This chapter continues my reflections on the three archetypal perspectives of ‘self-development’, ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’ that have been providing us with a framework for a big-picture overview of the Buddhist approach to Enlightenment and spiritual practice. As it is a continuation of the line of enquiry of my last chapter, I am currently calling it simply ‘Self-Power, Other-Power, and Beyond – Part 2’. While the chapter does stand on its own to some extent, I recommend that you read my previous chapter first – it can be accessed by clicking here.

This chapter continues to use the overview of Buddhism from an archetypal point of view, that was presented by one of Sangharakshita’s students, Dharmachari Subhuti, in a talk that he gave in 2003. Because it is loosely-based on the three ‘yānas’ of Hinayāna, Mahayāna, and Vajrayāna – pointing out the way in which we can see these re-capitulated in the spiritual development process of individual Western practitioners – it would probably be incorrect to say that these are Subhuti’s ideas. I am nevertheless very deeply grateful to him for his initiative in presenting this fresh and much-needed conceptualisation, and for his recognition that these three approaches should be thought of as archetypal perspectives. 

Extending considerably beyond the starting point for discussion that Subhuti provided, I have been presenting a personal examination of the range of problems and possible Dharmic misunderstandings that can arise when the characteristically ‘Eastern’ archetypal psychology of Buddhism is expressed within the collective unconscious mindset of the modern West. This exploration is also, necessarily, an investigation of the particular archetypal predisposition and current collective challenges of what we might call the ‘Western ego’ – so it is in part an investigation of the egoic mind as it has emerged with particular collective characteristics, within the context of the very particular historical conditions of the West.

Sadly, I found myself giving up on the Buddhist tradition at the end of my twenties, having lived a full-time Buddhist lifestyle for many years. While I had a very deep experience of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha – the Three Jewels of Buddhism – and for many years had been seized by a passionate commitment, the Buddhism that I experienced at that time, was full of deep incongruities. Indeed, I found aspects of its practice in a Western context to be deeply un-ethical and psychologically crude. My rejection of these incongruities, led me to lose all connection with Buddhism for more than three decades – even though aspects of its wisdom continued to serve as foundational points of reference for me.

My discovery of Dharmachari Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model, in about 2019, initiated a profound healing process for me – a difficult healing process accompanied by grief, as a flood of insights that had previously eluded me, arose. This three-fold framework provided me with a whole new way of understanding spirituality, and a whole new way of understanding the experiences of Buddhism that had so profoundly impacted me in my twenties. My intensive process of learning within Western Buddhism back in the 1980s, was somewhat unusual. It seems that it was my fate – my karma, as we say in Buddhism – to see what can go wrong when the heroic idealism of what Subhuti called the ‘development’, or ‘self-development’ perspective is over-emphasised, and when the other two perspectives are not adequately integrated into Dharma practice and Sangha culture.

Because I studied archetypal psychology concurrently with Buddhism in my twenties, I already had many insights in the form of archetypal reflections on the limitations of identifying Buddhism with the heroic ‘self-power’ perspective. It was not until I came across Subhuti’s model however, and more recently David Brazier’s advocacy of an ‘other-power’ Buddhism based on Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu), that I found validation for my instinct that Western Buddhist practice naturally evolves beyond the heroic and may even take on an entirely different and opposite ‘other-power’ frame of reference.

So, this chapter continues my archetypal psychological observations on the way this universal dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ plays out in individuals; in groups and societies; and in the processes of history. I shall continue to move between reflections on our individual process as Western meditation practitioners, our group processes as members of Western Buddhist Sanghas, and my reflections on the archetypal processes that have shaped Western history and culture. While I want to continue to validate the neglected ‘other-power’ perspective, I hope to also continue providing an outline of Buddhism’s third perspective, which reconciles the dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ – Subhuti’s ‘self-discovery’ perspective, which have been calling Vajrayāna.

This chapter is a work-in-progress. I welcome comments, if anyone wants to write to me via the contact form.

 

My overall aim with this book is to explore the four foundational elements of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ (Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death, and Spiritual Rebirth) in the light of Buddhism’s traditional trikāya model of mind. In this endeavour, I have found Dharmachari Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model to be powerfully explanatory – an outline of the three very different archetypal perspectives that we find combined in different ways, and emphasised to different degrees, in Buddhist tradition. In this chapter, I shall be continuing to seek the three-fold synthesis of these three perspectives, and continuing to highlight the dangers of practicing these approaches in isolation – especially the dangers of the heroic ‘self-development’ approach, which corresponds to the default perspective of the Western ego, and therefore is very often practiced in a one-sided way that excludes the other two perspectives.

In Part 1 of this long essay, as part of an analysis of the key elements of the default ‘heroic’ (self-development) perspective of the Western mind, I pointed out that the Hero archetype is more than just the archetype of the egoic will. It also provides the archetypal basis for our compulsion to be on the side of the ‘good’ in the judgmental dynamic of good-and-evil that is always at play within the construction of personal and social identity. Even more important, in the light of our three-fold model of ‘self-development’, ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’, and our Buddhist aspiration towards true individuality, the heroic mindset tends to lead to a darkly dysfunctional expression of our archetypal need for ‘self-surrender’. It seems that if human beings cannot find a positive expression for this archetypal need for authentic spiritual surrender to the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality, then this universal impulse will instead find expression in willing surrender of individuality through emersion in the group – which of course leaves us very vulnerable to psychological manipulation by the powerful.

While a conscious and positive ‘self-surrender’ and recognition of the true Other Power of the dharmic reality leads to a deepening of ethics and wisdom; the unconscious ‘self-surrender’ to the ‘other-power’ of the group, is a sacrifice of our discernment and our intelligence, to the group’s values and beliefs. Far from being a route to personal responsibility, ethics and spiritual self-transcendence; the dark reality of the archetype of the heroic, is such that even in the context of genuine Buddhist idealism, it will usually lead to a loss of individuality. The heroic mind’s tendency is to disintegrate our experience into polarities of consciousness and unconscious – and to divide our world by creating sharp dichotomies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’; ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; wanted and not-wanted; valued and de-valued, etc. Needless to say, our deep unconsciousness of the fundamentally erroneous and judgemental way in which the heroic mind describes and give conceptual definition to our world; when combined with our compulsion to lose ourselves in group processes, serves to undermine any true ethical sensibility – even in the most well-intentioned Western Buddhist.

I shall be getting into the cognitive-perceptual details of this loss of ethics in my next chapter. For now, let me just add that it is through the ‘form-creating’ rūpa skandha that the heroic mind ‘forms’ its distorted descriptions of reality. In the Buddha’s use of the term, the rūpa skandha denotes the reifying, concretising process by which the conceptualising, narrative-forming intellectual mind constructs a reality rather than allowing our actual objective reality to ‘be as it is’. In the context of the egoic mind, the rūpa skandha believes itself to be merely observing reality and describing it objectively, when in fact it is weaving an illusion. Significantly, this thinking function of the mind, describes both self and world as having ‘form’ – and being fixed and separate – when in reality everything is process, and both self and world are open systems. So the ‘form’ of things is an illusion, and what form they have, is only the ’empty’ form provided by the archetypes and systemic processes.

So, while we might imagine that the egoic will is at the core of our moral agency and is the prime driver of the processes of spiritual integration that we are seeking; in reality it simultaneously creates internal conflict and disintegration, and undermines our ethical sensibilities by creating psychological Shadow – our cognitive-perceptual blind-spots. This is why it is so important that Western Buddhist practitioners find forms of expression of the ‘self-surrender’, or ‘other-power’ archetype that are deeply authentic and true. We must each find a real personal response to the objective realities of the eternal dharmakāya and the archetypal samboghakāya. It may help you to know that we do not need to be able to distinguish these two subtle realities from each other. Indeed it is best, in my view, to see them as inseparable – since the unknowable dharmakāya and the visionary and bodily-felt sambhogakāya, are the un-manifest and the manifest aspects of a single dharmic reality. And thankfully that dharmic reality is ever-present, and available to us in every moment of Mindfulness.

We are all familiar with the idea of peer-pressure in groups. In regard to the heroic perspective and the heroic mode of consciousness, there is a similar social psychological dynamic that is so deeply inherent in the heroic, and so deeply inherent in the egoic mind, that it usually functions completely unconsciously. There may sometimes have been a superficial dynamic that we might call peer-pressure operating in those who attended Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies in the 1920s and 1930s, but more fundamentally, what history witnessed was a dimension of the archetype of the heroic. What was seen was a mass assertion of the egoic will through an experience of mass-consciousness, and a joyful and willing surrender to that experience – a willing surrender of individual rationality and discernment through immersion in the tribal consciousness of German nationalism. While the reparations that were imposed at the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, had been calculated to break the German spirit, the Nazis, in reaction to the violence of that punishing impulse, created a compelling heroic vision of a vigorous Germany with a renewed sense of national destiny, and filled with an instinctual vitality and purpose – a vision which was explicitly framed in the language of heroic self-surrender and self-transcendence.

Self-transcendence is a concept that Buddhists use too easily and without reflection – seemingly unaware that processes of self-transcendence can be both positive and negative. It is often used in place of the term ‘self-development’ that I have used for the first of Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’. Since we are seeking to understand the ‘back’ or Shadow of the ‘self-transcendence’, or ‘self-development’ ‘myth’, it is useful to reflect that the Nazis advocated, and indeed experienced, a form of self-transcendence – but not in good way. It is because of this association that I avoid, and would like to strongly discourage, exchanging Subhuti’s terms in that way. Reflecting on this opposite form of ‘self-transcendence’, a very similar expression of the same archetype, and of the same heroic impulse to surrender to the ‘other-power’ of the group, may help us to recognise the very different self-transcendence via the Middle Way that the Buddha was advocating – and may help us to understand why a narrowly heroic approach to Buddhism should be regarded as very problematic, or even as antithetical to the more comprehensive and balanced three-fold view that we need to be cultivating.

The heroic ‘group’ that I am talking about here is a collective manifestation of the heroic ego – both are socially constructed. The egoic self and the group in which it is inseparably embedded are expressions of the same archetypal pattern. This is why the archetypal imagery of the Six Realms in Buddhist cosmology, provide such compelling images of the way in which the egoic mind finds collective expression – and in that collective expression manifests the egoic tendencies (kleshas) in extreme ways. The group, on one side, and the non-individual ego, on the other, are a reflection of each other in the social psychological and individual psychological realms. As with the egoic mind, the group’s potential for evil is not at first apparent. Indeed, in the context of the heroic, the ability to surrender our ethically discerning heart and our intellectual clarity to group processes, can very easily appear to be a virtue. This dynamic of negative self-transcendence and negative self-surrender to the ‘other-power’ of the group, can very easily be present in a Sangha, no less than it was in Nazi Germany. The manifestation of the archetype is a matter of degree, the archetype playing out is the same.

The great Hannah Arendt, reporting on the Adolf Eichmann trial in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, gave a brilliant psychological analysis of the paradoxical way in which individuals in a society seized by the hero archetype lose their individuality – giving up any sense of personal ethical responsibility. Eichmann, who was charged, by Hitler, with the job of administrating the ‘Final Solution’ to the Nazi’s ‘Jewish problem’, was an intelligent and well-educated man. We fail to understand the nature of evil if we imagine him as a mad person with an insane hatred of the Jews – he was just a rather ordinary and efficient bureaucratic servant of the German state, who was able to use his intelligent rationalising mind to transcend individual ethical responsibility. Studying Eichmann’s testimony, Arendt gave a wonderfully clear description of the way in which a denial of responsibility, and a denial of the humanity of the identified enemy gets woven into the language of the heroic group. Evil was indeed well-described, by Arendt, as banal – so commonplace and deeply woven into the fabric of life that it goes unnoticed if we are not practicing that profound vigilance, which the Buddha called apramāda.

Properly understood, the archetypal principle of Sangha in Buddhism provides a counterpoint to the phenomenon of the heroic group. A Sangha is a Buddhist group that aspires to go beyond functioning merely as a social group or as a religious institution, but a community of beings who are at various stages on the path to Enlightenment. So, it is a group in which the individual practitioners, by endeavouring to practice the true ‘self-surrender’ of samādhi, or meditative-receptivity, begin to express a true spiritual autonomy of body, speech and mind – no longer socially surrendered to group norms, but guided by an ‘other-power’ relationship with the dharmic reality; relating to self and world with Mindfulness; and engaged in a true ‘Going For Refuge’.

The archetypes of Buddha and Sangha – of Enlightenment and true spiritual community – are an inseparable pair. The path to Enlightenment involves a process of learning to function as a true individual within a true Sangha – and the Dharma is our guide to both. It is very significant therefore, that we understand Sangha deeply, and understand that the Sangha archetype is profoundly undermined by the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, and requires the cultivation of a true ‘other-power’ spiritual culture. So, Sangha is profound spiritual reality – it requires the collective practice of true ‘self-surrender’, if it is to find embodiment in this nirmānakāya world. To think of a Sangha as a ‘Buddhist group’ is to completely miss what Sangha is. I hope in the course of the book to be able to show that Sangha is a sublime ideal – and one that requires not just our heroic idealism but our ‘self-surrender’ to the dharmic reality. And ultimately, it requires a culture of ‘self-discovery’ – a culture of ‘self-enquiry’ dyad practices and of resting ‘as’ Consciousness.

From the point of view of Buddhist wisdom, there are no evil individuals – only archetypal and systemic processes that lead to evil outcomes through the egoic problem of what we can call identification or personalisation. In Western culture, Hitler has become a favourite enemy image for conflation with individuals who have been targeted for regime change by the Western military alliances – by people whose job it is to provoke Shadow projection, and manipulate populations by evoking the archetype of the heroic fight of good against evil. Hitler is nevertheless, a useful figure to reflect on – a person who can perhaps help us to understand the pathology of the heroic. Hitler was an unusual leader in that he was an introvert, but like other leaders he had a very keen intuitive sense of the power of the heroic. He had a particularly deep understanding of the suffering and thwarted aspirations within the soul of the German people – it was as if he instinctively knew their psychological inner landscape – and most importantly, he had a particular instinct for the Warrior Hero archetype in German culture, and understood how to harness the power of that archetype.

So, Hitler almost certainly recognised that the Hero, when awakened in the collective, creates a force that subjectively appears noble, but objectively has a capacity for violence and inhumanity, and for ignorant submission, woven into it inherently. If he was evil, it was in his conscious use of his intuitive understanding of the nature of the heroic to gain personal power over the German people and to inspire them to violence – initially against those within Germany who saw what he was doing, and subsequently against Germany’s external enemies. He instinctively understood how to provoke a mass identification with the heroic, so that the energy of the German population would be at his service, while dissolving the individuality of each individual German man and woman into their national identity. With this knowledge he was able to mobilise a heroic idealism that was simultaneously deeply inhumane – easily crushing all political opposition, eliminating German democracy and establishing himself as the absolute leader. He used the language of nobility, effectiveness, and heroism to place Germany in the hands of its most violent, heartless, and unconscious individuals – people who were ruthlessly effective in their pursuit of Hitler’s goals; people for whom an absence of empathy was regarded as a source of strength.

If we have a foundational knowledge of archetypal psychology, and are well-informed about history, we cannot approach the heroic without deep ambivalence. I shall be attempting a more detailed cognitive-perceptual analysis of why this is, in my next chapter, which is on the Buddha’s systemic model of the self – the five skandhas. This form of analysis, and self-enquiry into the nature of ’emptiness’ (shunyatā), is characteristic of the ‘self-discovery’ level of practice that I have been calling Vajrayāna. One of the main problems of the heroic (‘self-development’) approach to Buddhist practice is that it, in effect affirms the illusion of fixed and separate self, and leaves no room for the Buddha’s foundational insight that the self is ’empty’ of self-nature – just a coming together of cognitive-perceptual processes to create the appearance of a self. Because the heroic is so deeply incongruous with this more ultimately true way of thinking, the ‘self-development’ perspective will always create a one-sided and incongruous mode of consciousness. I find it curious when I see Buddhists presenting the Dharma as if it were just a more refined and spiritually idealistic form of the heroic. Because the heroic is the default perspective of the egoic mind, it simply cannot be crudely harnessed to the service of the good in this way.

The Hero is the archetype of that narrow and inherently partial mode of consciousness that is the basis of our suffering. As Western Buddhists we may talk of using power in the service of love, but in the context of the exclusive ‘self-development’ orientation, the power mode is always our default, and will always be predominant – unless we are willing to integrate a deep and authentic form of real ‘other-power’ Buddhism into our practice. For me, the integration of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ that we need, is to be found in the three-fold perspective – the Middle Way perspective that I have been calling Vajrayāna. The Vajrayāna form of Mindfulness practice, in which we repeatedly take short moments to rest ‘as’ Consciousness and release our identification with the minds cognitive-perceptual contents, offers our best hope of liberation from our cognitive-perceptual blindness. Our attachment to the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective is understandable given the egoic mind’s propensities, but it’s limitations as a basis for spiritual development are tragically underestimated and, in my opinion, not sufficiently understood by Buddhists.

In my previous chapter, I spoke about the tendency for those who have no knowledge of archetypal psychology to see the Hero archetype and the Mother archetype as opposed principles in their spiritual psychology. When we construct a psychology in which this crude polarity is foundational – in which the Hero is associated with the moral will in opposition to the Mother, as a symbol, not just of our regressive impulses and our childhood conditioning, but of women in general – we run into huge problems. If we are drawing our understanding not from a universal archetypal psychology but from a crude Western understanding of the social psychology of an ancient Indian monastic culture, it is understandable that we might conflate Mother with the feminine in general – but this is clearly incorrect.

To bring clarity, and to free the life energy of our sexuality from this confusion, I have argued that we need to be aware that those individuals who are passionate advocates of the primacy of the heroic ‘self-development’ approach to the Dharma have often had an especially strongly positive experience of the personal mother, and that this has left a fear of the feminine in their unconscious. These hero-of-the-mother individuals are charismatic and influential, so we need to be especially careful not to allow them to weave their fear of the power of the feminine, into our fundamental framing of the Dharma. The collective psychology of the West is not the same as the collective psychology of Mother India out which the Buddha arose.

As Westerners, we need to look to our own traditions for guidance. In European history, we went through our own uniquely Western cultural healing process, which was a spontaneous reaction against the collective psychology of Christianity where the archetypal feminine was generally devalued and despised largely due to the reaction against Paganism and the powerful cultural influence of Christian monasticism and its celibate priesthood.

Historically, in Indian culture, while the imagery of the Divine Marriage archetype is extremely prominent in the collective unconscious (in a way that both alarmed and fascinated the English colonialists), actual marriages have been arranged. In Europe, until fairly recently, courtship and marriage was also a much more constrained and practical affair than we might imagine. In Medieval Europe however, there emerged a literary tradition of song, poetry and prose, that is filled with examples of heroic knights whose heroism was somehow intrinsically bound up with their love for a woman – a lady – whose image they would hold in their heart, while engaged in their heroic quest. There are a variety of positive and negative images of women in the medieval romances and Arthurian legends, but this imagery of the knight and his lady is very significant because it depicts the anima is in support of the heroic male ego’s spiritual quest. So, it presents a strong contradiction to polarisation against the feminine that seems to be suggested in ancient Indian Buddhist monasticism. Indeed is seem to suggest, paradoxically, that the heroic ego needs the ‘other-power’ connection that is provided by the archetypal feminine, if it is to sustain its ‘self-power’ engagement with personal transformation.

The term ‘courtly love’, is a 19^th Century naming of this Medieval literary genre, which also names an archetypal pattern in male psychology that has a healing role and great cultural value, and which is of particular importance for heterosexual men in the West. If we are engaged in an appropriate curation of the Buddhist tradition for the Western cultural and psychological situation, it might help us to understand the ‘courtly love’ tradition as a point of reference, because it emerged in the Western collective unconscious as a necessary balance to the harshly anti-feminine reaction that characterised much of the first millennium of the Christian period. It is insufficiently acknowledged that this anti-feminine spirit within Christianity led to a brutal destruction of civilisational strands that represent great beauty and human potential. Western Buddhists need to acknowledge that this pattern of violence is still alive in the collective unconscious of the West – or we will find ourselves acting it out.

Two events come to mind, that for me symbolise this violent current in the Christianised collective mind of the West, and the dawn of those ‘dark age’ centuries. The first is the murder of Hypatia in 415 AD. Hypatia was a brilliant female Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Eqypt. The second is the destruction of the Demeter-Persephone mysteries at Eleusis. The Eleusinian Mysteries where an extraordinary international mass-healing event that was celebrated every year at Eleusis near Athens until Roman Christianity put an end to it. In embracing Buddhist wisdom presented to us as it is the Pali Canon, in the cultural frame of reference of ancient Indian Buddhist monasticism, we have to be very careful not to find ourselves giving expression to the most violent and life denying tendencies in the Western collective unconscious.

I feel a need to push back against those who would dismiss the love between men and women as mere biological conditioning or sentimentality. Although this is a trend that the Buddhist tradition did eventually reject in the course of its evolution, it still tends to be referenced because of the continuing cultural influence of the Buddha’s choice of adopting of ancient Indian shrāmana tradition as the cultural foundation for his community – although, of course, there was in effect no other option available to him. While there may be Pali Canon fundamentalists in the West who will continue to advocate celibacy, and there will always be individuals for whom this choice is appropriate, the process of creating a Western Buddhism requires us to acknowledge not just the totality of Buddhist tradition in the East, but our very particular Western psychological inheritance. I am aware that I am speaking to, and for, heterosexual practitioners of Buddhism here, which is by far the biggest proportion. It is important, I believe, for heterosexual Buddhists to be able to frame their relationships, not as a falling away from the ideal, or from the Buddha’s teaching, but as a lifestyle choice that has, not just inherent of spiritual value as a path of transformation, but has a particular nobility and spiritual purpose that could not be achieved through any other lifestyle choice.

What I am saying then, is that the ‘courtly love’ tradition, and the particular quality of commitment and erotic bonding that heterosexual couples try to find, far from being an indulgence in sentimentality, can be seen as a necessary healing impulse emerging spontaneously within the Western psyche. The Western soul is still trying to heal its anti-Pagan attitudes of violence and disdain towards the feminine, and this is process that is alive in all of us. Those of us, who are engaged in raising the the consciousness of humanity, are also implicitly engaged in a recovery of an appropriate valuing, not just of women, but of the archetypal feminine within the psyche of men and women. A man who is becoming conscious needs cultural processes that allow him to value the feminine within and without. He not only needs to hold the feminine as precious in his heart, he needs to engage with the love of women as a spiritual practice – to provide the women in his life with a deep cherishing and containment so that they can flourish spiritually. If he can understand and meet his partner’s spiritual needs, she will meet his spiritual needs – including spiritual needs he did not know he had.

So, the male Western Buddhist practitioner needs something that Early Buddhism cannot provide, but is perhaps provided by, or at least suggested, by the imagery of courtly love. He needs to entertain the possibility that the passion of erotic desire can serve a deeply positive function in the human soul; that it can find life-affirming expression; can be disciplined; can be morally elevating; can be humbling of the ego; and can even lead to transcendence, exultation, and ‘self-discovery’.

I have returned to these reflections on the heroic mindset’s deep propensity for confusion in regard to sexuality, because this confusion has such widespread negative and even tragic consequences for Buddhism and therefore for the world. One of the most fundamental reasons for the lack of a much more widespread engagement with Buddhism in the West is the association of the Dharma either with celibacy – or with Buddhism’s seeming hypocrisy in regard to celibacy. To the non-Buddhist world, Buddhists appear to express a stumbling confusion in this area. This is why the distinction between the Mother archetype and anima archetype in male psychology is so important. The Mother is the crude vitality of biological nature – the cruelty and creative power of biological evolution; the survival of the fittest. The anima is the opposite of the Mother. Our anima images represent the objective reality of the psyche (a useful word that denotes mind as a phenomenon that is both apparently personal and archetypal). Anima also drives evolution, and in a much more significant way – not through survival, but through mate selection, and paradoxically, through our instincts for everything in the human experience that goes beyond mere survival and dominance and replication of genes. It is the anima archetype that gives us our sense of the erotic, of beauty, of art, and of the soul’s rich depth and complexity.

There is a deep paradox here that I am returning to because it is so fundamental. I have characterised the heroic ‘self-development’ view as the perspective of the hero-of-the-mother. This is partly because this perspective sits much too comfortably within the materialism of a narrow pre-Quantum Physics world-view, and because of its conscious or unconscious polarisation against the anima. Far from being that which pulls us back into our animal nature, it is the anima that lifts us out of our animal nature – out of the heroic survival-of-the-fittest domain of the Mother archetype, and into the much more complex and soulful domain of the truly human.

Homo Sapiens is not just the apex predator, the most intelligent and skilled of the animals – he is the hominid who is optimised for Consciousness, and for an ‘other-power’ relationship to the dharmic reality. He is the hominid with a polytheistic imagination, and capable of a sense of soul and ethics, and of human dignity and value. Humans are capable of an archetypal sensibility. Members of the species Homo Sapiens have the capacity to recognise that their life is a reflection of divine patterns – archetypal patterns. Unfortunately those seemingly more orthodox Buddhists of the hero-of-the-mother temperament, find themselves in alignment with the scientific materialists in wanting remove the poetry from heterosexuality – claiming that it is sentimentality and delusion.

I regard this as a dangerous and ultimately un-Buddhist impulse. It is characteristically human to recognise that the heterosexual bond is much more than animal instincts, psychological regression, and orgasm addiction – that it reflects the Divine Marriage archetype. As Western Buddhists we may choose to try to try to ignore the realities of the Western collective unconscious, but it will not help us to become integrated and positive and wise – and it will not help us spread the Dharma. Ultimately, the divine union that we seek is the Middle Way reconciliation between the eternal dharmakāya and this mundane nirmānakāya world in which we all live – a reconciliation within every aspect of mind, that is represented for us in the archetypal images of Divine Union in the sambhogakāya mandala. The Tibetan Buddhist archetypal psychology of the sambhogakāya mandala presents us with highest possible expressions of the Divine Marriage archetype. As Western Buddhists, we would do well to promote awareness of this imagery. The reduction heterosexuality to biology, and the denial of the potential spiritual value of sexual relationships is usually just ignorance. It is often sometimes worse than that however, because it is often a knowing rhetorical dishonesty on the part of those wish to validate there own position, and shape Sangha culture in a way that favours their own predisposition.

Our investigation of the nature of the heroic is in various ways bound together with our reflections on sexuality and the question of renunciation. There are various other areas of erroneous thinking that appear to be associated with the heroic, but the sexuality domain seems to provide us with a lot of examples of cognitive-perceptual errors. There seems to be value in clarifying these areas. Not only because it is of foundational importance to the identity of Western Buddhism that we provide this clarification – but also because they provide us with such strong examples of the cognitive-perceptual limitations of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective.

In regard to the theme of how we should view sexuality in the context of the Dharma, I find myself needing to state my view that, in Western Buddhism, no prescriptive generalisations are appropriate in regard to the issue of the positive or negative effects of sexual relationships on Dharma practitioners. Indeed a different form of renunciation is appropriate in the Western context – a renunciation not of sexual relationships themselves, but of all crude and generalising judgements in regard to sexual relationships. We should also renounce all crude differential evaluations regarding the two genders, or regarding particular sexual orientations – like the idea that homosexuality is more supportive of spiritual development than heterosexuality. The positives or negatives are just too individual, complex and indefinable to prejudge, and each individual’s needs and circumstances are so different as to make any such generalisation inappropriate.

Western students of Buddhism certainly need objective psychological knowledge to support self-enquiry and reflection. We need to understand the masculine and feminine as archetypes within the psyche of both men and women, or we fall into the strange literalism regarding gender identity that has seized the liberal West in recent decades. We also need to able understand the nature of human sexuality through the lens of evolution and physiology. It is just altogether too presumptuous however, for us to turn such knowledge into prescriptions regarding lifestyle. Each Buddhist practitioner must be responsible for their own choices, and must feel free to make their choices without any pressure from those who claim to carry the authority of the Buddhist tradition. If anyone is offering guidance, it must be a form of guidance that points the individual, though deep self-enquiry, to their own knowing.

 

 

Sexual relationships may or may not distract us from our spiritual path. Our view will likely depend on which ‘myth’ we are in, but we must decide for ourselves and refrain from pressuring others with our points of view. Having said that, I feel a need to present the counter-argument to the hero-of-the-mother perspective. Incongruous as this might seem to a heroic perspective rooted in the culture of Early Buddhism, I believe that our relationship with our sexual partner may for some of us become the crucible of our transformation, and the most important venue for the spiritual work of developing Positive Emotion and a kindly, relational awareness – and perhaps also for the ultimate work of self-transcendence. It needs to be said that the Dharmic path is a path of relationship – a path of deep friendships and spiritual partnerships – and that these may or may not be sexual relationships.

For me, Sangha must be understood broadly – since Sangha is an archetype and very much more than a religious institution. One way of approaching the idea of Sangha is to think of it as the social-psychological dimension of the Dharma. Identity is socially constructed and dissolution of the self-illusion is socially facilitated also. I find it helpful to understand Sangha as inclusive of our intimate partners – those with whom we share our spiritual journey. The Dharma is a path of integration and spiritual learning explicitly through this broadly understood Sangha principle – through authentic relationship and authentic community.

Because of Buddhism’s history, there will always be Buddhists who are dismissive about the value of long-term committed sexual relationships – framing these as ‘attachment’ and ‘clinging’. While I want to affirm that celibacy may be a valid path for some, I find myself also wanting to say that, for some of us our sexual partners may be the most important spiritual friends on a mutual journey of healing and spiritual liberation, and are likely to be the deepest and most authentic relationships we will ever have. I see no reason why a Buddhist should not approach such a relationship with the utmost seriousness and total commitment. People who claim to be our spiritual friends within a Sangha often have agendas running – they are both consciously and unconsciously constrained by their role in the religious institution of the Sangha. So, there may be no other person who is a better spiritual friend, and more important to your spiritual progress than the person who is your lover and/or life-partner. There may be nobody else in the world who will come to know you as deeply, or care for you as much.

In addition to bringing a critical perspective to the heroic impulse of renunciation, we need to distinguish between the Buddha’s social teachings, and the ultimate truths that are the foundation of his Middle Way path – the Middle Way being the Buddha’s challenge to the heroic asceticism of ancient India. By the Buddha’s social teachings, I mean those that relate to the social conditions of the culture of ancient Indian society, where the life of a celibate mendicant monk was usually the best option for one who is intent on self-transcendence. This was a lifestyle set within the framework of the strict expectations of a particular monastic community and the wider social conventions of ancient Indian society. It was also however, most importantly, as I have tried to explain, set within a culture of ‘other-power’ spirituality, where the spiritually motivated individual can relatively easily find themselves held by a sense of the divine other, and coming to rest in samādhi – in the peace and blessedness of a real relationship with the dharmic dimension.

Returning to reflect on Carl Jung’s spectrum of childhood conditioning, it is clear that our Dharmic understanding must include a wide enough range of psychological principles so that we can help people at both ends of the spectrum of life experience. The blessed individual at the positive end of the spectrum may have a bullet-proof strength of personal identity (the invulnerability of the heroic), whereas the very challenged individual at the negative end of the spectrum may have either no functional ‘sense-of-self’ at all, or deep-rooted unconscious self-hatred, or may just have very poor cognitive function or executive function due to genetic inheritance. When we face into the contrast between these two poles, it becomes clear that there is a need for thoughtfulness and humility. It is of great importance, that as Buddhists we cultivate a sophisticated and experiential understanding of the nature of the self – something that tends not to be available within the one-dimensional and anti-psychological framework of the heroic.

The positively conditioned individual, when presented with a narrowly heroic approach to the Dharma, is likely to appear to thrive, and to succeed at any task that they are given, whereas the negatively conditioned individual, who desperately needs an experience of personal effectiveness and personal value, is likely to fail. Dharma teachers need to be aware of this distinction. It is not enough to create a path that is adapted for the ‘strong-ego’, heroic, individuals. The weak also need help – indeed it is the more conflicted and stressed individuals that are more likely to be drawn to Buddhism, and they are likely to need a more nurturing path, and one that sees grieving, and the repair of psychological damage, as explicitly having a place on the spiritual path.

A particularly unfortunate expression of a lack of awareness of the very different needs of different practitioners,  and of a generalised application of the heroic emphasis in our approach to Sangha culture and Buddhist practice is in the idea that failure and humiliation are valuable as a way of ‘breaking the ego’. Buddhism is sometimes presented as if it is full of vague stories of Enlightened masters hitting their students with a stick, or of students being required to repeat tasks whose main purpose is the exhaustion and humiliation of the student. Within a heroic ‘self-development’, or heroic ‘self-transcendence’ approach to Buddhism, I have seen the practice of humiliation adopted as part of an un-thought-through behavioural psychology with the purpose of breaking through an individual’s psychological defences – in much the same way that animal trainers might set out to a ‘break’ an animal, or train an animal by punishment and reward. This sort of thing is common in high-pressure workplaces, but it so incongruous to see it in Buddhist communities, that I find myself speculating that it is a expression of the hormone testosterone, which causes aggressive assertion of rank in human male dominance hierarchies, just as it did in our primate ancestors.

While there may indeed have been some notorious Enlightened masters in the ancient East, who engaged skilfully and beneficially with their ‘strong-ego’ students in this sort of way, I don’t believe that there should ever be any general application of this sort of thinking in a Western Buddhist context. It is certainly possible to ‘break the ego’ of a person who is psychologically fragile and deeply defended, but it will not help them spiritually – and it is much more likely to create deep emotional conflicts and damaged relationships. The fact that this sort of absurd thinking could pass for Dharmic understanding, and actually be embraced as a form of practice within a Sangha, is something for us to think about – for me, it strongly highlights the psychological limitations of the exclusive ‘self-development’ perspective on practice.

One of the paradoxes that are highlighted when practitioners (we should include non-Buddhists who are also intent on radical spiritual transformation) are spread out along a psychological spectrum, is that a few of the most challenged individuals do eventually become wise – even to the point of gaining significant insight, and recognition of the dharmic reality. The ‘strong-ego’ individuals may also become realised, but they are probably more likely to achieve a lot of personality development while otherwise seeming spiritually constrained – and paradoxically appearing not to change significantly. The Buddhist tradition acknowledges this connection between suffering (dukkha) and wisdom. This paradoxical phenomena is not limited to Buddhist communities. In almost every city in the world there are wise Alcoholics Anonymous coaches who, having achieved recovery, devote themselves to the support of others – endeavouring to introduce those who are still in the grip of addiction to the benevolent ‘other-power’ that will be their salvation.

In the Buddhist context, this paradox is often seen, and deserves our attention. Those who ‘get’ the Dharma at a deep level, may not be the well-adapted individuals who adhere single-mindedly to the heroic perspective. We should perhaps take it as significant, that those who gain insight are not necessarily the most charismatic, or physically vigorous, or otherwise accomplished students, as we might have imagined – and they are not the individuals that ‘fit in’ to the Sangha organisation most easily. Indeed, the bold and critical clarity of their thinking is just as likely to create something of a problem for the organisation’s leadership. Those who are in the process of a deepening surrender to the real ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality are unlikely to be willing to surrender their own knowing in the face of the human ‘other-power’ of the Sangha hierarchy.

There are several important strands of reflection that I need to share here. The goal-orientated, behavioural focus, and black-and-white thinking of the heroic ‘self-development’ approach appears to lead to an inability to understand the Enlightenment process as a process, and that the our conditioned nirmānakāya selves are complex and multi-faceted. It tends to exclude the idea that insight is incremental – that spiritual development progresses incrementally and usually very unevenly across multiple dimensions. Tibetan tradition, drawing out an aspect of the Buddha’s teaching on the ’emptiness’ of the five skandhas, says that there are five Wisdoms – and that we do not develop them all at once. One of the implications of the multi-dimensional and evolutionary nature of wisdom, is that Wisdom (prajñā) cannot be separated from Faith (shraddhā) – that it is by our deepening recognition of, and familiarisation with, the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality, that we progressively erode, and them sweep away, the personalisation of the self.

As soon as we start thinking of insight as an all-of-nothing personal experience, as the ‘self-development’ perspective tends to do, we create enormous problems for ourselves. At worst, the judgemental ‘right-or-wrong’ impulse of the heroic perspective is so quick to step forward and judgementally dismiss the fragile new shoots of emerging insight, either in others or in ourselves, that nobody wants to risk putting their head above the parapet. I have seen a person return from a solitary retreat with a profound sense of faith and ‘other-power’, only to be attacked – judged harshly because this did not immediately show as improved performance in other areas of their personality. This is typical of the behavioural focus of the ‘self-development’ perspective, which is distrustful of internal incremental shifts, and paradoxically is especially distrustful of internal shifts that indicate the emergence of an internal source of knowing and inspiration. The true ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality is threatening to the Sangha hierarchy and to the ‘self-power’ spirit of the heroic ego.

Even though most Buddhist Sanghas understand that the goal of spiritual practice is true individuality, the actual emergence of individuality is always an uncomfortable process, both for the individual practitioner and for the Sangha of which they are a part. The emerging individual is no longer nested comfortably and unconsciously in the social dynamics the Sangha – the old ‘other-power’ social adaptations and the tendencies of the individual to look outside of themselves for wisdom, are challenged from within by a new ‘other-power’ sensibility and a recognition of an inner source of wisdom. To describe this transition within the individual practitioner’s relationship with the Sangha as ‘uncomfortable’ may not be putting this strongly enough. Difficult, complicated, or distressing may be closer to some people’s experience – especially if the Sangha culture favours the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective on the Dharma.

As I spoke of in my last chapter, if a Sangha wishes to be true to its stated aim of supporting the Enlightenment of its participants, it must learn to recognise and support these times of transition – and a Sangha that is over-identified with the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective will tend to fail in this regard. The fact that a Sangha which strongly preferences the heroic ‘self-power’ approach may be closed, not just to the ‘other-power’, but to the emergence of a true individuality in its members, may be very difficult for some Buddhists to face into. This is the psychological reality however, of the ‘self-power’ identification – that it is inherently bound up with a particular type of unconscious group identification; with a particular type of unconscious group cohesion; and with a culture in which ideas and values that step outside of the ‘self-development’ model are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, constrained. While the idea of a hierarchy of wisdom and compassionate capability within the Sangha is, of course, appropriate, we cannot afford to be blind to the negative dynamics of power in hierarchical spiritual groups, or to the way such dynamics inhibit the emergence of individuality – even as they claim to be fostering it.

Real wisdom springs from our relationship with the dharmic reality, so if our perspective on the Dharma is narrowly heroic, and uncomfortable with ‘other-power’, their will be a subtle and not-so-subtle discouragement of real individuality and wisdom from inside and out. To embrace a ‘self-development’ view exclusively, is to frame Enlightenment in a way that is too behavioural and too extraverted. As always there is a Middle Way to be found. While it is reasonable to expect internal spiritual changes to show in our behaviour and communication; if we are too heroic, and get over-focused on behaviour, we create unreasonable expectations of ourselves, which interfere with our process. The exclusive ‘self-development’ approach of the heroic mindset can cause us to deny ourselves the internal avenues of self-enquiry that lead to emotional transformation and insight. We should not allow those of the narrow ‘self-development’ persuasion, to be the judge of what is of value in our practice – we must develop our own intuitive sense of the life-forward direction. While there will always be those who see it as their role to advise us and direct our spiritual progress, ultimately we must find guidance within. The primary measure of our progress towards wisdom must be the quality of our inner relationship with the dharmic reality, and the quality of our relationships with those we love.

The ultimate goal of Buddhist practice can be framed in behavioural terms. We are indeed seeking to become concretely effective servants of the wisdom and compassion that is woven into the fabric of the universe. The path however, is primarily an inner one. The Middle Way therefore requires us to find a balance. In the process of recognising the dharmic reality, we recognise that behavioural change and new areas of knowledge, capability and competence are secondary to the primarily internal process of Enlightenment – secondary to the deepening of our relationship with the dharmic reality. If we over-emphasise the behavioural focus, and adopt the heroic ‘self-development’ approach, we are in effect reversing the natural order of emphasis in the process. We then find ourselves putting heroic behavioural change first, and putting the more subtle emotional and perceptual change that we call faith and wisdom, second.

The tragic paradox of this is that the focus on behavioural effectiveness to the neglect of the internal processes that support free communication, spiritual friendship and sustainable personality change, always leads, seemingly inevitably to a failure to meet the behavioural goals. Any spiritual collaboration that is overly-heroic, and overly-hierarchical, will inevitably be unsustainable, and will ultimately fail. I have spoken before about how the Tibetan Vajrayāna, in effect, replaced the Buddhist tradition’s earlier identification of the virtue of virya, or vigorous determination, with the much more subtle idea of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. The need for wisdom in regard to effort – the need to apply effort in a wise way and toward wise ends – cannot be emphasised enough.

As I have said before, we may not all be able to become heroes – as this may quite simply, be physically and neurologically beyond our capabilities in this life. We can all however, within our limitations, become humble bodhisattva agents of the transcendental dharmic order – animated, vitalised, enlivened and invigorated by that relationship. Some of us may express that relationship of agency and service in a way that appears heroic. That however, would be an incorrect characterisation, because such people are acting spontaneously, and have moved beyond the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. Enlightenment is not an achievement of the egoic will – and nor are any of the activities of those who gain Enlightenment.

Inviting a deep enquiry into the archetypes that are at play when Buddhism is adopted and adapted within the collective psychology of the West, I have suggested, as a question to ponder, that the Western ‘hero-of-the-mother’ does not need the transcendental – at least not in the traditional Buddhist sense, as a transcendental dharmic reality recognised as a real ‘other-power’, and as the source of our healing and salvation. This is perhaps a very surprising and counterintuitive idea – difficult to face into for those Westerners who have grown used to seeing Buddhism as a path on which a form of real spiritual self-transcendence is possible through the effort of a personal will. As I have explained, our attachment to the heroic expresses a wider Western cultural blind-spot however. We can lack a real interest in the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality because our sense of ‘self-power’ is so highly developed – and because the ‘other-power’ perspective requires us to renounce the cognitive limitations of our deeply held, but often not-fully-conscious, scientific materialist beliefs.

If however, a practitioner is not turning inwards towards the ‘other-power’, to find the transcendental dharmakāya and archetypal sambhogakāya, as the source of their healing and their wholeness, then they will not find the source of their ultimate mental and emotional stability – and the source of their practice of Integration and Positive Emotion. Wisdom is also likely to elude them, because they will not be looking beyond the egoic mind – which is where wisdom is found. They may even fall into the delusion that wisdom is merely a sort of extension of what they already know. Even Integration and Positive Emotion, the two foundational stages of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ require, for their completeness, an ‘other-power’ attitude – as I shall be explaining in my future chapter on the brahmavihāras.

In general, the Western approach to knowledge tends to be extraverted, but wisdom requires that this is balanced by a more introverted approach – a willingness to look within; to engage in self-enquiry. Spiritual knowledge is not like the knowledge that we can gain by going to school or university and studying diligently. It is not enough to be deeply familiar with the traditional teachings. It is not even enough that we have a truly masterful and encyclopaedic knowledge of the teachings after years of reflection. Our purpose rather, is to recognise the objectively existing truths that the teachings are pointing us to – the archetypal realities that are symbolised in the sambhogakāya mandala, and the reflections in the concrete reality of this nirmānakāya world that the teachings are also pointing to. If we fail to balance the outer guidance with inner reflection and self-enquiry, we will always be absolutely beholden to others who identify themselves as wise – and may never find wisdom for ourselves.

The sort of enquiry that is required, is one in which we endeavour to see both the darkness and the light of the human condition. These things go side-by-side in the Buddha’s approach. The Middle Way and the Four Noble Truths both express this paradox. One of the practical implications of this, is that those who suffer can often see the transcendental more clearly. The comfortable prosperous Christians and Jews who facilitated, and benefited from, the Atlantic slave trade, were morally bankrupt and spiritual lost. They used the external textual form of their religious teachings to justify their inhumanity. The African slaves who adopted the Bible as their spiritual support and guidance, looked beyond the words and developed a profound sense of the transcendental – they found in Christianity a sense of the universal moral order and of the ultimate goodness in the universe. Dr Martin Luther King, who was heir to that tradition and that suffering, became a beacon of truth and justice in the prosperous but morally bankrupt society of post-WW2 USA – until he was brutally murdered by those who felt threatened by his message.

In Buddhism, especially in the Vajrayāna context, we acknowledge the way suffering calls forth a recognition of the ‘other-power’ of unconditional love, and of what Christians call ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’. Buddhist tradition recognises the deep paradoxical connection between these two realities. We may even say that suffering has a spiritual meaning and a spiritual purpose – even a compassionate purpose – in the mysterious reciprocal reconciliation process of spiritual evolution. We might even say that suffering is necessary – not just inevitable. We should perhaps entertain the possibility that we suffer in order to find the unconditional reality of Loving Kindness, Equanimity, Compassion, and Appreciative Joy – the brahmavihāras – woven into the fabric of Consciousness at the level of the dharmakāya and evident to us in the bodily-felt archetypal reality that we call sambhogakāya.

I shall be exploring the brahmavihāras – and their archetypal source in the mahabrahmavihāras – in detail in a future chapter. For me, the mahabrahmavihāras are the ‘other-power’ sources of our ultimate salvation and the fundamental dimensions of our experience of the sambhogakāya, and it seems that we may be less likely to recognise them if we are too comfortable. It is commonly stated that Buddhist wisdom leads to a transcendence of suffering, but it is important not to understand that idea in a superficial way – those who do not suffer are not more spiritually developed, and those who have fallen into a complacent denial of the harsh reality of the suffering that pervades this world, have truly lost their way.

In this connection we should acknowledge the English Quakers, who also looked beyond the words of the Christian teachings and found guidance in an internal and transcendent light of truth. This was another vital spiritual community that arose out of painful disillusionment – out of the violence of the English Civil War in the 17th Century, and out of the disillusionment that followed the first publication of the Bible in the English language. Nine out of the twelve members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery that was founded in 1787, were Quakers – the other three being Anglicans. Quakers had however, campaigned against slavery for a century before that committee was founded. It is significant that the moral conviction and leadership came from the Quakers – a small, socially-marginalised and persecuted religious group with no formal hierarchy of priests, and a group that sought only to facilitate its member’s ability to know ‘that of God’ within themselves and their fellow man. Notably, the Quakers used a highly-conscious and empowering form of organisational structure that in the modern world would be identified as a form of ‘sociocracy’.

Martin Luther, reacting against the corrupt, disdainful, and abusive episcopal hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church had spoken of ‘the priesthood of the believers’, but the Quakers went beyond the other Protestant fellowships in the way they gave expression to this equalitarian principle. They called their church services ‘Meetings for Worship’, and while they had a keen sense of reverence for the elders within their spiritual community, they conducted these meetings in an extraordinarily egalitarian way. Essentially, they saw the whole congregation as standing in the all-pervading light of the transcendental. They were guided by the principle that while human beings may be very unequal in their gifts, they are of equal value in the sight of God, and should be equally ready to receive messages of wisdom or inspiration, and preach them to others – whether male or female, black or white, slave or free.

Shortly after my period of intensive study of Buddhism in my twenties, I became a practicing Quaker for more than ten years from my early thirties to my early forties, and found the Quaker approach to worship to be an extraordinarily beautiful expression of many aspects of the Buddha’s Middle Way – especially in regard to the need to balance the extraverted orientation of learning from external authorities within the tradition, with the more introverted approach of being supported to find a source of internal authority. At best, the Quakers were certainly ‘self-discovery’ practitioners – I believe many of them achieved a reconciliation of the ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ to a significant degree. That tradition bore witness to the fact that the ‘light’ of Consciousness was beyond the egoic mind. Indeed, they learned to rest in a relationship of devotional-receptivity to the metaphorical ‘light’ of the Transcendental. While many early Quakers would have specifically identified that reality that they called ‘the light’ with the indwelling spirit of Jesus Christ, the tradition increasingly recognised the ‘light’ to be universal – so universal that it was ultimately not appropriate to identify it exclusively with the cultural container of Christian tradition. There is a clear commonality with Buddhism in their approach. They knew that Truth – objective and compassionate knowing – comes from patient meditative receptivity to the transformative power of the ‘light’ of Consciousness. They were practicing what Vajrayāna Buddhists would recognise as a form of Mindfulness practice.

If we are unconsciously immersed in the world-view of the heroic, we may never learn the subtle practice of allowing ‘other-power’ to guide our knowing and provide energy for our practice. The Quakers had a keen sense of the importance of going beyond the egoic mind – of finding moments of receptivity to inner guidance in the midst of daily life decision-making. This is a neglected aspect of Middle Way practice – this ‘other-power’ mode of knowing. In the Buddhist context, we can think of it as gaining a sense of guidance through direct receptivity to the dharmic reality within. I often find myself wondering if elements of the organisational structures and decision-making practices that were adopted by the early Quakers, might usefully be integrated into the Western Buddhist practice of Sangha.

History has shown very clearly that there were elements in Quaker philosophy and practice that served to profoundly challenge a collective dysfunction that runs very deep in Western societies – and Western spiritual communities. We should at least be aware that when a Western Buddhist organisation chooses an explicitly hierarchical and episcopal structure, that a cultural and philosophical balance to this needs to be found in some way – if the lived experience of Sangha is to deeply reflect the balance of the Buddha’s Middle Way and the Five Wisdoms. Indeed, the purpose of the teaching activities of any religious organisation must be to support its members to find their own knowing – to find their own recognition of the objective truth that the teachings are pointing to. This balance can be difficult to find and incorporate into the culture of Sangha because the heroic ego tends to preference hierarchical organisation, and tends to be defended against practices that engage in ‘other-power’ and ‘self-discovery’.

I have suggested that perhaps we do not suffer enough in the modern West – and therefore are not prompted to turn inwards towards the dharmic reality. Of course, there is suffering in the modern West – terrible suffering, terrible injustice, terrible cruelty, and a terrible waste of human potential – but we tend not to acknowledge it. We do not need to be suffering the relentless physical hardship of life in medieval Tibet to be motivated to recognise the dharmakāya, but it is worth noting that there are many Western Buddhist practitioners who appear not to need the transcendental, and appear closed to the ‘other-power’ view, or at least fail to advocate for such a turning inwards – and that many of these are nevertheless highly influential and in positions of authority.

This is important, because there are ‘Buddhist leaders’ in the West whose Going For Refuge is so heroic in character, that it does not include a personal turning inward in an attitude of devotional receptivity toward the dharmic reality. If our Going For Refuge does not incorporate a keen sense of a real ‘other-power’ that is concretely supporting us in our spiritual evolution, then we may be Going For Refuge to ourselves – or to an idealised future-self image that the egoic mind has constructed. The triratna, or ‘Three Jewels’ of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is an archetypal expression of the dharmic reality – these three principles are beyond the imagination of the egoic mind and cannot be fully grasped. In the Vajrayāna traditions’s Refuge Tree practices, it is made clear that Going For Refuge, if is it is to be effective, must be directed towards the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya – not just to the nirmānakāya world of our aspirational spiritual identity, our Dharmic understandings, our teachers, and the social world of our particular Sangha.

A possible root of the apparent emphasis on heroic ‘self-development’, and the associated prejudice against the development of a true ‘other-power’ Buddhism, is in the un-thought-through assumption that a Western Buddhist Sangha should strive to make Buddhism accessible to Westerners. I cannot help feeling that this idea needs to be made more fully conscious, and needs to be the subject of a rigorous collaborative enquiry. While the idea of maximising accessibility is laudable – and I agree that in the West, we should strive to create a new and distinctively Western Buddhism, that is adapted to meet the challenges of the modern world – we must however, avoid the danger of dumbing Buddhism down to meet the cultural expectations of Westerners. We should not underestimate people. People who come to learn meditation, and study the Dharma, are after all people who are drawn to look beyond the Western mindset. They are likely to welcome an articulate challenge to the straight-jacket of the scientific materialism and the heroic mindset that is our cultural inheritance. We cannot dumb down our whole approach just to cater to a few narrow-minded individuals who are closed to the possibility of a transcendental dharmic reality.

It could be argued that if a Buddhist religious institution is not actively empowering its participants by promoting a truly ‘other-power’ Buddhist perspective, and perhaps even some sort of introductory guidance in the practice of ‘self-discovery’, then it may be showing a conscious or unconscious attachment to its institutional authority – and perhaps even failing, in much the same way that Christianity did, to validate its participant’s direct and independent connection with the dharmic reality. This is an incongruity that may seem so dark that it seems hard to contemplate – indeed it is a Shadow that many in positions of institutional power within Buddhism will, quite understandably perhaps, absolutely refuse to contemplate. These collective psychological dynamics played out in the West, in Christianity, for centuries, and are present in our culture to this day. It is unwise therefore for us to ignore these cultural tendencies. A heroic ‘self-development’ spirituality that is geared toward the establishment of a strong moral ego as the primary agent of personality change, and that is socially adapted to the acceptance of the authority of others within the hierarchy of the Sangha, will have a Shadow side. This is a psychological fact – even the most genuine commitment to Buddhist ethical precepts will not immunise us, or absolve us of responsibility. At worst, such a model is unethical, unsustainable, and a betrayal of the principles of the Buddha’s Middle Way.

It can be argued that the Buddhist notion of Going For Refuge to the ‘Three Jewels’ of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is incomplete, and even misdirected, if it does not include this ‘turning inwards’ towards the truth – an internal source of truth without which we find ourselves dependent on external sources of guidance. External guidance is of course also necessary, and this involves the difficult task of translating and interpreting the Buddhist texts and commentaries, and discerning what is of value. Even more crucially, it involves deciding who we can trust. We should only ‘sit at the feet’ of teachers who have shown themselves to be trustworthy, who really are wiser than us, and who are genuinely committed to our empowerment. We need to be aware that many who claim to be teachers in the Buddhist context, are teaching ‘out of the tradition’ rather than from their own realisation. There is always the danger that the Western practitioner may, even after years of such extraverted Buddhist practice, find themselves with no real source of guidance within – no direct knowledge of the truth that they have ostensibly been Going For Refuge to.

I hope that these detours in my narrative have helped my readers to see that there is a wider cultural issue here for the Western Dharma practitioner and Sangha member. The current spiritual crisis of the modern West could be characterised as having arisen because we are so materially comfortable that we no longer need the transcendental – and are so blinded by scientific materialism that even some of our Buddhist teachers are closed to the dharmic reality. Where this narrow perspective is present, it has a profoundly limiting effect on our Dharmic culture. For, example, Mindfulness practice, becomes extremely limited and behaviourally focused if there is no acknowledgement of a wise and compassionate ‘other-power’, ever-present in the experience of Consciousness. We have lost our moral reference points. Archetypally speaking, we have become the grandiose heroes of a materially benevolent mother – and in that heroic identification we have become distracted and disorientated, even though we are extremely accomplished. Because of hubris, we have allowed our sense of the sacred, and of the soul, and of the indwelling divine, to slip away – and we are all in danger as a result.

At worst, we have lost the ability, or even the need, to look within – to recognise the eternal and transcendental reality in which we rest. And because of this we have lost our moral compass, our discernment, and our sense of spiritual direction. A true ethical sensibility requires a comprehensive self-awareness that challenges the egoic mind’s tendency towards unconsciousness. Even more fundamentally however, it requires an awareness of the moral order that is inherent in Consciousness – woven into the fabric of the universe on the level of the dharmakāya, and manifest in us as the imagery and bodily-felt experience of the sambhogakāya.

The cultural process that has brought the West to its current lost place is a paradoxical one. The philosophically-minded might acknowledge that it has been a descent by way of the cultural movements of modernism and post-modernism. Our creative participation in the metamodern future that is trying to born requires us to become keenly aware of the cultural wall-paper that has been shaping our consciousness. Buddhism can help us in this, but only if we use its archetypal perspectives to critique our society and critique the heroic and monotheistic dysfunction of the egoic mind. As Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model suggests, we need to become aware of the myths we are in and aware of their Shadow.

The notion of a metamodern intellectual sensibility that might take us beyond modernism and post-modernism, and might create a reconciliation and creative integration of those previous movements of thought, is directly relevant to our current theme. Metamodernism is a Middle Way – a third way which reconciles a previous dichotomy – and I believe that a Western ‘other-power’ Buddhism can contribute to this cultural renewal, and to a new basis for ethical discernment in Western societies. Unfortunately however, ethics in Western Buddhism is generally approached in a heroic, idealistic, and ‘self-power’ way. This means that it is putting its faith in the power of the Sangha as a ‘positive group’ guiding ethical discernment. In practice this approach to ethics often leaves us lost – and looking to the various currents of modern and post-modern thought in our society for ethical guidance. While we certainly need to acknowledge the positive role that a positive social group can play in the support of a culture of ethics, we cannot afford to fall into the idea that the combination of a heroic moral will and the Buddhist idealism of Sangha culture, is on its own sufficient to create a better society. We need to incorporate an ‘other-power’ approach if we are to lift our ethics practice and lift the way we think about ethics to a higher level. Each practitioner ultimately needs to be taught to look within for the basis of their ethics.

There is a nihilism abroad in the modern West. Buddhist philosophy when crudely understood can also appear nihilistic – especially if it is viewed through the lens of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. Indeed, the unconscious nihilism within the Western world-view is closely related to the dominance, in the West, of this same heroic ‘self-power’ mindset. This nihilism that I am talking about is one of the extremes that the Buddha specifically warned us against when he presented his Middle Way approach to spiritual practice, but that does not prevent it from finding its way into Western Buddhist culture.

We are living in Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’ universe – the existential desert of modernism, but overlaid with the ethical chaos of post-modernism. There is no culture of looking within to a divine ‘other-power’ that might orient us, might renew our sense of right and wrong. The idea that there is a moral order in the universe is now generally regarded as an archaic pre-modern idea. Across the political spectrum from left to right, people are not looking within for what is right – they are looking to the heroic and judgemental right-and-wrong narratives that are intellectually constructed by groups within society, and by the influence operations of the powerful. In the absence of a real ‘other-power’ spirituality in our Western Buddhist culture, we are forced instead to look to the external other-power of our chosen social and political groupings. If the philosophy and practice of ‘self-power’ dominates our Sangha culture, it will not provide us with a real embodied sense of ethics – rather, it will only fulfil the much more limited modern and post-modern role of providing us with a socially-constructed set of values and ideals.

There is a huge piece of reflection that could be included here, about how, in reaction to the ethical confusion of modernism and post-modernism, many in the modern world find themselves returning to, and clinging to, the religious certainties of Christianity and Islam. In making the choice to embrace these faiths people are expressing an archetypal human need for an ‘other-power’ spirituality, which Buddhism could potentially meet in a much more appropriate way. The problem with Christianity and Islam is that they are not just faiths but religions. In other words, they contain real pointers to the divine (i.e. dharmic) reality, but that pointing is buried with a framework of archaic and fundamentalist beliefs, and within mythic stories that are taken literally. Buddhism is much more philosophically subtle, and frames much more ambitious spiritual goals – aiming to support the development of true individuality, and a profound mental and emotional alignment with the dharmic reality through meditation practice – whereas the Abrahamic religions can be characterised as fostering heroic development through emersion in the values and practices of a religious group.

Although Christianity and Islam appear at first to be profoundly devotional ‘other-power’ traditions, in reality they both tend to express that ‘other-power’ impulse in an erroneous fundamentalism. The cultural basis of ethical discernment within those traditions lacks the ‘self-enquiry’ or ‘self-discovery’ component which is so characteristic of Buddhist spirituality – it comes from the social influence of the religious hierarchy, which illegitimately assumes the authority of the divine. History has shown that introjection of ethical ‘commandments’ to create the ‘self-power’ ethical emphasis of these religions does not create ethical and just societies – far from it. Participants may experience and recognise ‘other-power’, but are not trained through meditation and self-enquiry practice in a process that cultivates individual ethical discernment. Because the devotees of the Christianity and Islam are not oriented by the aspiration to personally develop for wisdom and compassion, they remain guided by religious ethical codes rather than by an emerging sense of individual knowing rooted in Integration, Positive Emotion, and a release of egoic personalisation. So, the empowering sense of ‘other-power’ that they provide, comes at a great cost. The theism of these religions brings a terrible absolutism to their thinking – and historically this has produced outcomes that were far from ethical or compassionate. Rather than leading to individuality, ethical discernment is lost as the participants become psychologically submerged in the religious group.

While our ‘self-power’-oriented Western Sangha may teach us basic meditation practices, and a set of traditional Buddhist ethical precepts, it may fail to guide us in the practice of turning inwards towards the ‘other-power’ source of our own ethical knowing. We may, in effect, be left with only a form of heroic humanism – only a set of idealistic principles – as the philosophical framework for our ethics practice. And after decades of meditation practice in the spirit of this heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, we may be disappointed to find that we have not become deeply transformed – that we have not become the profoundly ‘good’ and effective person that we hoped we might become. We may still find ourselves deeply confused in our personal ethics – and in our ethical stance on political issues and on the ethical issues facing our society.

Objective news coverage is very rare in the modern world. A strange societal phenomena that appears to be related to post-modernism, has been the seeming loss of the idea of objectivity in current affairs journalism – which has, in effect, generally abandoned objective reporting in favour of a form of ideological commentary. Indeed, modern mainstream news coverage, now appears to see it as its role to take a heroic ethical position. Rather than offering balanced historical analysis, and views from both sides of an issue, they present a perspective that supports the editorial view of the news corporation – not uncommonly, presenting news in an unashamedly propagandistic way, to support either the government position, or the view of the company’s board of directors and advertisers. We rarely see news journalists and their editors even attempt to be impartial. Rather, they appear to see their role as to sit in judgement and decide who is good and who is bad, and then tell their audience what is right and what is wrong – unapologetically presenting a curated version of the truth, and unapologetically telling their audience what to think.

This is a very dark trend indeed. Western societies are no longer arenas which take free speech as a foundational principle, and in which perspectives on the reality of the modern world are freely discussed. They have become post-modern battlegrounds, where there is merely a battle for the prevailing narrative, and the value of truth itself appears to have become almost entirely lost. While post-modernism appears to create a lively cultural debate on a range of ethical issues, in reality it produces a superficial atheist liberalism in which there are no objective reference points for ethical discourse. Paradoxically, this goes hand-in-hand with a fiercely anti-liberal religious conservatism, that at worst is equally value-free and morally bankrupt. While the discerning person can find tiny pockets of real, objective, independent journalism on the Internet, the legacy news media industry appears to have lost sight of its ethical foundation. While the journalistic arena is splintered into left and right, these signposts are less and less meaningful or rooted in historical realities – and they are splintered further, with numerous channels each providing commentary with a particular bias that is either geared to a particular ideological group, or interest group, or ‘identity’ group, or more often, is simply presenting the perspective of the media organisation’s owners and managers.

The phenomena of epistemic bubbles now predominates – mutually exclusive knowledge spaces where information is curated to confirm the bias of each particular group. This is, in large part, a phenomenon of the social media age, where the algorithms that personalise our social media feeds ensure that we live in an echo chamber of ideas that confirm our own prejudices. This dangerous and irrational phenomenon sits easily in the context of post-modernism, but it is easily manipulated by the powerful and has already become deeply dysfunctional. Ideas like ‘truth’; ‘society’; the importance of the democratic nation state; and class identity, that were so important within the philosophy of modernism that dominated the 19^th and 20^th centuries (a view which itself grew out of the philosophical worldview of the European Enlightenment that emerged in the 17^th and 18^th centuries), have lost value in the post-modern world – with its explicit rejection of objective truth. Our subjective focus on our family interests and our friendship tribes is an expression of this shift in the philosophical zeitgeist.

If it is prepared to face into the impact of these trends, Western Buddhism can perhaps offer and antidote to them. In the context of this individualism and modern tribalism, the Dharma can however, only offer a really profound ethical counterpoint to the nihilism of the modern world, if it re-introduces the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth – and that there is an objective dharmic reality that can serve us as an inner guide in the development of our ethical sensibility. If we are going to lift ourselves out of the narrow, intellectually-constructed ethical narratives of modernism, and the subjectivity of post-modernism, we need more than a socially-constructed moral code based on ancient Indian Buddhist monasticism. A heroic idealism and an ethics which looks to the Sangha hierarchy for ethical guidance is ultimately not enough. Worse still, it turns the Sangha into another post-modern battleground for the dominant narrative on the ethical issues of the day.

We need above all to support the emergence of true individuals – individuals that have the courage, wisdom and emotional maturity to stand in their personal truth against the social group if necessary – guided by their own internal relationship with the dharmic reality. These individuals must also be equipped with the conceptual language of historical, systemic and archetypal reasoning so that they are able to articulate a basis of ethics that includes reference to the objective dharmic reality – and so that those hearing what they have to say recognise the objectivity of their assertions. To push back against the subjective, post-modern, post-truth, free-for-all battle for the ethical narrative, we need forms of ethical reasoning that go beyond appeals to the authority of the Buddhist tradition.

A core idea, for me in the development of an ‘other-power’ spirituality, and an ‘other-power’ ethical discernment is the idea that our wants and desires (samskāras) are not personal. The Buddha strongly emphasised this, but it is an illusive idea, and therefore is not well articulated until we get to the three-fold perspective of the Vajrayāna stage – where it is embraced as the practical basis for all practice. The practitioner who is seriously engaged with the ‘self-development’ perspective tends to view all the desires and motivations as, not ’empty’, but personal, and therefore finds themselves engaged in a personalised internal conflict between those volitional energies that are deemed good and those that are deemed bad. The Vajrayāna view de-personalises the samskāras. By framing Mindfulness practice as an invitation to rest as Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha), it invites us to dis-identify with them, and recognise them to be, not personal, but universal.

This recognition has profound deepening effect on our ethical sensibility – because we start to recognise that ethics is not actually about a heroic renunciation of particular samskāras, in ourselves and others, that we have deemed to be ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’, but about the nature and quality of our relationship with our samskāras. When we begin to recognise the samskāras to be multiple, and dis-identify from them, our psychological functioning begins to change profoundly – we no longer function ‘heroically’ because we no longer have a simplistic belief in a heroic moral will at the heart of the egoic constellation. Rather, we observe the samskāras systemically – noticing them arising in Consciousness, and noticing the associated feelings and thoughts, but not necessarily identifying with them. Relating to the samskaras (of ourselves and others) from this more Mindful place we are not only much more psychologically sophisticated and compassionate in our ethics; we are no longer so judgemental – no longer so preoccupied with our judgements of ourselves and others.

One of the most useful Western psychological models that can support us in this awareness is the Nonviolent Communication model of the late Marshall Rosenberg. Viewed from the point of view of the Buddhist archetypal psychology of the Vajrayāna, we can recognise, when we study his model carefully, that what he presented was not just a Mindfulness of Communication model, but a Mindfulness of the samskāras model. Intuitively recognising, as the Buddha did (even though he had not done any deep Buddhist study), that we must release of identification with the egoic will by dis-identifying from its volitional components (samskāras), and recognising them as ’empty’ of self-nature, Rosenberg called the samskāras, Universal Human Needs. The word ‘universal’ clearly indicates the ultimately ‘non-personal’ nature of human motivations (samskāras).

The word ‘Need’, or ‘Needs’, at first seems incongruous in this context; but the word ‘needs’ in this context denotes objectivity rather than subjectivity – so we a talking about volitional energies that are recognised to be impersonal rather than personal. By juxtaposing the word ‘Needs’ with the word ‘Universal’ in this way, Rosenberg gives us a very useful conceptual label for the same psychological reality that the Buddha spoke of in terms of the ’emptiness’ of the samskāras skandha. The view of the human will that we find expressed in the Vajrayāna idea of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, requires this curious and sophisticated impersonal and ‘other-power’ view of the volitional samskāras. Without this sophistication, Buddhists will always tend to fail to express the subtlety of the Buddha’s view in their approach to ethics.

Most importantly, in my view, we can only succeed in the Buddhist goal of bringing in a new ethical sensibility, and building a new society, if we are willing to go beyond the Buddhist idealism of the ‘self-development’ perspective. To bring renewal to our ethics, and renewal to our society’s ethics, we need to support the development of a rich and culturally appropriate ‘other-power’ Buddhism for the West. The question of what such an ‘other-power’ Buddhism would look like is enormous, and is too big for this chapter. I hope this book will go some way towards addressing this question however – a question that is crucial for Western Buddhism, and possibly also for the world. As a starting point however, there are a few features of such an ‘other-power’ approach to Buddhist practice, which I regard as foundational for those who are intent on discovering this new ‘other-power’ basis for ethics. I shall only briefly outline them here – and shall be returning to explain them in more detail in later chapters.

For me, the first of the features of a deeper culture of ethics, is the practice of all the brahmavihāras daily – not just the metta bhāvanā. This need not be as arduous and time-consuming as it sounds, because the brahmavihāras are, in effect, attitudes of the ‘ever-present’ Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha). The second feature that I would prioritise is more general. It is my conviction that all practitioners who are undertaking the radical transformation of their ethical sensibility by releasing the egoic kleshas (via the practice of the brahmavihāras), need to be making use of the psychology of the Vajrayāna that is depicted in the sambhogakāya mandala. The ‘mandala wisdom’ of the sambhogakāya provides, in my view, the Buddhist tradition’s most comprehensive and systematic guide to the dharmic reality. The third feature of a deeper culture of ethics is the Vajrayāna approach to Mindfulness that I have spoken about – the idea of framing our practice of Mindfulness as resting ‘as’ Consciousness. The idea of resting ‘as’ Consciousness, initially just for moments at a time, while recognising that Consciousness is universal and ’empty’ of self-nature as the Buddha described it, is a way of re-framing all aspects of our practice and lifting it beyond the constraints of the ‘self-development’ perspective, and even beyond the ‘self-surrender’ perspective. This is a paradoxical and difficult-to-define ‘non-practice’, that is akin to the teachings found within the Zen tradition. It involves learning to momentarily release egoic identification and rest back into the objective and collective field of Consciousness from which the erroneous sense of ‘I’ arises. I regard these three features as a way of bringing the subtlety of the Buddha’s Middle Way into our practice, and as a way of gaining a real familiarity with the bodhisattva principle, or bodhicitta – and moving beyond the heroic mindset of Buddhist idealism.

I believe the Vajrayāna psychology, or ‘mandala wisdom’ (with its corresponding sets of skandhas, kleshas, Realms, brahmavihāras, Spiritual Faculties, Wisdoms, colours, Buddha-family symbols, and male and female Buddhas) provides a profound archetypal framework for ‘other-power’ practice. In particular however, it provides the basis for a much deeper practice of the brahmavihāras than is possible within the heroic ‘self-development’ framework in which they are usually taught. An ‘other-power’ Buddhism that also endeavours to discover Buddhism’s three-fold cultural synthesis (the three ‘myths’ combined and reconciled), would correctly locate the brahmavihāras within the sambhogakāya mandala, recognising them as the mahabrahmavihāras – recognising them as the archetypal powers that they are; as the keys to our practice of a Middle Way synthesis of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ in meditation practice; and as the ‘attitudes’ of Consciousness.

Making this connection is fundamental. The brahmavihāras, when we locate them correctly in the sambhogakāya mandala, gives structure to an ‘other-power’ practice of samādhi. The brahmavihāras bring profound healing to the egoic mind, and in my view, are our most concrete way of experiencing the dharmic reality. It is by endeavouring to familiarise ourselves with the bodily-felt resonance of the objective ‘other-power’ reality of the archetypal sambhogakāya that we can systematically release the kleshas and begin to create a new ethical sensibility that is in alignment with the dharmic reality. I shall be talking about the location of the brahmavihāras in the sambhogakāya mandala in a future chapter – and also about the location of the felt-experience of the brahmavihāras in our somatic anatomy.

Particular influential in shaping our world, has been the post-modern economic philosophy of neoliberalism, a body of ‘neo-classical’ economic theory that managed to sweep aside the ‘classical’ and modernist economic thinking that had gone before. I am touching on this again because neoliberalism is such a profound and world-shaping expression of the same archetypal pattern of egoic ignorance that finds expression in our mis-placed trust in the heroic will. Neoliberalism is distinctively heroic, one-sided, and ideological – and like the heroic ‘self-development’ approach to Dharma practice and Sangha culture, it has a deeply flawed logic and a dark Shadow. Far from being scientific and objective, it grew out of the ideological polarisation of the Cold War period – reflecting the right-wing consensus and US capitalism’s methods of maintaining global economic hegemony that gained dominance at that time.

We need to be aware that the egoic mind in arises out of a systemic societal and cultural context and that it the same time creates these same systemic group contexts. The Buddha saw this very clearly and taught us to find a place of objectivity and ethical vigilance. Human societies are, unfortunately, in some ways always a reflection of the worst aspects of the egoic mind, while at the same time occasionally expressing a reflection of benign character of the dharmic reality. The more clearly we see the dharmic reality, the more keenly we see this dichotomy, and the more keenly we see the dark manifestations of the egoic playing out in our world. Neoliberalism is a prime example of a systemic political, cultural and intellectual phenomenon that has the same archetypal foundation as the egoic will and therefore has enormous cultural power.

What the world as a whole needs in the discipline of economics is a clear-thinking pragmatism that acknowledges the actual and necessary complexity of the system; multiple perspectives; and a multi-polar world. We need a Middle Way rather that an ideological extremism defined by the global hegemon and the powerful banking centres of the US and the ex-colonial countries. Neoliberalism is deeply unethical – incompatible with global justice, but it goes unchallenged, because it masquerades at an economic philosophy of ‘freedom’. In reality global neoliberalism is ‘capitalism on steroids’. While claiming to be an expression of ‘freedom and democracy’ it is an extraordinary systemic phenomena that is unconstrained by democratic structures. The US is the country that has gone furthest down the neoliberal road, so the democracy of the US is entirely captured by and subject to its imperatives. The faceless organism of neoliberalism is even showing itself to be able to marshal the political, military, intelligence and propaganda resources of the US and NATO to bring down nation-states like Russia and China that are expressing a wish to adopt a different and independent economic strategy.

Neoliberalism is a stark example of a mythic, or archetypal, and systemic phenomena playing out in history, and highlights the importance of an ethical sensibility which allows us to see both the ‘myth’ and the ‘system’ that we are in – if we wish to observe the world objectively and make sound ethical judgements. Neoliberalism is also a good example of a post-modern reaction that we are not even aware we are in. It is a set of ideas that have come to predominate, not because they are true, but because they perfectly reflect the preoccupations of the egoic mind and of those who have most power in our world. Perhaps even more importantly, in regard to our current theme, it is a ‘hero-of-the-mother’ philosophy that over-values materialism, performance, and the personal will, while de-valuing non-material human values. It is fundamentally dishonest as an economic philosophy because it replaces the classical economic goals of ‘industrial capitalism’ – with its worthy goals of creating real wealth, general prosperity, raised living standards, health and education – with the single very narrow and crude goal of ‘financial capitalism’, which is the goal of ‘making money’.

Neoliberalism claims to be a value-neutral economic science, but in reality it is an anti-labour economics. It seeks to to drive down wages, while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the already wealthy. What Western governments have in effect done is to hand the levers of power of their democratic nation states over to the international banking and finance industry, believing that that industry’s goal is the creation of prosperity – when in reality the goals of the finance sector are better thought of in terms of the parasitic extraction of monetary value from the real wealth-creating sectors of the society. By making modernism and post-modernism more fully conscious, and releasing our identification with these habits of mind and the intellectual positions that go with them, we could create the conditions for the emergence of a new creativity that better serves human needs – a creativity that is more deeply reflective, more trustworthy, and more rooted in reality. Neoliberalism is for me a compelling example of the ethical bankruptcy of an un-thought-through post-modern reaction against the grand narratives of modernism. In order to return to rationality, Western societies need a Middle Way ethics guided by the mental clarity and evaluative discernment that spring from a direct experience of the transcendental dharmic reality – recognised within each one of us as bodily-felt knowing (sambhogakāya). We have however, not yet seen the full horror of the dark parasitic dynamic of neoliberalism that was set in motion during the Thatcher-Reagan years – and it is difficult to see how such wealth inequality can ever be reversed.

So, one of the main features of the zeitgeist – the worldview of the modern West – is the conviction that we can actually live quite well without a sense of the transcendental, and without a sense of society.  We are content to live superficially because life, at least superficially, is so comfortable. The marriage of the heroic humanism of the scientific materialist worldview with Buddhist philosophy creates incongruities in the Western practitioner, however. We can end up with a Western Buddhism that is not really true to the tradition because it does not acknowledge and place value upon the dharmic reality – instead placing its confidence in the Western intellect and the personal will, and continually making reference to brain science and the latest fashions in liberal humanism, rather than attending, through the practice of Mindfulness, to the phenomenological mystery of Consciousness itself.

To really know the bodhisattva archetype – the principle that guides us to release egoic identification, and to surrender to the deeper transformation that only the dharmic order can bring – we need to distinguish it from, and perhaps contrast it with, the hero-of-the-mother. This is not easy to do, but I have been offering some starting points. The heroic is a left-brained and one-sided mode of consciousness that refuses the actual subtleties and complexities of reality. It tends to polarise against unconscious opposites rather than opening inwardly in order to integrate them. Many Buddhists confuse the Hero with the bodhisattva, and in doing so create a terrible confusion – a destructive mental rigidity, which we must deconstruct if we are to enter deeply into the process of integration. The tragic fact, when we see this archetypal psychology clearly, is that if we become over-focused on the Hero, the bodhisattva is lost to awareness – obscured by the heroic ego’s self-obsession. The single-mindedness of the Hero often turns out to be his undoing – rather than allowing him to penetrate to the nature of reality, it can serve to profoundly undermine his pursuit of wisdom. The threshold of the heroic mode of consciousness tends to be too impermeable – too closed to what lies beyond it. Wisdom requires a softening and opening of the mind – and an allowing of what is.

Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ begins with ‘Integration’, and many of his students have assumed that the primary agent of this process of Integration is the heroic will. It is my contention however, that Integration cannot be either correctly understood, or achieved, while we are caught unconsciously in the myth of the heroic – the myth of ‘self-development’. This is why I feel such a keen need to give time, in these introductory chapters, to exploring the implication of the ‘Three Myths’ model before exploring the ‘System of Practice’ any further. We cannot afford to approach Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ in a way that is narrow, reductive and heroic – though many people do. We must approach it through the three-fold view of the Vajrayāna, and through the myth of the bodhisattva – not through the archetypal perspective of the Hero.

So, we need to contrast the Hero and bodhisattva. Whereas the hero-of-the-mother is dramatic and impressive, the bodhisattva is humble – and may indeed, even, be unimpressive. The hero-of-the-mother is intent on mastery – and often shows mastery. The bodhisattva may, over time, also find mastery, but via a different process, and from a different motivation. His mastery is not simply an act of self-determined self-creation – rather it an expansion into his eternal and limitless true nature as the dharmakāya, and into a patient and self-less responsiveness to the world’s needs within the limits of his capabilities. The bodhisattva‘s growing familiarity with the dharmakāya while being completely engaged with the challenges of the nirmānakāya, brings Spiritual Death and then Spiritual Rebirth – which are like a surrender to, and then spontaneous emergence from, the womb of the dharmakāya.

I am not saying that there is absolutely no place for the heroic perspective – only that it is a partial perspective, and dangerous because it is so easily taken to be a complete and sufficient understanding, while it actually brings a psychological crudeness and lack of sophistication that betrays the Buddha’s foundational teaching – his notion of the spiritual path as a Middle Way. One of the ways that the warning that am giving is sometimes spoken of (and was spoken of by Sangharakshita) is in the idea that power must always be in service to love, and not the other way round. This is a basic idea, but easily forgotten. There is an important related conversation here, about how we use the power of the egoic will to cultivate love through practice of the brahmavihāras (the most well-known being Loving Kindness – mettā / maitri). I hope to show in the course of this book that the cultivation of love is a Middle Way process – as much an ‘other-power’ process as a ‘self-power’ one, and ultimately one that transcends this dichotomy.

If, perhaps understandably, within the nirmānakāya perspective, we hold that the heroic egoic will is the only agent of spiritual transformation by which we can become a more ethical, relational and empathetic human being, we are likely to find ourselves failing in that aspiration. The love that we seek to embody is not just an idealised abstraction that we have created for ourselves, or adopted as an emulation of our ideal, or of the behaviour of those who embody our ideal. Rather, it already exists ‘within’ us, at the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya levels of our being. If we allow ourselves to be caught in an identification with the archetypal perspective of the Hero, there is a great danger that these suprapersonal dimensions will either never be recognised – or will never be taken seriously and allowed to inform our practice. We may even become locked into a narrow egoic delusion, while believing ourselves to be wise.

If we have been led to believe that the egoic will is the only agent of spiritual transformation, our spiritual progress is bound to come to a halt before we reach the goal. The Pagan myths were clear about the inherent limitations of the heroic. Think of all the heroes who were turned to stone by the Gorgon Medusa – the dark Shadow-side of the ‘positive-mother-complex’ perfectly personified. Perseus, a rather unusual Greek hero, who showed characteristics of the bodhisattva, found the liar of Medusa to be like a grave-yard, full of the grotesque statues of long-dead heroes – all turned to stone by her petrifying gaze. The Indian mythology is perhaps even more eloquent – but in a different way. It personifies the egoic will in a class of beings called the asuras, of which the most famous in Buddhist tradition, was the great Mara – a sort of devil figure in Buddhism – who, famously, confronted Gautama Buddha on the eve of his Enlightenment. It is sometimes said that Buddhism is a religion without a devil. This is not quite correct. Buddhism presents us, in its description of the asuras, with a very sophisticated archetypal perspective on the nature of evil – and we would do well to pay attention to it.

The mandala wisdom highlights the very direct connection between the samskaras skandha – the volitional processes of the mind that give us our sense of a personal will – and the asura archetype. Buddhist tradition tells us that identification with the samskāras skandha leads to the accumulation of the energetic kleshas in a category called irshya, or ‘envy’, or ‘mimetic desire’, and that this karmic momentum leads us to take rebirth in the asura realm. This realm is a cosmic dimension where the beings are large and very powerful, and at first appear to be god-like, but are envious, avaricious, harsh and brutal – and always driven by a desire for control and domination.

Preoccupied by thoughts of war and conquest, the asuras are locked eternally into an obsessive military conflict with the devas – whose easeful existence, born of good karma, they covert with passionate and ignorant envy. Female asuras are said to be beautiful, or at least very attractive and alluring, but both male and female asuras are manipulative and intensely selfish. They are beings who are seized by the desire to steal or otherwise appropriate – or even to simply destroy what they cannot possess. While the idea of an objectively existing asura realm, may or may not be literally true, the Western Buddhist should be in no doubt of the psychological truth of the asura archetype – as a dark force that shapes human personality, human society, and human history. Indeed, we could say that the asura archetype is even more present in Western culture than it is in the East – since the West lacks the negative view of this archetype that we see in the East.

If, as Buddhists, we think we can understand the egoic will without reference the asura archetype, we are deluding ourselves. The asuras are the archetypal personifications of the miserable and violent reality that is created by identification with the samskāras skandha and therefore also with the kleshas of the irshya category. In the imagery of the asuras, we are shown the nature of the egoic will when its self-serving, controlling, dominating, manipulative, and inherently conflictual nature, is given free rein. If we are seeking self-transcendence within a heroic world-view that fails to fully acknowledge the eternal dharmakāya and archetypal sambhogakāya, then we are probably doomed to find ourselves embodying the asura archetype.

The asuras may be powerful and effective, but they are ‘war gods’ – they exist in an eternal state of envious warfare against the devas. They want what the devas have, but have no understanding of how to achieve it. The devas, whose divine rebirth is due to positive mental states and ethical actions in previous lives, represent a much more positive and creative developmental trajectory. The devas also cling to the self-illusion and express selfishness, but in a very subtle and refined way. The tradition tells us that the Buddha’s Middle Way, by leading us to release our identification with all of the cognitive-perceptual skandhas that create the self-illusion and drive the process of becoming, allows us to go beyond rebirth into any realm.

The asura archetype shapes human history more than any other – there are countless examples of this. Most obviously in recent centuries, we can see the asura spirit at work in the colonial empires, which came to an end via the double disaster of the catastrophic and barbaric industrial-scale slaughter of WW1 and WW2. The rise of fascism in Europe, the totalitarian Communism of Stalin’s Russia, and the rise of a rapacious international capitalism based in the US, were all examples of societies in the grip of the asura archetype. War has always been with us, but the ‘modern’ phase of world history, of which Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’, has been especially vulnerable to the power of this archetype – and remains so. The Nazis, with their distorted and cruelly elitist embrace of Nietzsche’s ubermensch and ‘Will to Power’ (an idea that Nietzsche himself abandoned – his book of that name was published without his permission), are further characteristic manifestations of the asura archetype in recent human history.

Sadly, the asura archetype is not recognised in our world – not recognised as the archetype of evil that it is – and our unawareness to this archetype makes the whole world ethically blind. Unable to see the asura archetype, we are blind to the confluence of dark forces that shape our world. The necessary systemic analysis of the psychological, social, economic, political, and geopolitical factors eludes us. I find myself astonished and exasperated that there so little room for this archetypal perspective in the public discourse – even within Buddhist communities of practice. Instead, we see a dumbing down of discussion – a condemnation of the conduct of individuals, but little acknowledgement of the systemic and archetypal processes which are the real drivers of evil. This ignorance serves, and is actually sustained by, the anti-democratic players in our society who are seized by the asura archetype – the drive for personal, organisational, military, or economic dominance. The necessary systemic analysis is dismissed as ‘socialism’, or as mere ‘conspiracy theory’, and there is a naive trust in Western democratic institutions, when it is clear that these institutions have already been profoundly undermined.

There is, in Western culture, a sort of worship of the asura archetype. There is an irrational devotion that shows itself in a gullible susceptibility to the heavy-metal mystique of military firepower, and a willingness to sink a significant percentage of our collective resources into the manufacture of ultra-high-tech military weaponry. Our mystification leads to the political passivity of allowing ‘experts’ within the military-industrial-complex to also manufacture enemies to attack with the weapons that our taxes are paying for. The belligerent narrative manipulation that openly surrounds all foreign policy debate is pure asura practice and asura psychology, and the coverage of war by mainstream media channels is pure asura culture – deception and spectacle; and manipulation through bogus humanitarianism, the dishonest rhetoric of freedom and democracy, and evocations of the heroic.

When we study the Tibetan Buddhist ‘mandala wisdom’ – the psychology that is based on the dynamic structure and archetypal principals that are symbolised in the sambhogakāya mandala – we are confronted by the fact that the dark propensity of the egoic will (the samskāras skandha, generating the kleshas of irshya, and expressing the archetypal mentality of the asuras) is the very opposite of the brahmavihāra of Compassion, and of the subtle ‘other-power’, or Middle Way, approach to life that is expressed in the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. We need to see these opposites clearly, and understand the archetypal connection between them. The implication is that we are unlikely to achieve a deep embodiment of Compassion without also gaining a deep recognition of its opposite – the violence of the asura archetype at work in our world.

The All-Accomplishing Wisdom is a mode of perception that sees the dysfunction of the egoic will – its drive for control and dominance, and its personalisation of that which is impersonal. It is a mode of perception that is essential to a complete ethical and compassionate sensibility, and to a complete psychological awareness. I shall be returning to the All-Accomplishing Wisdom a lot in this book. Not only is it crucial to our appreciation of the Middle Way approach to practice that the Buddha was advocating, but it challenges us to open up to a mode of perception that sees both ourselves and our world dynamically, systemically and through the lens of an archetypal psychology. This is the mode of perception that Carl Jung called Intuition. This mode of perception – a mode of perception that sees patterns, processes, and trends, and sees the energies and motivations that create self and world – is essential if we are to understand the nature of the human mind, which is itself an open system with an archetypal structure.

The primary perceptual reference point, or perceptual function, for the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, is the concrete and the sensory – the immediate domain of sensory reality and bodily-felt experience that the Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of the vedanā skandha. While there is great value in grounding our practice in what is most concretely evident, the spiritual life requires us to include data points outside of this realm. We need to gain a familiarity with the intangible, if we are to approach the dharmic reality, and become familiar with it, and gain confidence in it. The spiritual psychology of Tibetan Buddhism invites us into an intuitive mode of psychological intelligence that sees polarities and dynamics and archetypal structures. It also invites us into a corresponding ethical sensibility – one that sees ethics impersonally and systemically, and in terms of the archetypal patterns that are playing out in our world.

Perhaps the most significant way in which asura culture expresses itself, is in economic debate, which, in Western culture, is under the spell of an asura economic philosophy, which I mentioned earlier. Leaving behind the earlier history of economic thought that took a much more challenging and all-encompassing perspective, the world is in the irrational grip of a ‘neoliberal’ economic philosophy that elevates Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ – the selfish personal will – to an absolute and overarching value, as if it was a source of divine benevolence.

It is very common for Buddhists to frame all reflection on ethics in a narrowly personal way, so much so that they find themselves falling into the idea that Buddhism has nothing useful to say about history, geopolitics, economics and war. This failure to engage with the collective and systemic dynamics that lead to a failure of ethical awareness in society is a betrayal of Buddhist wisdom, in my view. The Buddha would say that nothing is personal, and that we live immersed in the kleshas. So dark and violent are these collective and archetypal processes, that paradoxically, it is only through intensive spiritual practice directed towards recognising our personalising delusions, and only through gaining a deep familiarity with the benevolent dharmic reality in which we are simultaneously held, that we can begin to function as true individuals.

For the Buddha, the self was an impersonal and systemic phenomena – and he saw all human societies and all human groups as a collective playing-out of these same impersonal phenomena. When it is true to this insight, Buddhism offers a subtle social psychological understanding – an understanding without which the foundational idea of Sangha, or spiritual community, is lost. Without this systemic and archetypal awareness, Sanghas can easily deteriorate into self-serving religious institutions – and spiritual community can even be lost to the archetypal dynamics of power that are depicted in our images of the asura realm. If we are engaged in the creation of Sangha, we cannot afford to be complacent and naïve about the dynamics of power. We cannot afford to make a deal with the archetypal devil of Buddhist tradition. We are truly deluding ourselves if we think that we can put our trust in the egoic will as our saviour.

One of the paradoxical aspects of the heroic ‘self-development’ mindset is its relative blindness to Shadow – both personal Shadow, and Shadow in the collective of humanity. Within the framework of this perspective Shadow is so often just projected out – frequently with a great force of judgement. But force of judgment is not the same as seeing Shadow – indeed, it is the opposite. What I am calling ‘seeing Shadow’ is an explicitly non-judgemental response, and may be characterised as a compassionate and clear-seeing response to the systemic phenomenon of dukkha, (unsatisfactoriness, dysfunction, unconsciousness, suffering). The person who is identified with the heroic, will often see themselves as having a penetrating intellect and a superior ethical sensibility, and as committed to taking compassionate action, and as identified with the good. But while they may be very quick to judge individuals that they perceive to be ethically lacking, there is no guarantee that they will be able to see the impersonal and systemic malaise of dukkha that is playing out in the social systems that they are part of and identified with.

A paradoxical expression of the heroic is complacency – a seeming detachment regarding the deep collective Shadow, so that the dukkha of humanity is not fully recognised and deeply felt. This is because the insight that the Buddha called dukkha is only fully recognised when it is experienced simultaneously with, and in the context provided by, the universal blessing that is the compassionate presence of the dharmic reality. True Compassion is a volitional response that arises from beyond the egoic mind through a consciously receptive relationship with the dharmic reality. So, while it is understandable that we might associate Compassion with the heroic idealism of the ‘self-development’ perspective, it is actually the ‘other-power’ perspective that connects us most deeply with the essence of the bodhisattva.

This is a theme that I shall be addressing in more detail in my chapter on the brahmavihāras (Compassion, Loving Kindness, Equanimity, Appreciative Joy). In its Mahayana phase, the Buddhist tradition came to identify the cultivation of the brahmavihāras as one of the key practices of the the bodhisattva. In the West, we usually take this to mean that these sublime attitudes should be cultivated by a heroic effort of the egoic will. The Western heroic mindset however, easily misses the fact that the brahmavihāras are best understood as ‘other-power’ practices. Within the Western ‘self-development’ perspective, we approach the brahmavihāras as ideals, and as positive mental states to be cultivated to counter the negative tendencies of the egoic mind. Their ‘cultivation’ is ultimately however, better characterised as a process in which we familiarise ourselves with the objective dharmic reality of the brahmavihāras – a profound archetypal reality that the tradition calls the mahabrahmavihāras. This experiential recognition that the brahmavihāras are unconditionally present ‘within’ us at the samboghakāya level of mind, is a much better basis for a highly developed ethical sensibility, than Western-style heroic idealism.

As Western Buddhists we generally think of ethics as representing a basic, or foundational level of practice – adopting the Buddha’s three-fold framing of the path as Ethics, Meditation and Wisdom (sila, samādhi, prajñā) in a somewhat rigid and sequential way. While this sequence has a logic within the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, it can cause us to miss the fact that the completion of ethics (sila) requires deep meditative practice (samādhi) and a significant degree of wisdom (prajñā). In the West, we a conditioned to frame ethics in external and behavioural terms.

In Buddhism, there is a recognition that ethics is three-fold – body, speech and mind. The ethics of behaviour (or ‘body’), while it is the most obvious level of ethics, is not the most fundamental. The deep transformation of our ethical behaviour and ethical sensibilities, requires a transformation of our mental attitudes and an opening up of cognition and perception, and these changes are then reflected in our speech and behaviour. So, it can be argued, that while heroic idealism may get us started, we are unlikely to achieve a really deep and reliable ethical transformation without first surrendering to the dharmic reality in a true spirit of ‘other-power’. For me, this surrender begins with our opening to the recognition that ethics is woven into the fabric of the universe – and inherent in Consciousness as the brahmavihāras. Indeed, for me, the practice of the brahmavihāras is the place where our heroic ‘self-development’ ideal of ‘cultivating’ the four dimensions of love meets, and finds a practical reconciliation with the actual ‘other-power’ reality of those four dimensions of love. You will not, in my opinion, find a more solid foundation for an ethical sensibility anywhere, than in the ‘other-power’ approach to brahmavihāras practice.

When, through true ‘other-power’ practice, we recognise that Wisdom and Compassion are ever-present dharmic realities, within our experience but beyond the egoic mind, then our personal ethical sensibility is transformed; and so is our ability to recognise how lost the modern world has become from an ethical point of view. It is as if we are only able to gaze unflinchingly into the heart of the ethical darkness that is dukkha, if we have first gained a confident recognition of the benevolent dharmic reality, and of the immanence of nirvāna. The Buddha presented this stark contrast between the collective reality of dukkha and the collective reality of nirvāna in both his Four Noble Truths and Middle Way teachings. It is in the light of our experience of the benevolent dharmic reality, that we see dukkha in its full horror – and find ourselves deeply motivated to try our best to ameliorate it.

While dukkha and nirvāna, or our recognition of suffering and our selfless compassionate response to it, were primary for the Buddha, there are further dimensions that we should acknowledge. By recognising the dharmic reality and entering into the ‘other-power’ perspective, it is not just Compassion (karunā) that awakens in us; it is Equanimity (upekshā), Loving Kindness (maitri), and Appreciative Joy (muditā) also – all four of the brahmavihāras. So, it is not just humanity’s suffering that we notice, it is humanity’s inherent blessedness also. We see the beauty of this world, and we see the great beauty and the wonderful qualities of our fellow human beings – recognising the inherent sacredness of our world, animated as it is by the evolutionary principle of the Buddhism associated with the bodhisattva. Indeed, as we gain familiarity with the dharmic reality, we naturally value, or love, or feel care for our world (the maitri aspect); and appreciate, celebrate, enjoy, and feel a sense of wonder about our world (the muditā aspect). Not least among the brahmavihāras that arise as we enter deeply into the ‘other-power’ perspective is Equanimity (upekshā) – the ability to be accepting, non-reactive, non-judgemental, and to allow everything to be as it is. This is very significant – although it is often claimed that meditating within the ‘self-development’ framework can bring peace of mind, the fact is that the heroic ‘self-power’ perspective does not, generally speaking, lead to Equanimity.

As you will have noticed, I have felt a great need to expand on the theme of the heroic ‘self-development’ view, in order to give my readers a really clear sense of how easily this perspective is hijacked by the inherent moral ambivalence of the egoic mind. This is a foundational understanding that all spiritual traditions wrestle with. The egoic will does indeed have the potential to be a moral agent, and it does indeed have a profound role to play, but in the context of Buddha’s Middle Way, it plays a much humbler role than we might imagine. The heroic ‘self-power’ / ‘self-development’ perspective must be balanced by the ‘other-power’ / ‘self-surrender’ perspective, and must ultimately be reconciled in the ‘self-discovery’ perspective that we see most clearly in the Vajrayāna.

If we are wise, we will insist that the egoic will plays this humble role – or it is bound to take over and become an obstacle to our progress. Once we achieve some degree of spiritual knowledge and spiritual development, we are in great danger if we imagine that we have achieved these things entirely by our own efforts – and we may even become monstrously arrogant. It is also very easy, from such an exclusively ‘self-power’ place, to judge other people for ‘not making enough effort’. This sort of judgement is especially common in those of the positive-mother-complex temperament, for whom identification with the hero archetype, and therefore a very narrow and personal framing of the notion of ‘effort’, is instinctive. When Sangha culture is dominated by the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, we even see the tragic situation where those practitioners whose passionate commitment and engagement with the Dharma is finding expression through the ‘self-surrender’ (‘other-power’), or ‘self-discovery’ (Vajrayāna) perspective, being told that they are not making enough effort. It is as if the ‘self-development’ practitioners want to drag others back into a more heroic mode of practice. This sometimes arises simply from a failure to understand ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’ – but it can often be more malevolent. The egoic mind being what it is, people like to undermine and dismiss what they do not understand, and what does not affirm their own perspective and sense of personal power.

While virya, the Buddhist virtue of determination and spiritual purpose, is always necessary, we cannot afford to understand this virtue crudely. Rather we must attend to the way the tradition brought more and more refinement to the notion of virya over the centuries, so that it eventually came to spoken of in an almost entirely non-heroic way – in terms of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. The All-Accomplishing Wisdom de-personalises the egoic will. It frees us from from the grandiose hyper-masculinity and simplistic binaries of the asura hero’s thinking. In this book I shall be reaching for this much-neglected perspective that is so foreign to the Western mindset – a perspective that is not only neglected by, but maligned by, the advocates of the heroic, especially those of the materialistic ‘hero-of-the-mother’ persuasion.

The All-Accomplishing Wisdom is a perspective that takes a phenomenological view of the will; that sees it as a multiple phenomenon; and that sees all motivation as impersonal life energy seeking fulfilment and reconciliation. So, the All-Accomplishing Wisdom is like the wisdom that we associate with Taoism and with the practice of Aikido – the wisdom that embraces the play of the opposites, and sees processes of healing and integration at work everywhere. The All-Accomplishing Wisdom is explicitly a ‘Middle Way’ wisdom – while virya, as it is conventionally understood through the Western heroic lens, most definitely is not. It is a separation and reconciliation of opposites – so it is that patient wisdom whereby each dimension of mind progresses by first recognising and relating to, and then expanding into and reconciling with, its opposite.

For those that have become locked into an unconscious adherence to the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, the Mahayāna (‘self-surrender’) and Vajrayāna (‘self-discovery’) approaches to practice are often distorted. The Mahayāna spirit of devotional-receptive opening to ‘other-power’ can easily be lost if the bodhisattva principle is embraced, not as a universal in-dwelling potentiality beyond the egoic mind, but only as heroic ideal. When the bodhisattva is reduced to an ideal, we get a heroic version of the ‘self-surrender’ myth, which is unfortunately likely to be even worse that the basic ‘self-development’ perspective because it involves so much heroic self-denial and heroic self-sacrifice. This sort of mythic self-sacrifice in the name of ‘self-surrender’, supposedly in order to conquer the egoic mind, is often compelling to those of us who are unconsciously immersed in the Christian cultural mind-set, and may feel very deeply meaningful – but it is not at all an expression of the Buddha’s Middle Way, and can be extremely limiting, and very psychologically dangerous.

It is as if the Westerner, when he or she engages in a devotional way with the archetypal Buddha images as if they were a depiction of egoic ideals, is not engaging in the sort of devotional-receptive faith in the dharmic reality that we see in the East. Rather than being a practice of connecting receptively with the dharmic ‘other-power’, worship (puja) for the Western Buddhist, very easily becomes an attempt to generate and sustain heroic energy by reinforcing our identification with our ideals – usually in a group setting. While this may be viewed as form of self-surrender, it is often only a self-surrender of a heroic sort – a version of the heroic self-curation of the self that I spoke of earlier. This more heroic approach to pūja practice may lead eventually to true ‘other-power’ self-surrender, but it may not – especially if Sangha members experience a subtle ambivalence towards the true ‘other-power’ perspective in the way these practices are introduced and talked about.

The Westerner’s opening to an ‘other-power’ perspective represents a significant opening – a movement towards balance that is an expression of the Buddha’s Middle Way method of healing. For me, it represents a key step – perhaps the key step – in a Middle Way movement towards the more complete psycho-spiritual reconciliation that I have been calling Vajrayāna, or ‘self-discovery’. For me therefore, the ‘self-surrender’ perspective is of enormous importance, and we cannot afford to allow our Western prejudices, and our unconscious preference for the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, to confuse and reduce ‘other-power’ practice. We must remember that our practice of puja may lead to our ‘self-surrender’, and into a devotional-receptive relationship with the dharmic ‘other-power’, but it may not. In the Western context the practice of puja and the experience of the dharmic ‘other-power’ are not necessarily synonymous.

It is very easy for Western Buddhists, because they tend to reduce the bodhisattva to the Hero, to therefore fall into an identification of the Mahayāna with the heroic. We need to be extremely wary about this – very aware of the danger that this holds. If we appropriate the subtle ‘other-power’ spirit of the Mahayāna to the heroic – reducing it to heroic idealism – we may, without realising it, be betraying what is most essential and most beautiful in the Buddhist tradition. We may be standing in the way of a healing wisdom that the collective West desperately needs. For me, Mahayana Buddhism, and Buddhist worship practices, and mantra recitation are best understood as a way of introducing ourselves to the ‘other-power’ perspective – but we must endeavour to bring this devotional-receptive sensibility into our meditation. Ideally, the Mahayāna serves to open up a new devotional-receptive spaciousness in our Mindfulness and meditation practice – an opening to the dharmic reality that Buddhism presents to us in its imagery of the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya.

I have spoken elsewhere about the fact that the word samādhi, which is rendered in English as ‘meditation’, or worse still ‘concentration’, has explicit connotation of ‘other-power’ when it is used elsewhere in the classic texts of Indian spirituality. We should not allow the scientific materialists and the advocates of the heroic to appropriate this profound Sanskrit word. We need to claim it back as an expression of the sublime. Properly understood samādhi is the practice of acknowledging that we rest always and forever in the divine – in the dharmic reality. Samadhi is our return to rest in the primordial love. Amitabha – the red Buddha of the Western direction in the mandala, always recognisable by the mudra (gesture) of samadhi (hands folded in his lap) – is a favourite image in Buddhism of that primordial love. We are not separate from the eternal dharmakāya, or from the mandala of archetypal samboghakāya Buddhas. When we open beyond the heroic, meditation becomes a practice in which we gratefully acknowledge the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality that supports us.

If we are practitioners of the brahmavihāras, this movement from ‘self-power’ to ‘other-power’ in the way we approach the meditations, has the potential to revolutionise our practice. I have already spoken about how, when we recognise Loving Kindness, Equanimity, Compassion and Appreciative Joy as objectively and collectively existing archetypal energies that are woven into, and inherently present in Consciousness, our practice is raised to a whole new level. If, because of the power of the heroic ‘self-development’ myth, we refuse the gift of the ‘other-power’ perspective – the true ‘self-surrender’ perspective – we are doing ourselves, and the Buddhist tradition, and perhaps the world, a great disservice.

The Vajrayāna, when similarly viewed through the lens of the heroic will of the ‘self-development’ perspective, may be even more psychologically dangerous, since it appears to invite the practitioner to enter into egoic identification with mythic perspectives and archetypal forces, in order to deny human limitations – and transcend ordinary social ethics. Although this misunderstanding is fairly common, it is not at all in the true spirit of Vajrayāna – and is a very long way from the subtlety of the Buddha’s Middle Way. This is why it is so important to correct these misconceptions. It is especially important not to understand Vajrayāna as an approach that expresses our ‘Going For Refuge’, and our pursuit of spiritual liberation, in an extreme way. Far from being an approach which goes to extremes, Vajrayāna takes the spiritual practice philosophy of the Middle Way – a philosophy of not going to extremes – to the highest possible level.

Vajra, which is one of the most central symbolic, iconographic and archetypal principles in Buddhist art and psychology, is often assumed to be a symbol of the egoic will of the Buddhist aspirant, but in reality it has nothing to do with the egoic will at all. In the Tibetan system of spiritual psychology, vajra symbolises the positive, or dharmic, counterpart of the form-creating rūpa skandha – the judging, conceptualising, concretising and narrative-creating function of the egoic mind. So, vajra refers to the penetrating clarity of those who release their identification with the thinking aspect of the mind, and who therefore come to rest in, and have a deep familiarity with, the imperturbable stillness and non-reactivity of the dharmic reality. It is this familiarity with, and this unconditional surrender to, the dharmic level of mind that is the basis of wisdom in Buddhism. The vajra principle therefore points to a release of egoic judgment. It is particularly unfortunate therefore, and not uncommon, for vajra to be associated with a heroic amplification of the thinking mind – through a fierce and absolute identification with the conceptualisations that the egoic mind has created, believing them to be a form of wisdom.

So, vajra is related to the brahmavihāra of Equanimity, and to the perfect stillness and pure objectivity of the Mirror-Like Wisdom – qualities associated with the dharmakāya, not the egoic mind. Yet it is common for Western Buddhists to be led to imagine the Vajrayāna as some sort of ‘smash-and-grab’ raid on Enlightenment – a ‘breaking through’ to Buddhahood by a heroic and psychologically inflated egoic will. At worst, when the frame of reference with which Vajrayāna practices are being approached is the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, there can be a disastrous absolutisation of Dharmic principles that have been mis-understood within the heroic frame of reference of the egoic mind – and a corresponding absolutisation of the heroic will.

The actual symbol of the will – of the samskaras skandha and of the All Accomplishing Wisdom – in Tibetan tradition, is the visva vajra, or Vajra Cross, which we can think of as the primordial prototype of the mandala. The visva vajra is a profound symbol of, and graphic representation of, the structured multiplicity and energetic complexity of the mind – and of its potential for integration and unification. Energetically, it shows us the way the bodhicitta, the universal will of the bodhisattva, arises from multiple processes of separation and reconciliation – by our coming into relationship with, and then integrating, dharmic forces that are inherent in Consciousness but are beyond the egoic mind. Perhaps even more importantly, the vishva vajra symbolises the mandala of cognitive-perceptual components (skandhas) – arranged as cognitive-perceptual polarities to be integrated and reconciled as we approach cognitive-perceptual wholeness.

So, the Vajrayāna reframes and profoundly refines the way we think about energy, determination and effort, because it sees the spiritual process as one in which energy is progressively released and made available by the reconciliation of the psychological conflicts that have previously been generated in the egoic mind by the cognitive-perceptual polarities of consciousness and unconsciousness within the structure of the body-mind. The Middle Way of the Buddha, and of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom of the Vajrayāna, both point to a path that is much more sophisticated than the heroic ‘self-development’ path that tends to predominate in Western Buddhism. This is a path on which we seek to identify and fully acknowledge the multiplicity of opposites within the psyche, and then to transcend those dichotomies by bringing them into reconciliation.

I touched on this in the chapter in which I introduced the trikāya doctrine, but it needs to be emphasised that Mindfulness – the practice at the core of the Buddha’s teaching – is not the heroic practice that it is often presented as. We could take the example of the Israeli snipers who used to lie in safety overlooking the Gaza boundary fence peering through their telescopic sights. They may well have showed incredible calm, and steadiness of concentration, and continuity of focus, for hour after hour – as they shot Palestinian boys through the knees, and logged their ‘successful’ hits. (This was described in an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that had conducted interviews with a number of IDF snipers.) This is a strong example to make a point, but we need to be very clear about the difference between the extraordinary mental and physical competence of the egoic warrior-hero, and the attitude of the bodhisattva. When the Buddha told us that Mindfulness is ‘the Way to the Immortal’, he was clearly pointing to something expansive, profound and not just deeply humane, but confronting to the cruelties of this world – and to something much more challenging, subtle, and inherently compassionate than the heroic mode of consciousness can ever be.

The heroic mode is not simply value neutral. It is much worse than that – because it dishonestly dresses itself up in the garb of nobility. It struts and postures, and maintains apparent psychological cohesion and identification with ‘the good’, but its incongruities are inherent, even though they are usually well-hidden. The apparent Mindfulness of asura consciousness, with its invulnerability, strong will, and seemingly unshakable self-belief, is actually the opposite of the softening and opening movement of mind that the Buddha was pointing to in his advocacy of Mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is usually understood to be a rendering into English of the Sanskrit word smrti, but another Sanskrit word is also translated as Mindfulness – apramāda. It may help us to briefly explore and distinguish these two aspects.

Apramāda means ‘vigilence’ – a humble ethical vigilance that explicitly recognises the ever present possibility of unconsciousness, of ethical blind-spots, and of empathy failure, and is our alertness for, and attention towards, that in us which is incongruous with our values and intentions. Smrti, on the other hand, means ‘memory’, or ‘remembering’ – so we have to ask ourselves, what dimension of mind it was that the Buddha was asking his students to remember, that was so profound that it would lead to the ‘Immortal’ – to liberation. Mindfulness defies description, although many have tried to describe it, and have described it in various ways – almost always in ways which reduce it and fail to acknowledge its profound mystery and spiritual power – so, we have to find what the Buddha was pointing to for ourselves. For me, the dimension of mind that the Buddha was asking us to ‘remember’ was Consciousness itself – the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha that the Tibetan Vajrayāna places in the centre of the mandala.

So, it can be argued that Mindfulness involves a vigilance that is more humble than heroic, and a relationship of surrender to the non-personal reality of Consciousness that is equally humble. Indeed, it could be argued that Mindfulness can only be fully understood via a framing of the Dharma that includes the ‘other-power’ perspective. We might even characterise Mindfulness as a devotional-receptive practice – not a ‘self-development’ of our quality of the self, but a quality gained by our receptivity to an objectively and collectively existing ‘field’ of Consciousness. Within this view, we become conscious, not by an effort of the heroic will, but by resting ‘in’ and ‘as’ the dharmic reality – the dharmakāya manifesting as Consciousness in our experience. When we start to see the absolute failure that inevitably follows from a heroic framing of Mindfulness practice, and when we embrace the humility of Buddha’s practice of apramāda (vigilance), we cannot help but recognise this Vajrayāna framing of Mindfulness practice as ‘resting as Consciousness’, as the balancing principle that was missing.

Every aspect of the Buddha’s path was a Middle Way, and the Middle Way practice of Mindfulness was at the core of his teaching framework. The Middle Way seeks the reconciliation of the mundane and the eternal; the nirmānakāya and the dharmakāya. Initially this reconciliation can only be glimpsed for short moments of time, since it is only in single discreet moments of time that the eternal can be recognised. The Vajrayāna invites us however, to see these moments – periods of a second of two in which the egoic mind is released – as windows into the eternal.  We are invited to remember these moments and to return to this mystery; and invited to entertain the possibility that Mindfulness is made possible by the field of Consciousness in which we rest – and is a phenomenon of the ever-present dharmakāya; the primary reality and the source of our salvation.

This is most definitely ‘other-power’ territory – we are out beyond the edge of the heroic universe, and learning to surrender to the dharmic reality. This ‘remembering practice’ that the tradition calls smrti is, I believe, the neglected heart of Buddhist practice. I have spoken of it as the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha in the centre of the mandala of the skandhas. These ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of vijñāna are personified, in the Tibetan Vajrayāna, in the white images of the male Buddha Vairocanā and the femail Buddha Ākāshadhāteshvāri (or Ākāshadhātvishvāri), who are depicted locked in an erotic embrace in the centre of the mandala. They personify the external and internal aspects of the Dharmadhātu Wisdom – the wisdom that recognises the ’emptiness’ of the vijñāna skandha. It is in this recognition that Consciousness is not personal, that we release the energetic momentum of the kleshas of avidyā – the habitual personalisation of our cognitive-perceptual experience.

It is not absolutely necessary to personify the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the Five Wisdoms, but when we see these ten aspects of the five skandhas cognitive-perceptual system embodied in archetypal Buddha figures, they are rescued from abstraction, and our sense of their objective and collective reality is brought alive. The fact that Gautama Buddha spoke of Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha) as have an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspect is missed by most students of Buddhism, but when we see Consciousness personified in a male-female pair of archetypal Buddhas, their is no escaping this reality – we are forced to engage in self-enquiry and to find in our experience, the two sided of the psycho-spiritual reality that is embodied in this pair of figures.

Vairocana means ‘the Illuminator’ – he is the active dimension, the non-personal ‘light’ of Consciousness, that we nevertheless identify with, and imagine to be personal. Ākāshadhāteshvāri, in Padmasambhava’s Bardo Thodol texts is the archetypal embodiment of the receptive dimension of Consciousness – so she personifies the ‘space’ of Consciousness, while also embodying the attitude of resting receptively ‘in’ and ‘as’ Consciousness. I believe this white female Buddha figure takes different forms in different cultural strands and historical epochs of the Buddhist tradition. For, example she is called simply ‘White Tārā’ in more recent centuries of Tibetan Buddhism. She also has obvious parallels with the figures of Pranjāpāramitā and Quan Yin. Everywhere she appears, she invites a subtle ‘other-power’ engagement with the dharmic reality, and takes us beyond the merely heroic.

Within the framework of my proposition that we should regard the sambhogakāya mandala as our guide to the Middle Way, Ākāshadhāteshvāri is quite literally central. She is in the centre of the sambhogakāya mandala – we might even say that it is her mandala. Indeed she appears to right at the centre of the trikāya. Our acheivement of whatever quality of presence or Mindfulness Vairocanā embodies, would seems to be related to the depth of our practice of that receptive relation to the primordial space of Consciousness that Ākāshadhāteshvāri represents. Ākāsha in Buddhist tradition, is the primordial ‘Vajra Space’, or ‘wisdom space’ – the open-source intelligence of the universe, available to all who are receptive. Ākāshadhāteshvāri therefore, is ‘Our Lady of the Ākāshic Dimension’, or ‘Our Lady of the Vajra Space’ – both a personification of the primordial intelligent space of Consciousness, and our foremost model of an attitude of surrender to that dharmic reality.

So, it cannot be emphasised enough that the Middle Way is not merely heroic. The Middle Way explicitly invites the Western practitioner to open out of the heroic mind-set by acknowledging a balancing sense of the transcendental dharmic reality. We cannot afford to allow the egoic mind to appropriate the dharmic reality, to use ‘other-power’ to bolster the one-sided heroic ego and inflate it with spiritual power. If, rather, we initially relate to the dharmic reality in a true spirit of ‘other-power’ Buddhism, it will eventually be recognised as the containing primordial space – the Vajra Space of Being and Consciousness in which the heroic self-illusion is dissolved. It will become the Buddha Nature womb from which we are reborn into the patient, selfless, and compassionate activity of the bodhisattva. Vajra certainly denotes a penetrating clarity and deep conviction, but this is the gentle clarity of the perfection of wisdom – the acceptance of paradox and complexity, and the ability to hold multiple apparently opposed truths simultaneously in awareness.

I have felt a need to share these reflections in numerous ways. When we are up against the formidable momentum of the egoic mind, we often find that repetition is helpful. The egoic mind it repetitive and our unravelling of it also involves repetition – seeing it more clearly by viewing it from multiple angles, and seeing its dysfunction in multiple ways; and turning repeatedly towards the source of Consciousness in the experience of Mindfulness, and bearing witness repeatedly to the value of that practice. For me, the Vajrayāna denotes a complete and comprehensive three-fold perspective on spiritual development, such as was present in the teachings of Gautama Buddha, but was most clearly articulated by the great practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It is a gentle and subtle approach. It could be characterised as an approach that ‘works smarter – not harder’. It requires effort, but not necessarily more effort, and certainly not a crude form of effort or an extreme effort, because it recognises that what we are seeking to embody is already eternally present in a germinal form in the depth of the mind.

What I am identifying as Vajrayāna, is the path that seeks to reveal what is obscured by the egoic mind – rather than focusing exclusively on the removal of the egoic mind’s obscurations (kleshas) or on their replacement by positive states. This is subtle and paradoxical, because it recognises that the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya are, in fact, never obscured. The kleshas, often called the ‘obscurations’, are actually incapable of obscuring the dharmakāya, since the dharmakāya is the imperturbable space of Consciousness in which the egoic kleshas arise inseparably, and eventually come to rest.

By understanding that the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya are never obscured – or at least are never completely obscured – we can direct our attention to that which is always there beyond the obscurations, and can seek to cultivate a familiarity with that. This way is actually more direct, even though it may seem indirect from the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. We do achieve a release of the obscurations, but the process is a gentle one and a paradoxical one – it is a ‘self-release’ of the egoic energies by a seeing-through of the self-illusion. This way avoids direct confrontation and internal conflict. It aims to go directly to the essence – directly to the experience of what it is that we are seeking.

Because it is so often distorted and misconstrued, many come to regard the ‘self-discovery’ myth of the Vajrayāna as the most potentially dangerous perspective of all, because it implies an invitation that we familiarise ourselves with that level of the mind at which we are already, in some mysterious and difficult-to-define sense, already Enlightened. It is even suggested by some, that if our practice were to be informed by this ‘self-discovery’ emphasis, there is a danger that we might glimpse that within us that is untouched by the egoic kleshas – untouched by greed, or hatred, or ignorance, or envy, or pride – and that we might, as a result, stop practicing the Dharma altogether. I do not believe this is true, however.

The paradox of this is that the practitioners that are most likely to ‘give up practicing the Dharma’ are those who are identified with the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, who give up in despair after finding that this approach does but not bare fruit for them. There are also the heroic ‘self practitioners who give up practicing the Dharma, while maintaining their identification with it. I have also seen many Buddhist practitioners are who gave up practicing Mindfulness and ethics, and who rationalised this conduct in terms of the idea of ‘skilful means’ – a term which they associate with the Vajrayāna, but misconstrue. It is probably clear to my readers by now however, that these were not true Vajrayāna practitioners – that they were in fact heroic ‘self-development’ practitioners who were making use of Vajrayāna concepts to create rationalisations and justifications for the extreme character of their heroic approach to practice and the ethical incongruities that were arising from that. The generalised belief in the danger of ‘self-discovery’ practitioners giving up practicing, seems to be based on a misunderstanding. That fear, which I shall be exploring below, is in any case far outweighed by the very great transformative potential of the ‘self-discovery’ approach to practice – and by the important ways in which the Vajrayāna, properly understood, gives expression to the balance and completeness that was originally present in the Buddha’s vision of a Middle Way.

I am sure there are people who have given up spiritual practice after an encounter with the dharmakāya level of mind – and I am sure these people were especially common in the 60s and 70s. My readers have probably met people who appear to have had such ‘peak experiences’, and glimpsed their ultimate true nature – most often with the help of psychedelic substances. It is easy to become judgemental, and perhaps fearful, when we see how delusional and closed-minded such people can become, as they start to ‘teach’ from their new-found place of ‘spiritual knowledge’ – but these are usually people who were never really committed to spiritual transformation in the first place, and have never grounded themselves through serious Dharma study and practice.

I feel a need to offer some further understanding of this fairly widespread ambivalence towards the mode of practice that Subhuti called ‘self-discovery’, and the various Dharmic conceptualisations that are associated with that perspective – the dharmakāya; the dharmadhātu; the dharma niyama; Buddha Nature; dzogchen; etc. Some of Sangharakshita’s students claim that he himself expressed this ambivalence – even though, during his long period of residence in Kalimpong, in northern India, in the 1950s and 1960s, he had friendships and personal contacts with several renowned dzogchen masters. My reflections on this question from an archetypal point of view, leads me to believe that the problem is not with the Vajrayāna perspective itself, as we might imagine, but with the problems that arise when the Vajrayāna is viewed, by Westerners, through the lens of a worldview that sees scientific materialism and the heroic ‘self-power’ view as the foundational framework for practice.

We need to look a little deeper at these claims, by advocates of the primacy of ‘self-development’ perspective, that those who are practicing on the ‘self-discovery’ level tend ‘not to need the Sangha’, or ‘appear to give up practicing’. We need to consider that both these statements may just be a tragic misunderstanding – a particular form of confusion of the type that ‘self-development’ practitioners are prone to. From the point of view of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, the practitioner who has learned the profound wisdom and transformative power of simply resting ‘in’ and ‘as’ Consciousness, and has therefore begun to gain a keen sense of the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality, may indeed appear to have given up ‘practice’ and given up on the Sangha. The Middle Way method requires us however, to step out of the ‘self-development’ perspective, and to consider this appearance from the point of view of the other – from the point of view of the ‘other-power’ and ‘self-discovery’ practitioners themselves.

We need to acknowledge that these are people who have had some sort of encounter with the dharmic dimension and have been changed by it, so that an exclusive ‘self-development’ perspective no longer ‘works’ for them; is no longer experientially true – or is even felt to represent a backwards step and a narrower view of the Dharma than their own. They may be in a very significant spiritual transition, and may feel very alone and confused, as they try to formulate new Dharmic conceptualisations that might encompass their new experience of reality. They have come to a place where the exclusive ‘self-power’ view, and all the associated understandings and values, now feel deeply inadequate, even wrong – perhaps deeply wrong. Until their new approach to practice is stabilised, they are likely to be very vulnerable. They may feel that they are now, most definitely, outside of the worldview of Western society – and desperately in need of Buddhist friendship and acceptance within the Sangha. They may have a great need for empathy – ideally from someone who has previously undergone such a transition in themselves.

So, in reality, what the ‘self-discovery’ practitioner is ‘giving up’ is not their Dharma practice or their need for Sangha, but their previous exclusively ‘self-power’ approach, and their previous framing of the Dharma in heroic ‘self-power’ terms. Having opened to the dharmic reality in a new and deeper way, they are indeed becoming more spiritually autonomous, but that does not mean that they do not need the Sangha. The ‘other-power’ practitioner, or ‘self-discovery’ practitioner, once they have found a sense of guidance within, and begun to gain confidence in their own knowing, is likely to find themselves conflicted, especially if they are expected, by their Dharma brothers an sisters, to accept Dharmic formulations that are framed within the narrower ‘self-development’ view. Indeed, the strength of the three-fold perspective that I am advocating for, is that it provides a basis for empathy and respect – and a readiness to welcome the practitioner’s expansion into a deeper and more comprehensive view of the Dharma. Without this empathy and respect for each other’s process, a heroic ‘self-development’ practitioner will, perhaps unknowingly, violate the ‘other-power’ practitioner’s process – reacting to them with dismissive judgements at a time when they have a deep need for understanding and support.

It can be argued that the ‘Three Myths’ framework invites us to consider that, if the Western practitioner is deeply committed to an ongoing process of deepening, their spiritual life is likely to go through two very significant spiritual transitions. The first of these transitions is the expansion, through a recognition of the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality, from an exclusively ‘self-development’ perspective into the two-fold view of the ‘self-surrender’ perspective. The second transition (which may follow very quickly for some, or may not) is the further expansion into a three-fold ‘self-discovery’ perspective in which the existential conflict between the first two perspectives is resolved. Both of these transitions may be so radical from the point of view of the ordinary mindset of the modern West, that they may be experienced either as times of spiritual revelation or as times of madness. Indeed, they may be felt to be so disturbing that the individual will close down psychologically against what is happening – without a spiritual friend they may be unable to sustain the transition. Whatever the individual’s subjective experience in these time of transition, these are times when the practitioner needs intensive support from the Sangha – or from at least one practitioner who is more experienced, and who is willing to provide support and guidance and encouragement.

If the culture of our Sangha is dominated by the ‘self-development’ view, and contains very few practitioners who have consciously transitioned beyond that limited framing of the Dharma, these times of expansion that I have been speaking about are likely to be complicated and difficult. Most obviously, if the individual’s experience of the transition is not welcomed in some way, but instead actively attacked by other Sangha members, who for whatever reason feel a need to impede, or undermine, or devalue, the more balanced approach to practice that is emerging, there will be painful disillusionment, a sense of betrayal – and the confusion and distress that I have spoken of above. Indeed, there is a great danger that the transitioning individual – far from ‘no longer needing the Sangha’ – feels rejected by the Sangha, or even perhaps feels that they have no place in the Sangha. Having witnessed tragic and extremely painful processes of this sort, in others and in myself, I am very motivated to raise awareness in regard to such processes.

There is another key psychological concept that is absolutely necessary, in my view, if we are to understand the problematic nature of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. Carl Jung coined a very useful term, inflation, to describe what happens when the culturally extraverted heroic ego of the Westerner encounters inner archetypal forces – forces that come from beyond the egoic mind. Whether these forces are positive or negative, they often have a de-stabilising effect on the individual, since they are usually too powerful for the individual to contain, integrate, and embody in a conscious way. Jung called this psychological de-stabilisation inflation, because the effected individual becomes metaphorically ‘inflated’ and puffed up – seised with grandiose ideas; by a lack of empathy; by a grandiose sense of their own importance; and by a tendency to lose sight of their human limitations. Jung regarded this state as very dangerous – as a form of madness in which awareness of personal Shadow is dangerously obscured. Having seen the disastrous effects of this phenomenon of inflation in various different Buddhist contexts, I cannot help but regard this as an essential Dharmic conceptualisation for anyone who is interested in ethics – or in the egoic processes by which our ethical sensibility and our empathy can appear to fail catastrophically.

We might imagine that inflation is mainly a feature of the ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’ perspectives, but it is in practitioners of the heroic ‘self-development’ persuasion, that it is most clearly seen. We might also imagine that the problem comes from the dharmic dimension – and we might therefore take instances of inflation as evidence of the dangers that are inherent in the path of direct ‘self-discovery’. This would be mistake however, because the problem is not in the dharmic dimension, but in the heroic Western ego’s difficulty entering into a true ‘other-power’ relationship with the dharmic dimension. It is as if the collective unconscious of the Western mind tends to make the Westerner too extraverted, monotheistic, heroic, and ‘self-power’ orientated to relate graciously, appreciatively, wisely, and receptively to manifestations of ‘other-power’. The Western ego, because it frames its experience in heroic terms, tends to fall into a grandiose and inflated ‘self-identification’ with the archetypal powers that it encounters rather than relating to them humbly and appropriately in the devotional-receptive spirit of the ‘other-power’ perspective.

So, when inflation happens in a Buddhist practitioner who has, consciously or unconsciously, exclusively adopted the ‘self-development’ perspective as their framework for practice, they not only tend not to recognise it as a danger – they instead will often see it as sign of significant progress. Worse still, they tend to claim that whatever progress has occurred as an egoic achievement, rather than simply recognising it as evidence of the beneficial nature of the dharmic reality. Indeed, they will often take the manic energy generated by their experience of inflation as confirmation of the rightness of their heroic ‘self-power’ approach – seemingly unaware that their self-awareness and ethical sensibility is severely compromised. They will often then step forward into positions of leadership – positions of leadership in which they speak with the authority of the Buddhist tradition, and propagate their view that the ‘self-development’ approach should be primary. If they manage to function in their ongoing inflation without being challenged, they may even start to privately (or openly) imagine themselves as a heroic leader in a Dharmic army of Buddhist heroes. While their egoic identification with the heroic remains however, their Dharmic judgement is likely to be deeply flawed – as I have been trying to explain.

As a final point in this thread of reflection, I feel a need to re-iterate that, while inflation is very common in Western practitioners of the Mahayāna and Vajrayāna, it is not the Mahayāna and Vajrayāna that are the problem. Rather, the problem is in the lack of real connection with the actual humility of ‘other-power’ Buddhism in heroic Western practitioners. The bodhisattva is the most sublime archetype – the Mahayana’s archetype of Enlightenment as compassion. It is when we unconsciously frame the bodhisattva in the terms of the Western Hero that we run into problems. Similarly, the Vajrayāna, with its great psychological sophistication, and direct engagement with the energy of Enlightenment, is extraordinary, but very quickly becomes problematic, if its ideas and methods are unconsciously framed within the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective.

While I can understand why this might happen, I cannot help but feel that only a fool would imagine that a glimpse of reality constitutes a complete energetic transformation of their body-mind. One of the things that I like about Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ is that it makes this very clear. It does not only present the two transformative stages of ‘Integration’ and ‘Positive Emotion’ – the stages of practice by which the egoic mind is brought into alignment with reality. It emphasises that the transformation process continues on after that, and, in effect, never ends. The internal and external transformation that is required, if we are to be an agent of the dharmakāya while living in the world of the nirmānakāya, is endless. An infinite accumulation of skills and positive qualities is needed, if we are to fully embody the bodhisattva principle.

In Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ model, there are two further stages of practice beyond the point of fully encountering the transcendental reality of the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya, and of recognising the ‘emptiness’ of the self-illusion. Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth, the second pair of stages, can be understood as higher octaves of the first pair (i.e. of ‘Integration’ and ‘Positive Emotion’ respectively). The second pair emerge naturally from our practice of the first pair, but provide us with a structured path of transformation even after we have learned to rest consistently as Consciousness – as the dharmakāya – and have already gained a corresponding sense of the ‘emptiness’ of the self-illusion. Because of this correspondence between the first two stages and the second two, the practice of Integration and Positive Emotion is, in reality, never left behind – they are an ever-present necessity inherent in our nirmānakāya nature and in our nirmānakāya situation.

I feel a need to further emphasise that the essence of the three-fold vision that I am calling Vajrayāna, was present in the teachings of the historical Buddha. We are told, in the Pali canon, that Gautama Buddha, reflecting on his experience, after his Enlightenment, briefly faltered in his conviction that what he had realised could be communicated to others. Until a conceptual framework for his teachings began to become clear to him, he appears to have been somewhat daunted by the enormity of the task. The tradition presents this in a wonderfully poetic and mythic way. The text (the Ayacana Sutta), which is clearly a mythic embellishment of a historic event, communicates a sense that the Buddha recognised that the path to Enlightenment was extremely subtle and multidimensional, and very difficult to formulate conceptually in words. We are told that he was visited by the highest form of Brahma – the great four-faced, four-armed creator god of ancient India. Brahma had appeared to him to make a heart-felt request on behalf of all beings – addressing the Buddha’s conflict, he pleaded with him to teach the Dharma.

The sutta then tells us that in the course of the eventual formation of Buddha’s final unequivocal decision to give himself completely to the task of teaching the Dharma, he had a vision of humanity in which he saw a vast lotus pond with innumerable lotus buds and lotus flowers of different colours and in many different stages of unfolding – some were only lotus shoots, still buried deep in the mud at the bottom of the pond; some were tightly closed buds, growing up through the water but still fully immersed; some were just breaking the water’s surface; and some were rising above the water level and beginning to unfold into full bloom. So, the Buddha saw humanity as diverse – as widely differing in temperament; widely differing in ability; and at widely different stages of spiritual development. He recognised that, while all people are drawn, either consciously or unconsciously towards the light of the dharmic reality, they are at very different stages of spiritual evolution, and subject to very different needs. The implication is that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ version of the Dharma – that the Dharma is always a personalised response to the individual’s life situation and cultural context.

So, because it addresses the diverse needs of humanity at different levels and stages, the Buddha’s teaching appears to contain incongruities – and when we address the Buddhist tradition as a historical whole, these incongruities are highlighted. This is why the ‘Three Myths’ / ‘Three Yānas’ model is so valuable. It provides us with a framework that allows us to discern three very distinct and very different archetypal perspectives within Buddhist thought – three perspectives which we must become deeply familiar with, and must learn to combine and integrate, if we are to find our way on the spiritual path.

While I may be labouring this point, I cannot help feeling concerned when I see Western Buddhists who are failing to extend themselves intellectually so that they are working with this more comprehensive three-fold model that reflects to totality of the Buddhist tradition. The embrace, by default, in the West, of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective is understandable, but it is not an expression of the Buddha’s Middle Way. The Buddha himself was daunted by the task of developing adequate conceptualisations for the complex and paradoxical reconciliation process that he had himself undergone. The nature of the ultimate reality that later Buddhist tradition called the dharmakāya was, and is, beyond the limits of conceptual language. It is a reality that can only be ‘pointed to’ with Dharmic conceptualisations – or with images, like the sambhoghakāya mandala imagery of the ten Buddhas.

The Buddha recognised that his ‘pointers’ were always going to seized upon in erroneous ways by the egoic mind. This led him to speak of these ‘pointers’ – the Dharmic conceptualisations that he was offering – as a raft to get to the further shore of nirvāna. So, the Dharma was not a graceful boat of elegant design – rather it was just a crude and make-shift raft, to be left behind at that further shore. His point was that Dharmic concepts are inherently limited and limiting, and inherently not quite up to the task – easily misunderstood or taken in the wrong way. He wanted us to understand that they are provisional, and that we must only use them to the extent that they serve us as a vehicle for our transformation – that we must be ready to abandon them as soon as they are no longer useful.

In his parable of the raft, the Buddha was saying that it would be absurd for us to become so attached to our concepts that we are unwilling to see their limitations and let go of them when the time is right – even carrying our crude raft of concepts on our backs when we reach the further shore. He wanted us to subject our Dharmic concepts to rigorous scrutiny – to ask again and again if they really ‘work’. If he could speak to Buddhists in the modern West, I imagine the Buddha would urge us to closely examine and critique the current translations of his words into modern English equivalents. He would advise us to ask ourselves whether the four hundred years of oral tradition, and all the translations and edits and re-translations down through the centuries have managed to retain the essence of his teachings – and in what ways aspects of his teaching have been lost over that vast span of time. I shall be engaging in some critical reflection of this sort in regard to the Buddha’s five skandhas teaching, which is the subject of my next chapter.

In the curious and expressive idiom of Buddhist tradition, Buddhists speak of ‘Going For Refuge to the Dharma’. In part ‘Going for Refuge to the Dharma’ is a simple statement of our recognition of the value of the teachings of the Buddha – and of our deep-felt-impulse to deeply understand and practice these teachings. To ‘Go For Refuge to the Dharma’, is to recognise that the tradition of spiritual philosophy and practice that the Buddha initiated, while also human and flawed, ultimately represents a source of absolutely reliable and liberating guidance in a world of illusions and unsatisfactoriness. If we think more deeply about this however, we acknowledge that ‘Going For Refuge to the Dharma’ encompasses a very rich and complex engagement – because the Dharma can be interpreted in so many different ways.

The Dharma is both broad and deep, and our ‘Going For Refuge to the Dharma’ expands as our appreciation of it expands. We need to understand it broadly, but in doing so, we must endeavour not to miss its depth and its essence – the eternal and archetypal Truths within the Buddha’s teachings – which the written words in the ancient Buddhist texts and Dharma books are only pointing to. The Dharma is an indefinable and universal idea – an archetype even – and paradoxically our ‘Going For Refuge to the Dharma’ requires us to release the idea that we already know what the Dharma is. Rather, we are undertaking to sincerely engage in a process of discernment, of the Truth, or Truths, that the word Dharma is pointing to. As modern Western practitioners, this commitment goes a step further, since we are not only undertaking to discern the Truth, but are also undertaking to create really accurate modern-language conceptualisations and clarifications of that Truth that are appropriate to the spiritual, psychological, and philosophical sensibilities of the modern ‘Western’ world.

So, ‘Going for Refuge’ to the Dharma, for a Western Buddhist cannot be a passive activity. It is not simply about being a good extraverted thinking student faithfully absorbing the ancient texts and merely receiving the opinions of our teachers. Western Buddhism, for me, is an active intellectual engagement with the essence of the Buddha’s core teachings, and simultaneously with the collective spiritual, cultural, psychological, and philosophical plight of the modern West. The creation of a Western Buddhism requires an engagement in deep and imaginative reflection upon the dark psychological, philosophical, and geopolitical history of the West, and asks us to distil some fresh and culturally appropriate understandings, both from Buddhism’s history and from the depth of our own knowing, so that we might help our world at this time.

However great our book knowledge, our ‘Going For Refuge to the Dharma’ requires the humility of acknowledging the limits of language, the limits of the intellectual mind, and the limits of the tradition’s capacity to faithfully represent, or ‘point to’, the Truth that it is ostensibly baring witness to. This is yet another expression of the trikāya and the Middle Way. These teachings tell us that the Dharma has an absolute, eternal, and perhaps unknowable aspect which corresponds to the dharmakāya – a level of Truth, or better still, Reality, that transcends Buddhist tradition completely, but nevertheless provides Buddhism with its basis. Only slightly more accessible is the dharmakāya‘s reflection in the sambhogakāya as archetypal imagery and bodily-felt knowing – the universal spiritual principles that are represented by the mandala of sambhogakāya Buddhas. These universal spiritual principles have a Buddhist character, at least in the way they are presented, but are nevertheless also universal and in some ways transcendent of the Buddhist tradition. Thirdly, there is the nirmānakaya aspect of the Dharma – the vast collection of texts and traditions and commentaries and interpretations that represent the whole history of philosophy and practice within Buddhism. It is this third aspect of the Dharma that the Buddha was characterising as a mere ‘raft’ of approximate conceptualisations – and as a finger pointing to the moon of the dharmic reality.

When the Buddha spoke of the Dharma as ‘a finger pointing to the moon’, he was warning against the egoic mind’s tendency to literalise and reify Dharmic concepts – concepts that can only serve as pointers to the archetypal and eternal realities that they refer to. More than this however, he was urging us to turn our attention to those realities; to turn our attention to the moon; to endeavour to recognise the dharmic reality that later Buddhist tradition called the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya. One of the ways in which we can go beyond the merely heroic ‘self-development’ perspective in our Going For Refuge to the Dharma, is to remember that we are Going For Refuge to the Dharma as the trikāya.

This is an idea that is explicitly understood and emphasised in the Refuge Tree visualisations of the Tibetan Vajrayāna, where the practitioner Goes For Refuge to a visualised representation of the trikāya. So, the conceptual framework for our ‘Going For Refuge to the Dharma’, if that Going For Refuge is to be effective, must express an engagement with the whole trikāya, not just the Dharmic formulations of this conditioned nirmānakāya world. The Middle Way path of the Dharma involves an interaction of this limited and conditioned nirmānakāya level of mind with the unconditioned dharmakāya level of mind that always completely interpenetrates it – and the sambhogakāya, which symbolically describes that interaction and that reconciliation in the imagery of a mandala of archetypal Buddhas, is central to our understanding of that Dharmic path.

As a way of further clarifying this, we should acknowledge that the Buddha spoke of three levels of wisdom: firstly, the knowledge of the Dharmic conceptual frameworks; secondly, a contemplative familiarity with those Dharmic conceptual frameworks; and thirdly, the direct knowledge of the dharmic realities that the Dharmic conceptual frameworks point to. So, once again, we see the Buddha addressing multiple levels of study and practice, and we see him addressing them in a way that takes care to validate all levels of practice, while always re-asserting the ultimate level of engagement. The first two levels, of Dharma study and Dharma contemplation can be achieved within the framework of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. The direct knowledge level requires the shift of perspective that I have been talking about – an opening of the heart to archetypal dharmic truths and to the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya levels of mind. The Buddha’s third level of wisdom – the level of direct knowledge, is for me essentially identical with the three-fold level of engagement that I have been calling Vajrayāna. This is the path of ‘self-discovery’; of ‘self-enquiry’; of the ‘resting as Consciousness’ approach to Mindfulness; and of direct engagement with the realities of the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya.

The principle of discerning pairs of opposites and understanding how a reconciliation of those opposites is possible through a third perspective is perhaps the essence of the Buddha’s Middle Way. This mode of discernment can be applied repeatedly in Buddhist study and practice, and indeed must be applied repeatedly, if we are serious about following the Buddha’s guidance. I hope my explanation of how the reconciliation between the ‘self-power’ perspective of the ‘self-development’ myth, and the ‘other-power’ perspective of the ‘self-surrender’ myth, has helped us to understand this Middle Way principle – and has helped us to also understand the trikāya model of mind. Furthermore, I hope we are now better equiped to explore Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ from both a Middle Way and a Vajrayāna perspective.

I hope I have been able to show that the Hero is a deeply ambivalent archetype – and almost indistinguishable from the asura archetype of Buddhist tradition. Many Western Buddhists talk of the Hero archetype as if it were very close to the archetype of the bodhisattva. This is simply not the case. The Hero and the bodhisattva are better understood as opposites – perhaps opposites to be reconciled, like the nirmānakāya and dharmakāya. The resolution of this confusion requires that we ground ourselves in the practice of the sort of deep self-enquiry that is intrinsic to the three-fold ‘self-discovery’ approach.

Similarly, we must find a very deep and personally grounded experience of the truth through the practice of self-enquiry before we should let anyone convince us to ‘surrender’ to anything that is not our own ultimate true nature. The whole notion of ‘self-surrender’, while it may appear to be deeply part of Buddhist culture, and to spiritual culture more widely, is fraught with very great psychological and social dangers. Spiritual organisations are inherently and perhaps necessarily hierarchical, and this makes them vulnerable to all manner of social pathologies including elitism, Shadow projection, and social control. The complex relationship of the individual’s process to the social process which provides the context for practice, is easily confused – so that the needs of the Sangha as an institution are often prioritised over the need to foster the individuality, the spiritual autonomy, and the real needs, of the Sangha’s members. This confusion is especially prevalent if the notion of ‘self-surrender’ is being held up as a value without grounding it in a really authentic sense of ‘other-power’ practice, or the individual empowerment that true Vajrayāna practice provides. Both the heroic spirit and the spirit of surrender must, in my view, arise naturally from a deep process of self-knowledge. They should not be forced – and indeed cannot be forced – not without psychological danger.

The bodhisattva path is a three-fold one, of ‘self-development’, ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’ – although the term ‘self-discovery’ does not quite encompass the profundity of that third process in which the first two are reconciled. The bodhisattva path is also one of both wisdom and altruism – wisdom and compassion. Before we can apply the force of the egoic will to the task of transcending the egoic mind, we should know where we are going – we should have a very clear comprehension of the nature of our goal. Before we can surrender the egoic mind to a spiritual ideal, or a teaching, or to persons who claim to embody such ideals and teachings, we should undertake a deep enquiry into our own nature, and should undertake to discover our authentic self and the gift we were born to give.

I would argue that the emphasis that I am advocating here is reflected in the teachings of Gautama Buddha himself, who identified ‘Right View’, or ‘Perfect Vision’, not as the last, but as the very first limb, of his ‘Noble Eight-Fold Path’. While many Buddhist teachers teach as if wisdom is so far down the road of our spiritual journey that we should not concern ourselves with it, I take the opposite view – an approach that is hopefully not only more respectful and less likely to waste your time, but also one that gives appropriate consideration to the psychological safety of those who would undertake this journey of radical transformation.

I take the view that, for the Western practitioner, the entry level for the Buddhist path is higher than we might have been led to believe – that a certain degree of wisdom, such as the Buddha expressed in his notion of ‘Right View’, is a necessary foundation for the subsequent ‘path of transformation’ (the remaining seven limbs of the Path). I believe that Right View, properly understood, gives us an overview of the Path. It is not unusual to find Buddhist practitioners (and practitioners in other traditions) who seem quite lost – who seem to have set off in the wrong direction spiritually speaking. It is common for instance to meet Buddhists who believe that the Buddha’s realisation led him to a dark view of human nature. Such Buddhists are therefore unnecessarily hard – even harsh – on themselves and others, and find themselves advocating an approach that is far from wise and compassionate.

It is also common to meet Buddhists who believe that the Buddha’s realisation brought him to a completely opposite place – to a state that in modern parlance might be characterised as one of ‘positive thinking’. I believe this is also incorrect, and can lead to a state of complacency, where the practitioner is lost in the delusion that it is enough to weave ourselves a comfortable cocoon of egoic positivity – a place from which we can then ignore the Shadow of the egoic mind in both ourselves and others. Entirely unnecessary violence and tragedy is everywhere in the modern world, and we are betraying the Buddha’s teaching if we ignore it and fail to engage with it.

The Buddha’s path was a Middle Way. His view, and therefore his path, was neither superficially positive, nor superficially negative. And it was not-not positive, and not-not negative. His was a non-dual realisation and a non-dual path – and we lose sight of this at our peril. His Middle Way approach could be characterised as one which sees the mind and the universe as both deeply positive and deeply negative simultaneously – but neither does this statement come even close, because the Buddha’s experience was one of a reconciliation and transcendence of these opposites. While the egoic mind and the nirmānakāya world rests eternally in the divine dharmakāya, the world’s identification with the egoic illusion is so nearly universal that we collectively create a hell for ourselves – and we completely fail to see the dharmic heaven that is always simultaneously present, or the possibility of creating a beautiful reflection of that heaven within the nirmāmakāya.

This has been another very long and rambling chapter. I have needed to highlight some dangerous misunderstandings, and establish some foundational principles without which the Middle Way is not only not possible, but hijacked by the egoic mind. I need my readers to be true to their own knowing, in the spirit of the Vajrayāna, and to resist the charismatic vigour and authority of those who would reduce Buddhism to a program of heroic behaviour change.

The Buddha’s path of Mindfulness – of comprehensive awareness – cannot be understood without reference to the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) in the centre of the mandala. We need to learn to rest ‘in’ and ‘as’ Consciousness. This is what it means to reconcile the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya in our experience – initially only for short moments of time. The essence of Mindfulness is very difficult to describe. It requires a process of familiarisation – resting as Consciousness and noticing its qualities. It is tempting for Westerners to frame Mindfulness only as a ‘self-power’ process – as if Enlightenment was a process of building up the egoic mind so that it is more powerful and accomplished. Mindfulness may indeed allow us to build capabilities and personality qualities, but this is secondary. Much more fundamentally, Mindfulness is an ‘other-power’ process – a release of the egoic mind’s momentum.

To practice Mindfulness is to learn, whenever we remember to do so, to release the egoic mind’s personalising identification – it’s personalisation of it’s emotional evaluations (samjñā skandha), it’s form-creating conceptualisations (rūpa skandha), it’s sensations (vedanā skandha), and it’s volitions (samskāras skandha). Even more fundamentally, it also requires us, whenever we remember to notice, and savour, the experience of Consciousness (vijñāna skandha) – familiarising ourselves with that experience and releasing our personalisation of it. When we notice, through our practice of Mindfulness, that Consciousness is always there when turn towards it, their is the potential for us to open to an ‘other-power’ perspective on Mindfulness practice in which we recognise that Consciousness is an objective and collective reality – an ever-present and all-embracing dharmadhātu that supports our growth of awareness to the extent that we are open to it, and even when we are not consciously engaged in that process.

So, Mindfulness, like everything else in the spiritual life is a Middle Way. While it appears to require personal intentionality, it can also be characterised as letting everything be as it is, and the recognition that intentionality is not actually personal – but rather is a compassionate suprapersonal force that is gently urging us forward. As our moments of Mindfulness are increasingly informed by that sense of appreciative joy and gratitude that is the spirit of ‘other-power’ practice, we will know that we are beginning to find that reconciliation that the Buddha spoke of as a Middle Way. Mindfulness, the Buddha told us, is ‘the Way to the Immortal’. Every moment of true Mindfulness – of resting as Consciousness in a spirit of ‘other-power’, and familiarising ourselves with that blessing. It is a moment of re-connection with our source – a moment of Enlightenment.

I hope to be able to show in detail, in the coming chapters, that Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ – Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death, and Spiritual Rebirth – is a comprehensive model of the process of spiritual development. The ‘System of Practice’ is, essentially, a journey of Mindfulness – but in a very deep sense of that word, such as can only be understood through the lens of the Vajrayāna. By resting ‘as’ Consciousness – initially just momentarily, in the midst of our busy, externally focused lives – we begin a journey of familiarisation; familiarising ourselves with Consciousness; familiarising ourselves with a resonance of the dharmakāya, ever-present in our experience. Its first stage, Integration, while it can be superficially understood through the lens of the heroic ‘self-power’ perspective, can only be fully understood if we enter into an ‘other-power’ perspective. The practice of meditation (samadhi) inherently requires an attitude of ‘meditative receptivity’ to that higher dimension of mind that I have been calling the dharmic reality, or we end up reducing it to a mere concentration exercise.

The ‘System of Practice’ is a journey in which ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ is subtly but systematically reconciled via a four stage process. On the basis of our establishment of the ‘other-power’ attitude, in the Integration stage, the subsequent Positive Emotion stage naturally follows as an out-pouring of, or a channelling of, what we are receiving. Indeed, while the Positive Emotion stage has a more extraverted character, it is a stage in which we become agents of the benevolence of the dharmic reality – channels for those dimensions of love which Buddhist tradition calls the brahmavihāras.

Integration and Positive Emotion, when understood and practiced within the three-fold frame of reference that I have been calling Vajrayāna, are very effective ways of moving beyond heroic idealism in a staged and thoughtful way – and of opening to ‘other-power’ and Vajrayāna modes of practice without the risk of inflating a heroic and delusional spiritual ego. Properly practiced they lead us gently and naturally to that place of mental and emotional stability that arises from seeing through the self-illusion – a process that is so significant that we can call it Spiritual Death. The Buddha framed this release of identification with the cognitive-perceptual process that create the appearance of a fixed self, in terms of the ’emptiness’ of the ‘five skandhas‘. I shall be talking in detail about the skandhas in my next chapter. I find them to be essential for our understanding, not only of the processes of Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth, but for the foundational processes of Integration and Positive Emotion also.

In the ‘Spiritual Rebirth’ stage – the final stage that we are ultimately seeking – the reconciliation of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ moves towards completion. In this stage we are still actively practicing – still actively familiarising ourselves with the benevolence of the dharmic field of Consciousness in which we rest – but our intentionality has lost its egoic character. The openness and un-knowability of the dharmakāya is naturally expressed in us as Being, Loving-Kindness, Compassion, and as true creativity and spontaneous generosity – and as a gradually unfolding embodiment of all the dharmic virtues that we see personified in the archetypal Buddhas of the sambhogakāya mandala.

 

William Roy Parker 2024

 

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