OEITH #115 Manifestation - The Nidanas, Part One

Hijacking the Buddha's teachings on dependent co-arising as a detailed model of manifestation, we consider its magical applications: the Maha-nidana Sutta and its relevance to magick; its contrasts with Kabbalah; differences between religion, science, and magick; the centrality of dependent co-arising in Buddhism; religions as models of reality; the nidanas as steps in the process of manifestation; a personal perspective on Buddhism; hacking dependent co-arising; death, birth, and becoming; death and life as interwoven; birth not as creation, but as parts becoming perceivable as wholes; the constant flux of becoming; death and life as different perspectives on becoming; grasping as a lust for existence and a means of existing; craving as a prior judgment call that can sometimes be resisted; the validity of positing psychological causes for material phenomena; how to hack grasping and craving; feeling-tone or vedana and its relationship to craving; regular spiritual practice and psychological work; the effects of an exercise concerning vedana set by Rob Burbea; how states fade, but knowledge remains; how interrupting the process of manifestation allows something besides the ordinary to appear; sensory contact, and why the tree that falls in the forest without anyone to hear it definitely does not make a sound; the sense of an external world; psychedelics as a hack at this level; six senses, and the mind as a sense organ in Buddhist psychology; a personal experience illustrating how this is the case; the tendency to regard mind as a "thing"; name and form; the myth of the conquistadors' galleons; Platonic forms and Jungian archetypes, not as ideal objects but as universal predispositions; the importance of name and form in magick and in therapy; the impact of the human body on human experience; the body as agent rather than object; how some of these phases are more hackable than others; mind, psyche, and soul; soul as an individual instance of human experience; how the body is in the soul; soul as awareness of individual experience versus consciousness as pure awareness; an exercise for exposing the unfindability of awareness; consciousness as the qualityless provider of qualities; consciousness as discernment or discrimination; formations as karmic imprints or tendencies; the possible relevance of formations to scientific experiments concerning free will; how formations may be encountered in meditative states; at the very fringes of manifestation; ignorance as the impulse to make something out of nothing; reviewing the process from ignorance all the way to death; manifestation as a process proceeding from ignorance to samsara; the possibility of transcendence.

Peter G.H. Clarke (2013). The Libet experiment and its implications for conscious will, https://tinyurl.com/s2xshu84 (bethinking.org).

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, trans. (1997). Maha-nidana Sutta: The Great Causes Discourse (DN 15), https://tinyurl.com/zf5f2m27 (accesstoinsight.org).