“In this final era of the five dregs,” in other words, there’s nothing left of spirituality, there’s nothing left of light, of goodness, of love, of joy in the world, of essence, it’s all gone. Just the dregs are left. But in this final era, “the great synthesizing proclamation of the Vajra prophecy arises as an infallible, directly visible sign of virtue. The revelation of the mind of Samantabhadra has emerged.”
So in the same way that orthodox Christians on Easter will say “Christ is risen,” he is saying “Buddha is risen. Buddha is here in this final era,” in this final time of the dregs, of a total lack of truth in the world—this is the moment when that prophecy of the coming, right, every religion has that prophecy—whether it’s the second coming of Christ, or the coming of the Messiah, or the coming of the Mahadi, or the coming of Maitreya, or the coming of Samantabhadra—it’s all the same, that in the end the light will come as never before, and the entire revelation will be given. A greater revelation than any of the prophets have delivered thus far in any of the religions; a level of revelation and understanding that is unprecedented. that cracks open the consciousness of everyone who is attuned to that truth, and brings them into the infinite Presence.
So this is the moment when if your eggshell of ego hasn’t yet been cracked and scrambled, and turned into fully cooked God-consciousness, it’s going to happen soon. And this is that time when you should be prepared for that great event of the completion of our alchemical Self-transformation.
Interestingly too, in this Tibetan book he refers, and the final prayer, if I can find it, of the original is a prayer to Shiva, and to Ganapati, which is unexpected in a Buddhist book. But it is a revelation and a recognition that there is a continuity from beginning to end, from the a to the ha, that reveals the one I, the one Self, that is consistent through all of the various religious prophetic traditions.
There’s an interesting book, I think I’ve referred to before by an academic woman named June McDaniel. It’s called Lost Ecstasy: Its Decline and Transformation in Religion. It’s an interesting book if you are so inclined to understand why we only have the dregs now, but religions have been in decline from the very beginning of Kali Yuga, it was built into them, because those who were responsible for sustaining them didn’t want any competition. And so each revelation, each prophet, was considered the last. No more after this! And so there would then have to be a new religion with a new prophet who would say, “Uh-uh, God did talk to me and there’s more. And let me tell you!” And so the prophecy of Israel ended with the second temple—you didn’t have any more Hebrew prophets—and of course, after Jesus there were some saints, but there weren’t any New Testaments written after that. And with the Islamic revelation, the Quran was it—no prophets after Muhammad.
Of course there are still other traditions like the Baha’i, and like others that have formed in the latter days, that have claimed otherwise, but for the most part, a religion, once it is established, turns against ecstasy, because if you get a new ecstatic prophet arising in your midst, suddenly you may get different teachings, and the religion will be out of the control of the priesthood. And so ecstasy was suppressed in all of the religions, and a turn toward law, and logic, and toward conventional thinking, and scriptural repetition, and dogma, and ritual of very conventional sorts, replaced ecstasy. And of course, in the modern age this worked very well for the powers that be, because they preferred the citizens of the modern state to enjoy wargasms rather than spiritual orgasms. The orgasms were the way that the Tantric practitioners tried to find ecstasy after they couldn’t find it, just through meditation, but even that fell to a level of pornographic vulgarity that it lost its credibility in whatever serious halls that it once had.
But today, because people feel—and the ego is incapable of breaking through to the bliss of the Self—there’s been a massive turn to drugs, and the only way most people have ever felt any joy at all in their lives is under the influence of mushrooms, or some other chemical, and of course, it’s rather short lived. And so the feeling that one can only achieve bliss with the help of chemistry, or war, or a fight club, or a sex club, or some other form of activity usually that is dangerous—the thrill of death is the only thing that makes people feel alive these days, because they are so burdened by their ego defenses. And so even the belief that one can reach true ecstasy through meditation is very rare, and it’s very rare that it happens, because the ego doesn’t really any longer have a true belief in the soul, and in the presence of God, that is not separate from one’s own consciousness. But that breakthrough from the I-thought to the Absolute rarely happens.
One thing I thought was very interesting in this book was a reference to Christina Groff, whose husband, Stan Groff, was famous for LSD psychotherapy, and then holotropic breathing as another way to try to gain ecstasy—but his wife Christina used alcohol, and she became an alcoholic, and had a real difficulty with it and then wrote a book, actually, about how she used the Twelve Step program to overcome it. But she said that it was only through alcohol, not through LSD, that she could experience anything like love, or connectedness, or freedom, or joy.
So I’ll quote her. She says, “I knew I had found it in the delicious oblivion of alcohol. My boundaries melted, the pain disappeared and I was, I thought, free. I felt comfortable within my own skin and felt connected with a carefree vitality that told me I could do anything. I was at ease with people in a way that was impossible otherwise. In my daily life, I finally felt included, accepted, and cherished, until alcohol turned against me.”
So that’s the problem is, all of these supplements will turn against you sooner or later, and result in some very bad trips, and very major karmic consequences. But the fact that people need alcohol and other substances to feel good, and to feel connected and real, is a sign of how far we have fallen from our true nature. But it’s very important to recognize that no substance is needed. Consciousness itself is bliss when it’s free of the ego baggage, when we have silenced the mind completely, and become truly our boundaryless Self, that blissful energy pours into us, and through us, and saturates our being. And it doesn’t wear off like a drug in a few hours—it remains our constant state. And that’s what liberation is about. And it’s only when one has attained that Self-realization that real life begins, and one realizes what life is, what reality is, what this universe is.
And it can only be done when one is completely present and sober at the same time. One is totally drunken with the divine presence. It’s that interweaving of some Samsara and Nirvana, of the conscious mind that is fully grounded in reality and yet at the same time completely transcendent. And the paradox of those two dimensions in nonduality brings a great deal of the bliss into manifestation. So much for lost ecstasy that now hopefully is re-found for all of you.
Now let’s go back to our quest to leave the flea market.
