The following is excerpted from a manuscript-in-process entitled Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness.

There are profound similarities and

differences between the Seven Planes system and the visualization practices of

Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism as well as between theosophy and Vajrayana, Zen,

and Dzogchen, and other lineages of Buddhism in general. These systems address the same Ultimate

Supreme Reality from diverging cultural perspectives, at different emotional

tones, from unique ontological and eschatological perspectives.

Historically theosophy and Buddhism

arrive from opposite poles of West and East and reflect that European and Asian

in their spiritual strategies, meditation techniques, lifestyles, styles of

asceticism, and relative optimism or pessimism regarding our immediate and

ultimate fate. A zendo with zafus for

sitting meditation, chanting paramitas,

and bowing is not the same brand of kiva as a lodge hall with plastic roses and

quartz crystals and circles for conducting séances and summoning spirits. As the Zen initiate sits for hours, days,

weeks, years on a cushion, trying to tame his monkey mind and regain his

fundamental dignity, it doesn't look like a psychic student visualizing his

grounding cord and layers of his aura.

Yet each is running subtle energy.

The long-term gap in cultural context is blatant: While internal

meditation and alchemy in Taoist and Buddhist cultures gave rise to energetic

breathing, gathering of interior chi, and nonattachment to form, the West's

externalized alchemy produced forges, locomotives, and laboratories.

Of course, this is a

oversimplification: the West has internal arts, and Asia

originated technologies too. Both

traditions are Deep Earth. Each shares the other's shamans, sybils, and

psychics. Each is self-secret such that

even if a person were directly given the teachings, he would not have the right

context in which to understand or use them each requires transmission of

rituals and techniques from teacher to student.

Each has tenebrous tendrils in the

other, as the systems are complementary: one's surface tends to function as the

other's depth, and vice versa. Buddhism has enlightenment as its explicit

and apparent goal. Psychic work seeks

personal reality and spiritual freedom.

But those are cover stories.

Spiritual freedom lies also at the core of Buddhism, and enlightenment

is the alternate reality of theosophy. A

lama is as psychic a practitioner as a tarot reader, and an Astral traveler is

as concerned as a Zen monk about the precision of his or her meditation.

Riding a sublime current out of

Hinduism, Buddhism has as its sine qua

non: breaking the cycle of samsara (birth, life, death, and rebirth;

incarnation and reincarnation): "Lead me from the unreal to the real. Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality."*

Theosophy's corresponding goal is to participate fully in the

world. But Buddhists party and carouse

too, while theosophists aspire to get off the Great Roller-Coaster.

Buddhism is rooted in a Vedic view

of life (existence) as illusion, transformation, and inevitable grief. Theosophy does not refute or evade this

verdict, but it does not prioritize it or cast an existential gaze in its

direction. Instead, it follows higher

vibrations, as it leads the horse celebratorily around the corral (the corral

being Life As It Is) and cultivates a resilient capacity for pleasure and

sorrow and the ceaseless waves of change connecting them. At the same time, Buddhists participate in

creative expression of Life As It Is and ride the Wave.

From a monastic Buddhist

perspective, the world is a place of diabolic temptations, of traps that keep

us from self-realization and immortality, luring us into one state of damnation

or another. But why? In either instance actually-pleasure-seeking

or strategic abstinence — why? Or is

"why" a mere bleat against the vastness and mysteriousness of our

manifestation?

Both Buddhist monks and clairvoyant

trainees disavow that our situation is an unfortunate exile outside of satori:

instead, they understand that this is exactly how things should be despite "heartaches by the number and troubles

by the score." We are here to

take in the majesty of creation: "to be able to embrace everything with

the mindfulness of awareness-wisdom, without losing the continuity of that

awareness." (MM7)

Easier said than done; easier

practiced over a period of resolve than maintained for the long haul. But that is the way to become a magician or

master in either system, to escape the cycle of endless rebirth or whatever.

The Buddhist gaze is its act of

sitting zazen and encountering limitless interior space, letting thoughts arise

and fade away without beguilement or attachment to a goal. It is like looking an inner night sky. To make ourselves transparent and receptive

enough to glimpse our ground luminosity is our opportunity for awakening within

a dream to something not quite the dream.

In fact, it is our only choice, the only solace we have in the face of

inevitable loss, grief, and suffering.

Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki-roshi posted it this way:

"Suppose your children are

suffering from a hopeless disease. You

do not know what to do; you cannot lie in bed.

Normally the most comfortable place for you would be a warm comfortable

bed, but now because of your mental agony you cannot rest. You may walk up and down, in and out, but

this does not help. Actually the best

way to relieve your mental suffering is to sit in zazen, even in such a

confused state of mind and bad posture.

If you have no experience of sitting in this kind of difficult situation

you are not a Zen student. No other

activity will appease your suffering. In

other restless positions you have no power to accept your difficulties, but in

the zazen posture which you have acquired by long, hard practice, your mind and

body have great power to accept things as they are, whether they are agreeable

or disagreeable.

"When you feel disagreeable it is

better for you to sit. There is no other

way to accept your problem and work on it….

"The awareness that you are here,

right now, is the ultimate fact. That is

the point you will realize by zazen practice."

"Right here, right now"

is the heart of Buddhist practice, reflected in popularized maxims like

"be here now" and "the power of now." "Right here, right now" means

refining a pinpoint awareness of the moment of consciousness and its

effects. As a damp fog gradually

drenches one, humbly practicing zazen while yielding to the universe soaks one

with a stable joy.

Using quite different tools,

theosophy also taps the energy of "life as it is," awakening our

natural receptivity to joyful energy, but in a more vernacular, free-falling

and county-fair kind of way. While it

has its existential moments and groks the cosmic view, its repertoire for

dealing with the universe skirts spiritually immaturity — a version of flailing

futilely in circles within samsara. Buddhism's advanced practices for attaining

joy and neutrality are discriminating and discrete by comparison with anything

in theosophy. So I wouldn't recommend

dropping Buddhist practice for psychic tools in hopes of having more fun and

getting off scot-free.

Drubwang Tsoknyi Rinpoche warns

against getting trapped in idealized practices or conceptual frameworks

(Buddhist or other). Even the goal of

clarity and "being empty" is a snare unless one holds to the emptiness out of

which all thoughts are proceeding. As

the act of meditation focuses the meditator on present time, he may find

himself counterproductively working with the "now" as a separate, dual concept,

copied from a conforming observation of what insight or compassion should look

like and how it should behave — replicas and counterfeits. Instead one must let things be as they are,

constantly recognizing the fact of the self-arising nature and source of mind,

and waking ourselves to it through constantly shifting appearances. Then compassion will be compassion, and "now"

will really be now:

"The real bodhichitta, which is awakened mind,

is of course already present within us as our basic nature, but somehow it is covered

up by our normal way of thinking, encased within the shell of deluded

perceptions. It's not so easy to have it

become visible immediately in a full-fledged way. It's as if we need to plagiarize awakened

mind a little bit, by forming a thought as an imitation. There is really no way around this other than

to make a facsimile of the awakened attitude….

[W]e need to copy bodhichitta by forming the thought of compassion for

all beings. There is nothing wrong with

that. Bodhichitta is not copyrighted; no

company manufactures it, so it's not as if we'll be sued. We simply want to imitate what we have heard

so much about, the awakened state realized by the buddhas and masters of the

past."

We can't forge compassion. Yet such imitation — copying energy,

plagiarizing visualizations — is not only permissible but de rigueur in theosophy. Of

course, real psychic meditation does not get stuck in forgeries; it blows them

up and moves on as directed by present energy.

Dzogchen prefers clear mind; theosophy prefers clear energy. In the end these are the same. Different paths, same payoff.

The difference between these

systems can sometimes be a matter of whether one believes that the gods and

source energies of the universe are fundamentally benign and ecstatic or

indifferent and cruel — but that is a superficial reading too. Both systems accept a beneficent creation and

our ultimate redemption. Buddhism

doesn't project the universe as ruthless or punitive: our minds have ensnared

us in a vicious cul de sac. Because of the deviousness of the snare,

mature teachers tend toward abstemious strategies while keeping the main

attention on the source of mindedness and the symptomology of our attachment to

fleeting pleasures and security. Joyful

and loving practice provides the basis for transcendence of our core

deceptions.

Kagyu-lineage tulku Chögyam Trungpa's

legendary "crazy wisdom" offers engagement with life as well as permission to

participate in extreme forms of pleasure and experience as teaching modes. The rationale is that, insofar as all states

are real in themselves and arise from the world, no act or encounter can be

avoided indefinitely. Attempted

avoidance merely creates agitated mind and habitual trance states as well as

inauthentic piety without spiritual resilience.

On the other hand, following one's innate desires down to their source

energies is indispensable to transcendence.

"Crazy wisdom" uses the

innate quality of pleasure-seeking to deconstruct itself. If one goes consciously on his or her own

mindful trajectory with an awareness of inner luminosity and the innate

brilliance of their own presence, then in fact every act is allowed and every

experience becomes part of the training — but only as long it is directed toward

clarity rather than pleasure for its own hedonistic sake or for

self-aggrandizement.

Trungpa is exhorting people to

understand their own desires — in their origination and intrinsic nature, and

this is different from merely having fun.

He and other such teachers may seem to be encouraging followers to

indulge where they are drawn and attracted, but the path remains one of

dropping attachment. Hedonism turns out

to be symptomatic and superficial solace-seeking and not very pleasurable or

fulfilling in its seeming gratification.

This teaching is way too easy to

misunderstand and misapply because, after all, who doesn't want to have fun in

the context of high-end spiritual permission?

For some it becomes a license to engage in promiscuous sex,

intoxications, and profound slackerdom as per desire. The dark side was provided in spades by many

of Trungpa's followers and those of other "crazy wisdom"

teachers. In the decades following the

exuberant sixties, apologists performed a charade of spiritual practices under

what they took as carte blanche:

ordinary ethics don't apply to this here pilgrim and seeker!

What they rationalized from their

gurus, unfortunately, was that, if you are a sincere Buddhist warrior, you can

have all the wine, women, drugs, and hiphop you desire and, as a bonus, you can

become enlightened in the process. If

that sounds too good to be true…. The

universe is an open road, gracious and magnificent to a fault, but it is not facile. Nobel-level abuses and criminal betrayals

within Trungpa's own Naropa community speak for themselves-but the same brief

could be laid at the feet of many other contemporary gurus, yogis, and dharma

tactiticians (Da Free John/Adi Da, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and Swami Muktananda

among them).

As a serious Buddhist practitioner,

Trungpa was trying to persuade his students to break their links with their

self-absorptions, self-deceptions, smugly high self opinions, and other

placations and adornments of ego. He

decried the distractions of our monkey minds, in particular our attachments to

pseudo-miracles and chimerical promises of soul depth. Too many would-be devotees fritter their

lives and hopes away, he warned, for a god they never meet, an essence they

cannot find.

When he urged his disciples to

follow their own crazy wisdom, he meant not their desires per se but the roots behind those desires, the basic emptiness-to

find those it exploration of energy rather than by monastic avoidance. The recipe was recognition of the impulse,

not the satiation of its carnal expressions.

Egoic mind, Trungpa averred, does

not really want to achieve clarity, basic sanity, or its own true nature or the

cessation of its neurotic patterns because that would be planning its own

funeral — so it enacts fake versions of spiritual accomplishment and then tries

to sell itself and others on their legitimacy and sincerity. He called these out as mirages and delusions

on the switchbacking path to clarity.

Eventually we will be disappointed

in all such practices because they do not lead to enlightenment or happiness or

real pleasure. Even if they are

practiced devotedly, they make one only more neurotic. I'm afraid he would consign Astral bodies,

Seven Planes, golden suns, grounding cords, and the like to this nemesis.

However, the neurotic abuse of any

sacred practice — erotic, spiritual, or even compassionate and charitable — is ripe

for the taking, and in the present consumer society, righteous spiritual

heavyweights as well as wannabes among the masses fall for most gaudy and

grotesque attractions and achievements.

It's Burger King reality. We wolf

down more than we need or want. We make

ourselves more sexually obsessed than called for by our desires or needs. We invent a metaphysics more decorous,

inflated, and exaggerated than anything we can use psychospiritually or

integrate therapeutically. We cut

ourselves off from our own souls and paths of individuation, as we creatively

psychopathologize ourselves beyond our ground pathologies and spiritualize

ourselves in fictive and superficial realms where our soul doesn't dwell. We invent fake initiations in the name of

gods and holy precepts and in the guise of Tantric quests and soul

healing. Likewise we declare ourselves

guilty for the wrong reasons, far guiltier in our self-blame than any actual sins

we have committed would entail.

As failed practices turn into

boredom, boredom seeks new toys, chimeras, neuroses and self-seductions,

cleverer ones, with which to entertain itself.

When these come in spiritual disguises and lead to frustration or boredom

again, the boredom turns into anger and then rejection of practice

altogether.

Trungpa insists that there is no

hidden entertainment in true commitment to the dharma — so boredom in fact is a

very useful sword to expose the hollowness of ego and cut to the goal of

egolessness.

This teaching plays out as a

paradoxical medley of ascetic rejection of neurotic pleasure addictions with

celebratory joy-rides on the world's delights and thrills.

In a theosophical counterpart to

this debate (gratification versus clarity) John Friedlander asks people in

workshops whether they would rather get what they want or be happy. These outcomes are rarely the same thing,

which is a surprise to many. Of

irresistible desires, he asks simply, "Do they actually make you happy? Or are they just what you want?"

In an ensuing exercise he invites

students to look back over the lives and pick out something that they

desperately had to have and would have given anything for, and didn't get. Would they be happier now if they had

gotten?

More often, in retrospect, we will

find that we dodged a bullet. This is likewise what he is calling attention

to when he suggests looking at one's life, particularly its disappointments and

sorrows, from the perspective of the Soul, outside of time and even after

death, rather than from the standpoint of envy or regret about satisfactions

unrequited. Real happiness is a subtle,

profound, and elusive state and is quite different from exhilaration, fulfilled

passion, or life success-though these draw their energy and pleasure from

primordial core joy.*

It is sometimes hard to tell in

instances of real practitioners and lives which belief is in fact in play,

which practitioner is which: who is cheery and hopeful; who is dour and

severe — and what brand of spiritual epistemology either is practicing. It is often a matter of individual

personality rather than philosophy — an ecstatic magician can be depressed and

alienated despite a productive practice, while a rigorously ascetic Zen monk

can be as happy every morning as a child on Christmas.

From an operational standpoint

theosophy finds more of a grand purpose in this veil of illusions: it has

happened for a reason; it exists expressly for the contemplation or ecstatic

recognition of the divine. We are alive

because we are incarnated, and we have incarnated on the path to

self-knowing. However debauched the

divine has become here — and the present predatory, commodity-ridden global

culture would seem to be about the most anti-spiritual, nihilistic blowback to

sacred reality short of Hell itself — we are participating in cosmic co-creation,

of which this world is a critical and nonoptional phase.

Thus, the karmic, reincarnative

journey is available to all of humanity (and other creatures and entities)

without running the Zen gauntlet. In the

theosophical canon, the universe calls for active participation and co-creation

more than renunciation or empty mind.

Whatever creation takes away in loss, it gives back in another form, so

one has to savor rather than renounce appearances. But that is also what karma and reincarnation

are all about.

Buddhism finds fulfillment and

divine service in confronting uncertainty and mortality moment by moment and

building a capacity to tolerate, appreciate, and live it by translating despair

into conscious acts of compassion and nonattachment. You can feel the cadence of Buddhist practice

at its core when Sogyal Rinpoche reaches out to "to all beings, living,

dying, or dead. For all those who are at

this moment going through the process of dying, may their deaths be peaceful

and free of pain or fear. May all those

who at this moment are being born, and those who are struggling in this life,

be nourished by the blessings of the buddhas, and may they meet the teachings,

and follow the path of wisdom. May their

lives be happy and fruitful, and free from all sorrow."

Theosophy does not approach any of

these these matters so directly and existentially — so, yes, at times its

dilettantishness can result in a shallower spirituality — but it works on

blending shamanically with the intrinsic power of the universe, encountering

its majesty and terror not as an ordeal or punishment but an opportunity for

experience, knowledge, and transformation of meaning.

It is like saying: We're in the

heap, and the heap is all we know, so it must be the right heap, it better be

the right heap, and we are meant to make peace and order and joy here because

it's where and why we exist and the heap exists-so go to it, play magic, or

whatever."

In that sense the Seven Planes is

slaphappy and easy-going in its approach to practice, though it is

fundamentally sober and serious in its overall view. It seeks focused attention and commitment

through symbols, roses, auras, grounding cords, neutral space, and energy

cultivation rather than by going directly at resistance through thought and

breath. Of course Buddhism has its own

lotuses, sacred colors, and tangkas for visualized pathfinding too.

For some who practice rigid

Buddhism, enlightenment can be turned into a grim march up an unscalable

mountain of infinite height — a sentence of a trillion kalpas that has to be

served and lived out (recalling the legendary Buddhist measurement of a kalpa

as the time it takes for a mountain be worn down by a dove's wing brushing

it — in other words, a very long time). By

contrast, the theosophical perspective has always tended to be gratifying,

playful, affirming, reassuring.

Yet both warn that change is

inevitable, profound, and our only destiny — and you know what that means. Authoritarian theosophy can be as doctrinaire

and grim as any Buddhist precept.

Finally the world is the world, and where we are is where we are.

Aleister Crowley once remarked,

upon the death of a child (and I quote approximately here from memory of

something I read a long time ago), "Yes it's an illusion, but this one is a

super-illusion."

Who is to judge or grade among

run-of-the-mill everyday illusions and super ones which get to be the super

ones? Buddhism makes it simple: they are

all illusions, perhaps different scales and grades of illusion, but smoke and

mirrors all the same. Magic meanwhile is

a game for moving clouds and mists, either way.

I know people who have failed to

achieve peace or clarity from years of Buddhist practice and then have broken

through to deeper meditation in a matter of days via Reiki or aura reading-and

then checked back on zazen and been able to deepen its state astonishingly from

the insights gained in a less

structured system. Relieved of the onus

of a narrow meditational focus, they dropped into receptivity to simple

flow. I have also heard of people

traveling the other way — from ritual magic to hard Zen — and succeeding in

deepening a previously blasé or opportunistic spiritual practice.

You can't dawdle in the

paradoxes. In the intersection of these

two viewpoints a world exists, a zone of energy, creation, joy, epiphany that

is also utterly empty, a proposition of total forfeiture. We ignore this barren aspect, even in magical

and shamanic contexts, at our peril. Yet

we must meet the world's full ecstatic manifestation and expression, with an

open heart, even in ascetic systems.

Either way, we cannot afford mere ideology or one-track minds because

reality is always waiting, at a degree of the real.

Creation may not be the Wild West

or Las Vegas — riding the bronco, figurative or real — but neither is it the

gloomiest extreme of samsara, enticing creatures into trance-based delusions

and then dashing them indifferently on the rocks of those beliefs. The universe is both systems, both paths, in

balance, always.

What is it in such circumstances,

to have a serious as opposed to a flibberty-gibbet life? The best teachers of all spiritual traditions

pose a challenge. You don't even need teachers. Our seriousness and our faith are precisely

what let the universe take over, right now.

Both Buddhism and theosophy

practice the art of the impossible through acts of faith, humility, and

devotion. Suzuki Roshi introduces the

Zen version of this paradox through the enigmatic practice of bowing: "Each bow

expresses one of four Buddhist vows.

These vows are: Although sentient beings are innumerable, we vow to

save them. Although our evil desires are

limitless, we vow to be rid of them.

Although the teaching is limitless, we vow to learn it all. Although Buddhism is unattainable, we vow to

attain it.' If it is unattainable, how

can we attain it? But we should! That is Buddhism.

"To think, Because it is possible

we will do it,' is not Buddhism. Even

though it is impossible, we have to do it because our true nature wants us

to. But actually, whether or not it is

possible is not the point. If it is our

inmost desire to get rid of our self-centered ideas, we have to do it. When we make this effort, our inmost desire

is appeased and Nirvana is there."

Theosophy likewise advocates the

impossible: reversing time, seeing the future, conversing with the dead,

learning the details of past lives. It

is not that we expect to accomplish these things and confirm them like the

ordinary successes of life; it is that, since we can't tell the difference

between accomplishing them or not at the subtle level of the techniquesso we

might as well accomplish them. We might

as well take journeys of meaning into the Truth Mystery.

The difference here is a subtle

one: Buddhism says to proceed without

attachment because it is impossible to get there, but along the way you find

and embrace your own true nature and realize there is nowhere to arrive so you

don't have to get there. Theosophy says

to go it because the universe itself is a miracle and not only can any energy

be turned into any other, but every energy is already being turned into every

other on some frequency or other.

Either premise is only words, words

and energy, words as energy, but the

proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is energetic and functional, not

intellectual.

Both Buddhism and theosophy have

magic in their basic operational manuals, but Buddhist magic is different from

theosophical magic. Shunryu Suzuki says

quite: "We can put no magic on the world; the world is the magic. We cast no charms on the world; the world

itself is the charm." We cannot

additionally bedazzle the wonders of nature because nature is what is dazzling — dazzling us into consciousness, beyond

the repertoire of even the most accomplished thaumaturge. Everything in this creation is magical, so our

tricks and tools stand paltry before the austere magic of there being a world

at all.

In mature theosophy, we can put no magic on the world either-the world

itself is a magic that we tune into.

Students have gotten confused around this notion because, having been

told that we create our own reality, they think that they should be able to

control reality too, or that these are the same thing.

We can't control reality. That should be obvious; yet it isn't.

Unfortunately most psychic schools in the West teach putting charms on the

world. Naïve, petulant, pompous, and

ultimately futile acts of attempted control are an epidemic among superficial

psychics. They act as though the

universe will open like a slot machine if they tweak the right spot. This has led practitioners of voodoo, love

magic, remote healing, of idle fame and fortune to ruin, misery, even

psychosis. When we pretend to control

reality, we lose our chance to create reality; that is, to engage in a creative

theophany with the universe. And reality

is immune.

Zen students participate in

creating reality-Zen mind-by bowing and acknowledging the innate divinity of

the universe.

Theosophy should never become a

game of magic evocation. Its path is the

crease along which the whole of creation is trying to individuate, to express

its true nature and become loving and whole.

We are making ourselves real to ourselves, not doing party tricks.

In Buddhist guru yoga, a student

unites his or her mindstream with the mindstream of the teacher, submitting to

his or spiritual authority, sometimes saying a regular mantra to enforce the

act. The essentially magical premise is

to gain a measure of the guru's grace and karma, to skip steps (many lifetimes

worth of them if possible) through riding on the avatar's swifter steed. Support and solace come simultaneously from

higher intelligence and a local company of seekers. By invoking the mantra, by accepting the

teacher's lineage, the practitioner merges his state of being and destiny with

not just his guru, not only the collective realizations of all the masters and

buddhas in the guru's lineage, or even all the avatars in associated lineages across

space-time, but the Wisdom Mind of the universe itself.

This is a Tantric (mantrayana) practice from the first

millennium that spread from India to Tibet.

The 'mantra' is literally 'that which protects,' so the act of viewing

the guru as the Deity/Buddha protects our mind from ordinary view. The actual prayer

is a tool to remind us of the experience of non-duality, and a magical charm to

enter more deeply into it. Ultimately

guru yoga is not about emulating or worshipping the guru or lineage but about

experiencing this non-duality (Dharmakaya), having the direct experience that the

guru's mind and our mind are one, actually it is more accurate to say that our

awareness is empty of mind. What the

outer devotional aspect can do is to help soften and dissolve habitual mind and

its view, but the real import is the experience of Dharmakaya.

Guru yoga is an option because

Buddha Mind is already present in each individual. One is not merely sharing another's practice

or meditational success; one is merging with his or her own innate spaciousness

and radiance and reclaiming his or her true nature. Recognizing the guru or the lama is simply

recognizing one's own mind.

Guru yoga is a forerunner of

transference in Freudian analysis between therapist and patient-the same

energy, the same operation but on a different psychospiritual plane. In each case something intrinsic-an insight

or karmic trail-is transferred spontaneously.

Quite apart from the actual goal of

guru yoga, many students make fantastic claims, to others certainly and to

themselves as well, about the superior divinity of their guru. This is another example of the consumerist

superstar/Hollywood personality. It

becomes absurd to the point of blasphemy to presume that, for instance, Muktananda

or Adi Da or the Dalai Lama — sophisticated, compassionate, and powerful as each

of these became in their own right — have anything like the level of development

or intelligence that the Earth itself, maintaining all its living and

geological systems, has, or the Mother of all Caribou, or the Mother of all

Turtles, or the Sun maintaining the orbiting planets and forms of an entire

Solar System.

Yes, these transpersonal entities

are also practitioners and alive beings in the sense of individuated integrities;

they are gurus deserving of yoga too.

They have perceptual levels and life-spans both inside and outside our

frame. And they are practicing something

very different from standard human enlightenment.

Theosophy has no exact equivalent

to guru yoga, but it does likewise work on the basis of merging with exogenous

intelligence through one's own intrinsic grace.

Energies in the aura are the practitioner's link to the Wisdom Mind.

Western teaching does not provide a corresponding method for

entering a guru's karmic zone, but there is a vague parallel in the concept of

the Group Soul and another in the voice provided by a teacher to match in

traveling through planes of consciousness.

One might also extrapolate that Christians practice a form of guru

yoga, by taking Christ in to their hearts, and wanting to "become as Christ."

While Buddhist yoga requires arduous training

in attention and devotion to an advanced master, theosophical or Christian

transference of wisdom and frequency is in principle automatic and at one's

immediate disposal.

But the paradox that joins these

systems tells us that the opposite method holds for each modality too: satori

or enlightenment is available spontaneously in Buddhism, no matter one's level

and degree of practice, and discrete attention is required to actualize energy

for moving among tiers of consciousness.

At the highest level of Buddhism, magic becomes obvious, though it is a

distraction and ruse with mostly potential for spiritual remission at

sublevels, while at the highest level of theosophy, one can engage a guru's

karma if that is their intention.

Dzogchen, considered the ultimate

Buddhist teaching, is literally the primordial essence of all teachings, the

Great Perfection or Completion, not in terms of a final goal but a path through

the ground of our primordial nature.

Dzogchen is as subtle and profound a Mind teaching as Planet Earth

offers. No matter how often you return

to an authentic Dzogchen text, there is always more wisdom under its nuances and

subtexts of words, pouring out the blessings and source luminosity, even in

English translation.

Dzogchen goes to the basis of our

incarnate situation, the big hitters: being, essence, manifestation, space, action,

life and death, karma. Its teachings deliver

these foci through their penetration of the tantra of existence — a mixture of

high philosophy and rigorous practice, which shows how we got here, where and

what this is, and what we have to do in order to achieve self-realization

through a non-discursive state of attention to self-arising forms.

Try telling any of this to the

neuroscientists, behaviorists, and "map is the territory" realists

cited earlier in this book, and they will mostly smirk. It is not part of their collective universe

or agenda; it does not compute.

In an email to me on this text,

reader James Moore observes: "I made a bumpersticker inspired by a Dzogchen teaching of

Padmasambhava's: 'YOUR

MIND — You're Just Imagining It.' Which

makes the crucial distinction between 'mind/thoughts' (which both science and Buddhism

say is an illusion) and awareness of this thought stream, 'the true nature of

mind,' which is a constant. So, our mind

(or whatever stuff we want to talk about) can be an illusion, but the question

then is, 'An illusion to whom, to what level of consciousness or quality of

awareness?' This is the core teaching of Dzogchen, but I'm amazed it isn't more

clearly elucidated in modern Western philosophy, psychology, and science

(probably because it apparently requires a 'leap of faith' to accept this

immeasurable/unquantifiable, yet obviously experienced, awareness)."

Functionalism may propose that subjective mind is an

illusion. Dzogchen teaches to bypass the mind and access

awareness directly, and that while the mind is an illusion, this 'nature of

mind' is not — the luminous awareness inherent in emptiness isn't an illusion (unlike other Eastern

philosophers who state that it's all

an illusion).

Science attempts to define mind in order to

understand nature. Dzogchen considers

that process a tautological feedback loop that muddies the glass through which

humanity is looking for something deeper.

The glass of materialism cannot in fact be cleaned because you cannot

wash matter off matter. Its ultimate

false clarification is to be scrubbed down to nothing but particles — particles

that are so dense and transparent at the same time that they are a de facto dead end.

I will leave it to you to decide

which is a more sophisticated view of consciousness: the one offered by the functionalists

and materialists promoting neuroscience or the Dzogchen approach. They mark the current diametric poles of

human epistemology and the real battlefield of modernity. By comparison the rift between radical Islam

and the West is a passing family squabble about who has bigger guns, more

balls, and is going to kick more ass.

Dzogchen arrives at precisely the

same intersection of transparency and opaquity as science but, recognizing it

at once as a temporary conflation, cleans the glass of material tautologies and

then looks again through its newly subtler rendering. But you can only clean the glass if you

believe in mind as a real portal rather than a bioelectric mishmash of multiple

drafts, a portal wherein the convergence of transparency and density is a view

into something else, real and stable and lucent. If you get misled by extrinsic conflagrations

and fireworks, and interrogate them as if the true reality and profundity, you

never see the dark pool of light through which all self-originating forms pass.

In Dzogchen practice a person must

transcend his or her thinking rational mind and enter Rigpa, "the naked

awareness, within which everything is contained: sensory perception and

phenomenal existence, samsara and nirvana.

This awareness has two aspects: shunyata — emptiness as the absolute, and

appearances or perception as the relative." (ZP5)

This insight is rooted at least a millennium before experimental science

began in earnest though, from the standpoint of the super-sophistication of science,

it is delusional, soft, uneducated, naïve.

Science seeks a map of primordial

nondual reality. Rigpa is primordial nondual awareness in its

seriousness and commitment to a continuity of tough empirical analysis

(interior not external). Once one gains

clarity, one sees that "the essence of mind is empty, spacious and pure

from the beginning, like the open, blue sky; its nature is luminous clarity,

unobstructed and spontaneously present, like the sun with all its warmth and

light; and its energy of manifestation is compassion, unimpeded and all

pervasive, like the rays of the sun that shine on us all

impartially." (ZP6)

This is mind's natural,

unperturbed, nonintellectual, meta-scientific state. It is not an intellectual or even emotional

conceit; it arises from the nature of our being, our heart purity, and our

uncontrived and genuine nature.

From a third position theosophy

delivers a progeny of that same golden sun in a more procedural and operational

manner without the goals of nonattachment or eventual enlightenment. Its point is not to catapult us out of the

messy world that we are in; it is to synchronize and synergize that world with

the higher energies that source and sustain it whether such energies exist or not.

After all, we have our existence and our imagination, and everything

else should be left to destiny and the gods.

We don't have to figure it out because we can't figure it out; we just

have to do our stuff, activate our energies, clear out old pictures; the rest

will take care of itself. We don't have

to find profundity: it finds us; it is

us.

Another difference between

theosophy and Dzogchen practice is that psychic work emphasizes, arguably to

the exclusion or at least demotion of everything else, the energetic

interference of other entities in one's aura, while Buddhism prioritizes one's

own independently originating mind.

What one practices in Dzogchen, by

contrast, is holding to the primordial state without effort or clinging so that

"relative appearances are naturally freed in themselves, where they arise,

and thus there is no need for renunciation." (ZP70)

This is a transparent paragon to which psychic meditation aspires. Maybe.

Suzuki-roshi spoke eloquently on

this: "The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic

ideas. In other words, just practice

zazen in a certain posture. Do not think

about anything. Just remain on your

cushion without expecting anything. Then

eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes

itself…."

The process of relaxing into one's

own nature and experiencing its essential luminosity is fathomless, profound,

and discrete, as reality and phenomena keep splattering the clear sky with distraction,

fuss, and urgency. The unaltered core

beneath this is the key to deepening mind and being.

Although here too I believe that

the teachings and practices crisscross under the surface, it still remains that

the space of Dzogchen and Vajrayana is very clean and empty — literally spacious — and

in the ritual and existential cultivation of that spaciousness you go toward

your own independently originating existence.

By comparison the space of theosophy is ornate and jazzy.

The reason that I think that they

crisscross is that the primordial source energy has only its own origin and

realization of the divine and, whether one identifies it with intruders or

one's own fragmented attention, the diagnosis is the same, and the imperative

is to clear it.

Which method one chooses to practice

depends on which layer of reality and existence one chooses to travel along en

route to the same destination: Dzogchen for silent, deepening awareness en

route to transcendence, theosophy for playing with and being played with by the

world's energies in hope that enlightenment or its equivalent will work itself

out because the universe is bonded to a singular resolution. Dzogchen says, "It's a bear and a

bitch, so go to it." Theosophy

says, "It's a bear and a bitch but "ooo-eee,/ooo-eee

baby,/let me come and take you on a/sea cruise." Both are meant to be practiced in and among

ordinary life while observing simutaneously the arts of family, householding,

gainful labor, and social service.

Neither is in principle monastic.

Dzogchen cuts through the paradox

of why, if we are born out of creation itself — out of spirit, out of enlightened

and divine being — we should be in such a fix and have to bother to practice so

hard just to get by, let alone find any comfort, let alone become sane, let

alone enlightened; or, for that matter, why it should make any difference what

we do, since it is all divine — or inversely, if we are not born divine and have to practice and train with great

difficulty to attain transcendence, what's the point and how can matter

cultivate in itself a quality which is not inherent and innate (plus what if we

are just zombies anyway, with mere illusions of consciousness, mind, and

compassionate action)?

"Let's say that I have just

died," Tsoknyi Rinpoche proposes.

"The particular type of group dreaming I shall now join — whether it

is a hell group or a hungry ghost group or a group of celestial beings is

entirely dependent upon the karmic phenomena that I have created earlier…. Once…I am pushed in [a] direction by

karma…the karma begins ripening. I start

to experience that type of scenery, and at that point, even if I change my mind

and think, 'I don't want to be here any longer,' it would be difficult to shift

dreams. Why? Because it is ripening; it is

happening…..

"Without understanding this

important point, you may be uncertain as to what those realms actually

are. Dependent origination and karmic

experience are very central to the reality of what we are, and they are

interconnected."

Something more profound than

everything lies at our base and is unfolding through our lives and awareness to

its own fruition. Such is, in effect,

our situation on Earth and why this so-called life "illusion" can't be

dismissed or just popped like a bubble.

We are still ripening.

As noted above, a major difference

between Buddhism and theosophy is that theosophy does not have enlightenment as

its primary operative strategy.

Enlightenment or even fortuitous reincarnations are not, in its terms,

the supreme or only goals of the universe.

We do not know what the goals of the universe are, but they may well

comprise stuff far from enlightenment or an intention toward it. From this perspective, enlightenment is a

particular agenda about which the universe has not yet commented yea or

nay. The goal itelf is, in part, an

attempt to control reality and claim confidential knowledge of the universe's

agenda.

Enlightenment has been such an

automatic construct and paragon in Buddhist and even New Age systems that it

almost never deconstructed outside of the terms of its proposition, but one

might consider for a moment that enlightenment roughly means particularly

leaving this state of awareness, this frequency of self-reflective ego

consciousness along one track of time (unidirectionality) and entering timeless

nondual awareness.

But if that is the goal, what about

the paradox that timeless nondual being has somehow and to some purpose chosen

to manifest in the dual space of personal desire and the human individuality

homing frequency? Why? Why has spiritual energy has chosen to

constrain identity within subjective containers of stably fixed personal

experience, to create the human platform: "a whole universe of physical,

emotional and mental contrasts which arise when we think of ourselves as

separate beings and we think of everything outside the boundary of our skin as

utterly outside our self"?

John Friedlander thinks it worth

considering that the pursuit of enlightenment and the tantric practices used

for attaining it may rub out certain filters that are meant to be there. They

are meant to be there for reasons that are concealed within the universe's

arcanum, its undisclosed plan, so one shouldn't automatically presume the

opposite: that removing them is prime and ultimate goal of existence.

What is enlightenment anyway? In a literal sense it is "light"-a

state of being immersed primordial-ground light, a taming of mind so it becomes

illuminated from within-ontological luminosity.

But this is naked awareness, not enlightenment as such. I would suggest

that naked awareness is a powerful enough goal in itself without the prize of

enlightenment, though in either case these are words for something else.

In John's terms enlightenment is simply the removal of

Etheric filters; it is a technical issue of practice. He says:

"As a result of thousands of years

of ego development described I the last chapter, our Etheric body contains

filters that create a pause of self-reflection between our experience and our

interpretation of that experience. That pause of self-reflection and our

subsequent individualized interpretation of our experience gives our experience

a resonance, a folding back on itself that most other consciousnesses don't

have. This is humans' unique contribution to the universe.

"Our bodies and the psychic underpinnings are like virtual

reality goggles that create the perception and suggest the sense of me and not

me, self and other. When a person becomes enlightened he or she changes her

Etheric body and removes the filters that have created the apparent sense of a

self utterly distinct from others. This removal of the filters takes enormous

power and focus. Often practitioners seeking enlightenment will undergo years

and even lifetimes of discipline cultivating good character to the point of

sainthood.

"As

a result, many enlightened beings are also saintly. But saintliness is not a

requirement. Etheric filters can be

shattered by intense esoteric practices without the person's developing

emotional or mental maturity….

"In

and of itself, enlightenment says nothing about the state of the enlightened

beings' emotional clarity or mental wisdom."

That is certainly the case, as (for

instance) Chögyam Trunga showed that it was possible to be enlightened and an

alcoholic too, and other enlightenened masters, almost certainly legitimate,

were pederasts, pedophiles, gluttons, and many other human things. Enlightenment is a state, a frequency, an

enhanced mode of being, but it is not the

state of perfection and infallibility; it is not the end of all growth, personal

or otherwise, nor is it the ultimate goal of the universe. The universe is working on a vaster fabric of

which enlightenment is one of the baseline threads.

From a more pedestrian theosophical

viewpoint, enlightenment entails a capacity to travel among planes unimpeded,

hence to enjoy Astral, Causal, Buddhic, Atmic, and Monadic zones; to experience

their colorations of reality as familiar on their own terms; to be able to

navigate transdimensional geographies; and of course to achieve the Adi, home

source of "enlight," eventually to get to realms beyond the Adi in

some form.

John puts it this way:

"Theosophy's aims are radically

different. Theosophy explores a universe of evolution without end. Of course

the ground of being, that simple sense of being comprising non-dual awareness,

is the ground of being for all consciousness and for all evolution. Non-dual

reality is the unchanging ground to which nothing can be added or taken away. But

Theosophy explores another direction, the direction of perpetual evolution. Using

an appealing straightforward structural model, the Victorian Theosophists

redirected the mystical quest into a businesslike engagement of the world….

"In Theosophy, the soul is the

center of human life. The soul, in Theosophical terms, is that eternal gestalt

that puts down an incarnation into physical reality, learns from it, moves to

its next incarnation, and learns from it. Through a linear series of

incarnations, the soul (and deeper aspects still) achieve mastership rather

than enlightenment. No mention is made of non-dual awareness. Instead the

excitement is focused on ever greater kindness and generosity, and on an ever

greater objective impeccability (more like the evolutionary chain of angels

rather than humans)."

Enlightenment is a nonchoice in

theosophy only because it is outside the system. There is no abstract heaven or domain beyond

gradations of energies and their vibrational expressions. There is no rulebook or scheme of

prerequisites for final karmic graduation. Everything is more complicated,

entangled, enigmatic, and emergent than the goal of transcendence, or any goal,

allows. There is spacious awareness without enlightenment: the Great Dance.

We have no way to get off the board

because there is no board; there is only energy changing. Truly enlightened teachers of all traditions

teach this too of course, but many Buddhists, like Catholics, still yearn to

get out of here with their teachers and chums and go to that chimerically

eternal better place-the Heaven or Nirvana where all these troubles and

reversals cease and spaciousness extends forever.

Mythical enlightened beings such as

the Hindu yoga-saint Babaji or the the figure behind indigenous American

Trickster Coyote, are said to incarnate, to descend repeatedly onto the

Physical plane anew and to take on a working simulacrum of their original

cellular-genetic body at will.

Ostensibly they can also, if summoned or so moved, travel here in an

Astral body, a Mental body, a Monadic body.

And while such entities are in the process of continual shape-changing,

enlightenment is on hold, though they could go there too, vamoose from this

planet for good. Maybe by now they have.

From one metaphysical perspective

we have lives at all because there was nothing else to do with eternity. Time exists as an expression of energy, as

there is no exogenous way otherwise to individuate and transmit soul and

attention. From a cosmological

standpoint, time is a contrivance to create cosmology. Sequentiality flows oneway because we are

inside something, and that something appears to us as a moving

temporality. All creatures are clocks,

traveling motionlessly on a swift river that goes only one way, no return

possible. All life is subject to birth,

maturation, decay, and cessation.

Inanimate matter is chugging along with us: you cannot smash an asteroid

(or a piece of china) and then turn it around such that it flows back into its

precise prior state.

In this zone we are born, mature,

grow old, and pass-in time only. Then

amnesia wipes out the workings and works of time. Only it is not amnesia; it is a deeper and

more indelible memory.

Time is a tautology and a

contradiction. To become enlightened is to be annihilated. To be annihilated is to lose individuality:

individuated consciousness merges with cosmic consciousness. Since that greater consciousness field is

eternal, changeless, and outside chronology, you are extricated from samsara

and leave time.

But to where, from the standpoint

of consciousness? If being enlightened

is getting off the roller-coaster, where does one arrive from there?

Eternal bliss is a dangerous

proposition, while total emptiness can sound a lot like a functional

materialist's view of death as obliteration and eternal dreamless sleep.

Plus, how is the cosmic

consciousness of enlightenment different from the primordial empty state in

which reality and existence originated in the first place? The Big Bang!

Is the goal simply to travel from

original mind through rough country back to original mind? Transparency into matter into transparency?

But there is another way to look at

time and its obliteration. Time can be

cosmological filler at one level and fall away at another so that all events in

time are full (event-full) but simultaneous and synchronous.

Seth explains through Jane Roberts:

"When I tell you that

you lived in 1836, I say this because it makes sense to you now. You live all your reincarnations at once, but

you find this difficult to understand."

He says, "You lived in 1836," but he means, "You live in 1836."

Suzuki Roshi speaks similarly from a Buddhist chord: "We

are always here. Do you understand? You think before you were born you were not

here. But how is it possible for you to

appear in this world, when there is no you?

Because you are already there, you can appear in the world. Also, it is not possible for something to

vanish which does not exist. Because

something is there, something can vanish.

You may think that when you die, you disappear, you longer exist. But even though you vanish, something which

is existent cannot be non-existent. That

is the magic."

The resolution to this koan-the

ultimate fate of consciousness, root and ground nature — is in the heart, beyond

dichtomies and dialectics of the mind.

Buddhist and psychic lineages have

roots in different ranges of the shamanic tradition. Buddhism models the inner, contemplative

aspect of shamanism, whereas theosophy is a ritual, symbolic version of

shamanism, retaining its ancient tool kit spontaneous healing, precognition,

remote viewing, tekekinesis, and telepathy but adding a modern psychological

and metaphysical strategy.

In this light, one can try to

capture a glimmer of a pancultural North American Indian world-view which

recognizes the individuality and awareness of Sun and Moon and Earth and of the

archetypal totemic basis of animal species.

It goes something like: the universe is a great dream in which warriors,

gods, and totem spirits pour together.

The landscape into which the European colonials sailed and then hacked

was a Dreamtime in timeless cyclical continuum-Penobscot and Pawnee, Miwok and

Chickasaw, Tlingit and Hopi. The

invaders drove the indigenous mindedness off the land because they saw it as

actual land, real estate inside time. In

the process, they forced the habitants out of the dream. By introducing noncyclical, secular time,

they shattered the ceremony and drove the spirits away.

America's native people didn't get

it at all when the White Guys arrived in giant sailing vessels from beyond the

Great Water with their deeds and flags, medals and gerunds. They could not wrap their minds around the

concept. They did not see the scam

coming because its premise was so incongruous to them — that someone could show

up and claim their ancestral territory, a sacred zone in which they had dwelled

and hunted for generations immemorial, whose every hectare they had committed

to memory, space which had been given them by gods, totems they had defended

against intruders for timeless time — that someone else could seize it in the

name of a mere Idea and then hold it with muskets and cannons and a willingness

to act at all times without morality, honor, or compassion. Law is a strange clan god indeed, but a god

nonetheless. The natives never got it,

and so they were dispossessed, by the Word.

They put everything at stake in the ceremony and the dream, and that was

not necessarily wrong, though they lost the battle on this plane and in this

reality, for now.

The fact is, the realm they

discovered and inhabited is still here and continues to lean on us and our

consciousness and must be encountered before the bigger game is up.

For the Asian Buddhist, who shares

shamanic ancestors with the North American natives, the bardo waking dream was

subtilized into deeper layers of aware being.

But that was after Hindu influences arrived from India, and those other

"Indians" were long vanished, to new lands, where they enacted the

Dreamtime in another plane, its warriorship, buffalo, coups, medicine bundles,

scalpings, and vision quests-sacred and numinous acts that the Westerners

coming around the planet the other way misperceived as pagan primitivisms.

When Buddhists arrived in Arizona

in 1974, coming from the ancestral East, Tibetan Kagyu Karmapa and Hopi clan chief

brought the shamanisms and dialects back together. In the words of an observer:

"It was early to mid afternoon

in the 100-degree range as the big car, a gold-colored Cadillac, began to

gradually spiral its way from the desert floor around and around this

mountain-like mound of dry and dusty soil which was Mesa 2. As soon as we arrived at the top of the mesa,

His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, emerged from the car

and was greeted by a short, wiry, and weather-beaten Chief Ned, who was

probably in his late seventies. The Hopi

chief was clad in dusty Levis, an old plaid short, and worn-out snakers. In spite of the terrible hardships that had

befallen the Hopis, here stood a man, a chief who, while showing signs of being

worn out and downtrodden, possessed dignity and presence.

"His Holiness asked the chief

how things were to which he replied, 'Not so good.' The chief explained that no rain had fallen

in seventy-five consecutive days and the crops were failing, creating enormous hardships

not only for his tribe but for others as well.

His Holiness's response was swift and immediate. From his face there arose and radiated a

great wave of compassion. His Holiness

promised Chief Ned that he would pray for the chief and the rest of the

Hopis. What followed was a special

invitation from the chief to Holiness and his small entourage of five or so to

enter the Hopis' sacred kiva. Afterwards

there was a brief but warm farewall between Chief Ned and His Holiness.

"The Karmapa returned to the

front passenger seat of the Cadillac and we began a gradual descept under a

horizon-to-horizon spotless clear blue sky.

We were hardly two-thirds of the way winding around and down the mesa

when His Holiness began to recite a particular puja. A noticeable stillness ensued and with it a

sense that we were circumambulating this mesa.

We reached the desert floor and continued on a forty-minute ride to the

eventual destination, a motel convention center.

"It was during those forty

minutes that I witnessed nothing short of sheer magic. For as His Holiness continued the puja, I

watched in wonder and amazement at the unfolding of a magically sped-up

transformation of a clear blue sky into something else. This miraculous display easily upstaged the

scene in the Cecil B. DeMille film The

Ten Commandments of the sky above Moses as he parted the Red Sea. The Hopis had lost their siddhi for

rainmaking…." The Karmapa was

bringing it back from the East, the homeland, as there was still enough shared

chanting energy to allow a psychic correction en route. It was the Hopis who made the rain, but it

was the Karmapa who supplied the reconciliation of notes.

"I alternated between driving

and watching, transfixed by something quite unbelievable, namely this stage-by-stage,

magically time-enhanced transformation of a clear blue sky into a solid

steel-gray-and-black colored-sky that was actually quite frightening to look

at. It is challenging to behold such an

intense level of concentrated, rapidly magnetized energy so suddenly made

manifest from something seemingly empty."

Here shamanic manifestation meets

psychic manifestation and magical invocatio and both meet transparency and

spaciousness: the universe is revealed in its Unity Basis as one perfectly,

subtly unfolding logic and nature. There

is no actual discrepancy between naked mindful awareness and self-creating

reality, between compassion and energy, between fullness and emptiness, between

Eastern and Western or either and Indigenous branches of shamanism.

Another way of posing the

difference between Buddhism and the various schools of theosophy is that

Buddhism begins from the premise that this isn't real — this manifestation — and

then works toward understanding it and participating productively in it because

something is real. Theosophy begins from the premise that this is real, this whole creation, and then

works toward understanding it and participating productively in it with the

goal of encompassing its entire contingent energetic manifestation. Both try to wake us up by screaming:

"Look at this. No, I mean really

look at this. No, you don't

understand. Really this! It is subtler, deeper, more deceptive, more

incredible, more poignant than you grasp.

Wake up. Look, damnit! It is absolutely beautiful and

mysterious. Life is. Mind is.

Being is. And there is more. Even more.

And then there is even more."

Find the spot where 'This is real'

is the same as 'This is not real,' and hold it.

This is a very subtle fulcrum on which to balance because 'this is real'

goes to the root of all that is; and 'this is not real' also goes to the root

of all that is — all that is, ever was, or will be; everything you have, ever

had, or are going to have. The way in

which both are simultaneously valid and, more than valid — essential, and

essential to maintain nondually-is the yoga of life. It is a sublime and existential yoga, an

Eternal Object undercurrent, and it imposes its posture at every moment, and

asks you to meet and maintain it. That

is where Buddhism and theosophy embrace.

When I recited koan of 'this is

real and this is not real' to John, he remarked that he had thought the

identical thing but as follows: "It is better to experience our existence

as unreal and meaningful than to experience it as real and

meaningless." I love it. One can swing on that jungle gym too as with

every lurch from bar to bar, the same ones back and forth, it gets deeper: real

but meaningless (science), unreal but meaningful (Buddhism). "Unreal and meaningless" qua

"real and meaningful" is equally profound in that it may add nothing

to the original pair but it also takes nothing away.

In the tension between 'this is

real and I know it is real and not only real but really profound and

fathomless' and 'this is not real but an ecstatic mirage and not real in an

unimaginably profound way,' an exquitely subtle reality arises. Your mission — and it is too late to decide

whether you should wish to accept it or not — is to fuse the two views into one,

an epiphany that cradles the universe (and your being) in its bottomless

catacombs.

In moments of involvement in life

as it is, we experience a kind of euphoria out of which an emanation radiates

through those catacombs at every deepening and telescoping and microscoping

layer such that the whole enigma of existence-at-all, of universe via starry

corridor and raucous carnival, fills with the light of our own immaculate

being, our inexplicable pinpoint of "I" from which we radiate and

suffuse into said catacombs of universe (and self). Then 'this is real' is commensurate and

inextricable to 'this is not real': simultaneous halves of a paradox dunking us

in wonderment and horror both, a mutating, shifting, sensation of astonishment,

exuberance, reverence, and shock-because it is all and only matter and we are

matter too, as we resonate together in an unknown vulnerable space on the

precipice of an utter and unknowable abyss.

And at each moment, you silently

chant to yourself: "This is real.

Get it. This is real. But this isn't real. It can't be real." Not only because it isn't real but because

there is another context, another context for anything, and everything, and

once you get it, you light it, at least momentarily, with the realization that

every moment and thing in the universe is absolutely incredibly, insanely

perfect — magnificent, unprecedented, exquisite, beyond reckoning or

explanation — inextricable, irreconcilable, indispensable, imperative,

eternal — and here you are.

(BTW I don't think that this is the

kind of stuff that zombies can do or be programmed to do, but I could be

wrong. Perhaps someone has written two

very subtle programs-Theosophy 3.0 and Buddhism 3.0. Either way, I think it is fine to run both of

them together and let Zombie and Dzogchen chips fall where they may.)

Possibly no condition of our

present Piscean incarnation is more subject to Aquarian metamorphosis than our

way of dying. At death the material

corpus that we carry around as ourselves turns into a corpse and is abandoned

by the Self and the Soul (wherever they go).

It beyond doubt is left to molder and dissipate, its corpuscles,

membranes, and matrices lost as such.

The Soul, if it exists, takes with it the luminosity and essence of the

body's experience, but it forfeits something in the process. "There's something that's lost," John

Friedlander posits, "when you leave your body behind." He recommends careful study and practice of the

Rainbow Body, an echelon previously reserved for high priests, Kriya yogis, and

Vajrayana lamas. If people cultivated a

different attention, they might be able to leave here by way of the Rainbow

Body, converting flesh into light and preserving crucial information stored in

it at subtle levels. All unscathed

experience is used in Creation's memory structure, beyond neurons, hard drives,

and ganglionic centers.

"The Atmic is probably the

plane that is involved in learning how to exit life in the Rainbow Body,"

John intuits, "in other words rather than dying in the way that almost all

of us currently do, you simply transition, turning the cells of your body into

light…. You transition into a different

energy level…. That might be the

preferred way of moving to your next spiritual step…. It is a great individual

and group blessing…for people to learn to take their body with them as

energy."

A Rainbow Body begins as a Physical

papyrus of condensed light and neurons and personality engrams which burst into

aura sheaths and dissolve into the Greater Cosmos like dew without losing their

essence. Without Rainbow resurrection we

can't find the gateway, we don't see the corridors or portals, for instance by

which that little snake in the driveway got into this zone, now skitters across

the gravel, looking here and there for passages through the dimension.

Tibetan lamas study and train for a

lifetime (or more) to design their memory structure for continuity into a next

life-they try to hold onto enough meaning and karmic structure to join the

beads on the string, not in a science-fiction sense of assembly-line ghola

clones of themselves but in the actual process that the structure of

consciousness allows.

However, John says, that does not

mean that all of the rest of us can't play or are not in the same game. It

is the game at hand. We may not be

nearly as good at karmic continuity as a Tibetan lama because we do not train

it fifty thousand times, and we do not have the same stake in eligibility or

primogeniture, but we are working with the same rulebook, the same cellular

storage structure, the same Akashic record, an identical DNA-based gossamer

Rainbow-Cellular frozen-light carapace with an innate karmic carryover

regime. We don't reincarnate like them,

but we eventually ford the same river to come upon the same ghost

terrains. How could we not?

Referencing the spirit Seth, he

proposes that our memory structure and ego existence after this life may not be

exactly what is traditionally proposed or whgat we would choose or expect, but

we will probably consider in the end that the universe has given us a fair

shake.

A cellular-light body impregnated

with a neural network coiled into a storage and ganglion is a temporal

repository for the Soul or essential being.

The Flower of Life vehicle of transformation, the theosophical instrument

for psychic continuity is of pretty much the same vintage as the Hindu and

Buddhist one — how to get out of this realm and body in relative good shape and

continue the journey.

Since we each inherit a Rainbow

Body, we also can exchange it back into light, not as psychic acrobats but as

ourselves. If Aquarian prophecy bears

out, we should see more of this practice, and not just from lamas, by the

middle of the twenty-first century.

Sometimes in a chi gung class when I am asked to make myself light and cleanse my

bones with chi energy, I feel cosmic

stuff pouring down through my crown chakra into my tan-tien, torpedoing through the bottoms of my feet into the

earth. I feel that this is what I am

made of, how my density was fashioned — that I am yawing back to an original

energetic state, to light itself, imagining and cultivating that sensibility

not only in my mind but in my cells.

I feel it

briefly; then the feeling passes.

This is our greatest secret as well

as our most imposing shadow. We were

once energy bodies, and we can be energy bodies again; it's that simple, that

not-simple.

You don't have to be a lama

targeting a rebirth to participate in your own high energies and transits of

creation or to imprint your knowledge, internalizations, and experiences into

the fabric of creation. "Rebirth by

lama" is just one style. Buddhist

practice may valorize its catechism, but the universe itself is not privileging

or honoring only certain tickets of admission.

Everything happens, everything works, as what it is.

*Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

*A Michigan

resident teaching in Cincinnati, John joked that the happiness he was talking

about was something a bit more substantial than "Michigan beats Ohio

State," to which a voice in the audience called,"Now that's a

fantasy!" I am reminded too of

Robert Penn Warren in All the Kings' Men:

"Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time

back, we had been happy? Was our

happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the

moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light

from faraway." (226) The

psychic entendre of RPW's merely

existential metaphor radiates at multiple levels throughout my entire book.