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17 The Terma and the Terton

The Terma and the Terton

Angel Falls in Venezuela, the highest waterfall in the world

Yes, the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting
for you to notice it. A wave swelled toward you
out of the past, or as you walked by the open window
a violin surrendered to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
– Rilke, The First Duino Elegy

§ This 3.0 update to this course is dedicated to Idris who is Mnemosyne, Goddess Memory, the mother of the nine Muses.

Time After Time

Refrain, reframe. That is the natural play of emergent memory in the 2nd attention. Memories return like the refrain of familiar songs, sometimes melodic only, sometimes with lyrics. With the refrain comes the reframe, the optics of the event “in the past moment” framed in the lens of current moment of recall. Whenever you remember an event past, you recall it in the Now. It emerged in a frame within another frame: remembering that you are here now, you remember something that happened then. You can remember where you where and what you did, selectively, or you can elect to seek out a memory. Most often, recall comes by itself, off and on, unintended.

It takes a certain act of intended attention to remember where you are now and what you are doing at this moment. Why doesn’t it occur to you to intend to remember where you are now and what you are doing now? It happens that way due to the habit of living in linear time. It doesn’t seem necessary to exert your attention to remembering in that way. Linear time gives the illusion that it remembers for you, or something like that. You assume, without knowing that you assume it, that you don’t have to exert an effort to remember what is happening right now.

But someone once said, ‘You don’t have to remember that you lived before to remember that you are living now.” Is that true? How can prove it? To break the habit of living in linear time must be extremely difficult, right. “Actually, it’s super easy. Barely an inconvenience.” All you have to do is run this refrain: “The moment I am living now is the first moment of my life and always will be.

Here’s a routine query for your rigpa specific to memory as a function of the second attention: How far back does your memory go? All the way to the first moment of your life, to the event of birth, emergence from the POE (portal of entry)? “Objects in mirror are closely than they appear.” Is the moment of your first intake of breath closer than it appears. No  one remembers back that far, although some falsely claim to do so. But most of us can recall our earliest memory, can’t we? Picture that in the repository of the 2nd attention there is a folder titled LMM. You open it and riffle through the files which are dated in linear time, arranged chronologically. The first one I find is dated June 1949 and located in Friendship, Maine. My mother and I are walking up the hill from the harbor, right at the first bend to the right. She asks me, “Who discovered that indigo grew well in South Carolina?” I reply, “Eliza Lukas.”

Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722 – 1793), born in Antigua, British West Indies,  was a high-bred colonial woman living on a plantation with black slaves.  When her father sent Eliza seeds of indigofera in 1740, she made it her highest desire to plant them in the next season. By experimenting with indigo on a new terrain and climate, Eliza also took advantage of the knowledge and skills of black slaves who had cultivated indigo in Africa. After three years of persistence and many failed attempts, Eliza demonstrated that the indigo could be successfully cultivated and processed in South Carolina.”

There were as I recall five questions. The four I can’t recall are stored in the 2A cache. I don’t remember talking about anything remotely historical with my mother.  Yet the mother recites a catechism with her son of three and a half years. Where did these five questions come from? Why do I remember this one and not the others? Why the indigo clue? Purple/indigo dye produced from the mucous secretion of sea snails was the signature color of initiates in antiquity, and no one lesser could wear it. After three years of persistence, in 1743, Eliza succeeded in producing a viable crop. The date is her successful experiment is 7 years off 1750 when Sophia went lucid. Granular detail.

The Most Beautiful Truth

“Time after time, I tell myself that I’m so lucky to be loving you…” Original version 1947.

With the makeover of Nemeta 3.0, I have retained the previous material on the Terma and the Terton under Faculty access. I pondered long and hard on including this material public to faculty at all. Why the reticence? Units here are often intimate, biased by personal pretenses (transparent or not), and flagrantly self-indulgent. What we in recovery used to call “inappropriate disclosure.” In the meme of the current day, it’s “performative.”

At best, the content of this section of Nemeta approximates to things I might say to you in conversations that we never had, and never will have, in person, face to face. I cannot assess their value or impact coming to you in this secondary, virtual form. The reflections on the no-self self conjured out of the Void by the presumed “Nagual of Infinity Ridge” belong to him and him alone. Nevertheless, here they are for you to consider. Make of them as you will. If you can enjoy them, I will rest easy.

Recently, I told someone close to me about how I sometimes feel as I drift out the range in old age. I said, “I miss me.” When I happened on this performance by Miles Davis, it came over immediately like the soundtrack of that emotion. Perhaps it’s worth noting that “Time After Time” plays on the meme of the Aftertime, my rendering of the Eternal Return of Nietzsche. I guess one could say, “It’s all right if you miss yourself now and then, since you meet yourself again in the Aftertime.” And it must be true because it rhymes.

You will notice that I have added a new block in the C-panel: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TRUTH. It contains so far the four units I’ve written on the Eternal Return, which I withdrew and buried so deep I could almost not find them. Well, I’ve decided to restore this material without editing — so far. I still have reservations about this topic. I am not confident that it can be pertinent or instructive to you. However, during completion of the Idris shift (18 – 24 July), I found myself returning to it, or it returning to me, in a way I could not resist. This time, my reflections on the ER generated something I can only describe as a meta-riddle, that is, a riddle that solves other riddles. The hashtag of this riddle is “The Second Certainty.” I don’t think you will have to ponder long and hard to know what the First Certainty is: that you will die. Clear enough? So what is the Second Certainty?

Originally, I had posted the units on the ER under course 5 Metacritqiue. Then I put them on private, then lost track of them during the makeover. Now you will find them here, including one I had not released, The Riddle of the Aftertime. Why here? I have come to consider the ER as a kind of terma. Thanks to Nietzsche’s life and work, I was able to write Not in His Image and complete his critique of Christianity. I owe so much to him, but for a long time I disregarded the ER. (I may have explained that somewhere. With age, it is harder than ever to remember what I write, or that I have written something.) When the ER came back, it had all the markings and the irresistible force of a terma-like download, and it is still running. That’s why you find it here.

On Metacritique, I placed these units in a block titled The Last Beautiful Truth. The ER was indeed the last beautiful truth of his life. After cracking down on Christianity and categorical morals (in The Genealogy of Morals), he got that hit as Sils Maria. I don’t know if he could not talk about or simply if he did not want to share it with anyone. If the latter, I know exactly how he must have felt. It is obvious to me now that Nietzsche’s mind at the end would have fixated on the dogma of death that comes in the Christian belief-system, and in many others, as well. And I find myself where he found himself with it. It takes everyone to the same realization, but for some it may be a hellish challenge to get there. To me, the ER is the most beautiful truth ever conceived by a human mind.

I intend to add another unit to this block on the ER, dedicated to the meta-riddle of the Second Certainty, although I am not 100% confident that I can fulfil that intention. Right now, and for a while now, the demands on my time and attention are monumental. There are things I’d like to do and things I have to do. Being a bred-in-the-blood Kalika, I hate doing anything I don’t want to do… Until that changes, I won’t be able to get back to the ER and share what I have discovered about the Second Certainty.

§ Original Introduction 17 Original Introduction Landing Page: The Terma and the Terton

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17 The Terma and the Terton: Course Curriculum

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