Is Individual Free Will a Prison? More on Mahayana, Alchemy

I’m moving this to the top, to highlight some subtle but important differences.
michael

No-where or now-here
From: Max
Subject: General
Date/Time 2006-09-10 22:20:24
Remote IP: 69.86.147.116
Message
Hi Michael,
People see the truth based on their spiritual openness and development. Some see Buddhism as a doorway to a wonderful mystery, some- as a temple built out of dogmas and rituals. It’s our choice to lock ourselves in the spiritual prison and through away the key. Or not…
M.

Max,
I totall y support the diversity of paths. It is part of the Free Will nature of this realm. I have travelled widely and seen that the truth lies in the human beings choosing the paths and making them into what they create them to be here on earth. This doesn’t make all the paths the same, diversity has its evolutonary purpose both on the biological and the spiritual levels. That’s why I don’t choose my friends based on their religion/path, but on who they are.

None of the religions – Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam – have any inherent existence. They are all human constructions, i.e. expressions of human free will, and are sustained by new generations of followers/practitioners keeping any particular path alive.

So the ultimate underlying value here is cultivation of Free Will. But there are fundamental differences in the type or meaning of Free Will perceived in different paths. Most of them want the followers to surrender their individual will to a higher collective will, some in the form of a Deity/God that has never been a human and never will; some as a human that has become a deity (Christ, Krishna), some to a priesthood, some to an abstract concept of the elevated human (Atman, Buddha) or to give it up to an Underlying Primordial Ground (Dzogzhen, Ramana Maharshi). Taoism is mercurial, and in its evolution has embraced a whole range of these, from Celestial Masters deifying Lao tzu to wuji worshippers.

The alchemical point of view is slightly different in its specific application of free will. It posits that the human being has all the ingredients of the cosmos/collective within them, and if their virtue and cultivation method is in alignment, that they can express the highest level of free will attainable while still living within the human form. In short, the adept may consciously “cook” or refine the primordial within the human form, by internalizing its cosmic processes within the human process. That grows their level of free will while embodied. It uses the human form as the alchemical vessel of transformation, and hold humanity as an essential part of the divine process of Way-making.

Clarifying the differences between paths/religions allows humans to hold a clearer intention and to more deeply explore their creative potential – a potential that is given to everyone by the division of the Original Sprit into the Many.

Most importantly, deciding if one resonates with a teaching is the key as to whether one engages that path and commits to exploring its practices. It is not about arguing about beliefs, which are often irreconcilable – it’s about clarifying which practices will be most effective for each person to achieve optimum health and self-realization. For me, that means evaluating any method or path by its degree of embodiment. Embodiment is the culmination of free will.

I perceive fundamental differences in the expression of free will between Mayahana Buddhism, its offshoot in Chan Buddhism, and my investigation of the process underlying Taoist inner alchemy. In my opinion, the Mahayana Buddhists were most likely meditators who realized the falsity, the dead endedness of the mainstream Buddhist teachings and the problems it created – mainly that Emptiness metaphysics destroyed the ground for moral action. If everything is illusory, so is moral action. Plus, they saw that many humans do not resonate with Negative thinking.

Their solution: write up a new text, claim Buddha wrote it on his deathbed, and start a new sect. Was this revelation or cultural realism needed to allow Buddhism to evolve? I say the latter is more likely. Very common in the history of religions for people to invent new levels of Highest Consciousness in order the trump the old order of rellgion and gain adherents. And use the founder of the religion to “write” the text for them, suddenly (hundreds of years later) clarifying the problem with the original religion. Did the ghost writer of the sutra have “super consciousness” while He was writing the text? We can tell its not written by a woman, giving birth to form is still bad karma. The superconscious state of mind of the anonymous writer is a matter of belief.

The compromise the Mahayana made was to allow “essence” to have reality, but only at the level of the (to use Daoist lingo) Original Spirit, i.e. only the primordial essence is real and true, everything else is still false and illusory at the human level, i.e. to make only the physical samsara realm as “empty”, This reversal of traditional Buddhist termiinology was as far as they could go and still claim to be part of the Buddhist family (my opinion).

In short, the importance of having a human destiny and fulfillilng the soul’s desire to complete that destiny is still missing from the Mahayana version of allowing limited essence/function into the Big picture. It’s still not allowed into the little human picture.

Allowing for immortality ONLY at the collective level (original spirit, Buddha-mind) still does not offer a convincing bridge between the primordial and the embodied human being. It does not offer a cosmology as to how 100% of humans suffer from the “bad karma” of having emotions and thoughts, or remove what I perceive as an innate judgment AGAINST humans for having emotions and thoughts and thus creating more bad karma (rather than feelings potentially being the true expression of free will/destiny).

It is still NEGATIVE THINKING rather than POSTIVE THINKING at the level of the embodied human, even though the Buddha mind is allowed Positive Existence.

In short, there is overall still a bias against incarnation itself, this physical plane is a lesser realm that is to be transcended as the first possible opportunity, rather than an integral and valuable part of the cosmic process. The Wheel of Life itself has now been allowed to have inherent existence at the level of its Creator, but individual humans still need to get off the wheel in order to clear their bad karma of having been born a human instead of a god.

It avoids, or worse, denies the FREE WILL issue that humans have a spark of the Original Spirit within their embodied human self that makes them potentially REAL here in the physical plane. REAL means having “real free will choice”, rather than a phantom choice being made by a distant Original Spirit in another dimension, that rather clumsily cannot control the feelings and thoughts of its (puppet?) creations. I raise the puppet question because if you don’t have real choice over creating your own destiny, you are some kind of puppet, even if a divine one.

Now, I want to make clear, that this free will choice of path has nothing to do with having wonderful and divine experiences. One can surrender to the collective level of the divine mind and have those wonderful experiences download into your individual mind on any path, and feel that they are confirmation of one’s decision to follow that path, deity, teaching, etc.

But having a blissful experience has nothing to do with accepting responsibility for one’s free will, i.e. one’s ability to create a reality and sustain it as a harmonious and balanced process within physical embodiment. Bliss is not skill. The Tibetan Buddhists know this, and that’s why they emphasize skillful means.

Inner Alchemy and qigong are skillful means of getting deep inside the embodiment process at the human level.

My bottom line is not about choosing between the interesting or quaint or exotic or marvelously grand beliefs a particular path offers, but evaluating what level of FREE WILL it cultivates on the practical level in each individual human.

The highest level of free will available to a human is to CONSCIOUISLY CREATE YOUR OWN SELF at all levels of the process – original spirit, oversoul, soul, heart-mind, body. Sex is the most popular unconscious way to participate in that process. Inner sexual alchemy – simultaneously coupling the yin, yang, and yuan levels – ioffers the experience of a progressively higher level of that process. Bypassing the process is a potentially dangerous illusion that can be engendered by feelings of bliss. It can paralyse you to stay at one level. A tough balancing act.

If you don’t want to do the work of earning or learning that level of free will, then at your death my knowing is that each of us will be given the level of free will in other planes that is our “default” setting.

For most people, this means at death they will be dissolving their individual form into some level of the collective, and letting that level of the collective decide what to create next, i.e. a very low level of integration of their individual free will. The collective, after all, doesn’t want to be sullied by some level of “unproven” or “inharmonious or non-virtuous” individual will.

Religions are in the business of convincing believers that the followers have nothing to do but follow the collective, and that they will at death be taken to the highest levels of Creation/SuperConsciousness/God/Buddhamind if they are good/pure, did what the priest hood or practices demanded. How to sort through this quagmire of grandiose claims made for each rellgion’s promised heaven?

I prefer the Taoist alchemical approach, which holds that most of your attainment is going to happen while you are in your body, or immediately after the time of death. You can experience your individual essence and level of self-realization now, while embodied. So the body is the supreme vessel of transformation, and thus THIS LIFE is supremely important. It’s an opportunity, the body is not seen as bad luck or bad karma or suffering. Its your unique contribution to the collective process.

I personally am not interested in the teachings of those Taoists in China who absorbed Buddhist ideas about the process that undermine the inherency of humanity in the physical plane, who focus on Other Worldly Enlightenment, or who lack alchemical skill but make pronouncements about the process.

I have to filter all of Thomas Cleary’s translations to convert the Buddhist “mind categories” he imposes on the texts back into simple, experiential alchemical language of jing-chi-shen-wu. His books are great for Buddhists who have adopted Taoist alchemical methods – they are not necessarily seeking greater embodiment of their free will, but rather surrender to a collective level of it.

In sum:

Your post suggests that I’ve boxed myself into a kind of “spiritual prison” because I don’t see all paths as leading to the same marvelous end. This sounds to me like a religious judgment of a believer in the spiritual collective ruling-the-individual rather than the individual growing up to rule the spiritual collective within them.

I put Original Spirit below me as the ground rather than above me as the Free Will ruler. I say Original Spirit makes the rules, but it doesn’t enforce its will – that is our job as humans. This is similar to Process Theology in Christianity (God is Process) or Rudolph’s Steiner’s description of the notion of God in ancient Greece; God was omnipresent as divine witness, but not omnipotent. The “potency” or free will has been distributed to the Many, of which we are each One.

I don’t think humanity will ever get out of its spiritual prison until individual humans recognize their inherent free will as real and learn to use it in practical, embodied ways. That is still not the message I get from Chan or Mahayana Buddhism. When they evolve to recognize Heaven and Earth as equal co-creators within human form, let me know.

Your Prisoner of spiritual process,
Michael