Shared Presence Bodhisattvas
Presented on: Thursday, September 15, 1994
Presented by: Roger Weir
A New Aion: Four Talks On Our Once and Future Wholeness
Presentation 2 of 4
Shared Presence Bodhisattvas
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 15, 1994
Given at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore, West Hollywood, California
Transcript:
This is the second lecture in a series of four. These constitute a memorial to my daughter who died last year at this time. The nature of this particular series is to bring into play a series with phases of ideas that Ive been working on for about forty years.
Last week we talked about the peculiar nature of Hellenistic Judaism, of how Alexander the Great had brought together a vision, largely inspired when he was a teenager by his teacher, Aristotle. His teacher had studied that vision from his teacher; and Aristotles teacher was Plato. And Plato had gotten it from his teacher, Socrates. And Socrates had learned it from his teacher; and his teacher was a woman named Diotima. And Diotima was a Pythagorean. She was a member of that mystical esoteric community of people who for ten generations after the death and life of Pythagoras kept alive a lineage of esoteric Philosophic community.
So Alexander the Great received an ongoing lineage, which owed its original dynamic to the person and the genius of Pythagoras. Pythagoras distilled it from the Egyptians and from the Persians; he studied for 22 years in Egypt. He studied for 11 years in Persia. And these Egyptian-Iranian vectors, in a tensor combination produced in Pythagoras a radical change of mind.
The radical change proceeded for at least 100 years. The Greek genius had sought to find an ultimate substance of which the universe was consisted. What was the ultimate substance? If we find that, we will then know what everything else is. The radical change with Pythagoras was that he stopped looking for a substance and began to understand that what is fundamentally real in this universe is relationality. Number ratios that constitute gestalts of wholeness are what are ultimately real; and not things.
That elements, no matter how subtle they are, are not the ultimate foundation. Relationality that could only be seen in the wholeness of the mind are the fundamental substrate of what is true. And the Pythagoreans called these people who could see in this way, Mathematici (Mathetes) from which we get the term mathematics, those whose minds are ratio-nally Operative. Those who com-prehend. Those who see by composing form consciously; in proportion to a whole. Those who have an integral mind where Nature, by symbol and idea, is proportional to a larger whole, a complementarity with differential consciousness. They then, live in this Real.
We saw that the discipline of beginning to understand how to allow the mind space enough to see with these mathematical relationships, required a silencing of worldly habitual pointing-to-a-thing language. That the talk which we use to characterize the world is largely one of cultural habituation to believing only in an object-ive substrate of things.
We have to learn to stop talking that talk, cease at least temporarily, to use that language. So for five years the initial population in a Pythagorean community were enjoined to silence. They were called acousmatici, those who are able to hear (acoustic) yet are enjoined not to speak; the better to create that space of mind wherein the ratios of the real could be perceived. I use this phrase specifically new: ratios of the real. It is characteristic of my style, an exacting expression in a new syntax, grammar and vocabulary of word and phrase. My language here, in these presentations is my own new development of Differentially conscious English.
Such dynamic-gestalt forms became the new radical norm in Greek thought with Pythagoras. But so new was this that it did not take hold for a long time. We know today, by the late 20th century, that it takes a full 150 years for an idea to mature so that it can be used by men and women in a general life way. That from the time of some one individual conceiving a new idea in their mind, to its use by a large population of men and women is about 150 years.
Pythagoras flourished somewhere around 500 BC and Alexander the Great comes into the world about 150 years later. And in the 350s BC, when Alexander the Great came in, he was the first person of that generation who looked upon this idea as something that they could bring into practical being. Alexander the Greats personality was stylized by the need to be the Divine conqueror, to bring this visionary idea into play; not an ideal: an idea whose time had come.
But it required a new kind of humanity. It required a humanity that could transcend traditional geographical cultures and their mythic image bases, no matter how blissful. Lotus eating is a snare. And the only way to engender a new people was to found a new city, where no city had been before. To populate that city by bringing people together from all over the known world. Populating that city were those pioneers of a new Vision. Immigrants from all over the world. Now, you recognize Alexandria, being a pioneer city of this vision of a new kind of mankind (it was called the Oikoumene) that Alexandria, when it was founded some 332 years BC, reappears in History almost 2000 years later as the idea of the United States. Not the constitutional republic so much, but what I call Hermetic America. Mankind as one under God, within a divine vision and a humane conscious loving.
The United States of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln is a re-creation on a large scale, a continental scale, of what Alexandria was as an original urban center.
The remaking of the Oikoumene, of a people who are free from any particular culture, who see the world in terms of many cultures at the same time. Allowing themselves a civilized freedom to be able to entertain ideas that are new, have never been visioned before. Citizens like Thoreau and Whitman, Wallace Stevens and Frank Lloyd Wright, and those of us still working at it.
We saw that the population of people in Alexandria who made the greatest use of this were not the Greeks but the Jews. The Greeks became international throughout the Mediterranean, but the Hellenistic Jews became the most international people in the city of Alexandria. And out of that population, we saw that the most outstanding teacher of the time, the time of Augustus Caesar, the time of Tiberius Caesar, in that time period, was the individual who comes down to us rarely as historical or personal: Jesus, a Hellenistic Jew who visioned and taught the radical new mind. His was the transform vision from earth-bound habit to conscious spirit, person prismed to live in the entire Cosmos. Man at home in Heaven, again.
Yet he took it a step further. Understood that if individual elements object things are not the ultimate reality, then the perceiver of the reality also has to be changed. That the person must be changed; the person cannot be some kind of static thing. The person cannot be a simplistic cultural role.
For if the universe is truly alive with the ratios of the real in dynamic movement, then the person also must be a very mysterious dynamic. And we ourselves must be some kind of ultimate indexing of the highest speed of the dynamic gestalts of this universe. But that that quality of character needs to be discovered, transformed, released, liberated, saved in a sense, saved from its own ignorance, saved from its own old conceit that it is a thing to be had. And other people are things and that the only thing to do is to have things for oneself. And that this whole ensemble of ideas, the regard of habituation dead ends had to be, lets say it, thrown away, tossed out, changed radically. Like tossing out money changers from the Temple.
And so last week we looked at Jesus in Alexandria, that kind of brilliant radical transformative teacher. Now we look at something even more amazing this week. It is the incredible influence of that Hellenistic-Jewish Ecumenical- Alexandrian outlook as it traveled back to the East, in particular to India where it influenced in a way its most radical thought of the day. India, where it changed forever the nature of the most powerful current of thought in India of that time: Buddhism. The Mahayana has a measure of Hellenistic-Judaism; and is a relative of Early Christianity.
And the evidence, just like the evidence for Jesus in Alexandria is enormously dispersed; widespread, because it is not there as something to find: but there as dynamic gestalts to recognize.
And one has to train oneself for a long time to develop a taste for that subtle elusive reality. A kind of Pythagorean taste, a quality of letting the mind settle enough so that it discloses the ratios of the real, rather than grabs for something substantive. That anything that can be grabbed substantially is in fact in terms of the universe, temporary, conditioned and ultimately unreal. All things must change. It was something before, it will be something yet again, later on, constantly changing, constantly in flux. But what doesnt change are the mathematical ratios of the real. Those gestalts of wholeness which are unconditioned and which occur, not as extant objects, but occur as self extant realities. Or better, occur as emergent possibilities of complementarities.
Let us come back for just a moment. This is a big order, this is a fantastic idea. How is it that Hellenistic Judaism changes Buddhism? And what is it that happens? The traditional name for what happens is that Buddhism changed to the Mahayana, the Great Vehicle. And the characteristic idea in the Mahayana is the Bodhisattva.
We know, from at least three or four very accurate historians, that Alexander the Great went to India with his whole army, his whole entourage; with his Oikumene. There are archeological sights where the Greek camps dug deep wells: where they made fortifications. They set up an empire, Greek kingdoms that survived for centuries in India. The Greeks in India were there for centuries from around 300 BC on.
We know too that the Romans developed certain extended trading outposts in India, largely on the far coast of south India across from what is today Sri Lanka, and actually sent an outpost as far as Viet Nam. We know that the Greeks established for themselves outposts in northern India and trading posts along the western side of India, all the way down to the Malabar Coast.
We know this because there is a classic Greek travel book about travel from Egypt to India written about 100 AD. It covers the entire route from Egypt down the Red Sea, out into the Arabian Sea, along the coast, and a special cut off across the Indian Ocean, which was discovered in 50 BC by a Greek sailor named Harapolis, down the Indian Coast, and around as far as Ceylon: Taprobani is what it was called in ancient Roman times. We know too that in all that time, from 300 BC until at least 50 AD, in those 350 years Buddhism was little changed. The Mahajana is not specifically a creek Buddhism per se.
Buddhism was already, in itself, a radical restructuring of the ancient India way of life. The pattern which was there in the Vedas, the pattern which had been even brought into essential wisdom in the Upanishads was nevertheless unchanged: Distilled but not transformed. That Buddhism which had revised that old Hindu life, by the Buddha who was a contemporary of Pythagoras, was a trusty method which distilled ancient yoga.
One of the key documents in the collection of the Buddhist sacred books (the earliest collection of the Buddhist sacred books from the original Theravada) is the last book in that collection called The Questions of King Milinda. Now the people in Ceylon spoke another language called Pali which used a southern accent to pronounce Sanskrit (or the Magadi dialect of the Buddha). And Milinda, in that southern accent, is actually the Southern pronunciation of Menander. And so theyre the questions of King Menander, a Greek king whos fortress was in Segala, in the center of North West India known as Gandhara. For several hundred years the Greeks were kings there. And at one time this Menander, who was philosophically trained in the classic Platonic Greek tradition was able to out argue all the Buddhists in the neighborhood. Finally a very sophisticated special Buddhist monk, Nagasena, was sent to him; to not only answer his questions, but to show him the superiority of Buddhist thought.
The Questions of King Milinda dates from about 150 BC. And we know that the last editions of The Questions of King Milinda were added about 1 AD, the complete book of The Questions of King Milinda show Buddhism intact straight from the Buddha; had never changed.
And yet 90 years later, by 90 AD a monumental radical new Buddhism was introduced by a sophisticated monk named Ashvaghosha. And the title of his book is The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. Its the first time the Mahayana is talked about as a world vision Oikoumene able to be actually reached by men and women by a radical practice of transformation within, both individually and collectively. Founded in faith (Pistis, Shraddha). That not this, but suchness (Tathata) was Real. As real as Shunyata (emptiness, void, zero, perfectly gone). Together they constitute a tau/te complementarity set.
But whats peculiar about the Mahayana at its very beginnings and Ashvaghoshas book is the talk all about awakening Faith in the Mahayana, Shraddopada, the way of Faith. One of the aspects thats characteristic of classic Buddhism is that Faith is a useless conditioned quality like crossing your fingers; that analysis leads to emancipation. Analysis not faith. But in Ashvaghosha, the entire genius of Buddhist analysis is trained upon Shraddha, upon awakening Faith. And its a technique of using (in mathematics its called recursive), a rebounding kind of analysis, a fractal excursus upon an originating instance.
Instead of just going on with an analysis, let it also reflect back upon its own origin. So instead of just further developing a thought, one throws the whole genius of thought back upon its own basis, its axioms, its original rules. So that one begins to see into the accumulative nature of the problem. The nature of the very language, and not to look for further answers so much, but looking to reformulate solution in terms of a more accurate reality. Penetrating appearance to accumulate the treasure of exact resolution.
And so Ashvaghoshas book about 90 AD is all about looking truer with depth quality of Faith, into Shraddha. We find there disclosed, a subtle transform that had not been seen before. A gestalt not seen hitherto, a ratio of the Real. Mathematically certain, and can be proved to be so.
Now what were talking about today, is something which was developed during the 100 years after Ashvaghosha, after his little book on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. His students, the next generations, began to wonder about a very crucial happening in the life of the Buddha before his enlightenment. The question was this: when the Buddha went off on his own in the middle of the night, his only companion was his trusted household servant Channa. Channa and the wonderful horse that his father had given him. He went off to be a mendicant, to study under one yogi after another for seven years, until he finally just decimated his ignorance as well as his emaciated body and wrung-out mind.
In doing so, he had left behind a wife and a small son, an infant son. His wifes name was Yasudara. Now Rahula, his son, later on became a Buddhist, became a mendicant; but Yasudara died heart broken. And her final question, which was never answered in classical Buddhism: if this is the Dharma that the universe sustains, am I exempted from that Dharma and thrown away, for my heart is broken, by husband is taken, our family is decimated, the royal lineage is ended and I am left empty handed, empty hearted life, broken to death.
Thus the Buddha is justified, even his son is justified; but his wife, Yasudara, her misery is something left un-addressed and unanswered to this day. And, as we will appreciate later, it is also about Mary Magdalene and her disgraceful dismissal from Christianity, from the life and person of Jesus.
And so what were talking about tonight, what I call Shared Presence Bodhisattvas, is brought into play, in part, by Yasudaras death, by her disappointment, by her fractured reality. For if the Dharma of enlightenment is only sufficient to justify the Buddha, or his son or sons (Sangha); if we can throw away someone like Yasudara, then this is a Dharma not worth having. This is an enlightenment that should be forgone. A new Buddhism is called forth. Beyond all monks and priests are Shared Presence Bodhisattvas. Yet to come; surely coming.
And indeed, at the very core of Ashvaghoshas book, The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, is the introduction of a new kind of being, a new kind of human helper, a new kind of healer called the Bodhisattva; that healer, that helper, who refuses to have enlightenment for himself until all other beings are ushered into enlightenment before him, guarantee that not only Yasudara and her like reach enlightenment before one will accept it for oneself: but all sentient beings in the entire Cosmos. Only then is justification rendered complete.
So that the issue of the left over wife of the Buddha becomes developed after six hundred years into this full blown realization, this idea of the Bodhisattva. The Bodhisattva carries then a double (or paired) vector (its called a tensor in mathematics), carries a tensor which involves not only wisdom, but compassion. A tensor of Prajna and Karuna (Wisdom and Love). High Dharma is not single gender selfish. Nor disregarding of women as a distinct humanity, differentially capable of developing variations of Presence, Tathata, Suchness to be shortshrifted any longer. Wisdom without a matching compassion, without this as a vector pair to tensor together, is not an enlightenment that one would accept on the highest levels. The virgin monks and priests must be rejected in the great western paradise, Sukhavati. There all must educate themselves and each the other to learn our High Dharma.
Seeds of this were introduced into India, in this book: The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana around 90 AD; and in fact caused a sensation at the time.
How does it happen that in those 90 years between the last edition of the questions of King Milinda and the book of Asvaghosha, The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, how is it that in those four generations this radical new idea of the Boddhisattva, the emphasis of recursively directing analysis to Faith as the unlocking key for a salvation vehicle, form? How does this come to be?
Right in the middle of those 90 years is 41 AD and thats when St. Didymos Judas Thomas (the twin the Synan Church makes him a twin of Jesus), the famous doubting Thomas, went to India. Thomas who wrote The Gospel according to Thomas (the scholarly title) that was found with the Nag Hammadi material after the Second World War in Egypt, one of the lost gospels. The Gospel of Thomas that gives us 114 secret sayings of the living Jesus with no editing, no tampering by church counsel after church counsel over centuries and millennia. He says in one of the sayings, one of the logia: split the rock I am there. This quality that there is in the radical restructuring of thing into presence, (into the set of suchness and void together) by analytical ratios of possibility, constitutes a new transcendent level not of existentiality, but of Reality.
And that its in this new transcendental Real that forms fly. And are not seen by worldly eyes, but are seen by seeing with meditative eyes of calm mind transformed by vision. A conscious space of mind able to entertain reality, and not goggle after the merely desirable apparent. That is lusting after cardboard cupie-dolls, indeed.
For when the worldly eyes look at things, it reproduces the things as images and when the mind swarms with images, it only sees second hand illusions of things of this world. Images that fade in time, images that are replaced by stronger projection, images also, fleeting, and thus endlessly pursued. The Buddhas term for that world is Samsara, the fleeting world. Its only apparently there, and its only apparently there because the mind is swimming with images fed into it by an unselective unedited mentality, stuffed by a selected and edited and culturally habituated ego perception. A veritable hungry ghost of a fantasmal episodes long running into night.
When Thomas goes to India about 41 AD, two things happen. Thomas goes to Southern India, to Kerela. We know the place exactly because there are Christians still there. There are more than two million Christians in southern India who are descended from St. Thomas teachings and his missionary work. There have been churches for two thousand years in southern India. Not only that, but where Thomas went in southern India is the only place that has Jewish communities. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 68-70 AD, whole colonies moved to southern India and set up Jewish colonies around the places where Thomas taught, for Thomas, as Jesus, was not known as a Christian originally but as a radical Hellenistic Jew. And these Jewish communities date from about 68-70 AD and in fact are still there and have been there so long (two thousand years) that all the topographical features are named like Judah Hill, and so forth, and the names are still there. This India terrain has Hebrew names.
Whats peculiar about Thomas is his insistence upon a radical use of language to recursively implode upon itself. So instead of just speaking in a worldly way one becomes aware of the base upon which one has just said something. And that by continuing this kind of analytical self recursive consciousness, one begins to hush the inner voice of the mind, to hush the inner images of a reproduced secondary world of representational things, and to allow, patiently, a space of attention to occur. There one begins to realize that the radical word speaker, and the world are indissolubly on a same level of wholeness.
That we occur with reality in such a way that there is no way to put barriers, except artificial image barriers, in between, and create what ostensibly are things. What ostensibly is then an individual separateness. What ostensibly is ego isolation.
And that the experience again and again, is that as the space of the mind expands in its own way, we begin to sense that this universe is characterized by oneness, without any false divisions whatsoever. It is in no way a coloring book of outlines, handed to us to draw in our own colors. It has no stamped outlines whatsoever. We are in a relative wholeness which can only be divided by itself. That is true unity. The real monad of Leibnizs mathematical cosmos.
That great unity (Te in the Chinese Lao Tzu) allows for a correspondent series of arithmetic and geometric qualities in the division of experience. This is the key called logarithms, discovered by John Napier in England about the time Shakespeare was first generating The Tempest.
Now we know that in between Thomas and Ashvaghosha, in that fifty years, the power, the incredible exactness reflected in Thomas thought, brings Jesus quality of Hellenistic Judaism, his Alexandrian Ecumenical vision, into play. We know that teaching made its way quickly to the great university in India of its day: Nalanda.
Nalanda University was a huge place, kind of a plant like that of our UCLA (University of California) here in Los Angeles would be. Many many buildings, and tens of thousands of students. Nalanda had buildings over 40 stories high, 1500 years ago. It was a great learning center, a university city. And it was there that Ashvaghosha studied.
Ashvaghosha studied under a teacher named Parshva. And it is Parshva and Asvaghosha who convince a great king at that time named Kanishka, they convinced this great king, who was quickly taking over all of India, all of central Asia, all of what had been Parthian Iran, Kanishkas kingdom stretched from the middle of India all the way up into what is today Kazakstan; all the way from the deserts of central Iran to the Ganges. It was Parshva and Ashvaghosha who convinced him that in order to have an empire this large, he had to have a world vision, an Oikoumene in Asia. And in order to do that, he had to do what Alexander the Great had set up for his Oikoumene.; he had to have a great world vision for a radical new kind of humanity: Cosmic Bodhisattvas. And where that radical one world vision in Alexandria turned out to be Hellenistic Judaism, in Asia its version was Mahayana Buddhism. With its future secret of Maitreya, a Coming Buddha who sat paired with the historical Buddha: a set of Shared Presence Bodhisattvas.
Under Kanishka a great counsel was held and Parshva, (like we talked about last week of Eusebius handling the great Christian Ecumenical counsel for Constantine, so that Ecumenical Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire literally overnight), a similar kind of thing happened in Asia, literally overnight.
Everywhere, Kanishkas widespread kingdom became a realm for spreading Mahayana Buddhism. And this is why Mahayana Buddhism, when it spread, spread to the North into Asia. It didnt even go as far south as Sri Lanka (Ceylon) it never went that way. It didnt go across the straits to Burma or Thailand. It went where Kanishkas kingdom was; it went into central Asia, and from there it went to China, and then on into Japan and Korea; and now to the West.
In Mahayana Buddhism, just like in Hellenistic Judaism, the key to the Ecumenical quality was a new kind of person who could transcend any particular culture. Who could be at home in all kinds of cultures and yet keep underneath this variety, like a ratio denominator, a quality of integration which was recognizable. So that someone from any part of this world, the veritable Oikoumene, who really understood it, would be able to converse with someone from any other part, even if they had no knowledge of the particular background or habits, they knew the structure of the interior of the person because they had the same structure. They made sense to each other in this radical mathematici way.
So this Pythagorean communitas spread to Asia, through the Alexandrian Hellenistic Jewish prism, in the form of Mahayana Buddhism, and changed the face of Asia at that time. We know that in the time of Kanishka and his son Kanishka II, ranging from about 70s AD up until about the 130s AD, that Mahayana Buddhism simply swept over the entire region. But centered itself in Gandhara and it was in Gandhara that for the first time one has images as a human form of the Buddha. And those images are not so much of a Buddha but of Bodhisattvas. And those first Bodhisattvas, when you look at their features, have Greek faces; and Alexandrian minds; and Hellenistic Jewish spirits.
Well come back and were going to talk in the second half about how this tremendous development went one step further. The further step was the realization about 100 years later, the full blown realization that the final implication of this was that a Bodhisattva in no way could be an isolated being. There must not be a single Bodhisattva but there must be a Shared Presence interfacing in all Bodhisattvas. The nuclear form being a Shared Presence pair. And that means all of us in some way, have our reality interfaced to produce in us an exact oneness which the universe is, man as microcosm is indeed a Cosmic Person. Yet differentially unique at the same time not a paradox but a ratio of the real. Lets take a little break, and well come back to that.
SHARED PRESENCE BODHISATTVAS
PART TWO
High Dharma transmission is not something that can be verified in terms of looking for postal address, stamped visas, that kind of evidence. Its the kind of evidence thats there for the experienced hunter who goes out into the wilderness after an elusive prey, who knows how to hunt that wilderness, and through patience and skill and long experience comes back with the game.
The proof is in the living. What can you do with knowing this?
And what you can do with knowing this is inhabit a world which is coming here in the future. A world where the transformations on such a deep radical nature are even more extended, even more resonantly different than the ones which we are talking about that happened 2000 years ago. But we cannot even begin to go to kindergarten in this new aion that is here now until at least we catch up with what men and women were capable of doing 2000 years ago. Were not talking about anything that was difficult for them in that they did it and they did it by the tens of thousands if not the millions. It was not the province of a few geniuses. It might have been that at the beginning but it was finally the tone of an entire civilization for long centuries.
When in 1900 the great courageous explorer Sir Aurel Stein, collecting for the British Museum, went to the middle of the Gobi Desert, to a place that had been uninhabited for a thousand years, the site of a city called Lou Lan. He went to the cemetery which was haunted by strange Gobi Desert winds that moaned in murmurs, for the only thing there were ruins of the foundations of some buildings, and those great odd mounds that dead tamarisk trees make in that part of the world. And digging patiently week after week, he turned up a hoard of material that is now in the British Museum in London.
And there one of the most mysterious of all the fragments is a portrait of a Bodhisattva that has a St. Andrews cross in the middle of the aura, right in the middle above the Saharastra chakra where a transcendental third eye would be, is a Christian cross. Another bit of ancient tapestry shows a wide-eyed seers face next to the top of a Hermetic caduceus.
There are many mysteries in this world which are real. They are clues, not to something extra-terrestrial, but to something supra-terrestrial thats going to leave this planet and then be extra-terrestrial. Something which is radically, cosmologicaly universal already; and has been in us a long time. And is going to be freed. Freed of any encumbering, habituated, conditioned, simple cultured quality: released, liberated.
In a way, the compartments that we have within us are recreated in the world without us, outside of us. Those lines of political demarcations that we see on globes in libraries are not there on the earth as seen from space. There are no yellow areas adjoining pink areas adjoining green areas that are different countries. And one of the characteristics of life that was seen, disclosed from the moon, is the incredible unity and beauty of the earth, a cloud swirled blue gem. And we are not isolated.
One of the most gorgeous of all of the views that came to us in 1990 from Voyager 2 that had gone beyond the orbit of Neptune (beyond the orbit of Pluto that was inside Neptunes orbit at that time) and turned its cameras back and took this beautiful family portrait of the entire star system. From that vantage point the sun and all the planets look like a constellation of stars, theyre all stars together in one local region of time/space. That is what is real. And our future home two centuries from now needs to be that star system and not some pink area on one globe or some yellow area on one globe or a green area on some globe, but an entire star system. I call this our Stellar Civilization.
Because its only from that radical mathematic ratio of the real that we will be able to hear for the first time the kinds of languages, the realities reprocessing the images, that belong to a true conscious space-time universe: the Cosmos of at least 5 dimensions.
And our responsibility is to get our descendents there by positioning a launch window now.
Thats what its all about. Not about a winning a space race, not about global communication; its about reaching a ridge in a gestalt of stars thats high enough up that were going to get for the first time a real cosmological view. So that the mind of silence that already has been engendered in this species which we are, will be able in that silence to intuit some elegantly wild dimensions of ourselves that have never been realized before. In order to do this the teachers of the future will come in pairs.
Theyll come in shared presence pairs, dancing to a differential conscious harmonics.
Because only in that highly sophisticated interpenetrated quality of selflessness does the requisite learning growth occur, which anneals us to the real and not glue us to the conditioned.
For individual teachers who becomes sophisticated enough to use a no-image language, too often they transcend the facility to use language entirely. If youre a good enough yogi to be Real, you usually dont teach. One of the extraordinary qualities of the Historical Buddha happened after his enlightenment. And not just sitting under one tree, he sat under four different trees. Seven days and nights, under four different trees, a complete lunar cycle of 28 days. The Bodhi tree was the fourth seven. When enlightenment came there was no way that he could teach. Not only was there not a language which he could use, there was nobody here that he could recognize as somebody who could be a teacher. There was no thing that could be a teacher. And there were no things that could be called students. No one to hear (that was real). There was no one to teach, there was no one who could teach, and there was no way to teach, and yet it happened.
How did it happen? Two merchants wandering by saw the incredible elan of this young man, he was only 35 years old, seated there under the Bodhi Tree. And they asked for teachings, and he, without thinking about it, delivered teachings, he just did it. When he thought about it analytically, in memory, there was no way it could happen. And yet it did happen, when asked for. Because enlightenment is not separate from reality and a true request for learning, evokes a true response. Even from someone enlightened, who has no language to use, no person to speak, and cant even recognize that you are there. Nevertheless it still happens. Its a quality of selfless exchange. The secret exchange of selves, which Shantideva, an 8th century Mahayana teacher says, is the quintessence of a Bodhisattva guarding High Dharma suchness amidst the void. In the long brilliant centuries of Mahayana for about 1,000 years the Mahayana was one of the most sophisticated of all the developments on this world.
And towards the end maturity of that great period of development there lived in India, perhaps the most elegantly beautiful Buddhist Saint named Shantidiva: Peace of the Gods was his name. And he wrote a book called the Bodhicaryavatara about guarding this thought of enlightenment. That precious split second, that pico second or femto second, where one makes up ones decision: that eventually youre going to find out what its all about. Just that split (differential conscious) second that once in your life you tell yourself accurately: I would really like to know. Thats called the thought of enlightenment. Just: the thought of enlightenment, Bodhichitta.
And Shantidivas book was Guarding the Thought of Enlightenment (Bodhicaryavatara). And what comes out of that activity which that resonance of commitment that builds. And he says the ultimate mystery that one comes to see, drop by drop, is the nourishment of the exchange of reality in enlightenment. You recognize that theres absolutely no difference in your deepest true selflessness Shunyata, from someone elses deepest true selflessness: Shunyata. This being so, as Tathata, Suchness, Presence is also so. So there can so be a secret mystery; an exchange of selves. High Dharma Love. High Dharma Wisdom.
And on the basis of that kind of communion, even in enlightenment, languages can be discovered, disclosed. Persons can be real, beyond ego or selves. Worlds can be nourished, Children born and loved. And men and women find a universe thats rich and harmonious and really Cosmic. Like Shared Presence Reality.
One of the emphases in Shantidiva is that there is a series, like a phased series of qualities, like qualities that are distilled from actual practice by the actual doing. By the actual doing, accompanied by an intense quality. Recursively making sure, and understanding; and being attentive to this whole process, caring for it. That the process of caring for these phases works a reality transform. Six qualities can be distinguished, which emerge disclosing enlightenment. These six qualities index the phases both as an internal cycle and as a differential range. Those qualities called Paramitas, perfections. There were six of them and they were given in two pairs of triads. Almost like two triangles that can interpenetrate together and make one whole.
The first three Paramitas were so simple that you could give them to children and even to animals. You could even train animals in the first three and they were safe enough, you could give them to children. But practiced over a growth duration, a growing up over a lifetime, a maturation process of person, with the encouragement of teachers who understood how to engender the real, those three would deepen into another three. Very powerful. The difference between a few drops and the surge of an ocean. Its still just water, but the one is the accumulation of a universal quality of it. Imagine a tidal wave so large that 500,000,000 light years of galaxies are washed on the crest of a wave, which some possibility of a future you surfs. Thats the kind of Cosmos this is.
The first three were simply called Dana, Sila, and Kshanti. Dana was giving, Sila was usually translated as morality, but what it means is to do things in an ordered way, in a right way. And Kshanti, simplest of all, patience, simple patience.
But patience is a transform quality, its a Paramita, its a perfection. Its like the patience of Job becomes a real Paramita. But when patience is deepened when the drops of patience accumulate through a maturation process, patience deepens into what was called Virya. We get the English word from the same Indo-European root: virile, Virya, strength. The strength of endurance, that someone with Virya is unstoppable because they never go half way, they never go part way, theyre always holistically in motion. And so its like an ultimate moral karate, theres no way to stop it. And so patience builds into the maturity of Virya.
The same way with giving, that Dana, that simple process of learning to give. Here we might mention that in Maimonides, a 12th 13th century Jewish sage, the highest form of giving is that no one knows who gave and no one knows who received. The pure givingness that Dana is in that way is not just a generosity. Its not just a build-up of a little characteristics, Dana deepens into what is called concentration or meditation, Dyana. Dana deepens into Dyana.
When someone sits in a deep concentration, what is essential about it is not the me-ness, the mine-ness, the ego-ness of my power to sit here and turn this body into petrified coal if need be (the old Chinese monk Hui Neng petrified his body at death). Joseph Needham from Cambridge University who wrote the great volumes of Science and Civilization in China, took a photograph of the anthracite coal like body left by Hui Neng, still in China, still in his temple. If you want to use psychic power to do that, you can learn to do that. Its going to take a long time but you can do it. But thats not it. Because the essence of meditation is the gifting of your attention outward to shared ranges of possible exchange. The blessed, delectable mountains, the rivers or streams of conscious paradise.
Thats where real meditation comes into play. Real contemplation is a gift. Like the prayer of the forest to let the day be fine, for really fine is to be Real. Lignious mummification like spontaneous combustion doesnt fuel anyone for long, really.
And then Sila, its usually called morality, but the deeper word is like an ethic, its like an ethic of doing. Sila is the practice of doing exactly in an order anything right. In ancient Iran this was named ASHA, one of six amesha spantas, Holy spirits.
You can be entirely humble about Sila, about ethics about ethical training. It doesnt matter how few practices you select for yourself, what happens is that the observation of them be in this way of opening the resonances out. As it does so, Sila deepens into wisdom, into Prajna.
There was a yogi one time, a Tibetan doctor in the Kargupta order, Karma Thinley, Rinpoche, an old High Dharma friend of mine, said even if you just keep the yoga of hands held up and your little fingers moving up and in, and practice that perfectly, the resonances of a perfect practice of that will permeate, everywhere. And in the rippled resonances of this realization of that practice, wisdom comes, emerges whole.
Because wisdom is not seeing something or any thing, there are no things to see, theres not anything at all. With wisdom eyes, you put the man with X-ray eyes (like in the old classic movie, The man With The X-ray Eyes) to shame, one could look forever and see nothing because there are no things. But everywhere there are relationalities and ratios of the real which hold mathematically eternally, theyre there. They are the jewel matrix ready for tensor travel on a femto~notice.
Prajna comes out of this ethical practice; and its the continuity of the doing. What you do do: mindfullness (satipatthana). Sila has a kind of continuity, and that continuity, skene, weaves itself with patience.
Braided, Sila and Dhyana weave themselves with Dana, with gifting and givingness. Bundled, those three Paramitas deepen into Virya, Dyana and Prajna. They become like an elegant wild harmonic of wholesomeness. All the dimensions of time-space-consciousness take on new quality, new character. What you thought was powerful before, you see are now just apparent crests of energy, and what you see now is the reality of water, of the ocean, one lives as well in the ocean and not just on the turbulent surface of it.
For if you think that the ocean is majestic because you have been on a boat on the surface, just imagine that underneath it is a world that spreads out the same extent around this world all the way down to 35,000 feet. Thats 3,500 stories deep. The ocean is so much more than just waves, and this deep reality of such an ocean is called in Buddhism, Dharma Datu. One who is at home in that Dharma Datu inhabits a Dharmakaya, a Dharma body. This is old Bodhisattva talk. There are eventually those bodies discernable in ways that interest even aliens and gods who must come to learn as do we.
So our true body is a shared body complexity that inhabits a Cosmos. Not just an ocean that covers one planet, but galaxies like grains of dust, like the sands of the Ganges. And even thats just one turtle-shelled universe in the midst of who knows what! What depth, what gorgeousness, what exotic dimensions of freedom! And to fight over a line in the sand because this belonged to our tribe and that belonged to your tribe; that is truly ignorance geometry.
But theres no way, no way, as the old development of the Mahayana found, that a single teacher can deliver this new radical quality; it takes Shared Presence teachers.
And so you begin to see a very curious thing. You begin to see pairs of Bodhisattvas, pairs of teachers. It is such a resonant penetration of vision that Sir Aurel Stein, who found the Bodhisattva with a St. Andrews cross in the middle of the aura, also found there a most fantastic illustration. It was a piece of cloth that had two large Cosmic snakes intertwined, braided together, and at the top they were separated out and on one side was Fu Hsi, the creator of the I Ching and on the other side was Nu Kua the universal woman, and they as a Shared Presence team were holding: one was holding a plumb bob, the other the carpenters square. Its not that the inhabitants of the Gobi Desert 1000 years ago were Masons, (thats yet to be discovered). Shared Presence Bodhisattva teachings had matured there.
Yet had matured a civilization in a geographical part of the world that was completely upset by the desiccation that happened. For that part of the Gobi Desert, in a space of centuries became so arid and dry, no life could be there. Sand covered the cities of that civilization, and no one went there until Aurel Stein went there 1000 years later. It was the same thing that happened in the Sahara Desert about 10,000 BC, the desiccation of the land forms simply drove the people out, and the civilization there was forgotten.
But the image that was in the mind of the late 19th century seers, saw there a Shambala (of the past), or Shangri-La (of the future). An ancient kingdom, who knew how many root races before were hidden away in the Gobi Desert. Treasures from archeological ages past. Others are projections, cultural projections; or, in the case of Shangri-La, a future vision. But there are realities, Historical realities and envisionments that are possible. One can learn to see in this way. And the seeing will not be in some distant method but as the way within which you live. The American photographer, Edward Weston, said composition is the strongest way of seeing. And the composing of a life rhythm, double cycle woven, which is really appropriate is your strongest way of seeing. Its the DNA way, the Fu Hsi/Nu Kua way. A Shared Presencing.
If we go back, if we go back some 1800 years, Id like to give you just a sample of the kind of language that was used of Bodhisattvas at that time, just so you could hear for yourself in English translation. This is from the Verses on the Accumulation of Precious Qualities. Ratna Guna: Ratna means precious and Guna means qualities, precious qualities; the accumulation of them (Samcaya).. And its the kind of languaging which was used at that time so that Bodhisattvas could talk, and how would they talk? In cosmic song, in Gitas and Gathas. From the Ratna Guna Samcaya Gatha:
No wisdom can we get hold of
No highest perfection
No Bodhisattva
No thought of enlightenment either
When told of this if you are not bewildered
In any way anxious in form in feeling in will perception and awareness
If nowhere in them you find a place to rest your anxiousness on
Then you are ready to have a home nowhere
And to wander freely everywhere
For you are at home everywhere
And wherever you go is where you need to be
This is the kind of talk, of a Gatha sung in the middle of the Gobi 1800 years ago. We need to pull out of this for ourselves many realizations.
This is a kind of celestial dragon sinuosity that over-arcs the world. It doesnt limit itself to East or West. It also weaves back and forth, energy like in dynamic frequency. And when Buddhism had reached this kind of an apex in India, it was truncated by invasions. In China it was truncated by rules and laws made up by people jealous of the enormity of the Buddhist communities, and the holdings of the monasteries, and so forth. Like Cromwells England taking lands and wrecking buildings. When the Asian form of this Shared Presence Bodhisattva wisdom reached a kind of an impasse because of conditions in Asia, it flowed back into the West. Came hidden, back into the West.
And it came back into the West, oddly enough, in the same way that it left, it came back through the Middle East. But this time when it came back, classical Alexandria was gone, but the city that was formed at that time, made as if it were a reincarnation of classical Alexandria. This was the Bagdad of Harun ar-Rashid. The Bagdad of the Arabian Nights.
And it was there in the Bagdad of the Arabian Nights, that one found the Asian wisdom returning. Funneling back from where it had gone out so many centuries before. Filtered back into the West, because the West in its own impasse had come to an archetypal crisis called the Crusades. The Crusaders that were sent to the Middle East were a conduit, in a subtle paradoxical way, for this wild wisdom of the Shared Presence Bodhisattvas to permeate back into Western Europe.
Yet the men of the West couldnt hear it. They couldnt see it. They couldnt think it. Their minds were filled with images, images of righteous conquest, of vengeance of Crusades, of power, of conflict.
It was the Western women who got it. They understood a higher presence of love of shared life. They were newly able to read, just become literate then: while the men were away fighting in the 1100s, they had to run the estates, the lives, do the educating, the thinking.
And they received that message, received the Shared Presence Bodhisattva wisdom from the East. And you find it permeating everywhere in the female intelligence of the 1100s, in the 12th century. By the mid 12th century its everywhere for these wise Western women. And because there was only one way then for them to express themselves in spiritual terms, they came to be known as mystics. When one looks to see those times, there is a complete range of great women mystics.
And for several generations on into the 1200s, into the 13th century, one finds an enormous population of women, ostensibly called mystics, but really women who were recognizing that there is an interpenetrative sharing quality to the spirit in reality. Which can be learned and taught and shared.
Occasionally there were some men who were learned in this way. One of them was St. Francis of Assisi (with St. Claire). Another was Bernard of Clairvaux, who spent a great deal of his talent in life writing five books of commentaries on the Song of Songs, the only book about that kind of pure sharing love in that whole wisdom literature. His great correspondent was Hildegard of Bingen.
Its a quality thats there also in Chartres Cathedral, greatest of all of the Cathedrals. The Chartres that was built and then burnt to the ground and then was rebuilt again, not by some one individual but by generations of ordinary men and women who understood that this was important. And when you look at the great sculptures, the caryatids there in the arches of the approaches to go into the interior Chartres, you see again the same faces that you saw in the original Bodhisattvas in North West India a thousand years before. And one can take photographs of those Chartres Cathedral faces and match them up one by one with the Bodhisattva faces from Gandhara and you see this interior quality, unmistakable of the Shared Presence people.
Why did it not develop from there? Because it is so subtle and ineffable and requires actual practice. The 13th century, the 1200s became a time of a build up of massive national changes and kingdoms and before you knew it the Black Plague was upon Europe coming in many waves and centuries past and much of this was forgotten. And only occasionally would there be groups of men and women who would remember, or who would recognize or who would discover and bring this back into play. Civilization values are esoteric only in degenerate cultures. Those values in healthy civilizations are the mathematics of the wise.
Were going to talk about one of those immediately next week because they are foundational seeds out of which Hermetic America emerged. The seeds of this were planted in Florence in northern Italy, in 1439.
There, an energetic genius, a young commercial genius, whos family was into many things, banking being one of them, the Medicis. The young Cosimo de Medici. Cosimo, who got into problems with another family, the Abruzzi, and was unjustly or perhaps fortunately (this is the theme of the Fortunate Fall), exiled from Florence for a year and went to Venice to hang out with his friends. It was just the time when Mahmud the Conqueror was laying final siege to the Byzantine stronghold of Constantinople. They knew it was going to fall (and did fall in 1453.)
About a decade or so before it fell, many of the teachers took the most secret and sacred writings they could and fled from the city. They were coming to the West looking for places to be. Often they found there blank stares because the West didnt understand that they were carrying ineffable secrets, treasures beyond compare. Few in the West knew what they were, or how to read them or even that they were anything of value. And so they wanted to have a world Ecumenical counsel of religions of East and West meeting together. Of all the sects coming together. To discuss all this. They wanted to hold it in Venice and the young Cosimo de Medici saw a good thing, knew a good thing when he saw it. He convinced everyone that he was going to return to power in Florence and that they ought to bring that convention to Florence. Which they eventually did.
When young Cosimo de Medici rode back with his secret plan for a new Oikoumene vision, he was going to use Florence like Alexandria had been used, like Bagdad had been used, like Chang-an in China had been used: not as an anvil upon which to build chains of legal and military and political authority, but to rebuild a new kind of wisdom-fashioned humanity. Ones who could see reality within the spiritual spaces that they had made in themselves, in their character. As a great civic refining fire to alchemicaly transform men and women.
When Cosimo rode back into Florence and rode past the empty Abruzzi villa outside of Florence, he stood up in his saddle, silently as if to demonstrate: Ive come back, not simply as a victor over you, but with all the treasures of the world. Now were going to put it all together, right here in our town, in our city. His noble visage reminded any phantom helper spirits of the time that there was a new Alexander of Alexandria, another Asoka, a new Kaniska, a veritable King Arthur visionary planning his next Camelot.
And out of that origin came the Bodhichitta of the Hermetic Renaissance. The thought of enlightenment, that later resounded in huge resonances, became the personality of Benjamin Franklin, the mind of Thomas Jefferson, the spiritual snow-wind of Thoreau, the courage of Lincoln and the vision of Walt Whitmans Democratic Vistas.
Were going to talk next week about Hermetic America, one of the books I will publish, a very important saga in this ongoing story, the story of human liberty. I hope that some of you can make it next week. Thank you.