Marvelous art by Ionel Talpazan

Dear Friends,

As promised, find here a sample of my recent writing on UFOs, power, and spirituality. This essay – written last year in preparation for more academic endeavors – moves through some deep tangle. It is not itself finished scholarship, but it does address an intellectually engaged community. I hope you will find it energizing, and perhaps freeing.

Importantly, this is not the final word. Far from it. These thoughts are offered in the spirit of sharing, with the hope their resonance might give way to clearer, fuller, and more liberatory undertakings.

Ever in the Circle of Giving,

Kennyō

Openings: On Beginning to Theorize UFOs and Secrecy

“Because of the cover-up, we are essentially living in a dream. In other words, this is not the real world. It’s a little corner of the world, and a lot of it is denied, and we’re denied knowledge of that… I see that as a social justice issue of the first order.”^[1]

The UFO occupies a unique position within the order of contemporary thought and perception. Since the 1950s, the term “UFO” has served as a placeholder for an array of complex and ambiguous phenomena, simultaneously signaling their presence and cloaking them in an aura of strangeness and unknowability. This rhetoric has provided a script for decades of secrecy and denial – sealing phenomena off from investigation while relegating them to a mystificatory logic that leaves critical questions unasked. As a result, “UFO” now carries heavy speculative and mythological associations, based in a narrative of extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth in aerial vehicles. Maybe something like this is happening, but much of what gets assimilated into the category of “UFOs” does not fit within such a framework.

The shift to “UAP,” then – especially when glossed as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, rather than Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – might be welcomed as a positive development. At least with “UAP” the voidness and obscurity – ontological, epistemic, ethico-political – are conveyed overtly, yielding a semblance of neutrality and open-ended possibility. Yet, as with “UFO,” “UAP” discourse enacts the illusion of asserting authoritative knowledge about a subject it defines as intrinsically inaccessible. The result is a web of “experts” who seem to know a lot about “UAP,” even as the category’s content remains opaque.

This situation has been orchestrated, in part, to enforce deliberate strategies of concealment, deception, and erasure.^[2] These strategies, however, reflect a more basic machinery of secrecy whose operation is integral to power in all its forms.

Not despite but because of these complications, the UFO/UAP topic is increasingly vital to engaging the world we inhabit.^[3] Indeed, UFOs are a necessary gateway to thinking about the nature of power. More than this, they are a portal to fundamental questions about the nature of reality, modernity, and the cultural domain we so familiarly call “religion.” These zones of inquiry are interrelated in ways that UFO/UAP study is uniquely capable of illuminating. For example, a broad genealogy of contemporary regimes of UFO/UAP secrecy can be traced from ancient mystery schools, through the formation of early modern secret societies, into the post-WWII military and intelligence establishment.^[4]

To say that the UFO/UAP is critical to our engagement with religion is to say that it bears directly on questions of our humanness. Religion has been, and continues to be, the dominant historical vehicle for defining the human self-image and informing humanity’s sense of its place within the cosmic totality. The story of the human, and of a human-centered universe, is, in ways that vary according to tradition, a religious construction, and UFO/UAP narratives have the potential to revise, reinforce, challenge, and overturn that construction. This encroachment of UFO/UAP realities on religious constructions of the human also extends to modern scholarly understandings of religion as the product of human invention.

Then there are considerations about the extent to which religion itself has been a repository and instrument for UFO/UAP encounters. Some ancient religious records – such as the Hebrew bible’s book of Ezekiel, passages in the Hadith and Qur’an, and texts from Tibetan lineages of treasure-revealers – describe interactions very similar to those found in modern accounts of UFO/UAP experience.^[5] Haphazard takes on this similarity have inspired two hundred years of popular myth and speculation, as well as cursory scholarship underwriting vague and unstable claims. Yet the resonances are too striking to dismiss, and the matter calls for sustained, careful reflection. One consequence of such reflection, I suggest, would be a rethinking of what religion is and how it manifests in the modern world. What are gods, spirits, demons, angels, aliens? Who interacts with them, and what is the nature of these interactions? Why and how do they matter?

Wake-Up Call

In this as in many other respects, the UFO/UAP arrives as something of a wake-up call for the prevailing intellectual culture. Tracing continuities between the metaphysical politics of traditional religious institutions and the globalized control-systems mediating modern UFO/UAP interactions draws attention to a foundational, yet occulted, dimension of power organizing and constituting the human world. Close examination of religious traditions is itself enough to provide preliminary access to this dimension of power. Yet, in general, modern intellectuals are no longer able to recognize in religious experiences an interplay of real, animate forces. The immense record of modern UFO/UAP encounters – which includes thousands of sincerely reported “anomalous” events worldwide each day – is in some ways less remote, metaphysically, culturally, and historically, than traditional religion. The physical and testimonial evidence of sustained UFO/UAP contact is compelling by any reasonable standard and warrants scholarly attention. For the most part, this evidence is not kept secret. It is not classified and requires no security clearances to obtain. Lack of acquaintance with the material – not doing the homework – is the main impediment to its implications being appreciated.

What are these implications? For present purposes, I want to suggest that they can be framed primarily in terms of power. Again, a wake-up call: There are hidden forces and agencies operating in this world, exerting constant and pervasive influence. On some level, everyone seems to know this, yet the default mode of the prevailing intellectual culture is to deny it. This denial continues to have disastrous real-world consequences – down to the onset of wars and the outcome of political elections. Failure to provide intellectual guidance and direction for engaging with this hidden level of power has left a vacuum in popular consciousness. This vacuum has been filled by violent, paranoid, reactionary fantasies. Bad faith actors demonstrating at least some awareness of hidden forces have been empowered to lead, and they have exploited this authority to promote their own agendas.

Going further, the hidden forces are deeply entangled with what we, as an intellectual culture, continue to refer to quite prosaically as “religion.” That is, they are implicated in a dimension of power that is soteriological, apocalyptic, world-creating in nature – reflecting the truth that all power is totalizing in its full scope and scale. That is, power, which is based in the projection of the other’s agency, the other’s mind, with its inherent secrecy, contains within itself the possibility of total imprisonment, and total liberation. It contains the potential to simulate, unmake, and move between worlds.

Familiarity with the record of UFO/UAP contact and close encounter illuminates this potential, shows specifically how it has been actualized. However, the notion that we are trapped in an all-encompassing simulacrum, in somebody else’s work of art, has been central to modern intellectual inquiry, from Descartes to The Matrix. Rapid technological and cultural developments of the last one hundred years, which in significant ways coincide with modern UFO events, have turned this gnostic thought-experiment into a cogent scientific hypothesis – into a scenario that might be confirmed empirically.^[6]

This way of thinking about power is largely ignored in the contemporary academy – though it is by no means absent among philosophers, ancient and modern. At its core is a recognition that the nature of power is inseparably bound up with the nature of mind. Power’s basic operation is the ability to make something appear. Appearance, as mind, contains within itself an inherent questionability, an endlessly recapitulated interplay of trust and deception, rooted in an intrinsic hiddenness, a secrecy. The power of secrecy to constitute an “inside” and “outside,” a “self” and “other,” a “0” and “1,” is actualized not only through sociohistorical formations, but at the level of appearance itself. What we call “mind” is a solidification, an ontological hypostatization, of that dynamic, and of the techniques and relations through which it is enacted. The appearance of having, of being confined to, a mind – and of needing to penetrate through mind in order to gain access to an otherwise hidden reality – is a fundamental manifestation of power. As such, mind is the mysterious opening through which the hidden “others” encountered both in religion and in modern UFO/UAP contact events emerge.

Religion as Control-System

A primary historical function of religion has been to exploit, manage, and control this dynamic of secrecy through systems of discipline and mediation. Metaphysical concepts have served strategically as instruments of consolidation and territorialization – enforcing ontological order, establishing limits, boundaries, pathways, facilitating interactions and transformations, imposing taboos. What has come to be described as “the perennial philosophy” represents the generic metaphysical template of Axial Age control-systems – the standard blueprint for religious technologies of power. The conceptual categories that comprise this perennial philosophy have served to normalize, absolutize, and reify religious practices and forms, authorizing their mediations, securing their material structures as perpetually necessary and sacred. The power dynamics involved in traditional religious interactions with spiritual forces have played out largely within the discursive and perceptual grids inscribed by these categories.

But this is not the only operating system through which such encounters are able to play out. Modern UFO/UAP interactions have for the most part been uncontained by traditional religious frameworks and orientations – eluding, to some extent, even the basic metaphysical categories of the perennial philosophy. One way to conceptualize this rupture is as a genealogical transformation in which contingent historical forces reconfigure experiential and onto-political possibilities, facilitating new practices and fostering new modes of representation. However, this approach presupposes the genealogist’s access to what is real and efficacious in history. The impact of secrecy and disinformation on our scholarly capacities necessitates a more radical degree of critical self-reflection and theoretical experimentation. Scholarly inquiry itself is always already shaped by the dynamic of secrecy, implicated in its strategies of denial and modes of knowledge-production.

The epistemic and methodological questions this raises are ground-level, as well as all-encompassing. Here, it is a matter of setting a basic orientation for how to proceed. Is there any way to avoid initiation into this process, this inherent dynamic of secrecy and disclosure? To echo Descartes’ Meditations, once the total nature of power has been glimpsed, what can be trusted as a basis for knowledge? Every piece of evidence, every appearance, encodes the potential for an originary deception. What is behind this? What hidden force? What agency?

As Descartes recognized, the mystery of consciousness is already an initiation into this questioning. Consciousness contains within itself this specter of otherness, this secrecy. In this sense, mind is power. Mind is mind-control. At this stage of the inquiry, for those inclined to respond, as the Buddha allegedly did, that we have embarked on an unhelpful path of thinking, not disposed to a clear or healthy state of being, some further context is needed. Indeed, the Buddha is said to have advised against looking for agency behind the world of appearances, on the grounds that such investigation would not lead to ultimate freedom. Yet the Buddha was addressing the śramaṇic, yogic cultures of ancient India, where initiation into an interactive world of diverse spiritual agencies, including universe-creating devas, was taken for granted as a subtext for discussion. A soteriological, apocalyptic, and cosmo-spiritual politics was actively practiced in that setting. We, by contrast, are in a situation where such initiation has been denied to us, and by us, for centuries – or rather it has been confined to participants in a hidden machinery of power relations, what some have called a “breakaway civilization” or “parallel world.”^[7] The Buddha was not denying or refusing to open to such a domain of cosmo-spiritual politics; he was enacting what he took to be a supreme pathway through that domain, a pathway of liberation.

The path of genealogy, for contemporary scholars, can easily become a path of ongoing denial, of refusal to acknowledge the domain of spiritualized political agencies, except as the by-product of stories, discourses, and other conventional social forces. But what alternatives are available? What would it mean to enter this field of hidden politics fully and immersively – to theorize not from a safe distance, but as an open and engaged participant, to think dangerously, transformatively, gnostically?

Jeffrey Kripal, and a few other scholars, have taken bold steps toward doing just that. Kripal’s efforts are inspiring – yet his theorizations often reinscribe the territorializing logic of traditional metaphysical systems.^[8] Formulations like “the human-as-two” and “the super natural” seek to ground UFO/UAP and paranormal experience in something ontologically necessary and stable. Indeed, Kripal tends to view these realms of experience as phenomenological reflections of reality’s ultimate, unchanging nature – symbols, as it were, of the Absolute, not to be received in their own terms, but as encodements of a transcendent truth. Such symbols partake, moreover, of a “third, imaginal space,” neither spirit nor matter, which is a projection by human consciousness of its own evolutionary potential. Paranormal and UFO/UAP experiences are therefore to be understood as humanity’s symbolically and biologically mediated encounters with its own superhuman future, with its own divinity.

Taken together, these ideas reproduce many of the key elements of the perennial philosophy, reframed in humanist terms. With this comes a reification of ontological categories and a naturalization of evolutionary hierarchy, along with its attendant elitism and implied teleology. All of this amounts to a regime of what I call “paranormativity” – the enforcement of a normative philosophical template that encodes, restricts, and regulates a specific ordering of “paranormal” possibilities.

Kripal’s thinking is fluid and not easily pinned down. His concepts are far from rigid and often morph into one another, or open into paradox. Yet his suggestion that encounters with beings exhibiting advanced technological and military capabilities should be reinterpreted as projections of human biological and psychological structures, or as expressions of an ultimate monistic reality, is profoundly unsatisfying. Indeed, the whole humanist-theological aspect of Kripal’s project elides what is most shocking and salient about many of these experiences: that they are live physical encounters with powerful, otherworldly agencies whose involvement in human affairs has been denied for centuries. In effect, this is a depoliticizing move, drawing energy away from dynamic, mobile, edge-zone interactions back into abstract, generic explanatory categories.

We need theorizations that clarify and engage with the cosmic ecologies and technologies of power embodied in these encounters. Further, we need to think critically about how these encounters have come to be perceived as “impossible” and “paranormal,” rather than affirming those designations as natural. Certain events are classified as “paranormal” or “anomalous” not because they bear a special relation to ultimate divine reality, or because they are inherently advanced or deviant, but because they occur along perceptual boundaries that have been instituted, enforced, and policed, often, on a micro-scale, by the perceivers themselves.

Power/Secrecy

Entering this zone of power relations is unsettling for many academics, because it feels close to the realm of “conspiracy theory.” Actually, if the term “conspiracy theory” had not been so thoroughly and unreflectively disparaged, we might think of conspiracy theory as one important vehicle for thinking through these questions. Secrecy is inherent to power. Power operates through the projection of agency, of mind, with its intrinsic hiddenness. To the extent that we are all invested in this secret, power is real. So on this level we are all conspirators in maintaining the secret of secrecy itself, the secret of power. We might regard this as a “founding” conspiracy, which makes possible many other “conspiracies” – alliances and affiliations of agencies, whose inherent nature is hiddenness, all cooperating to enact complex mandalas of power, apparatuses of appearance.

The primordial rootedness of worldly power in hidden agencies has been recognized throughout recorded history, as evidenced in the myriad cross-cultural efforts to identify political authority with divine and otherworldly lineages – from the Sumerian King List to emperor-deification in 20^th-century Japan. Modern attempts to theorize interactions between human and divine agencies without reducing them to conventional social forces have tended to view these interactions psychologically – as manifestations of mind or psyche. In such theoretical contexts, this emphasis has usually meant removing the divine agencies from the field of power, conceptualizing them not as political forces, but as elements in a privately enclosed domain of spiritual or psychological unfolding. This has been the approach to spirituality taken by Jung and his followers, by transpersonal psychologists like Stanislav Grof, and to a large extent by Ken Wilber and proponents of integral theory. It also characterizes the dominant philosophical orientation guiding the field of parapsychology.

This pattern of psychologism is encoded in the modern scientific worldview, with its “taboo of subjectivity,” and engrained in colloquial theorizations of mind and body.^[9] By sealing off the psyche as a private, ontologically demoted realm of experience, this logic obscures the dimension of power traditionally managed and mediated by religion. In this way, modern psychologistic interpretations both of spirituality, and of UFO/UAP contact and close encounter, reinforce the dynamic of secretion and concealment instituted by religion itself. Again, this dynamic is rooted in a founding secrecy that gnostic, esoteric, and mystical currents of religion have tended to conceptualize soteriologically – as the liberating, salvific secret of a hidden, divine reality. In monotheological (and buddhological) traditions, God, Brahman, or Buddha is projected as the ultimate hidden agency behind everything.

All power derives from this founding dynamic, from this projection of secret omnipotent agency – not just power manifesting in the form of deities, UFO/UAP, or “paranormal” entities. This is to say that all power proceeds from the secret of mind, appears as a manifestation of mind. Religious traditions engineered ways of exploiting this basic dynamic of secrecy to conjure and commune with hidden agencies, mythologized as gods, to engage and align with their power. Such alliances and methods were (and still are) recognized explicitly by religious societies as the source and locus of worldly governance. Yet protocols of secrecy and initiation remained central for controlling and facilitating access to these alliances and mediating their powerful potentials. These protocols were integral to technologies for opening and transforming consciousness, for activating power through the basic gateway of mind, manifesting power at the level of appearance – spiritual disciplines, sādhanās, ritual embodiments.

Modernization and secularization have been processes, not of abolishing these forces, but of suppressing and stigmatizing their recognition as actual influences on worldly events. Knowledge of their presence became “occult,” “esoteric,” “paranormal.” Where it is acknowledged, this presence has been increasingly segregated into an enclosed realm of imagination, psyche, or consciousness – cut off from the “real world,” which is supposed to be purely material. Yet, what the modern UFO/UAP phenomenon makes abundantly clear is that these “spiritual” forces – along with many of their associated techniques and protocols – have not ceased to operate within the material domain of worldly power. Rather, their operations have largely migrated from the apparatuses of religion into the complex circuitry of governmental, intelligence, technoscientific, and military organizations, where they are mediated by new systems of control, new ontological templates, new modes of representation, new technologies of perception. The order of conventional worldly power continues to be shaped by alliances with hidden “nonhuman intelligences.” It is just that now these nonhuman agencies coordinate with psychic spies, scientists, and soldiers, rather than with devout priests and anointed monarchs.

Ambiguous Disclosures

If this sounds like a sophisticated version of what “conspiracy theorists” have been saying for decades about reptilian overlords and secret pacts with ETs, that would not be a total misreading. But the point is not to arrive at some definitive mythos or master-narrative and interpret everything in those terms. These are zones where appearances are exceptionally malleable and multilayered, where trickery, illusion and deception are basic principles of conduct. This is not because UFO/UAP or NHI are less real, more mind-based, or more inherently liminal than any other phenomenon. Rather, it is because they have been positioned, through shifting configurations of power and knowledge, at the nexus-points of control-systems that function according to a logic of secrecy and disclosure. Thus, the task is one of attending closely to evidence gathered from within these contested systems, flexibly and responsibly discerning the contours of what is happening, not grasping for conclusions. Such discernment is made possible by a wide open view – one guided by a radical unknowing, a mobile, vibrant, paradoxical view that embraces multiple interpermeating perspectives and possibilities.

Yet the relevant path of theorization is also gnostically engaged and immersive, with definite, historically-conditioned blockages needing to be undone. Many of these blockages are the product of centuries of intellectual denial – a denial that saturates established cultures of academic and scholarly authority. Academics might not respond well to the suggestion that the world works very differently from what they have been thinking and teaching all these years. They might resist the idea of powerful, influential forces of which trained experts have remained totally ignorant, and about which they themselves have been thoroughly deceived. And who among us is ready to accept that humans are not at the top of the food chain – biologically, technologically, politically, spiritually? Who is prepared to face the implications?

Yet accounts of UFO/UAP interaction demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that these are real, urgent considerations needing to be faced. The order of power in this world is not what 99% of academics think it is. There are intelligent, embodied, technologically advanced, human and nonhuman agencies operating in our midst, with capabilities surpassing the wildest sci-fi imagination. And frankly, this is just the beginning. Honest examination of the body of UFO/UAP evidence calls for engagement with the following six hypotheses:

1. There are technologically and psychically advanced nonhuman agencies, not recognized by official history, acting and intervening in human affairs, and this has been happening for millennia. Humanity is not at the peak of planetary dominance and control.

2. The U.S. and other world governments, along with networks of non-state actors, have maintained secret space programs and advanced technological projects with capabilities far exceeding what is conventionally known. There is a “breakaway civilization” operating with a more advanced science and worldview.

3. As the latter implies, there exists a body of advanced, operationalized knowledge – scientific, technological, psychical, spiritual – not attained by the elite establishments of the conventional world. Our knowledge-systems are inferior and potentially obsolete.

4. The tech capabilities of the breakaway civilization extend into the realms of death, dream, and psychic phenomena. Knowledge about the structure of life-and-death, consciousness and unconsciousness, has been hidden from conventional humanity. The whole history of ideas, including the history of religions, is implicated in this concealment.

5. Human history has been engineered largely by hidden forces. Mass culture and communication, educational and political systems, legal, military, and economic structures have been shaped by hidden agendas.

6. The sensory world itself is a simulacrum produced by advanced technological agencies. Perception itself is inherently illusory – or its normalized, enforced ordering is a construction that can be seen through by extraordinary means.

At the very least, these hypotheses call for sincere investigation and reflection. If any one of them is true, then a great deal of what we think we know is called into question. Anyone who has taken steps to scrutinize the mass of evidence underlying these hypotheses recognizes that the record is just too vast, too variegated, too persistent, too forensically sound for all of this to be one elaborate lie – explainable in terms of hoax or disinformation. Such things happen, to be sure, but as minor tactical maneuvers within the context of something much bigger.

One challenge with this much bigger thing is knowing exactly what to make of it – especially at the level of detail. There are so many diverse reports, incidents, testimonies, experiences – filled with so many bizarre, intimate, multifaceted layers of meaning – that numerous disparate narrative threads, analyses, and speculative frameworks have inevitably emerged. The infusion of disinformation, rumor, propaganda, and fantasy into the mix, from various sources, further complicates the situation. Is this whole process one of rigorous, evidence-based theorizing, or is it more aptly conceived as a path of mythologizing, a practice of living myth? Are these even different options – mythologizing and theorizing – and, if so, how are they different?

Spirituality as First Politics

So far, we have been focusing on the suggestion that UFO/UAP study helps us recognize in religion a complex, hidden dimension of power relations that has been secreted into “occult” spaces by the modern world. Religion, in effect, is a spiritualized, solidified metaphysical politics, and UFO/UAP represents one facet of its modern genealogical transformation. This dimension of politics, moreover, is foundational to the conventional order of power; it is the source of power’s very appearance and actualization. This constitutes not just a “mystical foundation of authority,” as in Derrida’s phrase, ^[10] but a complex interzone of practices and technologies that operate directly at the level of mind to manufacture, substantialize, and organize what appears. The picture evoked by this analysis is one of spirituality as first politics – religion as a historical formation at the ground level of political engagement, a contestation at the level of mind, consciousness, appearance.

Yet engaging at this level of politics is not a matter of reverting to some archaic, idealist, religious worldview. Mind itself is a technological production, a simulation, an appearance that exists only as a reification of power. Indeed, it is a reification that is produced as the ground of all appearances, as the gateway to all powers. Pace Marx, to change the mind is to change the world. The mind is the world – an endlessly complex, material, technological web of connections, in constant flux. Broken down, it is information, bits, 0s and 1s.

The reification I have been calling “mind” could be – and has been – called many things. What is important is that it is the strategic ground for the whole construction of power, the prison-matrix, the totality of dualistic existence – what in Indian traditions is labeled samsara. This mind is defined, animated, by a dynamic of secrecy and revelation that is never finally resolved. The struggle to break free from the perpetual affliction involved in this dynamic is one way of embodying the most basic level of soteriological politics.

Throughout the history of shamanism, magic, and religion, spiritual technologies have been deployed for a variety of purposes, often but not necessarily grounded in an ultimate goal of salvation or liberation. Such technologies alter consciousness to promote receptivity to divine revelation, to facilitate contact and communication with spiritual agencies, to generate special physical, psychic, and prophetic powers, to activate healing, to restore social relations, to gather information, to enhance sexuality, and so forth. These technologies can, of course, be used benevolently, and also in sinister, malevolent, and self-interested ways. Some of these technologies have the power to catalyze otherworld journeys, to open passages to completely different systems or dimensions of reality. Some allow intervention in the lands of the dead or communication with the ancestors; others enable movement through dream-realms or activate special relationships with plants and animals.

Knowledge, in this as in any other context, is never neutral or inert. Acts of knowledge are acts of power. Theory is praxis. The perspectives and interpretive categories we bring to bear in response to UFO/UAP happenings operate strategically. They constitute moves within an emergent field of contestation, relationality, and change. They open up, and foreclose, transformative potentials. They advance, and limit, possibilities for further knowledge and experience, action and connection. And they are implicated at every step in processes of secrecy and disclosure, unfolding on multiple levels, in which access to information is always incomplete.

Amidst these processes, conclusive certainty is never an option. Moreover, theorizing within the zones of power revealed by UFO/UAP encounters means engaging in a politics that is also spiritual – a political spirituality. This implies immersion in the dynamic of secrecy and disclosure at its deepest level, in the reifying formation of mind itself. At this level, politics is soteriology. Going further, channels of engagement multiply. Many spiritual practices inherited from traditional religious contexts have been technologically enhanced and reconfigured as UFO/UAP “contact modalities.” Entheogenic traditions and their modern psychedelic adaptations present just one familiar and rapidly spreading example. DMT (Dimethyltryptamine), pervasive in nature and increasingly administered to volunteers in scientific research labs around the world, has been described as a “reality-switch technology,” able to facilitate contact with nonhuman agencies, launch experiencers into unknown dimensions, and unlock alien languages.^[11] Advancements in AI, quantum computing, nanobiotech, and virtual reality promise exotic upgrades to the mind-altering, reality-switch capabilities already present in Earth’s biosphere. Yet the tech applications brought to bear in these realms need not be exotic or scientifically cutting-edge. Since the 1960s, routine biomedical equipment has been instrumental in resuscitating “dead” patients, yielding a proliferation of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and allowing unprecedented access to under-theorized existential between-zones, bardos.

Psychic Warfare and Exotic Tech

Whistleblower revelations in 2025 have drawn much attention to “psionics” operations within the militarized world of Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (USAPs), including some allegedly involved in retrieving nonhuman craft.^[12] In these operations, soldiers – sometimes recruited as children from indigenous cultures – gifted with exceptional psi abilities and trained in perceptual and psychic arts, are employed to initiate contact with aerial UFO/UAP, which are then invited to land by these “psionic assets,” or else brought down with high-powered microwave weapons. While the formalization and public knowledge of these programs have reached new levels, many of the practices themselves have a long history in connection with the development of UFO/UAP “contact modalities.” Indeed, the modern UFO phenomenon has been inseparably enmeshed with manifestations of psychic and spiritual abilities since its earliest stages – at least as far back as the bizarre “airship” incidents of the 1890s. This should not be a surprise, as the linking of superpowers, siddhis, charisms, and other special abilities with NHI-contact occurs ubiquitously throughout the history of religions – as when Muhammad becomes a divine information-channel through visitation by the archangel Jibrīl, or Ezekiel develops precognition through fiery skywheel visions.

It is good to remember that, while knowledge of these zones of psychospiritual engagement has been suppressed in modern times, the practice of occult politics has continued without interruption. Indeed, this practice has intensified, penetrating the machineries of state, corporate, and technoscientific power, spawning shadowy modes of weaponization. The modalities of mind-control and psychic warfare practiced by generations of evil sorcerers, bad shamans, and “black” magicians were emulated and further elaborated by Nazi chemists, MKULTRA physicians, and Soviet psychotronics engineers.^[13] Among the founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, vital to early U.S. aerospace efforts and now part of NASA, was rocket engineer Jack Parsons, famously a student of Aleister Crowley and an active occultist. In 1946, about a year before the UFO “crash” near Roswell, Parsons, along with his then associate L. Ron Hubbard, performed rituals in the California desert to summon alien beings who would help precipitate the end of a world-age and the start of a new.^[14] By the 1970s, parapsychological research and occult spirituality had become vital elements of Cold War geopolitical strategy, with the CIA sponsoring “remote viewing” programs and other psychic spying initiatives through Stanford Research Institute (later SRI International).^[15]

Concurrently with these developments, a split history was unfolding. On one level, the world’s industrialized nations were mobilizing tremendous resources to launch physical human beings into space, using conventional aerospace systems. Powerful computational and communication technologies were emerging, and human society was entering the digital information age. Even on this conventional level, the forces unleashed by these developments seemed to be accelerating towards a critical threshold of transformation. The human species seemed to be rapidly approaching a “technological singularity,” in which conscious artificial general intelligence would become fully self-programming, surpassing the intelligence of its creators. Moreover, Earth’s atmosphere would no longer constitute an outer limit of human physical exploration; the species was becoming extraplanetary. These were new, material developments – unprecedented, as far as can be discerned, in human history.

At the same time, partly enabled by the “crashing” of “flying saucers” first in Italy in 1933 and then in New Mexico in the 1940s, a hidden world of super-advanced technoscience was opening up, with its own covert geopolitical “arms race” and “space race.” The potential capability of this technology was profoundly exotic and open-ended, and it was conceptualized through a synthesis of esoteric spiritual principles with alternative paradigms of physics. According to a 1950 memo written by Canadian government engineer Wilbert Smith, based on his correspondences with U.S. physicist Robert Sarbacher, the level of official secrecy involved in this world of technological development surpassed that of U.S. hydrogen bomb programs.^[16] In coming years, this secrecy would compound and fractalize exponentially, yielding a baroque system of “black budget” projects, largely unhindered by government control and oversight. The psychospiritual, “consciousness-interfacing” dimensions of these technologies would become increasingly salient, with new waves of “paranormal” research – like the research conducted for decades at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah – informing programs such as the “psionics” operation described above.^[17] A vast, shadowy, extralegal network of power was forming, governed by protocols of secrecy and initiation, in which psychic warfare tactics were utilized to contact, engage, and capture allegedly nonhuman technologies. These technologies could then be studied, reverse-engineered, and turned into patentable, replicable, profitable products – often with military and intelligence applications.

The full scale and shape of this “breakaway” world remains unknown, obscured as it is by dense layers of compartmentalization, classification, and deception. The extent to which its incursions into the perceptual realm of conventional public life overlap and interface with the activities of a more ancient UFO/UAP presence is a matter of considerable and ongoing debate. What is known is that scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – including Nikola Tesla, Thomas Townsend Brown, and participants in the Kowsky-Frost research – experimented widely and successfully with etheric energy generation and electro-gravitic propulsion systems, and that these experiments guided subsequent research and engineering efforts.^[18] Starting as early as the 1930s, these efforts were brought into alignment with exotic projects based on materials gathered from a growing number of recovered UFO/UAP.^[19] By some accounts, this confluence resulted in the production of serviceable human-made “UFOs” – aka Alien Reproduction Vehicles (ARVs) – by the mid-1950s.^[20]

There was a brief period in the 1940s and 50s when conventional news media and scientific publications in the U.S. openly discussed leading-edge aeronautics industry breakthroughs in the field of “gravity-control.”^[21] At that time, it was already clear that leading aerospace and defense corporations such as Lear, Sperry Rand, and Bell were heavily invested in this path of development. Once the profound capability of the exotic technology was more fully understood, however, further development became secret, and ongoing public exposure to close encounters or sightings of UFO/UAP was met with official disinformation or incorporated into the burgeoning cultural mythology of “aliens.” The stage was then set for an incessant theater of psyops, perceptual hacks, and cognitive manipulations, employing the UFO (or UAP) as a deceptive talisman – a drama that continues in the present, now largely mediated by AI and the internet.^[22]

World-Shock

To appreciate the potency of the forces involved in UFO/UAP interactions, direct familiarity with the extensive record of contact and close encounter is crucial. People don’t just see distant luminous objects in the sky or through radar – experiences which themselves can be ontologically shocking. In such visual displays, UFO/UAP exhibit characteristics and movements that defy established comprehension of what reality is and how it works. Yet, in even more intimate forms of encounter, UFO/UAP infiltrate deep into the order of conditioned perception, loosening, disrupting, and dissolving constructed barriers and identifications. This typically leads to manifestations of telepathy, psychokinesis, levitation, teleportation, out-of-body-experience, subtle energy activation, precognition, and other recognizable psi effects. However, these effects are only by-products of a more encompassing initiatory process, in which reality is exposed as inherently psychoactive, magical, dreamlike – a participatory play of appearance. The UFO/UAP “craft,” with their diverse, comical, inscrutable, shapeshifting forms, respond instantly to experiencers’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Through sustained immersion in contact, experiencers’ lives become suffused with synchronicity and various forms of “high strangeness.” They develop persistent “paranormal” abilities and undergo life-changing spiritual emergencies and awakenings.^[23]

The nonhuman beings who appear in close encounter situations play in this dream-construct, signaling its malleability. They suddenly change physical form, or become invisible. They manipulate the time-space fabric, rearranging the supposed causal order of events. They alter, erase, and induce perceptions and memories, conjure unthinkable sensory displays. They show up accompanied by the human dead, or by strange chimera. They perform apparently miraculous feats of physical healing. They shut down, turn on, and otherwise interfere with, high-security nuclear weapon systems.^[24] They intervene in the dream realms, simulating novel dimensions of experience. Often they seem to materialize and dematerialize, as if crossing between worlds or zones of reality.

There is also extensive evidence that they carry out abductions, cattle mutilations, fantastical surgical procedures (including extraction of sexual materials), and other disturbing acts, with definite consequences on the plane of gross physical reality.^[25] Many accounts describe secret human military units engaging in similar acts, sometimes making them appear as the work of NHI.^[26] Complicating matters further, there are numerous cases indicating extensive collaboration between “breakaway” human elements and NHI, for both benevolent and malevolent purposes.^[27] This assessment is supported by a wide range of experiencer testimonies, including many from within military and intelligence worlds, as well as by material evidence and data. By all accounts, “NHI” do not comprise a unified, monolithic force with a singular, consistent agenda. The same can be said of “breakaway” humans. These complexities and ambiguities must be carefully weighed when engaging the very real-world, irrepressibly physical dynamics of UFO/UAP secrecy and power.

Significantly, the historical presence of NHI, as communicated throughout the records of religious traditions, seems to have undergone a qualitative and quantitative shift in the last one hundred years. That is, since the dawn of the modern “space age,” the phenomenon seems to be manifesting more fully and prolifically in the physical world, presenting itself more vividly as a technological and material force, rather than as a strictly spiritual or “supernatural” one. This impression could be an artifact of humanity’s own increasingly scientific-materialist worldview and evolving familiarity with technological attainments and possibilities. It might also be that the phenomenon was always “technological,” or that it somehow adapts its appearance spontaneously in accord with human perceptions and expectations. The perceptual interactivity and ambiguity of the phenomenon is such that no sharp or determinate distinctions between the “material” and the “spiritual,” the “technological” and the “magical,” can be maintained. UFO/UAP contact calls for an engagement that is both scientific and spiritual, political and religious. It is not that traditional religious worldviews have somehow been misinterpreting close encounter events – misperceiving technological powers as miraculous. Neither is it that religion constitutes the true, spiritual path for engagement with UFO/UAP, a path which modernity has corrupted. Indeed, the categories of “tradition” and “modernity” are themselves exposed by the phenomenon as porous and inadequate.

And yet there is no denying that modernizing forces have catalyzed a revolutionary change in the relationships mediating UFO/UAP encounters. Human technoscientific achievements of the last two centuries have produced both an ecological-existential crisis of unprecedented urgency and a novel repertoire of ways to actualize the apocalyptic, soteriological, reality-shifting powers represented by NHI. Within a culture of Christian-influenced, modern-historical interpretation, this change tends to appear as a singular teleological process of disclosure or revelation. However, the linearity and finality imposed by this view dissolve amidst the complexities inherent in modernization itself. Such complexities reveal this moment not as an ultimate endpoint, but as a multivalent juncture of transition and creative emergence. In other words, apocalyptic technological attainments are not a final solution (there is no final solution), though they do open up the possibility of entering a completely new world.

That new world is a world of contact, a world of communion. From the ages of religious dominance to the present, the UFO/UAP reality has been governed by a logic of secrecy and disclosure, grounded in the enforcement of a primordial hiddenness – a basic metaphysical confinement I have called “mind.” This mind has been the foundation for a reign of secrecy, maintained by a conspiratorial “ruling class” of hidden agencies, and enacted through concealed webs of apocalyptic powers. Processes of disclosure and discovery are now underway that disturb the foundations of this reign, potentially bringing it to an end. Recognition of the presence of hidden forces, including nonhuman agencies able to simulate conscious worlds, is spreading through the general population, influencing institutions of conventional authority. Close encounter experiencers, psychonauts, near-death returners, neurohackers, techno-yogis, and chaos magicians are cracking into the secret of consciousness, breaking open the secret of mind. These processes are not heralds of an ultimate “end of secrecy” – indeed, their immediate effect has been a kaleidoscopic proliferation of secrets – but they do mark a movement away from the ruling order of secrecy that has governed humanity throughout its recorded history.

With this movement comes the possibility of a true communism, a cosmic communism, an actualization of empowered relationship and open interchange through a fundamental overcoming of projected alienation and otherness. Beyond, but necessarily inclusive of, a dissolution of economic class relations as envisioned by Marx, this transformation has the potential to address more fully the root of domination in the human world. As Marx realized, human bondage exists as a techno-material ensemble of exploitative social relations that solidify the vibrantly interconnected living world into a commodity-form. Yet modern systems of economic and political domination – such as global petro-capitalism and the national security state – are at base strategic mechanisms for establishing and maintaining UFO/UAP secrecy, and these mechanisms are thoroughly invested in the reificatory logic of secrecy at its deepest level. Mind, with its 0 and 1 source code, is the fundamental commodity, the fundamental substance. Relative to these exploitative systems, cosmic communism is not a utopian destination, but a starting point and field for practice. Such practice begins with open acknowledgment and intimate encounter among cosmic forces, secret agents, and proceeds through humanity’s initiation into cosmic community, the gateway to sustained, immersive participation in ecologies of cosmic intelligence and interplay.

Again, these cosmic, mandalic ecologies are animated by forms of participation that integrate the scientific and the mythic, the political and the spiritual. They involve playing in zones of relationship beyond death, beyond space-time, beyond the waking construct of consciousness and orderly causation. They activate moments of breakthrough, world-disclosure, mandalic design, revelation. Mystical, yogic, esoteric, and gnostic religious traditions represent humanity’s core paradigm for engaging immersively with the ground-level secret of mind, and for navigating the mandalic relations it entails. Shamanic lineages of practice, maintained in indigenous healing and spiritual traditions, are especially resonant with humanity’s currently unfolding initiatory process, in part because they preserve traces of past “prehistoric” (i.e. before the Younger Dryas cataclysms that ended the last ice age) cycles of cosmic communion. These lineages transmit effective ritual technologies, social forms, and principles of NHI-interaction, all of which remain profoundly relevant to present circumstances, and offer a vital alternative to militaristic, anthropocentric strategies of engagement. Moreover, indigenous ethical, ecological, and political teachings promote embodied, heart-centered orientation toward future horizons of Earth-loving yet cosmically mobile civilization. These mythopoetic teachings encode ways of living beyond, between, and through the lines of established, colonized perceptual order.^[28]

The gnostic, esoteric, yogic, and mystical paths seek to diagnose an essential bondage at the level of mind, and to engineer a way out. Modernity, in many respects, embodies a radicalization and acceleration of these tendencies – not an “immanentization” or historicization of practice so much as an intensification of the methods of release. Use the fire of the gods to burn down the prison-house they built for us. Modernity, particularly in its “secularizing” aspect, also mobilizes and intensifies the deconstructive force already radically harnessed by the mystical path, as its via negativa. This intensity has paved the way both for the abolition of organized religious authority – a development well underway – and for the opening of faith, and therefore of practice, beyond any category of fundamental reification, beyond the trap of mind. Expanding beyond this trap, this cover-up, the heart is unbound by any rigid set of social conditions, any determinate metaphysical order, any conceptual organization of possibilities. This heart-openness cannot be violated, and so nothing – no non-religion or profane world – needs to be denied, repressed, renounced, hidden. When even nothing is fundamentally not hidden, cosmic communism becomes possible.

The path to cosmic communism is wide open – yet dangerous and liminal. When cosmic forces break out from the secret of mind, appearances fractalize holographically. With this proliferation of 0s and 1s, the dynamic of secrecy and revelation seems to be alive everywhere. Every bit contains a secret to be unlocked, an infinitesimally tiny apocalypse. In a destabilized, transitioning social order, tyrannized by spectatorial subjectivity and surveillance, this dynamic is projected as a theater of conspiratorial warzones. Apocalyptic infowars break out seemingly at random, as fragmented “sense-making” communities scramble to grok order in the midst of chaos. Acceleration of info/intel tech-capabilities produces and multiplies insider/outsider factionalization, with intelligence and counter-intelligence forces engaged in endless oppositional struggle for validation and transparency. In such an environment, information and disinformation become virtually indistinguishable – these categories and subjectivities, with their purported claims on truth and reality, blurring and oozing into one another.

Meanwhile, the stakes couldn’t be more extreme. All far-out, totalizing skeptical scenarios and gnostic thought-experiments quickly become evidentiary options, integrated as potential alternative timelines or complementary reality-dimensions. Reality itself becomes a porous, dispersed, existentially unstable fabric – switchable from 0 to 1 and vice-versa. Simulations within simulations, matrices within matrices. This interplay presents itself as a deterritorialized geography of flowing info-channels, activating a practice of onto-cryptographics – hermeneutically programming and decoding liminal economies of appearance. Tracing and hacking, transplanting and splicing, engineering and re-engineering, the endless play of illusion.

In this situation, haunted by individualist values and assumptions and shaped by techno-feudalist class-stratification, politics easily devolves into a masked wandering through the simulated data-spheres of false gods. To some, this will seem the inevitable consequence, perhaps even the reward, of breaking down the dominant historical paradigm of secrecy. Disclosure will be perceived as liberatory only insofar as it frees exceptional individuals to fashion themselves as deities, to synthesize novel worlds through their self-determining will-to-power and “creativity.” Already there are those who invoke evolutionary principles – “mutation,” “superhumanity” – to justify leaving the retarded masses behind, or trapping them in some broligarch’s video game.

Fundamentally, however, no one can be left behind. This evolutionary vision is bound in a conception of power, and of secrecy, that fails to account for its inherent rootedness in the nature of mind. Mind’s secret is a total empowerment, a total initiation – and the basis for all empowerments, all initiations. Tout autre est tout autre.^[29] Every other is completely other. Every other contains the seed of absolute power, the power of all gods. We are all the illuminati. This is cosmic democracy, if you like, or anarchy. Anarchy without exception. Beyond anarchy, however, is kōanarchy, the power of kōan. Kōanarchy is completely open and basically relational, connective. This basic, open relationality includes everything. It is what opens when someone goes looking for mind, looking directly into mind’s nature. It is the heart, the open, beyond something and nothing, dream within a dream. With kōan, there is no place to go, no place to hide – dream within a dream, nothing behind, nothing outside or beyond…

Cosmic communism is a practice of love – all-embracing, infinite, open. Everything that can possibly happen is embraced, encompassed by this love, this compassion. All the will-to-power’s expressions are ripples in its ocean. The inconceivable heart opens beyond the secret of mind, beyond any enclosure. When mind is absolutized in the traditions of religion, as the ground of their “perennial philosophy,” this absolute is identified with an unchanging discipline and assemblage of social forms. Every path of mysticism brings this identification to crisis, to its limits. Modernity mobilizes the absolute, and with it the relative forms. Though subject to taboo, the secret of mind becomes a scientific, political, and cultural matter – the “mystery of consciousness,” a pervasive, absolute subjectivity. It also becomes a matter for direct experiential inquiry outside any established system of religious authority or mediation. Dr. Maurice Bucke’s discovery of “cosmic consciousness” is an early signpost in modernity’s ongoing recognition and investigation of mind’s unboundedness, its ability to accommodate novel historical, cultural, and experiential transformations.

This spaciousness, this accommodation, has meant that modern life, with all its revolutionary change and uncertainty, can also be an embodiment and practice of faith. Faith, here, is opening through the absolute, embodying the inconceivable, trusting the all-inclusive heart, which through modern philosophy and spirituality has become a path for heretics. This heretical faith, mobilized by promethean forces, has served as a vehicle for breaking into mind’s secret, for breaking out its repressed energies, its repressed spirits and possibilities. This break-in and break-out continues through radically experiential spirituality in its various forms, through technological enhancements of spiritual experience – such as transcranial ultrasound stimulation and 5-MeO-DMT – and through the many formal and informal modalities by which consciousness opens beyond itself. UFO/UAP experiencers are at the living crux of this collective emergence and ontological effervescence.

In the context of religion, this faith, this opening, has been understood as a soteriological process – salvation by opening to the Divine One. It has also been conceived as the foundation of a moral and political order – the foundation for a life of communitas and connection, a life of responsibility. Modern faith is not a departure from the soteriological, but an enfoldment of soteriology within a larger, complex ecology of liberatory possibilities. Similarly, it is not a destruction of the moral heart and communitas but an expansion and multiplication of its connective sphere. Cosmic communism blooms as a practice of immense, infinite responsibility. Its faith realizes we are all in this together, every one of us, at every step of the way, no matter what.

UFO/UAP Matters

This togetherness is not just a psychological or affective state. The physics of UFO/UAP technology draws upon an infinite, open fullness, intrinsic to matter. This is energy, basic, active energy – what is left when all other activity is frozen to zero – and there is “enough of it in the volume of a coffee cup to evaporate all the world’s oceans.”^[30] This zero-point energy is free and omnipresent. Its supply is not limited, and therefore it cannot be exploited or controlled for profit. Physically and economically, it is the free, universal power that the modern regime of UFO/UAP secrecy has been designed to cover up. Allowing access to this energy field through simple devices would bring down the fossil fuel system and provide baseline wealth and infrastructure for 8 billion people.

Scientists and inventors have been killed for publicly studying, manufacturing, and promoting free energy technology.^[31] Advancing the release of the scientific and technical information needed to develop free energy is central to the political process of UFO/UAP disclosure. The obstacles to free energy are not technoscientific in nature; they are imposed by enforced secrecy. The knowledge and engineering capabilities have existed in classified and secret programs for over a century. Breaking open the secret of mind necessarily entails breaking open the secret of free energy.

Peaceful, compassionate efforts to engage the UFO/UAP disclosure process as a matter of political spirituality have long been unfolding and are gaining momentum. For many years, the organizing and educational activities of Dr. Steven Greer have included the development of yogically-inspired CE-5 (Close Encounters of the 5^th Kind, or human-initiated NHI contact) protocols, extensive release and circulation of suppressed UFO/UAP information, and committed advocacy for free energy technology and “cosmic diplomacy.”^[32] Whitley Strieber’s immersive, experiential reflections and open-minded, critical analyses continue to illuminate the complexities and depths of the contact process from within.^[33] Organizations among scientific, religious, political, military, legal, and media professionals are increasingly attuned to the accounts of UFO/UAP experiencers and sensitive to the unavoidability and enormity of their implications. Influencers within these fields are coming to terms with the massive historical body of UFO/UAP evidence and preparing their communities for a major social transformation – the emergence of a new world. By many indications, academics within the humanities are among the last elite social classes to catch up with the change that is happening. Why is that? Evidence that presents UFO/UAP as a physical, historical, empirical reality, involving extensive cover-up and manipulation by political, military, and intelligence forces, has been especially slow to permeate academia. UFO/UAP disclosure is a process that calls humanity, and everything it knows about itself and the world, into question. In theory, such questioning is the very raison d’être of scholarship in the humanities, the very pulse of critical, self-reflexive inquiry. What is it that we are not willing to question, not willing to face?

In all likelihood, the case I have presented here will be met with the usual conventional historicist, biopolitical, and social constructionist assumptions – even if these are not overtly held or articulated. However, my analysis does not purport to describe forces independent of processes of social construction. Instead, I have suggested that a historically dominant onto-political regime of secrecy has governed important zones of social interaction and obscured fundamental operations of power from view. The exposure of these operations requires a rethinking of what “society” and “power” are – one that includes beings conceived in traditional religious worldviews as “spiritual” and “supernatural” and accounts for the pervasive influence of their soteriological and apocalyptic capabilities.

My theorization of secrecy implies not only that the presence of these beings has been denied or suppressed, but that they exist as a manifestation of mind and therefore reflect mind’s inherent dynamic of trust and deception, reality and illusion, inside and outside, self and other. Indeed, all appearances reflect this dynamic, yet hidden agencies like gods, demiurges, and superintelligent “aliens” display the power of secrecy in its fullest, embodied potential. Their ability to simulate, conjure, and manipulate perception teaches us about the relationship between technological agency and what we take to be the causal order of nature, reality. Encountering them is a bit like encountering a big (or not so big) boss at the end of a level in a video game. They are important, decisive, even pivotal figures, yet like the rest of the scenery, they are simulacra, just part of the game. Their appearances and demonstrations of power can themselves be traced through networks of interacting agencies and forces of simulation.

With this recognition, we are reminded that UFO/UAP disclosure does not provide any ultimate answer or resolution, and that it indeed leaves much that is uncertain and unknown. Even as layers of genuine godlike power are revealed, questions remain about the larger context within which these powers are exerted. In our most open, most transformative, most extraordinary moments of revelation and insight, what we have access to is very limited. We receive only a glimpse. Moreover, most basically, what matters is not containable in words or experiences, not capturable by any process of secrecy or disclosure. Faith opens to an essential beyondness, mystery, inconceivability. To theorize, in the midst of such unknowing, is necessarily to participate in myth.

Mythologizing about UFO/UAP is not antithetical to, but necessarily informed by, evidence-based critical investigation. There are human actors to be named, trails of influence to be documented, hidden connections to be traced. Secret histories and mythologies are not the same thing, though they converge in unknowing. Secret histories, however groundbreaking, tell a contextually circumscribed story, limited in scope and consequence. Mythologies place events in the context of an ultimate, cosmopoetic narrative, holding scenes and characters within the sphere of totality. Through myth, relative happenings shine with the light of infinity, crystallizing as ephemeral embodiments of what is beyond comprehension. Yet even rigorous, fact-based histories melt into mystery when considering the world-altering implications of UFO/UAP superpowers. Such is the logic of secrecy, with its neverending path of initiations.

Just as religious authorities exploited tales of nonhuman intelligence to serve and glorify their own agendas, modern political operatives commandeer UFO/UAP narratives, twisting and manipulating representations through an increasingly complex circuitry of multimedia channels. Mythologies and fabricated histories are planted, forcing researchers to exercise special care in scrutinizing sources and discerning potential pathways of influence. Trust is always in question. Yet, crucially, such psyops are possible – and have become such a prominent and formative element of modern popular consciousness – precisely because UFO/UAP encounters continue to happen; nonhuman agencies continue to infiltrate people’s lives, or vice versa, with all that entails; and UFO/UAP secrecy continues to be enforced, pushing these experiences into and beyond the blurry edge-zones of perception, knowledge, and control.

^[1] Whitley Strieber, Dreamland interview with Daniel Sheehan. https://unknowncountry.com/dreamland/will-pope-leo-reveal-vatican-secrets-danny-sheehan-offers-expert-opinion/. Retrieved 27 May 2025.

^[2] See Trevor Paglen, “Society of the Psyop,” a three-part series in e-flux journal.

^[3] From now on I will use the term “UFO/UAP” quite flexibly, sometimes as a singular or plural noun, sometimes as a nominal modifier or adjective.

^[4] An important precursor to present-day institutional secrecy around UFO/UAP is highlighted in Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Eire tracks the Catholic church’s 16^th- and 17^th-century inquisitional strategies to manage and suppress knowledge of supernatural and miraculous events, particularly levitation. He links these strategies to the contemporaneous rise of demonology, which he suggests was “a parallel scientific revolution, unjustly and imprudently ignored” by modern historians (They Flew, p. 318).

^[5] There are, of course, modern religious movements like the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the Church of Scientology, and the Nation of Islam that take overt inspiration from encounters with Nonhuman Intelligence (NHI – another new buzzword in official UAP discourse), which they conceive in extraterrestrial and technoscientific terms. There are also so-called “UFO religions” like the Raëlian Church and Heaven’s Gate, organizations which remain more thoroughly grounded in a modern ufological worldview while also infusing UFO/UAP events with “religious” significance. What differentiates these groups and orientations? What, if anything, sets them apart from “non-religious” UFO/UAP cultures? Are they interacting with the same entities and intelligences, interpreting them in different ways? These are topics for another occasion.

^[6] A recent attempt to articulate this hypothesis is found in Vopson, Reality Reloaded.

^[7] The term “breakaway civilization” was introduced into UFO research by John Keel and later influentially employed by Richard Dolan. Former U.S. intelligence officer Matthew Brown refers to a “parallel world” of cosmic-political activity in recent public interviews.

^[8] Perhaps the finest example of Kripal’s theorizing is found in “That They Are Not Human,” chapter three in How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else.

^[9] I borrow the phrase “taboo of subjectivity” from Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace.

^[10] Derrida, “Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority.’”

^[11] Andrew Gallimore, Reality Switch Technologies. Rick Strassman refers to DMT as “the spirit molecule.”

^[12] Journalist Ross Coulthart’s interview with former Air Force intelligence officer Jacob Barber on NewsNation was the catalyst for waves of subsequent discussion around these topics.

^[13] Some of this history is told in Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

^[14] An insightful and careful discussion of Crowley, Parsons, and Hubbard is found in Erik Davis, “Babalon Launching: Jack Parsons, Rocketry, and the ‘Method of Science.’”

^[15] See Targ and Mishlove, “Ninety Years of Remote Viewing, ESP, and Timeless Awareness.”

^[16] The memo is reprinted in Timothy Good, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide U.F.O Cover-Up, pp. 464–466. Smith writes: “The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.” A similar comparative assessment relative to the Manhattan Project and U.S. nuclear weapons research has been made in recent public statements by Harold Puthoff and Eric Davis. See the recent documentary The Age of Disclosure.

^[17] For the U.S. pentagon’s involvement in this research, see Kelleher, Knapp, and Lacatski, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon.

^[18] LaViolette, Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology.

^[19] In Majic Eyes Only: Earth’s Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology, updated in 2024, Ryan Wood reviews documentary, testimonial, and physical evidence for 104 UFO/UAP “crash incidents.”

^[20] The date of October 1954 is given by Steven Greer for “anti-gravity” breakthrough within U.S. covert programs.

^[21] Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point, pp. 1–21.

^[22] Paglen, “Society of the Psyop.” As Paglen notes, those active in this theater are exploiting techniques of magic.

^[23] Many of these patterns are systematically documented in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Nonhuman Intelligence, a record of research carried out with the support of former astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

^[24] Hastings, UFOs and Nukes.

^[25] Many of these phenomena have been documented by Linda Moulton-Howe, beginning with her 1979 film A Strange Harvest. Also see John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens; David Jacobs, Secret Life: First-Hand Accounts of UFO Abductions; Kathleen Marden and Denise Stoner, The Alien Abduction Files; and Budd Hopkins, Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions.

^[26] Helmut and Marion Lammer, MILABS: Military Mind Control and Alien Abductions

^[27] Such cases are found throughout the published research of John Mack, David Jacobs, and Budd Hopkins, and in the more autoethnographic writings of Whitley Strieber, Terry Lovelace, and other experiencers.

^[28] See, for example, Teuton, Cherokee Earth Dwellers.

^[29] Derrida, The Gift of Death.

^[30] Interview with Harold Puthoff.

^[31] The case of Eugene Mallove is among the most prominent.

^[32] See Greer, Extraterrestrial Contact: The Evidence and Implications.

^[33] Strieber, A New World.

Dear Friends,

This week I finished writing the first part of my Ph.D dissertation and sent it off to my committee members. I have a wonderfully supportive and inspiring committee and love the academic work I’m now doing. The focus of my dissertation is UFO (or UAP) secrecy – which allows for profound reflection on questions of power, knowledge, and the nature of reality. Immersing in these questions entails close engagement with modern security protocols, information ecologies, and exotic technoscience. It calls for familiarity with the vast historical record of UAP contact, encompassing a diverse spectrum of intimate encounters, and sensitivity to its transformative potentials. Yet animating my pursuit of these questions is an underlying contemplation of the implications of UAP contact for basic existential and spiritual matters, and a personal reflection on the place of UAP research within my own spiritual process and life path. What bearing do UAP realities have on the core situation of existential bondage and liberation? How does UAP disclosure alter or illuminate the nature of the spiritual path? What does all of this mean for practice, moment by moment?

Much of my reflection is cultural and historical. If technologically advanced, superpowerful beings are shaping the world, and the human species has been systematically lying to itself about this for centuries, what does that imply about the relevance and trustworthiness of religious traditions? Now, Buddhism is much more than just a “religious tradition.” It contains scientific, philosophical, artistic, and technological dimensions that do not conform to any universal definition of “religion,” and it has shown itself able to adapt with great flexibility and to accommodate new and emergent conditions. Moreover, we should be wary of the very category of “religion” – a normalized modern construct that tries to fit the full range of worldly weirdness into a hegemonic template. However, the consolidated development of traditional Buddhist systems and institutions does accord with the dominant, patriarchal order of “world religions” during the last 2,500 years. More specifically, Buddhism grounds itself in a core orientation shared with other traditions that partake of this order. This is an orientation of totality driven by a logic of absolute negation and radical liberation.

Now, this is very formulaic. Anyone immersed in practice knows that the way itself calls all aspects of this orientation into question. The Heart Sutra negates everything – suffering, the path of practice, liberation – including negation itself. Liberation is inconceivable and unmappable. It’s not a thing. Only when these elements are reified does Buddhism concretize into a definable scheme of social and spiritual organization. Yet it is precisely this organizing scheme that needs examining, for this is what we reproduce when we undertake the forms and disciplines of organized Buddhist practice. As Dharma Between Worlds has explored from the beginning, not only UAP disclosure, but modernity and dharmic inquiry itself expose the insubstantiality of this scheme. Once this is recognized, the tenability and relevance of formal Buddhist (or any religious) participation immediately becomes an open question.

So what is specific about the challenge to dominant religious systems posed by UAP disclosure? One option is to view UAP disclosure as the most potent leading edge of modernization, intensifying onto-political processes of immanentization, materialization, and secularization set in motion by modernity itself. Another is to see it as basically recapitulating the left-hand paths of tantric religion and shamanism – playing out a logic of transgression and communion ritualized by some traditions, while being prohibited as demonic and dangerous by others. Both of these options lose touch with what is most important. Both ultramodernist and left-hand antinomian representatives of UAP disclosure fail to show how UAP contact manifests the way. Instead, they cling to strategies that uphold the deluded self and perpetuate egoic contraction. Manifesting the way is not about transcendence or rejection but about genuineness, liberation. Whatever vehicles of liberation modernity and transgression might provide can be integrated, rendered available, actualized, embraced. Similarly with UAP contact; its openings are not to be denied or ignored; rather, they become horizons for further manifestation. Bodhisattva activity opens, adapts, and continues.

And yet are not some forms and conditions more suited to liberation than others? Is there not a dynamic, a process, of liberation that must be supported, sustained, and cultivated through formal practice? Do not the established yogic and contemplative traditions provide blueprints for this path of cultivation? This is essentially a question of upāya, skillful means, and it has no fixed answer. Upāya is a spontaneous outgrowth and play of unbounded compassion. In a world drastically transformed by modernization and accelerating technoscientific advancement, permeated by mysterious forces and unknown agencies, liberatory means must be not only formally religious but anomalously and scientifically experimental. Ritual ecologies and mandalic collaborations must be developed that synthesize spirituality and technology, consciousness and matter. A new world is emerging through this process, and it irrepressibly will be, like this one, a buddhaworld filled with buddhas! As always, the kōan: how do buddhas practice?

That’s all for now. I want to thank you deeply for continuing to care and engage with this path! Good things will come as we keep opening and tuning in together!!

My dissertation work will be absorbing throughout the upcoming year. Great vow is what continues through it all, holds it all open.

If you express interest, I’ll share some of my more refined writings about UAP – including a recent presentation on UAP disclosure and Dōgen’s Genjōkōan. Do let me know your thoughts.

In True Love and Dharma Friendship,

Kennyō

*Image: View of the Cosmos from Dorje-Ling (thanks to Eric Huntington)

A practitioner’s vital question: What is practice? In its open way, there is no escaping it.

This is not a settled matter. We might think a practitioner has the answer to this question and knows how to proceed accordingly. And yet a practitioner finds the only way is to be open with this question, for the question to be open, and opening.

Much of what we call practice, our recalling of practice, refuses this openness, forgets the question, treats the case as closed. What then? Then it can only be a matter of aspiring to practice, seeking practice out, being on the trail. With help we find a place from which the question of practice can open.

Most conventionally called “practice” is just the coming together of so-called practitioners, or of Buddhists. Practice becomes the name for social assemblies in which Buddhist or practitioner identity is affirmed. Participation in such gatherings, attendance to scheduled “practice” events, membership in Buddhist organizations, etc. constitutes practice. The monastic version would be following the schedule, engaging in all the rituals and ceremonies, being present for meditation sessions, attending sanzen, etc. All of these activities are important and not to be denigrated. Without such gatherings and organizations, would there be practice?

Next we immediately consider practice as an application of method or technique. Practice is the performance of formal actions recognized as having liberatory value or efficacy. This includes the panoply of methods prescribed by Buddhist tradition: generosity, ethical conduct, mindfulness, meditation in its various forms, inquiry and study, the many yogic protocols. Engaging these methods – ideally with vigor, discipline, and sustained commitment – is called “practice.” Often a straightforward causal and pragmatic model is implied here. These methods work. They produce good results. Without this level of engagement, how can one be a practitioner?

The Buddhist framework underlying this causal model brings out the medical and clinical resonances of “practice.” Here the causal efficacy of practice is understood in terms of the four noble truths. Buddha, ultimate soteriological physician, formulated what is essentially an all-encompassing diagnosis and cure. Dukkha – root causality of dukkha – liberation – path of liberation. Practice is what moves beings from dukkha to freedom and happiness, a basic process of liberatory healing. Practitioners are skilled in the arts, sciences, and modes of service associated with this process. Some (like Jizo) are “general practitioners,” responding to any and all conditions; others may be more specialized. Enlightenment indeed is a healing; practice indeed requires skill and sensitivity in healing arts.

Further evolution of the causal-medical framework appears throughout tantric and esoteric traditions of practice. In these complex systems, “practice” is not only technical but fully technological in its integration of ontic domains, synthesis of perceptual modes, transposition across informational zones, and refinement of machinic operations. With good reason, these traditions are identified with the “vehicle of upaya” or adaptive measures. They employ all available methods inherited through millennia of yogic tradition and develop them to max potential through self-organizing, shapeshifting communal formations. In tantra, many diverse areas of culture come to be embraced within the lotus-bloom of “practice.” Food, sex, creativity, work, all the enhancements and rearrangements of the senses. Buddhanature is pervasive, and fields and interfaces of practice-life multiply. Practice as mature, advanced, sophisticated, integrated skillful means: A beautiful vision, one whose promise of enchantment and world-transformation has only begun to be realized.

All of these conceptions are united by a common orientation to practice as active, interventional, an exercise of agency and causal power – something a person does, an activity or interface a person engages in. Even if “practice” is not conceived in merely instrumental terms – doing something to make something happen – there is still a sense that it must refer to a process of doing. (Maybe, as with the ancient Greek concept of “praxis,” this is understood as doing something for its own sake.)

Dogen Zenji, however, speaks of “practice-realization.” He points to an ontological matter. Practice does not consist of a personal doing, an agentive operation, a process or mechanism of intervention. Practice is not contained or defined or separable in any way. It is practice-realization, the manifesting of reality as such, as suchness. It is genjokoan, the ever-manifesting koan, koan manifesting now, koan manifesting as everything-life. Koan is embodying the way, ordinary suchness as the way, everything as the way, the way as the way. What is this way, this circle of the way? How is it practiced? How is it practice? What is practice?

Dogen attests to continuous practice. What is continuous? What continues? Practice has no beginning or end. Does it have a middle, a medium? What is this?

Perhaps the most potent lesson conveyed by “practice” is its pointing beyond theory, to intimate immersion as the only way, not-knowing as gateless gate. Reality is inconceivable, participatory, constant all-inclusive flow. Practice does not grasp or pursue it or relate to it in any way. The koan is not resolved in theory. Unbounded completeness manifesting. All beings embodying the great way.

Practice asks: What is practice?

Painting by Jackie Tileston, Instructions for an Unfinished World

There is no way to conceptualize or objectify practice. Dōgen Zenji pointed to practice-realization, cutting down and composting all attempts to project a path or process. My dear friend and teacher Keith Dowman insists on “radical Dzogchen”; any slight movement that would reify or merely suggest a gradual path is to be undermined preemptively. There is nowhere to go, no way, no how. There is wisdom in this, compassion.

All strategies, goals, and methods are redundant. This is not license to let loose with whatever, to abandon practice, to impugn or ignore the way. Far from it. By all means embody the way. Yet it is my experience that conceiving of an enlightenment-process and striving to accomplish it is an inherently deluded endeavor. Benefits, lightenings, healing effects, might come. But to operate that way is to remain trapped in a fundamental misperception. Achieving enlightenment isn’t really what Zen practice is about. More essentially, there is no such thing as achieving enlightenment. Or achieving enlightenment is delusion.

Not that it’s not real, or that profoundly powerful transformation does not occur. Transformation does occur, and there are methods to effect this. Are “the world religious traditions” the only or most important repositories for these methods? Increasingly, the answer is no. Certainly, traditional shamanic, magical, yogic, meditative, and tantric ritual technologies have been developed and refined to a high degree of efficacy. But combined with modern industrial technologies, their powers are enhanced exponentially. Such combinatory, integral technologies are only in their infancy. The potential results are only beginning to be explored.

It seems that the modern world is increasingly obsessed with these methods and their potentials. Surely such obsession has long been a guiding undercurrent of modernity, but recent pursuits – many of a transhumanist, luciferian, or TESCREAL orientation – are supercharged by accelerationist sensibilities and rapidly-advancing consciousness-interfacing technologies (including synthetic psychedelics). Even more striking is the extremely intense concentration of power and wealth that governs access to these potencies. Jeffrey Epstein and many of his “collaborators” were fanatically determined to maximize the efficacy of spiritually transformative technologies. To what end?

There are conversations to be had, in this vicinity, about the vows and ends and intentions that best accord with such technologies, and that are necessary for those technologies to fulfill their true purpose. These conversations are important, urgently so, and potentially revolutionary. Forming a social vehicle that can accommodate and wisely guide transformative technologies is a first-order collective imperative in our time. Traditional spiritual paths have much to offer in this regard. But ultimately these conversations miss the point of practice-realization, or rather they can easily lead to a trap of enlightenment-within-delusion.

Conceiving enlightenment as a process leads to an endless pursuit of transformations. Is this what modernity is? Is it inevitable? There would seem to be a form of (continuous) practice, a (circle of the) way, that embraces intrinsic buddhanature, embodies nonaction, recognizes great completeness here and now nothing to be done. What is this form?

It would also have to embrace transformations, include modern mutations, integrate counter-normative paths of deviance, weirdness, and divergence. For the danger on the other side is becoming some kind of fundamentalist or traditionalist, thinking I just have to surrender to an already-prescribed form, trust in the authorized discipline, not open to possibilities and consequences, eschew transformation and experiment. Doing nothing, already buddha, very mediocre, conformist, maybe quietist, conservative, fully obedient, why try.

Herein lies the more essential trap. Thinking the way is this or that. Missing what is most obvious.

Hello!

In 2023 I left Great Vow after nine years of monastic immersion. I was forty years old. I knew I’d be turning toward a political, intellectual, and aesthetic mode – reactivating some of the energies that engaged me in earlier life. I found myself re-entering academia. I connected with a program (at Ohio State) that would allow me to pursue my strange, taboo, and boundary-crossing interests.

These interests are not mere fascinations or shocking curiosities. They are driven by a profound movement towards clarity, openness, love, and liberation. Much of my work focuses on historical formations of UFO/UAP interaction and the forces of secrecy that govern these formations. I investigate zones of power and apocalyptic technology that have been occulted in the modern world – operating as hidden but tremendously influential forces, directed by unknown agencies and intelligences. How do we think, how do we live, in the midst of this hiddenness and not-knowing?

As I begin the intensive process of writing my dissertation, I again reflect on how this work interfaces with my primary calling as a priest and Zen practitioner. Close study of UAP matters calls everything – not the least of which religious institutions and traditional representations of reality – into question, demands a rethinking of established paths, knowledge-forms, and systems of authority. Once the full implications of UAP engagement are considered, what is left of spiritual life, religious community, a viable practice and process of awakening, liberation?

Cast in terms of my own immediate life, how do UAP matters bear on my moment-by-moment practice? How do they affect what I say and do, how I show up, at our weekly Mud Lotus gatherings, at precept ceremonies, zazenkais, and retreats? What does this mean for how our local community develops, what directions and opportunities I pursue in Columbus, how I think about these unfoldings? What are the implications for the next phase of my life – what I do, where I go, how I live, after the Ph.D? How do they play into the manifestation and mutation of vow?

These discernments are ongoing and not at all abstract or hypothetical. Such questioning is inherent in the process of UAP study itself. Indeed, investigating UAP and secrecy is a political undertaking. It reveals contact that isn’t supposed to happen, evidence and testimony that aren’t supposed to exist – thereby drawing attention to the mechanisms by which these happenings and beings have been concealed from view. Going further, one discovers powers and scenarios that far exceed any conventional order of control or repression. Some of the agencies and forces involved in UAP encounter have the ability to simulate worlds, rearrange space and time, transmute matter on micro and macro levels, manufacture dreams, interface between the living and the dead. Whatever these agencies are, their powers coincide in many ways with those exhibited throughout the history of shamanism, magic, and religion.

That is to say the questions these powers raise surpass what is “political” in any conventional sense and enter what is imagined as “spiritual.” More fundamentally, they show this is a false dichotomy. Interactions with “spiritual” beings involve power relations that keep this world imprisoned in material and historically concrete ways. Political power is exercised, in part, through the harnessing, manipulation, and suppression of “spiritual” superpowers. The more one reflects on this dynamic, the more one realizes that political and spiritual liberation are inseparable.

Tracing the agencies involved in simulating, distorting, and erasing UAP experiences ultimately leads to big, unanswerable questions. Who is behind this (this whole apparent world, this simulation, this…)? If everything is a fabricated appearance, what is true? What is real? What is the nature of consciousness itself? Is that too a simulation? Is there any way out (of the matrix)?

One might say these are perennial questions, but their form rearticulates as the world politically reconfigures. The form of the koan is not static; it morphs as the transformation of history itself, which is always an alteration of perception.

Happy Halloween!! Daring and Delightful Samhain!!

As the veils are thin, and channels of communication and communion are open, I’d like to make a small offering.

This was the first sustained philosophical writing I did after leaving the monastery and arriving in C-bus – late 2023. It traverses planes between ecstatic poetry and academic scholarship. Who knows what it is?!

It offers a sparking glimpse into the ideas and horizons guiding my ongoing research. I hope you enjoy!!

(As always, your comments, feedback, and reflection are warmly welcomed. Throughout November, I’ll be immersed in writing for Ph.D candidacy exams, so my responses and follow-ups will come later.)

Power’s Open Secret

In a world defined by the categories of binary logic, what is excluded fundamentally is the middle, the intermediate, the in-between – the liminal zone between existence and nonexistence, where all appearances come to pass. This zone is an interzone, a matter of entanglements, an infinite nexus where each thing is always many things other than itself.

Regard this exclusion as the fundamental enforcement: enforcement of denial, enforcement of concealment, enforcement of secrecy, enforcement of ignorance. Yet this enforcement is simultaneously a production and ordering of knowledge. Denial/reification = endless game of hide-and-seek.

In the 1880s, Charles Fort observed that investment in “Dogmatic Science” produced a motley assortment of “damned facts,” figures of knowledge unassimilable within the dominant, reified worldview. Foucault, in Madness and Civilization, showed that the structure of modern subjectivity is itself constituted through denial – simultaneously a political and clinical confinement – of the subject’s unintelligible perceptual other, pathologized as insanity.

Such controls on what can be known – which likewise define what knowledge is prohibited, outlawed, forbidden, denied, secreted – establish the basic code of operation for an all-encompassing order of power. They do not, however, constitute a fixed threshold of secrecy and revelation, as if to set the stage for a knowing-awakening that would liberate from the grid of power-denial altogether. The bounds dividing the authorized from the damned, the hidden from the revealed, are shifting, mobile, contested.

This mobility obviates the call for a “Perennial Philosophy,” or a universal soteriological path transmitted through hidden channels of unchanging tradition. Not that religious aspirations are false or invalid; rather, they operate as techno-simulations and perspectival constructions, just as any machineries involved in the formation and deformation of subjectivities. Metaphysical paths to finality or escape-from-the-grid function only as portals, passages within an endless play of forces – however consolidated. Layers upon layers of simulation … Absolutisms are just stagnant, unreflective modes of relativity…

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Gnosis, then, moves in ecstasies of immanence, never-ending dance of veiling and unveiling. Through folds and fractalizations, this movement is all relations. Kaleidoscopic flux of entanglements. Intelligent ecologies of appearance, spontaneously assembling. Alter-poietic conjurings of animate world-displays. Fluid, interchanging onto-cryptographies. Live mandalic micro-programs that activate, deactivate and conduct: Call these movements of power. Rifts and seams, opening in gnostic world-disclosure: This magic dreamshow simulates and encodes further simulations, multiplying to infinity. Kosmogenic techne: techno-productive, dream-weaving machineries – total disciplinary systems, paradigms, apparatuses of perception – god-minds, entelechies, reality-matrices…

In spiritual circles, these operations are organized strategically and called practices. Technologies of Self – with “Self” identifying the very threshold of appearance, prime ontological vanishing point. Traditionalist spiritual disciplines seek final liberation through Self-Knowledge. They propose an ordering of power that posits Self as Absolute, Unconditioned. This positing is itself a techno-operation, a simulating construction, an enactment of relational dynamics. All spiritualities are fluid, technological, and “altered” in this way. Mystical Realization is achieved and sustained through complex disciplinary arrangements – non-Pure.

The taboo on knowledge is not transcended once-and-for-all, then, through salvific knowledge of Self – revelation of what was hidden. Rather, power’s secret unlocks as an endlessly proliferating portal, opening to unbounded liminality, only-ness and in-betweenness of the excluded middle. This middle includes the extremes, the 0s and 1s, the terminals. Playing and replaying – interplaying – the threshold dance of true and false, the movement of power encountering itself, stepping through the mirror of Self, embracing the simulation of an illusory world, a nonexistent reality. Waking in the dream, engaging the open secret.

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This gnostic dance takes shape in specific thought-experiments, specific encounters with the apparent limits of knowledge. These involve passage through extreme skeptical scenarios, as gnosis calls into doubt all received knowledge, exposes all truth as lie. Such are the arts of forbidden knowledge. They move through a recapitulating crisis of total imprisonment<turned>liberation, total deception<turned>truth-revelation – matrices within matrices, infinitely spiraling, infinitely reflexive.

Forbidden knowledge is thus mobile and transitional. Its home is the fractal continuum, the in-between, the bardo. Herein lies the affinity of such knowledge with tantric and esoteric spiritual lineages. Gnostic enactment is mandalic, experiential – yet inconceivably material. This materiality is non-objectifiable and always in-process. Flux and relationality, not circumscribed by any prior philosophical division of subject and object.

Such materiality is transgressive and hybrid – embodying freedom through boundary-crossing, opening in mutant contact with others. The boundaries crossed are flexible and diversely arrayed: the world. This gnostic contact enacts ritual freedom. Not an ultimate illumination, but an already-consummate conversion of ecological forces, an inter-permeating communion of totalities. Every particle offers a microcosmic portal, containing the whole, presenting the play of secrecy and revelation. Gnostic conversion joyously and immersively partakes of this play.

The Perennialist model of secrecy posits spiritual Self-Illumination as the secret – mystical source of all power. Yet power is always multiple, and every presentation appears as an immediate access-point to mystery. In its very presence, appearance hides itself, keeps its secret. Appearance itself is an encryption. Power indeed operates at the very threshold of appearance, in the determination of what can and cannot appear. In order for anything to appear, infinite machinic processes of veiling and unveiling must be underway. These operate as simulation-technologies. Yet this simulation-production is also a hiding, a concealment of what is made not to appear. Technologies of power are not necessarily hidden themselves, but they enact a concealment; they encode a secret.

This movement of secretion and revelation is itself a play of illusion, a dance of appearances – an endless dream-within-a-dream that is simultaneously a waking. It contains within itself an ineradicable questionability, a kosmic joke, an inherent potential for both deception and disillusionment. This is a trickster dynamic, a hermetic materiality that is irreducibly weird, queer, phishy, cockeyed, coyote.

A metaphysical-religious hermeneutic seeks to decipher the One Great Kosmic Code and unlock its Hidden Truth. Gnostic-hermetic arts of forbidden knowledge encounter revelations as animate conversions of energy, techno-productive matrix-births, ecologies of mandalic reprogramming. These arts embody the inseparability of the spiritual and the political. They incite breakthroughs that fundamentally disrupt orders of power and open the potential for new worlds to emerge. The order of power is also the order of reality (reification). Hence, these initiatory breakthroughs are simultaneously enactments of radical self-release and liberation from delusive ontological fixity. Arts of the prison-break. These arts embody the revolutionary spirit of apocalysmo.

The secret of power always hides itself, masks itself, as the secret of Self. This is why Traditionalist metaphysics posits Self as the hidden matrix of all appearance. Yet the gnostic process reveals hidden “alien” forces operating in the place Self seemed to occupy. In this way, the metaphysical-political order is totally disrupted, imploded. The whole world-organizing system of power-knowledge functions to prevent the revelation of these hidden forces.

This dynamic is exemplified by the current situation with UFO/USO/UAPs, contact, and close encounter. An overwhelming body of evidence – including lab-tested materials, traces of exotic technologies, physician-confirmed human bodily marks and modifications, reliable multiple-witness reports, extensive radar and video footage of UFO/USO/UAPs, extraordinary circumstantial evidence, and many thousands of first-hand testimonies – far exceeding ordinary legal and scientific evidentiary requirements, has accumulated over many decades to support the hypothesis of an advanced nonhuman presence on Earth.[1] And yet the mechanisms of epistemic authority continually reject, marginalize, deny, and, if possible, erase this evidence. The order of power-knowledge simply cannot assimilate it.

The specter of advanced alien intelligence, which has lurked in the shadow of modern subjectivity since long before Descartes’ cogito, conveys the possibility that our experienced “reality” is in fact a high-tech simulation. That is, it promises to fulfill the ancient Gnostic intuition that the sensory world is projected by a technologically powerful but deceptive agency (or “demiurge”) who claims to be the One and Only omnipotent God. However, this apocalyptic scenario is only one provisional dynamic through which the gnostic play of revelations can be enacted. To uncover this deeply repressed secret is only to make way for further and deeper secrets – and deeper disclosures. The process is endless.

The “revelation” here is not just a discursive knowledge that informs people of alien presence; it is a receptive acknowledgment that enables the alien presence to appear. One might conceive this as an “unconcealment,” in line with Heidegger’s reading of the pre-Socratic aletheia – truth. Yet the alien presence is no more true or real than any other appearance. It resides with all appearances on a continuum of reification and negation. Within the dominant reality-system, the established programming matrix, it may seem that we are meeting “our creators.” But this discovery too is a simulated appearance, produced by technological forces. Such is the secret of power, operating always at the threshold of what is able to appear. In this scenario, the gnostic technologies of power perform the function of a conjuration.

A similar dynamic is present wherever there is imposition and policing of a critical ontological barrier. Criminalization of psychedelia serves as the metaphysical foundation of the modern War on Drugs, which is itself a violent continuation of colonialist efforts to exterminate indigenous spirituality and Earth medicine. In psychedelic experience, the secreted, privatized domain of subjective consciousness is exposed as the communal playground of myriad intelligent agencies, constellating spontaneously into mandalic ecologies of appearance. Arts of psychedelic gnosis involve active participation in these forbidden ecologies.

Such direct participation is necessary to disrupt the order of reality established and sustained by the long War on Drugs. Once again, the revolutionary power of this disruption is enacted through gnostic technologies operating at the edge of appearance and intelligibility. Power’s secret, its magic, manifests as the contestation of a metaphysical taboo, through a liminal interplay of veiling and unveiling. Concealment, here, proceeds through a material logic of prohibition and confinement, enforced by legal systems, psychiatric institutions, the prison-industrial complex, and an array of normalizing social forces. Meanwhile, the play of power activates transgressive counter-practices whose essential impulse is apocalyptic, revelatory, and whose spirit is radically antinomian, outlaw, free.

This law-breaking is at once a crossing of the more fundamental ontological/epistemic/perceptual barrier, and thus a means of engaging power’s secret directly, through immersive participation in its interplay. Such dangerous, resolute participation – gnostic participation – is actualized by drinking the medicine, swallowing the pill, taking the trip, uniting ritually with repressively hidden intelligences. Gnostic practices of ritual freedom open channels of ecodelic entanglement and communion. Gnosis is thus the gateway to mandalic arts of ritual ecology, with their kaleidoscopic conversion and re-constellation of animating forces. These forces are the living agents of consensation; that is, they come together not as guides to an independently existing reality, but as dreamers simulating sensory ecologies through mysteriously empowered alliance.

Are these the gods and ancestors who dream all worlds into existence? So it may seem, as the familiar architecture of reality dissolves into the radiance of ecodelic hyperspace. The secret of power is revealed in this dissolution, initiating both the end of an existing world-order and the birth of a new. This is not merely a process of psychological breakthrough but of political and ontological apocalypse. It yields not final liberation but a new field of contestation and discovery hitherto undreamt. Matrices within matrices, the infinite play of apocalysmo.

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The dynamic recapitulated in all of these case-sketches is not unlike what happens in a video game: the heroine faces the big boss at the end of one reality-level and then moves on to the next level. Such is the dynamic that propels “history” – not in the conventional sense of the events of the past 10,000 years, but on a much larger timescale that has been lost to us due to our forgetting of earlier cycles of civilization. Within this kosmic process, material transformations and transformations of consciousness are not separate. “Apocalypse” involves both a shift of perception and a shift of reality. According to the basic metaphysical template of the “Perennial Philosophy,” all appearances play out on a continuum ranging from very dense to very subtle frequencies of vibrational manifestation. The subtler frequencies are categorized as “consciousness” or “mind,” the denser frequencies as “matter.” These categorizations form a reality-control-system, which has been institutionalized by the “Great World Religions” and extended by the priesthood of modern science.

Within this control-system, vibrations that have become consolidated, solidified through patterns of enforcement, appear to the coarse senses as material arrangements. These arrangements constitute the total empirical world as recognized by scientism’s nihilist-materialist worldview. According to this worldview, an inviolable threshold of appearance is established by the ontological demarcation of materiality itself. This threshold is identified with the barrier of death, understood as the end of material existence. What is beyond death is not material and therefore cannot appear.

This establishment of “death” as an absolute boundary of perceptibility is modern civilization’s core strategy of secretion. The supposed inevitability and universality of death are meant to secure this boundary as the site of an unquestioned taboo. Yet the illusion of an impermeable barrier between life and death cannot be sustained, even in the midst of world-destroying nihilist plague. Not only are links of communication and intelligibility between the living and the dead recognized in virtually every human culture ever recorded. Innovations in medical technology since the 1940s have produced a veritable outbreak in cases of Near-Death and Beyond-Death Experience, leaving humanity with an enormous array of phenomenological reports from “the other side.”[2] Furthermore, the American Spiritualist movement that began in the 1840s catalyzed waves of groundbreaking psychical, parapsychological, and thanatological research that continues vitally in the present. Communication with the dead is a lively scientific undertaking – the modern apotheosis of radical empiricism.

Those who cross consciously into death and return undergo a process of initiation similar to that of the alien experiencer and advanced psychognostic. These glimpses, however, are fractalized dispensations of a larger metamorphosis. The secret of power unveils itself through initiatory breakthroughs whose nature is participatory and all-inclusive. The veil lifts upon and as the whole kosmic assemblage. To reveal the forces behind humanity’s mass-hypnotic belief-in-death carries world-changing implications beyond what can be imagined. New transfigurations of the endless dance are here-and-now emerging: Signs of butterfly-humanity bursting into its imaginal phase of flight?

In addition to matters explored here, many uncanny factors point to this unfolding moment as a unique historical crossroads of collective initiation. Planet Earth is in peril, and the human spirit is faced with an existential crisis of its own making. Shadowy forces are coming to light. In the apocalyptic here-and-now, all reified orders of power are utterly sublated; the very source of power shines forth, bringing Self face-to-face with its own absolute limit and undoing. In this moment of identity-displacement, of self-becoming-other-than-itself, a super-gnostic cogito is enacted. Self free from itself, open to the play of forces, initiation is already complete.

In this always-already completeness of initiation lives and moves the fullest empowerment, the open secret. Ultimately, no one is in control. Herein lies the secret of secrets. No agency holds this secret, because we are this secret. We are all the illuminati.

References:

Dolan, Richard. UFOs for the 21^st-Century Mind. Independently published, 2022.

Dyck, Erica and Chris Elcock, editors. Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics. MIT Press, 2022. Cambridge.

Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Translated by Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy. Routledge, 2006. New York.

Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Tarcher, 2016. New York.

Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Truth. Translated by Ted Sadler. Bloombsbury, 2013. London.

Ring, Kenneth. Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience. Quill, 1985. New York.

[1] A good introduction to this research is Richard Dolan, UFOs for the 21^st-Century Mind.

[2] The International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS) celebrated its 40^th anniversary in 2021. (www.iands.org.) Decades of pioneering research have also been supported by the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

Amazing Art by Jackie Tileson

Homage to all buddhas!

All bodhisattvas!

All kind and benevolent beings!

May your powers expand and multiply!!!

Zazen is all-inclusive. As a practice, it is an embracing of totalities, ever-evolving, ever-open. “Like the five-flavored herb, like the five-pronged vajra / wondrously embraced within the real…” Fullness, infinite connection. Great Completeness. Maha-Sandhi. ཨ

The image of Zen we have consolidated in modern, English-speaking circles tends toward austerity and negation. Yes, there is a spare, minimalist aesthetic inherited from (modern) Japan, but compounding this inheritance is an assemblage of Buddhistic conceits, refracted through modernist lenses: The essence of Zen practice transcends cultural forms; it is beyond conditioning. It requires an abandonment of all rational thought – saying no to intellect, curiosity, pleasure, involvement in the senses. This Zen tends more towards solitude than relation, more towards silence than sound, more towards stillness than activity, space than bodies, seriousness than play, nothingness than things, death than life, etc. etc. etc. In all of these respects, it is a one-sided or lopsided Zen.

Specifically, we tend to idealize a conception of practice as an utterly non-intellectual or even anti-intellectual affair. It’s perhaps relevant to note that this orientation is itself a mediating framework, an intellectual model, a pattern of conditioning, that provides a symbolic and philosophical context for whatever experiences might occur.

Zen teachers I know have commonly denounced “philosophy” as a waste of time, a merely conceptual engagement not leading to real satisfaction. Of course there is truth is this kind of critique – and in all the “negative” emphases mentioned above – insofar as they point beyond, the open gate of inconceivability. Yet here we are also dealing with a profound underappreciation, and misrepresentation, of what philosophy (wisdom-loving) was, is, and can be. More importantly, there is an implied impoverishment of the Ch’an/Zen practice-tradition itself – denuding it of anything so complex, mediating, reflective, or interactive as to be called “philosophical.”

With regard to ancient Mediterranean traditions, as scholars like Pierre Hadot have shown, philosophy was fundamentally a way of life, animated by questions and aspirations that modern Zennies might comfortably call spiritual. That word “spiritual” becomes even more apt when we consider the Neoplatonist lineages of theurgy enacted by figures such as Iamblichus, or the sorcery-infused wisdom-arts transmitted by Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles. The scholarship of Peter Kingsley, Gregory Shaw, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, and others sheds light on these lesser-known philosophical traditions.

Then, of course, the European Rennaissance alchemists and magi who inherited these traditions also referred to themselves as “philosophers,” engaged in “philosophical arts.” They considered themselves part of a tradition that extended back into Egyptian and Sumerian mystery paths, long predating, though definitely informing, Moses and Plato.

Anyway, the point is that these were not detached, know-it-all intellectuals, with their noses in books. They were wizards, pilgrims, lovers, engaged mystics, who experienced nature as thoroughly animated by divinity, suffused with enlightening forces, vibrant, communicative, and alive! The more I immerse myself in these traditions and their paths of practice, the more fully I realize the necessity of embracing everything as the way. Zazen embodies, integrates, incorporates everything, the whole flow of happening – opening to the movement of forces in, through, and across all dimensions of nowness.

This all-inclusive, all-embodying way is what I encounter in the poetic master-writings of Hongzhi, the 12^th-century Ch’an wizard of Mount Tiantong. Cultivating the Empty Field is our Ango text here at Mud Lotus in C-bus, Ohio, and find myself enjoying its depths anew. Hongzhi’s zazen is not restrictive and pared-down. If it is spare, it transits through spareness as one of its myriad folds and mutations. Hongzhi’s thriving zazen garden grows from seeds planted generations earlier by Shitou and Dongshan. Its roots are inconceivable mystery – zazen itself. The constant interplay, intensely fractalized and recapitulated on all levels and scales simultaneously, of absolute and relative realities, provides the conceptual source-code on which every zazen instruction is a riff. Dongshan and his friends and students mirthfully “systematized” this play through the unfathomable pentaliptical logos of the “five ranks.” Philosopher or not, there is no end to this play! Buddha’s flower-ornament utterance barely emitted a breath!

Nature itself is the best book, and its teachings continue on immeasurably.

Rediscovering this orientation and spirit of engagement is important for me now, practicing continuously, not knowing, being called upon to “teach.” It is important as I revalorize, restore, recuperate, and reform various elements of my life-force – including the intellectual, the imaginative, the erotic, the wildly emergent and experimental – that were subordinated in the context of monastic life, or held in ambivalent abeyance. In Zen, I don’t have anything to “teach” and have never felt aligned with the idea that teaching authority is justified by some ineffable private experience, devoid of content. Whatever practice-realization is, it is a big blossoming flower, unfurling in the midst of it all.

The One Taste of mind’s nature is undeniable, inescapable. This is the essence of liberation. Mind’s nature reveals itself as an open, empty expanse. Moment to moment, the realization is all-inclusive. Nothing is left out. No restrictive order or demarcation is drawn. Unbounded wholeness, body of now.

Intellectually, practically, and historically, this implies an all-encompassing integration. It implies a way of life that is open, experiential, always evolving and experimenting, always embracing the new. Traditional renunciant paths are part of the mix, but they hold no exclusive authority. They interact with multiple perspectives in a continual process of metamorphosis and inquiry.

In this space, their claims lose rigidity and become permeable, flexible. Inveterate clinging to fixated half-truth dissolves in a flood of deepening discovery. Traditional doctrine has the opportunity, then, to expand, soften, grow to more beneficial form.

In this way, the dharma’s fullest potential is actualized. This is a natural and constant happening, inherent to dharma’s unfolding, not unique to modernity or “the West” (whatever that is). What we call “Buddhism” (again, whatever that is) has always been this way.

With this spirit alive, we can question basic dogmas and rote practice-routines, feeling out their vital truth. One framework that has long served practitioners but contains hidebound assumptions is “the four thoughts that turn the mind toward dharma.” Traditionally, these are the four:

1) Unsatisfactoriness of Samsara

2) Inevitability of Death and Impermanence

3) Preciousness of Human Birth

4) Reality of Karma

Reflection on these themes is presented in many formal Buddhist practice-venues as a necessary gateway to a life of authentic spiritual engagement. Indeed, reflection that places practice in a context of ultimate liberatory purpose and total cosmic realism is on some level indispensable. Yet the specific traditional Buddhist articulation of “the four thoughts” will to some remain unconvincing. Here are some potential upgrades.

1) On the Unsatisfactoriness of Samsara: What’s the problem? Why should beginningless, endless cycles of birth, death, and transformation be seen as intrinsically bad, something to escape from? Why not celebrate the magic and mystery of this cyclical, miraculous display? The renunciant judgment of “unsatisfactoriness,” while experientially resonant under some conditions, seems to reflect an aversive, life-denying, hostile-to-nature orientation towards reality. Such an attitude may also be linked to particular historical traumas, and to collective (de)formations like slave-labor, hierarchical social structure, and male-dominant authority systems. Indeed, dualistic, subject/object perception is stress-inducing and produces an endless proliferation of delusive thought-forms and irresolvable desires. And that’s good to recognize. But what shines through all those projections? Imperfection is ok. Change is ok. Sensory immersion is ok. Let’s not be bitter and oppositional about dualistic reality but dance in its illusory magic.

2) Inevitability of Death and Impermanence: Says who? Human lifespan seems to be quite malleable, and there are ongoing efforts to extend it indefinitely. Also, there are a surprising number of organisms (many of them aquatic) that do not undergo biological aging, or senescence. Death is not an inherent feature of biological life. Anyway, how are we defining death? Do we know what death is? The cultural conception we have of death is shaped by a very limited set of human-centric historical forces and perspectives. This particular, mythologized image of biological death does not necessarily follow from a recognition of impermanence or flux as a basic feature of reality. Is death something that will happen in the future, or is death right now? And now. And now?

3) Preciousness of Human Birth: Yes, and humans are not the only game in town, and not always where it’s at when it comes to embodying the full range of buddha-qualities. Human existence is not isolated. It is entangled at every point with plant, animal, fungus, star, and planet, with water and with fire, with mineral and with air. Birds are buddhas; trees are buddhas. And what about the panoply of NHI (NonHuman Intelligences) yet to be acknowledged or discovered? Are we necessarily the best and brightest, the only ones with access to ultimate reality? Or even the only ones with the balance needed to practice the buddhist path? Are there not buddhas in every realm? Also our self-image as “humanity” is changing – through technology, bioengineering, ecological necessity, etc. How much longer will “the human” as we understand it last? If “the human” gives way to something else, does the dharma become obsolete? I don’t think so.

4) Reality of Karma: Cause-and-effect has never been a solid, substantiated reality – not even logically or empirically. It is basically a story: This happened, then that happened, then the other happened, etc. We all know that stories have no ultimate substance, even though they do weave the conventionally perceived world. No mechanism or physical process of causation has ever been discovered. How can we say that causation defines how reality unfolds? Many experiences (including some UFO and paranormal encounters) suggest the order of causation is highly mutable and can be rearranged. In any case, the linear stories we tell can’t be trusted very deeply. Why invest more in them than is warranted? Just to keep things under control? To conform, to obey, to be good? To really be good might mean opening beyond our limited belief in causation…

The point of these revisions is not to dismiss or corrode the motivation to practice, but to deepen and clarify what it’s really about. If we can’t rely on a traditional, anthropocentric, patriarchal, scientifically-uninformed, moralistic worldview to generate that motivation, then where do we turn?

Each of these “four thoughts” contains the seeds for a profound activation of bodhicitta. That’s why they have endured for centuries and will continue to endure.

Here in these brief contemplations, I have begun questioning and offered some starting points for further exploration. Much more will come in a later essay. For now, a positive refinement and reformulation of the “four thoughts” might appear something like this:

1) The Bind

2) What is Death?

3) Aliveness

4) Total responsibility

These phrases evoke some of the resonances I feel. Where in these reflections does bodhicitta open up for you?

Master Keizan Jokin asked the nun Mokufu Sonin:

“The winter is coming to an end, and the springtime is arriving. There is an order to this. What is your understanding?”

Sonin replied: “In the branches of a tree without shade, how could there be any seasons?”

Keizan asked her: “What about right now?”

Sonin bowed.

Keizan then transmitted the Dharma robe to her.

In Part I of this essay, “Playing the Buddhist Mind Card,” we reviewed the various strategies by which the concept of “Mind” (or “mind”) is weaponized in Buddhist discourse to enforce a certain normative conception of life and practice, often defined in terms of conformity to a narrowly idealized vision of “Buddhism.” We identified specific “onto-political machineries” – the “Spiritual Bypass,” “Anti-Intellectualism,” the “Anti-Revolutionary Gaslight,” and the “Paranormative Erasure” – through which this enforcement is paradigmatically carried out, both in traditional Buddhist teaching and in the context of modernized “consensus Buddhism.” Finally, we glimpsed the potential to liberate genuine realization of “Mind” from the manipulative operations of Buddhist Mind Card (BMC) logic.

In continuing this inquiry, and in keeping with the orientation of the larger Dharma between Worlds reflective ensemble, Part II will track the Mind Card dynamic as a by-product of the interplay between Buddhism and modernity. In modern Buddhist discourse (and Buddhist modernist discourse, which is sometimes but not always a slightly different thing), there is a common trope that falsely organizes “human knowledge” according to an essentialized duality of “East” and “West.” Knowledge and mastery of external, physical reality, the trope claims, has been the province of Western science and rationality. The East, by contrast, has specialized in a “science of the Mind,” an equally masterful empirical exploration of inner, non-material reality. Advocates of this framework then go on to assert that these pursuits are equally important, equally valid, and equally necessary for a comprehensive understanding of reality.

The implication is that both paths reflect and reveal ontological zones that are pregiven, built into the nature of things, inherent in the structure of reality – “mind” and “matter.” For all his effort to think “post-metaphysically,” the great American integral theorist and committed spiritual practitioner Ken Wilber reinforces this exceedingly metaphysical assumption in his articulation of the “four quadrants.” The “Upper Left” quadrant – in Wilber’s AQAL system – inscribes first-person interior reality as an indispensable and necessary dimension of all happenings. Likewise, the Upper Right and Lower Right quadrants encompass the world of physical matter, in its singular and collective forms – also a necessary component of all conditioned reality. Early on in my study of Wilber’s system (which I undertook zealously in my early twenties), I recognized the ambiguity of the Upper Left quadrant in relation to the multivalent concept of Mind (or mind), especially as Mind is articulated and explored in advanced yogic and spiritual practice-traditions. For example, in the Cittamatra (Mind-only) or Yogacara (Yogic-engagement) school of Mahayana Buddhism, Mind is not viewed as just one zone or perspectival dimension within a larger grid of reality (i.e. the Upper Left quadrant). The whole point of this school’s teaching is that Mind is the nature of all reality, that all reality is the nature of Mind. Mind is everywhere and everything, and realizing this is the gateway to liberation.

This enlarged – indeed, all-inclusive – intimation of Mind has deep affinities with other traditional conceptions of ultimate or Absolute reality, including monotheistic notions of God, Brahman, and Spirit, as well as some resonance with the thinking of modern idealist philosophers such as Berkeley and Hegel. This absolutization of Mind in Buddhism is the source of major tension with modernity, which we will get to in a moment. For now, let it be acknowledged that Mind, in this absolute sense, is not an empirical concept. It is not some zone or region of reality that can be investigated, studied, and known, alongside other zones or regions. It is unbounded, Absolute – Reality with no outside. Therefore, it does not lend itself to “science” in any recognizable sense; it cannot be approached as a specialized domain. (It cannot be approached at all!) Mind does not refer to any particular object, realm, or field of experience. Practical injunctions to “turn towards” or “investigate” or “look into” the Mind are not operating empirically but in some other way.

This other way of operating belongs to a process of yogic and spiritual transformation that is very real and has indeed been profoundly (though not at all exclusively) developed by traditions east of the Euphrates river. This process involves high-tech methods, elaborate taxonomies and systems of representation, and sustained periods of experiential and analytical immersion. Thus, in some ways, it resembles and lends itself to generative interaction, and even collaboration, with modern physical sciences. However, it tends to proceed on the basis of a logic of Mind that, from a modern critical-theoretical standpoint, appears as highly problematic and seems to function as an ideological device or metaphysical control-system.

This controlling, mystifying, manipulating function is precisely what we found in the Buddhist Mind Card strategies diagnosed in Part I of this essay. We could posit an Absolutistic logic of control that governs all the dominant religious systems of the world and is encoded in the “perennial philosophy,” which forms their common metaphysical template. God, Brahman, Mind: these are supreme power-concepts, founding, talismanic institutors and activators of authority, super-organizers of knowledge and perception. The baseless conversion of a formless Absolute into a particular, relative instantiation of form constitutes the founding, law-giving act of power. Through this absolutistic substantiation or reification, a necessary, normative order is established. Where the Buddhist Mind Card is in play, identification of Absolute, Unbounded, Infinite Mind with some relative, finite set of circumstances, practices, and rules is what confers authority upon Buddhist institutions and their representatives. It forms the innermost impetus both for spiritual direction and for social domination and hierarchy. Insofar as these forces and their dynamics are conceived as microcosmic reflections of the total reality, their logic is the logic of order as such, the logic of reification, of making-real.

In practice, imposition of the Absolute concept – here, Mind – calls for surrender to the prescribed forms. Command of the concept’s scope and definition determines what forms are recognized as authorized and empowering. “Don’t waste your time with x. Turn your attention to your own Mind.” And with that injunction comes a whole apparatus of specific requirements and obligations. Taken altogether, “looking into your mind” implies becoming a Buddhist, assimilating all the relevant codes, norms, and procedures. The Mind Card becomes propaganda, the ticket to a whole way of life.

Indeed, buddhadharma, Buddhist practice, encompasses all of life, all of reality; it is the originary, evaluative demarcation that is ideological, coercive, that founds an order of power. And yet we are always implicated in the play of power, and the point here is not to escape it. One stream of modernity negates the absolutistic concepts, exposes them as ideologically manipulative and deceptive. Another recognizes their endlessly expansive potential and opens them further, breaking the bonds of tradition, institution, and localized authority.

Everything is the way; and yet the water flows where it flows. This paradox is at the heart of spiritual engagement. How to embody boundless Mind, here and now? This question is repeated, reactivated, in virtually every Zen koan. There is no limit to the scope and variety of this koan’s many responses.

Mind is everywhere, everything. This points to suchness, flowing now just as it is. The Absolute is to be found nowhere else. How to find it, exactly in the flow? The assumption we have about Mind (or is it “mind” in this case?), that it is interior, that it is accessed in a privileged way by the individual subject, that it cannot be reached or attested to by others, is not specific to modernity, or to Greco-European and post-Christian traditions of thought. Questioning that assumption is a vital force in Buddhist practice – articulated as central by the Yogacarins and their progeny. If Mind is not inside, in here, not bound within a sphere of subjective access or private identification, then what is it? We could say that everything has the nature of appearance and that everything is a construction. To vivify, we can add that everything is like a dream or a magical illusion; there is nothing behind appearances, no solid grounding. There’s no real subject experience is happening to; it’s just the open play of appearances.

These realizations emerge through experimental processes of direct inquiry, perceptual alteration, and embodied engagement – what modern Buddhists call “meditation” or what ancient Indic sramanic traditions call “yoga.” Processes that open to Mind go beyond technology, beyond “arts,” beyond practice, to immerse in what is inconceivably unbound, free, and all-inclusive. All appearances manifest Absolute wakefulness and pure spontaneity. The radiant luminosity of Mind is fully present and complete in its first initiatory glimpse, and yet habitual contraction and identification gives it the semblance of otherness, unattainability. Liberation is realized by freeing the obstructed and fixated habitual self-contraction and giving way to Mind’s intrinsic natural radiance and compassion.

Mind, at this level of immediate, embodied realization, is all-pervasive, fully permeating every zone and dimension of moment-to-moment experience. Every appearance is nondual, no separation between phenomena and experiencer, no subject/object gap or duality, no interior and exterior. Every manifestation is “inner” in the sense of being utterly intimate, a transitory mutation of awareness, without any independent substance or determinacy. Everything is a movement within awareness’s field, a movement of Mind’s great ocean, a passage of weather through vast sky.

What is Absolute is not personal, subjective experience but Mind, Awareness, which spans the far edges and constructed boundaries of relativity. Awareness traverses the alleged division between life and death, waking and dream, consciousness and unconscious, this world and beyond, self and other. The crystallized forms of ordinary sensory experience occupy just one channel within the open spectrum of possibilities Awareness is capable of accommodating. No alteration exceeds its bounds. No action violates its integrity.

This is Mind as Great Way, Open Road, encompassing even the weirdest and farthest-out modern deviations and derangements. Tantric traditions offer models for transgressive boundary-crossing and dissolution of polarities; their practices are often systematic and formulaic, focused on particular edges and taboos circumscribed within the context of a stable religious social order. The transformations wrought by modernity destabilize tradition and destroy religious authority, leaving no static normative order in relation to which transgression might be defined, no institution that serves as a presumed microcosmic reflection of Absolute reality.

With the dismantling of established sacred canopies, all arrangements have the potential to be recognized as equal manifestations of Mind. This modern social situation is prefigured by teachings such as those of the Yogacara school, and by radically mystical and gnostic currents throughout the history of religions. Yet the Buddhist (and especially Yogacarin) emphasis on Mind enjoys a special filiation with modern equalization, as it resonates with modernity’s incipient reaffirmation of Mind’s (or “consciousness’s”) metaphysical primacy.

Without getting too far into the weeds, we can observe that in recent decades the “study of consciousness” has emerged as the vehicle for a range of important transformations in the modern worldview, and in its dominant regimes of knowledge. As a result, many phenomena regarded as “anomalous,” “paranormal,” or in some way “extraordinary” have become integrated into legitimate fields of scientific and humanistic research. Quite often, this has been facilitated by situating these phenomena within a conceptual framework that views “consciousness” as the fundamental substrate of physical reality. To this extent (and contra the BMC shutdown-logic analyzed in Part I), reference to Mind has become an enabling condition for the pursuit of revolutionary and fringe modalities of scientific investigation and research. This development reflects a shift in modern conceptualization – we might say, from mind to Mind: the prevailing modern image of mind as an individual, subjective realm of private experience is increasingly displaced by an expansive vision of Mind as all-encompassing ground of reality.

This “new” modern “idealist” vision of Mind carries great potential as a unifying framework for understanding a diverse assortment of historically suppressed and ignored phenomena (such as psi, NDE, UFO/UAP encounter, psychedelic experience, plant and animal intelligence, and more). As such, however, it has so far stopped short of actualizing the Buddhist engagement with Mind as an unsurpassable gateway of supreme existential liberation. These pathways are by no means unrelated or mutually exclusive. Historically, Buddhist and other gnostic-mystical engagements with Mind have provided initiatory entry into a vast field of informational flow and energetic resonance. Yogic realization of Mind as the body of reality has led to complex and subtle understandings of the energetic circuitries of life, including the movement of vital energies (prana/qi/lung) and the organization of matter according to patterns of vibratory frequency. Entered experientially, such understanding can be channeled for the compassionate cultivation of psi and other “paranormal” abilities (siddhis), and for benevolent, healing attunement to nonhuman intelligences and hidden ecologies. Within a Buddhist-gnostic liberatory context, such capabilities appear as special means for enhancing, intensifying, refining, and expanding the mandalic embodiment of awakening, deepening the total fulfillment and enactment of the nature of Mind.

Such means become useful and available not through advancements in theoretical knowledge, but as the virtuous outgrowth of direct yogic perception and realization. This realization can be catalyzed through intimate pointing to Mind’s nature – intrinsic, radiant, reflexive, always already present. Freed from manipulative BMC strategies, this pointing carries no necessary allegiance to normative Buddhist cultural forms and regimes of practice. In the modernized, deterritorialized world, such regimes might only get in the way. Realization of Mind’s nature is an inside job, in that boundless Mind only has an inside. It is self-secret; its secret can never get out. The traditional Tibetan word for a Buddhist (nangpa) literally means an “insider.” Here the term finds an expanded, cosmocentrically radicalized valence. An initiate into the nature of Mind is all-in. There is only Mind. As the newborn Buddha declared, “I alone am the World-Honored One.”

Nothing in the Mind-only mandala is alien, foreign. This is not some Hegelian-style dialectical reappropriation but an immediate liberatory actualization and unconditional faith-orientation for continuous practice. Practice here is not prescriptive and formal but spontaneous and openly experimental. Recognition that everything is Mind fulfills Dogen’s proclamation in Genjokoan (Manifesting Suchness) that “all dharmas are buddhadharma,” that all appearances are buddha-manifestations, luminous contours of the Way.

With this practice-realization comes a perpetual disclosure of Mind as kaleidoscopic, holographic, mandalic. All the technological, artistic, and imaginative capabilities, not only of the ancient traditions but of “secular” modernity, with its complex bodies of cultural and scientific knowledge, can be brought to bear as instruments and conduits of enlightened activity. This is the truly Great Vehicle – buddhahood, awakened Mind, openly and fully embodied in the all-inclusive completeness of each moment. This is the vehicle of suchness itself as a constantly mutating mandala of total liberation.

Mandalic actualization of Mind opens a freedom beyond what modern civilization has allowed itself to imagine. It moves towards an enlightened society – shambhala – that incorporates all the marginalized, stigmatized, and repressed knowledges and potentialities that have remained hidden from the modern world, haunting it as specters. Phenomena such as psychedelic breakthrough and initiation, UFO/UAP interaction, and “anomalous” psi ability indeed become intelligible in new ways when a holographic Mind-paradigm is embraced. This revolutionary paradigm-shifting process has been reconfiguring scientific disciplines and their theoretical frameworks for more than a century now. Philosophically, this shift is perhaps best exemplified in the recently influential work of Bernardo Kastrup.

More fundamentally, the awakening and blooming of liberated mandalic Mind brings an empowerment inconceivable from the standpoint of modern physicalist philosophy, with its liberal conceptions of subjectivity and personal freedom. The whole cosmos is psychoactive, psychedelic, Mind-manifesting, awake with intelligence. Everything participates in continually evolving webs of communion and communication, simulating magical, living worlds through conscious, creative interaction and complex flows of information. Nature is a quantum supercomputational poem, weaving itself spontaneously through the power of attention, morphing with the lightning-speed intentionality of awareness itself. Altering perception is altering the world. All the terminals are integrated. Death, dream, visionary and extrahuman realms, alternate consciousness-systems, zones of virtuality, all become available as immanent planes of operation, live venues of bodhisattva activity. Mandalic self-programming proliferates endlessly, guided by transpersonal relations of intimacy, friendliness, and compassion.

Meditation – Mind Minding Mind – is the basis for all the mandalic arts and sciences. Yet mandalic practice unfolds with infinite novelty and complexity, spontaneously disclosing unimaginable filiations, sampling and mixing constellations of ritual ecology. All is relation; the Great Vehicle is a family affair. Meditation, as familiarization, is the art of limitless intimacies. This path of immediacy and discovery is both spiritually liberatory and scientifically revelatory. Its enactment is a communal-democratic revolution of love, justice, and ecological balancing. Mandalics practices the energetics of friendship, the vibratory healing of trauma and violence through care, respect, and loving attention. Through common presence and interconnectivity, myriad positive collaborations and companionships become possible. A society no longer governed by the fears and limitations produced by existential contraction and self-identification is a transformed society. Mind reflects itself to itself, manifests itself to itself, through spontaneous relations of compassion, interactive arts of caretaking, tending, nurturing, flourishing, gathering, receiving, enjoying. Our work together is a life-giving, courageous responsiveness.

Buddhist Mind Card logic has no place, can find no grip, when Mind recognizes and energizes itself through interrelational processes of continual emergence. Traditional Buddhist forms, institutions, theories, and practices are not obsolete in the context of such processes. Rather, freed by modern critique from the delusion of reificatory authority, their true potency can shine forth more vividly. Buddhism was never about Buddhism. To make it so was always to distort its liberatory purpose. Mind awakening to itself can be the basis for a different world. It will not be a Buddhist world but a world of buddhas.

Among traditional vehicles for Mind-awakening – yogic rituals, contemplative arts, spiritual technologies, transformative practices – those we consider “Buddhist” are especially abundant, diverse, and efficacious. However, the solidity of the category “Buddhist” is profoundly questionable, given the complex cross-cultural interactions, hybridizations, and shifting geographies that have shaped our spiritual traditions – all within a context of influence from mysterious transhuman forces and forgotten historical processes. What we call “Buddhism” is largely a modern colonialist scholarly construct. Formations of Buddhist practice have always been porous and adaptive, redesigning, upgrading, and recalibrating themselves in accord with situational need.

The secularizing, globalizing, destabilizing energies of modernity have further loosened the structures of traditional authority and ethnocentric membership, decoupling buddhist Mind-yogas from Buddhist culture and identity. These forces have been inseparable from the corrosive violence and injustice wrought through military, economic, and cultural imperialism – what used to be called “globalization” but now seems to almost everyone like suicide. For Asian and Asian-diasporic Buddhist communities, the “modernization” of Buddhism has been accompanied by oppression, displacement, denial, cultural theft, and distortion. Whatever forms emerge from the ongoing interplay of Buddhism and modernity will have to be guided and tempered by careful attention to this history and its continuing repercussions.

Reassertion of traditionalist authority and hierarchy, however, is not the answer. Indeed, it has never been the answer, has always been a false path, a strategy of imprisonment through reification. Living in the open koan of Mind has always been the undying spirit of Zen practice. Buddhist Mind-yogas instantly leap beyond themselves, beyond any formalizable procedure, operation, or technique. In the moment, they leap beyond Mind itself, calling into question its very findability.

Calligraphy - “Our mind, new and fresh every day” by Shodo Harada Roshi

Like so many curious, freethinking people in the modern world, I have speculated about and imagined the possibility of contact with alien intelligence since childhood. As I grew older, my speculations became more sophisticated, informed by a growing familiarity with science, philosophy, and world cultures. As my studies deepened, some of these buds blossomed into incipient research interests. Psychedelics mutated and mobilized my teenage mind, and my connection with the weird and “paranormal” became an intimate reality. Quickly ultimate existential matters emerged as central and foundational. Yoga and meditation brought discipline, and life unfolded with a clear spiritual orientation.

At least for a while – a ruthless, tyrant intellect was in constant pursuit of usurpation. In 2012, late into a multi-year phase of personal and spiritual crisis, a psilocybin mushroom experience helped break through layers of accumulated resistance and negativity, unveiling cosmic forces long denied. Catalyzed by this experience, many of my earlier, unconventional research interests resurfaced, now within a richer a more complex context of life-lessons and intellectual capabilities. My investigations became quite intensive, propelled in part by the afterglow of visions that could now never be unseen. (My experience had not been a classic UFO encounter, but was a glimpse into zones of animate intelligence our normalized world is managed to conceal.) Quickly again the heart’s aspiration was activated, and I sought grounding on the spiritual path. I entered full-time Zen monastic training at Great Vow in 2013.

Emerging from the monastery ten years later, these interests in UFOs, contact, and close encounter are now the basis for a new round of professional academic research. I recently received a grant to attend Contact in the Desert, a large UFO conference held annually near Joshua Tree in the high desert of southern California. There I had a table with a modest exhibit inviting participation in my ongoing exploration of resonances between modern UFO phenomena and the thousand-year-old terma tradition of Tibet. The highlight of the conference, however, was hearing from those whose lives have been thoroughly transformed through the path of close encounter and contact with “NHI” (Nonhuman Intelligence). Amidst all the important discussions of secrecy, psi phenomena, and exotic physics, what came through most essentially was a recognition of love as the source of all goodness and the vehicle for human survival. For the experiencers who have engaged most deeply with contact and its attendant phenomena, the ultimate revelation has been an awakening of love and faith-mind.

We experienced some mysterious, amazing things in the desert – especially on the last night, when hundreds gathered outside to gaze into the starry sky, aided by powerful guides and useful, discerning technologies. As the conference ended, some wonderful artist-experiencers a few tables down from my terma exhibit shared their ceramics, paintings, and naturally-dyed fabric-arts. Among these was a Japanese-style samue, just as I had worn every day at the monastery and still wear regularly for meditation and less formal dharma events. It was ocean-green, dyed with algae and other living earth-colors, and happened to fit me perfectly. As I conversed with these neighbors – and discovered, magically, places where our spiritual lineages (including Tibetan and Zen Buddhist lineages) closely converged – I realized it was right for me to return home with this samue (as a loving gift from Kisei). Yet again, UFO contact had opened as a gateway of spiritual initiation, restoring and expanding my presence on the bodhisattva path.

Indeed, this pattern of entanglement between contact and spirituality has persisted for decades, defining and animating my dharmic involvements. Immediately after Contact in the Desert, I entered a weeklong Vipaśyanā, Mahāmudrā, and Chöd retreat hosted by a Drikung Kagyu community in Dayton, Ohio. The retreat was held almost entirely outdoors – a forest-dwelling immersion in the essence of practice. Alive with bodhicitta, resting in unbound buddha-mind, I found myself energized by the magic of contact. Many of the prayers and rituals throughout the retreat, including the extensive generosity-driven Chöd sadhana, were disciplined, explicit enactments of contact. What does this all mean? How is contact with “NHI” implicated in religious practice? Who are the beings encountered by modern UFO experiencers, and what has been their role (if any) in the formation of religious traditions?

As I navigate the complexity of these questions, I find myself ever guided by love’s essential signal. To quote a sage who crossed to the other side and returned: “Enlightenment is what happens when there is nothing left of us but love.”

image by Takashi Murakami

“The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

- Martin Luther King Jr., 1959 Sermon on Gandhi

The crossroads King describes here is present in our time, where we find ourselves. And his choice of “beloved community” is an urgent call. That a battle, an attack, a violation and abuse is underway is all-too-apparent. These are twisted times, and we are tangled up together, wherever we stand, in webs of confusion, in webs of solidarity and love.

Choosing and practicing nonviolence, non-harming, ahimsa, is in mind-heart and deed the path of buddhas, and I’m grateful to be linked and united with all of you, that path open before us. Let us travel together, as far as the path leads!!

This three-month season has been a swirl of energies, both connective and disruptive. Far from retreating and defending ourselves against these forces, our spiritual practice embraces them as medicine – however strange. What we need from each other in this process is friendship and common vow, learning to trust in the continuous practice that unfolds through phases of seeming lapse and bereavement.

In this spirit, I bow in appreciation for your presence and engagement during this 90-day Dharma Between Worlds sabbatical and ask how I might continue to serve you in seasons to come. Particularly, I’m wondering whether you might like to receive audio (and maybe video?) transmissions from our dharma gatherings here in Columbus, OH. It’s fairly standard now for Kisei and me to alternate week to week giving 20- to 30-minute talks (with discussion) on Wednesday evening. So far we have not been recording. (Kisei’s ZCO group meets virtually on Mondays, and those talks circulate through Earth Dreams.) But we’re thinking about starting to record, and your feedback and encouragement would help us move this train along. So every 2-3 weeks I’d send out an audio offering through this substack newsletter, with some nice images and/or video to go along. How does that sound? Thoughts? Requests?

Thanks to those who read “Playing the Buddhist Mind Card.” Your comments, impressions, and counterpoints – especially on these long essays – are always welcome. As spring semester winds down, I’m re-entering that current of inquiry and can feel the next wave emerging – with hopes to set sail in early summer.

The themes of that essay are vividly active in my life and practice and path as a teacher (those are not three separate things!). These themes also form something of a bridge with aspects of my bubbling academic work. Broadly, this work traverses a zone of questioning about the mutual impact of religion and modernity, the future of religion in the midst of technological and social transformation, the possibility of religion beyond anthropocentrism, maybe beyond Earth, the place of tradition and perennial truth within an adaptive form of community and practicing.

For purposes of this message, we can focus the questioning on the future of buddhism (if not of buddhadharma). Could it be that the best way to embody buddhahood in this historical moment is not to practice in a traditional buddhist form? This is not an abstract, hypothetical question but very real, practical and immediate. It’s also not a question to be answered by any individual, arrived at and held to as some kind of intellectual self-certainty. Rather, I think we are wondering and questioning and discerning and engaging together. Is it most wise and compassionate, most genuinely and deeply and wholeheartedly buddhist, to be buddhist?

Modern buddhists (like the 14^th Dalai Lama) have been engaging in this kind of inquiry – with its consequent practical experiments – for centuries. In some form, these questions even precede modernity, in any familiar world-historical sense, and are just part of the radical self-reflexivity and skeptical interrogation animating buddhism from its beginnings. And of course practicing deeply we all know that “being a buddhist” is not what this is about, that the question “whether to be a buddhist” is not all that important or profound, that subscribing to or identifying with some “ism” is hardly the point.

Yet these are real questions, with real day-to-day practical, mundane, conceptual, symbolic, relational, philosophical, cultural, political, economic, ethical-spiritual consequences. Getting down to it, the consequences, as always, are soteriological; they matter for liberation. Everything does. And it’s also true that this particular set of questions operates through relatively superficial formations and complexes of meaning – names, conventional identities, categories of representation, but also cultural traditions, customs and norms, lineages of authority and influence, morphogenetic inheritances, ritual technologies, secrets. The terrain is complicated.

Because what constitutes “buddhism” (which I recently stopped capitalizing in most settings) is complicated. The forms and vehicles of tradition encompass the full range of what we think of as “the manifestations of life and death.” As a buddhist, every moment, every detail of time and space, has some ritualized, buddhistically conceived articulation and place within the chaos-infused open system. Buddhism is life-and-death, and being a buddhist shapes life and death in every conceivable way.

On one level, we could approach all of this as a question about “the obsolescence of religion” and so drift in a more sociological, speculative, and abstract direction: What is the future of life on Earth? Are we moving towards a technological singularity driven by a runaway artificial superintelligence, and if so how does this alter our sense of reality? What if we are already living in some kind of superintelligent simulacrum or Matrix? Is that something we’re on the verge of discovering, through breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing, advanced physics, neuroscience, etc.? Will we meet our superhuman technological creators? Have some people already met them? What happens if technology leads to the transcendence of biological death, as envisioned by Bryan Johnson and other transhumanists? What if people like Jeffrey Martin and Shinzen Young succeed, and we end up with a button to push for instant enlightenment? Are psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT already fulfilling this vision?

These are all significant and imminently relevant questions – but not exactly the gist of the present reflection. I’m thinking about the words I use in my bio, what Mud Lotus puts on its event-flyers, how we describe our spiritual practice in conversation, how we communicate and trace the genesis of our spiritual-cultural inheritances. Is “buddhism” a beneficent and felicitous category for defining the scope of our aspiration and engagement?

The answer here need not (and in any case will not) be an absolute yes or no. I do find myself fluidly slipping in and out, sometimes “being buddhist,” sometimes more or less, sometimes not very much at all. It really depends.

And this is in the spirit of buddha’s own irreducible, open pragmatism. Buddhism as liberatory play, spontaneous happening, adaptive medicine, “skillful means” (upāya). The Lotus-of-the-Wondrous-Dharma Mahāyāna Sūtra elucidates this open, liberatory orientation, revealing upāya as the natural, infinitely potent spirit of reality itself. All of this just kaleidoscopic, interactive dream-display manifesting spontaneously and responsively, in perfect tune with our liberating, our opening, on and on and so on.

This buddhism-as-upāya vision allows buddhism to enter and exit the playing field as needed, according to a deeper buddha-logic, beyond-buddha.

How we proceed with this medicine play is always a springing-forth of myriad multifold adaptations, lotus-blossomings. How much of the tradition are we bringing aboard for this journey? What configuration of rituals, forms, concepts, symbols, gestures, will comprise this vehicle? The Lotus Sūtra uses the metaphor of “vehicles” to convey the different modes of dharma historically sprung from the buddha’s infinitely generative teaching-awakening. There the suggestion is that apparent variety ultimately returns to the one – ekayāna, the “one vehicle.” But what does the one return to?

See, these historiological and categorial questions about “buddhism” and its vehicles are not separate from basic theology, buddhology, spirituality, call it what you will. Start asking, and you are right in the heart of kōan.

Dear Ones

As we enter the new year – and I enter my final semester of Ph.D coursework – I want to return to the long-form essay, and to the core Buddhism/modernity dynamics that first catalyzed this Dharma Between Worlds series. This essay – “Playing the Buddhist Mind Card” – calls attention to distortions and misapplications of the concept of “Mind” that have shaped modern Buddhist discourses. The essay will be released in phases – each phase adding to the larger corpus that includes “Dharma between Worlds,” “Koan of Power/Power of Koan,” “Homing: Life of Vow,” “The Call to Renunciation,” “Buddhagnosis (part one),” and perhaps a few others. The initial vision was to assemble these into an essay-collection, published in print form. More on that to come.

Deep bows of thanks for your continuing support and engagement as our common mysteries unfold!! Your feedback is meaningful on many levels and always welcome.

Playing the Buddhist Mind Card

If there is any distinguishing feature that defines Buddhism’s unique contribution to the modern world, it is its profound embodiment of an orientation to reality as Mind. This orientation is the basis for tremendous innovation and challenge as Buddhism continues to expand its already prolific global influence. Some part of the challenge can be traced to a wide divergence of views within modern intellectual traditions about what mind is, or even whether it is. Moreover, none of these views exactly correlates with any of the multifarious Buddhist concepts that might be identified with the mutable category “mind.” Indeed, while the word “mind” (or “Mind”) has ancient roots spread broadly throughout Indo-European language traditions, there is no universally agreed-upon definition. This lack of consensus only serves to stimulate and enhance the creative interplay that makes the Buddhism-modernity encounter so radically generative. What is Mind? The openness of this question provides an essential groundless ground for both Buddhist and modern paths of inquiry – clearing out an integral space where these lineages can converge, mix, and mutate.

The way of this essay is not one of academic philosophizing or scholarly analysis, nor of traditional Buddhist apologetics or “practice.” Rather, it embodies a questioning that adapts itself improvisationally, opening to multiple interrelated strategies and perspectives. Such questioning thrives in interzones of uncertainty and ambiguous alliance, plays in tangled fields of hybrid relationality, mutating familiar constructs and dreaming nonlinear ecologies. In this transitive, fractalized, kaleidoscopic way of thinking, every thing encountered is many things other than itself; all is animate, dynamic, interpermeating, porous, a flux of intervention and experiment. All is welcome.

Here liberation blooms as an all-inclusive, transformational process; the mess of intellect gives itself away, little by little, or all at once, and questions freely unfold. Given my personal background and experience, some of these questions reverberate from years of Zen monastic life and immersion in formal Buddhist discipline. In Zen Buddhist engagement, Mind manifests as a live matter with myriad facets – an omnimpresent koan, pervading life and death. Rarely are there efforts in Zen to give Mind a strict definition. Nonetheless, patterns and strategies in the deployment of the concept “Mind” are clearly discernible.

To begin, let us turn our attention to the conceptual and cultural strategy I’ve come to refer to as “playing the Buddhist Mind Card.” In all its versions, Buddhist and otherwise, the Mind Card (abbreviated as BMC or MC) operates as a form of talismanic violence, weaponizing the concept of Mind. Implicit in this weaponization are more rudimentary functions of reification, falsification, and instrumentalization. As a strategy, the Mind Card is not just an individual’s thought-form or speech-act; rather, it is an organizing system for a collective form of life, an apparatus of cultural control.

Buddhism exerts a growing influence in the world – spiritually, intellectually, culturally, politically, ecologically, technologically. While the primary field of operation for the MC strategy is now the relatively small subcultural terrain of Buddhist modernism, its potential reach is much larger. As a civilizational template, Buddhism seems to possess a unique capacity among the “world religions” and other global ideologies to accommodate the strange confluence of forces shaping the historical present. Buddhistic worldview-adaptations are increasingly called upon – consciously and unconsciously – to interpret emergent fluctuations in world events and respond to the crises in which those events are implicated. Indeed, the Mind Card strategy has upgraded and evolved through this process, establishing itself as a cultural formula with great potential value and benefit for the planet.

Each tactical application of the BMC strategy can be extrapolated to produce many variations. The whole point is that all of these manifestations enact the same basic logic. This logic draws upon foundational Buddhist ideas – generally, permutations of the concept of Mind – to enforce specific configurations of power/knowledge/normativity, at the exclusion of others. We can think of these operational enforcement-systems as onto-political machineries.

In short, prototypical BMC logic states that you shouldn’t waste your time on X, because the root causes of suffering and ending suffering are “in the Mind.”[1] Therefore, you should abandon X and devote yourself to “looking into your own Mind.” Fair enough – Buddhism 101. Yet a closer examination of this logic reveals its coercive function, thereby unlocking hidden questions about the nature of Mind, and what it means to “look into it.”

The accumulated force of BMC-based thinking has produced a paradigmatic set of onto-political machineries, which have come to permeate the world of modern spirituality. These are familiar and largely routinized discursive-cultural formations, which can now be easily recognized. The first of these is The Spiritual Bypass (SB) – an old and oft-recycled term in modern spiritual circles. In the SB, an appeal to “Mind” is used to avoid facing difficult issues of a physical, emotional, interpersonal, or psychosocial nature. Troubled by conflict with an ex-partner? Better turn your attention back to the ground of your own experience, to address the roots of conflict in the mind. Persistent anxiety triggered by childhood memories? Look deeper: The Buddha taught methods to calm the mind by clearing away the ultimate sources of anxiety. With the SB tactic, complex processes of healing and self-discovery are canceled out, bypassed, allegedly superseded by Buddhist insight into Mind.

Next is the use of BMC as a form of Anti-Intellectualism (A-I). Reading is either a hindrance or a waste of time; maybe you should burn your books, like some of the great Zen ancestors did. Anyway, the dharma isn’t contained in books or thoughts or words; it’s found by looking into the essence of your own Mind. All the teachings arise from this source, which can only be accessed through “the practice of meditation.” Philosophical reasoning, historical understanding, sutra-study, self-reflection, contemplation – basically every form of discursive activity – should be abandoned. At worst, such activity opposes awakening; at best, it is an irrelevant diversion.

Then comes the Anti-Revolutionary Gaslight (ARG). Trying to release sentient beings from material systems of domination, violence, imprisonment, injustice, evil? Your efforts are misdirected, futile. Didn’t you know? Samsara can’t be fixed. War and inequality have always marked human society, and the cycle will go on and on without end. Collective action doesn’t really change anything; it never has. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter whether you’re black, white, orange, green, or maroon; rich or poor; free or in chains. Everyone thinks they’re oppressed; everyone thinks they’re right about the world and how it should be. This is just the deluded ego-mind generating false paths, false solutions. The world isn’t the cause of your suffering; it’s your own mind.

The Paranormative Erasure (PE): All that really matters is your commitment to looking directly into your own mind. If you do that, everything you need to know will reveal itself. Forget all that weird, secretive stuff happening in the world – UAPs, cryptids, encounters with the dead, psi abilities, unexplained healings, contact with nonhuman intelligences, psychedelic visions, crop circles, etc. These are all just projections of an untrained, confused mind. Such fabricated appearances are unreal and should not be acknowledged or pursued. Train and purify your mind with utmost diligence, and you won’t get caught up in unhealthy illusions. Find unshakeable refuge in pure foundational Mind, free of distortions and elaborations.

What these machineries have in common is a denial of materiality, a denial of form (Sanskrit: rupa) – or rather a selective denial of specific materialities and specific forms. Engagement with these materialities and forms is seen as a departure from the practice of “looking into the mind” – and thus a deviation from the true Buddhist path.

A refraction of this BMC logic, highlighted in the case of Paranormative Erasure, but more widely applicable, views the materialities in question as symptomatic manifestations of a deluded mind. Buddhist protocol, then, is not to engage with these mind-projections directly, but to address them at the level of mind’s root-delusion. Indeed, BMC logic often seems to be calling for a radicalization of liberatory intent and action – a disengagement from superficial matters and a turn toward practices leading to ultimate freedom and happiness. But is this the actual impact of BMC? What leads to liberation? How does BMC define or determine this?

As a coercive strategy, BMC logic is not employed to provoke a free, open inquiry into the nature of Mind and liberation, but to assert the exclusive priority of a certain set of practices, beliefs, and values. This assertion is based on a highly restrictive, insular, and static definition of mind, and of the range of phenomena mind is supposed to encompass. This conception of mind eschews relationality, elides otherness, and promotes singularity over difference. Accordingly, the cultural practices it supports embody a program of isolation, withdrawal, rigidity, and conformity. Stable conservation is favored over curiosity and novel experience; Repetition of the same takes precedence over mutating perspectives and multiplication of connections.

This impoverished, withdrawn, inwardly-fixated “look into your own mind” culture is presented by BMC as the essence of Buddhist spirituality. Indeed, the BMC strategy’s covert function is to propagandize for a way of life that identifies itself with traditional, institutionally authorized Buddhist practice. This way of life is compulsory, because it alone fulfills the ultimate Buddhist goal of liberation from suffering. All other paths of engagement are excluded, while “Buddhism” remains, unimpeachable.

Of course, such a narrow representation of Buddhism contrasts starkly with the richness and complexity of Buddhism as a living historical system. Moreover, BMC’s claim that this narrow, exclusive path is the supreme way to enlightenment finds many detractors both within and outside of Buddhist traditions. Finally and most importantly, the genuine call to inquire into the nature of Mind holds spiritual potency far beyond what is realized by the BMC view.

BMC’s reduction of “mind” to a coercive, ideological category actually serves as the vector for a multi-factorial spiritual disease. Central to this disease is a nihilistic denial of involvement in various webs of causal influence – an ontological violence that operates under the illusory guise of pious non-participation, a kind of renunciation. Practically speaking, such “non-participation” amounts to passive assent to the status quo; in this way, BMC discourse fosters a generalized quietism. “Mind” is defined so as to require total withdrawal from the conceptually-structured, empirical world. All worldly interaction must be renounced for the sake of “looking into one’s own mind” – the quintessence of practice. Anything that implies relationships with other beings, contingent situations, social realities, ecologies, commonly perceived sensory phenomena, is really just a projection of your own mind and should not be engaged directly.

Herein lies BMC’s radical movement towards solipsism. What, then, is to be engaged? Just this one thing – “mind” – whose nature and status are unchanging under all conditions. Only this matters, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Only this is real. Such an attitude is both fundamentalist and absolutist. Somewhat perversely, all of these features of BMC add up to a strategy whose grounding is purely intellectual, even doctrinal. BMC proceeds through implicit adherence to an idea of mind, which it presents as an unassailable tenet. This can only result in a manipulative form of ideological dogmatism. Fundamental to this warped infrastructure is BMC’s most decisive move, which provides impetus for all that follows. This is the reification of “mind” as a determinate, circumscribed, finite and exclusive entity, which somehow confers normative value onto some cultural forms while prohibiting others.

All in all, the clearest sign that the BMC strategy is a deceptive ruse is its adherence to an ideological, apologetic agenda. Its injunctions and proscriptions are guided not by free-spirited inquiry, but by a predetermined allegiance to Buddhist authority, which it seeks to restore in the face of non-Buddhist deviations. What does it mean to “look into one’s own mind”? Where, how, through what procedures, does one look? These honest questions are pre-emptively shut down by BMC logic, which surreptitiously identifies “investigation of mind” with specific normative cultural practices of Buddhism. From within the BMC machinery, this isn’t really about inquiry into the nature of mind; it’s about getting you to be Buddhist, to obey the authority of Buddhist systems and institutions. “Mind” – like “God” in authoritarian monotheistic discourse, or “Geist” in what Marx called “the German ideology” – is a super-concept designed to accomplish this purpose, in part by shrouding itself in an aura of incontestability.

Is BMC thinking, then, an expression of true faith, true surrender to the forms of authentic religion? On the contrary, this might be regarded as a path of idolatry. True faith knows no bounds. BMC is all about identifying absolute truth with a narrowly demarcated, highly specific and tradition-bound, way of practicing. Its goal is to justify and enforce this specific formalization through a strategic invocation of “mind” as the locus of spiritual ultimacy. In the process, many deceptions are propagated – such as the notion that absolute conformity to Buddhism is the truly effective way to address emotional, interpersonal, intellectual, social, and political problems. Some Buddhist advocates will claim, for example, that social justice activism “doesn’t really help.” Individuals must “get to the root of the problem” by engaging in Buddhist practice. Only then will the world undergo a deep transformation.

But what is the record of Buddhist institutions when it comes to gender and racial equality, economic justice, democratic self-determination, militarism, global climate impact, and the like? Not so good – definitely not a superior model for the world to follow. In some instances, where these issues are concerned, Buddhist institutions embody the worst of humanity. (Consider the genocide in Myanmar.) In general, it seems wise to ask: Do traditional Buddhist institutions manifest a form of society we would like to realize in the future? Is the BMC strategy providing a more radical solution to the worldly problems and situations it regards as secondary to “the mind,” or is it just ignoring them?

Let us not think this can all be blamed on ascetic, transcendence-obsessed, early Buddhist monasticism, with its renunciant ethos and extinction-oriented ideals. BMC logic infiltrates diverse channels of Buddhist teaching, including some of the most prominent traditional Mahayana communications. For example, Nagarjuna’s presentation of the Two Truths in Mulamadhyamikakarika culminates in a BMC-style recuperation of formal Buddhist practice-authority. (Even if all views are equally empty at the level of ultimate truth, the conventional truth of Buddhism must be upheld against the conventional falsehood of its non-Buddhist adversaries.) Dogen Zenji’s brilliant Genjokoan similarly concludes with a bizarre affirmation of “the wind of Buddhism” as the truly indispensable mode of transformative spiritual culture. And how could one forget the Lotus Sutra’s vehement and loquacious recommendation that “bodhisattvas” isolate themselves from all manner of noxious worldly characters (including women, children, “unmanly men,” hinayana practitioners, non-Buddhists, members of the Candara caste, materialists, anti-materialists, and folks employed in various low and unclean professions) and focus on cultivating a “quiet mind”? Indeed, the BMC strategy seems well-suited to Mahayana sensibility in that it regards mind as both absolute ground-level reality and as substantiating a particular configuration of life-practice. Often, the language of “emptiness” (sunyata) is found to operate interchangeably with “mind” – as when Mahayanists argue that everything is empty and void, and therefore Buddhist practice alone should be upheld.

Of course, BMC also manifests pervasively in the context of “consensus Buddhism,” understood as the generic, amalgamated product of Buddhist modernism. Perhaps, overall, BMC is best characterized as a deceptive misappropriation of Buddhism’s core teachings on the nature of “mind” for the purpose of enforcing a disciplinary regime of power. Thus conceived, BMC is not so much the expression of any particular form of Buddhism as an ersatz appropriation, which can be deployed generically under the pretense of embodying diverse forms of Buddhism.

And yet there is something deeply true hidden within the manipulative folds of BMC logic. The injunction to release worldly attachments and direct one’s life-energy toward the investigation of mind clearly echoes basic Buddhist teaching. Moreover, Mind is the medium of all liberatory endeavor; realizing Mind’s nature is liberation itself. BMC’s selective, exclusionary demarcation of mind, separating it from unauthorized life-activities, falsifies this reality. Clever Buddhist apologists will say that such exclusionist rhetoric is pure skillful means (upaya). There is a renunciant path, which must be undertaken in the early stages of spiritual life. This path necessarily entails withdrawal from certain worldly engagements. Even though mind’s ultimate nature is boundless and all-inclusive, guiding novices to the narrow road of “looking into the mind” helps free them from bad conditions and facilitates their entry into Buddhist practice.

The pivotal question here concerns this goal of facilitating “entry into Buddhist practice.” Is this an end in itself? If you say it serves the liberation of all beings, look again. Does it really? How do you know? What is “Buddhist practice”? Is there a necessary or empirically evident connection between “Buddhist practice” and liberation or awakening?

In getting people to do “Buddhist practice,” BMC appropriates the ultimate goal of liberation. Its machineries serve the power-agenda of Buddhist self-perpetuation, while mind’s basic nature is obscured from view. If healers, intellectuals, activists, and fringe researchers want a glimpse of Mind, why not let them have it directly, right where they are? Does shaping their lives into a Buddhist mold bring them closer or farther away from this direct access? What does conformity to Buddhist doctrine, discipline, and formality help them to do besides become propagators of Buddhism?

The specific zones in which BMC machineries operate are revealing. Ersatz Buddhism attacks where it feels threatened, in areas of insecurity, weakness, and uncertainty. One major force that threatens Buddhist authority, through complex and powerful channels, is modernity. To some extent, the BMC discursive apparatus is a reaction to this large-scale threat. Ersatz Buddhists have a tendency to downplay and deny the occurrence of radical ruptures and transformations in human history. (One might argue that historical consciousness is absent from Buddhist traditions altogether.) “This is samsara. It’s always been this way. You can’t fix it.” “What you call ‘history’ is just one big repetition – the same patterns over and over. Greed, anger, and ignorance – round and round we go. Humanity has always faced the same problems.” But the profound alterations – population explosion, ecological disruption, socio-economic mechanization, acceleration and expansion of energies – that accompanied the 19^th-century industrial revolution, and intensified through subsequent world-changes, cannot be ignored. Many of the cultural practices BMC opposes most adamantly are implicated in these processes of modernization.

Why would forces of modernity be perceived as threatening to Buddhism?

In the next phase of this essay, we’ll explore this question, showing how the concept of “Mind” governs the Buddhism-modernity dynamic – and how mandalic permutations of this concept can open gateways to Mind’s liberating nature.

[1] As we will see, there is a closely-related form of MC reasoning that denies the reality and importance of phenomenon X, on the basis that it is “merely a projection of mind.” This logic, which directly targets the ontological status of phenomena, operates explicitly in some instances of BMC. At base, however, ontological reduction of phenomena to “projections of mind” is implied by all forms of MC logic.

image from Tarot deck by Robert M. Place

Hello Dear Friends and Loved Ones. Now is the time to connect with and live grounded in what matters most deeply. We need each other, cannot go on without each other, are open to all relations by nature. Power’s claims cannot be trusted. Its agencies operate by stealth, concealment, illusion. Lines are drawn that do not define us. Manipulative forces promote trouble as it serves their purposes, burden and deform as strategies of control, all a setup. This is artifice, conjuration. What they proffer is not real trouble, not good trouble, not a movement of energy we can live by.

Fields we share are endless. We find ourselves, find each other, through webs of infinite contact, boundless connection. Every move and breath is a multi-response, interactive, a total collaboration. Together we are implicated in a vast, unfathomable weave of possibilities, opening distinct pathways of suffering and release, violence and healing, crisis and liberation.

This togetherness is basic and empowers us beyond temporary cycles of division and distress. It is the site of real agency and responsibilities, openings for action. It calls us to live on the scale of what matters, awake to our full situation. What is happening here – this luminous flash we call life? In what beyonds is it held, what mystery? Fragile, majestic, inconceivable, needing care at every turn. In what way does it go on?

At this level fabricated certainties and spectacles are worthless, uncompelling. Awakened in not-knowing, what we find is most intimate. Immediate life provides our actionable ground – direct action. We become practitioners, not cunning strategists. Our strategy is to embody the heart’s aspiration; our polis is the mandala of all interactions, the familiar ecosystems of our lives. This is the most vital activism we can engage in, the most effective organizing, the biggest campaign.

Spiritual practice has always been a political matter. Moment by moment, opening to love. Feeling the connectedness of sun, sky, ocean, breath. Touching the earth, being touched. Communing with creatures. Listening. Gazing into the full moon. These solidarities will sustain in the midst of changes, calamities. Choosing to trust our relatedness, our compassionate nature, enacts revolution, generates alternative energy. We feel this. No burden will survive our inevitable transformation. No conjured and fixed ideas will adapt us to a new world.

In the morning, compassion. At midday, compassion. In the evening, compassion. Through the night. Each moment the great turning is underway. Each moment, letting go of identity-contraction. Letting go of attachment. Letting go of grasping, anxiety and stressful thinking. Continuing to open, to be present. Meeting with friends, neighbors, families. Filling the senses with place, nature, human forces. Staying tuned to weird and far-reaching developments. Enjoying, offering, trusting, engaging, continuing in blessing.

Practice-intensity is often driven by a longing for the Absolute. This is a particular masculinist orientation – but then again the traditions we inherit are decidedly masculinist. Our own thinking will reflect this – and conspire to convert it. If reality is conceived as a polarity of Many and One, our monotheistic conditioning compels us to identify divinity with the One. Union, Totality, Wholeness, is what we seek – not otherness, dispersion, and differentiation.

Largely the drive is unconscious. We know the words, concepts – God, Brahman, Buddha-Mind, True Self, Dharmakāya, Absolute – and we elevate them. But subtler forces propel and organize our moment-to-moment engagement, our ways of intending and investigating.

Buddhist practice tends to move in the direction of Mind, reifying Mind as the locus of realization, the sphere of Totality to be clarified, the singular Place of Practice. A familiar Zen injunction: Look directly into the nature of your own Mind. This can get us thinking, imagining, hoping, that our aspiration will be fulfilled through a complete apprehension of this domain – whether by gradual purification or by seeing it all at once.

The Mind in which we invest our practice-energy is our own Mind – isn’t it? It’s the Mind of our direct experience. What we are pursuing is the Mind of the One who experiences. Thus there is a sense that looking into Mind is looking into Self, looking into the looker. And Mind is all there is.

These are all reifications. Not to discredit such efforts – which are essential. But there is something false behind them – fabricated, artificial. No one is going to find the Mind, the Self. There is no such thing.

And there are ways of breaking down investment in these falsehoods that open up new modes of practice. Rather than striving to penetrate into the nature of Oneness, there is attending to the infinite relations in which we are always and now participating, and by which our very awareness and self are constituted. This is a softer, lighter, more receptive attending. It is messier, more complicated, more entangled. Its curiosities and permeabilities are many, manifold, multiplying. Intricate and delicate, disorienting and profound, such opening may seem to desecrate our linear focus.

Such attending, embodying, accords with the spirit of interbeing, pratītyasamutpāda, “relational happening,” the infinite playing-together of all things. To shift in this way implies a decentering of our spiritual agenda, a displacement of our ordering sense of purpose and direction. At base it’s a further blossoming of the bodhisattva path.

It would be easy to simplify and misunderstand this shift, to turn it into a rigid ideology. Better to approach it as an intermittent and ongoing experiment. Very practical, immediate. Only active when it’s relevant. And we know not everyone needs the same medicine, not all the time.

A little opening of the senses, loosening the gaze, relaxing the body. A little release of effort, easing of tension, letting go of certain holding-patterns, allowing pleasure. Reattuning to this moment’s polymorphic potentials. For some, these small acts may remedy engrained habits of asceticism.  

Also, let’s enlist Mu in this mahāyāna bloom of intimacies. As much as Zen can sometimes seem militantly obsessed with the True Self, such projections are never left standing for long. Zen is self-subverting, ever in play. Mu as practice carries the deconstructive force of the always already, the dissolving-everything-it-touches force that touches everything, including itself, leaving everything as it is, always already animate, alive.

With Mu there is no place to stand, no alibi. No solidity or fixity lasts through its all-inclusive, continuous application. There is no escape.

So here we are, here it all is, in it together, making it happen. Don’t try to wrap your mind around it. Just mind your relations. Let mind be blown open by love, by Mu.  

Art by Bernard Dumaine

108: Most conscientious modern Buddhists will recognize this number as symbolically significant for the traditions they inherit.  Regular visitors to monasteries and dharma centers have likely experienced the in-group knowingness and low-grade synchronicity evinced by the number’s enigmatic recurrence. The reasons for 108’s importance, however, may be glimpsed only faintly, if at all.

References to the number are scattered profusely throughout Buddhist scripture, ritual, and iconography. Those based in Japanese Zen communities might recall the 108 strikes delivered to the ceremonial bell on New Year’s Eve at midnight. The traditional mala has 108 prayer-beads – an ancient Indic design that predates Buddhism. Some lineages associate 108 with explicit doctrinal categories or philosophical principles. For example, the great Mādhyamika tetralectician Nāgārjuna – in his austere commentary on the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras – multiplies a series of abhidharmic lists (6 senses x 3 feeling-tones x 2 karmic paths x 3 time-frames) to arrive at a figure of 108 afflictions encountered by the bodhisattva on the way to enlightenment.  

Rarely is the attention of modern, English-speaking Buddhists drawn in by these numerical resonances. Good Zen practitioners in particular tend neither to be impressed by the mystique nor curious enough to seek out any deeper meaning. Sangha old-timers might chuckle bemusedly at the seeming arbitrariness and irrationality of the phenomenon, or sneer with disdain at the superstition it evokes. Aside from a vague sense of conspiracy, perhaps the most common reaction is tuned-out disinterest.

Before turning to the question of why this is so – let’s get familiar with some of the profounder, seldom-discussed layers of the 108 mystery, which are frankly mind-blowing – especially considering that the meme emerged from a civilizational complex more than 2,600 years old.

To wit, modern scientific measurements confirm the following:

-  The diameter of the sun is approximately 108 times the diameter of the Earth.

-  The distance of the sun from the Earth is approximately 108 times the diameter of the sun.

-  The (average) distance of the moon from the Earth is approximately 108 times the diameter of the moon.

-  As a result of these latter two facts, the sun and moon appear to be the same size from the perspective of Earth.

Scientists have only been able to produce reliable calculations of these distances in relatively recent times. (The currently-accepted measurement of the sun’s diameter was obtained in 2003.) 

In addition to this uncanny set of convergences, 108 plays a key role in the astronomical phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes – the apparent gradual shifting of the starscape due to a wobble in the tilt of the Earth’s axis. This obscure-sounding natural deviation actually serves as the basis for the entire interdisciplinary field of archaeoastronomy. Precession is what enables ancient megalithic sites like Göbekli Tepe, Angkor Wat, and the Giza pyramids to function as long-count calendrical systems, by way of astronomical and mathematical information encoded into their material structures. Precession also undergirds the well-known ancient concept of “world-ages” – according to which the Earth is now transitioning from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. These transitions unfold in 2,160-year intervals – a round multiple of 108 (x 20) and, incidentally, equal to the moon’s diameter in miles. One full precessional cycle or “Great Year” – a backwards passage through the 12 zodiacal signs – is 25,920 (108 x 240) years, the same as one full yuga-cycle in the Indian system.

In short, 108 factors prominently in some of the most mysterious natural patterns linking Earth with its larger cosmic ecosystem. It is reasonable to hypothesize that these astronomical phenomena underlie the widespread incorporation of 108 into sacred traditions from India, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and beyond. Indeed, throughout much of human history, especially prior to the consolidation of the transcendence-oriented “world religions,” the astronomical and spiritual dimensions of culture have been inextricably united.

Why are modern Buddhists, and Zen practitioners in particular, so unfamiliar and unconcerned with these matters? Much can be illuminated by reflecting on Buddhism’s multicentennial encounter with Euro-American modernity. Since the 19^th-century, Buddhism has actively redefined itself as a tradition uniquely compatible with secularism, democracy, and scientific rationality. Efforts have been made to assimilate Buddhadharma to the modern world by extracting its universal spiritual essence from the conditions of its historical transmission. This has led to the formation of a decontextualized, individualistic, “protestant” Buddhism – a construct to which 20^th-century Zen was especially willing to adapt.

One broad consequence of this rebranding has been the gradual displacement of Buddhist spirituality from all considerations of myth, cosmology, and worldview. Often, this process is framed as a pragmatist or skeptical denial of traditional doctrines of karma and rebirth. The larger dynamic, however, is one of metaphysical cleansing and normalization – the enforcement of a narrowly-defined set of modern assumptions about what the world is and how it functions. Any ideas suggestive of nonhuman intelligence, animacy in nature, cosmic order and synchronicity, or weird causal forces more generally are taboo and must be expunged.

This cosmological purging has shaped modern anglophone Buddhism so thoroughly that its rank-and-file participants – and often its authorized cultural representatives – don’t even know what has been lost. Japanese Zen lineages have suffered the greatest attenuation. The immediatist ethos and spare aesthetic so vital to those traditions have been routinely conflated with an anti-intellectual stance of rigid, atheistic scientism. The continuous-awakening-practice of burning-through-makyo is mistaken for a dogmatic rejection of anything perceived as too “magical” or “woo-woo.” Certainly, this would include astronomical correspondences seeming to indicate some kind of intelligent intervention or intentional design in realms of nature beyond Earth.  

We would never entertain such far-out notions! For modern Buddhists, anthropocentrism, closed-minded Darwinism, and an amnesiac 10,000-year view of history are sacrosanct tenets. It doesn’t even occur to us that our Buddhist forbears might not only have engaged in such cosmically turned-on thinking; they might have valued the ideas enough to preserve them for centuries as numerological code.

So here we are, stuck with the occasional dumbfounding reference to the seemingly random number 108.

Is this how the ancestors meant for us to practice?   

Image: Angkor Wat in Cambodia, with its 49-meter-long precessional mural, “Churning the Ocean of Milk”

Zen is a matter of liberation. This much is clear. Great Matter, Heart of the Matter: There is no teaching, no transmission, outside of this spirit. Liberation is the path, the practice, the fruit. It is the starting point and the goal.

And yet the crucible of Zen is a forceful opening into breakthrough – a catalytic process of complete transformation. Zen practice calls for intense, immersive engagement. Every moment of practice is oriented in this way – pointed, directed, channeled to the essence of immediate, embodied realization.  This cannot just be rhetoric, the stylistic flourish of medieval samurai-yogi machismo. All the refinements, alchemizations, encounters of practice-life reveal an undeniable potency. Some perceptible metamorphosis is happening. Some palpable experiential shift is underway.

Experience, however, is not the solution. No accumulation or clarification of experience leads to buddha, awakens buddha, reveals buddha. There is no path of transformation from here to there. There is no procedure or circuit of causative action that unlocks liberation, opens the gate. The gate is open.

So what is the point of all this? What distinguishes the teacher from me? What is happening in this here-and-now crucible, this mysterious living alembic of zazen? What could happen that would not just be another flash of experience, layer of transmutation, delusive ground of identification and reference?

Anything that appears to awareness is not awareness itself. Try turning awareness to awareness itself, and what results? Often we just get frustrated and give up; we get lost again in believing our thoughts, our analyses and assessments of how practice is going.

Is there an end to this intimate, reflexive inquiry, this turning the light to shine within, this turning and returning? Is there an other side to this? Will I break through?

Faith is a word that gained new meaning for me, during my nine years at the monastery. Not the conventional faith of hoping genially for some promised result. Not the faith of believing in the veracity, efficacy, or reliability of some teaching or claim, which I have not yet confirmed through experience. Not the faith of investment in dogma, tradition, or authorized forms of practice. Rather, “faith” became an honest pointer toward the inconceivable, unthinkable, simple pure presence, beyond-concept. It was a reminder of natural liberation, and of the untrustworthiness of my limited judgments and views about reality. As one of my teachers might have said, faith opened a space of “no conclusions.”

In this sense, the embodiment of faith is continuing – with what? At some point, there’s no map that shows the way. Whatever realization is, it’s beyond what I can conceptualize or demarcate. How is it different, then, from faith?

Is faith just a weak, embryonic form of the confidence realized masters seem to embody unconditionally? Is the difference simply one of degree? I find these distinctions confusing as I observe teachers, and teachers-in-training, and reflect critically on my own capacity to teach. I feel a profound desire for liberation to be something decisive – something that leaves no doubt. I’m looking, waiting, hoping for that total transformation that will release all burdens, leaving me free to live as a flowing manifestation of total clarity and spontaneous compassion. A good, wholesome aspiration – and where is it getting me?

If realization is real – a distinct potential that can be actualized – then shouldn’t it be possible to develop increasingly effective methods for its accomplishment? If instead realization is a total mystery, not at all the outcome of repeatable causal processes, then how can it be approached – except through faith, through a persistent orientation towards the inconceivable, beyond thinking? And how would we even know if this was an approach? What would be our reference-point?

Somehow, wholehearted practice seems to require simultaneously the pursuit of methodical and disciplined inquiry, and the relinquishment of any effort towards attainment. Every Zen student knows this, of course. But the paradox and ambiguity can feel maddening – difficult to reconcile with any emphasis on realization, enlightenment, or breakthrough as a determinate, recognizable phenomenon – particularly one supposed to provide a basis for spiritual and institutional authority.

Indeed, this entanglement is somewhat theoretical, and the purity of my faith is lacking – but what good is “pure faith” in light of the possibility of imminent breakthrough?

Who can help?  

(Portrait of Lin-chi by Suiō Genro, New Orleans Museum)

Dear Friends,

I’m happy to share with you this peculiarly hybrid piece of writing, fresh from the interzone between paths and lives. In a way, it marks a return of the animating energies that gave first life to the Dharma between Worlds experiment. This substack has always been conceived as a borderland excursion, an open and unknowing quest through spaces of spiritual overlap and conceptual ambiguity. It was initiated amidst my departure from the monastery in late 2022 – after nine years of immersion – and my uncertain transition into another life and another world TBD. It was also an exploration of the alleged interstices between spiritual life – particularly as played in a buddhistic key – and the frothing abodes of the intellect, especially critical scholarship around religion, again focusing on Buddhism and its prolific studies. This latter concern, too, was personal, even as it reflected a broader terrain of cultural questioning.

The piece I offer now boldly embodies this questioning, boundary-crossing spirit. First, as a matter of circumstance, it was written, rather exploratorily, as an essay for a first-year doctoral seminar in Comparative Studies. Having re-entered academia, after leaving the monastic world, my curiosity has continued to be trained toward potentials for a mode of discourse that would actively bridge academic and spiritual communities, generating thoughts of true relevance and intimacy to both. This work is a practice-launch in that direction. Second (?), the essay moves towards an immersive, interspiritual engagement with buddhist and gnostic paths of liberation, ready to weave betwixt and between their fertile grounds of apposition, difference, and affinity.

This is just Part one of the buddhagnostic adventure and mostly serves as a (dis)orienting methodological preliminary to the full dance. The second part will sink far more absorptively into the substance, so stay tuned!

For those with a sustained and capacious involvement in these matters, you might want to (re)visit the early essays that spawned this site. Like this one, they stretch into longer form and engage many of the same troubling and bubbling subjects. I have in mind particularly “Homing: Life of Vow,” “Koan of Power/Power of Koan,” and the original, eponymous “Dharma between Worlds.” Maybe eventually all of these will be gathered together in one big place.

Thanks and Enjoy!

Buddhagnosis (part one): Filiated Lessons in Liberation

Comparative studies of religion did not begin in modern Europe – even if the category of “religion” is basically an invention of 19^th-century scholars.[1] For at least 5,000 years, and undoubtedly much, much longer, lives we would now recognize as “religious” have been formed through interactions and encounters with others living very different religious lives. These living differences have not tended to harden naturally into exclusive categorizations and identities; for such solid boundaries to develop, a further order of agency must be introduced, one governed by rigid machineries of knowledge, classification, and control.

         Since the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial-academic study of religion has maintained this latter function, while simultaneously opening a space for its own schemata to be problematized and refashioned. Older waves of religious comparativism and cross-cultural spirituality – such as flowed along the ancient Silk Road network for millennia – have tended to be looser, more adaptive, guided by a different order of pragmatic intentions and ends.[2] Most crucially, in marking their distinction from scholarly agendas, these engagements, which still occur, largely take place within the context of living spiritualities and sacred communities; their actors are practitioners, initiates, devotees immersed, implicitly or explicitly, in mandalic ecologies and kosmic orientations, ascetic regimes and soteriological stakes. Within such vibrant constellations, relationships form and dissolve on grounds of shared yogic discipline and common ritual participation. Alliances play out in urgent tests of healing-power and syncretic games of magical experimentation. Divergences manifest in the tangle of domestic discernment and dietary choice, sexual renunciation and talismanic commitment.     

         Such scenes illuminate zones of extracurricular religious study, which variously blur and traverse alleged bounds of institutional and traditional identification. These zones are interstitial and liminal by nature – hybrid, mongrel, multiple, mixed. To call them “comparative” is cheeky perhaps, and tactically diplomatic, but the term points to something vital about religion and spirituality, which in turn exposes the absurdity of rigid investments in scholarly classification. Religions are always interreligions, spiritualities always interspiritualities – and more than that religion and nonreligion, spirituality and nonspirituality, share the same boat. At its heart, “comparison” offers a lesson not only about the nature of religion, but about reality (and nonreality) itself. Every comparable thing is always already some thing other than itself, and thus always already implicated in comparison. (Show me “an elephant,” and someone else will show me one otherwise.) This otherwise is always both a distance and a bridge.

The modern study of religion, however, has been heavy on distance. It defines, and has defined itself, on the basis of an illusory distance from religious phenomena and living experiences of religiosity. Certainly, many contemporary scholars reject overt claims of epistemic distance and objectivity and have labored to expose their untenability. At base, however, the modern academy has demarcated “religion” as a field to be known from the outside, from the standpoint of a subject that is not itself religious. A posture of distance, of disengagement from the lives of the actually religious, thus persists as an unconscious habit – enforced through scholarly training, programmed into “the modern worldview,” and incorporated into the basic operating codes of academic life and discipline.

         In part, this academic enforcement of nonreligiosity acts out a vague consensus-narrative of secularity, which itself seeks to organize and substantiate a larger mythos of modernity. This mythos of modernity serves as a basic template of meaning as to “what is going on,” “who we are,” “what we are doing here,” “what we need to do,” and so on. Fundamentally, it operates as part of a reality control system, determining what is able to appear, what can be experienced. Thus, the potential impact of the mythos is total.

Early in the historical formation of “religious studies,” investment in this mythos was more explicit and ideological. Founding figures like Marx, Weber, Freud, and Nietzsche, with all the dynamism of their thinking, conveyed a generic impression. Anthropocentrism, disenchantment, self-determining subjectivity, the triumph of reason over superstition, scientism, dogmatic physicalism, anti-supernaturalism – these elements of the modern mythos would thickly perfume the atmosphere that scholars of religion still breathe. The high level of anxiety and debate surrounding these forces, in contemporary scholarly self-reflection, attests to their enduring, ubiquitous presence.[3]

         Of course, this program of knowing religion from “outside religion” emerged within the milieu of European colonialism and empire and is shaped by all the problematic contact between “natives” and “non-natives” this implies. The “question of religion” came to be associated – if not fully identified – with the spectacle of primitive humanity non-native scholars perceived in these encounters. This spectacle reflected everything “we” are not (or are no longer) – a stage of humanity European civilizations had evolved (or were evolving) beyond.

The methodological strategies developed by scholars aligned with this dynamic. “Religion” could not be trusted to reveal its own substance and significance from within; its truth could only be accessed by denying or reframing what it said about itself, by looking beyond its claims to a deeper, hidden level of meaning, which only the “modern” scholar could reach. This logic gave rise to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” to reductionistic social- and cognitive-scientific approaches, to various forms of critical and historical analysis, and, somewhat more intimately, to anthropological methods of field observation and description.      

         Together, these methods conspire in upholding an illusion of distance between the modern scholar and religious ways of life. And yet this whole intellectual apparatus – and indeed the modern study of religion itself – actively recapitulates a range of liberal-protestant Christian assumptions and modes of subjectivity. Ontotheological categories are imported; regimes of ascesis are replicated; moral orderings are encoded; spiritual values are imposed. Far from divesting from religious commitment, the modern study of religion forcefully projects a very specific religious configuration and way of being. The very construct of “religion” as a knowable object is shaped and colored by this implicit set of normative commitments.

         Acknowledging this legacy raises the specter of an adjacent path of inquiry that has haunted the academic study of religion since its inception. Methods of theological comparison, often devised to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over other, less elevated “faiths,” overlap substantially with the academic discipline’s colonial and white-supremacist inheritance. To some extent, such theological projects were only accomplishing crudely and explicitly what was refined and implicit in more “secular” approaches: holding up the benighted cultures of the world against the light of Christian Europe in order to verify a preconceived hierarchical taxonomy of world cultures.   

         During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various schematizations of “the great world religions” emerged through the combined influence of these approaches. A third, alternative way, not immune from the political and conceptual entanglements of colonial scholarship, but much closer to ancient streams of interspirituality, and itself historically marginalized by the academic establishment, is found in transcendentalist, perennialist, theosophical, and other mystically and esoterically inclined currents of engagement. These streams, which often spawned eclectic, if uneven, global collaborations, spanning the divide of colonizer and colonized, cleared passages for further deepening of comparative and interspiritual experiment. However, since the end of WWII, these streams have been extensively redirected and reintegrated into the academic machinery, severing, to some degree, their connection with essential questions and stakes.[4]  

Breaking Through

Religion, as always, is a matter of re-linking – yet how could the link ever have been cut off? Breaking out, breaking through, from the modern illusion of distance begins with the recognition that we are always already implicated, always already immersed – in what? Religion saturates human life; all culture is religious in ways we have not even begun to fathom or decode, in part because we do not really know what religion is or where it comes from. One thing seems clear, however: What we call “religion” denotes a very recent (about 5,000 years old), very temporary, historically-conditioned manifestation of a much more ancient, more primordial set of forces, for which we do not yet have an adequate name. It is not only participation in religion – the formalized institutional practices of the last five millennia – that modern scholarship has denied and sought to extricate itself from, but contact with this more fundamental field of forces.

         Among these forces is an essential, pivotal matter that holds the power of religion’s ultimate end. What is this matter?  What is the essential, pivotal matter that the study of religion, enthralled by its mythos of modernity, has broken with, separated from, forgotten, lost? This great matter, as well as the delusive drama of separation from it, cannot be comprehended or described in the language of any particular system or tradition. In its inviolability, it implicates all traditions and nontraditions in ways that open and derange traditional boundaries and queer traditional identifications. To call this a form of “perennialism” is to revert to a logic of distance, to the position of identifying a knowable historical phenomenon, and thus to miss the point. Always already implicated in the essential matter means always already on the way, finding the way, traveling the path, unbounded and inclusive, fully immersed, all-in

         “All-in” is not to say that social exclusions, stratifications, and solidifications of power dissolve, or can be disregarded. It does, however, signal that those stratifications and solidifications are not what we think and have no determinate or authoritative reality. Fully implicated, fully immersed, comparative assembly opens in all directions, boundaries in constant flux – holographic web of flickering interrelations, insubstantial, free and unfixed. Comparanda are unformed, undefined, prior to the moment of comparison itself. They exist only in relationship, and not before. In this sense, appearances show up only through their entanglement in dynamics and operations of power – interplay of perspectives and forces – simulating appositions and antagonisms, affinities and tyrannies, catalyzations and spooky actions. Every particle opens as a fractal shimmer of alteration and mutation, infinite bloom of otherness and beyondness.

         Practicing tuned to this assembly is an essential matter of quest(ion)ing, no matter what. Such practice is immanent, experiential, ready for transformation – yet it does not know in advance where or wherefore it stands, or what it will become. Cut off from this spirit of practice, scholars perceive only the archival projections of power – frozen, fixed, symbolic facsimiles – and lose touch with the vibrant mobility and expansiveness of living forces. In its expanse, power carries an annihilative, apocalyptic potential – the capacity for total confinement and total release. All power is animated by, and returns to, the essential matter; all power’s modifications are activated and propelled by its stakes. Immersion in this matter involves inescapable engagement with strategies and operations of power in their fullest scope.

         The essential matter is an open secret that has not been kept. As a matter of practice-theory, we might get by with calling it liberatory, existential, soteriological. Most of all, it calls for a dangerous, intimate engagement; its potency presents the necessity of total change. And yet it is not a vocation for the few. At heart, all are enrolled. And indeed, the technologies that accomplish its mission are already everywhere active, circulating their effects, working their wonders. None is exempt from this efficacy, or fails to partake of its productions. They are all we have. You must appreciate now we are not merely talking about “religion.”

         The matter’s secret is open in that it bears on us everywhere; we are only ever doing its bidding. And yet it bears on us now very specifically, in calling for the end of religion – both its destruction and its fulfillment. Religion of the last 5,000 years has not kept the secret – that is, not kept it openly; it has projected the secret outward into fetishized representations, substantializing and consolidating its power, setting in motion the logic of distance and reification that afflicts modern scholarship. The current regime of modernity (this is not the only possible modernity) has parasitized religion, bringing it closer both to its ultimate fulfillment and to its demise. The demise of religion is actually a reterritorialization, a transposition. Religious projections continue within this modernity by other means, through other mediums and channels. Yet, at the same time, this modernity’s specific denial and cancellation of religion clears the way for the actualization of its innermost end – its essential matter. This actualization occurs neither within religion nor within modernity. Indeed, it does not occur at all. This is the matter of keeping the open secret, which is always already kept, and everywhere encrypted.  

         This matter, let us allow, consists of a hyper-realization – a simultaneous maximalization and minimalization – of the secret at the heart of every mystical path, every esoteric school and inner approach. Traditions encode it in the logic of union, glossed by Huxley and others as “the perennial philosophy”[5]; it travels far and wide under the banners of self-knowledge, self-realization. Its most condensed, pith instructions are transmitted through the “essence traditions,” pointing directly to nonduality, rigpa, the Nature of Mind, wisdom beyond wisdom – no gap between starting point and goal. These essence lineages in particular offer indispensable guideposts for embodying the referencelessness of the matter in question.

         This is all well and good, as the immersive, interspiritual way does not begin from anti-religion, but from an inconceivable faith or refuge. Its openness, most basically, is this faith – the wakeful recognition that everything is the way, everything the path, everything manifests enlightened activity, embodies the essential matter. This faith makes the whole world a spiritual tradition, the totality of existence a practice, the kosmic flight a path – with all variations and fusions in the mix.

         Engagement with the variations and fusions – comparative, interspiritual relating – is integral to this open path, and to the transitional, transformational process that embraces religion’s end. As religious forms and practices are increasingly “modernized” and dispersed from their traditional contexts, every permutation appears as a gateway, a unique presentation of the kosmic kōan. This kōan, this essential matter, has no intrinsic connection to what we call “religion” and will surpass and outlive all religious manifestations. Its enactment is an unmistakable, improvisational pathfinding, an inexhaustible kaleidoscopic conversion of mandalic potentials. The kōan’s capacity for adaptation is limitless, not constrained by current visions of what constitutes religious or spiritual practice, or by any presumed structural morphology of a supposedly universal process of liberation. Its adaptation has continued through violent waves of consolidation, corruption, colonization, commodification, and it will flow and dance and heal like water through every season and passageway beyond.

         For now, religious traditions are far from dead; they remain the prime repositories for humanity’s ageless maze of mystery-contacts and unexcelled vehicles for sustaining the great matter’s work. Their inherent multiplicity and hybridity – their life as inter-religions – is not a mere by-product of modern rootlessness and market chaos but reflects an implicated way of engaging that underlies and precedes all modern interventions. This way, then, is not particularly modern, though it is emergent and emerging anew amidst modernity’s apocalyptic facilitation of religion’s end.

In keeping with the open secret, the implicated matter, this all happens through a disclosure and discovery of new horizons of beyondness, newly advancing technics of interspiritual potency and relationality. These discoveries break out beyond religion into uncharted experimental zones, a movement made possible by modernity’s transfigurative “secularizing” assault. Emergent nonreligious spiritualities, New Age scientific paradigms, advanced technological interfaces with consciousness, nonlocal virtual practice networks, are all mutant de-secretions in the strange process of religion’s remixing.   

Religion, as history’s primary authorized carrier of the essential matter, the open secret, has been incorporated through this modernity into a globalized order, which consumes it and reconstitutes it as something different. Amidst this process, certain regenerate “models” of religiosity have emerged as especially powerful and conspicuous vectors of liberatory engagement, which is to say vehicles of religion’s end.

Among these, Buddhism and Gnosticism are pre-eminent and have played uniquely pivotal roles in fulfilling and communicating the logos of religion’s passage through modernity. Both vehicles come equipped with templates of meaning that interface sympathetically and consequentially with the prevailing modern mythos. Representing immensely complex and variegated traditions, Buddhism and Gnosticism have both lent themselves to concise and even skeletal re-formulations, easily adaptable to modern discourse and practice.

Part two of this essay attends deeply to the processes, potencies, and resonances that distinguish these vehicles and empower them as intimate agents of religion’s ultimate end. As the inquiry proceeds, differences and affinities dance together, animating an engagement that aspires to be emancipatory and enspirited. A few sparkling questions to ignite in departing: What is Mind? How does a conception of mind devised in modernity become expanded or turned inside-out through contact with buddhagnostic teachings? Is a dynamic of bondage and liberation innate to the essential matter? What is the relevant distinction between individual and collective liberation, and how does this distinction play out in Buddhist and Gnostic paths? The end of religion is the end of what?

The End

[1] See, for example, Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

[2] Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization. Routledge, 2010.

[3] Perhaps the most compelling recent glimpse into these discussions is Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press, 2017.  

[4] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism in the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2012. 

[5] Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial, 2009.

art by James Koehnline

Thank you all for your grace and patience in engaging with Dharma between Worlds! My life responds to a multi-octave, modulating call. I’m feeling out how to continue along this medium-pathway of writing in the midst of prolific and mutating responsibilities. Much of my intellectual and literary capacity is taken up now with academic endeavors, and that is where my attention most often turns and turns again. The imagined boundary of the spiritual and the academic is of course one potent site of exploration for these improvisatory rituals…

Next weekend I’ll be traveling from Columbus to Rice University in Houston for a few days of research at the Archives of the Impossible. The AoI is rapidly becoming the world’s foremost collection of primary source-materials related to Contact and Close Encounter experience. It also houses collections encompassing the realms of parapsychology, Ufology, government psi programs, and the weird study of religion.  All in all, AoI is a unique collaboration among academic researchers, collectors, archivists, program directors, and first-hand experiencers.

Most significantly for my purposes, the AoI houses a compilation of thousands of letters sent to the home of Whitley and Anne Strieber in the late 1980s, after the publication of Whitley’s profound book Communion. Whitley wrote the book after going through a series of extremely strange, disturbing, and revelatory experiences, which led him to question everything he thought he understood about life and reality. The book is an attempt to reflect on his transformative process, and on the cover of the book (published in 1987) was the face of a being he encountered, and who, in complex and ambiguous ways, guided him into an unknown world. Upon seeing this face, many thousands of people wrote to Whitley and Anne, sharing their own similar experiences, which in many cases they had long kept hidden.

One of my aims in studying these experiential descriptions is to bring them into relationship with that body of mysterious and boundary-crossing phenomena we call “religion.” Many of the Communion letters indicate a process that deeply resonates with traditional accounts of spiritual awakening. What this means is a wide open question.

In addition to religious parallels, these letters describe tangible realities that point towards a complete reorganization of human life on this planet. Their authors encounter psychic powers, insights into the nature of consciousness, symbolic intelligences, and technological capabilities beyond anything the human species has on record. Humanity’s increasing entanglement with these potentials suggests new possibilities for Earth’s uncertain future.

The modernist and “protestant” forms of Buddhism that have gained momentum since the mid-1800s (especially in the anglophone world) often leave out the “supernatural,” “mythic,” and “magical” “folk” elements of age-old Buddhist practice. Often, this has included efforts to rewrite the history of Buddhism from a rationalist, pragmatic, scientific, or secularist point of view. In fact the vast Buddhist canon of scripture, commentarial literature, and material culture overflows with miraculous and paranormal happenings on many levels, such that it’s hard to imagine Buddhism without them. Just spend an evening with the Avatamsaka or Vimilakirti sutras.   

And yet there is a Buddhist tendency – not confined to the liberal-protestant varieties – to regard matters of seemingly apocalyptic or world-shifting import from a place of detachment. When detachment becomes disinterest, the state is pathological – complacent and disengaged nihilism. This might show up as not wanting to know, not wanting the secrets to be revealed, preferring to remain in (comfortable) ignorance, pretending hidden forces don’t exist. Or it might yield a high-minded hyper-critical rationalization that meeting superintelligent nonhuman visitors is no big deal.

There is wisdom in not being fooled about where liberation lies. And there are many ways to be fooled. But the meaning of history, humanity’s present crisis, what Earth’s future holds, matters. Matters a lot. Matters more than the fate of your local Zen center – though that matters too. Hooding our eyes, hiding in a dim stillness, simulating the acts of some ancient prince, will not do in the face of species-extinction, ecocide, the disclosure of long-held secrets.

Let us not be fooled.  Alien visitation is not your ticket to supreme enlightenment. But what among your activities is? What commitments align with Buddha Nature, sunyata, unassailable Diamond Mind? What engagements lead you away from it? (Don’t think)

Day after day, moment by moment, I find myself returning to the bodhisattva vow, radical bodhicitta, the dragon that never sleeps. Silence that pervades every pixel, light that suffuses deepest night.

How to be real about this matter we call “practice”? How to be real about what it all means, what is at stake. Where, here and now, is refuge?

This Wednesday Kisei and I host our first weekly gathering at ILLIO (It Looks Like It’s Open) on Shawnee ancestral land in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus. If any of you would like to support us (further) financially, we’ve created a gofundme campaign, which you can access here. These meetings are part of our collaboration with Mud Lotus Sangha, a network of local practitioners inspired by nature, and by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, among other sources.

As we prepare, I reflect on the mystery and joy of teaching – the paradox of offering what you could never have; the hidden truth that teaching is learning; the art of balancing spontaneous emergence with meticulous refinement and care. At its heart, teaching flows from love, points of origin unknown.

In my years of practice, I’ve been blessed to know many wise and compassionate teachers, and to receive the gifts imparted through their generous embodiment of dharma.  By far the teacher whose influence on my practice and methodology of meditation has been most elaborate, explicit, and direct is Dr. Daniel P. Brown. After serving as a mentor for several years to Chozen and Hogen, Dan led four weeklong retreats at Great Vow over the course of my residency. The first was in May 2013, just a few months after I arrived at the monastery, and the last was only three years before Dan’s death in April 2022. Two of these retreats were co-led with Bön teacher Geshe Sonam Gurung, and all of them included some interplay with Dan’s wife Gretchen Nelson.

I’d like to take this opportunity to share some key features of the approach to meditation I absorbed from Dan. He taught in the “pointing out” style of the Tibetan Mahamudra tradition, which traces back to the one-to-one or small-group student-teacher engagements of the wandering mahasiddhas. After downloading this teaching style directly from Tibetan master-meditators (with the authorization of the Dalai Lama), Dan refined it into a powerful technology, in part by engineering specific languaging and presentation to immediately induce subtle shifts in consciousness. He would deliver the words, and the states of mind would spontaneously be activated. Dan was a leading expert in hypnotherapy and served for 37 years on the clinical psychology faculty at Harvard Medical School; his professional and clinical skills were deftly brought to bear in the development of his meditation pedagogy.

Dan’s primary mode of presentation has a sequential aspect. The teaching is meant to induce a “shift in the base-of-operation” from the thinking, information-processing mind to awakened awareness, which is Buddhahood. Within a given session – and along the larger arc of lifelong cultivation – this process unfolds essentially as follows:

1)   Establishing the posture, with a strong base and upright spine, hands at rest, heart open, soft gaze. Dan would often highlight the traditional “seven points of Vairocana.”

2)   Stabilize attention

3)   Bring to mind the ordinary sense of self; scan through body and mind, looking for what this “self” refers to; not finding? relax into the radiant awareness that remains

4)   Eyes wide open, gaze into space of the visual field. “Mix awareness into space and space into awareness, until it’s one field of empty-awareness-space.”

5)   Open up to the timeless aspect of this awareness, the ground of awareness “not subject to the convention of time”; recognize that you are operating from this awareness, as this timeless, boundless awareness

6)   One last look back at any limiting beliefs. Limited, fixed beliefs do not define ultimate reality. In this sense, nothing can possibly get in the way.

7)   Ease up from any effort of concentration and let the coarse activity of the mind flow freely; all phenomena appear as waves within the vast ocean of awareness

8)   “Seal” with respect to immediacy: Everything in experience arises spontaneously – quick, quick, quick – recognized as empty immediately upon arising. Enter “automatic emptiness” (or “emptiness cruise control”)

9)   Recognize every strategy of meditation, every impulse to “do something,” as empty upon arising. Let the meditation happen all by itself. Open to the great meditation of Nonmeditation.

10)  Complete Nondual Awareness: View the surrounding space, the objects in that space, and the knowing of those objects as one unified field

11)   Open to the Totality of awareness, its Unbounded Wholeness. Practice of “Lion’s Gaze” – totality of awareness oriented to totality of awareness  

12)   From the Lion’s Gaze perspective of Totality, tune into the breathing body, and let the body float weightlessly within the vast expanse

13)   Recognize your True Face as the face of a Buddha

This cycle provides a clear path from the fixity of self-identification to the unbounded freedom of Buddhahood. While there is no substitute for the dynamic energy of Dan’s living teaching, remembering these guideposts can be of great benefit as a direct, immersive, experiential practice.

In my own small way, I try to embody this practice and incorporate its powers into the flows of ongoing transmission.