Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - I

Neither Supernatural nor Mechanical

Before we can attempt to discover what it is to hold something sacred, certain barriers must at least be mapped. Every speaker in such a discussion must make clear where he or she stands on a number of topics related to basic premises of this civilization as well as to religion and the sacred. It seems that the particular focus of the epistemological perplexity in which we all live today is the beginning of a new solution for the body-mind problem. A first step towards a solution is contained in the discussion of Jung‘s distinction between Pleroma and Creatura, such that mind is an organizational characteristic, not a separate ― substance. The material objects involved in the residential heating system – including the resident – are so arranged as to sustain certain mental processes, such as responding to differences in temperature, and self-correction.

This way of looking, which sees the mental as organizational and as accessible to study, but does not reduce it to the material, allows for the development of a monistic and unified way of looking at the world. One of the key ideas developed at the conference on Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation, some fifteen years ago, was that every religion and many other kinds of systems of thought can be seen as proposing a solution or partial solution to the body-mind problem, the recurrent difficulty of seeing how material objects can display or respond to such qualities as beauty or value or purpose. Of the several ways of thinking about body-mind, many are what I would regard as unacceptable solutions to the problem and these of necessity give rise to a whole variety of superstitions, which seem to fall into two classes. There are those forms of superstition that place explanations of the phenomena of life and experience outside the body. Some sort of separate supernatural agency – a mind or spirit – is supposed to affect and partly control the body and its actions. In these belief systems it is unclear how the mind or spirit, itself immaterial, can affect gross matter. People speak of the ― power of mind over matter, but surely this relationship between ― mind and matter: can obtain only if either mind has material characteristics or matter is endowed with mental characteristics such as ― obedience. In either case the superstition has explained nothing. The difference between mind and matter is reduced to zero. There are in contrast those superstitions that totally deny mind. As mechanists or materialists try to see it, there is nothing to explain that cannot be covered by lineal sequences of cause and effect.

There shall be no information, no humor, no logical types, no abstractions, no beauty or ugliness, no grief or joy. And so on. This is the superstition that man is a machine of some kind. Even placebos would not work on such a creature! But the life of a machine, even of the most elaborate computers we have so far been able to make, is cramping – to narrow for human beings – and so our materialists are always looking for a way out. They want miracles, and my definition of such imagined or contrived phenomena is simple: Miracles are dreams and imaginings whereby materialists hope to escape from their materialism. They are narratives that precisely – too precisely – confront the premise of lineal causality. These two species of superstition, these rival epistemologies, the supernatural and the mechanical, feed each other. In our day, the premise of external mind seems to invite charlatanism, promoting in turn a retreat back into a materialism which then becomes intolerably narrow. We tell ourselves that we are choosing our philosophy by scientific and logical criteria, but in truth our preferences are determined by a need to change from one posture of discomfort to another. Each theoretical system is a cop-out, tempting us to escape from the opposite fallacy. The problem is not, however, entirely symmetrical. I have, after all, chosen to live at Esalen, in the midst of the counterculture, with its astrological searching for truth, its divination by yarrow root, its herbal medicines, its diets, its yoga, and all the rest. My friends here love me and I love them, and I discover more and more that I cannot live anywhere else. I am appalled by my scientific colleagues, and while I disbelieve almost everything that is believed by the counterculture, I find it more comfortable to live with that disbelief than with the dehumanizing disgust and horror that conventional occidental themes and ways of life inspire in me. They are so successful and their beliefs are so heartless.

apple butterfly Tao

Vladimir Kush, Butterfly Apple, 1978

royal Tao

Sharaha, scroll painting, probably 18th century, British Museum collection

Saraha is also a fruit of the same tree [note: of Buddha]. Saraha was born about two centuries after Buddha. He was in the direct line of a different branch. One branch moves from Mahakashyap to Bodhidharma and Zen is born – and it is still full of flowers, that branch. Another branch moves from Buddha to his son, Rahul Bhadra, and from Rahul Bhadra to Sri Kirti, and from Sri Kirti to Saraha, and from Saraha to Nargarjuna – that is the Tantra branch.

It is still bearing fruit in Tibet. Tantra converted Tibet, and Saraha is the founder of Tantra just as Bodhidharma is the founder of Zen. Bodhidharma conquered China, Korea, Japan. Saraha conquered Tibet.
These Songs of Saraha are of great beauty. They are the very foundation of Tantra. You will have to understand first the Tantra attitude towards life, the Tantra vision of life.The most basic thing about Tantra is this – and very radical, revolutionary, rebellious – the basic vision is that the world is not divided into the lower and the higher, but that the world is one piece.

The higher and the lower are holding hands. The higher includes the lower, and the lower includes the higher. The higher is hidden in the lower – so the lower has not to be denied, has not to be condemned, has not to be destroyed or killed. The lower has to be transformed. The lower has to be allowed to move upwards… and the lower becomes the higher. There is no unbridgeable gap between the Devil and God – the Devil is carrying God deep down in his heart.

Once that heart starts functioning, the Devil becomes God. That is the reason why the very root of the word ’devil’ means the same as ’divine’. The word ’devil’ comes from ’divine’; it is the Divine not yet evolved, that’s all. Not that the Devil is against the Divine, not that the Devil is trying to destroy the Divine – in fact, the Devil is trying to find the Divine. The Devil is on the way towards the Divine; it is not the enemy, it is the seed.

The Divine is the tree fully in bloom and the Devil is the seed – but the tree is hidden in the seed. And the seed is not against the tree; in fact, the tree cannot exist if the seed is not there. And the tree is not against the seed – they are in deep friendship, they are together.

Poison and nectar are two phases of the same energy, so are life and death – and so is every thing: day and night, love and hate, sex and superconsciousness. Tantra says: Never condemn anything – the attitude of condemnation is the stupid attitude.

By condemning something, you are denying yourself the possibility that would have become available to you if you had evolved the lower. Don’t condemn the mud, because the lotus is hidden in the mud; use the mud to produce the lotus. Of course, the mud is not the lotus yet, but it can be. And the creative person, the religious person, will help the mud to release its lotus so that the lotus can be freed from the mud.

Saraha is the founder of the Tantra vision. It is of tremendous import, and particularly for the present moment in human history, because a new man is striving to be born, a new consciousness is knocking on the doors. And the future is going to be that of Tantra, because now no more dual attitudes can hold man’s mind.

---

The Royal Song of Saraha

I bow down to noble Manjushri
I bow down to Him who has conquered the finite.

1

As calm water lashed by wind
Turns into waves and rollers,
So the king thinks of Saraha
In many ways, although one man.

2

To a fool who squints
One lamp is as two;
Where seen and seer are not two, ah! the mind
Works on the thingness of them both.

3

Though the house-lamps have been lit,
The blind live on in the dark.
Though spontaneity is all-encompassing and close,
To the deluded it remains always far away.

4

Though there may be many rivers, they are one in the sea,
Though there may be many lies, one truth will conquer all.
When one sun appears, the dark
However deep will vanish.

5

As a cloud that rises from the sea
Absorbing rain the earth embraces,
So, like the sky, the sea remains
Without increasing or decreasing.

6

So from spontaneity that's unique,
Replete with the Buddha's perfections,
Are all sentient beings born and in it come
To rest. But it is neither concrete nor abstract.

7

They walk other paths and so forsake true bliss,
Seeking the delights that stimulants produce.
The honey in their mouths and to them so near
Will vanish if at once they do not drink it.

8

Beasts do not understand the world
To be a sorry place. Not so the wise
Who the heavenly nectar drink
While beasts hunger for the sensual.

9.

To a fly that likes the smell of putrid
Meat the fragrance of sandalwood is foul.
Beings who discard Nirvana
Covet coarse Samsara's realm.

10

An ox's footprints filled with water
Will soon dry up; so with a mind that's firm
But full of qualities that are not perfect;
These imperfections will in time dry up.

11

Like salt sea water that turns
Sweet when drunk up by the clouds,
So a firm mind that works for others turns
The poison of sense-objects into nectar.

12

If ineffable, never is one unsatisfied,
If unimaginable, it must be bliss itself.
Though from a cloud one fears the thunderclap,
The crops ripen when from it pours the rain.

13

It is in the beginning, in the middle, and
The end; yet end and beginning are nowhere else.
All those with minds deluded by interpretative thoughts are in
Two minds and so discuss nothingness and compassion as two things.

14

Bees know that in flowers
Honey can be found.
That Samsara and Nirvana are not two
How will the deluded ever understand?

15

When the deluded in a mirror look
They see a face, not a reflection.
So the mind that has truth denied
Relies on that which is not true.

16

Though the fragrance of a flower cannot be touched,
'Tis all pervasive and at once perceptible.
So by unpatterned being-in-itself
Recognize the round of mystic circles.

17

When in winter still water by the wind is stirred,
It takes as ice the shape and texture of a rock.
When the deluded are disturbed by interpretative thoughts,
That which is as yet unpatterned turns very hard and solid.

18

Mind immaculate in its very being can never be
Polluted by Samsara's or Nirvana's impurities.
A precious jewel deep in mud
Will not shine, though it has luster.

19

Knowledge shines not in the dark, but when the darkness
Is illumined, suffering disappears at once.
Shoots grow from the seed
And leaves from the shoots.

20

He who thinks of the mind in terms of one
Or many casts away the light and enters the world.
Into a raging fire he walks with open eyes--
Who could be more deserving of compassion?

21

For the delights of kissing the deluded crave
Declaring it to be the ultimately real--
Like a man who leaves his house and standing at the door
Asks a woman for reports of sensual delights.

22

The stirring of biotic forces in the house of nothingness
Has given artificial rise to pleasures in so many ways.
Such yogis from affliction faint for they have fallen
From celestial space, inveigled into vice.

23

As a Brahman, who with rice and butter
Makes a burnt offering in blazing fire
Creating a vessel for nectar from celestial space,
Takes this through wishful thinking as the ultimate.

24

Some people who have kindled the inner heat and raised it to the fontanelle
Stroke the uvula with the tongue in a sort of coition and confuse
That which fetters with what gives release,
In pride will call themselves yogis.

25

As higher awareness they teach what they experience
Within. What fetters them they will call liberation.
A glass trinket colored green to them is a priceless emerald;
Deluded, they know not a gem from what they think it should be.

26

They take copper to be gold. Bound by discursive thought
They think these thoughts to be ultimate reality.
They long for the pleasures experienced in dreams. They call
The perishable body-mind eternal bliss supreme.

27

By the symbol EVAM they think self-clearness is achieved,
By the different situations that demand four seals
They call what they have fancied spontaneity,
But this is looking at reflections in a mirror.

28

As under delusion's power a herd of deer will rush
For the water in a mirage which is not recognized,
So also the deluded quench not their thirst, are bound by chains
And find pleasure in them, saying that all is ultimately real.

29

Nonmemory is convention's truth
And mind which has become no-mind is ultimate truth.
This is fulfillment, this the highest good.
Friends, of this highest good become aware.

30

In nonmemory is mind absorbed; just this
Is emotionality perfect and pure.
It is unpolluted by the good or bad of worldliness
Like a lotus unaffected by the mud from which it grows.

31

Yet with certainty must all things be viewed as if they were a magic spell.
If without distinction you can accept or reject Samsara
Or Nirvana, steadfast is your mind, free from the shroud of darkness.
In you will be self-being, beyond thought and self-originated.

32

This world of appearance has from its radiant beginning
Never come to be; unpatterned it has discarded patterning.
As such it is continuous and unique meditation;
It is nonmentation, stainless contemplation, and nonmind.

33

Mind, intellect, and the formed contents of that mind are It,
So too are the world and all that seems from It to differ,
All things that can be sensed and the perceiver,
Also dullness, aversion, desire, and enlightenment.

34

Like a lamp that shines in the darkness of spiritual
Unknowing, It removes obscurations of a mind
As far as the fragmentations of intellect obtain.
Who can imagine the self-being of desirelessness?

35

There's nothing to be negated, nothing to be
Affirmed or grasped; for It can never be conceived.
By the fragmentations of the intellect are the deluded
Fettered; undivided and pure remains spontaneity.

36

If you question ultimacy with the postulates of the many and the one,
Oneness is not given, for by transcending knowledge are sentient beings freed.
The radiant is potency latent in the intellect, and this
Is shown to be meditation; unswerving mind is our true essence.

38

The buds of joy and pleasure
And the leaves of glory grow.
If nothing flows out anywhere
The bliss unspeakable will fruit.

39

What has been done and where and what in itself it will become
Is nothing; yet thereby it has been useful for this and that.
Whether passionate or not
The pattern is nothingness.

40

If I am like a pig that covets worldly mire
You must tell me what fault lies in a stainless mind.
By what does not affect one
How can one now be fettered?

translated by Herbert V. Guenther

yes to Tao

in the mind of Tao

Those who believe in substantiality

are like cows

those who believe in emptiness

are even worse
Saraha

In the area of cognitive sciences the development of an alternative guideline to the two dominant paradigms, cognitivism and connectionist-emergence, for the study of consciousness and Self has been carried on in the last years of his life by Francisco Varela with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosh, as a natural development of the autopoietic model of living systems by Maturana and Varela which sets cognition as the life process.

In the first part the authors outline the reference phenomenology:

A Fundamental Circularity:

In the Mind of the Reflective Scientist

An Already-Given Condition

A phenomenologically inclined cognitive scientist reflecting on the origins of cognition might reason thus: Minds awaken in a world. We did not design our world. We simply found ourselves with it; we awoke both to ourselves and to the world we inhabit. We come to reflect on that world as we grow and live. We reflect on a world that is not made, but found, and yet it is also our structure that enables us to reflect upon this world. Thus in reflection we find ourselves in a circle: we are in a world that seems to be there before reflection begins, but that world is not separate from us.

For the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the recognition of this circle opened up a space between self and world, between the inner and the outer. This space was not a gulf or divide; it embraced the distinction between self and world, and yet provided the continuity between them. Its openness revealed a middle way, an entredeux. In the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote,

When I begin to reflect, my reflection bears upon an unreflective experience, moreover my reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness, and yet it has to recognize, as having priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself .... Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them: The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

And toward the end of the book, he wrote, “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.”

Science (and philosophy for that matter) has chosen largely to ignore what might lie in such an entre-deux or middle way. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty could be held partly responsible, for in his Phenomenology at least, he saw science as primarily unreflective; he argued that it naively presupposed mind and consciousness. Indeed, this is one of the extreme stances science can take. The observor that a nineteenth-century physicist had in mind is often pictured as a disembodied eye looking objectively at the play of phenomena. Or to change metaphors, such an observor could be imagined as a cognizing agent who is parachuted onto the earth as an unknown, objective reality to be charted. Critiques of such a position, however, can easily go to the opposite extreme. The indeterminacy principle in quantum mechanics, for example, is often used to espouse a kind of subjectivism in which the mind on its own “constructs” the world. But when we turn back upon ourselves to make our own cognition our scientific theme-which is precisely what the new science of cognition purports to do-neither of these positions (the assumption of a disembodied observor or of a dis-worlded mind) is at all adequate.

on the power of Tao

It is not so much 'power' that corrupts  then the mith of 'power'. It is noted above that 'power', like 'energy', 'tension', and the rest of the quasi-physical metaphors are to be distrusted and, among them, 'power' is one of the most dangerous. He who covets a mythical abstraction must always be insatiable! As teachers we should not promote that myth.

from "Time is out of joint", 1978

does Tao exist?

DOES THE DIVINE EXIST?

To say that the divine exists will not be right, because all that exists is divine. Each and everything exists, only the divine cannot be said to exist. The divine is existence. To be divine and to exist is to say the same thing in two different ways. So the quality of existence cannot be attributed to the divine.

Everything else can be said to exist because it can go into non-existence. I can be said to exist because I will go into non-existence, you can be said to exist because there were times when you were not in existence. But the divine cannot be said to exist because the divine is always there. Its non-existence is inconceivable, so existence cannot be attributed to the divine. I will say existence is divine, or divineness means existence.

Nothing exists which is not divine. You may know it or not, it makes no difference as far as your divinity is concerned. If you know it, then you become existence, bliss. If you do not know it, you go on and continue in agony, but you are divine. When asleep, when ignorant, then too you are divine. Even a stone is divine, unknown to itself. Existence is divine.

All those who try to prove that God exists do not know. This is sheer nonsense to prove that God exists. Those who try to prove that God does not exist are in the same boat. No one will prove that existence exists. If you say it this way, if you ask me whether existence exists, the question will be absurd.

To me, when someone says that God exists, it means the same thing, that existence exists.

God and existence are equivalent, synonyms. Once you have become aware of what existence is, you will not call it existence. Then you will call it God. The moment one becomes aware of the total being that is, then you cannot use the existence. You become more intimate with it, so you have to use a personal name. You call it God. To call existence God only means this and nothing else: that you can be in an intimate relationship with it, that you can be in personal contact with it.

It is not something dead. It is not something to which you cannot be related. It is not something which is indifferent to you. When we say existence is God, we mean to say existence is intimately related with us. We are related with it, and it is not indifferent to us. But as far as the human mind is concerned, we do not know a more accurate word to use than God.