Herein please find attached a pdf file with all the ‘Pandemia Haiku’ written since October 2021. The collection numbers 108 which is auspicious in the Buddhist world.
108 Pandemia Haiku
Haiku: Spring 2024
One blog I greatly enjoy reviews traditional seasonal haiku in Japan where the year is divided into 72 5-day periods each with recommended themes or words. This week was singing frogs. Of course being in Mexico my seasons don’t quite align, but I don’t let that stop me. Have been writing haiku and spontaneous verse for over fifty years. Haiku is nice because it is short and the main point is to capture a moment of nowness. Very clean, direct art form. Sometimes I hit the target, sometimes I miss. It is always a good exercise. Enjoy.
Don’t ask me why (because there is no answer) but for some reason the latest is first and the first is last. And so it goes…
traditional haiku
containing Trump
does not contain Trump!
15:12
Mexican heat wave without
flushed fever within …
still I sip my warm green tea
boiling restless nights
desperately spiders bite
urgently mosquitoes whine
all-encompassing Heaven above
all-manifesting multifarious Earth below
this living, breathing wakeful world is Buddha!
24/05/14 15:06
deep summer night
throbbing frog-song
listening pond
midnight frog drone echo
casting the spell of Collective Dream
our minds enfolding three dimensional space
v2:
midnight frog-song
a spell dreaming our
deep pool of collective Mind
frog-song drone
summoning summer pond
of timeless memories
frog song in the dark
casting deep spells
of warm summer silence
before birth
after death
frogs forever singing
2024/05/11 12:32
https://seasonwords.com/2024/05/10/week-19-frogs-start-singing/comment-page-1/#respond
on my white peony in bloom
a white spider with tiny green eyes
looking back at me
2024-05-04 06:43
our final parting
a last frost
burning my bruised heart
last snow:
colourful crocus petals
tenderly push through
2024/04/27 12:29
spring rain in the sky
rainbows in the mind
barbarian bombs falling!
2024/04/19 09:00
soft spring rain
smooth pebbles glistening
making mottled rainbow reflections
2024/04/19 09:05
Japan… Siberia
We white geese know no human borders
We fly naked… and free
2024/04/13 09:30
New family member:
A local bird, discovering the little pool in our sagging drainpipe,
Has taken to bathing in it many times a day!
2024/04/09
Between heaven and hell
this moment and forever
life is falling cherry blossoms!
2024/03/29 08:30
spring heat wave
Impoverished local selling colourful hand-painted kites…
I drove on by, soon sad,
his tribal ancestors reproaching my selfishness in swirling dust clouds
2024/03/29 08: 20
on freshly oiled leather hinges
gnarly barn door swings open wide
veritable vista of lively white butterflies and daisies!
2024/03/22 09:04
my much loved wife
in her spring green dress
singing in the kitchen!
2024/03/02 19:07
concentrated life
budding
in breathless potential
2024/03/02 19:06
Rain melting snow
on its way
to being forgotten
2024/03/02 18:59
beckoning green buds
abandoning the past
quivering
2024/03/02 18:51
Growing old
is natural enlightenment
Just don’t try to define whatever that is!
March 2 2024 09:51
Singing insects
sounding within
helping to weave our budding three dimensional world
What’s that I hear?
The promising patter of
icicle droplets on the steps outside
Feb 19th: https://seasonwords.com/2024/02/16/week-07-fish-rise-from-the-ice/
Layers & Levels Chapter Ten: The Neoplatonic Tripartite Cosmos
I have recently stumbled upon the work of Wolfgang Smith, a distinguished Professor who graduated from Cornell with three degrees at the age of eighteen, about sixty years ago. He has been quietly revolutionizing philosophy, as it appears many have been doing far from mainstream recognition, first by debunking the core tenets of materialism, and then by rediscovering the Platonic view which can be expressed as a dot in the middle of a circle drawn around the periphery and a line connecting that dot in the middle with a similar dot on the circumference. (!)
To draw this image correctly, IMO there should be no dark area outside the circumference, only between it and the centre. I shall try to make one later.
Before reading further, I highly recommend first reading this article, one of several on his site: https://philos-sophia.org/cosmic-measurable-time/ Then, if you like them, his latest and very short book sums up a productive life’s work with great simplicity and depth: ‘Physics, A Science in Quest of an Ontology’ available in hardback, paper and on Kindle.
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Now, assuming you have read the article or watched one or more of many interviews with him on Youtube, we can make some remarks about it tying it in with some of the previous Layers and Levels list, first among which, as I mentioned in a recent chapter, can be regarded the Body, Speech and Mind trinity or triad. In the context of this series, it is also the notion of Mandala which literally means something like a zone or sphere with a centre and fringe and something in between – again a unitary triad in principle. There are your three levels, though one can subdivide or interpenetrate ad infinitum. The father’s mandala inside the marriage mandala operating clumsily one morning in the kitchen mandala having slept in the bedroom mandala within the nearby village mandala where last night there was a bad fire sending the mother to the hospital mandala in the larger town mandala in the national mandala; all such mandalas being distinguishable but also inter-related, inter-penetrating.
We will be re-examining the Mandala notion many times in upcoming chapters. For now let us take a look at Smith’s cosmology, another triad.
He labels the central spot the ‘aeviternal’ which is outside time; he labels the periphery ‘the corporeal world’ which exists within our experienced spatial-temporal dimensions; and the zone in between the two he labels ‘the intermediate’ ‘bounded by’ time but not space. So the aeviternal center is beyond time; the intermediate is bounded by time but not space; and the corporeal world at the circumference is bounded within both time and space.
This all involves what he terms ‘vertical causation’ which acts, from outside time and space, upon the corporeal world in space and time, outside the chain of what he calls ‘horizontal causes’ which in Buddhist terms is known as the karmic law of cause and effect.
The key point here is that physicalists, such as most materialist scientists for example, keep looking for ‘theory of everything’ to be found on the material, causative plane but they will never be able to do so.
And indeed this is for an extremely simple, drop dead obvious reason which physicalists have been training themselves for centuries now to be unable to see, namely the wholistic nature of phenomena. By wholistic I mean that an apple is an identifiable whole. As opposed to a brick, or a door, or a tree, or a house. None of these things exist as such on the physical level. A car comprises many different metal and plastic parts, bit by bit, piece by piece, but there is no actual ‘car’ there as such which can be identified using only physical criteria. No, there is a mind observing the car and can see it as such, just as it can instantly identify, pick up and bite into any apple. This ability to recognize the wholeness of the apple is a type of deus ex machina, the connection between the aeviternal and the corporeal, so basic it gets overlooked.
Then I stumbled on another Western philosopher, John Vervaeke who has formulated what he calls ‘neoplatonic zen’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbk3lA6zCic . This is a long talk; there are shorter ones available. From the introduction:
as Thomas Plant in his book the LostWay to the Good argues: ‘neoplatonism was the philosophical version of the Silk Road that bound the East and the West together giving them a shared lingua franca, lingua philosophia, by which they could deeply enter into transformative dialogue and intercultural exchange with each other.’
The lecture is entitled: ‘Levels of Intelligibility, Levels of Self’. So he is all over the ‘Layers and Levels’ notion. He explains how Plotinus argues that both reality and the self comprise various ontological levels, so that examining the one involves examining the other. There is no fundamental split between self and other, between subjective and objective. In this sense, the platonic philosophical view is fundamentally spiritual, though of course not necessarily bound to any particular religious doctrine.
I don’t want to say much more in this chapter. Those interested can watch and enjoy the lectures. But I do want to give a hint at where we might be headed. I say ‘might’ because I don’t have a clearly formulated plan. The contemplative approach from the Buddhist tradition generally involves uncovering the truth, aka ‘dharma’, found within one’s own experience. My teacher sometimes referred to this as ‘kitchen sink reality’. Any ontological levels that exist in philosophically explicated ‘reality’, to be valid, must be observable in our own nature and experience. What this means is that high-falutin’ concepts, or rather basic concepts that sound other-worldly or remote to our ear, to our minds, are in fact simple and continuously manifest in ordinary life.
As simple, for example, as our ability to perceive an apple as an apple. Right there we have multiple layers and levels happening: there is the bare physical level of the object on the wooden table; there is us observing it, in a corporeal, living, breathing form with eyes, lungs, beating heart; there are the particular qualities of the apple, colour, aroma, shape, density, position relative to other phenomena; not to mention how it feels and tastes when bitten into by a mouth with teeth and tongue. The level at which the apple is seen as an apple by ourselves is quite different from the level at which the apple rests on the table as such. The level at which it is tasted is entirely different as well. These levels, ordinary and commonplace as they are, can also be described as ‘ontological dimensions’. Sight dimension. Taste dimension. Time dimension – how long it sits there, and then gradually decomposes, our ongoing breathing and heartbeat as we observe or bite into. Space dimension – relation to other objects around, how it sits there. Emotional dimension – what apples mean to the observer, how its qualities resonate. All these layers and levels are simultaneously ongoing.
Although almost childishly obvious, such ontological layering gets generally overlooked. Indeed, the modern materialist approach tends to oversimplify and then negate too many of these experiential aspects such that when societies are organized around such excessive cancelling, the result is something far from from ideal, indeed not truly human somehow.
In any case, this Chapter provides two examples of contemporary Western philosophers who are bridging a multi-century divide between ancient and modern mentalities. We can see similar work happening in the geopolitical spheres which will no doubt be touched upon later. Indeed, we may well be at the end of the ‘introducing lists’ stage and soon will go into applying some of them to various different scenarios.
[Autobiographical Note: we are in the final stages of building a house, meaning that the bathroom and kitchen fixtures are going in, plus basic kitchen cabinetry, final plumbing, heating systems and so on, all of which require more hands-on oversight than usual. In about a month we hope to be moving into this new home and once settled in I intend to spend the next year steadily working through this series until it finds its natural completion. Until that move and settling-in unfolds, however, I shall probably only offer occasional pieces like this. Once am set up with a new desk, chair and home all around, including banana, macadamia nut, lemon and orange trees, along with delightful accompanying birdsong, production rate will pick up!!]
Layers & Levels Chapter Eight: Body Speech and Mind
We are getting to the end of the initial series of Lists which describe reality from non-materialist points of view, mainly but not only from the Buddhist tradition. This list has only three components and is really less a list as a very basic description of experiential reality. Indeed, perhaps this is the only one I should have offered from the get-go.
Simply put, in life – aka ‘experience’ – there are always three basic layers or levels namely: Body, Speech and Mind.
Body:
We all know what that is. Our physical body which has an inside and an outside. We feel the inside and can perceive our own and others bodies outside. It is that which is physical, dense, solid, particular, existing in a particular place though it is always moving around; it sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches. In short, it has a particular form beyond which is outside, and therefore not, the body.
Mind:
Mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives and processes; more fundamentally mind is that which is aware, awake, conscious. Mind dreams, imagines, analyzes, responds. If the body’s eyes perceive objects in space it is the mind which sees and evaluates them. Mind is that which perceives meaning and via which is channelled intention.
Speech:
This one is less obvious, perhaps, but is simply an interface between Body and Mind. If you go for a walk in the woods, for example, there is no end of speech principle at play: birds singing, squirrels chattering, insects buzzing, monkeys or dogs howling, with occasional louder moos or roars from larger animals. Leaves quiver, reflecting light into variegations of colour, light and dark or release raindrops in a pleasing patter onto the carpet of leaves below which crunch and rustle as we pass. All forms communicate certain qualities to each other in the sensory realm we share. Plants, though having a different sensory makeup, are highly attuned and responsive to what goes on around them – far more than ourselves in many ways. But lacking eyes they do not ‘see’ visual forms as we do though clearly they are aware of other forms around them and adapt or respond to them. All forms and shapes with their colours, textures, odours and movements are in a constant state of transmitting and receiving with all around them.
From a deliberately flowery text I wrote years ago to help work through chronic Lyme Disease :
Sacred Being, the Basis
All beings in this alive and awake self-dreaming universe present aspects of:
Body – some sort of shape or form manifest in location and terrain;
Mind – some sort of consciousness, awareness or intention;
Speech – some sort of communicative expression of meaningful information singing a
Living symphony of ever forming and reforming clouds and waves of Primordial Intelligence
A marvellous holographic self-mothering Song making itself up as it goes along
Saturated in interconnected living presence pervading all and everything,
Manifesting no end of self-organizing life forms, living creatures imagined into sentient being
With all their coemergent elemental and inanimate phenomena
Comprising luminous intelligence inseparably part of the universal background field
Containing, including and pervading all and everything, micro and macro.
Flowers in their flowering communicate the lovely enlightened language of Flowering Being
With manifold qualities of form, texture, colour, temperature, scent, beauty, sensitivity.
As with flowers so with all, from microscopic universes to macrocosmic spiralling galaxies
Multifarious microbes permeating soil and all life forms, primordially awake plants, majestic
Trees, incredible insects, fabulous fishes, beautiful birds, marvellous animals
Minerals, metals, crystals, silver, gold, jewels
Rainbows, sky, stars, ocean, wind, clouds, rain, sunlight, moonlight, thunder, lightning,
Mountains, valleys, jungles, deserts, farms, steppes, rural, urban, stormy, placid
Earth, water, fire, air, red, green, blue, yellow, purple, indigo;
Visibles, touchables, smellables, tastables, audibles, edibles,
Perfumes, spices, herbs, meats, fats, oils, vegetables, fruits, sweets, sours, fermented,
Wools, cottons, furs, silks, costumes, uniforms, males, females, dressed, naked,
All such forms together weaving karmic spells of interdependent being,
Living languages of meaningful qualities – which some call ‘gods’ –
Continuously broadcast and received throughout this dreamlike experiential continuum
All basically empty, basically luminous, basically workable, basically good.
The money quote there in terms of Speech principle is: living languages of meaningful qualities.
As with all such formulations, it is good to sit with them for a while and notice them over time in everyday experience. Body and Mind are fairly straightforward. On a literal and human level, Speech is speaking: with Body and Mind we communicate with each other using both voice-box, tongue and also various facial and other gestures. At some point we evolved initial scratches and scribbles in the dirt into sophisticated mathematical and vernacular languages. But also Speech has to do with the communicative nature of qualities, including how inanimate things like furniture and paintings express their nature to us by communicating something stylistically, atmospherically. Not to mention a lady’s hair, makeup, lipstick, nail polish, dress and smile – all are clear and present, not to mention delightful, examples of the speech principle.
In this sense, all qualities are Speech Realm phenomena. In a way, we can say that everything is talking in one way or another. This is a very deep, all pervasive aspect of living beings and the space, or realm, they inhabit, just as much as space is filled with no end of forms (body) and the ability to navigate in a world filled with such forms (mind).
That said, as with most of these lists, one shouldn’t be too rigid with the categories. Just as there a human beings with jealous god tendencies battling with each other in the canyons of Wall Street, so also there are highly communicative speech realm bodies like a peacock’s tail, or mind and presence rich uber-solid physical manifestations, like a motionless Zen rock garden. In short, all experience blends all three aspects so there is no such thing as only Body or only Mind, however there are these three core different aspects of experience which are both interesting and valuable to contemplate.
Further, the Speech notion highlights several key differences between this and more common materialist formulations describing so-called ‘reality’, including such notions as human beings being evolved apes and such. The Science philosopher and mathematician John Lennox is, along with Iain McGilchrist, one of the leading Western voices exposing the materialist outlook as a) widespread, b) fallacious and c) harmful. Here are some short quotes from Lennox lifted from a video entitled “John Lennox: The Question of Science and God, Part One”:
‘Information is not reducible to physics or chemistry (physical matter, particles or Body) which means that materialism is false as philosophy…
therefore purely materialistic science is not going to encompass a huge area of reality… making science not the only way to truth..
[indeed] making science the only avenue to truth is very dangerous and logically absurd’.
One ‘area of reality’ the materialist worldview does not see is the Speech realm. Although it may not be structured into words and possess grammatical rules, who can deny that a flower in bloom is expressing no end of qualities to others in the same realm, aka mandala, and in so doing helping to define the nature of that mandala? Similarly, the shape of each and every leaf on each and every tree communicates qualities. In this regard, we could go so far as to say that ALL physical form is designed in such a way as to communicate qualities about itself to the mind level in its realm – indeed it is the mind level that creates any awareness of ‘realminess’.
We can say that all form exists within a field of consciousness-awareness which perceives such forms as qualities expressing the various properties and intentions of the forms in question, such qualities being a type of meaningful language read by mind. So all the time we find ourselves in a realm manifesting forms (body), qualities (speech) and meaningful presence (mind).
So the next time you look at a flower, observe a bee or bird, watch a dog or a human amble across the street, or participate in a conversation among friends at the dinner table, you might want to pick up on the many simultaneous body, speech and mind aspects at play. This won’t trigger a life-changing experience, but it might help you notice what has been right in front of you your entire life in a different, and hopefully interesting, way. It’s a non-materialist way of appreciating the experiential universe we collectively create and share.
Postscript:
I had to write out several versions of this Chapter because too much kept crowding in. This is because, as mentioned at the top, perhaps this ‘list’ is the only one I needed to present. What has become clear is that many future chapters in this Series will be going over different layers and levels of the already presented material essentially drilling further down or using them in various contexts, albeit probably the one most often referenced will be Body Speech and Mind.
For example, one traditional example chucked from this chapter is The Three Bodies of Buddha, usually presented in arcane, impenetrable language. A second aspect is The Three Lords of Materialism’, a fascinating though an entirely different take. Later I will present some critiques of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution wherein one of the most substantive objections is how DNA, which of course Darwin lacked the means to observe and which we now know determines cellular development and function, is a form of code, which is language requiring some sort of mind whose intention and sense of purpose, or meaning, develops such a language which in turn determines cellular form and function making all three levels of Body, Speech and Mind clearly in play no matter how distasteful or ‘unscientific’ materialists may find this simple fact. Darwin’s bottom-up random-genesis theory, which bases all on physical matter, simply doesn’t explain how such language (speech) can have been developed to direct (mind) cellular development, let alone how they integrate and indeed create entire organisms. In any case, the discussion will naturally involve consideration of all three body-speech-mind aspects of living organisms, not exclusively emphasizing only the physical. Indeed, most modern scientists, not familiar with these simple non-materialist ways of viewing this our experiential continuum, lack the vocabulary to easily distinguish these various aspects and rather feel compelled to fit things into a uni-dimensional ‘theory of everything’ instead of accepting that reality comprises various (ever-changing) layers and levels, which of course is the principal thrust of this series.
Finally, here is the rock garden picture again. Hopefully you can easily pick up on various Body, Speech and Mind aspects therein – not to mention various layers and levels…
Layers & Levels Introduction Part Three
The purpose of presenting this series of lists is to provide terms of reference for future discussion and analysis. They have also been offering a slightly progressive journey of sorts in that our initial materialist assumptions, shared by nearly all modern people these days, posit an objective reality out there making all subjective, mind-experienced phenomena somehow less than real even though they comprise the vast majority of both individual and collective human experience. The first list was a quasi objective one, namely the Five Skandhas, starting with form and ending with individuated stream of consciousness, aka ‘me’; we then went through the five Chinese elemental phases, the six realms from Hindu-Buddhist cosmology and finally the five tantric Buddha families. The Five Skandhas are a quasi objectivist 1 list whereas the Five Buddha Families are anything but.
However, I don’t want to entangle the Reader in too many philosophical or analytical weeds by delving deeply (even assuming I were able) into all the many differences and similarities of objective and subjective views of reality; rather have been trying to point out that one major problem with over-reliance on the reductionist materialist, or objectivist, world view is that it blocks out too many vital, not to mention enjoyable, elements in human experience, discounting them as irrelevant and thus banishing them from public discourse and overall culture, a very real, and increasingly world wide, problem. This is not to deny that many of the insights derived from the objectivist point of view are valuable, however they go too far when they insist that only their view works for everything and unfortunately too many of us have consented to such cultural and perceptual parameters being set, to the detriment of all.
This beef animates this entire Layers & Levels presentation which is framed with the intention of demonstrating how so-called ‘reality’ is not only objective and therefore not uni-dimensional, flat, uniform, unchanging, always ‘there’, solid, physical-only and so on. Reality is more like a dream world conjured by a combination of one overall Being or Consciousness field within which unlimited particular living points of view including yourself, myself, the birds, the bees, the flowers and the trees and so on ad infinitum, each of whose perceptions constitute a unique dimension of ‘reality’, something I like to call our ‘Experiential Continuum’.
Within this multi-dimensional context it is possible to develop terms of reference based on observable experience, even if such observation principally comprises direct subjective experience. For example, whether we can prove it or not, when we look up we all see sky; and that sky provides multi-faceted emotional, psychological, physical, cultural and civilizational contexts to our lives. In other words, it is not only hydrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen and dust particles as measured by scientists. What scientists can tell us about the physical properties of the sky is interesting, even helpful, but it is not the whole story.
In any case, from more non-materialist approaches have developed, especially in Asia, many ways of observing, categorizing and also developing personal, intellectual and spiritual understanding, even mastery, with countless volumes written and schools or disciplines founded dedicated to furthering such knowledge and praxis. What makes this different from the modernist mindset is, again, that they are not based on objectivist assumptions. So in this Series, now that a few examples of non-objectivist ways of viewing reality have been introduced, we can hopefully begin to examine things through the different lens they offer, one which although at first may feel unfamiliar, is in fact much more familiar than the constrained, unnatural straightjacket imposed by the materialist views which of late have come to dominate so much of our modern world.
1: any of various theories asserting the validity of objective phenomena over subjective experience (merriam-webster online)
Layers & Levels Chapter Seven: The Five Buddha Families
We looked at the five elemental phases via a yin-yang formulation, now we shall look at them from the point of view of Buddhist Tantra. Tantra means thread or continuity, the idea being that one thread can go through several layers of fabric, or turn back on itself when being woven. Continuity in that the seeming gap between the wisdom of a fully realized Buddha and the ignorance of an ordinary sentient being mired in emotion-laden samsara is actually non-existent, much as the top and bottom sides of the same hand are mutually co-existent. In the jargon: wisdom and confusion co-emerge, or are ‘not-two’.
So these Five Buddha Families are not materialist descriptions of objective reality rather non-materialist ways of contemplating the inseparability of wisdom and confusion in the five main styles of approach which ultimately are based on the same underlying dynamics as the Five Skandhas.
First, why five? Well, in the case of directions, it is most natural to divide them into four main directions with an additional zone, or dynamic, in the centre. Second, the older texts posit three main drives 1 which later contributors expanded into five to better fit other models like the Skandhas. But we shan’t worry about such arcana; let’s just dive into the Five Buddha Families by describing each one, hopefully during which process the reader will start to pick up on the whole thing.2
Buddha Family:
Buddha means wakefulness or also the space which accommodates all experience. The colour is white, because it includes all others and is somewhat not a colour at all. It is spacious, like an abandoned campsite, or looking across a desert, or endless plains. If a tree, it is probably without leaves in winter. It is decidedly neutral, open, uncurious, bland, flat, featureless, accommodating, unopinionated, simple. A quality of nothing happening and nothing needing to happen. Not restless. When ignorant, it is a bit like animals, somewhat dull and accepting whatever is presented. It can be stubborn too, refusing to allow in new input or different modalities, preferring the familiar; could also be overly attached to basic routines or habits even if they are a little too limited or ignorant. Also Head. Five Skandhas: the fifth, consciousness in which the other four are experienced all together as one. Sense: Hearing.
Vajra Family:
Vajra is an indestructible material, ‘meteoric iron’. Fresh blue, but also white, like bright snow. Precision. Detail. Focus. Clarity. Also Heart. Vajra picks up on the details of form and shape. A leafless tree in winter framed by bright blue sky, or the particularities of white daisies in a green background. It also cuts, like a blade, separating one thing from another and so has a sense of intellect, concept, definition. Neurotic vajra can be angry, even cruel, poking someone in the heart as it were, or the desire for precision turning into obsessive perfectionism or inability to connect on a heart level. Element is Water. Skandha of Form. Sense: Sight.
Ratna Family:
Ratna means jewel, so it connotes richness. The colour is golden yellow. Texture, smell, presence, radiance, manifestation and spreading. Variegation, splotches, moss growing on rocks, profusion of flowers, colours, patterns, complexity. A beautiful woman wearing makeup, with lipstick, earrings, necklaces, rings, bangles, fancy clothing which moves lusciously in swirling curves. A sweet voice, a mothering presence, food on the table, probably a little too much of it, wine, cheese, fruits, abundance. When neurotic it gets overly greedy, sticky, prideful, bloated, with a mind or dwelling filled with collected junk. Element is Earth. Skandha of Feeling (the second). Sense: Smell.
Padma Family:
Padma is a lotus flower, denoting beauty along with a level of radiance that pulls you in. The colour is red. So whereas Ratna’s radiance is that of presence, or glowing, Padma’s radiance is that of a large city with all its lights on at night, glowing in the dark, or in the day displaying its tall, elegant buildings proudly, beckoning to all to come in and display themselves, to spend their money, to break their hearts. Paris is the quintessential Padma city, whereas Florence, no less elegant, is far more Ratna. When neurotic is over-emphasizes passion, sexual or otherwise, seduction, fantasy, grandeur, self-importance. Element is Fire. Skandha is Recognition/Discrimination which has to do with getting into the subtle differences between the forms and textured patterning in Vajra and Ratna, along with the atmospheric context provided by Buddha. Sense: Taste.
Karma Family:
Karma means action, or happening. So the law of Karma is the law of how things happen. The element is all-pervasive Wind which blows everywhere in all directions. Wind can be gentle or destructive, a soft touch or a powerful – though invisible – force. The colour is green symbolizing the profusion of the plant kingdom, of Life in all its endless forms. Karma can be generative or destructive. There are five karmas associated with all five families: Buddha is spaciousness; Vajra is pacifying; Ratna is enriching; Padma is Magnetizing; Karma is Destroying. But it could also be building, getting things done, overcoming obstacles, successfully winning a battle, planning and executing. If Vajra is the outline of a finely honed spear, Karma is the act of plunging it into the enemy. When neurotic it becomes frantic, misdirected, dictatorial, over-controlling, results-obsessed, restless. When sane it is extremely efficient and effective, thorough, complete, masterful. Sense: Touch.
In terms of directions: Vajra is East, Ratna is South, Padma is West, Karma is North, Buddha is Centre. They have been described, not unlike the Skandhas, as somewhat sequential but this is mainly to help describe their comparative differences. In life they are all happening at once all the time. Some people are predominantly one family more than another, but all of us have all five. All material objects and all experiential non-material phenomena have all five just as all living creatures have all five skandhas. Some say that plants don’t have the fifth skandha and possibly not the fourth; there is something to that. But some plant medicine people say that plants dwell in a conscousness state similar to our deep, dreamless sleep which partly explains why in cultures where they are used as sacred medicine they enter peoples’ dreams and give them messages or resolve long-standing health or psychological issues. In any case, plants for sure manifest the five families.
Now: one could no doubt invent five more families putting them in between the current ones, (four main directions, four intermediates, one in the center, and one for the fringe). But then the differences start to become too subtle so each one becomes less distinct. These are both a form of noetic science, a way to highlight certain aspects of experience, and fictive, in that they are a made-up layer of categorization without any material substance. True, but who cannot appreciate the difference between these five core thrusts, styles, insights, ways of being?
Each Family could be described in long chapters, even books, so the above description is about as minimalist as it gets. But if you get a good sense of them, it can be a lot of fun to watch them in action, see their qualities in phenomena.
They are part of the contemplative tradition’s perspective derived from combining a non-materialist view of reality with years of direct, contemplative discipline, which in the Buddhist tradition mainly involves sitting around doing nothing other than to simply witness what is already there without trying to exploit, manipulate or ignore (aggression, passion or ignorance, i.e. Vajra, Padma or Buddha). Like the Six Realms, they provide a different perspective with which to observe and experience phenomena and the life journey. As such, they are part of our non-materialist world view, the sort of thing which reductionist materialism has insisted is of no interest because not ‘real’.
Maybe so. But then Science cannot appreciate the beauty of a flower in bloom, let alone the loveliness of a woman, so clearly there are some areas where Science cannot tread but where non-materialist philosophy and spiritual formulations are at home. What we see with this Five Family model is the merging of physical and mental qualities, for of course the perception of the qualities of the physical is an experiential process, so in the non-material realm qualia (qualities) are the quanta being evaluated.
Indeed, we could go so far as to say that the qualities perceived in any given person, place, thing or subjective experience, are truly what matter, even though such qualities themselves per se are formless, insubstantial aspects we experience when encountering any solid-seeming phenomenon and with these Five Families we also start to merge qualities of objects and phenomenon with emotional and psychological styles, tendencies and manifestation. The whole world becomes like a living, breathing, dynamic Shakespeare production.
Which of course is what it is!
Note: the picture at the top links to an article in a popular American Buddhist magazine so you can get another take. The author is an old friend…
1 Buddha, Vajra and Padma = Ignorance, Aggression & Passion, the latter evolving from the former which includes all. These are the three basic approaches of individuated experience, aka ‘ego’.
2 For an excellent description I highly recommend the book entitled Spectrum of Ecstasy, written by Ngakpa Chögyam, a Welshman early on recognized as an incarnate lama.
Layers & Levels Punto 4 Metacrisis
A call to rediscovering Humanity from Ian McGilchrist, the Sage of the Isle of Skye
This little point (Punto) is simply a shout-out to listen to this condensed, one-hour lecture by Iain McGilchrist entitled ‘A Revolution in Thought’ addressing what some are now calling ‘the metacrisis’, a nice way of saying that everything in the whole world is going to hell in a hand basket on all fronts all at once (!).
For reasons which Iain well describes, we have devalued Goodness, Beauty and Truth, appreciation and experience of which can be called ‘the sacred’, and instead dedicated ourselves to a limited, literal, left brain dominated approach which prides itself on reducing the complex terrain that is ‘reality’ into a clear, compact map and then goes on to believe that the map is real and what it is mapping, the actual terrain, is largely fictive. This is why, for example, most modern scientists pedantically insist that subjective phenomena such as thoughts, feelings, insights, emotional connections, vows, honour, service, loyalty, dedication, sacrifice, the sacred and so much more, not to mention a sense of humour, are all non-existent irrelevancies because they are not ‘actually real’ or ‘really there’ because only the physical is real. Etc.
‘Nuff said. This lecture is well worth listening to because he boils down decades of philosophical and medical research published in two books almost three thousand pages in length into a well-honed one hour presentation.
And if you enjoy the erudite banter of Oxford Don types (Iain used to teach literature at Oxford before going into clinical neurology to better understand human nature), this dialogue between himself and Rupert Sheldrake (a Cambridge PhD) entitled ‘Intersection of Consciousness and Matter’, is also well worth a listen.
Layers & Levels Chapter Six: Materialism Revisited
Imagining that this Series is now at the point of crossing out of the innermost ring and about to form the intermediate ring which curves down and then creates the outermost ring (see Punto 3), I thought it a good time to review the materialist perspective on reality because in a way it is the background of this whole exercise even though the main thrust thus far is presenting examples of non-materialist thinking. Or put another way: materialism is what the material is crossing over, just as when the logo transitions from the inner to the intermediate ring this is a place where the line crosses over itself.
Materialism is a big topic and, as is so often the case, a term which means different things to different people at different times in different contexts so I will not here attempt to survey all of them. The main point here is that it is a worldview with a certain notion of ‘reality’.
First lets look at a standard definition, this from Britannica.
Materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.
That’s what I mean by the term though I would substitute the word ‘facts’ for ‘reality’. Interestingly, Britannica quickly goes into some of the problems with this view, including that which is called ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness, a phrase coined by Terrence McKenna decades ago and there is an interesting wrinkle with something called ‘dialectic materialism’, adopted in Marxist thought last century and purporting to be a higher order of view compared to ‘vulgar materialism’, but which IMO ultimately boils down to the same sort of thing.
Materialism depends upon the generally unacknowledged assumption that self and other, or observer and observed, are separate. This separation is axiomatic to the notion that only the physical is real because each physical object is similarly separate from every other such. If you break them down, complex forms comprise a multitude of individual (separate) particles making Reality something put together like a giant Lego construction of bits and pieces in space, which latter is regarded as some sort of void conveniently there to accommodate all apparent forms. Moreover, just as space is somehow there but non-existent because without form, so also with mind or consciousness.
We could take words like space, mind or consciousness and bundle them all into the word ‘experience’. If we look at our actual life every moment involves some sort of experiencing; but according to the materialist assumption, such experiencing is a non-existent fantasy which doesn’t ‘really’ happen. Maybe this doesn’t sound like a big deal until we consider that this assumption devalues so many valuable aspects of living such as:
Thoughts, feelings, memories, relationships, cultural traditions, beliefs, spirituality, artistry, loyalty, courage, nobility, sacrifice and so on ad infinitum. Because when you boil materialism down, essentially it posits that reality is comprised of lifeless, mindless physical particles. As such, it is a world without principles or values, only fit for robots. Which is why materialism is one of the most important issues out there.
I first started contemplating this when following the debates about Darwinian evolution versus ‘intelligent design’. I grew up assuming that Darwin’s theory was essentially correct and never gave it a second thought; but on reading a few articles about the debate, I learned that the whole theory depended upon ‘random genesis’ wherein genes just jostle around chaotically spitting out random variations, some of which survive whilst others don’t. But first: where do we see all these random variations? If we look around we see that creatures are remarkable stable in both the plant and animal kingdoms; only rarely do anomalies arise – people born with three legs or two heads and such – but these are clearly defects not passed down to their offspring as Darwin’s theory suggests. So though many of the comparisons between species – how so many animals have five fingers and toes for example – make the theory sound plausible, if you go down to its underlying assumptions it doesn’t add up. Clearly living organisms have some sort of intention and motivation, the ability to solve problems – like how ivy manages to climb up a wall by feeling out tiny cracks and protuberances, like how ants build sophisticated underground cities, like how wolves hunt in packs and so on. Clearly responsive intelligence is part of living reality and to posit it as some sort imagined irrelevance or mindless, random happenstance is simply wrong.
But more importantly, and again, it devalues so much of our experiential life as unimportant, irrelevant. Put another way, we are reduced to being mindless machines in a mindless mechanical world. Political systems based on this assumption are bound to end up de-humanizing us whilst damaging the inter-related webs of life which are living, interdependent dynamics wherein none of the participants, if you look at it carefully, is actually a fully independent, autonomous thing, or mere agglomerations of mindless, mechanical particles.
Speaking of the latter, is that not what the Five Skandhas description posits, namely that our experience comprises five layers or level of bundled-together elements? Well, yes, but not really because the constituent elements involved are experiential, not merely physical. The first Skandha of form, for example, involves experiencing three-dimensional space in which various different forms arise. We experience this dimension, similarly with feeling, categorization, intention and a resultant stream of individuated consciousness, aka ‘me’.
This Chapter is not about solving the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ rather pointing out that the underlying materialist assumption and mentality most of us live with posits the world as no more than some sort of lifeless machine making us all no more than biological machines, including plants and animals of course, living in a larger machine comprising rocks, air, water, planets, solar systems and so forth. And this mechanical view has gradually taken over most modern societies and resulted in an overly mechanistic view of reality, which includes both ourselves and our lives, and which devalues too many aspects of human experience, in so doing engendering increasingly dehumanizing civilizations.
But if you don’t start with this assumption, you can develop many other ways of thinking, feeling and living and since many traditions in the world have indeed started from different assumptions, there is a reservoir of perspective describing reality from a non-materialist point of view, which is what this Series has been introducing in somewhat simple fashion.
I’ll end this Chapter with an excerpt from an Article I wrote last year which I like:
If you were to ask a scientist to describe the movie you are watching on a screen, the scientist could talk about radio waves or internet EMF signals and various different pixels of light with different frequencies on a screen and sound waves emanating from a speaker diaphragm and suchlike but that same scientist would also have to admit that his science cannot perceive the story being told on that screen. Science doesn’t understand stories, nor can it hear symphonies or any music as such. That means that science doesn’t see feelings, emotions or meaningful experience. Science cannot see love or hate, disappointment or triumph. Science, in other words, doesn’t perceive most of what matters to us as living beings leading what we call ‘our lives.’ So science can see and do many great things, but not everything, including many of the most important experiences involving that which is most important in our human life journeys. Put another way: science has no regard for many things which we regard as most meaningful because science doesn’t ‘do’ experience and since we inhabit what on this blog is often called an ‘experiential continuum,’ science only perceives a narrow band within a far larger spectrum moreover often in ways, as per the example above about watching a movie, that are somewhat outside, or alien, to that experiential continuum.
Layers & Levels Punto 3: Vortexography
The vortex logo above is made with a Japanese calligraphy brush and ink. If you look at the center area you can see a little depression at the top of the inner ring. The stroke starts at the right of that depression then dips down and circles back up and around and then down again to the outer ring, draws that outer ring and then loops back into the center to the starting point where the little depression is formed by the brushstrokes not quite matching up perfectly.
This little Puntito is just an observation: there is one line, continuously drawn which starts off going forward, keeps going forward but forming a continuous curve and then returns to the starting point. In so doing, several things happen: it creates a new form as it proceeds; then it doubles back over its old form; then makes a new form all the way around the outer ring and then doubles back over that outer ring and an earlier inner ring. Also, sometimes it is ascending and other times descending; and sometimes it is outside and sometimes it is inside. Also, it creates three separate white space zones, each with a very different shape albeit all formed by the same one, curving line.
The point being there are lots of different layers and levels even on this one-dimensional plane of a continuous, curved line on paper. There’s a lot going on in this one simple thing; as is true of all things.
Layers & Levels Chapter Five: Heaven Earth & Man
Venerating the past in itself will not solve the world’s problems. We need to find the link between our traditions and our present experience of life. Nowness, or the magic of the present moment, is what joins the wisdom of the past with the present. When you appreciate a painting or a piece of music or a work of literature, no matter when it was created, you appreciate it now. You experience the same now in which it was created. It is always now.
[CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior]
Preamble:
At some point an Appendix will be put together providing more in-depth source materials for those interested, but for now we will continue with the author’s rudimentary babblings based on his training decades ago in such rather rare, pre-modern esoterica transported, most improbably, by a young Tibetan lama who escaped the communist invasion of his decidedly medieval Tibet by walking on foot for about a year, almost to the point of starvation, into India and from thence into the wider world of the twentieth century.
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Like the Torii Gate shown in Introduction Part Two, the origins of the Heaven, Earth and Man formulation are shrouded in the mists of Time. The Swiss Alps mountain man, Otzi, discovered a while back frozen in a glacier for approximately five thousand years, carried not only a few ancient stone acupuncture needles but also several small, circular tattoos on various points in his legs where, to this day, practitioners needle to alleviate arthritis, which he clearly had. The fact that this man had both acupuncture needles and marked points in Europe around 2,500 BC demonstrates how little we know of our own relatively recent history; in any case, where there was acupuncture there was almost certainly some sort of yin-yang theory and therefore also some notion of Heaven Earth and Man, given that Heaven and Earth are in many ways the primordial Yang and Yin formulations. So this is a very ancient trinitarian formulation, quite possibly the oldest of all, especially given how it needs no religious dogma or belief system to appreciate.
‘Ok’, you might say, ‘it’s old; so what?’ Well, let us explore. First I shall provide a traditional academic definition, then something from a contemporary teacher, and finally will unpack it a little further myself. Part of the reason I like to offer the first type of excerpt is that it’s a personal mission, of sorts, to show that many things seemingly frozen in time within formulaic academic language are still very much alive and kicking, though not readily apparent in today’s society. They echo the wittily portrayed god Pan in Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume: because no-one believes in him, nor any of the old Gods, any more he has faded from view, so all that remains is a horribly pungent odour wafting by in the wake of his invisible passage causing people to twicht or spasm in disgust, though they know not why!
Heaven and Man Are United as One.
The term represents a world outlook and a way of thinking which hold that heaven and earth and man are interconnected. This world outlook emphasizes the integration and inherent relationship between heaven, earth, and man. It highlights the fundamental significance of nature to man or human affairs, and describes the endeavour made by man to pursue life, order, and values through interaction with nature. The term has different ways of expression in history, such as heaven and man are of the same category, sharing the same vital energy, or sharing the same principles. Mencius（372？-289 BC）, for one, believed that through mental reflection one could gain understanding of human nature and heaven, emphasizing the unity of mind, human nature, and heaven. Confucian scholars of the Song Dynasty sought to connect the principles of heaven, human nature, and the human mind. Laozi maintained that “man’s law is earthly, earth’s law is natural, and heaven’s law is Dao.” Depending on a different understanding of heaven and man, the term may have different meanings.
CITATION 1
In terms of integration of categories, heaven and man are one. (Dong Zhongshu: Luxuriant Gems of The Spring and Autumn Annals)
CITATION 2
A Confucian scholar is sincere because of his understanding, and he achieves understanding because of his sincerity. That is why heaven and man are united as one. One can become a sage through studies, and master heaven’s law without losing understanding of man’s law. (Zhang Zai: Enlightenment Through Confucian Teachings)
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Now the more contemporary excerpt by my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché from a lecture given in 1979 introducing this triad in the context of a Dharma Arts Seminar wherein the Arts are viewed as a vehicle for spreading wakefulness in society, enlightened culture as it were. [Emphasis mine]
2. CREATION
“Being an artist is not an occupation; it is your life, your whole being.”
The principle of heaven, earth, and man seems to be basic to a work of art. Although this principle has the ring of visual art, it also could be applied to auditory art such as poetry or music, as well as to physical or three-dimensional art. The principle of heaven, earth, and man applies to calligraphy, painting, interior decoration, building a city, creating heaven and earth, designing an airplane or an ocean liner, organizing the dish washing by choosing which dish to wash first, or vacuuming the floor. All of those works of art are included completely in the principle of heaven, earth, and man.
The heaven, earth, and man principle comes from the Chinese tradition, and it was developed further in Japan. Currently the phrase “heaven, earth, and man” is very much connected with the tradition of ikebana, or Japanese flower arranging, but we should not restrict it to that. If you study the architectural vision of a place such as Nalanda University in India, or if you visit Bodhgaya, with its stupa and its compound, or the Buddhist and Hindu temple structures of Indonesia, you see that they are all founded on the heaven, earth, and man principle. This principle is also seen in the interior decor of temples built in medieval times and occupied by a group of practitioners: monks, deities, lay students, and their teacher. The principle of heaven, earth, and man is also reflected in the makeup of the imperial courts of China, Japan, and Korea, and in their official hierarchy, which included an emperor, empress, ministers, subjects, and so forth. In horseback riding, the rider, the horse, and his performance are connected with the heaven, earth, and man principle, which also applies to archery and swordsmanship.
Anything we do, traditionally speaking, whether it is Occidental or Oriental, contains the basic principle of heaven, earth, and man. At this point we are talking about the heaven, earth, and man principle from the artist’s point of view rather than the audience’s.
In the concept of heaven, earth, and man, the first aspect is heaven. The heaven principle is connected with non thought, or vision. The idea of heaven is like being provided with a big canvas, with all the oil paints, and a good brush. You have an easel in front of you, and you have your smock on, ready to paint. At that point you become frightened, you want to chicken out, and you do not know what to do. You might think, “Maybe I should skip the whole thing, have a few more coffees or something.” You might have blank sheets of paper and a pen sitting on your desk, and you are about to write poetry. You begin to pick up your pen with a deep sigh—you have nothing to say. You pick up your instrument and do not know what note to play. That first space is heaven, and it is the best one. It is not regarded as regression, particularly; it is just basic space in which you have no idea what it is going to do or what you are going to do about it or put into it. This initial fear of inadequacy may be regarded as heaven, basic space, complete space. Such fear of knowledge is not all that big a fear, but a gap in space that allows you to step back. It is one’s first insight, a kind of positive bewilderment.
Then, as you look at your canvas or your notepad, you come up with a first thought of some kind, which you timidly try out. You begin to mix your paints with your brush, or to scribble timidly on your notepad. The slogan “First thought is best thought!” is an expression of that second principle, which is earth.
The third principle is called man. The man principle confirms the original panic of the heaven principle and the “first thought best thought” of the earth principle put together. You begin to realize that you have something concrete to present. At that point there is a sense of joy and a slight smile at the corners of your mouth, a slight sense of humour. You can actually say something about what you are trying to create. That is the third principle, man.
So we have heaven, earth, and man. To have all three principles, first you have to have the sky; then you have to have earth to complement the sky; and having sky and earth already, you have to have somebody to occupy that space, which is man. It is like creation, or genesis. This principle of heaven, earth, and man is connected with the ideal form of a work of art, although it includes much more than that. And, to review, all of what we have discussed so far is based on the ground of health, on the idea of complete coolness, and a general sense of sanity. [Chögyam Trungpa, Collected Works, Volume 7]
First, notice the difference between the two excerpts. Here we see how seemingly distant abstract concepts can be brought to life by someone actually living the principles in the here and now. Trungpa Rinpoché explains the terms from the point of view of an artist and spiritual teacher practicing them in everyday life.
But let us start at the beginning, which is especially appropriate because in a way the Heaven Earth & Man triad, as per the above excerpt’s title, in a way describe Creation, which of course is a continuously ongoing process taking place in the present moment. Again:
“To have all three principles, first you have to have the sky; then you have to have earth to complement the sky; and having sky and earth already, you have to have somebody to occupy that space, which is man. It is like creation, or genesis.”
If we look out the window or walk outside, immediately we are struck with the over-arching presence of the sky above; this is nothing mystical, per se, rather immediate and direct. Then we can also observe the earth below and around with its endless variegations and multiplicities – all forms appearing under the essentially formless sky. Each tree has no end of leaves, each animal no end of hairs, each garden path no end of little pebbles, flowers, blades of grass and so forth. And here we are walking in between such Heaven and Earth as indeed we do throughout our lives, always. Now the artist’s perspective Trungpa Rinpoché provides adds a layer which helps us understand the experiential nature of this triad, but our concern again, at this stage, is not so much trying to slot this into any spiritual journey or practice, rather just to grasp the basic concept as part of our initial layers & levels skandha-gathering process.
That said, it is very helpful to take the above descriptions, especially Trungpa’s, and observe them at play in everyday life. This can be in small or large situations, for example how objects are arranged on the dining table, or how everything is put together in the kitchen, living room or bedrooms; or in public spaces how streets are laid out, which churches have a strong sense of sacred presence and which do not, which buildings express civilizational dignity and which are ‘off’ somehow.
Or one could analyze corporate or national governance along those lines as well, not to mention movies, sports events, political gatherings or military campaigns. Some organizations have a great sense of Heaven but lack connection with Earth, others the reverse; in the former those involved (Man) will tend to be overly ideological, perhaps unable to implement what they envisage, whereas in the latter they may overly fixate on the best manufacturing methods whilst avoiding discussions of overall vision, design and organizational viability.
Literally speaking, every house, for example, has a roof, without which it would not be one. The roof clearly connects with the sky above but also from within is the sky of the house inside. Roofs have qualities determined by quality of materials, dimensions, shape, whether or not they provide shade below with covered porches or not, whether they provide a sense of space inside or are oppressive, and so on. Then the Earth aspect is not only how the house sits on the ground and is positioned relative to the terrain and neighbouring houses, but again the materials, the quality of workmanship of the floor, walls, furniture – the gestalt of the physical structure including its plumbing, electrical and heating systems. The Man principle may have more to do with the overall feel and flow, for example where the kitchen is placed relative to the entrance, how the view for the person washing the dishes looks out onto a lovely flower garden or ugly brick wall. Also what sort of family lives there: are they social, talking and laughing a lot, or is it the house of a recluse, or a murderer, or political conspirators, or a family of quarrelling alcoholics.
A key aspect of this triad is the notion of Heaven itself. In Chinese philosophical circles there are long-standing arguments about absolute higher pristine Heaven versus relative lower mundane heaven – both Citations in the first excerpt were about this, for example. But what really matters is for these principles to come to life, to which end what is absolutely (pun intended) required is some sort of sacred outlook. Both Iain McGilchrist and Alexander Dugin have rightly stressed this as a sine qua non of good lives and society; moreover it is an experiential value increasingly alien to modernist, secular materialists – nearly everyone these days. In a way, this sense of sacredness IS the Heaven principle, atmospherically speaking, and of course as with everything there are different layers and levels of experiencing it, so no need for extended academic arguments. Also, although the Christian West’s notion of Heaven has certain overlap with this older, less faith-based formulation, this triad concerns here-and-now perception and experience, not anything other-worldly or afterlife related.
The sky presides over everything, is always there no matter what takes place. This ever-present nowness contains aspects of sacredness already; just as the profound majesty and limitlessness of Nature, the Earth principle, is another sacred aspect as well along with Nature’s inherent beauty, which all naturally appreciate.
Sacred art displays and engenders this, moreover all sacred perception comes from the experiencer being between the uplifting embrace of timeless, all-encompassing, absolute level Heaven and limitlessly variegated relative level Earth, both of which are fundamentally and primordially sacred, the experience of which quality is Man. In the West, cathedrals were a sacred art form dedicated to exploring these principles and making them part of both national and community cultural life.
Nowness is an inner, experiential aspect of the ever-present, all-pervasive Heaven principle. Another major aspect of this triad is that it both assumes and frames some sort of natural Order, or hierarchy. Things have their place just as with Heaven above and Earth below. The Man principle can be well or poorly executed thus societies can be well or poorly attuned to Heaven resulting in a discombobulated Man who cannot manage the practicalities of Earth and ends up creating a mess, either at the individual, family, community or national level. As you can see, this triad has broad implications and though not often mentioned in today’s post-industrial revolution Asia, it pervades much of their thinking and to this day deeply influences their view. Indeed, we can say It has likely been absorbed into their genetic makeup, as with all great civilizational ideas. Again:
Venerating the past in itself will not solve the world’s problems. We need to find the link between our traditions and our present experience of life. Nowness, or the magic of the present moment, is what joins the wisdom of the past with the present. When you appreciate a painting or a piece of music or a work of literature, no matter when it was created, you appreciate it now. You experience the same now in which it was created. It is always now.
Here follow two more paintings by the same artist. Notice how in all three there is, however small and dwarfed by the majesty of Heaven and Earth, a Man principle. Note also how in the first Man is placed where he traditionally belongs, in the Middle, whereas in the second he is at the bottom and in the third he is at the top.
and last but not least:
In the last two, the artist is playing around with where to put the Man principle; in the first it is very small and low down in the river valley, barely noticeable; in the second it is also quite small but on top of a dramatic mountain formation. Notice also how in the last one the orange colour in the house on top is echoed on the top of each lower mountain formation with the same orange splotches on one or two of the trees – a sort of mini-Man principle echoing the main Man principle expression of the two houses on top with windows placed overlooking the terrain below giving the sense of a witnessing mind, which is the animating Man principle. Note also how three paintings feature so many different layers and levels and in the last one there are three main levels, each with its own Heaven and Earth composition, again making those orange splotches on top the Man principle.
There are schools of art, especially flower arranging schools in Japan, which train students for years in how to perceive and then artistically heighten awareness of this triad. It is deeply woven into the fabric of all major Asian civilizations and of course exists also in the West, though not formulated as such.
Let us end with a haiku based on the last painting using a haiku technique from Trungpa’s Shambhala tradition which considers the first line a type of Heaven, then the second line a type of Earth complementing that first line, then the last line is Man, animating or tying the whole thing together somehow, usually with some sort of human feeling.
gazing down from on high
at swirling mist and mountains below
such quietly breathing splendour!
[Editor’s Note: at over 3,100 words, this is longer than desired, but since it includes over 1200 words from excerpts, the author’s contribution is around 2,000 words which is within the intended parameters.]
Layers & Levels Introduction Part Two
As the Inner Ring of the Vortex is drawn, this Layers and Levels Series is gradually acquiring some sort of shape, like a looming Torii Gate on a mist-covered lake at dawn.
The book – for that is clearly what this series of Articles is now becoming – will probably comprise three main sections, or Levels, modelled on the Vortex Logo, namely:
1. DRAWING THE INNER RINGS – collecting skeins, or skandhas, of various foundational layers and levels, building vocabulary and perspective from non-materialist, generally premodern, sources. (The current phase.)
2. THE OUTER RING: these principles and notions in a variety of philosophical, social, artistic, historical, spiritual and narrative contexts, perhaps principally showcasing the Buddhist Mahayana (‘Great Vehicle’), whose main thrust is the expansive generosity unleashed once individuals and/or society break free from the shackles of materialist self-imprisonment.
3. RETURN TO ORIGIN, SACRED RITUAL: examples and suggestions about how individuals and collectives can manifest sacred principles, with an emphasis on formal, or contained, simplicity, thus returning to the Inner Ring starting point of the Vortex Logo.
Moreover, it seems this book, should it indeed become one, is in part a response to the work of two contemporary philosophers, Alexander Dugin from Russia and Iain McGilchrist from the Isle of Skye, both of whom have gone to great lengths to deconstruct many of the underlying flaws of the modernist mindset, and who advocate valuing sacredness as key to remedying most modernist social ills. Seeing as the entire world is mired in the ‘thick, black fog of materialism’ 1 it is hardly surprising that much of their work remains similarly ensconced in explaining the nature and characteristics of that pervasive miasma. So what I am hoping to offer is some explanatory and performative examples from classic, non-materialist traditions, of what might help constitute Dugin’s Fourth Political Way 2.
As is well said: ‘Manners maketh Man’ in that they are a proactive, creative expression, not merely some sort of stuffy, pseudo-Victorian straight jacket. (Ask any happily married couple whether or not manners matter.) It is also an offering and response to my beloved teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, who tirelessly transmitted virtually all the esoteric content, and his close student and companion John A Perks, aka ‘Johnny’, his personal attendant and Chief Trickster for many years who founded, in accordance with his teacher’s suggestion, the lineage of Celtic Buddhism. Indeed, albeit decades after our teacher’s early death in 1987, they both still live and play together in Johnny’s mindstream, by the merrily flowing waters of Saxton’s River in Vermont, albeit now decades after my teacher’s death in 1987.
Editorial Note: at some point this Intro Part Two, and any other subsequent additions, will merge into a final Introduction but for now it features as a sequential entry in the emerging Series. Indeed, all the Blog and Substack entries will constitute some sort of first draft after which a book will be fashioned with no doubt many not making the final cut, or getting merged with various others. Editors love such shenanigans!
1 Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche The Sadhana of Mahamudra, 1968
2 The word ‘Way’ is substituted for ‘Theory’ for a Way is something actually lived and practiced, not merely hypothesized.
Layers & Levels Chapter Four: Story One
Welcoming the Dark Side
As we drove to walk the dog yesterday, my Mexican wife told me a story she had heard from an Argentinian podcaster who makes up stories. Though this one, interestingly, despite being told in Spanish, is about King Arthur. 1 Stories, of course, are the world’s oldest ways of communicating the various layers and levels of experience, so they fit right into to whatever it is this Series is cooking up! She told it from memory, altering it a little, and I have done the same as apparently did the podcaster Jorge Bucay (linked below). And so it goes with stories….
One day long ago, King Arthur was in his castle in Camelot languishing from an illness which had kept him bedridden for months. The Royal Physicians said that he did not have long to live. Sir Galahad, his most trusted Knight, was beside himself with worry. Then one of the serving girls, who lived in a village in near the Dark Forest, whispered in his ear: ‘the King has been bewitched. My mother says that there are only two sorcerers who can cure him; the first is Merlin but it will take more than two weeks for him to arrive and that will be too late; the second is Brunhilde, whom the King banished years ago, but who lives only two days ride away past the Dark Forest in a high mountain cave just outside borders of our Kingdom. You should go ask Brunhilde if she will help.’
So Sir Galahad passed through the dangers, which this tale does not tell, of the Dark Forest, and found Brunhilde in her high mountain cave just outside the borders of the Kingdom. She was a fearsome old hag, incredibly ugly to gaze upon – indeed on those few occasions when she went out and about she was often cursed and spat upon. Despite this unappealing appearance, Sir Galahad approached and told her of King Arthur’s dire predicament.
Said the Witch: “I am aware that he has been put under a deadly spell that only I or Merlin can lift; but he banished me years ago, so even were I inclined to heal him, which I am not, what’s in it for me?’
‘I am sure we can arrange fair payment in gold and treasure’ replied the Knight.
‘But gold and this old lady do not agree’, said the Witch.
‘Or the King could lift your banishment,’ suggested the Knight.
‘But I am quite happy where I am, thank you very much; and in any case you are in no position to guarantee that the King, once awakened from the spell, will wish to end my exile. He is, after all, a King, and you know how they can be. You must offer me something you can honor yourself!”
Neither spoke, considering. And then she suggested: ‘if you agree to marry me once I have cured the King, then I will go with you back to the Kingdom, lift the spell and save his life.’
The Knight, reluctant as he was to spend even another minute in the company of this evil-smelling, unsightly hag, nevertheless agreed, and off they went together back to Camelot where the Witch proceeded to boil up an evil-smelling magic potion in the King’s large bedroom fireplace, chanting strange spells and performing strange dances. Finally, exhausted, she told Sir Galahad that she must now sleep on the floor alongside the King’s bed, but that when next he awoke, the King would be fully cured.
Sure enough, when next morning the King awoke, he sat up fully alert and immediately commanded Sir Galahad, who had kept watch in a chair by the foot of the King’s bed all night long, to bring him a breakfast. ‘I feel like I haven’t eaten in a month!’ exclaimed the King, lustily.
‘You haven’t taken solid food in almost two months, Sire’, said the good Knight, ‘and indeed we thought we were about to lose you, so deep had you sunk under a wicked spell.’
At that last word, the King suddenly espied the horrible hag lying on the floor on one side of his bed, an unkempt bundle of stinking rags, and demanded to know ‘who or what is this ghastly evil-smelling mess lying alongside me in the Royal Bedchamber?’
The Witch, as if summoned, awoke and sat up exclaiming: ‘Well, Sire, you know very well who I am; I am Brunhilde the Witch whom you banished years ago into lifetime exile.’
‘I do recall, very well, and the reasons I banished you; but I ask again: what are you doing in my bedchamber. Answer quick or I shall have your head, witch or no witch!’
‘Sire,’ said Sir Galahad, ‘she is here on my invitation and guarantee of safe passage. Once we realized that you were under a spell and not suffering from a common illness, we determined that by the time Merlin would have arrived, it would be too late; so I journeyed past the Dark Forest and its many monsters to reach Brunhilde’s cave where I beseached her to intervene on your behalf to lift the deadly spell threatening your life and the life of our Realm, which she now has done. In return I gave her my word as a Knight of the Round Table that I would take her as my wife until death do us part.’
The King, though taken aback, perceived that Sir Galahad, as well as behaving honorably, had put in motion events that had saved his life; so rather than punish him for violating the Witch’s exile, he generously rewarded him with many lands including the area of the Dark Forest at the border of his Kingdom immediately adjacent to Brunhilde’s cave, though he could not refrain from expressing grave reservations about the choice of bride, given that Sir Galahad was such a handsome, well-regarded Knight of the Round Table who so many of the fairest and noblest ladies of the land desired to claim as their own.
The next day they held a private wedding ceremony witnessed only by His Majesty, after which Sir Galahad and his hideous, stinking bride left for her home. On the first evening back at her cave, Brunhilde made to enter and prepare the it for their first conjugal night but Sir Galahad, still struck by her intense ugliness, demurred, preferring to make camp outside. However, whilst mulling things over alone at his camp fire, he reflected that he wasn’t living up to his end of the sacred bargain and so begged permission of Brunhilde to enter her cave, to which request she, in a surprisingly sweet voice, assented.
On turning the corner after entering the mouth of the cave, Sir Galahad breathlessly beheld the most beautiful maid he had e’er set his gaze upon, rendering him speechless in wonder. Gently she approached him and, softly placing her hand on his forearm, made the following offer:
‘You have treated me kindly, Good and Gentle Knight, and kept your word though I know it must have been hard; in return I appear this way for you as reward for your kindness and honour. Though now you must decide: do you wish me to appear this way during the nights, or during the days.’
Sir Galahad hesitated, considering. If she appeared like this during the night, he knew he would be the happiest man in the kingdom for the rest of his days, albeit with none to witness; but if she appeared like this during the day, then the King and all the Realm would know how fortunate he was, how wise his choice had been and his power and influence would surely grow.
‘Choose now, Sir!’ insisted the Witch.
Spontaneously he replied: ‘Lady, you can appear as you wish whenever you wish as it pleases you.’ At which point the lovely Lady laughed, her voice like fresh spring waters bubbling gently in a highland stream, saying ‘Verily, dear Knight, you have chosen well; for you have treated me with a kindness and generosity I ne’er yet encountered from any other person, man or woman, in return for which I can now manifest, for your pleasure, in a way that is pleasing and resplendent, and thus shall I choose.’
And thus she did.
And so for the rest of their days she was the most beautiful Lady in all the Realm, and Sir Galahad the most contented, prosperous and honorable, of Knights much beloved by his King and all other subjects of the Realm.
MORAL:
No matter how we strive to banish the Dark and Ugly sides of our Nature, we must value them for all have a place under Heaven in this our Sacred Realm; moreover, once we have made a vow we should keep it no matter the consequences trusting that a just reward will be ours in this life or the next.
Layers & Levels Chapter Three: Introducing the Six Realms of Samsaric Existence
“As we go along from moment to moment, day to day, life to life, awareness and our thoughts keep shaping the life we lead. Cumulatively, the effect is tremendous. We can create for ourselves a tunnel lined with rags and deprivation or an open world of wealth and genuine communication – dark worlds, bright worlds, moderate worlds – so many different worlds can be created based on karma 1 we keep creating through our thoughts and projections.” 2
“Big fleas have little fleas
upon their back to bite ’em;
And little fleas have smaller fleas
and so ad infinitum” 3
From non-materialist philosophy, and as part of continuing to draw the inner swirl of a Vortex Logo wherein we muster initial vocabulary and perspective, in this Chapter we now explore a little non-material cosmology.
Below is something written thirty years ago for an almost published book entitled ‘When the Iron Bird Flies’ 4, intended as an introduction to Buddhism for younger readers. The entire section, wherein each of the Six Realms gets its own chapter and is treated in a somewhat imaginative way, is linked here. (If I say so myself, it’s worth reading!) The following excerpt introduces the topic.
The Buddha noticed that everything arises, lasts for a while, and then goes away. Everything. Whether you believe in a solid, permanent ego or not, it still works that way from birth, to living and through to death. Each thought or feeling is that way too. It arises, it goes along for a while and then something else comes up – perhaps you suddenly fall off your bicycle – or a pterodactyl lands in your lap! The key word here is ‘everything’: people, flowers, buildings, bees, love affairs, football games, breakfasts, lunches, picnics, moods, moments, conversations, dinosaurs, planets, stars and solar systems. Everything. This is a simple but also profound point. The very last statement that the Buddha uttered before dying was: “whatever comes together falls apart.”
Egos also seemingly arise, dwell and then cease. According to the Buddha, sentient beings – those beings who are alive, who feel things, who are born, live and then die – dwell for a while in the following worlds, or realms, known as the Six Realms, one of which is the Human Realm. These realms too arise, dwell and then cease no matter how real and permanent they might feel. They are the living dreams in which we play out our lives. We mentioned passion, aggression and ignorance as being perhaps the driving force behind evolution. From the point of view of the teachings which follow, the realms are the many dramas they direct and produce, the creative force which results in the endlessly ongoing cycle of birth, dwelling and dying.
These Six Realms of Existence are a description of where we find ourselves now as human beings. They can be regarded as a scientific definition of the external world, 5 but it is not necessary to do so. If you find the following descriptions of the hell or god realms unbelievable, that is fine. In fact – and this is definitely the most helpful way to look at them – they also describe the six main emotional states that we go through as humans, day after day, mood after mood, moment after moment.
The Buddha’s teachings help us to understand and really appreciate our human-ness rather than encourage us to ‘transcend’ it. As you will see, the main saving grace about being human is that we have such a broad range of experience. The palette with which each of us paints our lives offers a complete range of emotional states leading from hell to heaven and back again. Indeed, it is said that humans are the only beings who taste all six; that is what is so special about them, since only in a realm where you are not completely stuck do you have a chance to wake up out of the dream.
However, all is not rosy. It is said that all of these realms are part of the ‘Realm of Desire’. The problem with desire is that it creates an endless cycle, or self-perpetuating loop, of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Before you get what you want you have a sense of need, which is also a form of insecurity. After it is over, you again feel insecure and want something else. So there is constant need and alternation between satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Simply put, these six realms are descriptions of various levels of intensity from the most subtle, mental, exquisite and pleasurable to the most intense, solid, excruciating and painful. Although somewhat a factual description of our world, their main service is to point out the endlessly cyclic nature of our minds and experience. For example, your household may be somewhat stuck in one type of realm or atmosphere, and then you go off to school which is another; then you have a jolly meeting with a group of friends and that is yet another. They can be described and experienced separately, but, like primary colours, they can mix themselves one with the other to create endless combinations.
In the title to this chapter, you might have noticed the word samsaric, which comes from samsara. Samsara literally means ‘journeying’, but in this context it also means ‘cycle of existences’. It is as if we are on a spinning wheel. Sometimes we are on top and everything is fine and heavenly, but then, gradually or suddenly, we are going deeper and deeper down and everything is negative or hellish. It is constant. It never stops. The Hindu beliefs were that if one did good deeds, one could end up on top of the heap and stay there forever, which is similar to beliefs about heaven in so many other traditions. What the Buddha discovered was that because all states of mind are impermanent you cannot find a permanent resting place even in a trance or god realm; sooner or later you have to come down again, which is why it is described as a spinning wheel rather than a one-way ladder going up to heaven.
By cutting through the chains of desire that bind us to the constant craving for experience, we get off this wheel altogether. But that is later on. First, we need to examine our spinning journey on the wheel. Just for fun, let’s start at the bottom…
We will doubtless encounter this Six Realms later on, but at this point in the Series they serve simply as another initial example of Layers and Levels, in this case at more psychological and emotional levels. The picture above is linked to a public domain article with a traditional explanation. Here follows my own brief description of each realm:
Hell Realm: one of extreme pain, as intense as can be imagined and then some. There are two types of hell: hot and cold, burning or freezing. Traditionally depicted as one of unending torture with Hell Realm Guards whipping, slicing, burning, boiling, severing limbs, poking out eyeballs, ramming hot metal rods up various orifices and so forth. Every day you wake up it starts all over again, except of course in Hell you never get a minute off: each hour feels like a decade and each year an eternity. No rest for the wicked!
Hungry Ghost Realm: pretas have huge bellies but mouths only the size of pin holes; even if they do find water, they cannot slake such intense thirst through such tiny mouths! No matter how much they have of anything desirable they want more, though most of the time they desperately crave what they don’t or cannot have feeling its lack. So they are always thirsting, questing, yearning, craving, complaining, moaning, depressed, addicted. They live in a constant state of restless dissatisfaction, yearning for better experiences which never come but even if they do either they are soon disappointing or, if satisfying, they are immediately desperate to hold onto the experiences lest they slip away, which means they miss out on any fleeting pleasure for fear of losing it and are thus dissatisfied and disappointed all over again – and again – forever ghosts of the person they really want to be.
Animal Realm: Animals perform according to the specifications of their genetic design, making for a cornucopia of extraordinary productions – butterflies, tigers, peacocks and so on. Birds can navigate thousands of miles across oceans with nary a landmark; insects construct entire cities. Some creatures deep under the ocean live for centuries, others, like certain moths, for only twenty four hours, all following their genetic programming. So even though they can do so many incredible things in so many incredible bodies, it all ends up being somewhat mechanical, habit-driven and humourless; they come in all sorts of imaginative shapes and sizes, but lack any true imagination of their own – including that required to crack and laugh at jokes.
Human Realm: humans, on the other hand, are highly imaginative, perhaps too much so. No two humans are the same: some are rich, others poor, some honest, others lie all the time. Emotionally we go up and down like yo-yos changing from minute to minute, hour to hour and day to day. Although born into a relatively basic body, outside of ourselves and usually working with others in complex social dynamics, we are so skillful and creative that we can build houses, machines, entire cities and indeed civilizations. We can be extremely kind or unbelievably cruel making this world a paradise or living hell. In the Buddhist tradition it is said that only in the Human Realm can one attain enlightenment because here we can become aware of change, and thus of the insubstantiality of all creation, including both inner confusion and seeming external solidity, which seeming obstacles trap beings in the other Realms.
Jealous God Realm: asuras, or titans, are very powerful and proud of it. They are constantly on the lookout for anyone around who might be more powerful, or about to climb higher, than themselves, so they are also highly paranoid. Traditionally depicted as warrior types shooting arrows at the gods in towers above them, they strive to reach up and pull those gods down, trampling on those lesser than themselves in their zeal to ascend higher and take what they claim is rightfully theirs. They laugh at others’ misfortune; if they see someone slip on a banana peel, they find it amusing to imagine that they placed it there themselves – and even more funny if the victim is badly hurt.
God Realm: devas live in a realm of ethereally exquisite tastes, smells, touches, sounds, colours and ideas. They are seemingly in paradise, living on pastel-toned clouds sipping delicious ambrosia, every sensation perfect pleasure. But as soon as even the teeniest tiniest thing goes wrong the perfectionist spell is broken and either they instantly plunge down into the phantasmagorical freak-out of Hell or they find themselves fighting alongside the asuras struggling to get back where they belong; but the more they struggle the further they are from being gods anymore which triggers intense anguish which, again, projects them all the way down into the agonizing Pits of hot or cold Hell. They may well enjoy dwelling in the God Realm for what feels like an eternity, like a young couple in the ecstasy of first love, but that seeming eternity actually lasts only a few minutes in Hell Realm time where each moment lasts an eternity of excruciating, unrelenting painful agony.
This fundamental pain of the endlessly spinning wheel of samsaric alternating pain-or-pleasure existence is why the Buddha developed a system for getting out of its clutches; but that’s Buddhadharma, which is not the topic here. In terms of Layers and Levels, one fascinating thing about the Six Realms is that, like colours, they mix and blend with each other. You can have a more or less human realm personality – intelligent, playful and with sense of humour etc. – but suddenly find yourself consumed by a hellish temper tantrum hating the spouse who only a few hours ago you dearly loved. Or: you step out of your god realm mansion into your super fancy luxury car only to take the wrong highway exit by mistake (because some joker replaced the sign) and find yourself off-ramping into a dangerous neighbourhood known for its violent street gangs and then as you wait white knuckling it, doors locked, at the first red light, increasingly frightened that you won’t make it alive for another five minutes, you realize that you’ve totally lost that God Realm feeling and are now in an entirely different emotional realm. Such rapid changes happen all the time along with combinations of realms happening at once. You ARE a god realm like millionaire sitting in a super-comfy luxury car and you ARE in danger of being attacked any second whilst the comic on the radio really IS very funny and on top of it all you are suddenly VERY hungry and want to get to the nearest hamburger joint! Or you go into a truly destitute third world neighbourhood, garbage, disease and poverty all around, to meet a young violin playing prodigy who looks as lovely as any Princess ever painted, but whilst you are still catching your breath from marveling at her beauty you whiff the repugnant stench of dog shit which somehow got stuck to your shoe.
Also, you can have, say, an animal with god realm tendencies (a peacock, an eagle) or a god realm with hungry ghost – someone who has it all but is never satisfied, always questing for the next fascinating experience. Especially in the Human Realm, where most of us reading dwell, there are no end of layers and levels like this continuously unfolding.
So here we have a more fluid type dynamic which, like paints or emotions, blend into each other in no end of different combinations creating no end of ever-changing colours and landscapes, like civilizations which come and go across the historical landscape. Our mental and emotional states effect our surroundings, both their actual nature and how they appear to ourselves and others in this our mutually co-created experiential continuum. Moreover there is variance, depth, texture, morality, alternating joy and suffering, levels of intensity, layers of subtlety and crudeness. Just as no two places are the same in terms of physical terrain, so no two moments in time are the same nor any two experiences, individual or collective.
In this collectively shared Dream, we are all passaging through a world of experience shaped and coloured by varying manifestations of pain and pleasure. As the quote at the beginning reads:
“As we go along from moment to moment, day to day, life to life, awareness and our thoughts keep shaping the life we lead. Cumulatively, the effect is tremendous. We can create for ourselves a tunnel lined with rags and deprivation or an open world of wealth and genuine communication – dark worlds, bright worlds, moderate worlds – so many different worlds can be created based on karma we keep creating through our thoughts and projections.”
I also wrote a short piece on the Six Realms a while back on this blog at: https://baronbrasdor.art/2021/06/23/of-realms-humans/
1 Karma means action, also known as the law of cause and effect. See Chapter 11.
2 Entering the Stream, p 66, Shambhala Publications. Section written by Sherab Chodzin Kohn.
3 Edgar Allen Poe.
4 A prophecy by 8th century teacher Padmasambhava: “When the Iron Bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Teachings will come to the land of the Red Man.”
5 For those who like cosmology : according to Buddhist cosmology, we are in Jambudvipa, the Realm of Desire. Desire is that we want things, we want to live. See Prologue, The Birth of the World..
Layers & Levels: Punto 2
Tanka 1: Japanese Storytelling Theatres
Years ago in a friend’s book about Japan, I read how in Tokyo before the war there were about one thousand storytelling theatres. People on the way home from work would pay a quarter to sit in a theater for about thirty minutes listening to a wide variety of traditional and comic tales. This of course was in the era before television.
For some reason this little snippet of information confirmed my sense that the Japanese people and their civilization make exceptionally human human beings. I would love to spend a year in a Japanese village one day, drinking sake and writing haiku.
Elsewhere in the same book was a chapter on the snowiest village in the world. There is so much snow, about ten meters or so, that in the dead of winter you can see only the rooftops of each house. The villagers fashion tunnels between each others houses, basically living underground several months a year. They probably regale each other with stories around the fire, night after night, during the long, dark winter.
Trudging home in the snow
Each crunch under foot
Telling the tale of our heartbreak
The Shinjuku Suehirotei theater, decorated with the names of performers.
Contemporary ‘Rakugo’ storytelling in English
Another in Japanese (still picture above)
- Tanka: combination of haiku and short story ↩︎
Layers & Levels Chapter Two: Of Yin and Yang and the Five Phases
Whilst Lord Gautama, the Buddha, was busy deconstructing traditional Hindu civilization and causing political havoc in North India because so many Royal Heirs were ditching palace life in favor of wandering around as penniless mendicants preaching renunciation, mindfulness and the Four Aryan Truths, meanwhile in China a civilization of a very different sort had been steadily evolving based on similar insights but with different ‘Chinese characteristics’. Here the fleeting nature of things and experiences had been duly noted – as any intelligent person or culture inevitably does – but a special type of process theory had gradually emerged. Objects, for example, are not complete stand-alone entities, rather ongoing processes; indeed, everything is like a river which is recognizably there as such, but a closer look soon reveals that its constituent parts continuously change from moment to moment.
First there is a ‘river’ then there is no ‘river’ then there is….
To explain this eternal processing nature of reality a binary symbol emerged featuring a solid or broken line indicating that everything has two poles or main aspects such as beginning-growing vs ending-declining. We experience many such polarities, such as inner and outer experience – the thoughts and feelings ‘I’ feel inside versus the apparent world perceived by the senses outside. Or a mountain on a sunny day: the sunny side is warmer than the shady side but this continuously changes moment by moment as the sun moves across the sky. Similarly: up-down, front-back, inside-outside, fast-slow, warming–cooling, microcosm-macrocosm, center-fringe, growing-shrinking, virtue-vice, wise-foolish, loving-hating and so on ad infinitum.
In Figure 2 below we see this drawn at first as two lines making a teepee shape or then secondly as a circle, with two rising phases on the left being early and later phases of yang and two descending phases on the right being early and later phases of yin.
This is not an earth-shattering observation, of course, but building upon that as the foundation for philosophical, spiritual and even civilizational theory is deeply insightful as evidenced, for example, by how it engendered a remarkably precise medical science which in turn developed the world’s most sophisticated herbal medical tradition as well as, by applying these principles yogically, both acupuncture and medical qigong 1.
So this initial binary insight ends up producing another skandha, or bundle, of five called the Five Elemental Phases, Processes or Energies. Below in Figure 2 are two diagrams by Hua Ching Ni 2.
Note in the first Figure below how from starting with two principles, drawn as either a solid or broken line, you have four combinations of those lines and then, as shown in the lowest drawing on the page, by adding a third line to the Bigram to create a Trigram, there are eight possible combinations to which can now be attributed more complex phase values. Then by combining two Trigrams together into a six-line Hexagram there are eight times eight possible combinations making the sixty four Hexagrams of the I Ching. From simplicity comes complexity.
In a later chapter we will look at these eight Trigrams as part of analysing various different ‘layers & levels’ trinitarian formulations such as Mind-Body-Spirit and Heaven-Earth-Man, both to further explore Layers & Levels and also to build vocabulary with which to analyze a variety of natural and societal phenomena.
But before we get to eight we have five, which again is the four early and late phases mentioned above plus the zero line, or central, value.
To these phases are attributed various elemental properties relating to some found in nature, namely Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. And from those five are derived two dynamics, supporting and controlling. [See Figure 1 above]
Supporting:
Wood feeds Fire, Fire’s ash creates Earth, Earth’s minerals create Metal, Metal’s concentration and condensation produce Water, and Water nourishes Wood. This is often called the Mother-Child dynamic.
Controlling:
Water controls Fire, Wood pushes down on Earth, Fire melts Metal, Earth channels Water, and Metal cuts Wood. This is often called the Husband-Wife dynamic.
Organ Associations 3:
Each of the five major organs in the body is principally associated with each of these Elementary Phases namely:
- Fire with Heart
- Earth with Spleen
- Metal with Lungs
- Water with Kidneys
- Wood with Liver
And each major female (Yin) organ above has a male (Yang) brother organ namely:
- Heart with Small Intestine
- Spleen with Stomach
- Lungs with Large Intestine
- Kidneys with Urinary Bladder
- Liver with Gall Bladder
Each of these main and accompanying organs has a meridian line in the body with various points each with no end of inter-relationships creating a nexus of several hundred points each with major and minor correspondences with all other meridians and points, very much like a big city subway map, giving Chinese medical practitioners an extraordinarily precise yet infinitely variegated matrix of particulars to treat with needles, massage and herbal medicine.
So here we have gone from noticing four phases of an oscillating wave or circle to creating a dynamic map of inter-related energies, some supportive, some restrictive, just as happens in our muscular systems, or electrical circuits or dynamic climate ecospheres, not to mention family and social dynamics involving both small and large groups.
If we look at a tree we can see that there are various fundamentals in play: the root systems spreading hither and thither in the earth intimately connected via rhizomes with the roots of other plants in its orbit; then the trunk growing majestically heavenward spreading into various major and minor branches which in turn support a multifarious canopy of countless multitudes of leaves dancing together in gentle breezes, absorbing sunlight, being cleaned and refreshed by rain, serving as shelter to birds and other small animals whilst also providing shade for various plants and creatures below. Root action varies greatly from trunk and branch action which varies greatly from leaf action; some support and others provide stress, yet all together comprise the living, ever-changing but always identifiable dynamic process we nominally call ‘a tree’.
This chapter’s mission is not to explain all the mysteries and methods of Yin and Yang and related Five Element theory but rather to showcase another example of non-materialist View revealing how reality comprises no end of inter-related Layers and Levels. It is non-materialist because, like Buddhism, its starting point is direct experience. Any conclusions therefrom may entail endless debates 4, but despite any such niggles we all share certain bedrock experiences, though perhaps it takes special insight to identify and describe them well.
Importantly, yin and yang are not external ‘objective’ measurables, or quanta, even though they are clearly recognizable experiential qualities, or qualia, manifesting no end of specific, detailed characteristics. We all know the difference between top and bottom, front and back, warm and cold, inner and outer, near and far, rising and falling, beginning and ending, connecting and alienating, harmony and discord, light and dark, smooth and rough and so on ad infinitum. Building a matrix of inter-related ways of examining such things in the light of the insight that such phenomena arise continuously in some sort of polar, or binary, dynamic is the initial insight; then compiling that insight into a symbolic language of solid and broken lines was another leap forward from which no end of further layers and levels of meaningful relationships can be explored. Indeed:
The language of symbol is a portal into insight about natural experience with thus observed nature displaying further layers and levels of insight into how to read such experience; indeed reality reveals itself as a living process of continuously self-expressing symbolic language.
In another chapters we might peer into a six line hexagram, exploring how to extrapolate from a visual symbol drawn of only six lines no end of layers and levels of meaning, much like how a large tree with only one trunk can produce a seemingly limitless number of individual leaves. This is the sort of internally consistent symbolic language that can be systematically formulated from non-materialist starting points and which, not coincidentally, always manifests no end of layers and levels, because that is the nature of the experiential continuum in which we all dwell as both passive and active participants. This non-materialist starting point, the norm in most cultures until modern times, being personal experience itself which comprises both inner and outer mandalas 5 , stands in stark contrast to the materialist worldview that believes in a separate outer observable reality independent from the inner experiential observing mandalas wherein consciousness is somehow believed to also separately and independently dwell.
This different starting premise opens the gaping divide between premodern and postmodern mentalities and which now supersedes earlier such divisions between civilizational worldviews like Christian or Jew, primitive versus civilized, East versus West; indeed, with increasingly few exceptions it can be said:
We are all modernist materialists now!
[Diagrams scanned from Hua Chin Yi’s ‘Book of Changes and the Unchanging Truth’ whose introduction is excellent.]
1 Medical Qigong: now generally outlawed in communist China
2 A Daoist teacher who lived for years in Los Angeles and was a descendant of the Duke of Zhou credited with having helped his elder brother King Wen of Zhou formulate the sequence of the Hexagrams in the I Ching used for the past twenty five hundred years or so, along with the now established commentary about the hexagrams and the changing lines.
3 Brains and sexual organs don’t make it into the Primary Five, both being regarded as additional special organs mainly associated with the generative force of Water-Kidneys.
4 As in the physical sciences which theoretically should be able to settle such differences with unequivocal facts if it were not for those pesky, virtually limitless, layers and levels of known & unknown ‘variables’.
5 Mandala: any identifiable phenomenon comprising a cluster of particular characteristics such as a person, place, zone such as: inner, outer, palace, national, bedroom, kitchen, personal, open and hidden mandalas. To be explained in more depth later.
Layers & Levels: Punto 1
Sometimes little points that reflect the Layers and Levels theme will pop up. They won’t require a full chapter, just a brief description. For example this first one:
Punto 1
Languedoc Cooking Pots
I read years ago that in the South of France each peasant family has a large fireplace over whose fire hangs suspended a large cast iron pot into which pretty much everything gets thrown – vegetables, herbs, meats, spices and leftovers. The pot is never cleaned since it is always over the fire off to one side such that the ingredients are pretty much always simmering.
Over time, each family’s stew ends up having a similar but also very distinct flavour. Even though most families contribute more or less the same ingredients, some favor one spice over another, some family’s meat is more pungent or plentiful than another due to the terrain or other such particularity, some favour carrots over onions and so forth. (Accumulated layers and levels, manifesting as family stew!)
Some of these pots, I was told by a Frenchwoman – albeit one who lived in the Loir et Cher near Paris, not in her friend Marcel Pagnol’s Languedoc region in the South where this culinary tradition is reportedly practiced – have been continuously simmering for centuries. And nearly all the stews which came out of such pots were, and hopefully still are, seriously delicious.
Peasant gourmet: one of many things at which the French excel!
[Note: Have re-named the first two offerings from Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 to Introduction and Chapter 1. Author-Editor.]
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