Paris, also called Alexandros (Greek: “Defender”), in Greek legend, son of King Priam of Troy and his wife, Hecuba. A dream regarding his birth was interpreted as an evil portent, and he was consequently expelled from his family as an infant. Left for dead, he was either nursed by a bear or found by shepherds. He was raised as a shepherd, unknown to his parents. As a young man he entered a boxing contest at a Trojan festival, in which he defeated Priam’s other sons. After his identity was revealed, he was received home again by Priam.
The “judgment of Paris” was and continues to be a popular theme in art. According to legend, Paris, while he was still a shepherd, was chosen by Zeus to determine which of three goddesses was the most beautiful. Rejecting bribes of kingly power from Hera and military might from Athena, he chose Aphrodite and accepted her bribe to help him win the most beautiful woman alive. His seduction of Helen (the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta) and refusal to return her was the cause of the Trojan War. During the war Paris seems to have had a secondary role: a good warrior but inferior to his brother Hector and to the Greek leaders whom he faced. Menelaus would have defeated Paris in single combat, but Aphrodite rescued him, and the war continued.
Near the end of the war, Paris shot the arrow that, by Apollo’s help, caused the death of the hero Achilles. Paris himself, soon after, received a fatal wound from an arrow shot by the rival archer Philoctetes.
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Helen of Troy, Greek Helene, in Greek legend, the most beautiful woman of Greece and the indirect cause of the Trojan War. She was daughter of Zeus, either by Leda or by Nemesis, and sister of the Dioscuri. As a young girl, she was carried off by Theseus, but she was rescued by her brothers. She was also the sister of Clytemnestra, who married Agamemnon. Helen’s suitors—including Odysseus—came from all parts of Greece, and from among them she chose Menelaus, Agamemnon’s younger brother. During an absence of Menelaus, however, Helen fled to Troy with Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, an act that ultimately led to the Trojan War. When Paris was slain, Helen married his brother Deiphobus, whom she betrayed to Menelaus once Troy was captured. Menelaus and Helen then returned to Sparta, where they lived happily until their deaths.
According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodes, where she was hanged by the Rhodian queen Polyxo in revenge for the death of her husband, Tlepolemus, in the Trojan War. The poet Stesichorus, however, related in his second version of her story that she and Paris were driven ashore on the coast of Egypt and that Helen was detained there by King Proteus. The Helen carried on to Troy was thus a phantom, and the real one was recovered by her husband from Egypt after the war. This version of the story was used by Euripides in his play Helen.
Helen was worshipped and had a festival at Therapnae in Laconia; she also had a temple at Rhodes, where she was worshipped as Dendritis (the tree goddess). Like her brothers, the Dioscuri, she was a patron deity of sailors. Her name is pre-Hellenic and in cult may go back to the pre-Greek periods.
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Priam, in Greek mythology, the last king of Troy. He succeeded his father, Laomedon, as king and extended Trojan control over the Hellespont. He married first Arisbe (a daughter of Merops the seer) and then Hecuba, and he had other wives and concubines. He had 50 sons, according to Homer’s Iliad, and many daughters. Hecuba bore 19 of the sons, including Priam’s favourites, Hector and Paris.
Homer described Priam at the time of the Trojan War as an old man, powerless but kindly, not even blaming Helen, the wife of Paris, for all his personal losses resulting from the war. In the final year of the conflict, Priam saw 13 sons die: the Greek warrior Achilles killed Polydorus, Lycaon, and Hector within one day. The death of Hector, which signified the end of Troy’s hopes, also broke the spirit of the king. Priam’s paternal love impelled him to brave the savage anger of Achilles and to ransom the corpse of Hector; Achilles, respecting the old man’s feelings and foreseeing his own father’s sorrows, returned the corpse. When Troy fell, Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, butchered the old king on an altar. Both Priam’s death and his ransoming of Hector were favourite themes of ancient art.
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Priam pleading for the return of Hector. He was accompanied there by Hermes hence the Caduceus.
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In response to a dream, a bad omen, concerning his son Paris, Priam unleashed a causal chain of events which he was hoping to avoid. These events lead to the death of many of Priam’s sons and to Priam himself at the falling of Troy. In trying to avoid a possible fate he precipitated it. If Paris had not become a shepherd boy, would he have been chosen by Zeus and tempted by Aphrodite? There was an unintended outcome to the expulsion of Paris.
Yet the omen was fulfilled.
It is not a good idea to try to avoid your fate.
This is the message
I read the Iliad and the Odyssey in translation and in full in the summer of 1999 on the island of Crete. I was on baby watching duty while the ex-wife was attending a Tai Chi retreat.
This dream excerpt is part of a longer dream which starts in the foyer between Chemistry and Biochemistry at Imperial College in South Kensington. The dream gets increasingly less mundane and leads to this. This excerpt although brief in description was very long in “duration”.
I am now in a square room. It is very grand and ornate. I look up at the ceiling and the pattern there changes into hieroglyphs which detach from it and hang suspended in three dimensions. They are shimmering and in gold. I spend a great deal of time looking at these. I know them to be the senzar “alphabet”. I am caught in a kind of light beam, a kind of shower. These ideograms rain down upon me. I have the senzar falling into me. I now know that the senzar and that it is a part of me.
There are certain fundamental truths which lie behind all revealed religions. They are essential to the spiritual growth and the progressive realizations of divinity by man. All else found under the term “doctrine” and allied phrases are but expansions of these fundamentals, explanatory in nature, expressive of human interpretations, and formulations of evolutionary recognitions. These are mainly additions and are in the nature of adornment, speculation and prediction; they are constantly subject to change, to rejection or development as man’s intellect and spiritual perception unfolds; they are not basic or unalterable. It is the unalterable truths which must be discovered and recognized as the new world religion takes form on Earth and conditions human thought and consciousness in the coming New Age.
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The Basic Truths to Date
These basic truths never change because they are related to the nature of Deity Itself and have become apparent to mankind through revelation, as evolution has proceeded and man has developed the needed perceptive faculties and the required persistence of search, plus the unfolding of the inner light of the soul. These truths, inherent in the divine nature, reveal the soul of God. They are:
The Law of Compassion. This is the truth of right relationship, of loving understanding, of actively expressed Love. It is the foundation of brotherhood and the expression of the inner unity.
The Fact of God. This is the truth that Being is God Immanent and God Transcendent; it involves the recognition of the great Whole and the related part; it is the knowledge of divinity, ascertained through right relationship and identity of origin. It is the revelation of the life of God, pervading all that is (God Immanent), and of that same life, providing that still greater cosmic relation (God Transcendent) which is the final guarantee of all progress and of progressive revelation. ‘Having pervaded this whole universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain’ is the challenge of Deity and the eternal hope of humanity. This is the answer of Life Itself to the demands of humanity, to the enquiries of science and to the whole world problem. God is here, present among us and in all forms of expression; He includes, pervades and remains beyond. He is greater than all appearance. He reveals Himself progressively and cyclically as man gets ready for further knowledge.
The Continuity of Revelation. Ever down the ages and at each human crisis, always in the hours of necessity, at the founding of a new race, or in the awakening of a prepared humanity to a new and wider vision, the Heart of God – impelled by the law of compassion – sends forth a Teacher, a World Savior, an Illuminator, an Avatar. He gives the message which will heal, which will indicate the next step to be taken by the race, which will illumine a dark world problem and give to man an expression of a hitherto unrealized aspect of divinity. Upon this fact of the continuity of revelation and upon the sequence of this progressive manifestation of the divine nature is based the doctrine of Avatars, of divine Messengers, divine Appearances, and inspired Prophets. To all these history unmistakably testifies.
The Inevitable Response of Humanity. I have expressed in these simple words the instinctive spiritual reaction of man and of the undying human spirit to the three above foundational truths. This divine spirit in humanity must ever, and most surely does, respond to the divine Appearance. The witness to this is sure and proved. There is that in mankind which is akin to God and which recognizes its own when it appears. Such is the unshakable reality in the human heart, and recognition is the inevitable reward and result of revelation.
Progress. The reaction of the individual man and of the masses of men to the continuity of revelation – historically proved – cannot be denied. It is the basic fact of religion. The types of that revelation may vary but each new revelation – given in response to human need and demand – has ever led humanity onward towards a steadily brightening goal and a greater glory. The revelation may come on varying levels of the human consciousness. It may be the revelation of new lands to conquer, terrestrial or mental. Some person pointed the way. It may be the recognition of new laws and facts in nature, scientifically grasped and used; it may be the response of intelligent man to increased knowledge, producing a new type of civilization. Some liberated spirit pointed the way. It may be the response of the human heart to the Heart of God, leading to the mystical beatitude, and to the recognition of spiritual Being. It may be the reaction of man to some new teaching, some further unfoldment, resulting in a new and enriched religious approach to the center of life. Some Messenger pointed the way. But always it has meant progress, a moving forward, a rejection of some existing limitation, a repudiating of the undesirable and the evil. Always it involves the recognition of the possible, the ideal and the divine.
Transcendence. This means the innate capacity to pass beyond so-called natural law. This surmounting of limitation is ever taking place and this process of transcendence will call forth increasing recognition. It marks the next major phase in the manifestation of divinity in man; it signifies domination over physical law and humanity’s imminent triumph over the forces which have for so long held him to earth. Of this transcendence the present mastery over the air is the symbol. Man is rapidly mastering the four elements. He cultivates the earth; he rides the waters; he controls the electrical fires of the planet, and he flies triumphant through the air. The question now emerges: What, my brothers, next? Another transcendence lies ahead. It is one of the things which the coming Avatar will reveal.
With the lesser leaders, whom the human spirit evokes to its assistance, I shall not deal. I seek to unfold somewhat the Doctrine of Divine Messengers, of Avatars. From whence come They? What is Their nature? Who are They and what is Their relation to humanity, to the Hierarchy and to still greater groups of Lives? These are questions which normally arise and need clear answering.
An Avatar is a Being Who – having first developed His Own nature, human and divine, and then transcended it – is capable of reflecting some cosmic Principle or divine quality and energy which will produce the desired effect upon humanity, evoking a reaction, producing a needed stimulation and, as it is esoterically called, ‘leading to the rending of a veil and the permeation of light.’ This energy may be generated within the human family and focused in a responsive Messenger; it may be generated within the planet itself and produce a planetary Avatar; it may be the expression of the life impulse and energy of the solar system, or of sources outside the solar system and therefore cosmic. But alwaysit is focused through a manifesting Entity, is called forth by a demand or massed appeal, and evokes response and consequent changes in the life activity, the culture and the civilization of mankind.
The response or reaction of humanity to the divine Messenger establishes in due time the recognition of something transcendent, something to be desired and striven for, something which indicates a vision which is first a possibility and later an achievement. This is the historically proven process and testifies eventually to a fact. This new fact, when added to the facts established by other and earlier Avatars, enriches the spiritual content of the human consciousness, enhances the spiritual life of the race, and stimulates man to move a step forward into the world of reality and out of the world of illusion. Each revelation brings him nearer to the world of causes.
At the present time the Avatars most easily recognized and known are the Buddha and the Christ, because Their messages are familiar to all and the fruits of Their lives and words have conditioned the thinking and the civilizations of both hemispheres; because They are divine-human Avatars and represent something which humanity can more easily understand; because They are of like nature to mankind, “flesh of our flesh and spirit of our spirit.” They therefore mean more to us than any other Divine Emergence. They are known, loved and followed by countless millions. I would ask you to ponder on the potency of the nucleus of force which They have set up. The establishing of a nucleus of energy, spiritually positive, is the constant task of an Avatar. He focuses or anchors a dynamic truth, a potent thought-form or a vortex of attractive energy in the three worlds of human living. Then, as the centuries pass, that truth and the effect of Their lives and words begin steadily to condition human thinking; the established thought-form acts increasingly as a transmitter of divine energy as it expresses a divine idea, and this in time produces a civilization, with its accompanying culture, religions, policies, governments and educational processes. Thus is history made. History is but the record of man’s cyclic reaction to some inflowing divine energy, to some Avatar or some inspired Leader.
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Excerpted from “The Externalization of the Hierarchy – Section III – Forces behind the Evolutionary Process”
The Reappearance of the Christ – Chapter I – The Doctrine of Avatars
By Alice Bailey and Djwhal Khul
CHAPTER ONE
The Doctrine of the Coming One (Western Teaching) The Doctrine of Avatars (Eastern Teaching)
Whenever there is a withering of the law and an uprising of lawlessness on all sides, then I manifest Myself.
For the salvation of the righteous and the destruction of such as do evil, for the firm establishing of the Law, I come to birth age after age.
– Bhagavad Gita, Book IV, Sutra 7, 8.
Right down the ages, in many world cycles and in many countries (and today in all) great points of tension have occurred which have been characterized by a hopeful sense of expectancy. Some one is expected and His coming is anticipated. Always in the past, it has been the religious teachers of the period who have fostered and proclaimed this expectancy and the time has always been one of chaos and difficulty, of a climaxing point at the close of a civilization or culture and when the resources of the old religions have seemed inadequate to meet men’s difficulties or to solve their problems. The coming of the Avatar, the advent of a Coming One and, in terms of today, the reappearance of the Christ are the keynotes of the prevalent expectancy. When the times are ripe, the invocation of the masses is strident enough and the faith of those who know is keen enough, then always He has come and today will be no exception to this ancient rule or to this universal law. For decades, the reappearance of the Christ, the Avatar, has been anticipated by the faithful in both hemispheres – not only by the Christian faithful, but by those who look for Maitreya and for the Bodhisattva as well as those who expect the Imam Mahdi.
When men feel that they have exhausted all their own resources and have come to an end of all their own innate possibilities and that the problems and conditions confronting them are beyond their solving or handling, they are apt to look for a divine Intermediary and for the Mediator Who will plead their cause with God and bring about a rescue. They look for a Savior. This doctrine of Mediators, of Messiahs, of Christs and of Avatars can be found running like a golden thread through all the world faiths and Scriptures and, relating these world Scriptures to some central source of emanation, they are found in rich abundance everywhere. Even the human soul is regarded as an intermediary between man and God; Christ is believed by countless millions to act as the divine mediator between humanity and divinity.
The whole system of spiritual revelation is based (and has always been based) on this doctrine of interdependence, of a planned and arranged conscious linking and of the transmission of energy from one aspect of divine manifestation to another – from God in the “secret Place of the Most High” to the humblest human being, living and struggling and sorrowing on earth. Everywhere this transmission is to be found; “I am come that they may have life” says the Christ, and the Scriptures of the world are full of the intervention of some Being, originating from some source higher than the strictly human. Always the appropriate mechanism is found through which divinity can reach and communicate with humanity, and it is with this communication and these Instruments of divine energy that the doctrine of Avatars or of divine “Coming Ones” has to do.
An Avatar is one Who has a peculiar capacity (besides a self-initiated task and a preordained destiny) to transmit energy or divine power. This is necessarily a deep mystery and was demonstrated in a peculiar manner and in relation to cosmic energy by the Christ Who – for the first time in planetary history, as far as we know – transmitted the divine energy of love directly to our planet and in a most definite sense to humanity. Always too these Avatars or divine Messengers are linked with the concept of some subjective spiritual Order or Hierarchy of spiritual Lives, Who are concerned with the developing welfare of humanity. All we really know is that, down the ages, great and divine Representatives of God embody divine purpose, and affect the entire world in such a manner that Their names and Their influence are known and felt thousands of years after They no longer walk among men. Again and again, They have come and have left a changed world and some new world religion behind Them; we know also that prophecy and faith have ever held out to mankind the promise of Their coming again amongst us in an hour of need. These statements are statements of fact, historically proven. Beyond this we know relatively few details.
The word “Avatar” is a Sanskrit word, meaning literally “coming down from far away.” Ava (as prefix to verbs and verbal nouns) expresses the idea of “off, away, down.” Avataram, (comparative) farther away. The root AV seems at all times to denote the idea ofProtection from above, and is used in compounds, in words referring to protections by kings or rulers; in regard to the gods, it means accepted favorably when a sacrifice is offered. With the result that the root word can be said to mean “Coming down with the approval of the higher source from which it came and with benefit to the place at which it arrives.” (From Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary.)
All the world Avatars or Saviors, however, express two basic incentives: the need of God to contact humanity and to have relationship with men and the need of humanity for divine contact, help and understanding. Subject to those incentives, all true Avatars are therefore divine Intermediaries. They can act in this fashion because They have completely divorced Themselves from every limitation, from all sense of selfhood and separativeness and are no longer – by ordinary human standards – the dramatic center of Their lives, as are most of us. When They have reached that stage of spiritual decentralization, They Themselves can then become events in the life of our planet; toward Them every eye can look and all men can be affected. Therefore, an Avatar or a Christ comes forth for two reasons: one, the inscrutable and unknown Cause prompts Him so to do, and the other is the demand or the invocation of humanity itself. An Avatar is consequently a spiritual event, coming to us to bring about great changes or major restorations, to inaugurate a new civilization or to restore the “ancient landmarks” and lead man nearer to the divine. They have been defined as “extraordinary men Who from time to time appear to change the face of the world and inaugurate a new era in the destinies of humanity.” They come in times of crisis; They frequently create crises in order to bring to an end the old and the undesirable and make way for new and more suitable forms for the evolving life of God Immanent in Nature. They come when evil is rampant. For this reason, if for no other, an Avatar may be looked for today. The necessary stage is set for the reappearance of the Christ.
The Avatars most easily known and recognized are the Buddha in the East and the Christ in the West. Their messages are familiar to all, and the fruits of Their lives and words have conditioned the thinking and civilizations of both hemispheres. Because They are human-divine Avatars, They represent what humanity can easily understand; because They are of like nature to us, “flesh of our flesh and spirit of our spirit,” we know and trust Them and They mean more to us than other divine Emergencies. They are known, trusted and loved by countless millions. The nucleus of spiritual energy which each of Them set up is beyond our measuring; the establishing of a nucleus of persistent energy, spiritually positive, is the constant task of an Avatar; He focuses or anchors a dynamic truth, a potent thought-form or a vortex of magnetic energy in the world of human living. This focal point acts increasingly as a transmitter of spiritual energy; it enables humanity to express some divine idea and this in time produces a civilization with its accompanying culture, religions, policies, governments and educational processes. Thus is history made. History is after all only the record of humanity’s cyclic reaction to some inflowing divine energy, to some inspired leader, or to some Avatar.
An Avatar is at present usually a Representative of the second divine aspect, that of Love-Wisdom, the Love of God. He will manifest as the Savior, the Builder, the Preserver; humanity is not yet sufficiently developed or adequately oriented to the life of the Spirit to bear easily the impact of an Avatar Who would express the dynamic will of God. For us as yet (and this is our limitation) an Avatar is one Who preserves, develops, builds, protects, shields and succors the spiritual impulses by which men live; that which brings Him into manifestation is man’s need and man’s demand for preservation and help. Humanity needs love, understanding and right human relations as an expression of attained divinity. It was this need which brought the Christ to us before as the Avatar of Love. The Christ, that great human-divine Messenger, because of His stupendous achievement – along the line of understanding – transmitted to humanity an aspect and a potency of the nature of God Himself, the love Principle of Deity. Light, aspiration, and the recognition of God Transcendent had been the flickering expression of the human attitude to God, prior to the advent of the Buddha, the Avatar of Illumination. Then the Buddha came and demonstrated in His Own life the fact of God Immanent as well as God Transcendent, of God in the universe and of God within humanity. The Selfhood of Deity and the Self in the heart of individual man became a factor in human consciousness. It was a relatively new truth to man.
However, until Christ came and lived a life of love and service and gave men the new command to love one another, there had been very little emphasis upon God as Love in any of the world Scriptures. After He had come as the Avatar of Love, then God became known as love supernal, love as the goal and objective of creation, love as the basic principle of relationship and love as working throughout all manifestation towards a Plan motivated by love. This divine quality, Christ revealed and emphasized and thus altered all human living, goals and values.
The reason He has not come again is that the needed work has not been done by His followers in all countries. His coming is largely dependent, as we shall later see, upon the establishing of right human relations. This the church has hindered down the centuries, and has not helped because of its fanatical zeal to make “Christians” of all peoples and not followers of the Christ. It has emphasized theological doctrine, and not love and loving understanding as Christ exemplified it. The Church has preached the fiery Saul of Tarsus and not the gentle Carpenter of Galilee. And so, He has waited. But His hour has now come, because of the people’s need in every land and because of the invocative cry of the masses everywhere and the advice of His disciples of all faiths and of all world religions.
It is not for us yet to know the date or the hour of the reappearance of the Christ. His coming is dependent upon the appeal (the often voiceless appeal) of all who stand with massed intent; it is dependent also upon the better establishment of right human relations and upon certain work being done at this time by senior Members of the Kingdom of God, the Church Invisible, the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet; it is dependent also upon the steadfastness of the Christ’s disciples in the world at this time and His initiate-workers – all working in the many groups, religious, political and economic. To the above must be added what Christians like to call “the inscrutable Will of God,” that unrecognized purpose of the Lord of the World, the Ancient of Days (as He is called in The Old Testament) Who “knows His own Mind, radiates the highest quality of love and focuses His Will in His Own high Place within the center where the Will of God is known.”
When the Christ, the Avatar of Love, makes His reappearance then will the
“Sons of men who are now the Sons of God withdraw Their faces from the shining light and radiate that light upon the sons of men who know not yet they are the Sons of God. Then shall the Coming One appear, His footsteps hastened through the valley of the shadow by the One of awful power Who stands upon the mountain top, breathing out love eternal, light supernal and peaceful, silent Will.
“Then will the sons of men respond. Then will a newer light shine forth into the dismal, weary vale of earth. Then will new life course through the veins of men, and then will their vision compass all the ways of what may be.
“So peace will come again on earth, but a peace unlike aught known before. Then will the will-to-good flower forth as understanding, and understanding blossom as goodwill in men.”
Genealogically I can claim by heredity to be as Mad as a Hatter. This is because the one sixteenth English blood of mine can be traced to a Manchester hat maker whose family subsequently ran a public house in Hulme before the family moving to near Euston and then Cardiff.
It is pretty difficult in genealogy to trace Taylor, Jones, Griffiths and Evans. Looking for a specific Jones in Wales is a needle in a haystack pass time.
I am quite prepared to accept the notion that I am bat shit crazy, a complete nutter, a loony tune and as Mad as a Hatter, at least in the eyes of others if not entirely in my own. There is a slight problem when I engage in discourse which is entirely sane and partially erudite as this does not sit well with the nut-job diagnosis.
Over twenty years or so I have been writing down dreams and doing either full blown or partial analysis of them. I have acted on a number of occasions, but it seems that these dreams are important only to me {and the wife}. Attempts at communication die off and go nowhere.
These dreams are entirely passive in the sense that I make no attempt to direct them though I am entirely lucid to the fact that I am dreaming. I have a long time ago directed dreams. That is a different kind of dreaming and I call that wanking about on the astral plane.
In Early 2007 I had a dream which said that I MUST find the Great White Lodge.
So, what does an allegedly sane erstwhile scientist do with a dream which seems imperative? They start to explore. It led me back into to the Blue Books and a year and a half later to some visions or telepathic conversations whilst walking near dawn, completely sober, on the Ashridge estate.
Perhaps it was the genetic legacy of the mercury poisoning?
Or perhaps those visions were real. There I was “told” that this is my last incarnation on Earth and given sketchy outlines of my previous lives, two of which were Buddhist. It was suggested that I had been a close disciple of Siddhartha and that I was subsequently a Buddhist priest / monk. I delved into the various flavours of Buddhism. I can rule out Tibetan Buddhism because the life after the monk life, was Christian, a religious warrior life based and ended violently during the early crusades.
If I was a close disciple, then that places me in space-time around the year 500 BC
As a teenager I was obsessed and that is the correct word, with the TV series Monkey in which the Tripitaka is being taken to China, these perhaps are the three baskets of the Pali canon.
Excerpted From Wikipedia
The Pāli Canon is the complete Tripiṭaka set maintained by the Theravāda tradition is written and preserved in Pali.
The dating of the Tripiṭaka is unclear. Max Müller states that the current structure and contents of the Pali Canon took shape in the 3rd century BCE after which it continued to be transmitted orally from generation to generation until finally being put into written form in the 1st century BCE (nearly 500 years after the lifetime of Buddha). The Theravada chronicle called the Dipavamsa states that during the reign of Valagamba of Anuradhapura (29–17 BCE) the monks who had previously remembered the Tipiṭaka and its commentary orally now wrote them down in books, because of the threat posed by famine and war. The Mahavamsa also refers briefly to the writing down of the canon and the commentaries at this time. According to Sri Lankan sources more than 1000 monks who had attained Arahantship were involved in the task. The place where the project was undertaken was in Aluvihare, Matale, Sri Lanka. The resulting texts were later partly translated into a number of East Asian languages such as Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian by ancient visiting scholars, which though extensive are incomplete.
Each Buddhist sub-tradition had its own Tripiṭaka for its monasteries, written by its sangha, each set consisting of 32 books, in three parts or baskets of teachings: Vinaya Pitaka (“Basket of Discipline”), Sutra Pitaka (“Basket of Discourse”), and Abhidhamma Piṭaka (“Basket of Special [or Further] Doctrine”). The structure, the code of conduct and moral virtues in the Vinaya basket particularly, have similarities to some of the surviving Dharmasutra texts of Hinduism. Much of the surviving Tripiṭaka literature is in Pali, with some in Sanskrit as well as other local Asian languages. The Pali Canon does not contain the Mahayana Sutras and Tantras as Mahayana schools were not influential in Theravada tradition as in East Asia and Tibet. Hence, there is no major Mahayana (neither Hinayana or Pratyekabuddhayana) schools in Theravada tradition. The Tantric schools of Theravada tradition use Tantric texts independently, and not as the part of the Collection.
Some of the well known preserved Pali Canons are the Chattha Sangayana Tipitaka, Buddha Jayanthi Tripitaka, Thai Tipitaka, etc.
The Chinese Buddhist Canon is the Tripiṭaka set maintained by the East Asian Buddhist tradition is written and preserved in Chinese.
Wu and Chia state that emerging evidence, though uncertain, suggests that the earliest written Buddhist Tripiṭaka texts may have arrived in China from India by the 1st century BCE. An organised collection of Buddhist texts began to emerge in the 6th century CE, based on the structure of early bibliographies of Buddhist texts. However, it was the ‘Kaiyuan Era Catalogue’ by Zhisheng in 730 that provided the lasting structure. Zhisheng introduced the basic six-fold division with sutra, vinaya, and abhidharma belonging to Mahāyāna, Pratyekabuddhayana and Sravakayana . It is likely that Zhisheng’s catalogue proved decisive because it was used to reconstruct the Canon after the persecutions of 845 CE, however it was also considered a “perfect synthesis of the entire four-hundred-year development of a proper Chinese form of the Canon.”
Some of the well known preserved Chinese Canons are the Taisho Tripitaka, Tripitaka Koreana, etc.
Buddhism has been practiced in Japan since about the 6th century CE. Japanese Buddhism (Nihon Bukkyō) created many new Buddhist schools, and some schools are original to Japan and some are derived from Chinese Buddhist schools. Japanese Buddhism has had a major influence on Japanese society and culture and remains an influential aspect to this day.
Arrival and initial spread of Buddhism
Buddhism arrived in Japan by first making its way to China and Korea through the Silk Road and then traveling by sea to the Japanese archipelago. As such, early Japanese Buddhism is strongly influenced by Chinese Buddhism and Korean Buddhism. Though the “official” introduction of Buddhism to the country occurred at some point in the middle of the sixth century, there were likely earlier contacts and attempts to introduce the religion. Immigrants from the Korean Peninsula, as well as merchants and sailors who frequented the mainland, likely brought Buddhism with them independent of the transmission as recorded in court chronicles. Some Japanese sources mention this explicitly. For example, the Heian Period Fusō ryakki (Abridged Annals of Japan), mentions a foreigner known in Japanese as Shiba no Tatsuto, who may have been Chinese-born, Baekje-born, or a descendent of an immigrant group in Japan. He is said to have built a thatched hut in Yamato and enshrined an object of worship there. Immigrants like this may have been a source for the Soga clan’s later sponsorship of Buddhism.
The Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) provides a date of 552 for when King Seong of Baekje (now western South Korea) sent a mission to Emperor Kinmei that included an image of the Buddha Shakyamuni, ritual banners, and sutras. This event is usually considered the official introduction of Buddhism to Japan. Other sources, however, give the date of 538 and both dates are thought to be unreliable. However, it can still be said that in the middle of the sixth century, Buddhism was introduced through official diplomatic channels.
According to the Nihon Shoki, after receiving the Buddhist gifts, the Japanese emperor asked his officials if the Buddha should be worshipped in Japan. They were divided on the issue, with Soga no Iname (506–570) supporting the idea while Mononobe no Okoshi and Nakatomi no Kamako worried that the kami of Japan would become angry at this worship of a foreign deity. The Nihon Shoki then states that the emperor allowed only the Soga clan to worship the Buddha, to test it out.
Thus, the powerful Soga clan played a key role in the early spread of Buddhism in the country. Their support, along with that of immigrant groups like the Hata clan, gave Buddhism its initial impulse in Japan along with its first temple (Hōkō-ji, also known as Asukadera). The Nakatomi and Mononobe, however, continued to oppose the Soga, blaming their worship for disease and disorder. These opponents of Buddhism are even said to have thrown the image of the Buddha into the Naniwa canal. Eventually outright war erupted. The Soga side, led by Soga no Umako and a young Prince Shōtoku, emerged victorious and promoted Buddhism on the archipelago with support of the broader court.
Based on traditional sources, Shōtoku has been seen as an ardent Buddhist who taught, wrote on, and promoted Buddhism widely, especially during the reign of Empress Suiko (554 – 15 April 628). He is also believed to have sent envoys to China and is even seen as a spiritually accomplished bodhisattva who is the true founder of Japanese Buddhism. Modern historians have questioned much of this, seeing most of it as a constructed hagiography. Regardless of his actual historical role, however, it is beyond doubt that Shōtoku became an important figure in Japanese Buddhist lore beginning soon after his death if not earlier.
Early Heian Period Buddhism (794–950)
During the Heian period, the capital was shifted to Kyoto (then known as Heiankyō) by emperor Kanmu, mainly for economic and strategic reasons. As before, Buddhist institutions continued to play a key role in the state, with Kanmu being a strong supporter of the new Tendai school of Saichō (767–822) in particular. Saichō, who had studied the Tiantai school in China, established the influential temple complex of Enryakuji at Mount Hiei, and developed a new system of monastic regulations based on the bodhisattva precepts. This new system allowed Tendai to free itself from direct state control.
Also during this period, the Shingon ( Ch. Zhenyan; “True Word”, from Sanskrit: “Mantra”) school was established in the country under the leadership of Kūkai. This school also received state sponsorship and introduced esoteric Vajrayana (also referred to as mikkyō, “secret teaching”) elements.
The new Buddhist lineages of Shingon and Tendai also developed somewhat independently from state control, partly because the old system was becoming less important to Heian aristocrats. This period also saw an increase in the official separation between the different schools, due to a new system that specified the particular school which an imperial priest (nenbundosha) belonged to.
I did instinctively know some Shinto ritual and I have a strong affinity to Japan. The book I am reading in based in Mediaeval Japan and it is as if I am there when reading. I had a very profound experience in Yamanashi prefecture sat in a Buddhist cemetery looking south to Fujisan on bench under a statue of Buddha. So, my best guess, and it is only that, was that my second Buddhist life was Japanese, possibly Shingon. This suggests that “I” was dis-incarnate for 1300 years.
I wrote to a Shingon temple once, but they never wrote back.
I have one dream which locates at Bodh Gaya and another which locates in Eastern Japan.
This explanation is internally consistent
It is possible that I was given incomplete information at Ashridge and only a few “highlights” thrown in. A lot of Buddhist stuff in particular Śāntideva and Ryōkan Taigu speaks very directly to my heart.
A subsequent dream pointed at a specific individual for my ~500 BC incarnation and if the hagiography is correct that being would have some special talents.
The clearest recall I have are waking recalls in which a Buddhist incarnation is overlaid on my then current physical form. I got these during daylight walking along Upper Tulse Hill and on my way to lecture Chemical Kinetics at university. And very profoundly whilst sat at my desk in which I had om mane padme hum, which I remember with this Latin spelling as opposed to oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ, written in a Sanskrit tattoo ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ on both my forearms. Annoyingly I never got to see the colour of the robes, though there were dark in colour and not light. The recalls repeated over a period of several weeks. I never told anyone in case they sent me to the loony bin.
Imagine going to a senior science academic colleague and saying, “I have been having visions of myself dressed as a Buddhist monk sometimes even overlaid in the lecture theatre.”
What do you reckon the response / reaction would be?
I have attended a Tibetan empowerment run by Akong Rinpoche Tulku, for White Tara and Padmasambhava-Guru Rinpoche at Kagyu Samye Dzong London. I may have gotten an email reply from Akong’s brother at one stage. I very briefly gave a talk on dreaming there too.
This overlap with the extensive Tibetan lineages may account for the infiltration of Tibetan Buddhist figures into my dreams. If I am seeing a former incarnation of high lamas in my dreams that is a bit interesting, if only to me. These lineages are powerful, and people have been brooding upon them for centuries. A huge amount of thought, prayer and meditation has been directed at and into these lineages. There is ancient magic in the sense of tantra and Vajrayana therein.
The statue in my hall is Chenrézig–Avalokiteśvara. I was particularly drawn to this in a shop opposite Watkins Books in London. I discussed the patina with the owner, having recently helped a student who was doing a science / art project on patinas.
Then there are all these dreams such as the Sanskrit-Senzar Messenger dream which remains very vivid in my recall to this day. I can bring elements of it straight to mind and have just done so.
The thing is what, if anything, do you do with these dreams? During them I am entirely lucid and know that my body is asleep. The wife reckons I sometimes kick around when dreaming.
Answers on a postcard please…
I guess as a pass time it is relatively harmless and it keeps me busy looking stuff up.
These recalls started after I found myself, almost by accident, in a high ranking UK science university, after having done a Ph.D. at The Royal Institution of Great Britain of all places. I was in the process of accepting a Ph.D. place at somewhere else. I saw the advert for the RI. I had no recall of the name. I asked my supervisor about it, and he made a fuss, suggesting that I apply. If I had gotten 2 more marks out of a thousand during my degree, I would have stayed at UCL. My third year supervisor was a bit upset that the last studentship was given to someone {Sue who I had helped when she first arrived} with one more mark than me. It seems that quirk of fate set off a whole chain of events.
In my mind the situation is binary. These things above are either highly significant or I am as mad as a hatter and nobody else cares.
If the former is true then there are extensive karmic implications for others, if I am as mad as a hatter there are only very minor implications for others.
What remains of my mind thinks that the sum total of all these dream events are, in fact, significant.
The prophet is not diverted by illusions of past, present and future. The fixity of language determines such linear distinctions. Prophets hold a key to the lock in language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them. This is not a mechanical universe. The linear progression of events is imposed by the observer. Cause and effect? That’s not it at all. The prophet utters fateful words. You glimpse a thing “destined to occur”. But the prophetic instant releases something of infinite portent and power. The universe undergoes a ghostly shift. The wise prophet conceals actuality behind shimmering labels. The uninitiated then believe the prophetic language is ambiguous. The listener distrusts the prophetic messenger. Instinct tells you how the utterance blunts the power of such words. The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through it yourself.
– The Stolen Journals [1]
Frank Herbert “God Emperor of Dune” Gollancz,, Orion Publishing, London. Page 297 ISBN 0 575 07506 6
1st May 2008
Preface
As they say, “Every journey begins with a single step!”
I am heretic, a heretic to the church of reason. Though it was there that I began my genesis, there I found nemesis and where, I no longer belong.
This very morning as I mulled over koans and Leibniz, Lao Tzu and Newton, I stepped out of my front door. I looked down at our beautiful garden, now partially tamed and resplendent in the spring-ness of spring. Two beautiful white gulls flew overhead filling me with peace. I, yes I, had to return to the source and for me at least a part of the source of all this, is the second law of thermodynamics and that fate full night on a beach in Negril.
Over the last few days I have been waiting on a image from a lady in Australia to arrive and yesterday it did; a rose of deepest blue touched by the tears of heaven. This rose will adorn the cover of this book; “Vis viva – a journey to Sirius”.
Later, pondering on whether to start today or tomorrow and looking to clear my head, I took a stroll around the block. The wet earth rich in aroma from yesterday’s rain, the sun shining down on the fields nearby raised my spirits. And, as I paused to smoke on the bench, much as my grandfather had done, gazing out across the valley to Clydach, I saw a black crow chasing a red tailed kite into the sun. I followed them by eye until I could not bear it. I looked away and then only a few seconds later they were no where to be seen. The skies around here are big and there is no place to hide. But they were gone and I knew. I had to begin. It was an omen.
This book is not a book of answers. It is a book of beginnings. In these pages I will hope to outline a way of thinking that strays from the concretised thought patterns so prevalent today and in doing so will set myself up, for as we know, heretics are never welcome at the altar. Each church has for itself a bane of some kind and the bane of the church of reason is, proof. This is the catch 22 of a limited philosophical and dare I say “scientific” study of life. Here I mean science in the sense of knowing and knowledge and not in the sense of what has become the extension of technology which currently masquerades as science. How can I prove anything to you in the absence of a shared context? I cannot. It is only in reference to your knowledge and the veil of perception which is both yours and mine that I can attempt to communicate. In any case it is not things per se that I want to talk about, though of course things will be a part of this discourse. Proof itself is a concept. Proof is not really a reality but more often a mental construct within a thought pattern or collection of thoughts. In a sense proof requires a theory. In the absence of theory proof itself is only a potential construct of the mind which has yet to come into being.
Whether we like it or not the great philosophical, scientific, psychological and religious schools of thought have all influenced how we as mankind behave. They, along with the media, our peers and parents condition us to behave in certain ways. For example if lots of people agree on something then it becomes a truth and a lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Je pense donc je suis or cogito ergo sum, has permeated much of our thoughts and whether intentionally or otherwise has raised thought onto the high altar of existence, there perhaps to challenge the Divine for supremacy in the minds of man. If there is not thought then how can there be existence? Yet life itself is way beyond the scope of man’s petty intellect, it is so much more than that.
I feel therefore I am, is perhaps a better way of putting it. After all and once all that analytical thinking is done, life is much more of a feeling than a thought. Isn’t it?
Or even better still, simply, I am. Existence and life do not require logic or proof. There is no need for because, donc or ergo. At one level there just is.
The invention of these reasoning words pre-supposes a thought pattern upon the nature of communication that limits one in the exploration of being-ness. These words themselves hint at a direct and linear causality in life and constrain, implying the social conditioning inherent in the use of should and ought.
As part of this book I am going to attempt to reclaim some language before I use it. Words by their very nature, veil the truth and explicitly so. They take on a meaning or life of their own as they are used again and again. Certain sub cultures, let’s say for example the physical sciences use words in highly specified circumstance and within definitional frameworks, as such they cannot for them, have a meaning other than their context specific usage. Energy is a classic here. Ask any scientist what energy actually is and they will gloss over the subject calling it a capacity to do work. So what is this capacity that is energy? Does it really exist?
Here then is the beginning of the borders of a Kurukshetra, the Chautauqua of a journey into perception. Written by a man, in his mid forties, who has published in the physical science literature, co-founded a successful high technology spin out company and who was until recently a senior lecturer in chemistry at a top university. This means because of my qualifications that I am an initiate of a certain degree within the school of concrete science, the new religion of mankind.
Please, bear with me on this journey and let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Organism
In a very real sense we, as a mankind live in a material world. A world that is made up of matter and most of our consciousness or awareness is directed at surviving within the context of that world. Depending upon where we are in life, the process of living can be a real struggle, just getting the basics to sustain the physical form takes up all our effort. Should we have the good fortune to have a little physical plane wealth we might find ourselves with time on our hands; the time to pursue things not directly aimed at sustenance of being. Yet there are relatively few people who actually use this time to focus on the mystery of being-ness. People choose instead to get caught up in various activities that divert away from this, feeling secure that they are leaving such things to the religious leaders, philosophers, scientists and perhaps the poets of this world. In a strange way doing the ostrich of life and taking expressed overt pleasure in being profoundly superficial. From my position how can anyone not wonder what living is all about? Even the most blasé of us must have wondered a little on this, even if that came about only because of the death of a loved one or having to explain to a child where budgerigars go when they die. Such things are quickly brushed under the carpet as if they didn’t happen as perhaps the TV schedule now beckons and we must not miss the latest episode of East Enders.
Our societies conspire to teach us that life is only as it appears or rather how we conspire with each other to view it. Social conditioning fills us with all sorts of limitations to our perception and our choices of behaviour. It is riddled with expectation and the use of conditional vocabulary. It has a purpose in that it has evolved so that a bunch of human beings can live together in a way that is relatively harmonious, sharing a nearly common contextual interpretation of events and happenings, enabling at least some sharing of resource so that life can be sustained for many. Yet how many choose to operate in this world is rapacious, taking everything from life, the planet and each other. Very few people look at the cost, in real terms, of our behaviours on each other and the world we live in. We have come to the point where we are out of rhythm with flow of life and discordant with the universe. In a sense the song of life we now sing is harsh and dissonant. Because, deep down we all know this, we seek doings to occupy our minds so that we do not have to look at the tragedy of it all. At least a part of this comes from the conurbation of humans into large cities, where to keep the population quiet forms of entertainment have been developed. Out of these do indeed spring the highest that human artistic endeavour can achieve but there is much that isn’t. One only has to look at the role models we are asked to subscribe to, where for example celebrity is perhaps the new God and people willingly submit to the knife to get new boobs or bigger fuller lips, in the bizarre hope that it will cover for their deep insecurity about where they are actually going in life.
As humanity it is now time to change. In a sense this need is more real that you can currently imagine. We must now begin that journey home. That journey is to find what we are really capable of and have, for so very many years now, forgotten.
These last few centuries have seen mankind concretising its thoughts in a way never before experienced, bringing about ever more complex material world constructs. The globalisation of commerce and electronic communications has brought together ideas from the far flung corners of the earth into a melting pot of some considerable tension and the strain has been shown quite markedly in recent months. People wave the banners of their various faiths whether they be based in the religions imposed upon them by the power hungry and the fearful or the rationalist materialistic religions of science and hedonism; they wave them as sacrosanct in a manner verging on absolutism and exclusion. This posturing renders the truths hidden in the basic religious teachings silent and neglects the better aspects of scientific enquiry, banished to perhaps a publish at all costs mentality.
Despite all this the recent world events are evidence enough of the illusion of control man uses to help it sleep at night. The universe does not really care what man plans to do. It just is and does its own thing, whether it is tidal waves, earthquakes or hurricanes. In the scope of the infinite we are pretty small fry, despite all our arrogant pretension to the contrary.
Oh that great God of intellect; the one that so demands proof. It is so badly missing the plot. The thought forms of the mind and its self deceit have tricked us all for so long. How much cure is there for all the sickness in the world? Would it not be better to take a more prophylactic approach to living and flow with, rather than against, life?
Let’s start with physical science to begin to look a little deeper.
On the one hand I perceive my physical being as a solid object that eats, drinks, sleeps, craps, urinates, makes love, gets hot, gets cold etc. I can talk about being wet in the rain. Under certain circumstances outside forces such as sunlight change the physical nature of the form, I can feel pain through sun burn for example. I look at other people and might categorise them as attractive or ugly, fat or thin. I may even notice the elaborate woven dead plant material which they choose to drape upon their bodies so as to enhance their overall appearance for whatever purpose. I engage in complex social rituals and participate in group mind activities whereby we conspire to do something.
On the other hand the twentieth and twenty first century schools of thought known as physics, chemistry and biology, point at an altogether different picture. Apparently I am made up of atoms, held together in molecules which exert attractive forces on each other to form membranes, bones, blood vessels and a small grey thing called a brain. These disciplines tell us that the forces holding together these molecules are actually quite weak. Yet nevertheless this collection of molecules seems to move around and function on the physical plane as if there is some inner thing organising them with something akin to intelligence. Though I question here whether thing is as yet the right word.
This organisation of the organism which is a physical plane construct of molecules seems to go on without a great deal of conscious thought. The vehicle which is the human form is kind of, self organising. At certain times it brings notions into conscious thought; better have some food, water etc. I am pretty sure that most people are not conscious of the extent of hydration at a cellular level, yet something is, and as an organism the learned response is to reach for the Evian or whatever. You have to admit that at this level already, it is quite miraculous.
Hang on a minute. If this form is made of atoms and that tree out there is too, then aren’t we made of the same stuff albeit slightly differently organised? So, I am the same as a tree yet different from it. The form side of my life is shared with the rest of the physical world. Somehow this collection of molecules called Eric, is made of the same stuff yet is animated in a way that it is different to a tree. I have a vehicle that can do stuff and move around consuming other stuff in a way that keeps this counter entropic being functioning…
I, rather my physical form, have boundaries. There are edges to my collection of molecules. I can hit things and move them. I am a collection of molecules that act as a factory taking in supplies and producing waste, actually rather a lot of it. I have a carbon footprint. The existence of this, my form, impacts on the local, global and universal ecosystem. I produce carbon dioxide. I am connected to the universe in so very many ways. I recycle molecules used by other beings. You and I may even have shared the same water molecule. I pissed several this morning, someone or something else may soon incorporate these.
When I touch something, although the details of the molecule / molecule interactions escape my consciousness I perceive a sensation or perception of touch.
Digging a little deeper what then is going on? This collection of molecules, places something it calls a hand on the table and touches it. This table is fairly old, it feels slightly rough to the finger and the individual rings that make up the wood have a rather pleasant texture.
How can a molecule feel?
In touching the table and running my fingers over it I have changed both the table and my fingers for ever. Some of my skin and the molecules which make up this thing I call skin will have rubbed off perhaps never to return. The wood is now slightly moistened by the moisture I exude. Yet did I actually touch the wood? That is penetrate the space of the molecular assembly called a table?
This question, if we choose, might lead us deeper into the thought process of trying to think about molecules, then atoms and then maybe, if we are so bold, sub atomic particles. There is apparent consensus as to what, at least on one level, a molecule is. A collection of atoms held together with reasonably strong forces. Exactly how people envisage molecules will vary. These forces come about because of something called charge and this charge has two polarities; positive and negative. Apparently it is a property of matter. If we cut to the chase the concept of charge is still a hypothesis that is widely held to be true, therefore, if consensus of opinion matters it must be and it must exist. It was, if I understand it correctly, first thought of to explain the properties of a collection of molecules when rubbed, and named specifically for a collection of molecules which make amber. Hence we have an electron which is derived from the ancient Greek word for amber. Chemists love electrons; they are the very basis of their trade. I have to come clean and say that I have never seen one so I can’t really be sure that they exist. Though I have to admit that as postulates go, it is pretty good. It has served the test of time.
So these charges interact to produce forces on each other that can be attractive or repulsive. These electrons (and protons) when collected into a molecule then have a collective charge which maps onto a semi-rigid fluctuating shape, giving rise to something that has electrostatic potential. These things (charges) move around and produce a field. Put another charged thing in this field and it experiences a force. These forces hold stuff together and stop my finger pushing through the table. As my finger gets very close the forces get pretty large and unless I am able to exert truly massive force, my finger will never go through the table. It may make the atoms in the table vibrate. But the nuclei in my finger will never touch the nuclei in the table.
At this level I am a bunch of particles, some charged some not, that whiz around producing fluctuating fields that are bound together in molecules, which in turn are held together through weaker forces into cells tissues and bones; the collection of matter which this thing called Eric lives in. I am pretty sure this thing, this vehicle exists. I seem to remember having it around for more that forty of these other things called years. It has changed shape during this time and as a bunch of molecules it not quite as physically able as it once was.
Going deeper into the realms of maths and quantum mechanics one can explain, pretty well how these charges move and behave within in the context and the constructed thought process of physics and chemistry. Some people have got quite famous doing this. Yet all this doesn’t really answer what is this thing called Eric? The one that thinks he is sure that there is a physical form he inhabits. Is that it then, this physical form?
Well no not really. If through meditation I become silent and stop all the thought processes, the form appears to keep working, without me consciously interfering. I can control my thoughts to an extent and because of my training perhaps more so that many others.
I can only assume that there is something animating this collection of molecules, the vis viva of the title. This vis viva whilst contained, at least in the first instance, within the form is not the entirety of the matter, it is also something else. It organises, that is it turns the collection of molecules, into an organism that can express collective action so as to gather sufficient resource to continue its existence. It has a will to survive. Well at least I think it does.
Do I think? Well I guess so. What the hell is thinking anyway?
There is then an entity which experiences a sense of awareness, separate from the day to day running of the collection of molecules, which thinks it thinks. It, the entity is consciously guiding the collection of molecules into pressing the keys on this laptop and trying to communicate with you through an arcane series of glyphs called letters, brought together in a collection to make words and sentences. These in turn represent a series of noises that other collections of molecules and their indwelling thing have evolved over a number of years as a means of communication. The meaning of these words has some commonality, though I cannot be in anyway sure that you will interpret them in the same way that I do. As I write these keystrokes are being stored on a thing called a computer which, if the hypothesis is correct, is breaking them down into a string of zeros and ones written as different charge states in yet another collection of molecules. They are appearing on a screen which is made up of liquid crystals and my eyes (and maybe my brain) are interpreting them back. This is truly fantastic really.
A lot of people have gotten quite famous talking about this thing that is indwelling. Many theories abound and no one can, if they are honest, say that the have the answer to life the universe and everything let alone all the questions. We have psychology, religion, poetry and neuroscience; we have education and training, yoga and meditation. There are religious ecstasy and scientific and rational reasoning. All of these in a sense attempt to extend understanding a little beyond the identification with the collection of molecules. They attempt to take comprehension beyond the day to day factory approach to life and extend beyond instinctual living. Perhaps then this extension from instinct is the difference in how the vis viva, animates the human being, providing an awareness that allows abstraction from the basic functions of life. To believe that we are only our forms and that our being-ness is confined to a chemical-physical process alone detracts from the wonder of being.
This vis viva then is what animates the form. It produces a variety of different types of humans, with differing capacities and capabilities, yet demonstrating some over arching similarities. These enable us to talk of a humanity rather than several.
If you are strongly identified with your form side you may already have been slightly offended by my calling you a bunch of molecules. This in itself speaks volumes. Yet viewed from the angle of a hungry predator, you are simply a source of meat, of food and not the glamorous social being that you sometimes think you are. Quite simply your form is meat, it is carnate and something is in this meat, it is incarnate.
The vis viva incarnates, it animates and organises the collection of molecules and causes them to function in a manner which tends to sustain the physical plane organism. Or rather isn’t it that the vis viva causes a part of the greater whole to incarnate and eke out an existence in the form. In our species there are two genders, male and female. The functions of these two types of forms are similar yet different and hopefully complementary. The nature of the collection of molecules is also different and the instinctual house keeping of them has differing boundaries and rhythms. The physical forms evolve at their own paces.
What it is that is actually incarnate is subject to discussion, each religious community and their spokespeople can go on about this. Quickly we get into questions of faith whether your faith is atheism or theism. I prefer now to use don’t know mind. I don’t know what it is that has incarnated into the form called Eric. I am kind of interested to find out.
This brings me back to that fate full conversation on a beach in Negril and “The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.” Entropy can be thought of as a measure of chaos or disorder. The physical form is ordered and maintaining this order requires energy. The animating indwelling thing marshals the factory and for a while holds the second law at bay, sooner or later it “gives up the ghost” and the entropic process of the decay of form and return to the carbon cycle takes place. I remember quite clearly spouting off to a man on the beach about how life can be explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry, with all the passion of an evangelist. He listened to me as I have done to doorstep preachers with all the patience of someone talking with the insane. As I described that using Occam’s razor there was no need to invoke anything other that physics as nothing else was required to prove the function.
He looked at me and through me.
“You don’t really believe that do you?”
And so began the first phase of a journey part of which I am sharing now.
By this stage Eric was a post doctoral researcher, with some twenty-five published papers to his name. He was going places and an academic career beckoned. Yet all it took was a simple direct comment to demonstrate the sandy nature of the foundations of his evangelism. In a very real sense the outer expression of a world view that was incomplete. Chance would have it that a few days later Eric would climb the Blue Mountain in darkness to see the glory of a dawn, such as he had never seen before; playing witness through majesty and in contrast to the hollowness of his own words. He tried to forget. After that he kind of knew he was going through the motions, though it would be a good many years before he would start to find some answers, but more of that later.
The animating thing within the form had somehow arranged things for him to be there at exactly that point in time, to have that experience and to begin to shatter a mental construct of the world built up over many years in the church of reason and refined through the fixing of attention upon some of the most complex and sometimes mathematical descriptions of the world. My, wasn’t he clever? Study of any doctrine over a period of tens of years invests. Those investments are difficult to let go of and Eric tried ever harder to force them on the world, somehow they would no longer fit.
Without knowing how and in what way Eric had begun to change, he had felt the knock of the spirit. The animating thing, incarnate through the auspices of vis viva had begun to rebel against the construct it was being force fed through constant internalisation and verbalisation shared with his fellow scientists. Something long buried in him was beginning to awaken.
No Man
“No man is an iland intire of it’ selfe: Every man is a peece of the continent;”
John Donne, Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
So then what happened to this organism called Eric and why is he writing this, his own personal Chautauqua? His motives for this are not clear. Nor yet are his natures for there are many of these. All that he has told me is that there is in him a pressing need to express, to find a way to describe what was and is a most interesting path through life and onwards.
“It all started with Jason Bourne.” He tells me this is as good a point as any, from which to start. When Jason, after he realises the nature of what he has gotten himself into, refuses to submit to the programme he is forced, trained as an assassin and begins his missions. When asked to kill a man in front of his children something of the David Webb in him resurfaces, he botches the mission and is nearly killed as a result. He is then quite literally adrift on the sea of life not knowing who or what he is, with but a few clues to his past and a fog of amnesia surrounding him. He goes back to look at all the places and the people he once knew, trying to piece together what has happened.
Metaphor then is what it says on the tin, it is a transfer by linguistic connivance; a transfer from another reality or world into this one. It presupposes that this one is common. Of course it isn’t, yet it might be. In the use of metaphor Eric reckons that one can get a flavour or a taste of what he is trying to say and hint at the depths of the other worlds’ journey to Annwn in search of Awen, the inspiration of the vis viva. The breath which breathes life into all things, the breath that comes on the four winds and the moods they bear with them upon their shoulders, sometimes lightly and sometimes not. The Chautauqua then, is the search for a personal sense of Jesus, that sense of the divine potential incarnate in us all; where we are our own personal saviour, a sangraal quest for our inner being; the sense of at-one-ment with the world around us and perhaps the non mundane.
Eric came upon something quite by accident when he was a young man, caught up in all the hedonism of student life. It was a series of books starting for him with “The Journey to Ixtlan” written by Carlos Castaneda and so he heard of this thing called “the Warrior’s path”. He was rather taken by this series of books and read them all with a zeal, he was later to become famous for. When he talked about them with his flat mates it was rather clear that he had taken them seriously and they hadn’t. Something funny was going on and that year he was rather ill with many fevers. But he could not pretend he hadn’t heard, because he had. He did not know what he had heard but it was, something.
He got his degree and went on to study for a Ph.D. in chemical physics or “pissing about with lasers” as he liked to call it. The solitude of dark laboratories, expensive toys and the beauty of pure, coherent light, brought him much joy. After a while he twigged that he was pretty good at all this, he understood the theories and could make a laser sing. When he stood up to talk about his work, people listened, they even published his papers in scientific journals, what a hoot!
Later, when Eric went back to his school in Gloucestershire and walked around the sports fields, where he had snuck out during “lock up” to watch the fireworks of Guy Fawke’s night, made dangerous, secret, trips “out of bounds” for walnuts and ran and ran and ran. How many times had he done rounds as punishment? How great was that slip-slap-slip of his feet in rhythm with his breath. This was where it all began; one of his Jason Bourne moments, and it was at the hand of a well meaning man who in one sentence and in one act changed a life.
Eric had not settled in boarding school, his school work was messy and erratic reflecting his inner turmoil and his struggles to survive. Finally now at the age of 12 he sat his common entrance examination, though for him it was really another mock as he was due to be in the scholarship class next year. And there it was, on the English paper; write an essay inspired by any of the following. He chose:
“No man is an iland intire of it’ selfe: Every man is a peece of the continent;”
John Donne, Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
There it was his first quay off, off from the day to day and into the palace of dreams, it was the febrile stuff of a doorway into his inner world, shimmering, veil like, in the wind of his existence. There is someone else, after all, who had something of him.
Eric for once let it all go; he expressed all his inner loneliness drifting in a coracle from that Cape Town harbour, abandoned under the stars of the Southern Cross and without hope, until there, on the horizon was the first light of day. The master marked his essay and wrote of the poetry in Eric’s soul on his report card and then he did it. He read it out in assembly.
No man would write like that would they? After all the bullying on his sexuality, that was it, proof and in front of the whole school. There it was, never, never, never let it go again. How very attractive the science classes were after that. How easily he gained marks and passed the exams.
Eric says that it was a life that had two potentialities severed by a choice that was not really his, circumstance made it and his parents were now happy. His Nan though, was so proud of that comment, a poet in the family! When Eric saw the report card quite recently he could still smell the ink, a dark vivid blue, Parker’s Quink, written with a sloping italic nib. He experienced the same fear as he had done thirty years before. Eric had been here, here with the musty thin report book, charting his progress. He had held that book many, many times. Now though he could read between the lines, written by the teachers, having written many such things himself.
This was a node in his life, one of many. That world so precious and private to him had been taken out and with the best intentions, thrashed in public. Eric began to blend and here the chameleon was truly born. The twin Gods of should and ought began to take their hold on his psyche and he became the best sportsman he could be and the best scientist. He still did languages but kept them tight on a rein. He needed the marks for his exams.
Still and even on days like today when the rain caresses the ground he can remember the other country where people can be who they are; and all those water bottle windows gazed through; day dreaming in the foothills of that other country; the one that seems so far yet so close. And, again the window ledge is just wide enough to sit on, waiting for his parents who never came to rescue him. They weren’t of that other country so how could they possibly know what it was like. Nor was anyone it would appear.
I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love: The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test, That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best; The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago, Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know; We may not count her armies, we may not see her King; Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering; And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.
I Vow to Thee My Country, Sir Cecil A. Spring-Rice, 1918.
And that search for the other country was to continue for many years to come, always resident and poignant in his heart. Ready and fresh in his dreams yet as secret and as encrypted as it was possible to be. Buried deep within the layers of ice, the ice of a thousand tears cried in a silence of a song unsung and unspoken. No one knew what he thought and that gave him a sense of power. There, no one could harm him. There he was safe and he didn’t have to trust anyone.
When they let him read the lessons and the prayers he was very happy. Deep within him then the sense of the sacred was sanctuary and he did not mind that the others had their parents with them and that his were five thousand miles away. He and all the other expat boys got to ring the bells too!
Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de Votre paix.
Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l’amour. Là où il y a l’offense, que je mette le pardon. Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l’union. Là où il y a l’erreur, que je mette la vérité. Là où il y a le doute, que je mette la foi. Là où il y a le désespoir, que je mette l’espérance. Là où il y a les ténèbres, que je mette Votre lumière. Là où il y a la tristesse, que je mette la joie.
Ô Maître, que je ne cherche pas tant à être consolé qu’à consoler, à être compris qu’à comprendre, à être aimé qu’à aimer, car c’est en donnant qu’on reçoit, c’est en s’oubliant qu’on trouve, c’est en pardonnant qu’on est pardonné, c’est en mourant qu’on ressuscite à l’éternelle vie.
Par Saint François d’Assise
Later in life it was another rose that sneaked into his life and turned partially in the mortice to release the first seeds of an efflorescence that was to take him deep into Annwn and Awen; there again to offer him the proof that he was different and yet ultimately, the same.
Eric tells me that until you have been touched by the fingers of death there is no real concept of life. That you cannot begin to conceive life itself and that living is more of a going through the motions of existence. There is no fecundity in living and the organism which is the vehicle remains only partially awake, until the organising indwelling thing catches the breath of the vis viva and is inspired. Before this can happen the form side of life needs tended. The weeds and brambles that adorn the island of existence are pruned and hacked back; all that is unwanted is bagged up and taken to the re-cycling centre. Only then can the form side of life settle in the sea of floating things and allow creativity to stream forth un-abated. And it is the fingers of death that encourage the danse macabre of transformation, for it is only in the theatre of death that man can see his true script for this, his sojourn on the stage, where he is player for us all.
Eric says that he is lucky in that death has touched him three times now, and that the archetype of le mort should be welcome as it brings with it true change, for only then can man touch the very outer limits of his potential and truly, dance the edge. It is the universe’s way of showing the glory of incarnation and if we chose to see it, the pettiness of our doings and the darkness, which is so very often of our own making.
That island is crammed full with stuff, thoughts, should and ought. Filled with words that are not ours, choc-a-bloc with ideas put there by others, aspirations and ideals that have precious little to do with you; a veritable Shinjuku station at rush hour in time lapse photography where wave after wave of gripes and moans chant the koans of consumerism; the must have and the “if only” of the realms of the hungry ghosts.
“You know that people are rarely truly silent.” He says.
“True silence is what people fear the most. There and then, is the no-thing-ness of existence and it is primordial. It is before and will be after us and that is where the creative power of the void can be found, echoing out the very first sound into the darkness of manifestation; a single word which breaks the silence. It is this connectivity with the in-finite that man fears, insisting that it is only he and his island. He is lost in the sea of life, that he is one and has already separated from the zero.”
Eric likes to call the organising thing that animates the form the power within, as all the other words are now second hand. He distinguishes between the power within and the power without for clarity only. They are all part of the same awareness. He says that this distinction is a hangover from his sense of individuating identity and helps keep him sane, allowing him to tell all the stories that other people like so that they don’t panic or think him odd.
He says we all have a power within and it is the vis viva that animates this potential within us so that it incarnates. The one life chooses an aspect of awareness to materialise into form. This manifestation has an impact, it slows things down so that awareness becomes dream-like and foggy. It is just that so many people like the dream so much they aren’t willing to stop the world and wake up in the dream. The matrix of existence is so full of clamour and glamour that it straps people into a sense of reality that isn’t really there in the sea of the floating things. The folly of permanence and the arrow of time exclude the magic of being; after all we are all counter entropic beings are we not?
The incarnate matrix of existence has its stories and rules, by focusing intent upon their maintenance the world conspires to limit the potentialities to physical plane function whilst the organism and its thoughts keep the power within at bay with the brouhaha of social interaction and the relentless mind numbing noise of mass media and marketing. The voice of the power within remains unheard and talked over by the internal dialogue, often externalised, that convinces itself, at least partially, that the world of illusion is all that there is. This then is the sleight of hand that tells us we should be interested in what Manchester United are doing and whether of not Jennifer Anniston has found Mr Right; a sleight of hand that distracts us from perhaps our true purpose which is maybe, just maybe understanding the meaning behind why the vis viva animated the power within to incarnate so as to gain knowledge through physical plane existence and the challenges inherent in that.
Eric says that the irony is we dreamed this world into being yet most of us don’t even remember doing it and insist that this dream is real. Eric says that people have told him that he is a pretty powerful dreamer and he has no evidence to prove otherwise. He knows that for ten years of his life he did his very best to kill all of his dreams, he numbed them with chemicals and beer so that they would not speak to him at night. He says that coma is a good way to do this. The power within was wise to this and set him up with that visit to Negril, it had been silenced for too long and the sleeper must awaken. Eric didn’t realise it but he was in for a pretty rough ride after that.
The fire image above was recorded below where the washing line is in this image. The night I took this features later on in Vis Viva…
Since the year 1400 (a date to which I referred earlier) there have been constant appearances of lesser avatars, called forth in response to minor crises, to national dilemmas and religious necessity. They have taken the form of those men and women who have championed successfully some truth or some right cause, some human right or correct human demand. All these people have worked actively upon the physical plane and seldom received recognition for what they truly were; only history, at a later date, laid emphasis upon their achievement. But they changed the current of men’s thoughts; they pointed a way to a better life; they pioneered into new territories of human achievement. Such a one was Luther; another was Columbus; still others were Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci – to mention only four who so lived and thought and acted that they conditioned after events in some field of human living and are still recognized as pioneering souls, as leaders of men. With these disciples I shall not deal. They embodied ideas and made history – not the history of conquest but the history of progress. I seek to consider with you those still greater Appearances Who come forth from some hidden center, remote from or near to humanity, and Who “release from crisis the sons of men.” These fall mainly into four relatively minor groups:
1. Racial Avatars. These Appearances are evoked by the genius and destiny of a race, The typical man (in quality and consciousness, not necessarily physically) foreshadows the nature of some race. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, coming forth from the very soul of a people, and introducing and transmitting racial quality – a quality to be worked out later as the race unfolds. Coming forth correspondingly from the realm of cosmic evil, and responsible for the focus of materialism upon the planet today was Bismarck. Both men came forth within the same one hundred years, thus demonstrating the balance in nature and the constant interplay of the pairs of opposites. They are both types of the most powerful Avatars which humanity itself has as yet produced. They emerge along the lines of government, of the first ray and in the department of the Manu, and are very sensitive to Shamballa force. Such Avatars frequently emerge at the founding of a nation. This is true of both Bismarck and Lincoln.
2. Teaching Avatars. These Appearances sound a new note in the realm of thought and of consciousness; they reveal the next needed truth; they pronounce those words and formulate those truths which throw light upon the spiritual development of humanity. Such Avatars were Plato, the first Patanjali and Sankaracharya; they emerge upon the second ray line of energy, in the department of the Christ and are expressions of hierarchical force. When I say the department of the Christ, I would remind you that the name “Christ” is that of an office – an office that has always had its Head. I do not mention the Christ or the Buddha as among these Avatars because They are Avatars of another class and of infinitely greater potency.
3. Ray Avatars. These great Beings come forth at relatively long intervals when a ray is coming into manifestation. They embody the quality and the force of a particular ray. Next century, when the seventh ray has achieved complete manifestation and the Piscean influence is entirely removed, the seventh ray Avatar will appear. His work will demonstrate the law, order and rhythm of the creative process as it works out on the physical plane, blending spirit and matter. And as this ray is called the Ray of Ceremonial Order or Ritual, He will be largely instrumental in producing those conditions which will permit of the reappearance upon Earth of the Mysteries of Initiation, of which the Hierarchy is the custodian. He is necessarily connected with the Great White Lodge on Sirius. This fact does not, however, concern us now, for we await the coming of a still greater Avatar.
4. Transmitting Avatars. These manifestations of divinity appear at those great cyclic moments of revelation when humanity needs the expression of a new truth or the expansion of an old one in order to progress still higher on the evolutionary ladder. These Avatars issue forth in response to demand and are not so much concerned with racial development as They are with the subjective unfoldment of consciousness and with the stimulation of humanity as a whole. Of these Avatars the Buddha and the Christ are outstanding examples. They were not only human-divine Avatars, and hence able to link humanity with the Hierarchy, but They were something far greater and more important. They had reached the point where They could act as Transmitters of certain cosmic principles which – focused in Them in an extra-planetary sense – could stimulate the deeply hidden and latent corresponding principle in humanity. They transmitted and brought something from outside the planetary life – from the very Heart of God to the heart of man.The Buddha, because He achieved illumination, stimulated the light in the world, in humanity and in all forms. He served the soul of man. The Christ, because of His stupendous achievement – along the line of understanding – transmitted to humanity, for the first time in human history, an aspect and a potency of the nature of God Himself, the Love principle of the Deity. Prior to the advent of the Buddha, light, aspiration, and the recognition of God Transcendent had been the flickering expression of the human attitude to God. Then the Buddha came and demonstrated in His Own life the fact of God Immanent as well as God Transcendent; the idea of God in the universe and of God in humanity evolved. The Selfhood of Deity and the Self in the heart of individual man became a factor in human consciousness. It was a relatively new truth to be grasped by humanity. It had always been known by disciples and initiates.
However, until Christ came and lived a life of love and service and gave mankind the new commandment to love, there had been very little emphasis upon God as Love in any of the world Scriptures. After He appeared as the Avatar of Love, then God became known as Love supernal, love as the goal and objective of creation, love as the basic principle of relationships, and love working throughout all manifestation towards a plan motivated by love. This divine quality Christ revealed, and thus altered all human living and human goals. At that time too there came a great impetus and extension to the work and growth of the Hierarchy, as there was in a lesser degree when the Buddha came. Many initiates became Masters; many Masters passed to still higher work, and many disciples took their places in the ranks of the initiates. There was numerically a great influx of aspirants into the ranks of accepted disciples.
I have considered some of these Avatars in my earlier writings under different names and categories. I deal with Them here simply in an effort to reach a wider public with the teaching on the doctrine of Avatars or of divine Appearances. The Bible is full of such Appearances, but little is really understood about Them. The above are the more familiar groupings.
In September 1940 I gave an interpretation of a new Stanza of the Great Invocation, and in that communication I spoke of Divine Embodiments as the highest type of Avatar for which humanity could look at this point in its evolution. I spoke of the activity of the Hierarchy and of Shamballa, should these two divine Agencies decide that intervention in the form of a widespread cataclysm (engulfing all peoples) was necessary, and I referred to the emergence of inspired leadership as another and lower aspect of divine guidance and participation.
Such inspired leadership is now being given to humanity by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in contradistinction to the focused leadership of the forces of materialism through Hitler and another man in his group. But it is not with this form of leadership as expressive of the avataric principle that I deal here. Such leadership is called forth by elements present in humanity itself. I deal now with a fifth type of Avatar, greater than the other four. These Avatars have not, in this world cycle, experienced human life.
5. Divine Embodiments. These Avatars appear rarely; and when They do, the effectiveness and results of Their work are very great. They issue forth into manifestation via the center at Shamballa, because They are an expression of the will nature of Deity; They embody divine purpose; the energy pouring through Them and transmitted by Them is focused through the Lord of the World; They can only be reached by the united voices of the Hierarchy and of humanity speaking in unison; Their service is evoked only by realized need, and only after those who call Them forth have added to their faith strenuous action and have done their utmost, alone and unaided, to overcome evil.
They never descend lower than the mental plane, and the main emphasis and attention of Their work is directed to the Hierarchy; the Hierarchy is their transmitting agency; They occasionally reach those thinking people, focused on the mental plane, who have clear vision, potent resolve, directed will and open minds, plus of course, essential purity of form. These Avatars express the Will of God, the energy of Shamballa, and the impulse lying behind divine purpose. When They do come forth, it will be the destroyer aspect of the first ray of power which They will express; They bring about death – the death of all old and limiting forms and of that which houses evil. Their work will, therefore, fall into two categories:
They will destroy the forces of evil, using the agency of the Forces of Light.
They will reveal as much of the divine purpose as humanity is able to grasp through its best minds and most dedicated aspirants; They will clarify the vision of the world disciples and of all who have the disciplined will-to-know and who are dedicated to and expressive of the will-to-good. This knowledge and this will are needed in the coming period of readjustment.
How They will bring the present evil conditions to an end and how They will destroy the present evil state of materialistic aggression I may not reveal. It is not yet certain that human development and understanding and the massed intent of humanity will be adequate to the needed demand and strong enough to call Them forth. Time alone can determine that. God grant that the aspirants and disciples of the world will awaken to the opportunity and the imminent and waiting possibility. The plight of vast groups of people upon the planet today lies heavy upon the heart of the Hierarchy. But to bring release and the Appearance of the Power that can liberate, human cooperation is needed. Nowhere is this more desperately needed than among the German people in their unhappy land. God grant, therefore, that those Germans who have vision may join the forces of those who are seeking to free Germany and the German people from the imposed tyranny of the evil Lodge, working through their seven representatives in Germany. Once the Germans who are living free lives in other lands can think in terms of humanity as a whole and not in terms of national glamors, revenge or self-pity, then their voices will be added to those of the other free peoples and to those of the aspirants and disciples in all other nations.
When the Avatar comes He will convey to humanity something for which we have as yet no true name. It is neither love nor will as we understand them. Only a phrase of several words can convey something of the significance and then only feebly. This phrase is “the principle of directed purpose.” This principle involves three factors:
Understanding (intuitive and instinctual, but intelligently interpreted) of the plan as it can be worked out in the immediate future.
Focused intention, based on the above and emphasizing an aspect of the will, hitherto undeveloped in man.
Capacity to direct energy (through understanding and intent) towards a recognized and desired end, overcoming all obstacles and destroying all that stands in the way. This is not destruction of forms by force such as is now being imposed on the world, but a destruction brought about by the greatly strengthened life within the form. Only the next one hundred years will reveal the significance of this statement and then only if the massed intent of the people evokes this Avatar of Synthesis during the next twelve months. I have called this Being by this name because it expresses the quality and the objective of the force He brings and wields.
Another and lesser Avatar is also awaiting a call from humanity. He is esoterically related to the Avatar of Synthesis, being over-shadowed by Him. This Avatar can descend on to the physical plane into outer expression and can thus step down and transmit the stimulation and quality of the force of the greater Avatar Who can come no nearer than the mental plane. Who this Coming One may be is not yet revealed. It may be the Christ, if His other work permits; it may be One chosen by Him to issue forth, over-shadowed by the Avatar of Synthesis and directed in His activities by the Christ, the Lord of Love. In this way, the energies of both Shamballa and the Hierarchy will be focused through the chosen Coming One. Thus a triangle of loving, purposeful energy will be created which may prove a more effective way of releasing energy and a safer way, than the focused impact of one selected force might be.
I realize the difficulty of this subject and perhaps may simplify the matter by a brief summation:
1) A great cosmic Avatar can come if the Hierarchy and humanity can stand together with massed intent.
He will descend into the three worlds of human endeavor, but no nearer than the mental plane.
He will transmit a cosmic energy whose quality is Synthesis. This will express itself through harmony and unity, producing necessarily understanding, promoting goodwill, and eventually ending the separative, isolating tendencies of mankind.
His note and vibration can only be sensed by those whose individual note is also synthesis and whose life objective is the will-to-good. These are consequently the Members of the Hierarchy, the disciples and aspirants of the world and a few of the men of goodwill.
2) A Messenger or Avatar of equal rank to the Christ in the Hierarchy (or possibly Christ Himself) may come forth as the Representative of the Avatar of Synthesis and as His transmitting Agent.
This lesser Avatar works today as one of the senior Members of the Great White Lodge and is in close touch with the Christ, with the Manu and with the Lord of Civilization, the Master R -; He will act as the Coordinator between the Hierarchy and Shamballa. He will fuse and blend in Himself, through the quality of His Own life, the three great energies:
The will-to-spiritual power.
The will-to-love in its spiritual connotation.
The will-to-manifest spiritually.
The antiquity of the achievement of this Coming One is to be found in the name applied to Him, which is found in so many of the world Scriptures: The Rider on the White Horse. This refers to the time prior to the phrase so well-known in the Christian fields: “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” In the earlier cycle, the then initiates spoke of the “sacrificial horse, slain to all eternity.” It conveys the same basic idea.
This Avatar can descend to the physical plane and there appear, to lead His people – as the Prince Who leads through war to peace.
The whole problem before the Hierarchy and humanity today, in connection with the coming Avatar, can be summed up in the following four questions:
a) Can He bring the energy of synthesis with Him, thereby bringing about rapid changes?
This depends upon His being over-shadowed by the Avatar of Synthesis and upon that Avatar being evoked through the demand and the massed intent of humanity, aided by the Hierarchy.
b) Will the demand of the people be strong enough to evoke the higher potency, or will it be too feeble because of the failure of the world disciples and aspirants to focus this massed intent throughout the planet?
c) Will the higher over-shadowing not take place and only the lesser Avatar come to institute a slower method of gradual reform?
This slower method will be necessitated only if and because humanity will have demonstrated its inability to call forth and receive the higher measure and more potent vibration of divine energy. It is entirely for the decision of the world disciples and aspirants; not the decision of poor bewildered, deluded humanity.
d) Will the world disciples and aspirants appreciate the crisis and opportunity? They have not yet, as a whole, done so.
3)The Hierarchy today stands with massed intent. The cry of the masses is rising up to the very gates of Shamballa. It is stronger far than the demand of the spiritually oriented people – the disciples, the aspirants, the men of goodwill. They seem – from the viewpoint of the Hierarchy – to be overcome by inertia, to be engrossed by their theories and idealisms, and to be blind to the issues at stake. Can they be aroused? Can they stand with focused intent, strenuous physical service and activity, and determined effort to struggle, even unto death, for the defeat of evil? Can they preserve the inner attitude of love and non-separateness? Can they relinquish all for love of humanity? Can they sacrifice everything for the cause of freedom and of righteousness? This is the problem confronting Those Who are working for the appearance of the Greater and the Lesser Avatars Who can at this time save humanity if humanity desires salvation and will take the needed steps.
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Excerpted from:
The Externalization of the Hierarchy – Section III – Forces behind the Evolutionary Process
For some reason my attention was drawn back to this dream, this morning.
I am standing in a column of light which is shining down on me. It comes from above. As the light shines on me it etches into my skin black tattoos, these form on my arms, my legs, my chest and my back. They are letters, words and phrases in Sanskrit and Senzar. The letters are in a black ink and cover pretty much my entire body much like the Bulletproof Monk. I carry these letters.
Next I am in a city landscape and everyone is going to a party at city hall. There is a concert on there and people are gathering. There is an ensemble playing, it is like the Academy of Ancient Music and the instruments are all original period pieces. They are up on stage. On the ground floor and in a “box” is Princess Anne.
By this time I have told people about the tattoos and nobody believes me. There has been some press interest but the men with their 1950’s style newshound flash cameras have lost interest. This is because there is nothing to see. The party continues on undisturbed.
I now find myself in a department store which is old style. I am curled up on the floor near a counter wearing a grey long sleeved shirt. The shop people find me there and nudge me to get up. I get up and as I do so the sleeves of my shirt fall back to reveal a list of tattoos in Sanskrit, Senzar and Chinese. These are now in very vivid royal blue and the calligraphy is exquisite, it is almost moving and definitely alive and vivacious.
The store staff are all bewildered by this and take me to a back office. In the foyer to this back office are two small Tibeto-Chinese figures. They are dressed in ceremonial costumes and approach me. They are dwarves and twins. I show them my forearms and they recognize the Sanskrit and Chinese characters, they guess that the others must be Senzar. The tattoos are now moving like a “stock ticker” scrolling across my arms. The dwarves are awestruck.
Whilst I am waiting for the store staff I get bored and so leave the store, into a busy “New York” city street. It is raining heavily and my shirt gets wets through. It is clinging to me. I am wandering through the city in the rain with these vivid mobile, deep royal blue tattoos being the only coloured thing in a grey and black and white-grey world.
In the dream I know that I am carrying messages. I am by way of a messenger.
Later people gather around me and I show them my forearms. People now start to believe what I have told them before and all are astounded by the tattoos. I show church leaders and statesman.They are all stunned.
In the city the younger people are setting up to go to a house party. It is the usual thing and people are gathering to go to someone’s house. They are all too busy with partying. They do not realize that the “party” is at my house.
I am now on a roof and there is a stack of old billboard type advertisements. There are several of us and we are sorting them. There is one which reads Toltec 7-14 which we find and as we do this one of the phrases in Senzar lights up on my arm. It says “Toltec 7-14 New Book” in Senzar. I know its meaning. I know it is both a date and has the meaning of dreaming symbols {7= guidance and 14 = new knowledge}.
I awake with very strong sensations on and in my forearms and chest. These are very similar to when I had the visions of myself in Buddhist monk’s robes and tattoos in Sanskrit of inter alia “Om Mane Padme Hum” nearly a decade ago. I can feel the place where the dream tattoos were, particularly on my forearms
Sophocles. The Antigone of Sophocles. Edited with introduction and notes by Sir Richard Jebb. Sir Richard Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1891.
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If anyone is going to miscalculate on the hoof and cause a nuclear war through reckless extroverting, it is most likely to be Boris Johnson. He will say something stupid in the moment trying to impress the cameras and Vlad. will press the button. Vlad. might calculate that Europe is no longer a pal of the English.
It would not be the first time that Boris has caused harm by improvising in front of the camera…
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Over the decades I have, as a bearer of A reality, been metaphorically shot. I have offered my truth and as a consequence been on the receiving end of defensive bile and anger. People have on occasion been very nasty to me, some have sought vengeance. When people are full of BS and hot air they do not like the bearer of that deflationary pin. People who lack self-awareness do not like home truths.
Recently an ex-colleague of mine said that I once needed a good slap from a therapist, I said yeah, I did. I was a bit of an arse back then.
Here is question for you,
Have you ever made a truly massive, ginormous mistake yet felt that you were thoroughly in the right, utterly justified and cleverly winning an argument only to find out subsequently, maybe decades later, that your self-diagnosed omniscience was in fact an episode of arrogant egoic encephalitis? {swollen head}
I have been exposed to some very pompous people who have an extremely high opinion of themselves and the extent and pervasion of their intellect. It is difficult to work in a “top tier” university and not have such exposure.
There is an ancillary question,
Is it possible that certain individuals are of profound karmic significance?
Traou an Dour 
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