by Harvey Kraft
This belief also served as the foundation for the Buddha’s Dharma.
In Sakamuni’s view the Universe was filled with enlightening beings. Because they were able to see, fathom, and articulate the Dharma as it really was, they had the responsibility to lead all others to decipher it. Everywhere beings from across space and time, those who embodied the Universal Truth in body and mind, had achieved this harmonious state by using the same cosmic Teachings that Sakamuni espoused to his listeners.
He would point out that mortal beings lived in a relative reality distracted by a myriad of illusions. Although they perceived forms as solid matter and suffering as real, he contended that all of life was at
its core insubstantial and transient. Ironically, he observed, conscious beings regarded as separate that which was inseparable, and formed attachments with that which was ephemeral. From his enlightened perspective of the Dharma, however, Universal Truth was a pure, dynamic, and boundless Reality—a unified, integrated, multifaceted, and balanced super-structure of existence. In this system manifestations automatically and repeatedly came forth and receded from existence. This constant flow of creation and recreation produced various types of forms, appearing in various places, constantly changing their momentary conditional states. Although the stream of life generated overwhelming and unpredictable results, he proposed that human beings could mount this system and reprogram it with enlightened thoughts that would benefit all.
The Buddha unveiled his Dharma (defined either as Teachings, Truth, Reality, Laws, or Cosmology) in deliberate stages. His Dharma encompassed the True Reality (what is the true nature of things); the fundamental Laws of Existence (how things really work); and a Universe of boundless space-time-scale and dimensions.
The Buddha-Dharma unveiled the “True Reality of all Existence” as a single integrated system. However, he explained that it was a paradox combining the tangible and transcendent. In the Dharma all things were temporary and changeable, while simultaneously all things were in essence “void” [of relativity]. He included in it the universal “Laws of Existence” that managed nature, the physical laws of matter and energy, the metaphysical laws of life and death, social laws of community, and the inner workings of the mind. The Buddha-Dharma was itself a large operating system governed by the Law of Cause and Effect, creating a dynamic conversation between memories, potentials, desires, manifestations, and relationships interacting within the grand cosmos of existence.
The Buddha constructed an inseparable link between the consciousness of human beings and the cosmic infrastructure. He then used philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological devices to describe the cyclical mechanism that brought forth the manifestation, recession, and reconstitution of all phenomena in existence.
The Buddha matched his lofty rhetoric with the capacity of his audience to absorb the visions he shared with them. As they grasped more in progressive stages, they would awaken a desire for greater knowing. In turn, the desire to know the Buddha-Dharma would trigger a self-transformative process leading to an enlightened consciousness of “The Truth of the Reality of All Existence.”
His sermons were the vehicle for unveiling his Dharma in stages, which was why the word Dharma also came to be synonymous with his Teachings. The Buddha-Dharma as he revealed it over the course of several decades was recorded in volumes known as his sutras. The goal of teaching it: to hurdle the barriers that stand in the way of Perfect Enlightenment.
BEING OF THREE MINDS
The historical influences and various circumstances of the life of Siddhartha Gautama faded into the background once he revealed the wisdom of his cosmic visions. Consequently, no biography of the Buddha can be complete without diving into his mind.
The mind of the Buddha is the equivalent of a complete and accurate knowing of the Dharma. It encompasses the scope, nature, and essence of all existence. He communicated its Reality, Truth, Teachings, and Cosmology through the perspective of one who embodied “it.” He personally erased the line between person and Universe.
Buddhists believe that his thoughts are unfathomable. Yet the Buddha taught that each and every being was a candidate for achieving Buddha wisdom, because all humans inherently possessed enlightenment. His objective was to guide humankind to the awareness that they could evolve to higher consciousness, which he described in the Lotus Sutra as the achievement of “a state equal to my own.” Ideally, human beings could see the reality of life as the Buddha sees it. But as each person is completely immersed in a bubble containing their self, vulnerabilities, perceptions, and interactions, they largely see their reality as an overwhelming struggle for survival, getting what they want, or finding a way out of this mortal mechanism. To become conscious of their cosmic identity in this context is a profound challenge. Given the difficulty of getting people to concede the presence of their inherent legacy of enlightenment, it was incumbent upon him to show the way— to guide people to an understanding of this precious source that was available to them. Therefore, the Buddha devised a method with which to “awaken” people to their full capacity by engaging the veil of mortal reality through the practice of self-transformation.
To that end, he needed to start somewhere and, practically speaking, he had to start with what his listeners already understood. His Teachings began with a comparative review of his religious predecessors and contemporaries. Upon this foundation he advanced his own unique cosmological treatise. To facilitate just the possibility of enlightenment for human beings, he proposed that the human mind operated within the same system and laws that made the Universe work. But awareness of it would not be enough. Awareness was but a prerequisite for aligning the two on a personal level. The goal was to actualize it.
The Buddha’s visionary ability harkens back to ancient shamanic practitioners, especially the Arya sages, seers united in the tradition of the Lion-Sun Fellowship. This designation emerged from the prehistoric aspirations of tribal visionaries to understand the “unseen world of nature.” At the dawn of history shamans intuitively understood that they possessed a transcendent mind. While they appreciated the value of sensory acuity, they came to realize that the mind was also a sense that enabled one to explore realms beyond one’s immediate surroundings. The mind, as they understood it, operated on three levels.
The Individual-Mind provided a self-identity based on internal thoughts, feelings, and sensations. It formed the basis for consciousness, volition, behavior, and experiences, and also created the boundaries that separated “me from other.” The Shared-Mind was the collective identity of two or more persons with common interests, relationships, passions, and shared goals. For the tribe, it formed the basis for communal unity. In a modern context, this mind is formed by sharing beliefs, thoughts, and emotions between relational composites such as couples, families, workers, cultures, nations, religions, political alliances, and more—but it also creates the consciousness of “us versus them.” In addition, they realized that each person was part of a boundless Universal-Mind, an all-inclusive, non-differentiating higher identity that probed beyond the apparent and experiential. This mind unified all beings, all things, and the cosmos.
Ancient seers relying on the Universal-Mind envisioned a dual world divided into mortal and immortal planes. They used trance states to cross from one plane of existence to the other. From this consciousness of a greater sphere of existence emerged religions, gods, and cosmologies connecting human beings with natural phenomena, circumstances and events, exotic dimensions, divine beings, and other powerful forces.
The earliest religious communities were built on some form of locally-defined divine order. That’s why when conflicts arose among groups or settlements, opponents saw it as a war between opposing spiritual powers. Whoever won in battle could claim the stronger god and superior divine vision. History proves that religious leaders came to rely on militant authorities to win religious arguments and convert neighbors.
Buddhism rejected the idea that military power could
be used for settling issues of Universal Truth. It saw militarism and violence as the embodiment of chaotic behaviors and vowed to rid the world of this affliction. Buddhism was built on the notion that experiencing the greater knowledge of self and the cosmos through a mind-probing practice could produce an accurate comprehension of Universal Truth, and in the process transform the instinctual individual into a cosmic being.
In place of conflict and war, Buddhism sought to employ self-transforming practices in pursuit of enlightened wisdom. Furthermore, Buddhism offered to put its wisdom to the test. Rather than requiring blind faith in divine powers, it proposed that coming to terms with the Truth of Existence would liberate people from the cycle of suffering.
Liberation required one to look into the Buddha’s visions and contemplate their meanings. With a strong desire to explore the Universal-Mind within oneself, individuals could enter the Buddha’s vast and deeply profound cosmology where they would find a uniquely personal and self-transforming experience.
That’s because buried within one’s Universal-Mind is a deep-seeded need to know all that there is to know. The Universal-Mind operates on a super-conscious level—a higher level of consciousness that neither belongs exclusively to one individual nor any groups of people. It is always present within and without, whether one is conscious of its presence or not. This relatively inconceivable super consciousness, neither confined to one’s waking hours nor to sleeping states, is the portal where human beings confront the deepest and most elusive questions of existence: “Why was I born? . . . What is the purpose of my life? . . . What’s in store for me in the future?”
THE GRAND PERCH
When ancient shamans first explored the “transcendent sense” beyond the “here and now,” they used spiritual skills to “see” without eyes, “hear” without ears, “smell” without a nose, “taste” without a mouth, and “feel” without touching. They probed their immediate surroundings and discovered an “unseen” world within nature, and then they opened the gate to a cosmic landscape in the celestial realm above.
As religion advanced, spiritual practitioners realized that the mind was full of illusions. The ability of people to conceptualize, imagine, theorize, realize, foresee, perceive, intuit, fathom, and believe also meant that the mind was vulnerable to misconstrue or even hallucinate.
Using the Universal-Mind, shamans cultivated the skills to view spiritual entities and the power to actualize the imagined. It was this inherent yet mysterious talent that had made it possible to observe the hidden works of nature and to see therein unseen forces and patterns; sense what another person was feeling; grasp the continuity of time and the dynamic comings, goings, and endings of things; and look up at the sky and view in it far-away places beyond this world.
They learned that the Universal-Mind used dream language to communicate, and based on this knowledge, they devised a mythological language. Symbolism, imagination, and metaphor, the stuff that dreams and fantasies were made of, were the tools they used to connect with “cosmology.”
The Buddha, perhaps the master shaman of all shamans, used these skills to reach into the boundless repository of the Universal-Mind. He saw in it a database of memories and possibilities that made the manifestation of all phenomena possible. This information, he proposed, was stored in a non-local, super-conscious plane. His Teachings were based on the thesis that this formless universal storehouse was the fountainhead of life from which all phenomena toggled between potential and activated states. He communicated this grand reality in the language of “mythology”—the symbolic shorthand of visions, metaphors, myths, and dream images.
Today the word “mythology” implies fiction, and “cosmology” has become an ever-expanding realm observed through the tools of modern science.
Long ago shamans using trance visions explored the hidden “cosmology” of nature and the cosmos. “Mythology” was the language they used to convey their findings. People accepted the notion that shamans could see into the unseen world—and relied on them to communicate accurate visions of the realms beyond.
From the perspective of a visionary mystic, tapping the Universal-Mind was equivalent to telescopic wisdom or a view from the mountaintop—allowing the sage to examine the present from the perspective of a larger scope of causes and effects. If a “tuned in” being has developed the conscious capacity and co-creative skills to “read” (i.e., envision) and “write” (i.e., actualize) information onto the tableau of existence, they would be liberated from the automated functionality and narrow scope of the Individual-Mind or Shared-Mind.
Shamans understood that the Universal-Mind transcended boundaries, yet it was ever-present. It was as big as the Universe and encompassed all its possibilities. It was profoundly ubiquitous, far ranging, and nuanced. Its scope extended beyond one’s externally directed senses. It enabled one to detect the presence of that which was non-physical, even if it were hidden, disguised, remote, or even no longer present. Attuned human beings could use it to sense “potential”—what could be, should be, or will be.
In the ordinary course of their lives, many people use the Universal-Mind either as an intuitive or creative resource, or find access to it through prayer or faith in the divine. However, the noise of one’s Individual-Mind or Shared-Mind can interfere with the Universal-Mind, easily distorting thoughts or producing bewildering emotions. When one accesses the Universal-Mind with a level of clarity, the Individual-Mind or Shared-Mind may feel threatened by the higher mind’s challenge to its misconceptions. This is why it is difficult for people to distinguish among their three minds; why people prefer the familiar to what is new, hard to understand, or foreign; and why they quickly reject ideas that do not fit in with what they have come to believe.
And yet, amid all the confusion born of ordinary mental and emotional engagement with the world, people continually search to understand themselves. This desire to know ourselves, whether it is conscious or unconscious, reveals that human beings are intrinsically driven to learn why it is that they exist. To find that answer, seers and philosophers throughout the ages have aspired to decipher the profound meanings and mysteries of life.
From the grand perch of the Universal-Mind, humankind has been able to tap into a boundless Universe. What have we discovered there? Is it god, nature, or some reality as yet inconceivable? Will people succeed in finding the ultimate Truth of the Universal-Mind?
Civilization was born out of the continual pursuit for meaning and purpose. Today, as science discovers more about the mind and the Universe, the mystery of existence continues to outpace the ability of human beings to see, grasp, fathom, or penetrate it. Despite the growing explosion of knowledge available to the human race, our ability to pierce the ultimate secrets of the Universal-Mind remains as illusive as it has ever been.
SUPER COSMIC SYSTEM
Long ago, religious seers connected the mortal world and the afterlife with a soul that once separated in death would travel between these dimensions. The Buddha argued against this notion of two distinct entities, one a mortal form and the other a detachable spirit, that co-existed temporarily from birth to death. Instead, he reasoned that the information presumably encased in a soul-entity was to be found in the Universal-Mind. Just as a body of water could not be distinguished from its component drops, the Universal-Mind was a boundless ocean of infinite “meanings“ that contained all the information in existence, and each expression of mortal life was like a drop in that vastness. In this context, he contended, the information for every meaning or phenomenon, for every being, whether in a potential or manifest state, was ever-present and inseparable from the whole of all existence.
Buddhism linked the boundless scope of existence to the essence of individual life through a super-structure that encompassed everything. At the base of this system the Buddha viewed an underlying infrastructure composed of three boundless and inseparable fields, which he identified as Form, Formlessness, and Desire. This Threefold Field of Existen
ce described the essence of each and every phenomenon, as well as the scope and nature of all phenomena. He viewed everything across space-time-scale and dimension as an expression of the Threefold Field of Form, Formlessness, and Desire.
In the Buddha’s view, any phenomenon no matter its apparent form was in essence rendered from a formless “set of data”—composed of memories and potentials. This actionable information operated across past, present, and future, and even across lifetimes. It was called “Karma” and referred to all possible phenomena whether they were constituted of a person, groups of people or things, a fleeting thought, or emotion, or all of existence.
The Buddha envisioned the Universal-Mind as a cosmic super-system that permeated and encompassed everything. Everything in it was dynamic, transient, and cyclical. Therefore, the present large-scale Universe of Form was temporary and all subjects and objects in it were relative and mortal. But, from another perspective, the Universe was also made of Formlessness, and as such, was a holographic projection without substance at its core. In addition, the Universe of Existence was able to operate and change its attributes, because of the Field of Desire, the source triggering the manifestation of all things.
Using his Universal-Mind to identify the Threefold Field was an accomplishment of such profound meaning that only a Perfectly Enlightened being could fathom it. Nevertheless, the Buddha declared that those who would choose to follow his Teachings in due course would accomplish a state-of-being equal to his own.
To that end he went on to reveal the full spectrum of Buddhist Cosmology using mythic language. As his Teachings unfolded over decades he unveiled the scope, nature, and essence of existence organized here into a four-fold cosmographic system composed of: