
The Advaita Vedanta tradition, and Carl Jung, and other psychological traditions have chosen to call this impersonal experience ‘the Self’ (capitalised to distinguish it from the conventional personal egoic ‘self’). Those who begin to recognise what the Buddha meant by ‘Emptiness’ and ‘no-self’, having begun to release their own identifications with their psychological parts and functions, and instead to rest naturally as Consciousness, will paradoxically often feel they are discovering an authentic ‘self’: a true self; the self they were born to be; a more natural self, more free from neurotic conditioning. The Dharmadhātu Wisdom warns us that this apparent ‘self-energy’, joyful, authentic and creative as it may be, is actually due to our release of egoic identifications. It is not the emergence of a self so much as the emergence within our appearance of separateness, of the energy of Consciousness – the transpersonal energy of the Dharmadhātu.
While such ideas of an authentic self, or of an archetypal Self, are useful conceptualisations in some ways, if they are defined very clearly, I find myself preferring the more radical language of ‘no-self’ that the Buddha adopted. I also prefer to talk about the experience of being ‘aware of being aware’ in terms of the objective and collective field of Consciousness, a term which spirituality now shares with Quantum Physics and Quantum Biology – a very important connection for modern spiritual students, in my view, since Quantum Science is now actually affirming the experience of the mystics.
Vairocana and Akashadhateshvari – Light and Space
The image of Vairocana in sexual union with Akashadhatvishvari gives us an imaginal doorway into a vision of Consciousness as Light and Space – an invitation into an experience of mind informed by an all-pervading transpersonal luminosity, and by the profound spaciousness of non-identification. Both the Light and the Space aspects of this image deserves further investigation and reflection.
In the physical world, light usually has a source that can be located, and the capacity of this source of light to provide illumination gets markedly weaker with distance. The presence of objects causes shadows – places where the illumination does not reach. In this cosmic union of Light and Space however, it is as if every tiny scintilla of infinite space is itself a source of illumination. This therefore, is a space in which there can be no shadow, no place anywhere that is not equally and unconditionally illuminated by Consciousness and supported by its ceaselessly beneficial and transformative energies. The resonance between the Mahayana Buddhist imagination that emerged in medieval India, and the vision of reality given to us by present day Quantum Science is quite obvious and very striking.
Quaker Tradition – the Children of the Light
This way of imagining a union of light and space, as the source of our spirituality, is not peculiar to Mahayana Buddhism. It is also seen in Islam (the Arabic word nūr or noor is used to denote the all-pervading light of the divine); in Jewish tradition (the Hebrew aor, the primordial light described in the Book of Genisis, is from the same root as the Islamic nūr); and in Christianity, especially in Quaker tradition. The very early Quakers called themselves ‘the Children of the Light’. They had a mystical understanding of the profound statement of Jesus: “I am the Light of the World”, and recognised that the indwelling Light was universally and equally available, common to all men and women without exception – a truly revolutionary idea in the social, political, and religious context of mid-17th Century England.
There is a great deal that could be said about the effect of this spiritual insight on Quaker history, practice and psychology. Modern Quaker practice has perhaps lost some of its early mystical foundation, but in the first three hundred years especially, the Quaker tradition made an incalculably positive impact on world history, and has been an extraordinarily clear and courageous force for moral good. Simply be recognising the indwelling spirit of Jesus Christ in the experience of Consciousness, they developed an ethical, compassionate, and humanitarian sensibility that was centuries ahead of its time. I would like to find time to write more about Quaker spirituality and its positive effects on society and world history – because it is quite pertinent to the current exploration of the nature of the Dharmadhatu Wisdom, and the Buddha’s somewhat mysterious ‘remembering’ practice, which we now know as Mindfulness.
Archetypal Personifications of Consciousness
My approach to explaining the Buddhist mandala deities – the archetypal personifications of Consciousness – is perhaps in some ways the reverse of what is often seen. In my view, it is important to have a good understanding of the philosophical context, and especially a sense of the meditative experience, out of which these archetypal figures emerged. I have tried to provide this background in my previous articles, where I have focused on the brahmavihāras, which are pre-Buddhist descriptions of embodied Consciousness that the Buddha adopted into his teaching framework.
The Mahayana Buddhist deities are believed to have originally emerged partly from visualisations of the historical Buddha, and perhaps more importantly, from spontaneously arising visionary personifications of felt experience in deep meditation – probably meditations on the mahabrahmavihāras, the archetypal sources of the brahmavihāras (more on the mahabrahmavihāras here and here). The male and female Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and the mandala of the five ‘Buddha Families’ only later became established features of what may be called ‘Buddhist religion’.
My preference is to first explore, and hopefully in some way to evoke, the dimensions of embodied Consciousness, before detailing the archetypal figures by which Buddhist tradition came to represent them. To be true to this approach, I will need to share some of this foundational context – exploring each of the Five Wisdoms (and their corresponding opposites among the Skandhas and Realms) in detail in the next few articles. Once again we will be circumambulating the mandala – walking round it in a systematic and detailed way, just as I did with the four brahmavihāras, but this time we will be giving a lot more time to understanding the symbolism of the white centre of the mandala – the Dharmadhātu Wisdom and its associations. Most importantly the Dharmadhātu Wisdom is associated with the practice of Mindfulness, which is a powerful, foundational idea for the Buddhist tradition, and one that is extremely difficult to define accurately – and even more difficult to put into practice.
The Deva Realms: Archetype; Cultural Construct; Reality?
Those who are familiar with my writing, know that I use the capitalised form of the word Consciousness to denote that objective and collective field that pervades the universe, and in which we all rest equally – whether we acknowledge it or not. If however, we see the mandala as completely inclusive of all experience – that is, including egoic experience as well – then the centre of the mandala is also associated with the egoic experience of being a ‘person’; an apparently separate self who dwells in ‘states of consciousness’ (a vague term, which I try to avoid). The Dharmadhatu Wisdom allows us to see that Consciousness is always present – even in egoic identifications.
Buddhist tradition explains to us that states of egoic identification can be very refined and even blissful, while still being very much subject to the bondage of personal identification, as in the various Deva Realms. The devas, or ‘gods’, are said to live in blissful heaven realms where anything wished for is immediately manifested. We are told that, although the devas have taken this positive rebirth because of generous, beneficial, and ethical actions in previous lives, and may continue to dwell in blissful, creative states for extremely long periods of time, they are not able to attain Buddhahood because of a deep-rooted tendency to personalise their experience.
Understanding the distinction, and ultimately opposition, between the awakened state of abiding as the non-personal Consciousness, on one side, and abiding in bondage to refined forms of egoic identification, on the other, is a key aspect of the Dharmadhātu Wisdom. The Buddhist characterisation of highly positive egoic identifications as deva states, provides us with a very valuable perspective on this distinction – one which I shall be exploring in future articles. While I have had personal experiences that lead me to the view that beings can indeed exist as coherent ‘spiritual’ entities in subtle or non-material realms, I find it more illuminating to explore the meaning of the Deva Realms by seeing the deva as an archetypal being, as a personification of a universal psychological reality, and as a collective psychological reality that we can see manifesting in our group psychology as humans.
The Dharmadhātu Wisdom and the Deva Realms
The Dharmadhātu Wisdom can be thought of as that knowing which fully grasps the relationship of these two views of Consciousness – the universalising view and the personalising view – and consistently recognises the spaciousness of the impersonal and collective field of Consciousness as the only true basis of identity. The personalising tendency, when it becomes the usual deeply-held and unquestioned conviction that we are an individual ‘person’, is an enormous obstacle to realisation.
The deva archetype reminds us that while personalising is an obstacle