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.

 

Current Mandala of Love Projects:

 

1.   Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing and Buddhist Self-Enquiry

I have just completed a major edit on an article in which I am highlighting the many points of connection between the practice that the great Eugene Gendlin chose to call Focusing, and the practice of self-enquiry, or ‘self-discovery’ in Buddhism. This long article weaves together many of my favourite themes, including my new-found interest in Neoplatonism. It is my hope and expectation that all meditators will find this essay very stimulating. Its foundational theme is the set of associations between the sublime brahmavihāras and their corresponding skandhas – a set of correspondences that I have not seen explored elsewhere. The implication of this exploration is that the brahmavihāras, when all four practices are embraced deeply, are our best doorway, not only into that mental and emotional stability that Sangharakshita called Integration and Positive Emotion, but into the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha’s Enlightenment.

 

 

2.   The Trikāya, Other-Power and the Buddha’s Middle Way

In the prayer at the top of this page, I refer to the trikāya – the Buddhist tradition’s three-level model of mind, which is also a three-level model of reality. I have recently written several articles on this subject, in which I use this framework to reflect on what the Buddha was meaning to communicate in characterising his teachings as providing a ‘Middle Way’. My impression is that this line of enquiry has previously been under-explored, and that I may be filling a gap. This has inspired me to make these articles into the first few chapters of a whole new book project. You can read the first three chapters here.

 

 

3.  The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala

During the last few 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 can be found here.

 

 

4.  Meditation and Self-Enquiry

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 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 made connections with other psychologies that share the same inspiration. I engaged in an intensive study of the psychology of Carl Jung concurrently with my Buddhist studies in my twenties and I find it natural to incorporate that knowledge. Jung borrowed very heavily from Buddhism in the development of his own mandala model of the psyche – unfortunately without sufficiently acknowledging his debt. In my ‘Buddhist’ writing, I find myself borrowing back from Jung – and I certainly acknowledge a great debt to him.

I have in more recent decades 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 and Mindfulness practice as ‘resting as Consciousness’, and the recognition of the brahmavihāras as ‘attitudes of Consciousness’. The term Mindfulness in Buddhist contexts is subtle and illusive and has several dimensions, but I find ‘resting as Consciousness’ to be descriptive of its essence.

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 as 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. 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.

An important source of inspiration for these articles was my deepening appreciation of the meeting of Quantum Physics / Quantum Biology with Neuroscience, which has been taking place in recent decades. 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, and is powerfully supportive of the insights of the Buddhist tradition.

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

 

 

5.   The Emptiness of the Five Skandhas

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.

The first group is focused on the very important, but much misunderstood, rūpa skandha – the ‘form-creating’, function of the mind. 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 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’, or ‘describing’, function of the mind – that function of mind that labels things, or persons, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The rūpa skandha however, is usually rendered, not by more accurate and descriptive words like ‘conceptualisation’, ‘conceptual form’, ‘reification’, or ‘concretisation’, but simply by the word ‘form’. This introduces a confusion in which the rūpa skandha, the ‘form-creating’, or ‘narrative-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 and our bodily felt experience in the interior of the body. These articles aim to recover the great power of the Buddha’s ‘Five Skandhas‘ teaching by addressing this area of confusion.

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.

 

6.   Communication, Relationships, Empathy and Self-Empathy

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 practices 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.

 

 

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

The earliest piece of writing on the site, this longer piece was written in 2012. It covers the most significant events in 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.

 

 

8.  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 and fear-based identification with the samskāras skandha (the volitional energies). This identification leads to the egoic power-drive of the klesha of irshya (envy), and to various 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 a refined ethical sensibility and with 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.

 

 

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, I take a much wider and deeper 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; and to ask what might contribute to understanding, to resolution, and 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. There have been long-term systemic and cultural factors at play that are preventing even the academic field of history from accurately perceiving the actions of US power – so it is not surprising that the general public is so confused. The history of the activities of the CIA (and more recently the CIA cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy) since WW2 has been avoided mainstream historical scholarship and mainstream journalism – for fear of being tarred with the brush of ‘conspiracy theory’.

The effect of this has been that the US has, since WW2, been able run two foreign policy narratives concurrently, one being essentially propaganda fabricated for public consumption, the other being the actual dark reality, which usually remains hidden until years later – skilfully hidden by security state agencies whose nefarious actions are guided by the principle of ‘plausible deniability’. As citizens in the modern world however, we cannot hide behind our historical ignorance. It is not ethical to merely watch the nightly news as if it were truth. We are obligated as citizens to examine and recognise the systemic dysfunction of our media outlets – to honestly face the economic and societal sources of distortion and disinformation – and to seek more reliable sources of knowledge about the nature of our world.

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 three decades 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 being killed by landmines alone. Numerically, 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 has been 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. As we saw with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, an agenda of ethnic cleansing, together with the willingness to use violence and threats of violence for political ends, once it has taken root in the culture and identity of a nation, will destroy that nation one way or another.

 

 

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 contemporary 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 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.

For more of my anti-war writing consider reading on the articles below:

‘Mainstream Media’ and ‘Conspiracy Theories’ – Some Buddhist Thoughts

Self-Power, Other-Power and Beyond – Part 1

 

 

William Parker 2024