SPRING 1990
Ten years ago, I went to India to study Tibetan Buddhism with the Abbot of a Nyingma monastery. Among the stages of initiation that he told me about were mandala offerings. Since then, I have made thousands of such offerings, though not in the exact pattern that he taught me and not nearly the 100,000 repetitions that are traditionally expected. (I hope that there is in the world some room for adjusting these things to one’s own circumstances of contemporary moment. It is too late now if there is not.)
Then last summer, 1989, I attended the ten day, Kalachakra Intiation given by H.H. the Dali Lama in Santa Monica, California. I observed (being seated twenty feet from His Holiness much of the time) the construction of a large powder (sand) mandala during the rituals. Watching ‘the behind the scenes’ activities of the ritual assistents was as valuable to my understanding of such rituals as what was going on up front.
This was among several events, some traumatic, that lead to my being remarkably energized in a vision by my Spirit guide animal, my familiar, that caused nearly twenty four hours of disconcertingly high energy. Then I was drawn into a visionary experience, in the interior realm, in which I was present to observe the rising of a vast, horrific, black black beast/snake and its subsequent galactic travel; then its entrance through my perineum up my spine to become my skeletal and psychic nervous system. At first this was a terrifying experience, over a period of days. Then it took on a very attractive quality of white glimmering light.
These psychic events precipitated/facilitated(?) last Fall’s travel to India somehow, because it was immediately following that experience that travel to India became not only possible but a bit of a “coup” against all the odds of what was happening in my life at that time. Pannikar advised for the spiritual aspect of journey to India, my not forcing anything, ‘just let things develop.’ That was exactly my mood, since I was tired of the whole dynamic and had no ambition about any of it.
In Hawaii, while ‘innocently’ reading a novel one evening, a communication came to me from deep inside the island. “We will be with you there.” Fine. In Agra, I experienced a spontaneous ‘ritual’ pattern very like the one I had in Yemen that years ago was coincident with so many deaths and disasters. That was the day of the earthquake in San Francisco, October, 1990. In Dharamsala, I had terrible migraines. My friends there took me to a hospital once because of the migaines. They thought I was having a heart attack. I wasn’t conscious enough to tell them that it was only my way of being in the world.
Somewhere in my body/mind’s inner realm, I met the dragon (Nature) near the Sivaite shrine above Dharamsala in the mountains. A ‘spring grass in an old orchard’ sense of renewal. (St. George taming the Dragon (Nature) is a very important dynamic in all this) That was all amidst huge spaces of waiting for one thing or another; “stillness” and “clear light,” intense beauty, as well as disconcerting adjustments to being in India.
I had remarkably good luck with the Tibetans. I met the Dali Lama, also the Head of Nyingmapa, two great conversations. I was given the best teachers, guides.
Late in my stay in Dharamsala, the dragon came into my room and brought me something. The dragon turned into the large body of a man. It was barely alive. It was naked and male though I could not see any genitals, that area being darkened in shadow. This figure was well formed. Subsequently I went to Sarnath, on the other side of nothern India. The Dragon man’s eyes were cavities. Not that he was blind but he could not see. Like they had been burned out. I did not know what I was supposed to do with him. So I just let him be, to see what developed. After a few days the solution presents itself. We both are taken to a place on the grounds of St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo where I’d done rituals in the past. ( Once in the seminary, a friend asked me to heal him of a bad headache. I did. That night he had a great powerful dream. The next day we were walking around the grounds and came to the place where I had done the rituals and buried sacred objects in a small pit. He said that that was the location in his dream. In his dream I was a shaman with others and I was showing him how to ‘do it’. I had a hand full of pebbles that I threw down on the ground causing fire to shoot up out of the little pit.)
This was the place where the dragon man from Dharamsala and I were taken! For days I shamanized over him. He was dying. There was only a little ‘chi’ left in his body, in the naval chakra. I increased that and drew it up the central channel to his crown. He was mightly enlivened with a great crown of light around his head and now opened, seeing eyes. But it is wrong somehow. It is crazy evil light. All wrong. This goes on for days. He is laying still at that place in the seminary grounds. I now have the steel staff from Yeman. I strike the ground over and over again. Like Yemen. But (strike) all around his body prone on the ground. I am conscious at this point that I am striking whatever it is that is consuming the world. I strike with increasing frenzy, all around his head. Then by “accident” I strike him right in the middle of his forehead. I am shocked. Terrified. The great steel staff has pinned his head to the ground. I have killed him. Terrible mistake. I immediately try to heal him but the image fades out of my consciousness. I feel terribly stupid. Then, after a few days, I realized that what I did was the right, necessary thing. I had driven the staff right through the third eye. (*psycho/sexual meaning in this that might be interesting to explore someday as the basis for future Christian teachings about sexuality.)
But, the staff was now gone. And he is not dead but asleep, resting. The wound is healed/ing. He is resting in that place, a beautiful golden white light suffuses the whole vision and thus it remains. Just yesterday 1/11/90, from that light was developed a vision of the Himalayas where the dragon lived, then that extended as the psychic, skeletal structure of the earth ‘risen’ and characterized by that white golden clear sparkling light. Very beautiful. Great energy and beauty.
I will now compare the structure of my recent journey to to a classic Kundalini sequence, following the sequence in the Shrichakra mandala described by Tucci’s book on the mandala (Tucci’s appendix plate III),
- The earth chakra Muladhara at the perineum and Svadhisthana at the base of the genital organs is represented by my experience with the cthonic creatures the black widow spiderand the vast black snake just before my departure for India last summer.
- The experience in Hawaii, according to my journal, concluded with, among other things, an uncomfortably active, but pleasing energy flowing around the Manipura (stomach) chakra.
- The experience in Agra that was so disturbing was an unrequited affair of the heart and the loins, coincident with the earthquake in San Francisdo, but tied to issues of human identity and action; the Anahata chakra in the heart.
- News about the coincidence of the San Francisco earthquake and my own disturbance in Agra as well as some shocking but positive revelations about myself came to me soon after from the ‘throat’, the Visuddha chakra, of a holy woman. (The word)
- The violent headaches in Dharamsala (the top of my head felt like it was coming off as I was taken to the hospital…) as I study the mandala, indicate the activity in the Sahasrara Chakra, at the top of the head. [The Yamantaka (remover of obstacles, vanquisher of the god of death) Initiation was being given in the Dali Lama’s Monastery at this time. I was able to observe and photograph the contruction of the mandala used in this rite.]
- The vision of the “dragon-man” and the staff through his forehead, is the Ajna chakra, or the third eye.
- The energy flow from the earth through the marrow* of my skeleton preceding the terrible headaches and the concluding sense of the connection with the skeletal structure of the earth makes the microcosmic-macrocosmic leap. After I returned from India, I had a powerful vision one day of the Himalayas where the dragon lived. Then, that extended/became the vast psychic structure of the earth “risen” and characterized by that white, golden, clear sparkling light. All the sacred places from twenty years of pilgrimage connected became one body somehow. Thus the purpose of the Shrichakra mandala is to some degree effected with the resulting sense of somehow coming of age, of elevated integration, peace and normalcy, of having died, of giving up my powers, to be empowered in preparation for…
This seems to be a fairly clear “Kundalini”/mandala experience spread over several months and thousands of miles. Even if it were not actually fact, I believe it displays a subjective understanding of the “powers” of the mandala important in balance to objective vision.
Thus the human body and the body of creation engage to produce the mandala’s intention. Completion. The aesthetic experience of that is fairly elitist, since few would go to the trouble to conjure it, (or stumble into it), even this ‘mutated’ version of the classic pattern above. One is left with such questionable, personal versions as above and the painted cosmoplans. The aesthetic of it is inseparable from the whole ‘plan’ as I tried to indicate by quoting Guenther’s approach at such length above. In evaluating art objects, perhaps we could look at the painted, 3-D, or sand (powder) mandalas as psychedelic substances, from the art world rather than the plant world, meant to: aid one’s journey of transformed conciousness; to catalyze growth and holiness as fetish, power objects; to provide, in a ritual context, for the divine encounter with “self” and Self. The mandala, like the form of the cruxifix on one level of symbol or sacraments for pre-Reformation Christians, represents the distilled codification of a vast “wisdom” gleaned from eons of cultural and esoteric redaction.