Sea Dragons Go There!
The Secret of the Secret in the Land that is Nowhere
The true human nature is the primal spirit. The primal spirit is precisely human nature and life, and if one accepts what is real in it, it is the primal energy. And the great Way is just this.
from Master Lu Yen’s “Heavenly Consciousness,” a tract included in “The Secret of the Golden Flower” by Wilhelm & Jung
The Dharma Beat returns joyously to its dharma bum roots now, in the full shimmering presence of this particular moment in time. I talk a lot about our regenerative future. Time to walk my talk.
If I am to begin a new life - and I am, there’s no turning back now - then this is the place I wanted to begin again. My namesake, if you will: Hat Tham Phrao Nang on the Andaman Sea in the south of Siam.
That’s right - the “Tham” in my byline means “cave” in the Thai’s monosyllabic, musical dialect. And it’s also a homonym for the seed syllable at Tara’s heart, or Tam. Tara is my yidam, or heart deity, symbolizing wisdom-in-action, or compassion.
Hat means beach. Putting it all together, then, pictured above is the cave on the beach where the Sea Princess, Phrao Nang, dwells. And as you can plainly see in this photo, taken upon my return at sunset 33 years and 5 months since my spiritual journey began in earnest at it’s mouth, the tham of Phrao Nang is now protected by a live sea dragon!
(“water monitor” lizard, if you prefer the ordinary name)
That is who greeted me, feasting on rice offered up to the Sea Princess. And when I returned at sunrise to properly re-start this jet-lagged spiritual engine, he was there again, only this time approaching to inspect the meditation mound I was shaping with my bare hands. He was perhaps looking to see if I was laying some kind of eggs in there for him, flicking his long, forked tongue repeatedly, inching uncomfortably close - before veering off and trucking slowly down into the sea.
Due to his apparent vigilance, I nominally labeled him “Payakud,” who is the protector deity of Siam - a half bird, half man that stands guards above all government buildings here. Phrao Nang herself is surrounded by linghams piled up in the cave by local fishermen, their way of asking for fertility from the Andaman Sea. Those linghams are pretty effective, judging by the abundance of sea food on ply here in open air restaurants for the endless stream of ravenous tourists, or farangs, playing out their own fertility rituals.
All of this fertility worship was wiped away by the Boxer tsunami twenty years ago, sweeping tens of thousands of Thais and farangs out to sea, swallowed up by the great impermanence that is the reality of our lives here on Earth, here in Gaia’s guts, a psychic void symbolized so unfathomably by the vast and perpetually surging Indian and Pacific Oceans.
So I guess this time, in returning to her wiped-clean cave, with all those linghams cast adrift, Phrao Nang requires a protector. To be honest, this kind of blows my mind (for reasonst that will become apparent) - monitor lizards are supposed to be averse to humans, and thus it is rare to see them in the wild. But what better protector, really, for a Sea Princess than a Sea Dragon? Or “naga” in the Vedic language, as in Nagajurna, who brought the Heart Sutra back from the undersea world of the Nagas.
So of course, under Phrao Nang’s tutelage, we begin our journey right here with the primal, awakened understanding of reality:
Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness.
And emptiness is full of nothing other than form.
All together, then (because reality after all is not a duality), quantum empty form and the fullness of the void ~ Śūnyatā ~ manifest as a surging and relentless realm of interpenetrating causes and conditions that are just too complex to wrap one’s outstretching mind around.
Eventually, the mind gives up.
And it is only then that the numen, the pulsating sphere of luminosity, can be fully experienced as a unitary field of synchronously ordered light-energy, throbbing with life. And, permeating all contrary appearances, there is love.
That’s the kicker, if you ask a lifetime skeptic like me - the universal love the Beatles sang about, intense like a sun’s symbiotic embrace of a living, breathing planet within its procreative orb. Surging and relentless, cutting right through living and dying like a great tsunami of temporality.
Beingness; or, as the newly awakened Tathagata would refer to it, Suchness. Experienced only by those who have gone beyond ordinary perception. For the rest of us, it’s an aspiration inspired by glimpses behind the vale of tears.
That’s the beating heart of the Heart Sutra:
Gate Gate Paragate
Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
Śūnyatā is rooted in the word for swollenness, originally ussed to describe the state of the Tigris River overflowing its banks, fertilizing the fields. So you can see how terms tend to degenerate with translation and time.
What part of the word “emptiness” imparts a sense of a river overflowing its banks to you? We get around this by focusing on what things are empty of. For example, the self is empty of not being full of all that is other, while we instinctively tend to guard the self as if it were apart from all others.
Where did your body come from? Who taught you to speak? Ad infinitum.
So just dwelling in present awareness then becomes the most natural, and the hardest, thing for a self-conscious human to do.
Am I right? You check it out. You pick up the pieces. I fell apart years ago. It’s like with those pesky Christians: everyone wants to be reborn, but nobody wants to die.
If a Sea Princess can be reborn, than so can this old Taoist soul whose mind was inseminated by her “Magic Spell for the Far Journey” half a lifetime ago.
Four words crystallize Spirit in the space of Energy...
Wandering in Heaven, One eats the Spirit-Energy of the Receptive
I was 34 back then, very “yin” like the Receptive (Earth), mostly meditating with my eyes closed, and I quite literally had no idea what I was doing, or getting myself into, other than being as fully present as I could be after four months of tramping and meditating in the Alps of Aotearoa, listening to what the river had to say in the Garden of Eden, contemplating the love two mountains have for one another, happily losing my conditioned mind on my life’s Big Adventure. I’m 67 on my return, with one less gall bladder to show for myself. I am two different people here at one in the same time.
Kalacakra: the wheel of time, it turns.
I am returning to the “home that is nowhere,” the ultimate goal in the ancient Taoist alchemy chronicled by Wilhelm and Jung.
I realized even back then that the mysterious ‘home that is nowhere’ is now/here! The abode of primal energy. So sometimes time and translation can add a synchronous twist to the words, no?
((and just then, I mean now, a Dusky Langur, followed shortly thereafter by his family, stops and stares hard at me, really checking my get-up out - or maybe in disbelief at what I just wrote, before jumping up on the tin roof of my front porch here at Railay Beach Hilltop Inn, overlooking great limestone cliffs, swaying fronds, plastic pollution and burning garbage - hey, there’s no escaping samsara! Even in a tropical Paradise!))
“Magnificently glorious Guru! Please bless me to remember impermanence and death in my heart, and to generate the thought of no need in my mind.”
The idea of “home” has a radically different connotation to me now than it did back then, in 1991. After coming together with Ute, my opposite spiritual pole who I met here on the peninsula, for three straight sunrise meditations at the mouth of the cave where the Sea Princess dwells - her suggestion upon seeing me return from my habitual sunset meditations - we fortuitously triggered the spell at the heart of The Secret of the Golden Flower ~ from The Book of Consciousness & Life, translated by Richard Wilhelm and commented upon by Carl Jung. My life would never be the same.
Indeed, it was after experiencing the magic himself that Jung stopped writing in his Red Book! He seems to describe the effect of the spell as inducing a borderline psychotic state, to which I will attest and would add, one soaked in the kind of synchronicity I had only ever experienced under the influence of LSD.
The old masters named their religion after “the golden elixir of life,” which is to say ‘light,’ because it is said to regenerate the self as something much more eternal - the same claim made about successful high tantra practitioners. A light body, if you will, that is no longer dependent on the corporeal body.
This is the goal of all true alchemy. The “gold” one seeks is not some gross, mundane metal that humans place an arbitrary value on. No, it is nothing other than the golden elixir of ‘eternal life.’
Bottle that, and you’ve got something no credit card can affix a value to.
And now, because I’ve been asked before, and because these times are truly desperate enough that even the high lamas themselves have begun openly sharing ancient secret practices (e.g., Dalai Lama gave Kalachakra initiation live on FB!), and because I am now writing a magical memoir about such fanciful experiences, I’m just going to go ahead and disclose the secret of the secret.
What 4 words crystallize spirit in the space of energy?
You will not find the answer in the book, because it’s spiritual alchemy after all, and such things must be vouchsafed with riddles and misdirection. I first invoked the spell out loud here under a full moon, not having read the book nor having any idea what it was talking about, and then I went out of my bungalow to body surf the calm moon-lit water, chanting the only mantra I knew back then in my pre-Buddhist days, the one mantra that had helped me escape the oppressive duality of time (past/future), and which happens to be one of, if not the, oldest prayers known in Asia:
Om Mani Padme Hum.
The jewel is in the lotus.
In four words, this ancient prayer instructs us that the wish-fulfilling ‘jewel’ of awakening, mani, is first concealed and then discovered within the ‘path’ to awakening, padme. This is the symbolic beauty of a lotus flower floating on the surface of a pond while still rooted in the muck of samsara.
“Om” is actually 3 sounds - Ah, U, Mm, representing our presently slumbering body, speech and mind, while “Hum” (sounds like whom) is the sound of awakening, connecting us to basic experience of vibrating in splendour. Mantras are the first utterances of those who have gone beyond. They are “heart sounds.”
So do you see? I only found out by happy accident under a full July moon in the Andaman Sea that these happen to be four words that unlock the door to “magic spell world” - because they worked! The trippy effects could not be denied. It’s a bit like when the science fiction author Kilgore Trout discovers he’s a character in a book by the science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut! Parallel worlds open up at your feet.
But before you rush out, by the book, and invoke the spell, I have to share some of the fine print with you: the spell expressly requires that you be celibate, and that you spend 100 days meditating in nature - as I was that July when I met Ute, who had a husband and child back in Germany, and as I had just spent four months in Aotearoa doing. And the only reason I was carrying the book in my backpack was because it fell on my head in a bookstore when I was reaching for another!
Can’t make this shit up.
So I’m not really worried about the secret of the spell falling into the wrong hands now. Celibacy is a state of mind, not (just) a deprivation of body. But the seed energy generated by the combination of continence and natural contemplation is what is churned by the Golden Elixir of Light to self-inseminate the mind!
It’s not all that different than Kalachakra high tantra, as it turns out. This alchemy actually manifests, both in the secret of the golden flower and as part of a Kalachakra great retreat, in an embryo of light visible at the third eye whenever you close your eyes. I named mine “Li” ~ pronounced “Lee,” from the Book of Changes, meaning “light.”
Now if you want to know what happened next, after the spell took hold, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for the book. This is day two of a 6-week writer’s retreat that I am dedicating to that very purpose. It’s the point of me being here now, nearing the end of my mortal coil, after the spell has effectively run its course. But it’s not the point of this journal entry!
P.S. To those fam and friends who wonder why I am transporting hundreds of pounds of my dharma journals to Kathmandu, now you know why! Someone could make a good case for my committal with what’s in those journals.
“Magnificently glorious Guru! Please bless me to abide one-pointedly in practice in isolated places, not having any hindrances to my practice.”
I am moving to “the place where the teachings and practices unite.” Maybe we’ll discuss that next time.
My non-temporal dharma journals have been the receptacle for all my story telling until now. That’s because, while I have always self-identified as a writer, my writing talents have been devoted to the following all-consuming tasks, in order of my various careers in the world: defending and advocating for wildlife; exploring collective climate grief as a research psychologist, which culminated with a new taxonomy of climate trauma; changing the narrative around the management of wild Yellowstone bison in favor of the Tribes, to whom they are still sacred; and, most recently, becoming a full time advocate for Gaia and the One Earth climate strategy, while proposing a new positive psychology for a future ecological civilization to be possible.
Bottom Line through all of these efforts: Nature is the answer to all of our problems. That will never change.
And now, at long last, thank Goddess Almighty, I am FREE! The planet may be fucked (that’s now a scientific term, you know). But at this point, I think I’ve earned the right to say “Let the world burn without me.” I mean, turn. Let the world turn without me.
Yeah that’s it, he says, sitting on the equator, spinning faster than most!
I’ve done the best I could do under the circumstances, seeing it all through to its natural conclusions. But the land of my birth just pissed all over all those notions of actually doing the sane thing like, I don’t know, providing their grandchildren with a habitable planet?
Instead, unbelievably, and as a desecration to every soldier who fought or died in WWII (including my pop, who died 30 years after helping clean up Nagasaki), they’ve elevated the purveyor of quite a different secret: the Secret of the Golden Shower (Occam’s razor answer to “Why is he so beholden to Putin?”). Yes, King Maus himself, MAGA’s very own Il Dulce and fossil fuel whore (because Joe Coal Manchin is retiring to his yacht now, passing the methane torch to the Don).
Hell, even Clueless Joe Biden, on his way out the door of our burning house, told the International Courts that everything is fine, and don’t even think about assigning any legal responsibility to us, the world’s Imperialist Majesty, for climate catastrophes! As Genocide Joe could be heard to exclaim: “We are the Land of the Setting Sun!”
So yes, last straw. I’m an expat now. I’m thinking I might have a better chance of becoming a buddha than convincing Americans to give up their gadgets or welcome climate refugees into their sweet land of liberty. God DAMN Amerika! To thee I sing:
“This is the End. My only friend, the End...
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain.
And all the children are insane.”
“Magnificently glorious Guru! Please bless me to be free from unrealistic expectations about how the world is supposed to work, how sentient beings are supposed to behave, and how my spiritual path is supposed to unfold.”
Yep. Believe it or not, I recite that at the start of every day!
I need to keep re-minding my empty-headed self how to feel and behave on a daily basis - that’s one other secret I can share. Affirmations are good spiritual containers for our noble aspirations. His Holiness the Dalai Lama reduces all of our esoteric and exoteric vows down to two:
no more grasping (sutra); and,
abandon ordinary view (tantra).
We are asked to cultivate, in other words, an extraordinary view in this myriad world of manifold appearances and empty, fluidic forms. If it is all mind-made anyway, why not make it up in a good way? We ARE the Matrix! “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is people! I know, because I was born the very year that the multi-verse theory, accepted as fact by most physicists today, was first proposed - not to mention Sputnik, The Cat in the Hat, On the Road, and Atlas Shrugged! Not only that, I was born in the same town the first McDonald’s opened that same year!
I think that qualifies me to make it up as I go along, don’t you? I contain multiverses! Even Walt Whitman couldn’t claim that kind of street cred.
My noble lineage’s American founder, Lama Yeshe whose too large heart exploded the year I went to law school and Reagan was elected, taught all these sixties hippies in America that they didn’t need to take LSD “because you’re hallucinating all the time, baby.” And they believed him.
One of those flower girls became my root teacher, the Venerable Abbess Thubten Chodron, who founded the first Tibetan Abbey in the U.S., authored several profound books, and in her spare time co-authored the ten-volume Library of Wisdom & Compassion with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, a kind of exhaustive compendium of all Buddhist practices and beliefs. If humanity manages to survive the eco-crisis - a rather large IF? - those books will be referenced a thousand years from now by all Buddhist scholars everywhere all at once.
So if nothing else, you could say my views have been shaped by encounters with extraordinary teachers. I was even blessed to take a class from the late, great scholar and secret yogi Stephen Goodman called “Awareness” - there was no syllabus!
That was probably the most stimulating and entertaining class I’ve ever taken. He never showed up with anything prepared. But he was a living encyclopedia of Western Civilization, Science, and the Buddha Dharma, always jumping back and forth from one to the other, the light forever sparking from his and dancing on his prominent brow.
Dr. Goodman tells this great story I find most relevant right now:
“I was once at a teaching with Lama Tharchin Rinpoche, and after everyone was settled he said, ‘You know that we all have Buddhanature. And that means that at some point we’ll all become fully awakened.’ There was a big pause, and then he said, ‘Are you ready? Maybe in the middle of the talk tonight, you will become fully enlightened. Are you ready? It could be very inconvenient. What about all of the plans that you’ve made about where you’ll go after the teaching? You’re depending on not waking up, aren’t you? Maybe you shouldn’t have made so many plans.’”
As for extraordinary view, according to the the fully awakened former prince and sage of the Shakya clan - and Einstein as well, 2500 years later - the three times (past/present/future) are an equality. All contrary appearances notwithstanding.
That’s extraordinary. Can you even imagine?
We are flowing light in a multiverse made of pure, unadulterated consciousness. And in this starry metaverse, with all of its black and white holes (described as a black hole's "time reversal" - if a spaceship aimed for a white hole, it’s occupants would never arrive at the perimeter, no matter how close they got!) and with all its evanescent implicate orderliness, we each create a chaotic ocean of suffering (trauma/karma) for ourselves and ‘ourothers’ by pretending that the appearance of conditioned phenomena is somehow real, actually true, and somehow contains selfness.
“I in the world,” in other words, not the world in I - not even Bob Marley’s I’n’I. Just we two. Ah, there’s the rub. Like your mind and my own are any different in the moment you are reading this, right? And that’s what makes the cyclic world of samsara, quite unsatisfactorily, go round-and-around.
Our dying world is founded on the premise that seeing is believing. Even though it isn’t. It’s ignorance of reality and truth, as a matter of fact. And it’s an active ignorance, not a passive one. It’s a choice we make moment-by-moment. It’s ordinary in extremis.
Form is nothing like it appears to us - just ask any physicist. Buddha Gotama was not just the world’s first great psychologist. He was also the world’s first quantum physicist, approximately 3 millennia ahead of his time.
And as he was awakening under the bodhi tree, Prince Gotoma (as channelled by Keanu Reeves so accurately!) began to perceive things as they really exist, with all the veils ripped away like full cathartic release with the God Molecule (highly recommended video here!). And when the credibility of his enlightened status is challenged by Meru, with fresh vision the Buddha touches Earth and calls on Gaia to witness his extraordinary awakening.
It’s a profound gesture, is it not? It is said that the Buddha’s first teaching was in Deer Park, but is there no lesson to be learned from his spontaneous relationship to Gaia as he awakens?
And Gaia was even said to answer:
“He is worthy! There is not a spot on the Earth where he has not already offered himself to the attainment of Enlightenment and the welfare of all beings!” The Future Buddha continues into deeper practice [supported there by the whole Earth].
With the dawn he glances at the Morning Star and finds enlightenment, exclaiming: “Wonder of wonders! All beings are Buddhas, endowed with wisdom and virtue! Only their delusions prevent them from attesting to it.”
Yep. We’re a confused lot of buddhas, alright. Cooking ourselves like frogs in a pot we’re so proud of creating!
I’m on my way to becoming less confused, I hope, by moving to “the place where teachings and practices unite” - sacred grounds at the head of the Kathmandu Vale where a modern buddha in female form, the so-called “self-arisen yogini” Khandro Kunga Bhuma, is manifesting her vision of what such a place must look like.
And so your intrepid Dharma Beat reporter intends to faithfully attend the secret teachings from the self-arisen yogini, and share the good news with the world. Because the world could sure stand for some good news about now.
But first secrets first - my six week writer’s retreat! My own attempt to fold the 3 times into one big magical sphere of extraordinary cognition and story telling. Something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I last visited this alchemically charged beach, before I even knew there were Sea Dragons.
There is a square inch field in this square foot house - will you meet me there? Listen:
“Therefore you only have to make the light circulate: that is the deepest and most wonderful secret! If it is made to circulate long enough, then it crystallizes itself; that is the natural spirit-body... The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life.”
~ Master Lu
Let Phrao Nang be my witness!
How to even begin to comment on such am epic piece of writing! Apart from notice how I am already grasping for more!