Readers who follow our other websites across Syntagma Media’s network will know we have for a while had an informal supplement, or grouping of blogs, concerned with spiritual and paranormal topics.

Now that A Spirit of Place is no longer with us, owing to the author losing interest in writing about places she had never visited, we have just two sites left in this section: this one and Supernatural, authored by Deborah Woehr.

However, in September we are going to extend the group with a number of new sites based on different topic areas. One we are very hopeful of setting up arrived as a result of A Spirit of Place and may manifest in the form of a blog written directly from Arunachala, that mystical place which was the home of Ramana Maharshi in the first half of the 20th century.

Others are in the pipeline and will make up a new supplement called MetaSyntagma. Stay tuned for more information.

This post is going to be a bit contentious, but I believe it to be worth it.

I’m going to suggest that an updated version of Buddhism — and other spiritual paths — is urgently needed if they are to be accessible to 21st-century people. As a start, I suggest that “bodhisattvas” are renamed “Nirvaneans”, and “Living Buddhas”, “Posthumans”.

“Nirvanic experience” should also be regarded as accessible to the many and as a normal part of “growing up”, not some fabled Pure Land only visible to the ancients. Until we change our terminology and show that Nirvana is as true for us today as it was for Gautama Siddhartha 2500 years ago, living spirituality will remain the preserve of fossilized religions and charlatans.

With this in mind let’s take a look at one of the great Buddhist scriptures :

The Flower Garland (Avatamsaka) Sutra of Hua Yen Buddhism has had a great influence on the development of Zen. It brims with stunning insights into the nature of reality and is known for its magical, cascading descriptions which numb the senses and tumble us into Enlightenment by the sheer exuberance of it all. Buddha Lands without end, reflecting in jewels without end, come flashing out from the pages of these exotic volumes. No scriptural work comes closer to the wild dance of life itself than the immense, final volume of the Avatamsaka Sutra.

“Avatamsaka” refers to the garland of flowers around the neck of the Universal Buddha, whose concentration is said to summon up the spectre of the world.

The sutra presents the flowing patterns of life as the immoveable concentration of the Buddha, or Awakened Mind. There is thus a completely unhindered interpenetration between the Absolute principle, call it what you will, and the normal life that we lead from day to day.

These nirvanically-realized principles are not readily accessible to materialistic moderns who rely heavily on intellectual solutions to daily problems and challenges. Hua Yen Buddhism can be difficult at times but, like all of Buddhism, the doctrine dissolves into “seeing”, a concentrated, continuous awareness of the ocean of being, or Buddha-nature. In the final book of the Flower Garland Sutra, the monk Sagaramegha explains his doctrine of the universal eye by which he maintains his awareness at all times of the unborn Buddha-mind, represented by consciousness within and space without, here depicted as the ocean:

“Son, I have been living here in Sagaramukha (Ocean-
Door) for twelve years, having focused my mind on the
ocean and kept it present in my awareness, reflecting
on the measureless vastness of the great ocean, its
pure clarity, its unfathomable depth, its gradual
deepening, its variety of deposits of precious
substances, the measurelessness of its body of water,
its infinity, its being the dwelling place of various
immense creatures … and how it neither increases nor
decreases. I think: is there anything else in the
world as vast as the great ocean, as broad, as
measureless, as deep, as various?”

The book expounds the Hua Yen vision of the world as the vast state of concentration of the Buddha. All objects and happenings in the world are his teachings for sentient beings, and their lives are their means of practice. The Buddha is raised to the status of an all-embracing cosmic principle, the one consciousness behind all things. Gautama, the historical Buddha, participates as Vairocana Buddha, reality itself.

Despite his constant presence before all beings, however, he is only recognized by Posthumans. Ordinary mortals fail to identify his “body” which is the functioning of the world, their everday reality realm. As it’s put in the “Great Treatise” of the Taoist I Ching, “The kind man discovers it and calls it kind. The wise man discovers it and calls it wise. The people use it day by day and are not aware of it, for the way of the superior man is rare.” Again, “It possesses everything in complete abundance : this is its great field of action. It renews everything daily : this is its glorious power.”

The Flower Garland sutra is concerned with “clarifying the eye of unobstructed knowledge” in ordinary people. The means for this are twofold : the great guiding principle of the Buddha himself, fully revealed in his world — this is the path of the quick-witted, and the way of “enlightening beings”, the bodhisattvas (Nirvaneans), who return to the world of birth and death to bring all creatures to enlightened Posthumanity. The imperative for human beings is to develop the “ocean reflection” through nirvanic experiences, whereby reality can be seen directly at all times.

“The universally good always fills the universe
With various bodies flowing everywhere,
With concentration, psychic powers, skill and strength,
In a universal voice teaching extensively without hindrance.”

All our ancient religions have been distorted out of all recognition with time. Until we reassess them with an authentic “nirvanic eye”, they will become increasingly inaccessible to the majority, and the playground of fanatics.

Can there be humour in spirituality? It depends which religion, or none, you are thinking of. Some faiths are very definitely humourless, others mildly good natured.

But Zen can be uproariously funny. In its attempts to shake the student out of the torpor of familiar thought patterns, it will adopt almost any subterfuge.

Here’s a passage from my book, The Nirvaneans, to be published by Humdrumming next year. It concerns Master Rinzai of Chinese Ch’an, founder of the Rinzai Zen sect of Japan:

Master Rinzai (Lin Chi, died 866 AD) was undoubtedly a tough character. The transmission from Huang Po (Obaku) appears to be full of violence and mayhem. First Huang Po administers thirty blows to his hapless charge, then chases Rinzai out. Later, Rinzai returns and slaps Huang Po, with the comment, “There really isn’t much to Master Obaku’s Zen!” The two giants of Ch’an seem to be constantly squaring up like boxers intent on flattening each other.

In later years when Rinzai was a fully-realized master, he had an encounter with Tokusan in similar style. On hearing that this master would instruct his monks and say: “Whether you can speak or not, either way thirty blows,” Rinzai told Rakuho: “Go and ask him why the one who understands gets thirty blows. When he starts to beat you, grab his stick, hit him back, and see what he will do.”

Rakuho did as he was bidden, then returned to Rinzai with the news that when he had hit Tokusan, the master immediately retired to his quarters.

“So far I have suspected that fellow,” mused Rinzai, “but since it has happened like this, do you for yourself now see Tokusan?” When Rakuho hesitated, Master Rinzai hit him.

The nub of this story seems to be the egolessness, or otherwise, of Tokusan. But why should there be such a welter of blows? It has a certain entertainment value, but is it religion?

Zen arose out of Buddhism because the Chinese eye spotted what it saw as a major weakness in the Indian Buddhist system. The flaw was a tendency to formularization. As in other religions, the basic principles, intended to help the novice towards understanding, had lost their original force. Now they were just familiar phrases for chanting and disputation. What had once contained a powerful meaning for unlocking the truth had “degraded” to mantra, a repetitious, magical formula for inducing a trance-like state, which might have its uses in other contexts, but not in this one.

Nirvanoception is my own word for space consciousness, the underlying awareness that allows us to glimpse the Nirvanic realm beyond ordinary consciousness.

Here’s a short extract from my book, The Nirvaneans:

You are all Buddhas,
but you don’t know it.
Bankei

Nirvanoception is the third, usually latent, mode of knowledge. I say “usually latent” because we’re mostly unaware of it. We freely use body-mind modes of “perception” (senses) and “conception” (mind) to navigate around our world, while remaining completely in the dark about “space consciousness”, which is working in the background.

Normal consciousness is narrowly focused in our heads. Nirvanoception is wide, space consciousness, which takes no heed of trivial daily concerns. It clarifies during nirvanic experiences because perception and conception are “left behind” with the body-mind.

The aim of any spiritual path is to clean up the doors of perception and conception so that Nirvanoception shines brightly in our consciousness. To be precise, it’s how Nirvana experiences itself.

That is the Enlightened state. It’s what Tibetans call the Clear Light. It allows a higher mode of being to possess us, effecting a complete transformation of personality.

As Evelyn Underhill put it: “Mysticism is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search for reality, for heightened and completed life, which we have found to be a constant characteristic of human consciousness. It is largely prosecuted by that ‘spiritual spark’, that transcendental faculty which, though the life of our life, remains below the threshold in ordinary men. Emerging from its hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his life…Under [its spur] the whole personality rises in the acts of contemplation … to a level of consciousness at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception.”

So what is the Path of Nirvanoception? How does it differ from other paths?

It is essentially the path of the Jnani (as Vedantists would say); the path of analytical meditation, or the wisdom stream (as the Dalai Lama puts it); the path of Discrimination (Merrell-Wolff); the path of Knowledge (Gnosis), and the path of Direct Seeing. All these “names” could apply equally as well.
Put bluntly, if you want twenty years of psychotherapy, see a Freudian analyst. If you want arthritic knees, try the usual paths of meditation. If you want nice feelings, try charismatic Christianity.

The Path of Nirvanoception is a direct assault on the summit of Nirvana by attempting to break through to a higher mode of being. The aim is to allow the “Suprapersonal” to clean up the conditioned, karmic entity we normally are, thus releasing the clear light of Nirvanoception.

The Nirvaneans by John M Evans will be published in early 2007 by Humdrumming.