, a demented lower-level being who is bent on deception. He turns up boasting that he is the god, the only god, the creator of all. The tragedy is that huge portions of humanity fall for his lies. I, too, have been 'had' by the demiurge, in that I have believed that 'God' as presented by him is the true and only notion of God. Like any reasonable person, I have rejected the claims of the demiurge, while failing to see through to the roots of the deception. The demiurge is the pretender par excellence.

Part Three

'Counterfeit mimickry' - pretending to be something, while really being something else, the opposite, even -, which is what we could call the antics of the demiurge, is not a one-off. It remains a prime tactic in tricking humanity today, leading it astray from its natural way, its 'god-given' sacred path. You take humanity's innate sense of the spiritual - its most valuable asset, if you will - and then you twist it to your own devious ends.

Take, for example, that intuition of one-ness, of the interconnectedness of all life, which finds an echo, however far or faint, in the lives of many, if not all, people. This gets twisted into the modern ideology of multiculturalism, espoused by many dcent, well-intentioned folk nowadays. But they've been had. Oneness is not in the least the same as sameness, which is the hallmark of multiculturalism as presented. It seeks to create uniformity, mediocrity, one-size-fits-all. This is a programme relentlessly pushed by organs of control such as the BBC. Its result is a dead and deadening cultural globalism, brought into being by the artificial removal of distinction - which, paradoxically (or not), is the basis for true 'spiritual growth'.

It's a similar story with ardent forms of feminism, along with the war against gender distinction. These zealous efforts to erode and nullify difference, undertaken in the guise of 'fighting against sexism', have similar aims. Once more, many well-meaning people subscribe to these agendas, but they have been duped. What superficially appears to promote freedom is actually an Orwellian move beyond the wildest dreams of Big Brother in 1984.

This is an exercise in social manipulation built upon a dark distortion, in this case a bastardisation, of what Jungians call 'wholeness'. It is the union of opposites, the divine hermaphrodite and the royal marriage as represented in alchemy, or the yab-yum in tantra. This wondrous flower of the sacred life is corrupted into a monster. The result is a society of men unable to comment that a woman is looking nice today, for fear of ending up with a criminal record. Can a society get more sick than that?

There are other examples, but they can stay in the box for now. This hijacking of our deep-down spiritual sense is one of the darkest aspects of modern culture and politics. The cult of political correctness, in particular, is riddled with this pernicious, soul-destroying virus. It befalls us to, at the very least, look out for it, see it when at work, and free ourselves individually from its toxic influence. It's out to destroy the world of spirit, the spirit of the world.


Images:

Top:       Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, Altona, 1785 ('Wisdom is the female emanation of God')

Below:   The Temptation of St. Hilarion by D.L.Papety. Scratch beneath the surface, and you find that present-day efforts to eradicate gender distinction are nothing but a continuation for secular times of the Christian 'horror of the temptations of the flesh' crusade. That same visceral unease (dis-ease) with difference and the reactions it evokes. Both are life denying. Both attempt to repress Eros and the sensual.  
                

Brexit: Six of Cups

The Six of Cups - or Chalices, as I prefer to call them (Chalices, after all, come in sacred gold or silver, vessels of vision, soaked in legend and exoticism - Grail and Parzifal. Cups, on the other hand, are what you use for hot chocolate before going to bed). The Six of Chalices should be such a lovely card. Six, the number of harmony, the different elements mingling in perfect concord. And the Chalice is associated with the Water Element: flow, feeling, emotion, a certain kind of intuition, a worthy receptacle for the feminine aspect to existence. What felicity!

In the Thoth Tarot, the Six of Cups is simply called 'Pleasure'. In the Waite-Smith, two young children are depicted in a spacious garden. The larger child is handing a cup filled with flowers to the smaller. Around them are five more flower-laden cups. The card is often read as being related to nostalgia, pleasant memories of the  past, a fond looking back on things that have vanished. We have to go to some of the dark Tarot decks to shake us out of this illusion of a flowery Garden of Eden, a horticultural Paradise on Earth,

A deeper consideration will reveal that the Six of Cups is inviting us to look closely at the whole matter of how we relate to the past; to our past. There is indeed in this card nostalgia. Nostalgia.
There are those who will claim that a positive nostalgia does not exist. Severing all attachment to, and identity with, our 'personal past' is a necessary prerequisite for spiritual freedom. In Castaneda, the notion takes the form of 'erasing personal history'. Even granted the possibility of a positive nostalgia, still dwelling overmuch on the past brings its perils. Yearning, hopeless longing, the inability to let go of what what has been and is no more; the refusal to release, to merge with the one and only reality, that of the present moment. Repeating the past over and over again, without regard for the current situation. Finally getting caught in a nightmare version of Nietsche's eternal recurrence.

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the darker waters of the Six of Chalices unexpectedly began to flow, and with some force. I have found it difficult to comprehend what I have seen with my own two eyes during my brief forays into the twisted world of 'mainstream media'. It is indeed eternal recurrence gone horribly wrong. Like a bad smell from a too-long stagnant sewer. Or like slimy maggots crawling out of the furniture in that room in the East Wing that nobody visits these days. Like ghosts, nay ghouls of the worst kind; or, more accurately, vampires, irresistibly drawn out by a stench that they recognise only too well.

What are the phantoms that I witnessed, almost incredulously, in this spectral resurrection? There was Blair. There was Major. Miliband. Clegg. Out of the dark, dank, vapid air of the past did they make their unwelcome reappearance. Nobody prayed for their presence, or even invited them to raise their fatigued heads, but there they were, unmistakeable. It was as if an alarm bell had been rung, warning of the end of the world as we know it, and indeed how it should be, and they were powerless to resist. They responded, just as skeletal automatons would be expected to respond.

Why the opinions of the Blair should be given any more credence nowadays than those of Kirsty on the Tesco check-out in Paisley I have no idea. It seems that we are witness to the emergence out of their burrows of a tiny group of beings who are not able to live with the possibility that it's time to go join their local pub tiddleywinks team (not dominoes, since it reminds them of what they dreamed of seeing in the Middle East, and they start cheating); or do 'Strictly Come Dancing' or the jungle programme.

While Miliband at least had the decency to stop short of calling for another referendum, because the first one provided the wrong result, Blair and Major have been open and cavalier in their snubbing of the democracy that we are supposed to inhabit and adhere to. What did Major talk about? The tyranny of the majority? Am I hearing right?Dodgy stuff. While readers of Pale Green Vortex will be aware that we take western democracy with a pinch of salt, regarding it largely as a charade, another kind of opium for the masses, a veil over the deeper, not very democratic at all, realities of parapolitics etc, still..... You don't sign up for a democracy with your own sub-clause '.... when it suits me'.

In this parade of dishonour, I have to single out Blair as prime Lord of Darkness. Many years ago, I was well and truly had by Blair myself. I was among the multitude who shed a tear, quite literally, when he first came to power, and was on television walking around smiling, shaking the hands of well-wishers. Hope had arrived in the form of the Blair. The wicked witch was gone, her second-rate successors dead and buried as well. Bring in a new era.

Six years later, I was sitting in a restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, London, eating pizza with a friend (come on out, you know who you are....!). Halfway through the meal, my friend leaned over his Quattro Formaggi, looked me straight in the eye, and in a conspiratorial tone of voice asked me the question:"Are you against the invasion of Iraq?" I looked around nervously, checked that nobody was within earshot, before quietly intoning my reply:"Not as much as some people." We polished off our pizza quickly, wiped the cheese off our false moustaches, then shuffled uneasily out into the night.

Those were the days when I still believed what the mainstream television and newspapers had to say; I had no reason to do otherwise. I worked on the same basis as most people: the mainstream media report the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and leave the individual to form their own opinion. Rather than the process that I now see only too often: the mainstream media present certain events, facts, quasi-facts, fabrications and selected information, all of which serve to form your opinion for you.

So I was well and truly had by Blair (B-liar) and his not-so merry band of men from the shadows: Mandelson, Campbell et al. It's part of life's learning curve, should one wish to take up the challenge. Most hilarious of all today, is how this theme has started to go around: how we are living in a new world, where truth is no longer the yardstick. Surely this is another tactic of mind-subversion by the evermore desperate cool, trendy, liberal, all-embracing people (who are actually very nasty and intolerant of others when crunch comes to crunch), whose ascendence has been threatened by Brexit and the Trump. When was this Golden Era, when Truth was so valued above all else. Was it the time of the Blairs, Milibands, Cleggs, Majors???? Give us a break. The credibility-ometer has just exploded.

   
Images: Six of Chalices:
              Waite-Smith (top)
              Royo Dark Tarot (centre)
              Dark Fairytale Tarot (below)