A Planetary Terma

Open Source Earth Wisdom for Kali Yuga

Special notice 8 February 2022: I am posting this unit as a landing page to be accessible to all sentient beings, including ducks and dogs, who happen to pass by Nemeta. It presents an edited and updated version of a fundamental essay on Planetary Tantra originally released on metahistory.org in 2008. JLL

Standards of Authenticity for the Terma of Gaia Awakening

This essay will serve in some respects as a disclaimer for the author, but in others it will present some claims regarding the principles and practices of Planetary Tantra to be found on this site. Paradoxically, I will disclaim some possible assumptions about PT and openly state my claims about it at the same time. Just sayin’ for a friend.
– JLL. July 21, 2011. 3rd anniversary of the Ronda Moment

The Mahanirvana Tantra is an 11th Century Sanskrit text that anticipates in some ways the emergence of Planetary Tantra one thousand years later. A foundation text of Hindu Tantra (distinguished from Tibetan Tantra). it takes the form of a dialogue between Shiva and Parvati who represent the ideal tantric couple. Addressing his consort, Shiva says:

“When the degenerate Kali Age is dominant, Kalika ways should be practised truthfully and without concealment. Truth is divorced from concealment. There is no concealment without untruth. Therefore the tantrika dedicated to Kali should treat sexual rites with total openness.”

To my mind, what the Mahanirvana Tantra says of sexual rites—which belong, properly speaking, to practices of Kala Tantra—applies equally to the elementary rules and practices of the more general access path, Planetary Tantra. There is no mumbo jumbo in my treatment of PT. No metaphysics, either. Absolutely no make-believe. But there is plenty of genuine mystery to be explored without indulgence in mystification. I don’t have a hidden agenda. I like to keep my pretenses and claims right out in the open. Time is at a premium in Kali Yuga when, as the Tantra says, the human attention span becomes reduced to a few minutes at a time. My commitment to everyone who would now consider the option of Planetary Tantra is:

I will not waste a second of your time if I can help it. You will know right up front what my claims and pretenses are. That way you don’t have to hang around and investigate and peruse and ponder for months and years to find out what JLL is laying down, where the Maine terton gets it from. I’ll let you know as rapidly as I can and you can take it or leave it, compelled by your autonomous passions and whatever wisdom guides you and guards the course of your life.

Terma and Terton

Human nature being what it is, the human gift for language being what it is, people expect an individual to be identified in some manner, by a name, a tag, a label. We all carry some form of ID as a syntax accessory. Be it a driver’s license, a passport, or just a role (“single mother”) etc. JLL carries the Terton ID. That is to say, I identify myself as a terton. This is not a make-believe or magical claim. It is not even a mystical claim. It is just a statement of fact that others by now have also attested. I would not made such a claim if I could not prove it.

Traditionally the words terma and terton come from the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Scholar and historian Tulku Thondup wrote the first book to disclose this exotic tradition to the West: Hidden Teachings of Tibet. The Tibetan ter means “treasure, something discovered [in the earth]”. Interestingly, there is the root of terra, earth. Add -ma and you have terma, “wisdom treasure or treasure teaching.” Ma is of course a phoneme universally associated with mother, earth matrix, the source of life, shakti, the telluric powers, etc. It could be said that a “treasure teaching” is a spontaneous revelation deriving from “the Mothers,” the mother powers of the cosmos. In a more specific sense, the infernal or telluric dakini powers of Gaia.

Tibetan tradition attests that termas, said to be initially formulated by Padma Sambhava and his consort Yeshe Tsogyal, were implanted in the wisdom sphere of the Dakinis. You can’t be more explicit than that. In my experience, that is exactly where the Terma of Gaia Awakening originates. But I add this spin, that those dakini powers are aspects, modalities, or frequencies of the full-spectrum intelligence of Gaia, the living earth. Where is the wisdom sphere of the Dakinis located? In the subliminal zone of your ordinary mind AND in the external body and atmosphere of the earth, simultaneously.

Shenrab Chamma, Loving Mother of Wisdom
Bon / Tibetan thangka 19th C. Rubin Museum Collection.

A close equivalent to Gaia-Sophia can be found in the pre-Buddhist lore of Bon, the indigenous shamanism of the Tibetan plateau: Shenrab Chamma (above). At a still deeper layer of the Asian psyche, you encounter the sacred mother of the mountains, an archetypal figure of telluric numinosity even closer to the present Gaia-Sophia. On Infinity Ridge, I was directed to the name Zangza Ringtsun as a version of Gaia in pre-Buddhist mysticism. This figure represents the graphic portal of the Gaian emanation of Kali as a stream of brutally intense tenderness that strips away all illusions, especially the illusion of compassion. In an immense, shattering paradox, you receive the highest elixir of compassion when you surrender your egoistic notions of being a compassionate person. Such was my experience, anyway. An experience that utterly and permanently changed my view of my “humanity”, and indeed, my generic concept of humanity itself.

Termas belong roughly to two categories, earth treasures and mind treasures. The former are said to be physical artifacts such as small coffers or scrolls buried in the earth or concealed in a cave. When Buddhism reached Tibet from India around 750 CE, the indigenous Bon shamanism had to be repressed so that the doctrines and hierarchal system of the new religion could prevail. This story is told — more honestly, mindlessly repeated — with triumphal pride by pro-Buddhist historians. Visiting the Rubin Museum in January 2009, I saw a thangka showing the mountain mother pictured as a woman’s body merged into the features of the land around Lhasa, being chained and held down by spirits of the invading religion. The conquest of Tibet by Buddhism is typical of the anti-goddess tyranny of divine paternalism seen in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (In her magnificent book Buddhist Goddesses of India, Miranda Shaw, attempts to correct this error and set the record straight.) In the effort to save their sacred heritage, the Bon shamans buried scrolls and tablets to be recovered at a later time. Hence arose the rumor about earth treasures.

Mind treasures are said to be concealed in the hidden layers of the human mind, symbolically represented by clouds and sky. However, I would attest that mind treasures are in some manner actually stored in the sky, in the register of the unknown atmospheric properties, especially nitrogen, but also argon. Physically, my investigations show that Dakinis are labile fractures in the nitrogen zone of the atmosphere. These fractures catch the eye by erupting first into fractal patterns and then often, but not always, assume the form of naked dancing women.

In Tibetan iconography, dakinis are often pictured naked with the genital slit clearly shown (above, detail of Vajrayogini: www.tharpa.com). I have often wondered how this convention originated, who instructed the thangka painters to portray Dakinis in just that manner. I was uncomfortable with this image for many years, regarding it to be salacious and sexist, at worst. I took it for a ploy used by clever but prurient old men to appease the sexual cravings of Buddhist monks vowed to celibacy. Condemned to live in an all-male environment, secluded to the mountain fastnesses of Tibet, many monks might not have had the opportunity to see a naked women even once in life. Yet they could ogle a glorious set of tits and the muffless cunt to their heart’s content. Where is the mystical significance in that vision?

How the iconic convention arose, I don’t know. I can only speak from my own mystical adventures regarding the spontaneous eruption of Dakini imagery in the sky. Such visions as I have encountered accord closely with the testimony of Longchenpa, the legendary shaman and terton. In The Seminal Heart of the Dakinis, a female acolyte possessed by Yeshe Tsogyal explains:

“This type of sky appears when a lama who is a spiritual guide who will accomplish vast benefit for others is appointed to his religious seat of authority.”

Note the paternalist jargon and the appeal to male authority. That I can do without. Nevertheless, the nature of the celestial vision is clearly indicated: “It is an apparition of the field of buddha bodies and primordial gnosis.” LCP and his gnostic cell of Tantrikas attest vividly to “the external radiance of emission of Emanational Bodies (Nirmanakayas),” breathtaking sights which can in a trance state actually be seen in the sky.

Seminal Heart recounts a long group session of shamanic trance, comparable to the orgia of the telestai in the Mysteries. Significantly, there are sixteen participants, the number observed in Gnostic cells. Longchenpa’s team are inspired by drinking beer strained through “malt dregs,” i.e., fermented barley producing LSD-type effects. similar to those of the kykeon of the Mysteries. LCP is frightened and asks a luminous presence, “Who are you?” The dakini replies, “I am in all phenomena…. I am Namdru Remati, I am guarding your terma, the wisdom treasure I am going to give to you.” Still in shock, LCP is doubtful about how to regard these vivid, luxuriant, sentiently active visions. The dakini counsels him, “Being pleased or displeased are both a miraculous show of mind. You can come to be whatever I am!”

As the shamanic party concludes, all those attending witness “the sky filled with rainbows and the expressions of the dakinis” (Tantra in Practice: “Longchenpa and the Dakinis,” David Germano and Janet Gyatso).

The Tibetan word for Dakini, khandroma, means “sky dancer.” The nature of these nubile maidens is said to be of a diamond-thunderbolt, dorje. Also called adamantine: “The samadhi (supreme concentration) of the vajrayosana (adamantine girl) is the way to the ultimate bliss” (The Chinese Hevajra Tantra, XII.32). The Tibetan name for the Terma of Gaia Awakening is Dorje Namkhai Khandro Nying Thig, “Seminal Essence of the Diamond Sky Dakinis”. Diamond Sky refers to the fractalization of the nitrogen zone into a dome of hexagonal cells (Bénard cells), an immediate effect of seeing the sky with the dreaming attention. When you observe the sky with the second or dreaming attention, it turns green.

I have witnessed “the external radiance of the emission of Emanational Bodies” in the presence of others who saw what I did. My own guardian Kali often assumes the nirmanakaya of a vulture in the skies above my house. The vulture is a real phantom presence, as well as an actual bird. She flies in a particular manner to distinguish herself from others in the flocks that spiral effortlessly in thermals over the rugged hills of the Serrania de Ronda. There is a characteristic splash of color on the upper side of her wings, buff tinted with the color of dried blood. Shamanic practice generates “true hallucinations,” to borrow the felicitous term of Terence McKenna.

But to return to the dubious topic of the muffless cleft. I had seen a good many Dakini fractures in atmospheric nitrogen, and conversed with these glorious apparitions, before I got the trick. The revealed slit is the cue to an event. Unless you undergo the event first hand, you miss the cue. For instance, if I wear a tie with a thick blue ripple on it to indicate that I am a tour guide at Niagara Falls, you might be puzzled by the design of my attire. Standing before the falls, you would immediately realize what the ripple means. The entire power of the rushing, thunderous waterfall is compressed in that detail, that adornment on my tie.

Just so, there is a specific (super)natural power indicated by the genital slit. (“The nakedness of the lotus is its true adonrment,” goes a Tantric saying.) No Tibetan master has ever revealed what it is, to my knowledge. But in Tibetan Buddhism you encounter a great deal of prattle about the generation and completion practices, touted as the pinnacle of lamist magic: then development and perfection stages of Atiyoga, utpannakrama and sampanakrama in Sanskrit, bsKyed Rim and drDzogs Rim in Tibetan. In this presumed act of sympathetic magic, the lama visualizes a particular tantric deity (generation) and then dissolves into the visualization (completion), thus assuming a divine status for the aim of realizing the primordial nature of mind. Volumes and volumes of endless, archontically routinary lists and tedious inventories, categories within categories of mental states and practices, present the rigamarole that dresses up this practice. Making the goal nearly inaccessible due to baroque trappings.

But the time for male hierarchal monopoly over the spontaneously arising dakini wisdom is over. Lamist mumbo-jumbo goes down with the male power elite whose foundations are currently being demolished by the Wisdom Goddess herself. Since summer 2008, the highest goal of Tibetan Tantra is now an open source adventure. My message to all those fopped up lamas and tulkus and rinpoches is, thank you very much for preserving the decor and dogma, revered gentlemen, now get off your parasitic power trip and get the fuck out of the way. There’s a new kid on the block. The Anthropos, that magical child of the Gnostic heritage.

What the Tibetan lamas have never said to the world—perhaps because they do not know it themselves—is that the iconographical convention of showing the genital slit is a cue to the sublime event of being at the receiving end of generation. Note this point about the traditional practice: the lama directs a monumental focus of attention upon the yidam, the dakini pictured in lavish graphic detail in meditation at the first stage, generation. To generate means to concentrate one’s power of visualization toward that image. Now imagine the opposite process: the full-bore concentration of the Dakini’s magical power turned upon you. Coming in your direction like a torrent. The exposed slit has to be dissociated entirely from biological connotations. It has nothing to do with giving birth, even metaphysically, or any sublimation of reproductive processes, etc. Neither is it merely a symbolic image or analogue to psychological processes. The object of Dakini generation is the Unborn in human guise. The genital slit of the Dakini does not reproduce anything: it introduces the pure force of originality, the awakening of original mind. “You can come to be whatever I am!”

In practices of Gaian Tantra, I realized that what comes from the revealed slit is the generative torrent of the wisdom Dakinis of the earth, pouring our way. It is the generative power of the Aeonic Dreaming of Gaia-Sophia directed upon and into the human mind. To stand upright, hold steady, and receive this current is like standing in a wind tunnel. The full power of the Shakti Cluster is an sixteen-bore torrent of pure, crystalline animation erupting from the nitrogen zone of the terrestrial atmosphere. Such is my instruction.

So much for termas and those who guard and transmit them supernaturally, the wisdom Dakinis. A terton is someone who discovers a terma, a treasure finder. The most famous terton of the Nyingma lineage was Jigme Lingpa, initials JL. Figure it.

This is not a hint, hint, wink, wink. I am not the reincarnation of Jigme Lingpa nor of Longchenpa, whom Jigme Lingpa claimed to have been in a previous life. I am the avatar of Lash LaRue, the cowboy revenge of the Goddess. Look out there, old boys. This planet many not be big enough for both of us.

Tertonic Privilege

Having received the Terma of Gaia Awakening in the summer of 2008, I found myself in the role of a terton, a treasure finder. But a rather unusual one. Without a lineage, without an entourage, without sacerdotal qualifications or initiations notched on my belt, without the traditional framework that supports and to a large extent legitimates the “Tibetan Treasure tradition of channeled authorial voices” (Germano and Gyatso, ibid). I don’t channel and I have no authority based on paternal precedents. I am the son of a widow.

Also, whereas termas in the Nyingma lineage all derive from Padma Sambhava the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, the one I received did not come down from that source; although it can be said to have some deep affinities with that source (an untold story, there). This Terma comes directly from Gaia, the planetary animal mother. This Terma is her explicit instruction on how the human species can be interactive with her to the highest attainment of its divine potential in planetary magic reaching the cosmic dimension of awareness, integral with the Pleroma. It short, it carries the instructions for achieving optimal expression of all the faculties that Sophia encoded into the human species in the first place, acting with her consort Thelete (“Intended”). The sum-total of these faculties is called “the calibration of the Anthrops.”

For lack of a better term, or any preexisting framework to determine how I would be recognized and identified, I had to look upon myself as Gaia’s first terton. I may not be the last. I expect others to show up, women and men tertons, but there is a faint chance I could be the only one she requires. Maybe one is all it takes.

I really don’t know because I cannot predict or preconceive how Gaia-Sophia will act in correction. No one can. Anyone who claims to know the ultimate plan of the wisdom goddess is a self-deluding fraud. Perhaps well intentioned, but bound to mislead others. So what do intentions count if they are based in error? No one can know the plan of Sophia because she has no plan. She has a course to navigate, but not cosmic design to observe. Error, spontaneity, and novelty are intrinsic to her adventure. And ours with her. Those who claim there are no accidents in the universe may need some reality therapy to restore their damaged faculty of common sense. Shit happens. The empirical evidence of the senses is authoritative. That accidents and unanticipated events occur even at the galactic level is unacceptable to small minds in need of reassurance that cosmic order will prevail. This viewpoint is dangerously naive. Even a Pleromic Aeon is not omniscient. How bored it would be to know in advance how it is all going to play out. Sophia doesn’t know everything in advance. She has a pact to honor, but no preformulated agenda to complete. Sophia is a free agent.

In the initial moment when I received the Terma, certain of its features were vividly disclosed to me. Its fail-safe mechanisms, for instance. These guarantee that it cannot be turned into a religion or twisted to fit a cult agenda, although participation in the Terma is necessarily tribal in nature, thus assuming a cultic look. By definition, any small group of people devoted to something — constructing ships in bottles, raising rare orchids, playing the ukulele — make up a cult. As it comes into practice by small groups of people, Planetary Tantra will appear to be a cultic activity. But due to the way the Terma propagates in human imagination somatically aligned to the earth, it has immunity to the usual problems and pitfalls of cults.

This claim may be hard to believe and I don’t ask anyone to take it on faith. The obvious objection is, any kind of message of a religious or spiritual or metaphysical nature, purporting to carry cosmic truth, can and most likely will fall into the cultic syndrome. The results are predictable: the original message will become distorted and turned into dogmas and rules, infested with fanatism, riddled with secrecy, perverted from its original meaning, broken up by competing factions, run into the ground by egomaniacs, and so forth. It is often argued that “the original message of Jesus” was initially a true and valid teaching that got corrupted and co-opted. I have argued firmly that it was corrupt from the get-go. I stand by that view.

On this note, how about I go out on a limb and say this: it is difficult to conceive a spiritual-religious message that cannot be corrupted or co-opted, perhaps for the very reason that the world has never seen such a message SO FAR. All such propositions have gone down the same road, so far. I ask you to consider this: no teaching so — except the Pagan Mysteries — far has had the kind of origin that this Terma has. If everything proceeds from “initial conditions” — a trusty proposition there, and well worth observing — then we, the human species, may have not yet produced teachings from original conditions that would insure the preservation of its pure intent and operational integrity. But if the Terma of Gaia Awakening satisfies those conditions, it may well be the first teaching produced SO FAR by the human species that is truly incorruptible and cannot be co-opted. When I received it, I was indeed given this assurance.

I do not say that no one will TRY to corrupt or co-opt it. This may well happen. But no one can succeed. Again, don’t believe me. Time will tell.

Evangelist choir: precisely the kind of organized religious fervor you will not see with Planetary Tantra and the Sophia Mythos. If it comes to this, it can only be a fraudulent co-optation that will fall apart all by itself.

… Since August 2008, I live in the absolute certainty that the Terma of Gaia Awakening is the direct transmission of Sophia’s instruction to the human species, that will allow the species to complete the pact she made with us before we emerged on earth, and even before the earth itself existed as a planetary body. The Terma presents Gaia’s instruction for interactivity with her, reflecting the original pact she made with our species, period. The instruction is blood simple, consisting of three lines, a secret name, and a Vow to be ritually performed. That is the totality of the operative core of the Terma. Practice involves learning Her Story in its recovered and restored form, and eventually encountering the wisdom goddess directly in the Organic Light, and receive instruction from the Light, the primary substance body of the Aeon.

PT is Free

The Terma of Gaia Awakening is the first planetary terma, and could be the only one, for all I know. Maybe one is all it takes: one terma to a planet. One story to a planet: Her Story, the Sophianic myth… Nevertheless, this terma is an open-ended, open source experiment in cultivating the wisdom of our species, a project fully amenable to elaboration and extrapolation. It is a serial, group-generated terma with a duration of 208 years from October 2008. Potentially, any number of people could participate in the ongoing development of this wisdom treasure. Right up to the end of Kali Yuga in 2216. How then to proceed?

I have said before, the practice of Gaian Tantra is generous but the elaboration of this terma is not an anything-goes proposition. There is no make-believe or metaphysics in Gaian Tantra. The only way to elaborate the terma is by Dakini instruction from the Shakti Cluster. No other elaboration of content from any other source whatsoever can be integrated into this terma. It simply will not take. It will flake off, fray, disintegrate. It will look ridiculous, foolish, trite. This terma is invested with enormous apotropaic properties, repelling fakery, warding off contamination, repelling fanatic projections. The dangerous protector of this terma is the demonic guardian is Durtro Lhamo, patron of termas and tertons. The agency is identified by node 17 of the Shakti Cluster.

No one can promote Planetary Tantra by seminars and class or lectures, for which a fee is charged. There can be no commercial profit attached to the propagation of this Terma, no instructional fees, but ritual objects and shamanic tools used in the practice may be traded or bought and sold, as happens among indigenous peoples. Anyone charging you to teach PT or expound the Terma of Gaia Awakening is a fraud and a huckster, and delusional into the bargain. Anyone who claims to have my approval to transmit PT is a liar.

Such are the terton’s rules. Disregard them at your risk. I cannot impose those rules on anyone, of course, but I can state them, and there, I just did. Now let me tell you the rules to which I am subject in my role as Gaia’s first treasure-finder, the Maine terton.

Meeting Tulku Thondup

During the nine years of my association with the Marion Institute, I had the privilege to meet privately with Tulku Thondup. Does that name ring a bell? Above I noted that his book, Hidden Teachings of Tibet, which came out in 1986, broke a taboo of oral-only teaching and disclosed the arcane topic of termas and tertons to the English-speaking West. It so happens that Tulku Thondup has for many years been supported by the Buddhayana Foundation set up by Michael Baldwin, one of the founders and funders of the Marion Institute. Now there is the most ingenuous person I ever met in this life. Through Michael and his genial and intrepid brothers, Ian and Philip, I was brought into a circle of contacts that allowed me to meet privately with Tulku Thondup. This I did in Cambridge, Mass, around 2002, as I recall. It may have been November 2001 after the Marion conference on Gnosticism with Elaine Pagels, or the next year. I am not certain. TT did attend that conference and expressed keen interest in my unusual view of Gnosticism and the Mysteries. He encouraged me to write a book on the subject. Five years later, Not in His Image appeared.

At my meeting with TT at his apartment in Chelsea, I brought up something that had been shifting around in my mind for years. I asked TT if he thought it was possible for a terton to appear who would in effect be “free-lance.” That is, not associated with the Nyingma lineage or any other Tibetan tradition. I asked him point blank, “Could treasures from the wisdom sphere of the dakinis surge up in anyone’s mind, producing the revelation of a terma, or is that privilege reserved exclusively for people in the centuries-old lineage of Tibet?”

His face brightened at the suggestion, as if the idea delighted him in some way, and he replied, “Sure, certainly, it could happen to someone outside the existing framework. That’s entirely possible.” Then he paused for a beat, looking thoughtful, pensive. “But they would have to have criteria for testing it. To determine if it was legitimate.”

I was deeply struck by the added comment. In posing the question to TT, I had described a number of experiences throughout my life that appeared to resemble termas or terma-like eruptions of inner wisdom. One characteristic was special: the eruptions came intact like a Zip file. The total content of the teaching or insight received was present all at once, compacted. This is also how termas come to tertons, I understood. Although I was convinced of the similarities between my terma-like experiences and the traditional instances, I was totally at a loss on the matter of criteria for assessing the authenticity of the terma. When TT put that point to me, I was non-plussed, unable to imagine in that time and setting how I would ever work out such standards. It seemed an impossible challenge. Needless to say, the exchange left me feeling somewhat insecure.

In short, I was certain of my terma-like revelations, but totally unprepared to legitimate them.

That meeting occurred just at the time when I was conducting my first conversations with Gaia-Sophia on Infinity Ridge here in the Serrania de Ronda of Andalucia. What I could not have known or guessed at that time was that the criteria would become evident to me once I had advanced that contact and delivered the supreme terma, a mission for which I had been prepared through my entire life from the age of four. With the treasure revealed, it did not take long for me to recognize how to legitimate it. But it was rather a tricky process, let me assure you. In her biography of Jigme Lingpa. Apparitions of the Self, Janet Gyatso devotes considerable attention to the problem of legitimation among tertons. Traditionally, legitimation is huge concern and may require years to resolve. Gyatso shows that the Nyingma JL himself doubted the authenticity of some of his termas. Rather like a schizophrenic, he struggled to steady his mind at the shifting boundary between the real and the imagined, the actual and the invented.

Nine Standards

Over the course of three years since discovering the Terma of Gaia Awakening, I have come to define the criteria for authenticity that Tulku Thondup proposed, the standards for a free-lance terton. I will list them here without elaboration as that would require me to write an entire book.

1 Source determined, named: who is transmitting this terma. In this case, Gaia herself is the source of the Terma of Gaia Awakening. In turn, the terma reveals the full-spectrum, 18-channel console through which she transmits openly to the human species at large, depending on individual receptive to her telluric frequencies.

2 The source identified: background of the Terma, allowing the terton to determine its source. Unlike channeling, telestic audition of dakini wisdom does not produce experiences in which the source declares who it is by name. As for instance, Seth told Jane Roberts who he was, or Ramtha announced his identity to j z knight. On the contrary, this process requires the terton in Gaian Tantra to identity and name the source.

3 Sky omens, astronomy, celestial timing specific to the terma. This standard entails a long process of observation and inference that allows the terton to trace how the terma was anticipated by a sequence of sky omens involving planetary and stellar patterns of an outstanding kind. In my case, I detected a pattern involving Jupiter that showed me that the Terma was due to be revealed, i.e., decoded, up to one and a half or two years before I got it. Needless to say, divining those celestial omens I did not know what I was anticipating! The elements of surprise and novelty figure strongly in terma transmission.

4 First line of instruction. Each genuine planetary terma opens with a brief and explicit line of sacred instruction: “You cannot become anything but more beautiful.” I have said before, dakini syntax is cogent, composed in lapidary grammar. Discursive drivel, metaphysical propositions that cannot be verified, elaborate claims about divine order, predictions, volumes of spoon-fed speculation, wild stories of Atlantis or other worlds with no reference to the Sophianic vision story—this kind of material tells you that you are definitely NOT receiving on telluric dakini wavelengths.

5 Frame of instruction, overall design of the Terma. By this standard, the terma has to show a simplific and elegant design. Simplific, not simplistic. By simplific I mean that it has to have cogent esthetic integrity, crafted like a well-made object. It cannot be complicated with a mass of diagrams and schemas, for instance, maps of other dimensions, etc. It must be complex but elementary. Minimalist in terms of conceptual design. The Terma of Gaia Awakening presents one simple and singular schema, the Shakti Cluster.

6 Ritual elements provided by the Terma. Included in the transmission are the ritual and practical aspects that cannot be contrived or devised by male-mind abstraction. Rather, the ritual arises as a spontaneous and obvious counterpart to the opportunity presented in the instruction of the terma. In the Terma of Gaia Awakening, the ritual of the Gaian Tantra Vow is an obvious and spontaneous technique for achieving interactivity with Gaia. Along with the design features, ritual elements are also minimalist, streamlined.

7 Community entrusted with the Terma. In this case, the community that receives the Terma consists of the nine generations of the Black Time of Innocence, the Tribes of Kali. Generation one, 1945 – 1975, generation two, 1976 – 2005, and so on until 2215, the last year of Kali Yuga and the conclusion of the great Kalpa of precessional timing (25,920 years). 1945 is the birth year of the Maine terton.

8 Terton. By this standard, the biography of the terton must present a record of events that infer the role of treasure-finder, including dakini connections from an early age, supernatural interventions, lucid dreams, acts of magic and power, esthetic and voluptuary highlights, as well as whatever contributed throughout life to training and grooming the mythopoetic sensibility required to handle a terma.

And last but not least,

9 Location. A terma in the Gaian Tantras must be discovered in a place of great natural beauty, purity, and serenity, compatible with the sublime esthetic of the wisdom goddess. Her priorities are esthetic. She also requires there to be a specific historical refraction between locale and terma. A Gaian terma cannot be received just anywhere, arbitrarily. For it will come forth in a place where the nightmare of history interfaces decisively with the Dreaming of the Aeon. In the case of the Terma of Gaia Awakening, it was received in a place of spectacular natural beauty (Infinity Ridge) located about fifty miles from Sanlucar de Barrameda at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River—the place from which Columbus set out for the New World.

View looking northwest from Infinity Ridge toward the eastern flank of the Sierra de Libar range of the Serrania de Ronda, near Gaucin, Spain

So, such are the standards to which I hold myself, and anyone else who would contribute to the expansion and extrapolation of the Gaian Tantras. Item 3 is especially crucial in the wake of Sophia’s correction. If you cannot exhibit some mastery of astronomy and star mythology, you cannot play any directive role in developing this Terma.

There is no place for metaphysics and make-believe in Gaian Tantra. Such contrivances are neither desired nor required. One-on-one veracity is the hallmark of this experiment. Interactivity with the wisdom goddess has nothing do with individual empowerment, however. It is a power-sharing arrangement, a rite of consecration, not a ploy for self-empowerment. I have described Gaian Tantra as Shaktism reinvented, Shaktism being the “worship of power.” but I revise this syntax as follows: not the love of power but the love of handling power, is the mark of a Shakta. The power you handle is telluric, erotic, infernal, voluptuary.

Everything I describe about my first-hand mystical experience in Gaian ecosorcery can be verified by independent witnesses, and should be. I do not claim to have had any spiritual revelation from the Godhead in a state of transport or out-of-the body experience in which I was shown abstract principles of cosmic order. I refuse and refute any metaphysics that derives from out-of-the body transport. I recognize only those events of mystical illumination undergone in the body, firmly grounded to the earth. I also reject all false polaric notions of male and female powers in the cosmos, and other mental contrivances that purport perfection and balance in the cosmos. While I recognize the gendering of the Aeons and telluric powers, I do not claim there is or must be a state of balance between these dyadic energies. On the contrary, there is imbalance, extremity, and assymetry. Therein the Dance.

It is my wish that the Terma of Gaia Awakening be shared by all tribes to emerge in the Black Time of Innocence, the end of Kali’s Age, so that each kula or tribal community will find its own elaborations of termas, the basis for ritual practices of healing and learning, love, war, and earthbound magic.

jll: Andalucia
Revised: July 21, 2011 > February 2022