THE ONLY WAY FORWARD IS GOING BACK

A student, Shandiedang, advancing in the Dharma, this morning sent me the above cartoon which has wry humor and pinpoints the tragedy of human comportment.

There are few who would deny its main point that the human creature is a complete disaster. The great problem, considering the advance of Identity greed which exists as the norm, is "where to go back" and "how to perform that task."

Going back does not mean going back to a Neanderthal cave existence, although their conduct may indeed have been superior to our own, but returning to the natural state where man made the initial error without losing the correct and natural advances of the intelligent brain that was developed.

It does not mean that we must replace the computer with a club nor our warming clothes with an animal fur, nor our little square apartments with a cave, although certainly the little round huts or teepees which early tribes used were superior in a thousand ways to square apartments for square-minded people that have been converted into high-rise monsters.

In a romantic way, we may say that we would like to return to that point in legend when Adam and Eve, the reification of the first homo sapiens that stopped killing of the Neanderthals, began. 

       Actually, God messed it all up. 

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam  no suitable helper was found.

If we set aside for a moment the legend that Adam needed help for naming the animals, which is well within the scope of woman with her superior ordering mind, we find that the error began with the innocent naming of all living things (nama and rupa). But remember that man and woman, then, at that time were fully integrated with all nature as one.

It is also declared that The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

So God was also concerned about him being alone. God, then, with an omnipotent mind knew full well that without a woman there would be no offspring and that would certainly screw up his master plan.

Now we find that previously (Genesis 2.15), after the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (...) The LORD God commanded the man, (Genesis 2.16-17), saying, 'Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.'

In the West we give credence to the fruit being the apple, but the Hebrews, with a wiser head, name the fig, for after (Genesis 3.6-7),the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

So from the same fig tree that gave them the knowledge they took the leaves to cover their sin.

But their sin, you see, was not that they had ignored God's warning, but that they had eaten the fruit of knowledge.

What was that knowledge? It was not just that they were naked, but they had ingested the fruit of the knowledge of Duality.

He was different and separate from her. "Me and her" and "Me and him" were generated... along with "Me and every other named thing" as separate entities.

                                             BEYOND THE LEGEND

If we look beyond the legend we can establish roughly the probable time when this knowledge of duality took place. It began slowly not through a creation and there was a transformation of small nomadic hunter-gatherer groups into sedentary groups with the development of specialized food crop cultivation. This required the development of primitive language for the communication of the culture, centralized administration, transfer of ideas, and a depersonalized system of property ownership and writing.

This occured about ten thousand years ago, probably in the fertile belt running from Turkey to Iran. By 3500 BCE full-blown complexes were established in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities.

This required the extensive naming, together with the ownership concept with Duality as its main pillar and Identity ruling all.

So today, thousands of years later, we have developed the New Age civilizations of Duality and Egocentricity.

We have, it is certain, three forms of memory; short-term, long-term and a memory that is primordial and they are not located each in a separate place but spread around the brain rather like the memory of a computer. Of course, human memory cannot be restructured like that of a computer so the pieces remain dispersed. Fortunately we have a bio-system of allocation and a super-fantastic system of recuperation.

While humans recognized errors in comportment as far back as the Aryans, today the Brahmins of old have been replaced by psychologists and psychiatrists. Their task is to reduce the social errors of individuals in the the system, so that there is conformity, but no one ever speaks of restoring the natural system. For a psychologist to do that would be professional suicide, for society, the church and education depend upon the presence of a strong but obedient Identity. Therefore one's self-image and self-esteem are uppermost in their systems.

Any variation in accepted behavior has its social limits and those who do not conform are criminals or, in lesser cases, clients for therapy to return them to social norms.

In any case, the range of possible memory adjustment is the space for the individual "between his birth and his mental deviations." There are religious alternatives, but in evey case the task is one of legal brainwashing and is never a case of recuperation the true human nature.

The Dharma systems also operate in that range where cognition, perception, memory and consciousness operate (Vipassana) and also with sensations, discrimination, perception, cognition (volition) and attention/consciousness (Samatha).  

The problem is that while these together form an excellent tool to eliminate the symptoms of the Dual Mind, Identity and Stained Sexuality, there must be a continual and close observation and control of behavior to prevent the return of these stains of behavior.

The question then is whether or not there is a real practice that can manage to eliminate altogether the impediments of these three.  

                                           The answer is paradoxically "yes" and "no".

This answer requires explanation and so we can declare that the conceptual "Identity" in and of itself, the "Conceptual Duality" in and of itself and the "primitive force of reproductive sexuality" are essential as evolved and practical tools when they are known, within and below the level of consciousness, to be illusions and when they are tempered by the natural programs of balance and harmony.

The conceptual system (cognition) together with sensation, discrimination, perception and consciousness are all basically left-brain functions and are operative because of the presence of language, which is essentially also left-brain in its operation.

The natural programs, which are much more primitive conceptually, are right-brain operations. 

The problem is that the right brain has been neutralized by the force of Identity and the Dual Mind.

This Identity is Egocentric and the Dual mind generates the belief in the reality of every illusion.

                             ADVANCED DHARMA (NATURAL) REVITALIZATION

The advanced Dharma systems (in this case, Chan) have been evolved for over two thousand years and their objective is to reach into that area of mental operation and memory in order to revitalize the right-brain system and balance correctly the left-brain useful illusions with the right-brain natural programs.

It is an Herculean task which requires diligence, intellectual understanding of a high level, patience, stillness of mind, determination and perseverance. The results, if effective in all social systems, would completely change the devolution of the human creature. This is counterproductive for present societies with globalized minds, an addiction to craving and clinging and a false belief in their honor and dignity.

The great problem is that Identity does not want to let go of the concept of the Unity of all life and the belief in the existence of individual and separate human creatures. Religions with their illusions try to unite all human creatures under "one God" concept, which only at best regulates cognitive behavior.

Chan, as a "system/non-system", negates this position and presents meditations, called contemplations, which revitalize the right-brain programs, which we call feminine because they are the originally evolved and natural operations and regenerate correct connection with the left-brain master program of execution of the Feminine Principle.

We can and will go into greater detail in this web page, but it must be made clear that we are not talking about religious, social or traditional psychological processes. As a result it is clear that the return of the human creature as a whole society to a "garden of Eden situation" is impossible. What can be accomplished is the return of individual human creatures to the "uncarved wood" state where his/her original nature is melded with all the advances of the left-brain cognition to provide an individual noble human creature and not a mindless robot ruled by three internal viruses, supported by the collective Identity folly of the present world.

It is a difficult task and the first step, of course, is to believe that it is possible. But two questions are, "Do you see that the human creature is a disaster, as are his works?" and second "Are you ready and capable of making the necessary changes?", which require a sacrifice of your Dual mind, your Identity and your Sexual folly.

We must make it here clear that there is little wrong with the inventiveness and progress of science, and that the error lies in the way in which the human stained mind operates with these magnificent survival tools.