The Mahamudra Sky
[C.W. 373 The Circus Animals’ Desertion]
I
Many a theme sought after me and laid
Its claim upon my soul, for sixty years
Or more, imagination played
Across the broken harp of all my fears
And kept me going, held my heart intact
Season by season beneath the circus act
Of wheeling constellations, that sundry lot
Of starry animations, Goddess knows what.II
What can I say but “Make it new,” reanimate
Old themes, follow the course of heroes
And women also brave who rate
Respect and reverence, so the story goes.
The heart is a lonely hunter, for sure,
And whatever may be the formal lure
For passion to engage with picture-making,
Those images are up there for the taking.There is no counter-myth to high invention,
The brave new world just fakes it to prevail.
What sorrow and too human desolation
May come upon this species if it fail
To own this genius, a birthright divine?
The intervention now must be on time
And must be ours, no savior from above,
No salvation presumed solely by love.When Fool and Wise Man had a conversation,
Who between them learned the most?
Neither of those figures takes animation
Among the bright celestial host.
That riddle has been undefeated,
The terma, may it be completed.
Upon the final moment of that joke,
His life sprung on a single stroke.III
Those monumental glittering forms, returning now
To view, out of what single life emerged?
A country boy was he, who wondered how
Fate can be read, and when his heart surged
To its hidden source his body as well
Blew into cosmical debris, an abalone shell,
an unstrung bow, loose cord, and a strickle, measure
Of grain heaped on him in this rubble, your treasure.– 28 September 2009
NOTES
the circus act / Of wheeling constellations It could be said that the originals of Yeats’s “circus animals” were in the sky. Yeats certainly saw the timeless themes of poetry in association with those starry patterns:
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys [Twins], that burnished chariot [Auriga],
Lion [Leo] and woman [Virgo : Isis-Sophia] and the Lord knows what.
In Greco-Latin star lore, the constellations of the ecliptic were called zodiakos kyklos, which might be translated, “cycle of animations.” Zodiac contains the root zoe, “life, animated existence.” In Yeatsian terms, recurrent poetic themes. In Jungian terms, archetypes of the collective unconscious. In Gnostic terms, animations of the Aeons, divine powers that dream the myriad worlds. The Gnostic view that we are not beings created in the image of a paternal maker, but figures in the imagination of divinities with whom we can interact, as characters in a dream would interact with the dreamer, is the portal to the Sophianic vision and interactivity with Gaia. The wisdom-treasures of a terton inspired by this vision are tools and guidelines for that interactivity. But a terton’s discoveries rarely come to be actualized in the timeframe of their discovery.
“Make it new” Modernist theme promoted by Ezra Pound who took it from an inscription on the bathtub of a Tang Emperor, so he claimed.
The heart is a lonely hunter Title of a novel by Carson McCullers. It contains a weave of several Gnostic themes which unravel and fray toward the end. McCullers saw no higher resolution of the Gnostic view of life, which can engender grim and despairing emotions. I would argue that there is no such resolution apart from the encompassing vision of the earth as Vishnu-like Dreamer of the human adventure.
no counter-myth to high invention I have long wondered about this: if the evil-doing that prevails in society is not due to a massive force of malevolence, but to the default of the magic of human invention. Persian split-source duality asserts absolute good versus absolute evil, but Gnostic two-source duality asserts that evil behavior is merely due to the failure to optimize the supernatural talent of our species, not to an autonomous agency working against the preponderant good in human nature. Even in its ordinary and everyday aspect, the world we inhabit is an improvisational theater for divine magic. Yeats also sensed the presence of the Supernatural in the ordinary world, perhaps along these lines. His involvement in theater attests to a sensibility for the theatrical nature of human experience: “all the world’s a stage” or a setting for human characters to enact the Dreaming. Le vida es sueño.
the brave new world just fakes it to prevail Just before he died, Aldous Huxley said that in the totalitarian system of the future (“brave new world”) people would embrace their enslavement. They would not have to be forced into it, as Orwell’s 1984 predicted. I wonder if Huxley came to this view in some part due to his experience of cognitive ecstasy with mescaline and LSD. The pleasure to be enslaved, or the pleasures that tempt to enslavement, are the antithesis of the pleasure of the natural state of illumination produced by these psychoactive agents. Humanity will be consumed by one or the other, it seems. Huxley observed that the craving to pass out of oneself, and go beyond the filters of the mind, is so intense that it constitutes one of the strongest drives in the human species. Animals also exhibit this need to alter their consciousness, and choose the plants that enable them to do so. The great experiment of Gaia-Sophia with her species might feature a critical test: to alter consciousness and handle the effects. Failure to do so would put the species into a default mode or reliance upon programming as a substitute for the adventures of living imagination. That is to say, fake or simulated states would be fed to human subjects — as seen in fashion, entertainment, new age spirituality, the cyberworld, etc.
The fake world does not prevail due to superior power of programming, as if it were some kind of black magic skillfully perpetrated to deceive and oppress the human spirit — not wholly, at least. It may prevail because the fakery is a deviant spin-off of miraculous skills that go wrong and spoil when humans do not own and apply their powers of imagination. “What is that Talent which it is a curse to hide?” asked William Blake. The power to imagine what is real.
this genius, birthright divine Considered by the telestai of the Mysteries to be twofold: nous and epinoia. That is, divine intelligence (noetic capacity, including forms of hyperception such as clairaudience and telepathy) and imagination, the power of seeing what actually is.
no salvation presumed solely by love If love alone is enough to change the human condition, I’d like to see some proof of it on a one-to-one basis before extrapolating to the entire species.
Fool and Wise Man had a conversation Allusion to the terton’s session with a Tibetan lama of high accomplishment—possibly Dudjom Rinpoche or an unnamed Kargyu master—in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sometime in the early 1980s. On that fine occasion, the terton, to his embarrassment, had nothing to say for himself and nothing to ask. The best he could do was offer the master a riddle in the form of a joke: “If a fool and a wise man have a conversation, who learns the most?” According to the terton’s shakti, the Rinpoche’s response to that joke was a silent twenty-two minute download of mind treasure courteously deposited in the clouds for future retrieval. So much for irreverence.
Retro 1 JLL’s Audience With Lama
Those monumental glittering forms, returning now / To view The constellations of the Mahamudra Sky, initially detected by the terton in July 2008 after more than 40 years of naked-eye observation. By contrast to the received visualizations of Greco-Latin constellations, the figures of the Mahamudra Sky are massive devaic, demonic, and animal forms recalling the art of Tibetan thangkas.
strickle A bar used to level off grain heaped in a pail or basket, so that the contents conform to a fixed measure.
