Mandala of Love

Resting as Consciousness with the mandala wisdom as our guide, everything falls into place at last.

To the Trikāya, which is the true nature of all Dharmas,
non-dual, limitless, profound and vast, I make obeisance.
I worship the unmade, the unlimited, and the eternal.
I make confession of the sin of not knowing
that my own mind is the Buddha.
Rejoicing in the natural state, the self-aware, I request
the Buddha to revolve the ungraspable, omnipresent
and all-accomplishing Dharma Wheel.
I pray that the mundane and the transcendental
may be established in oneness.
Whatever obeisance and worship I have performed,
I transmute into the great shunyatā.
May all beings attain both shunyatā and great bliss.

I hope you enjoy my articles. The various inter-related categories of my writing are described below, and my coaching and teaching work is described below that. Keep scrolling to find links to my most recent articles. On a computer you can hover your pointer over the categories in the menu bar above to reveal the sub-menus, and listings of the articles. On a mobile, the articles are best read in a ‘landscape’ orientation.

Current Mandala of Love Projects:

I have not been able to find time to add much to the Mandala of Love website in recent months, as I have been in a full-time caring role taking care of a close family member. Below are a few of the projects that I have either been working on recently, or hope to be returning to before too long:

1. New Email List Sign-Up Page – Click Here

I have recently created a new page for email subscriptions (here), and would very much encourage you to add your email to the Mandala of Love list. In addition, if you are interested in the online course program that I have outlined below, please consider subscribing to that list also.

2. Five Wisdoms Mandala – A Program of Online Courses

I am currently preparing material for a Zoom-based group training program, so that those who want to engage more deeply with the themes that I have been presenting on the Mandala of Love website articles, can do so. I have chosen to call the program of courses Five Wisdoms Mandala. Click here for more details. The program will be presented via weekly group-Zoom sessions, which will each run for two hours with a short break. The courses will be structured into a series of modules – the initial course will probably have at least three six-week modules, making eighteen Zoom sessions altogether. It will include guided meditations; powerpoint presentations; self-enquiry dyad exercises; group discussion; and group question and answer sessions.

For those interested in these Zoom-based group trainings on the Mandala of Love themes, I have provided a summary of the main components of the program here.

You can sign up for email notifications here if you would like to receive information about these courses.

3. Anti-War Writing – Challenging Asura Culture in the Modern World

Those who have followed my writing on meditation and self-enquiry closely, may know that I give particular importance to the individual and collective psychology that we find symbolised in Buddhist tradition by the archetypal asura Realm. The asura Realm is associated with the green, northern quadrant of the mandala, where we see that our innate human potential for empathy and compassion, and for the fearlessness that springs from confidence in the beneficial power of the Transcendental, is lost due to our personalising identification with the samskāras skandha (the volitional energies). This identification leads to the egoic power-drive of the klesha of irshya (envy), and to dominant, conflictual, and manipulative ways of being. For more on this, see my articles here and here.

The Buddhist tradition is telling us, in the language of an archetypal psychology, that our personalising identification with the volitional energies , is personally and collectively very dangerous indeed, because it can lead the world to become lost in a particularly dark, violent and unconscious style of embodiment. The asuras are the powerful and obsessive ‘war gods’ of ancient Indian mythology, who are eternally at war with the benign devas, who are associated with refined ethical sensibility and positive emotion. It could be argued that, more than any other, it is the asura archetype that shapes human history – and yet it is very little known, and given very little attention, even by most Buddhists. While we need to be vigilant regarding the asura tendency in our own nature, I believe that we also need to be recognising it, naming it, and pushing back against it when we see it in our external world. While I have recently begun to write a few anti-war articles on this website, which you can find listed here, most of my anti-war writing can be found on my personal Facebook page which is here.

My ethical and compassionate response to the tragedy of the Ukraine crisis is complex, and is likely to be misunderstood by many people. While I recoil in horror at violence of this sort, or any sort, my training in nonviolence, mediation, and Buddhist meditation and self-enquiry, leads me to be more interested in understanding the conditions that lead to violence, than in mere condemnation of it. Rather than simply rushing to judgement, and joining the calls for more weapons for Ukraine, and for the punishment of the population of the Russian Federation through sanctions, I take a much wider historical perspective on the conflict than we are currently being presented with in the mainstream media. I prefer instead to ask what awareness we can bring, which might contribute to understanding, to resolution, to mediation, and to a break in the cycle of violence rather than a further escalation of it. This seems particularly necessary, since a major cause of the original escalation of the civil war in Ukraine into a direct Russia-Ukraine conflict has been the confusion and misinformation, much of it deliberate, that has surrounded the crisis, and has accompanied the deeply irrational and provocative actions of the US and NATO.

My extensive study of the historical and geopolitical background to this war, leads me to see this as a war in which Russia has, in absolute desperation, used military force to protect its own security, and the security of the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine. The military confrontation that we are seeing was predicted 28 years ago, and it was perhaps inevitable, given NATO’s determination to expand to Russia’s borders, and its complete unwillingness to consider Russia’s reasonable security needs. It was brought very much closer, and perhaps even made inevitable, by the reckless US-facilitated coup in Ukraine in 2014, and by the passivity of the international community as 14,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians were killed (and 50,000 were injured) by the sniper attacks and shelling from the Ukrainian army and its associated neo-Nazi militias over the 8 years from Feb 2014 to Feb 2022 – over a thousand people were killed by landmines alone. The fanatically anti-Russian neo-Nazi militias have been a minority element in Ukrainian society since WW2. US intelligence services have worked with these groups since that time, but it is the more recent actions of the US, that have allowed them to become the dominant political force that they have become in Ukrainian society today.

An image from the Indian movie ‘Mahabharat’.

The actions of both Ukraine and the US and the other NATO countries, can be seen as expressions of the violent and manipulative spirit of the asura realm playing out very concretely and extremely destructively on the geopolitical stage – as it always will until we learn to recognise it and challenge it. Ultimately, in my view, the resolution of this horrific conflict is to be found, not only in an honest enquiry into its economic and historical causes, but also in reflection on its spiritual/psychological causes. I would like to provide a little of both in the articles on this website.

4. Summaries of the ‘Meditation Guidance’ Series of Articles

There are currently 43 articles in my introductory series on meditation, self-enquiry, and the psychology of the mandala, which I initially chose to call ‘Meditation Guidance’. I generally recommend this initial series of articles to anyone who is new to the Mandala of Love website. I have now written summaries for the first 37 articles in this series and this listing is available by clicking here, or on image below. For more information on this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series, please see my description further down this page.

5. The Rūpa Skandha – A Twelve-Part Series

Click on the title above to read the first article in a series of twelve articles, which together take a very deep, broad and detailed look at what recognising the emptiness of the rūpa skandha, the ‘form-creating’ skandha, might mean in practice. This series is part of a larger series of articles, which can be found under the ‘5 Wisdoms’ menu above, and in which I will eventually be covering each of the five skandhas in turn. To read from the beginning of the ‘5 Wisdoms’ series click here.

The fact that the rūpa skandha is associated, in the Bardo Thodol (the so-called ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’), with both the Mirror-Like Wisdom and the Buddhist ‘Hell Realms’ (with their archetypal imagery of inhumane mental judgement, condemnation and hatred – leading to horrible tortures and punishments), establishes very clearly that the rūpa skandha is best understood to be referring to the Thinking function of the mind. The rūpa skandha however, is usually rendered, not by more accurate and descriptive words like ‘conceptualisation’, or ‘conceptual form’, but simply by the word ‘Form’. This introduces a confusion in which the rūpa skandha, the concretising, form-creating dimension of the mind’s cognitive functioning, and the corresponding ‘form-data’ of mental experience, is frequently associated with ‘the body’ in the concrete, sensory, and corporeal sense of the word – an association that is best reserved for vedanā, the skandha of Sensing, or the perception of Sensation. These articles aim to recover the great power of the Buddha’s ‘Five Skandhas‘ teaching by addressing this area of confusion.

6. The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala

During the last couple of years, I have had very little time for writing, but have begun work on a series of longer articles on the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu mandala that were described by Padmasambhava in his Bardo Thodol teachings. I have taken as my starting point, the central five verses in Padmasambhava’s ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’ (which you can read here). I have found these verses inspirational ever since I was introduced to them nearly 40 years ago, and I hope you will find them the same.

In this series, I am aiming to show meditators how each one of the five male Buddhas and the five female Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here, and brief summaries of all the articles that I have written so far, can be found here.

#Consciousness #Meditation — Teaching at Temple Byron in 2018

Meditation and Self-Enquiry

(under the ‘Meditation’ menu above)

The introductory series of 43 articles on meditation and self-enquiry, which I chose to call the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series, and which is listed under the ‘Meditation’ menu above, was my main focus in 2017 and 2018. I tried to write these articles in a way that would make them accessible to anyone who might have a general interest in meditation, self-awareness, and spiritual development. My approach to meditation and Mindfulness is distinctive, and perhaps idiosyncratic, because, although it is based on the Buddhist psychology of non-duality, and on the mandala-wisdom of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, it also makes use of the translations of the Buddhist skandhas that we find in the English translations of Carl Jung. Jung borrowed very heavily from Buddhism in the development of his own mandala model of the psyche – unfortunately without acknowledging his debt. I am borrowing back from Jung – and I certainly acknowledge a great debt to him.

An important source of inspiration for these articles was my deepening appreciation of the meeting of Quantum Physics and Quantum Biology with Neuroscience, which is now taking place. I find this to be most fully articulated in the brilliant Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis in regard to the nature of the brain-Consciousness interface – a hypothesis that is steadily accumulating experimental support.

Brief summaries of the articles in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series can be found here, or by clicking the image below.

I am most strongly influenced by Buddhist thought, and my approach could be characterised as a ‘Western Buddhist’ one – and one in which I have tried as much as possible to address the general reader. Where they can serve to illuminate and ground the deep non-dual psychology of the Buddhist mandala wisdom, I therefore make connections with other psychologies that share the same inspiration. I engaged in intensive study of Carl Jung concurrently with my Buddhist studies in my twenties and have drawn heavily on that knowledge. I have more recently been a passionate student of the deep humanistic psychology of Marshall Rosenberg (founder of Nonviolent Communication – NVC), and of Eugene Gendlin (founder of the ‘Focusing‘ self-empathy/self-enquiry dyad practice) and, since I have found these to be of enormous value in my understanding of Buddhist psychology, I have woven these perspectives into this Mandala of Love approach to meditation and self-enquiry.

This ‘Meditation Guidance’ series of articles, does not in fact present any detailed explanation of specific meditation practices, but aims to bring fresh insights to several common approaches to meditation – the Mindfulness of Breathing, Mettā Bhavana (‘Cultivation of Loving Kindness’), and the Zen ‘Just Sitting’ practice for example. The initial framework for the Mandala of Love approach, and for this whole series also, is provided by the four brahmavihāras (Loving Kindness, Appreciative Joy, Equanimity and Compassion) – a four-fold meditation-cycle and self-enquiry practice from ancient India, which was given a very important place in the Buddha’s teaching framework, and in the subsequent development of the Buddhist tradition. Central to my approach is the conceptualisation of meditation practice as ‘resting as Consciousness’, and the recognition of the brahmavihāras as ‘attitudes of Consciousness’. I find ‘resting as Consciousness’ to be more descriptive than the traditional Buddhist term ‘Mindfulness’, with which it is essentially synonymous.

The word Consciousness as I use it in its capitalised form in these articles, refers to the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha of Buddhist tradition, which we find placed at the centre of the Buddhist mandalas. To know Consciousness is not easy, since Consciousness is the ‘knower’ of our experience – the awareness that is aware of being aware. Our engagement in self-enquiry and familiarisation with the phenomenon of Consciousness is absolutely key to spiritual practice however – the Buddha told us that “Mindfulness is the Way to the Immortal”. As with all of the skandhas, the Buddhist tradition speaks of the vijñāna skandha having ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects. As I understand it, the ‘internal’ aspect is the non-personal experiencing subject – the spaciousness that is the centre and the circumference of our experiencing; and the ‘external’ aspect is the quality of ‘knowing presence’ that is orientated outwardly towards our cognitive-perceptual experience.

By re-framing meditation and Mindfulness practices as expressions of ‘resting as Consciousness’, and acknowledging the ’empty’ and impersonal nature of all the components of cognition and perception that arise in Consciousness (the skandhas of Buddhist tradition), there is an opportunity to set these practices in a non-dual context – one that is, I hope, much more true to the Buddha’s teaching than many of the modern derivatives. The Buddha bore witness to the impersonal nature of all psychological phenomena, and to the ’empty’ and non-locatable nature of Consciousness, and urged his students to take these insights as the foundation of their practice. When we step out of the egoic perspective, we can re-discover meditation as an activity whose purpose is to reveal our true nature and recover our natural state – the compassion and intelligence of our natural humanity.

The Five Wisdoms Mandala and the Emptiness of the Five Skandhas

(under the ‘5 Wisdoms’ menu above)

Since the beginning of 2019, I have been aiming in my articles, to provide some in-depth analysis on the Five Wisdoms; on the Buddha’s ‘Emptiness of the Five Skandhas‘ teaching; and on the closely-related ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’. I have created a new menu category for some of these articles, which I have called simply, ‘5 Wisdoms’. Under this menu you will find a group of introductory, or overview articles on the five skandhas. This will eventually be followed by five groups of articles – one for each of the five skandhas. I have begun the first group, which is one focused on the very important, but much misunderstood, rūpa skandha – the ’empty’ conceptualising, or ‘conceptual-form-creating’, function of the mind.

Find this series of articles listed under the ‘5 Wisdoms’ menu, or access brief summaries of the articles in that series by clicking here. You can access the first post in the series by clicking here.

Communication, Relationships, Empathy and Self-Empathy

(under the ‘NVC/Focusing’ menu above)

I have been a passionate student of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model for over twenty years, and have taught several courses based on his work and on the closely-related work of Eugene Gendlin, the originator of the Focusing self-empathy dyad practice. I have also developed an innovative approach to the NVC model, which I call the NVC Mandala, and which sees the ‘four components’ of Rosenberg’s model as a beautiful example of the universal mandala wisdom that we find in Tibetan Buddhism, and in the psychology of Carl Jung – although Jung, it should always be noted, borrowed much from Tibetan Buddhism in the creation of his mandala model of the psyche.

The ‘NVC Mandala’ that becomes clear when Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘four components’ model is arranged with Observations and Feelings at east and west, and Needs and Requests at north and south, is all the more remarkable for the fact that he developed his model without any knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism or the work of Carl Jung. The obvious connections between the non-dual psychology of the Tibetan Buddhist mandala and the practical psychological analysis of thought and language that is provided by Marshall Rosenberg, provide the basis for an extremely rich synthesis of ideas and very profound support for the Buddhist practice of Mindfulness.

I have placed Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing under the same heading because I have found it helpful to combine them into a single model. The outer clarity of communication, which the Nonviolent Communication model aspires to, requires a foundation of deep Presence and self-empathy – and these qualities can be more powerfully cultivated and more fully understood through self-enquiry dyad practice of the sort that Eugene Gendlin showed us when he presented his Focusing model.

I hope that the articles in the ‘NVC/Focusing’ series will be thought-provoking for anyone with an interest in bringing harmony and compassion to their relationships and communities; in the psychology and spirituality of everyday life; and in the Buddhist ideals of nonviolence, loving-kindness, and creativity. I would like to find the time to write some in-depth reflections on how both Nonviolent Communication and Focusing can support a deepening of Buddhist practice; and how Buddhist insights can support a deepening of the practice of Nonviolent Communication and Focusing.

You can access the first post in this series by clicking here, or via the ‘NVC/Focusing’ category in the top menu.

Book Sections

(under the ‘Book’ menu above)

The Mandala of Love website started as a book project called A Mandala of Love: Consciousness, Ethics and Society. I have published some of the drafts of the early sections of that book (from 2016) in the form of articles in a ‘Book Sections’ series, which can be accessed by clicking on the ‘Book’ menu above.

Alternatively, you can access the first post in the ‘Book Sections’ series by clicking here.

Hui Neng and the Mirror-Like Wisdom – A Zen Story

(listed under the ‘Buddhism’ menu above)

The earliest piece of writing in the site, this is a longer piece from 2012. Even though it is not quite complete, it covers the most significant events on the wonderful Hui Neng story. To access it click here, or on the title above. I am hoping that this article will provide inspiration and guidance to students of both meditation and non-duality. I find the story of Hui Neng to be one of the most beautiful and illuminating in the whole of the Buddhist tradition. Among the many deep themes in this rich and multi-dimensional autobiographical work, you will find, I believe, the essence of Zen.

Those who have been reading my articles on the mandala wisdom on this website, will find that Hui Neng’s story brings us back, in a fresh new way, to the traditional point of entry into the mandala: the blue Eastern Quadrant; the ’empty’ rūpa skandha; the Mirror-Like Wisdom; and the brahmavihāra of Equanimity.

Individual Coaching, Mandala Innerwork, and Meditation Teaching

Although I am currently very busy with personal commitments, I may be able to provide individual meditation guidance and coaching sessions via Zoom to people who are interested in my work. My Mandala Innerwork approach to coaching is a form of self-enquiry that students of meditation will find very supportive. These sessions are also especially valuable to students of the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model, since these sessions focus on the development of the attitudes and skills of self-empathy, which is foundational to that model. I am particularly keen to work with those who are interested in the Mandala of Love approach to self-enquiry, meditation, and self-empathetic innerwork, and who would value my support to apply the principles that I have been outlining in my articles.

My approach to innerwork draws on various sources of inspiration, but makes extensive use of the work of Eugene Gendlin, and his student Anne Weiser-Cornell. I have also completed the Inner Presence Coaching training of Jerry Donoghue, an NVC teacher who is based in Ashville, North Carolina, in the USA – an NVC teacher who, like me, is engaged with integrating NVC with the non-dual wisdom of the Buddhist tradition.

Jerry Donoghue and I also share the conviction that the practice of self-empathy, which is a foundational element of the NVC model, requires the acknowledgement of psychological parts – a theme that I have addressed frequently in my ‘Meditation Guidance’ articles (including here, here, here, and here). Indeed the self-empathy / self-enquiry approach that I have come to call Mandala Innerwork is founded on my observation, over several decades of my own innerwork practice, that the ability to self-empathetically recognise and work with psychological parts is an essential self-awareness skill, and a necessary skill if we wish to become more conscious; to recover an authentic self; and to integrate non-dual wisdom.

In the context of my individual coaching sessions, I like to integrate my meditation and self-enquiry work with my facilitation of self-empathetic innerwork. Both skills take the idea of ‘resting as Consciousness’ as their starting point. Indeed, my coaching work is best characterised as a form of self-enquiry facilitation, or of Mindfulness with the goal of Insight – seeing through the self-illusion. The depth of that enquiry depends on the choice of those that I am working with, but my own personal framework is rooted in the rich and powerful psychology of the Buddhist non-duality teachings.

If you would like to read more on my approach to NVC Self-Empathy work and Mandala Innerwork, please consider looking at the articles that can be found under the NVC/Focusing menu above. A brief summary of my approach can be found here.

William Parker 2021

January 7, 2018

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 7: The Somatic Body-Mind

This article is the seventh of fifteen articles inspired by the central five verses of Padmasambhava’s ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; you can read the previous article in the series here; and you can read the five verses here.

In these articles, I am choosing once again to use a non-traditional terminology for talking about the process of transformation that the Dharmadhātu Mandala invites us to engage in. Those who have read the previous articles on this series may recognise Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth as the stages of a system of meditative practice that was suggested by Sangharakshita in the 1970s. This being the case, I need to point out once again, that while I find that these four general stages fit my experience very well indeed, the detail of my own approach to these stages of meditation practice is not based on any detailed exposition by Sangharakshita, but on my own explorations.

I should also make it clear that what I am presenting here does not represent the consensus within the global Triratna Buddhist Community regarding Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ – far from it. My intention is only to share my own experience, and to share my own somewhat personal and perhaps idiosyncratic reflections. My hope is that others will find my exploration of that four-fold conceptual frame of reference to be meaningful and useful, and will be stimulated to engage in their own meditative enquiry into the profound spiritual psychology of the Dharmadhātu mandala.

This article was originally written as the first part of a longer article on the female Buddha Māmaki, but I have chosen to present it as a separate article, and as one which will hopefully serve as an introduction to that article. In it, I hope to provide a recapitulation of key understandings from previous articles in the series, and to further introduce the notion of the somatic, and the idea that meditation is an experience of, not mind, but body-mind – these being foundational conceptualisations for the article on Māmaki that follows. By talking of mind as body-mind, I mean, not an integration of two separate elements – mind and body – but an acknowledgement of the extent to which mind and body must be regarded as inherently integrated in the practice of meditation. So, while meditation can usefully be thought of, at least in the beginning stages, as an integration of mind and body – of ‘bringing the mind home to the body’, as Thich Nhat Hahn used to say – I am interested in a deeper integration, in the sense of a bringing into full awareness, of the five already integrated body-mind components, which Buddhist tradition calls the five skandhas. By way of introduction to the article on Māmaki, I shall, in this article, be reflecting on the vedanā skandha in particular – the skandha of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ Sensing, Sensation and Embodiment.

A Comprehensive Non-Dual Archetypal Psychology

In this series of articles, I have set out to describe the ten archetypal Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala – the mandala of the Five Wisdoms – and to present them as personifications of an interrelated constellation of Dharmic principles that together form a comprehensive non-dual psychology. These Dharmic principles can be viewed as stages in a transformation process – a transformation process that leads not just to Insight, and to the release of self-view (which we can call Spiritual Death); but to our embodiment of the transcendent Bodhisattva principle (a stage which we can call Spiritual Rebirth), through the release of the energetic residues of the egoic mind, which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas.

We can characterise the process of realisation that we call Enlightenment as having four stages – Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth – and we can approach each of these four stages through five meditative contemplations, using the Five Wisdoms Mandala as our guide. Each of the four stages engages with the Five Wisdoms at a higher level than the last. They are are like four octaves – the subsequent stages resonating with the earlier ones, and each expressing a higher and more comprehensive level of transformation and wisdom than the last. While it is true to say that embodiment of Consciousness characterised by Positive Emotion requires the foundation of mental and emotional stability such as is developed in the Integration stage, there is also however, a sense in which these two different familiarisation processes can progress in parallel. I shall be talking more about this below.

The most obvious division of the four stages is into the first two and the last two. There is however, a particularly strong resonance between the Integration and Spiritual Death stages (first and third), and between the Positive Emotion and Spiritual Rebirth stages (second and fourth). This means that our practice in the Integration stage, and our deepening connection with the five receptive ‘Integration’ Buddhas (that we we are currently studying), is likely to also produce significant insights into the impersonal nature of mind (Spiritual Death). Similarly, a deep practice of the Positive Emotion stage, and our deepening connection with the five expansive ‘Positive Emotion’ Buddhas, is likely to propel us into that profoundly and naturally altruistic way of living our embodiment of Consciousness, which the Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of the Bodhicitta – the emergence of the Bodhisattva archetype as the guiding principle of our being (Spiritual Rebirth).

What I am presenting here is clearly not an ego-psychology – in which an heroic and narcissistic egoic self makes vain attempts at transcendence by trying to appropriate divine powers to itself. Rather it is a Buddhist archetypal psychology, in which the humble and reverent egoic self of the Mahayana Buddhist practitioner seeks to know, familiarise themselves with, and surrender to, the benevolent forces of the Transcendental – the archetypal powers that are inherent in Consciousness and organised as a mandala of Five Wisdoms.

The Brahmavihāras – Self-Regarding and Other-Regarding

The egoic mind has tendencies which we can characterised in terms of energetic dis-integration and energetic contraction, and the practice of meditation, or resting as Consciousness, leads to the opposite tendencies – Integration being the opposite of energetic dis-integration, and Positive Emotion being the opposite of energetic contraction. One way in which this distinction that I am making, between Integration and Positive Emotion can be understood, is in terms of the brahmavihāras (Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Compassion, and Appreciative Joy) which can be either self-regarding or other-regarding – either energetically receptive or energetically expansive.

June 18, 2022

A History Lesson from Dr Martin Luther King

I am publishing the short article and embedded YouTube video below, in my ‘Anti-War’ category. For some time now, I have felt a need to supplement my engagement with the problem of the egoic mind – which has been primarily through meditation and self-enquiry – with some engagement with the disturbing reflection of that egoic violence and hatred that we can see when we look in a penetrating way at the values, systems, and structures (and individuals), that govern our outer world. While most of us in the modern West have a complacent sense of safety and stability, those around the world in less fortunate countries are finding themselves in the cross-hairs – the object of regime change operations funded by our governments, and supported by various well-funded pro-war propaganda agencies. This war has two enemies – because the propaganda war is always being simultaneously waged against ourselves, by these same agencies, who desperately need to cover up or justify what is being done in our name.

We live in extraordinary times; dark times in which great crimes are being committed both covertly and in plain sight; times in which the economic and political culture of the liberal democracies of the West has degraded to such an extent that both government and media are frequently propagating misinformation and acting in a way that is not only not at all in the interests of their populations, but very dangerous for the future of our planet. In a modern world where both nation states and international institutions are failing to maintain their integrity in the face of corporate and oligarchic forces and the march of new technologies, we need to create a culture of non-violence and wisdom – and as part of this we need to support those embattled independant voices for peace, truth and justice that are trying to push back against these dangerous collective manifestations of the egoic mind.

Please forgive my forthright and unqualified style in these short anti-war articles. My research is very deep and thorough however – certainly not confined to the mainstream media channels. I wish I had time to write longer, more detailed articles with references and sources.

I have wanted to post this video for some time. This speech by Dr Martin Luther King against the Vietnam War, is a moving example for me of how those who would uplift humanity are often drawn to face into the evil of war – and to study its historical roots and oppose the political, cultural and economic forces that foster it.

The anti-war sentiment and intention that Dr King is expressing here, has been very effectively sidelined in our current world. This is because the pro-war propaganda operations against us are now very much more sophisticated, comprehensive and effective. The voices of dissent in our media and in our parliaments are now very quickly crushed – there is not so much need to assassinate people as they did with Dr King. It could be argued that democratic restraint of the war machine is now largely absent – that our mainstream media commentators do not seem able to perform their function as educators of our populations, and of our elected representatives in government. In academia, the same process is evident – the removal the truth-telling trouble-makers.

The last four decades have increasingly shown us that if those in power want a war (either those in elected government, or those in the unelected government agencies that are really in control), they will find a way of creating a justification for it – frequently by generating allegations and provocations that later turn out to be just lies, or even false flag operations. In a strange, ‘Orwellian’ development since the events of September 11th, 2001, it has became acceptable for the foreign policy and defence establishment agencies of the so-called liberal-democratic nation states, to employ numerous specialist public relations firms and covert psychological operations agencies to propagandise their own populations, and to ensure a steady flow of favourable misinformation into all media channels – even training Islamic terrorists to create propaganda videos to present themselves as victims or as liberating heroes (as was achieved in Syria).

This propaganda war against us all was particularly evident in the case of the secret proxy-war to bring down the secular state of Syria using Islamic jihadist armies. Given the incredible success of the similar secret proxy-war in Afghanistan in the 80s against the Soviet Russians, the strategy is an understandable one for the Pentagon. One might think it would make no sense, given the concurrent ‘War on Terror’, for the US, the UK, France, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to be funding, supplying, and in various ways supporting, Islamic terrorists – hence the need for the massive propaganda operation (an estimated billion dollars a year out of the CIA budget). The operation to support the various Islamic terrorist groups who were intent on destroying the secular state of Syria, and on slaughtering its many non-Muslim populations, would certainly have been successful if it had not been for the Russian Federation coming to the aid of the people of Syria. The Russians have there own problems at home with Islamic terrorism and did not want to see it flourish. Because it took this principled stand in relationship to Syria, Russia has found itself increasingly vilified, especially by the US-UK propaganda machine.

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Prior to June 1965, Dr. King had occasionally expressed concern about the war in Vietnam, but he had done so publicly only in a tentative and extremely cautious manner. Dr King was acutely aware of the risk that direct criticism of President Lyndon Johnson on his Vietnam policy risked jeopardising the strong and critically important relationship he had developed with President Johnson in support of his civil rights efforts. However, various factors began to shift Dr. King’s understanding of the vast human suffering being caused by the US in Vietnam and, as a result, his opposition to the war slowly began to intensify, eventually leading to an unequivocal moral condemnation of US war policy, and a fundamental break in his relationship with Johnson.

The late Thich Nhat Hanh, now know to the world as a great Buddhist leader and writer, was at that time known only as the immensely courageous young Buddhist monk from Vietnam, who played the key role of educating Dr. King about the reality of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective and inspiring his transformation into a leader in the US anti-war movement.

The video below is of the speech, or “sermon”, that Dr King gave at the culmination of his soul-searching. He delivered it on April 30th, 1967 in New York, expressing a clear stand, not only for civil rights, but against the war in Vietnam. In it he spoke about the “triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism”. Just over two years later, after a period of increased police persecution he was assassinated.

William Roy Parker 2020

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March 20, 2022

The US-Facilitated Coup in Ukraine in 2014

I am publishing the short article and embedded YouTube video below, in my ‘Anti-War’ category. For some time now, I have felt a need to supplement my engagement with the problem of the egoic mind – which has been primarily through meditation and self-enquiry – with some engagement with the disturbing reflection of that egoic violence and hatred that we can see when we look in a penetrating way at the values, systems, and structures (and individuals), that govern our outer world. While most of us in the modern West have a complacent sense of safety and stability, those around the world in less fortunate countries are finding themselves in the cross-hairs – the object of regime change operations funded by our governments, and supported by our various well-funded pro-war propaganda agencies. This war has two enemies – because the propaganda war is always being simultaneously waged against ourselves, by these same agencies, who desperately need to cover up or justify what is being done in our name.

We live in extraordinary times; dark times in which great crimes are being committed both covertly and in plain sight; times in which the economic and political culture of the liberal democracies of the West has degraded to such an extent that both government and media are frequently acting in a way that is not only not at all in the interests of their populations, but very dangerous for the future of our planet. In a modern world where both nation states and international institutions are failing to maintain their integrity in the face of corporate and oligarchic forces and the march of new technologies, we need to create a culture of non-violence and wisdom – and as part of this we need to support those embattled independant voices for peace, truth and justice that are trying to push back against these dangerous collective manifestations of the egoic mind.

As the Ukraine crisis deepens, we are witnessing a major flaw in Western democracy, which is that our news media do not provide context and historical reflection on current events – and because of this, their output is almost devoid of real value or truth. Instead, the mainstream news channels give us soundbites and belligerent, jingoistic rhetoric that lurches towards war and necessity of arms sales and inhumane sanctions seemingly without a moment’s reflection. There is a rush to judgement, condemnation and violent punishment, without even an attempt to present evidence or to ascertain the motive of the accused.

This is a complex systemic phenomena, with many different government and non-government agencies and cultural and psychological factors contributing to the mix of misinformation – as well as the UK Foreign Office and the US State Department. The truth, it seems, is nowhere to be seen or heard. So, we have to seek out that truth – we need to look carefully at the faces of our journalists and examine the motivations of these important people who are giving us our news, and we must fully acknowledge the constraints against truth in the mainstream channels. If we do watch the major channels we need to observe them as a cultural and political phenomena – as a dysfunctional self-serving mess and a charade – not as providing witness to reality.

This is why the Russia Today news channel is perceived as such a threat by the governments of the NATO countries. RT is one of only a very few places where journalists who wish to report on international affairs, can do so with real honesty and integrity – and without pressure to keep to the bogus ‘Russian aggression’ narrative despite all the evidence of the contrary. Please find time to watch the short history documentary below, from a tiny independent media channel called Breakthrough News. It provides just a glimpse of the vast and systematic assault on their national security and sovereignty that the Russians have suffered from the actions of the US since the fall of the Soviet Union. From Russia’s point of view, NATO is absolutely not a defensive alliance, and the US manipulation of Ukrainian politics in 2014 represents a truly terrifying threat to the very existence of Russia as an independent nation state. Those who cannot see this are either simply ill-informed – which is most of us – or tragically and dangerously blinded by national self-interest.

We are looking at an escalating confrontation between nuclear armed powers – one which is quite as dangerous for the world as was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. It is an inherently unstable standoff in which the legitimate security needs of Russia, and of the Russian-speaking people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine are not being acknowledged by the NATO countries. We are also seeing the huge flaw in the logic of the NATO security alliance – that it only serves the strategic needs of the US, and cannot create security for the European states. It cannot create security because its very existence – relentlessly expanding and aggressive as it is – is an existential threat to Russia. The future of the humanity could be at stake here. We all need to be paying attention.

February 11, 2022

Reflections on NATO and the Tragic Irrationality of the Ukraine Crisis

I am publishing the short article and embedded YouTube video below, in my new ‘Anti-War’ category. For some time now, I have felt a need to supplement my engagement with the problem of the egoic mind – which has been primarily through meditation and self-enquiry – with some engagement with the disturbing reflection of that egoic violence and hatred that we can see when we look in a penetrating way at the values, systems, and structures (and individuals), that govern our outer world. While most of us in the modern West have a complacent sense of safety and stability, those around the world in less fortunate countries are finding themselves in the cross-hairs – the object of regime change operations funded by our governments, and supported by various well-funded pro-war propaganda agencies. This war has two enemies – because the propaganda war is always being simultaneously waged against ourselves, by these same agencies, who desperately need to cover up or justify what is being done in our name.

We live in extraordinary times; dark times in which great crimes are being committed both covertly and in plain sight; times in which the economic and political culture of the liberal democracies of the West has degraded to such an extent that both government and media are frequently acting in a way that is not only not at all in the interests of their populations, but very dangerous for the future of our planet. In a modern world where both nation states and international institutions are failing to maintain their integrity in the face of corporate and oligarchic forces and the march of new technologies, we need to create a culture of non-violence and wisdom – and as part of this we need to support those embattled independant voices for peace, truth and justice that are trying to push back against these dangerous collective manifestations of the egoic mind.

In the liberal democracies of the West, we are mostly unaware of how heavily propagandised we are. We trust our governments and we trust our mainstream media outlets. This is an extremely dangerous state of affairs, because in actuality both our foreign policy decision-making and our reporting of foreign policy issues has been subverted, and is in effect outside of democratic control and beyond reason. Foreign policy decision-making has been handed over to government ‘experts’, arms industry lobbyists and military intelligence personnel, many of whom have an extremely irrational bias towards war, if not a direct financial interest in its promotion. The government and arms industry operatives both covertly provide massive funding to pro-war think-tanks, specialist public relations firms and sponsored academics – and to far-right groups (in both South America and Ukraine) and Islamic terrorist groups (e.g. in Syria, Libya and Western China). Not only is this whole peace-time propaganda process out of democratic control on the government side, but the journalists and the documentary makers in both state-funded and commercial TV and newspaper channels are not pushing back with any factual reporting or demands for common-sense and accountability. War, and the creation of enemy images that lead to war, has unfortunately, always been good for the news industry – but this is especially the case in the modern US.

Far from providing any critique, our news media generally now merely provide cover, and have become used to acting as mouthpieces for the perverse and dishonest pro-war narratives being generated by the military-industrial complex and our un-thinking government ‘defence’ and foreign policy staff, who appear to have lost any sense of the value of peace and diplomacy in the modern world. The predominant frame of reference is actually not freedom, democracy, humanitarianism and ethics, but neoliberalism and US hegemony – the very antithesis of these values. Peace and diplomacy have no value in this frame of reference because they do not make money for the armaments industry, and they do not provide distraction from the disastrous effects of neoliberalism’s failure at home. We cannot assume that if we live in a liberal democracy and watch the TV news regularly, we are well-informed on foreign affairs. In the modern world the reverse is true – far from being informed, the general population in the West are being propagandised, manipulated, and ‘played’ by the dishonest rhetoric of freedom and democracy, while actually being prepared for war. It really seems as if the Western moral order has actually already collapsed, and all those who study the situation closely can see that most of the reporting in the foreign policy arena is already characterised by the worst forms of Orwellian Doublespeak.

All this being the case, we need media channels that provide journalism that has integrity and can provide the historical context and truly humanitarian perspective that is missing elsewhere. I thoroughly recommend ‘The GrayZone’, an independent channel on YouTube. We are closer to the full horror of a modern war between Russia and the West, than at any other time since the second world war, and this situation has been created not by Russian aggression, as the propagandists would have us believe, but by the belligerent stupidity of the US and the aggression of NATO expansion to Russia’s borders. The horrible and extremely dangerous crisis in Ukraine, and the massive propaganda attack on Russia for acting to protect the Russian speaking communities of eastern Ukraine, is a dishonest mess that has been 30 years in the making. In reality NATO had no legitimate purpose after the fall of the Warsaw Pact – except as a vehicle for US hegemony and US arms sales. I thoroughly recommend this video (below) of an English academic, Richard Sakwa (Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent), being interviewed by Aaron Mate several weeks ago, when the warmongering rhetoric was beginning to ramp up. This is a truly superb piece of journalism – honest well-informed commentary pushing back against a sea of misinformation.

Aaron Mate, whose instinctive sympathies are with the left rather than the right of US politics, is nevertheless one of the best informed journalists in the world on the whole insane ‘Russiagate’ misinformation mess that was created by the US Democratic Party in the wake of the election of Trump. He is someone who understands that the current Ukrainian crisis goes back not just to the US-facilitated coup in Kiev in 2014 during the Obama years; he knows that Biden, and Victoria Nuland, who is now US Under Secretary of State, were actively involved in that process of establishing the domination of right-wing anti-Russian sentiment in Ukrainian politics, which led to the promotion of the Ukrainian nationalists (literal pro-Nazi fascists!) in its army, which are terrorising the Russian speaking people of Eastern Ukraine. To understand the Russian protective actions, we need to be aware of the history of Ukraine-Nazi collaboration against the Russians in World War Two – and we need to be aware that Ukraine, far from being a model democracy is a rather crazy country with vast extremes of wealth and poverty, and with a deep-rooted fascist past, that has been pushed towards extreme anti-Russian sentiment by US and NATO interference.

The reason that we are being bombarded, in the mainstream media, with news that Russia is preparing for war, is precisely because the opposite is true. Russia is responding to provocation. Witnessing the military buildup on the Ukrainian side threatening the Russian-speaking break-away republics of the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, it is preparing to defend those people if it has to, and is simply asking the US for a legally binding pledge that NATO will stop expanding east. This has put the US on the spot, because the US foreign policy system is used to functioning as the world hegemon and they are not interested in peace and diplomacy – they do not do multilateralism and mutual respect. Domination, it seems, is their modus operandi, and the only language they understand. Hence the need for a massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign to distract the world from recognising the aggression and hostility of the US-NATO position.

William Roy Parker 2020

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February 4, 2022

Reflections on Buddhist Self-Enquiry and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ – Part 1

Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework
for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by
the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads

I have been reflecting for some time that, in the Buddhist tradition, self-enquiry (in Sanskrit: dharma vicaya – pronounced ‘vichaya’) generally tends to be thought of as a solitary practice. To support and develop a culture of dharma vicaya within Western Buddhism, there is a need however, for us to explore effective forms of meditative self-enquiry dyad practice – practices in which Buddhist friends sit together and take it in turns to ‘hold space’ for each other, so that each practitioner is supported to go deeper in their self-enquiry. Having studied and practiced Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ dyad practice for many years, I have come to see it as a model that Western Buddhists might wish to draw upon – staying firmly rooted in Buddhist philosophical principles, and using aspects of the ‘Focusing’ method to engage in direct experiential enquiry into the bodily-felt experience of those principles. Western Buddhists, not being constrained to traditional forms, have the freedom, after all, to adopt any practice that is an expression of the core values, principles and insights of their tradition. I know I am not alone in this conviction about the value of the insights that ‘Focusing’ can bring to Buddhist self-enquiry, so I would like to share some reflections. This is partly for my own clarity, but I hope that others will find it stimulating also.

Part 1 – Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Clear Space’ and the Brahmavihāras

A Phenomenological Approach to the Nature of Mind

Professor Eugene Gendlin’s primary area of scholarly expertise was in the area of phenomenology – which, in the context of modern philosophy, is that approach which values the actual reality of human experience over any abstract conceptualisation of that experience. It is an approach in which concepts must serve our experiencing and not take us away from our experience – as conceptualisation so often does. Buddhists who are familiar with Eugene Gendlin’s work, and with his Focusing dyad practice, will therefore inevitably tend to develop a deeper and more experiential understanding of the nature of mind than those whose engagement is more intellectual and philosophical.

The Buddha, it can certainly be argued, certainly shared Gendlin’s phenomenological focus, and the Buddha’s ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ teaching can be thought of as an example of him taking an established ancient Indian conceptualisation of the nature of mind, and subjecting it to a rigorous phenomenological analysis. He appears to have reframed the teaching completely – highlighting its erroneous concretisation, or reification, of the functions and data of our cognitive and perceptual processes. Indeed, he presents the ancient Indian five-fold framework in a fresh new way. He presents it as what, in modern terminology, might be called a dynamic ‘open system’ model of mind and experience – one in which everything is process, and nothing is fixed, or personal, or separate.

So, Gendlin was engaged in the very Buddhist activity of investigating his experience in a very penetrating and objective way. If we define meditation broadly, as direct engagement with the body-mind in order to achieve its transformation and recognise its ultimate nature – then Gendlin was certainly a meditator. But he brings attitudes to his approach that Buddhists may sometimes miss. Indeed, it is common for even passionately engaged Buddhist meditators not to see meditation in terms of self-enquiry; or self-discovery; or self-empathy; or resting as Consciousness; or as gaining familiarity with the relational nature of the body-mind. All of these attitudes or approaches are implicit in Buddhist approaches to meditation, whereas Gendlin’s Focusing makes them explicit.

A Relational Understanding of the Body-Mind

Gendlin’s rigorous phenomenological approach led him to a relational understanding of the body-mind – by which I mean that he came to the recognition that Consciousness exists in relationship with the functions and processes of the body-mind. This is entirely intrinsic to Gendlin’s approach to the body-mind – as it is to Buddhist meditation and self-enquiry – but this conceptualisation is much less well-known to many Buddhists.

It is my conviction that Buddhists – especially those Buddhist who have been seriously engaged with the task of locating the central Buddhist philosophical principles in their bodily-felt experience – while they may find the ‘relational’ emphasis initially unfamiliar, have a great deal to learn from exploring the practice of Focusing. The potential for Focusing practitioners to learn from Buddhism, may be even more significant however. Gendlin established the practice of Focusing only a few decades ago, in the 1960s, whereas there has been deep engagement with self-enquiry and meditation practice within the Buddhist tradition for twenty-five centuries.

Despite the obvious common ground between the two, and the common motivation, the dialogue between Buddhism and Focusing can easily fail before it gets started. Focusing practitioners may reject Buddhism as too conceptual and philosophical – and as too ‘heroic’ and ascetic in psychological terms; too disinterested in the mind’s contents. Similarly, Buddhists can reject Focusing, regarding Gendlin’s philosophical framework as a narrow one, relative to that of Buddhism. Also, while the logic of Buddhist wisdom warns us against this, many Buddhists, because they have a great need to affirm their Buddhist identity above all else, will absolutely limit themselves to practices that are expressions of their chosen strand of Buddhist culture and history – and maintain and attitude of disdain towards anything outside of that purview. So, there are several obstacles preventing modern Buddhists connecting with Gendlin’s Focusing. To miss the many direct parallels however, between the philosophy and practice of Gendlin’s Focusing and the philosophy and practice of self-enquiry and meditation within the Buddhist tradition, would be a missed opportunity for both traditions, in my view.

Focusing and Buddhist Wisdom

It could be argued that Buddhists have an advantage over other practitioners of Focusing, because they are open to the idea that both that which is observing, and that which is observed, are ’empty’, or non-personal, and that our personalising identification with both of these poles in the subject-object relationship of our experiencing, is the cause of our egoic dysfunction. This sort of understanding is implied in Gendlin’s approach, and experienced in the course of Focusing practice, but not highlighted. This ’emptiness’ of both subject and object however, is spelt out much more explicitly in the Buddha’s teachings – especially in his ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ teaching.

Many modern Buddhists, it needs to be acknowledged, do however find the five skandhas formulation impenetrable, and find themselves discouraged from engaging with it – which is a tragedy, given the absolute centrality of this teaching for the Buddha, and for the Buddhist tradition. One of my main aims in my various writings on the ‘Mandala of Love’ website, and indeed in this article, is to support a deeper engagement with the idea of the ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ among modern Buddhist practitioners.

The five skandhas teaching is very complex. It is probably not surprising that we should find it so often placed in the ‘too hard’ basket. There are many established confusions and mistranslations that get in our way. In Buddhist tradition, the cognitive-perceptual relationship between that which is observing and that which is observed, is described very comprehensively by the ‘five skandhas’ formulation, but because this is what may be called a ‘process model’ it does not make a clear distinction between the cognitive-perceptual ‘functions’ of Consciousness and the cognitive-perceptual ‘data’ of Consciousness. Additional confusion is introduced by the fact that each of the five skandhas was described by the Buddha as functioning in two ways – ‘internal’ and ‘external’ (as are each of the ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ incidentally). This is a very important detail of the teaching, that it is only very rarely acknowledged – but it is an aspect of the skandhas model that I personally find fascinating and deeply engaging.

Most fundamentally, it is vitally important that we understand that in his frequent discourses on the ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ the Buddha is taking an erroneous ancient Indian model of the self, and critiquing and deconstructing it – not merely repeating it and affirming it, as many modern teachers do. In this teaching he is fundamentally distinguishing his own understanding from the five-fold model of mind that went before, and demonstrating that each of the five components of that model are ’empty’ of self-nature. In more modern language he is saying that each skandha is better understood to be of the nature of a cognitive or perceptual process rather than as a fixed ‘heap’ (skandha literally means heap) – like the heaps, or aggregates (sand, clay, gravel, etc.), from which a house was constructed in ancient India.

There is much that needs to be said about the ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ teaching and the various common errors that have come into modern understanding of it. The insight that comes most forcefully as we study both Gendlin and the Buddha, is that the five skandhas teaching describes the relationship between Consciousness and the four cognitive-perceptual functions of Consciousness. This perspective is clearly borne out by the mandala psychology that we see in the Padmasambhava’s Bardo Thodol texts – where the the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha is place in the centre of the mandala.

If as, many modern commentators do, we place the ’empty’ rūpa skandha in the centre of the skandhas model, as a physical component relating to four mental components (including Consciousness) we immediately run into problems – and we depart from the Buddha’s core assertion that mind is primary, and end up with a model which looks very much like the scientific materialist paradigm that we so desperately need to get away from. Also, the ’empty’ rūpa skandha in the context of the Buddha’s critical analysis, does not denote the objective and usually material component of the self and world. Rather it denotes that ’empty’ cognitive-perceptual process that mentally creates and concretises the ‘form’ of our identity and of our world. The apparent ‘objectivity’ of these creations is an egoic delusion. We are never what we think we are, and everything in our world is also ’empty’ in this sense – entirely subject to our conceptual description of it.

I find it very significant that Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha) is acknowledged to have both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ dimensions – and there is great value in our making a serious effort to identify and find more explanatory words for the reality that this descriptive label is pointing to. The ‘external’ aspect of vijñāna appears to be that ‘knowing’ which is directed outwardly towards perception and cognition of the experienced world; while the ‘internal’ aspect is that which is directed towards that ‘clear space’ at the centre of the self-illusion, which is assumed to the central component a separate ‘self’ – but in fact does not.

Like Gendlin’s Focusing model, the Buddha’s skandhas model invites us to engage in a fundamental reconciliation of these subjective and objective dimensions. We are being invited, it seems, to notice that there are subjective and objective aspects of ’emptiness’, inseparably present at the core of our experience. The ’emptiness’ of the ‘external’ aspect of Consciousness that is ‘looking’ and is the apparent ‘knower’ of an apparently objective world, is difficult to recognise if we have not first recognised the ‘internal’ aspect – the vast and ’empty’ ‘clear space’ within, which may be regarded as the ultimate psychological container in which the processes of cognition and perception appear.

February 2, 2022

NVC and Focusing – Summaries of Related Articles in Other Categories

Because Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘Nonviolent Communication’ (NVC) and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ self-empathy practice, have been such a strong influence on me, and have been so valuable in my understanding of the mandala wisdom of Buddhist tradition, I have incorporated these perspectives into several of my articles. References to NVC and Focusing can therefore be found in other categories on this website – especially the introductory series on meditation and self-enquiry, which can be found under ‘Meditation’ in the top menu.

I would very much like to find the time to write some articles focused entirely on both NVC and Focusing, and hope that those will more fully articulate my conviction that these models are enormously relevant to modern students of Buddhism. In the meantime, I have listed below some of the articles on this site that reference NVC and Focusing – with brief summaries of each, which are different from the summaries that I have written for these articles when they appear elsewhere. Click on any of the titles or images to be taken to the corresponding article.

December 31, 2021

The Uyghur ‘Genocide’ Narrative and the Propaganda War against China

I am publishing this embedded YouTube video in my new Anti-War category. For some time now, I have felt a need to supplement my engagement with the problem of the egoic mind – which has been primarily through meditation and self-enquiry – with some engagement with the disturbing reflection of that egoic violence and hatred that we can see when we look in a penetrating way at the values, systems, and structures (and individuals), that govern our outer world. While most of us in the modern West have a complacent sense of safety and stability, those around the world in less fortunate countries are finding themselves in the cross-hairs – the object of regime change operations funded by our governments, and supported by various well-funded pro-war propaganda agencies. This war has two enemies – because the propaganda war is always being simultaneously waged against ourselves, by these same agencies, who desperately need to cover up or justify what is being done in our name.

We live in extraordinary times; dark times in which great crimes are being committed both covertly and in plain sight; times in which the economic and political culture of the liberal democracies of the West has degraded to such an extent that both government and media are frequently acting in a way that is not only not at all in the interests of their populations, but very dangerous for the future of our planet. In a modern world where both nation states and international institutions are failing to maintain their integrity in the face of corporate and oligarchic forces and the march of new technologies, we need to create a culture of non-violence and wisdom – and as part of this we need to support those embattled independant voices for peace, truth and justice that are trying to push back against these dangerous collective manifestations of the egoic mind.

In this video, Max Blumenthal, an anti-war journalist for whom I have enormous admiration, is participating in a panel discussion held on March 19, 2021, hosted on Daniel Dumbrill’s YouTube channel. With extraordinary diligence and persistence he has been documenting the deceptions behind the US government’s allegation that China is committing “genocide” against Uyghur Muslims in its Xinjiang region, challenging the dishonesty of the studies funded by the US government’s ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ (NED). He especially exposes the error-filled research of Christian fundamentalist and fanatical anti-Communist Adrian Zenz, the man who most of this anti-China disinformation can be traced back to. It is an astonishing reflection of the state of our world that Zenz is taken by the NATO governments (and the Australian government), and by the whole of the mainstream media around the world, to be a genuine expert on China. The principles of diplomacy and international law are no longer being applied – China is being arbitrarily declared guilty, with almost no chance of proving its innocence, but for the handful of voices like those of Max Blumenthal and Daniel Dumbrill.

William Roy Parker 2021

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May 10, 2021

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 6: Vajrasattva-Akshobya

This article is the sixth of fifteen articles inspired by the central five verses of the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; and you can read the five verses here.

The Mandala of ‘Receptive’ Deities Continued

This series of articles is essentially a systematic description of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu mandala, and in this article I shall be going one step deeper into what I have chosen to call the mandala of the five ‘receptive’ deities. This division of the ten deities into two groups – five ‘yin’, or ‘receptive’, deities, and five ‘yang’, or ‘expansive’ ones – is not a traditional formulation as far as I know, though it has several parallels in the traditional teachings. I feel very motivated to share it however, because I have found it to be such a powerful framework in my own meditation practice. It is my hope that readers will wish to experiment with meditating systematically on the somatic resonance of each of these deities as I have done. While you may wish to simply meditate on the deities as a ‘meditation cycle’, as I initially did, I hope to be able to demonstrate that these deities are best approached in pairs – since the pairs of Dharmic principles that are behind the west-east and south-north pairs of deities, represent profound spiritual oppositions that must be reconciled and integrated if we are to fully embody the energies of the Five Wisdoms.

The two-stage model that I have adopted (meditating on the ‘receptive’ Dharmic principles first, followed by the ‘expansive’ ones) correspond to the two initial stages – ‘Integration’ and ‘Positive Emotion’ – in the ‘System of Meditation Practice’ that was first proposed by Sangharakshita in the 1970s. The five deities in the first group, which we are currently investigating, are ‘receptive’ in that they are associated with ‘yin’ ,or ‘receptive’, energies in the somatic anatomy of the body, and because of this can serve to create a foundation of psychological integration in the early stages of meditation practice. They represent five key Dharmic principles, in the necessarily more introverted and self-empathetic process of our initial self-healing, and of gaining familiarity with the experience of ‘resting as’ embodied Consciousness.

August 15, 2020

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 5: Pandaravārsini

This article is the fifth of fifteen articles inspired by the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; and you can read the five verses here.

I offer these reflections without any claim to the authority of any particular tradition, or school of thought. I am adding my own personal and idiosyncratic commentary to the other commentaries that are available on the Five Wisdoms, and on the archetypal Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala, only because I believe passionately in the preciousness of this information. I cannot help feeling that there should be much more engagement with this knowledge than is evidenced on the Internet – much more discussion, reflection, contemplation and meditative self-enquiry which takes this primordial mandala as the integrated whole that it is. I sincerely hope that the thoughts that I am sharing will be supportive of this work, and supportive of those who share my love of the mandala wisdom.

In this article, I make reference to the five-fold ‘System of Practice’, that has been used, within the Triratna Buddhist Community, as a framework for thinking about the dimensions of meditation practice and the Dharma life more generally. Sangharakshita’s model originally identified Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death (i.e. Insight), and Spiritual Rebirth, as four key stages. To these four, a fifth component – Receptivity – was later added – usually as a third ‘stage’. While I am in complete agreement regarding the importance of receptivity and the need for its inclusion in the model, but I do not agree with the addition of it as an additional stage. In my own experience Receptivity is integral to the foundational Integration stage – and therefore to all the subsequent stages. The placement of Receptivity third in a series of five stages, does however reflect the reality that meditators generally come to an appreciation of the importance of Receptivity after they have been engaged with the goals of Integration and Positive Emotion for some time. It certainly fits my experience that a reframing of meditation through an emphasis on Receptivity is necessary for the sort of deepening of practice that is necessary for the emergence of the subsequent stages of Spiritual Death (Insight) and Spiritual Rebirth (Bodhicitta).

I need to acknowledge, and indeed emphasise, that where I have suggested, in these articles, that Receptivity should be given greater primacy, and have proposed that five of the ten deities can be considered to embody Receptivity are particularly supportive of the initial ‘Integration’ phase (and that the other five are more ‘expansive’ can strongly support us during the subsequent ‘Positive Emotion’ stage), this is an observation from my own explorations, and certainly goes beyond the standard interpretation of Sangharakshita’s model. I do not however, believe my suggestions are in conflict with Sangharakshita’s emphasis. I prefer to think of my ideas as a respectful engagement with his; as building on the foundation that his work has given us; as affirming the value of his original four-fold model; and as a tentative contribution to the process by which the Triratna meditation practice model is being forged in the furnace of experience.

The Mandala of Receptive Deities

In my last article (here), I spoke about the way in which the ten deities of the mandala fall into two groups of five. In the first of these two groups there are three female Buddhas and two male Buddhas, but all of them can be characterised as more ‘yin’, or ‘receptive’ in their energy as they are experienced in meditation. In the second group there are three male Buddhas and two female Buddhas, but all of them can be characterised as more ‘yang’, or ‘expansive’ in their energy as they are experienced in meditation. In the next five articles, I shall be talking about the first group of five deities – the ‘yin’, or ‘receptive’ group of deities – which are shown below. I shall starting with the deities of the mandala quadrants and finishing with White Tāra, in the centre.

I have chosen to start, in this article, with an exploration of the figure of Pandaravārsini; with the Discriminating Wisdom; and with the Dharmic principle that I have come to call ‘Uncaused Happiness’. It will not be possible to separate Pandaravārsini and the experience she represents, from Amitābha and the experience that he represents, but my focus will be on Pandaravārsini. I hope to show that for meditators, she is of enormous importance for our healing of the klesha of rāga, or ‘craving’, which is one of our greatest obstacles to realisation. More than this, because she represents the essence of our capacity to truly love ourselves, she can be regarded as the source of our capacity for emotional self-healing through meditation practice.

The Samjñā Skandha, the Klesha of Craving (rāga), and the Preta Realms

When, through craving, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of Discriminating Wisdom,
may Blessed Amitābha go before me,
and Pandaravārsini behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway,
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.

The five verses in the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’ take us clockwise around the mandala in the traditional way, starting in the centre and then the eastern quadrant. In this exploration, I shall be taking us on a different journey – a journey that aims to explore and embrace the hidden polarities and dynamic tensions within the mandala structure. We shall be starting in the western quadrant with the red light-path of the ’empty’ sanjñā skandha and the Discriminating Wisdom, which leads us away from the egoic reactivity of the Preta Realm and towards the emotionally nourishing influence of Pandaravārsini and Amitābha. Only then will we move across to the eastern quadrant to look at the blue light-path of the ’empty’ rūpa skandha and the Mirror-Like Wisdom, which leads us away from the Hell Realms, and towards the peace and mental clarity of Vajrasattva and Buddha-Locana.

July 15, 2020

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 4: Integration and Positive Emotion

This article is the fourth of fifteen articles inspired by the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; and brief summaries of all the articles can be found here.

In this article, I hope I can begin to tentatively explore how the kleshas and Wisdom energies, that I spoke about in the last article in this series (here), are located in the fields of the body, and on how we can begin to ‘hold the tension’ between those opposite groups of energies – as they appear as polarities within our bodily-felt experience in meditation practice. Each quadrant of the mandala points to an opposition between an egoic manifestation on one side, and a mysterious transcendent aspect on the other – which we can think of an aspect of our true nature as embodied Consciousness. We need to hold the tension between these opposites. By being careful not to deny the reality of either pole, while paying special attention to the ever-present somatic resonance of the transcendent reality, we begin to heal, and move towards our goal. Mandalas are complex multi-dimensional images of the many and various inherent oppositions within the psyche – which are the obstacles to our integration. Each quadrant of the mandala therefore describes a tension to be held – a polarity to be reconciled – and each axis of the mandala describes a tension to be held and reconciled also.

The Dharmadhātu Mandala as a Ten-Fold Meditation Cycle

I prefer to meditate on the ten archetypal Buddhas, not only as five apparent ‘couples’ as in the ‘Inspiration-Prayer’ – with one male-female pair representing each of the Five Wisdoms – or as five female Buddhas and five male Buddhas. Rather, I meditate first on what I have come to think of as the five ‘receptive’ deities (three female Buddhas and two male ones), and then on the five ‘expansive’ deities (three male Buddhas and two female ones). The two diagrams below, show these two groups of five deities – each with the ‘Dharmic Principles’ that I find useful for identifying the aspect of the Five Wisdoms that they personify, represent, or embody.

In the course of the articles in this series, I shall be explaining the words that I have chosen for the ‘Dharmic Principles’ and expanding upon them. There are two of these ‘Dharmic Principles’ for each Wisdom – one for each of the ten archetypal Buddhas in the mandala. The eight ‘Dharmic principles’ that are shown in the four quadrants of the two mandala are either brahmavihāras (Equanimity, Appreciative Joy, Loving Kindness, and Compassion), or are closely related Dharmic principles, which I call Qualia (Being, Embodiment, Uncaused Happiness, and Life Energy). While the Five Wisdoms are usually defined as the aspects of wisdom that arise as the emptiness of each of the skandhas is recognised, I, like many others, regard the brahmavihāras as an equally important way in to an understanding of them – and absolutely key to our bodily-felt experience of the Wisdoms in meditation. In previous articles on this website, I have already written quite extensively on each of the brahmavihāras and their related Qualia, but will be systematically examining each one of these Dharmic principles as we progress in this series of articles.

June 15, 2020

Current Mandala of Love Projects:

Individual Coaching, Mandala Innerwork, and Meditation Teaching

A Comprehensive Non-Dual Archetypal Psychology

The Brahmavihāras – Self-Regarding and Other-Regarding

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Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads

Part 1 – Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Clear Space’ and the Brahmavihāras

A Phenomenological Approach to the Nature of Mind

A Relational Understanding of the Body-Mind

Focusing and Buddhist Wisdom

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The Mandala of ‘Receptive’ Deities Continued

The Mandala of Receptive Deities

The Samjñā Skandha, the Klesha of Craving (rāga), and the Preta Realms

The Dharmadhātu Mandala as a Ten-Fold Meditation Cycle

Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework
for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by
the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads