The
monkster would come and ask questions about our practice. Jim
went into this overdrive. " well, you see it's like this.
In our Tibetan gig, we have to take more vows, but we also got
more tools. All offerings are clearing activities. Thus all our
activity is for clearing. You gotta have sufficient guru devotion,
man. They are the light. Clearing is possible only because of
them. " Jim was warming up. " You gotta have no attachment
for the results, man. Only then will they be full proof. The monksters
eyes were starting to glaze over. Jim just stared at him and rammed
him further.
"
You guys are from the no-self school, man. That's your pinnacle.
Get rid of the self, but what about others, man? How about non-other?
" Jim was moving in for the kill. " Yeah, how about
non-all? " The street monk was desperately trying to find
some way out of the room. Jim was now swirling and surging.
" Yeah, non-other answers the self-school's difficult quandary.
You see? Non-all can tackle all creation and dissipation. It's
like fucking, Kali man. Her big womb and all creation. "
I was furiously scribbling down notes on my pad.
The
idea of a mandala was really important to Jim. You could say
that a mandala was like a map of the mind and its connection
with the light source. When you did puja that was the easiest
thing to see. It was kind of on the surface. It was on the outer-rim
of the mandala. Like a car tire on the road, its outer edge
spun fasters and faster. You could touch, smell, and taste it.
As
you started to travel inside the mandala all energies were more
and more related to psychic activity. It was harder to see this.
All accomplishment was compassion here. Transformation became
compassion outside of the tire. But where the hub-cap just slowly
pivoted now that was undiluted awareness. It was the basis of
compassion itself. All levels weaved back and forth across the
cruising tire.
The
weave itself generated a pretty dense realization system. That's
what we were doing in Jim's room. Our altar was becoming dense
and denser. Photos and candles collided with incense sticks.
Bowls of rice heaped up on plates of food now towered over the
little Buddha figurines. Everything we did, every thought we
had, and every word we uttered inter-weaved and fused into something
much bigger than anything we could possibly imagine. All levels
of the tire webbed into each other and were transformed simultaneously.
It was pretty hairy to look into Jim's fertile imagination.
Jim
drove his points hard. You had to PULL-BACK. The more you did.
Then the more you saw. You just pulled back from SELF, then
from all your MULTIPLE SELVES. Then finally just ALL SELVES.
The release occurred on all levels SYMULTANEOUSLY. Bliss and
suffering were thus really inter-connected. They were these
bad-ass tools at your disposal. There really were no boundaries.
That's how ALL was finally contained. Yeah, this was it.
Jim
would say. " Yeah, man, let go of your identity and the
tension that any position just generates. That's expansion,
man. That's the bliss. Everybody feels it. Yeah, man. Just circulate
the energy, dissipate karma. Pull back and see ALL is just you
and ALL is ALL. There ain't no turning back after that.
Jim
kept talking about Rentongers, Shentongers, and Sahajists. He
felt Rentongers were very self-absorbed with themselves. Only
looking at their own minds while ignoring others. Shentongers
did a little better. At least they were concerned with other
minds, but it was the Sahajists that caught Jim's fancy. These
guys had real time for whatever, whenever. All was neither empty
nor full, but both and also beyond to these big guys.
Jim
went into a powerful trance with my help and described the different
worlds of these Buddhas. In the Rentong lands the buddhas were
brilliant and translucent. They were all lined up in dense herds.
Shentong Buddhas were dense too, but lived in isolated clusters.
While the Sahajists were very dense loners who could bring really
astonishing energies to bear.
For
fun, Jim went into the Bengali saint's world. He saw Buddahs
all lined up in a row like tin soldiers. These Buddhas wre acting
as protectors. Kali was in a grotto shining out to the Bengali
guy. Behind the grotto was frightening darkness and Jim ran
into trouble. He panicked and shifted into reverse gear. Jim
described what he saw as not even emptiness, but just this pure
resonance. It wasn't even luminance. I wasn't quite sure what
to make of all this. Was Jim's imagination just running wild?
Were we really on the Mayflower to the purelands? I was starting
to feel like Jim's baby-sitter.
The
more I reflected on Jim's descriptions of the Buddah worlds,
the more it all sounded kind of like stellar evolution. Things
got denser and denser. You had the dust clouds out in space,
then you had stars forming and turning into these dwarfs, and
finally you had a big black-hole form in all its inky and dark
magnificence. The Rentongers, Shentongers, and Sahajists, which
Jim started to call Kuntongers in his final hours were all kind
of landmarks on the way from the dirtylands to the purelands.
It was some hairy vision. But was it really real?
|