PHOTONIC MANIFESTO
A work in progress
by Yeshe Dorje
© Copyright, Yeshe Dorje, March 17, 2003
II
The Wooden Club
My telling of this story began this morning after a disturbing dream, unusually violent and repulsive as I was holding a wooden club beating another man, and as I write this it occurs to me that this image is coincidentally similar to my fraternal grandmother’s family escutcheon - the Wood clan of Scotland – that bears a bearded bare-chested man holding a large club.
In the dream I am beating a man with a large wooden club as he lies supine beneath me, looking up at me and instructing as to the best methods used during such beatings. I am staring at the grain in the wood, when I begin to understand his instructions I immediately realize I’m beating myself – at one point I tell myself to use two clubs and strike one upon the other – two of me are there, one beating the other with this cudgel until it is too disturbing and I awaken with a start, feeling the naughty stirrings in my belly of being secretly pleased because it is such an interesting dream… Was it really me that I was looking at?
Now of course as I’m writing to you it is much later in the day and I am halfway up Mount Lemon with the roadbook on the trunk of my car, as is my habit, pausing as we drive across America. I am writing these notes to you as a Guide and right now I am high above the Sonoran desert listening to the Beta Band, looking down to where the old sea used to be, the vast beautiful desert valley. All around us rise granite pillars, mesquite cactus and the mountains that gently hold Tucson in a lush oasis above its ancient aquifer, below the rumors of clouds shrouding the crystal city. The dream this morning had a voice, and it came into my waking and asked me to find the wisdom and tell you its story. The dream asked me to begin with ‘the child born upon the tide, follow the tide from Sri Lanka, remember the giant Glooscap, and the Land of Evangeline’. Later I recalled some of the words of my perfect teacher and brought them here to you:
Wherever the wisdom is no matter the source Make effort to obtain it Some of the most beautiful flowers grow From filthy water Thus do not be discouraged by the source of knowledge Concentrate your mind on using this knowledge As long as you grab the essence of the teaching You cannot be misled The different teachings are offered to find the right medicine Concentrate on the purpose of the teaching H.E. Garchen Rinpoche
So after lying in bed awhile, not thinking but listening to the voices in my mind and following the sounds of meditating birds, I went to the computer and Googled the poem "Evangeline" by Longfellow. I was amazed to find the tragic American story poem of love and loss and Evangeline’s wandering in the American frontier, as I too have been looking everywhere for love stories amidst all the sadness. I have been seeking love in the western lands for countless lifetimes.
Longfellow dreamed Evangeline left Acadia in search of Gabriel, and went searching all the way into the American wilderness. In surrendering to the Goddess, I dream of heroines, sweet and wrathful Dakinis that guide us to the truth and help us through this mind revolution, where we all make a leap of light consciousness. In my search for wisdom and love I dream that she joins me now in Sonora as we the citizens march against the Empire’s war with Iraq. If we seek love, we must oppose war, and that makes me against the Empire. This morning after I left the comfort and safety of my house and marched with my brothers and sisters, I noticed that they were full of joy because they’re doing something to oppose war and destruction. They are the true American patriots. The Total Information Awareness fascists were out in force observing us from black helicopters and taking pictures at the gathering in the Park. We are beginning the final revolution that subverts the dominant paradigm and frees truth from darkness. After marching and singing from Old Main along 4th Avenue and then down Speedway, on behalf of all of you we gathered together and we smiled and for a few brief moments, we truly knew each other. We joined together as welcoming spirits trying to prevent the death and suffering of so many other innocent humans being.
And so I begin the Photonic Manifesto.
As I was marching I was visualizing a tide of people acting together today, beginning in Japan and sweeping across the planet in protest against the war. And I pray that all of my brothers and sisters who acted by marching through the streets, even here in the heart of the Empire, will find the truth concealed within their hearts. We walked together against the hypocrisy of the Bush regime, as it seeks to destabilize the geopolitical landscape, reverse the social advances of one hundred years, and distract the Empire and American frontiers with ghosts of the machine. We see the puppets of the coup and the Gang of 1974. We chose to be conscious and seek the truth together, millions of people spoke out today against the rumors of war by moving in a human tide, our consciousness was followed in the evening by the year’s first full moon and most likely the high tides pushing through Cape Split. I say the tide is with us my brothers and sisters. When I think of the Cape, I think of all the water in all the seas. Every six hours, fourteen billion tons of seawater breathes past Cape Split into or out of Minas Basin. This steady daily movement of water around the Cape is more than the combined flow of all the earth’s streams and rivers, and produces a tidal roar locals call ‘The Voice of the Moon’.
My father once told me the story of people caught at Cape Split, hiking down the cliff and out in the flats beyond the shore, unfamiliar with the quickly rising tides or just plain unlucky... He told me ‘the Earth is a beautiful place, but you have to keep your eye on the sun and the tide’. So I suppose back there where I was born, I got into a rhythm with the sea and that is what helps me now to tell this tale of revolution humans and angels in the architecture, unlucky men and fabulous women, during the end of days.
The Guide to the Perplexed is a story about love as a radical tide that ends the Great White Empire, the rogue wave that finally carries the Moloch of Capitalism back into the sea from whence it came.
The Heroes of the Revolution
When we consider the revolutionary we reveal the risk takers who struggle through adversity for an ideal. To be successful, one must be willing to make sacrifices and suffer life’s more egregious vicissitudes. Some may say you make your own luck. Especially enjoying saying it to those down on their luck is my definition of schadenfreude.
But what if you made your luck several lifetimes ago, and you are a spiritual warrior deciding to seek the truth in each lifetime to end the suffering of all beings. What if you spent the past few lifetimes as a particularly difficult person? Those of us who seek the Dharma have some karmic connection to the Buddha created over countless lifetimes, this is something you come to know in a very intimate sense without having any tangible ‘proof’ to discuss with others or empirical evidence to show doubting Thomas. Because we live in these difficult times of transition, where the very nature of reality is perceptibly shifting, we cannot escape the karma of great wars and the fear, hatred and scars they created any more than we can escape the wonders we perceive. Revolutionaries remember the conflicts of the past centuries, and we see the war babies proliferate to make more war, and we see that in this degenerate age anger rises as a cruel tidal bore.
So I read in the paper that the daughter watched from the passenger seat as her stepmother drives the Mercedes into her father, and then over his body a couple more times, all the while the former beauty queen stepmother has a vacant evil look in her eyes and the fifteen year old gets to see it all and tell the Texas jury about it. What was the karma interacting for those three people, Dad having just come down from the hotel room tryst with his receptionist? It was the result of centuries of fear. It could also be said that they made their own luck, but it would be hard to argue this in the case of the young girl who is a seemingly innocent bystander.
What if they were playing out a multidimensional conflict over several lifetimes and all violence is in struggle with love, all negativity is in a fierce field of grasping interference patterns clawing through the display to simply exist, fighting the battle of its life and the battles are to time as waves are to the ocean?
What if a wave of higher frequency energy was flooding into our solar system and we could observe its arrival as coronal mass ejections from our star and climactic changes on the planets? What if we could feel the revolution within our bodies as our very being changes, as the nature of reality appears to shift and we get closer to comprehending the true nature of mind as the union of compassion and wisdom?
Thus have I heard, this Guide for the Perplexed seeks to open some space in this mind to catch glimpses of the truth… my motivation is that you might benefit from reading these words and improve your luck as we speed up, evolve and open our hearts to the photonic revolution. The Guide is a manifesto to right action, right livelihood, compassion, mindfulness and the cultivation of loving kindness. This is the path to truly making your own luck as the accumulation of merit goes into transpersonal bank accounts and we all benefit.
If we are to seek the path of right livelihood we become diligent in our devotion to right relationship with everything and everyone. This is the lesson we learned from our grandfathers until the industrial revolution rapidly increased the alienation of the global mind. It is his theory of alienation that makes Marx similar to the Buddha, in that they both observed the suffering and sought the truth regarding its cause and cessation. Truth and the lie make themselves known if you pause thought and listen, and this is discernment. This is the lesson Leon Trotsky taught Balthazar Babinsky in the internment camp, and that our friend learned from his grandfathers: the Lamas of his mind; as they all had considerable virtue indeed to come across the ancient truth and discover wisdom from the true nature of mind. Balthazar has a picture of himself standing naked covered in the deep red mud of the Southern Bight when the tide was out and he thought he could take a shortcut to Canning.
If you were to go to this part of the world you would look out over the vast wet expanse of clay that is revealed by the receding tide and it would never occur to you to try and walk from Wolfville to Canning. This manifesto is also the log of Balthazar the revelator’s peregrinations as even though he makes what seem to be wrong turns, every path becomes meaningful when we know where we are going.
For radical photonic spirits, the truth is there in our beginning, as life unfolds we suffer in our ignoble ignorance forgetting the Buddha nature that is our essence. Our suffering helps us to remember the wisdom within suffering, and when we remember this we spend this lifetime seeking the truth, learning to open our hearts and love so that we can benefit all beings.
One of the most interesting beings in this dream I am writing is Balthazar. Quite soon after I awoke from this morning’s dream where I was beating myself, I was at the computer reading about an oral history of the expulsion of the Acadians from our birthplace, Wolfville Nova Scotia. For over two centuries a family tradition was telling this story of the two true lovers separated by cruel fate and bad luck to march a trail of tears the rest of their lives in a search between Balthazar and Emmeline. When I read Balthazar’s name I was amazed to find unanticipated reference to him again, as Balthazar is my secret guide and he comes to my mind when I least expect him.
When I saw this reference to Balthazar, I knew it was past time to tell you this tale of our friend and the many other thoughts that I have regarding the end of days: this search for truth and observation of the imperial fates; the photonic manifesto and the revolution of consciousness; the evolution of the species and the dance of the luminaries. While we search this planet earth for the truth we discover the brightest light is becoming ever more luminous. But the truth is that the brightest light casts the darkest shadow and so this story also attempts to shed light into the darkness pervading the mighty Moloch of capitalism’s American frontiers.
The fact that I discovered it was Balthazar who left Acadia so long ago is remarkable, that it was a real flesh and blood Balthazar I had discovered yet again is an incredible story my brothers and sisters because it was seven years ago that I was lying on my back receiving an energetic treatment and I felt a mysterious third hand touch my body. Beverly was gently resting her hands on my chest and abdomen and I suddenly felt another hand beneath me on my body near the right kidney.
"there’s someone else here…" I said.
Beverly laughed and said "Yes someone has joined us, do you know who it is?"
I had no idea, couldn’t begin to imagine that I could have an idea but when I cleared my mind and asked who it was… in came Balthazar.
This is how I met Balthazar, although he had quite likely been with me for some time… how long? This type of experience was completely unfamiliar to me, and such an unlikely name to imagine or create in an instant of no thoughts, my mind was without thought… and then there was Balthazar. He is a real being that I cannot see but I do listen to him from time to time if I make the effort to check in as he is always here and I have come to recognize another myself. I feel bliss as we communicate energetically, and he feels very, very nice indeed and so do I at the times I surrender.
He has a sense of humor about his existence, as he says he has "nothing but time…" And of course he is central to my ability and my struggle to relate much of what is true and parse that which is false and if I were to just type the words now he would say now directly to you to open your hearts as this is our greatest gift and the opportunities are presenting themselves with great frequency within this dance of the luminaries. Is it not true that we seek the shining ones? That you seek because you read these words, and you seek because of everything you do and all of your suffering, for without suffering we become complacent and evolve at a slower pace, and you read these words because you seek to evolve quickly in the time of the quickening remembering these words as you transform your life. This is true. You feel it. I know you do so many days, perhaps years before you actually realize the result I write these words to help you feel bliss and know the truth of who you are.
Meeting Balthazar, surrendering to the ideas that there is another world and it is in this one, changed my life. Agreeing to have Balthazar accompany me opened up rewarding, ceaselessly fascinating worlds that were unimaginable to me, and have proven quite difficult to navigate unless I ask for his help. That is why the Guide is being written, somehow I seek to translate the events of my transformation and discovery of the Dharma into a tale that will transform you. As we become much more attuned and engaged with life and the energies of the planet, we are following moments burgeoning blossoms of life living more and more an expansion of life that seems to cheat the whole truth of impermanence because it is so richly perpetually unfolding. We are guided by a knowing of truth when we perceive it, even though we don’t necessarily comprehend it, because we come to understand that thought is the thinker and all thought is suffering. This Guide is about a practice of non-attachment in a world where we are defined by our attachments, desires for things are the dragon’s teeth, attachment is the root cause alienating the western mind. Releasing attachment results in an enhanced perception of the truth and is the gateway to other dimensions.
This morning a gateway opened and out came a torrent of thoughts and words dedicated to the enlightenment of all beings. I did live in Amherst at one time and so did Leon Trotsky distantly living the revolution in a prison for a month in Nova Scotia, teaching the radical ideas of his time to unlikely students, and for some reason I feel compelled to tell you about it and Balthazar has something to do with this. It also has something to do with living in the Bush empire of fear, and it definitely has much to do with a love of truth and the Marxist thoughts of Trotsky who loved truth and gave his life for it like our hero Sir Thomas More many centuries before.
Dear reader we share the desire to find a mind that was filled with hope and aspirations of a better life for his brothers and sisters, a heart that sought to create a world of equality and we seek the example of a warrior that fought to end the suffering – and I feel compelled to write to you now as the senseless threat to life is ever present in this time of impending Iraqi devastation – we share the most intimate interconnection here on this planet and suffer because we don’t know who we really are – a harm to one is a harm to all - and so I am here writing to you high above Tucson looking south towards Mexico and I think of him living with Frida Khalo because this is in the zeitgeist now and I think of the month Leon Trotsky spent in Amherst teaching and I see these words I write in this moanifesto as coming from the same prison of Samsara and I smile despite our suffering because I know that prison is full of teachers and each is a shining one illuminating the path out of this prison.
In March 1917, Leon Trotsky was wandering with his family, having been kicked out of France, removed from Spain, and leaving New York City after just two months to return to Mother Russia and her revolution. The Bolsheviks were suddenly in power and the world was changing dramatically as thousands continued to die in war and poverty across the planet each day. So Trotsky was understandably concerned and excited, he was vibrant with enthusiasm for the future and he could have hoped this sea voyage would give him time to think and prepare for his role in helping his comrades support Lenin to consolidate his leadership. He was emboldened with hope and spoke to fellow passengers of the ship making many friends but always raising the notice of spies, so that when he and his family arrived in Halifax harbor, he was soon arrested by Bluejackets to the cries and protests of "shame on you" from his new friends.
Just before he returns to the rush of events in Europe he briefly pauses in an old iron foundry in a small village surrounded by frozen barren marshland, an ineffectual effort by the British to influence the events taking place in St. Petersburg… We can observe the human in this hero of the revolution in the effect Trotsky had on his fellow passengers by their protestations at his arrest and we can note one of the small crimes our brothers the police are coerced into on a daily basis by the mighty Moloch of capitalism in the arrest of Leon Trotsky on his way to the revolution. Fortunately for our purposes my dear brothers and sisters the story I am writing takes advantage of this history to bring you together with Balthazar, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha and the Bolshevik Bodhisattva Leon Trotsky. It is they who guide us into the light of the Photonic Age.
When we are bold mighty forces come to our aid. Even as we realize the fruition of negative karma and suffer ignominious defeats and appear to have lost, it is in being true to one’s self in each moment that one creates a meaningful life and benefits countless sentient beings. I too met a teacher from a prison camp, and it was during his twenty years of breaking rocks high in the frigid Tibetan Plateau that HE Garchen Rinpoche met his teachers and took to heart their advice. Despite the harsh conditions and torture and despicable conditions Garchen Rinpoche committed himself to the practice for the benefit of all sentient beings and became enlightened in this lifetime. Within these pages you will accompany me to this great Bodhisattva’s teachings and bear witness to the transformation of his students.