Kundalini Splendor

These are two very large topics, and I am no expert in either. Yet I believe that all of us can gain glimpses of a higher truth when we study the ancient texts or view some scientific presentation on the physical cosmos as it has been revealed to us in recent years.

Today I happened to pull down a translation of the Diamond Sutra, a foundational text of Buddhism that dates from the 4th century BCE. It is called the Diamond Sutra because it is held to cut through all untruths to reveal the one truth of nondual reality. I opened to the chapter entitled "All Modes of Mind are Really Only Mind." What, I wondered, could this possibly mean.

Now, it would take a Buddhist scholar to render a full explanation, but as I read through the chapter certain possibilities came to my "mind." The writings are set up as a dialogue, with one Subhuti (one of Buddha's followers) and Buddha, the "World-Honored One", in a manner suggesting an early "version" of the contemporary "Conversations with God."

In this passage, Buddha, explaining the essence of that which we call mind, says:

Subhuti, if there were as many Ganges rivers as the sand grains of the Ganges and there was a buddha-land for each sand grain in all those Ganges riers, would those buddha-lands be many?

....Subhuti, however many living beings there are in all those buddha-lands, though they have manifold modes of mind, the Tathagata (Buddha) understands them all. Wherefore? Because the Tathagata teaches that all these are not mind; they are merely called mind. Subhuti, it is impossible to retain past mind, impossible to hold on to present mind, and impossible to grasp future mind."



Recently, I watched a Nova presentation on the universe, which used the same metaphor--grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts of our planet--to indicate how many other planets, stars, and universes there were in the cosmos. Indeed, the number is infinite, and unthinkable to us with our limited human intellect.

What if these distant planets were indeed places where intelligent life did exist? Would the "Great Mind" (sometimes called Buddha, sometimes God, sometimes the Oversoul, sometimes Divine Reality, sometimes Ultimate Creative Source) be able to know and comprehend the various forms of consciousness to be found on these distant locations? When Buddha tells us that what we think of as mind does not exist, is he saying that the only authentic consciousness is that of the Higher Reality itself, and that when we imagine we are "real" apart from that Consciousness, we are deluded.

In the moment of ultimate transcendence (which many call Enlightenment) the discovery is in fact that we do not exist as separate beings, that we are merely tiny atoms in the greater reality, for that reality is all that exists and the rest is appearance and fantasy.

This news is hard to swallow. We are not eager to surrender the sense of a separate self (ego).

Kundalini, though we can never adequately describe it nor totally penetrate its mysteries, is what tells us that we can experience oneness with the transcendent. The transcendent comes to us as bliss. In the moment of bliss, we forget all that makes us "us"--our occupations, our past experiences, our issues we are struggling with, our successes in the world. Truth has now been "stepped down" to our level. Appearances are stripped away, and we are lost in a new awareness. We are given that which we can comprehend with our feeling body, our energies which come from the source of all, for everything is made manifest from that Source which is Infinite Consciousness and Mind.

Yeats said, "Man can embody truth but never know it."

But--I do not think that because we realize the "non-existence" of the myriad appearances of this world, we can therefore turn away from the events that surround us on the grounds that they are not "real." For us, it is obligatory to know what is occurring here, now, on this planet, at this time of ultimate crisis, and do all we can to help meet the current challenges. I believe that many of us have come here just for this purpose. We are helpers, not rejectors, and we do all we can to promote what is rightly called evolution of consciousness.