It seems to be that those who concentrate on remember their dreams are more likely to do so. Although this has not worked for me personally it is attested by many who attempt to concentrate on their dreams. To me the most interesting of the dreamwork practitioners is Robert Bosnak at CyberDreamwork.com. Even though I don’t like his books very much his workshops are really good. And what he says is that it really does not matter how much of the dream you remember. What really matters is to relive it without interpreting it. In his dreamwork what one does is connect the dreams aspects to their loci in the body. Once each image or part of the dream that is remembered and relived in imagination are anchored in a part of the body one attempts to feel these connections and feelings all together, and that can at time lead to transformational experiences which Bosnak interprets alchemically. This technique can be done in groups, and they have long distance groups that operate via their website and do this kind of dreamwork over internet. You can also take a series of courses from Bosnak and get certified to do this kind of dreamwork. Much of what goes on in this area of Dreamwork strikes me as totally bogus, but I have found that Bosnak’s way of doing it has some interesting connections to Somatic Experiencing of Peter Levine. Another completely different but similar psychotherapy is that of David Grove which is called Metaphor therapy. These three completely different kinds of therapy have many interesting aspects in common. The key in each case is not the interpretation of the dreams but relating to the sensations that they make one feel in different parts of ones body, and focusing on that and following that as it undergoes transformations in the light of awareness. Certain types of Buddhist meditation also focuses on sensations and their self-transformations called Vipassana (introspective observational) as opposed to Samantha or pacification types of meditation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81)

I believe that everyone remembers some dreams sometimes. But many times dreams are uninteresting and so it is less likely for people to even recognize them to try to remember them. But if people never remembered their dreams then they might not know what dreaming is, as only those who have dreamt sometime in their lives can know this. And you hardly ever run into anyone who denies dreams exist, even if they don’t have them very often, and do really remember what happened at least they know on waking that they have dreamed, and what dreaming is. So what I am taking issue with is the idea that some people don’t EVER remember their dreams. I believe that everyone dreams, and everyone knows what dreams are, but they might ignore them, not really remember then explicitly, and all they may really have is a residue of dreaming, the fading of the dream. Everyone has the experience of dreams fading from ones grasp as one awakes. Like anything in consciousness if you spend time concentrating on it then it is more likely that one will remember more of dreams, and for Bosnak’s approach to dreams to work all one needs is a snippet that is still active enough that one can enter back into the trance of the dream while waking.

It is an interesting fact that studies show that most peoples dreams are negative, and so this also militates against against people wanting to remember them.

But the most interesting thing about your question, which I really want to deal with is the relation between dreams and memories. This is because I think these two phenomenological experiences are of real interest because they both deal with the realm of the imagination in different ways. According to Kant Apriori Synthetic Manifolds that we intuit are all based on the imagination. One of those is the singular of SpaceTime. And the idea of General Schemas Theory is that we project not just a homogeneous plenum of space and time as Kant thought, but instead different nested scopes of templates of understanding for different resolutions of spacetime. And the key fact which I use in my dissertation is that schemas operate across various realms of consciousness. So they operate in Memory and Dream, as well as in our projective imagination. In other words schemas are more basic than the variations in our modes of consciousness. I think this, if true for everyone, is of great interest because what structures mundane consciousness, imagination, memory and dream is all the same and this is one way to think about its a priori nature.

In many ways remembering a dream, whether a REM dream or a hypnogogic dream is tantamount to schematizing it. Bosnak’s point is that dreams are real, they have their own separate reality, and it is that reality one wants to tap into as it animates feelings within the body through its images and the feelings that are produced within the dreams themselves. But the difference between normal REM dreams and Hypnogogic dreams are striking in that in normal REM dreams we are observing ourselves from the outside in many cases. While in Hypnogogic dreams the illusion is very real and it is in a space in relation to our bodies and we are inside our bodies usually trapped in a frozen bodily state. But even though our relation to our bodies and other bodies in the two kinds of dream are very different still we apprehend those relations on the basis of the same schemas. We do not have a schema for one and a different one for another mode of consciousness. Same is true with the mundane consciousness of being in the world and what we imagine. All Art and Architecture uses the same set of schemas as do everything else we produce. It is this continuity across spacetime of phenomenal experience that make the a prioiri schemas a priori, they come before the differentiation of experience into modalities. Even non-worldly experiences in dreams, imagination, and visions reinforce the same schematization that connects us to the mundane world.

Studies have been done which show that our waking consciousness is not much different from our dreamstates. And much of our time we spend in trance during the day. The part of the time that we are in objective reality, designated as intersubjectively real, is not very long each day. So in a sense it is not significant whether we remember dreams or not because we are always in trances that related to our finitude. Reading, Conversation, Eating, Dressing, taking showers, riding in conveyances, driving we are continually falling into trances. But those trances even the deepest ones induced by self-hypnosis where we enter into the unconscious directly are all schematized with the same schemas. This was shown by an experiment done by Erickson where he would hypnotize subjects prior to their actually being “officially hypnotized” and they they would be asked where the wall was in the room they were seeing, and if they pointed out the real wall it meant that they were not under hypnosis, but if they pointed to a wall that was not there, then they were in a hypnotic trance. But even in deep trances people would see walls, not something else. Imaginary objects were still objects following the same schematic templates as actual intersubjectively agreed to objects. And the same is true of hypnogogic and dream objects or environments.

So in a sense it does not matter if we remember our dreams or not because much of consciousness is in fact trance, and these trances can be very deep so as to be direct experiences of the unconscious which we do not remember on waking. But then self reports of glimpses of these states find that the people having those experiences are seeing visions of different parts of their lives, or dreamlike images which are schematized just like our mundane experiences.

First you have to understand what Nihilism is, which is a western idea. Best book on that is the one by Stanley Rosen called Nihilism. Nihilism is basically a loss of meaning when you were in one side of a conflict and you come to believe that both sides are essentially the same, so there is a loss of meaning, anomie, and alienation that occurs. Best example is Achilles in the Iliad. Nietzsche and then Heidegger said that this was the central phenomenon in the Western worldview, and I believe this is correct. When looked at carefully we find that our society, and culture is filled with extreme artificial nihilistic opposites that are basically the same and detract us from the real concerns, for instance Democrats and Republicans are basically the same although they appear to be in conflict it is really incumbents of either party that really hold sovereignty, i.e. make laws for others that do not apply to them. First it was Teaparty and now occupy Wallstreet and many have made the comment that they seem to have similar goals and the real difference is age. It used to be that Skepticism was the strawman that philosophers universally criticized and now it is nihilism, in spite of the fact that most philosophies are nihilistic one way or another. Rosen shows this in the comparison of Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s philosophies.

Buddhism is only nihilistic in the sense that it seems to be a ruse which uses nihilism against the Indo-European worldview in order to destroy the belief in Being and return people to an understanding of existence. It interprets existence as nondual emptiness. It does not believe in the reality of the physical world but is phenomenological and only believes that everything is a product of consciousness. It deals with the problem of the wheel of Samsara (birth and death) and the production of Karma that bind us to that wheel and it offers a way out called Nirvana which is evaporation of the “soul” what ever that is which keeps us in the illusion of endless birth and death in cyclical time. But even though emptiness seems negative, it is really a negation of all four points in the tetralemma (A, ~A, Both, Neither) and points toward something else which is a strictly aconceptual and non-experiential viewpoint called prajna which gives us an understanding of the world that is what might be called non-attached, since it seems everything, including the self as essentially empty. This is not a belief in NOTHING, it is not Heideggarian Being which is No Thing. It is essentially a way to see existence below the veneer of illusion called Being produced by our Indo-European worldview. It is essentially seeing things they way they really are if we do not project our values on them, which are normally false, or not well founded at least. If there is a value that is there after all the illusions are blown away, then it is considered part of existence. For instance babies have seven natural emotions that all babies all over the world have, and that would be part of existence. But much of our emotions and feelings are projected onto situations, and thus are part of the epiphenomena of the illusions of Being.

So Buddhism is definitely now Nihilistic as was thought by early interpreters in Europe, because negation is still part of the logical alternatives and emptiness is non dual beyond all the logical alternatives. That nonduality once you take that stance is actually very positive because it leaves a lot of illusion projected by Being away, and that just leaves the illusions that are part of existence which are not as virulent. For instance in Buddhism they always give the example of seeing a rope and thinking it is a snake. This is a very deep ingrained response in us and therefore has roots in our existence even though we know it is an illusion after the fact. For instance the rock beside the road that no one cares about and no one bothers to pick up is what exists. But anything we project value upon beyond bare necessities of life are in fact false values, because they are unnecessary for the viability of our lives. Buddhism seeks to understand these values as illusions, and it tries to compare them with really important things like death. It basically says that it is these illusions that cause our suffering, because they are false projections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

The word for suffering used in Buddhism is dukkha which really means something more akin to dissatisfaction. Basically it is saying that anything that is an illusion ultimately leaves us dissatisfied in some very fundamental way. And so even in pleasure we can experience this dissatisfaction even if we are not suffering per se for instance with a dread disease. the key to getting out of that suffering is called the Eightfold noble path http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path. It is basically to connect to Rightness (RTA) which is an indo-european nondual which originally meant something like Cosmic Harmony in the Vedas. But in later hinduism it is called following ones Dharma which was a Caste Role. But since Buddhism is anti-caste it redefines Dharma as meaning the right way to live ones life, and that involves many of the same values developed by Jainism which is another older similar religion to buddhism which was not so radical, i.e did not reject Being as far as I have been able to ascertain. But it includes positive virtues like non-violence, compassion, giving to others, etc all positive virtues.

Try to practice yourself the eight fold path for a day. It is very difficult to bring cosmic harmony into ones life and to express this nondual of RTA, Arte in Greek, Dharma, etc. But if we could all do it it would make the world a very different place. A kind of positive utopia that we dream about but know will never happen in our lifetimes. But a Bodhisatva takes a long view he has myriad lifetimes to save all sentient Beings, which he has vowed to save before he himself enters Nirvana and gets out of the cycle of Birth and Death by creating Karma. The Enlightened one can follow the eight fold path effortlessly. He is that path incarnate. On a practical level it seems very positive to me and unlike Nihilism except that it uses Nihilism as part of the skillful means to dismantel the world of Being and point toward existence. These skillful means are a give given to the enlightened that they can teach how to escape from illusion and indicate the nature of enlightenment with ease so people understand and though their transmission the people can become enlightened themselves.

Buddhism is a direct and isomorphic transformation of the structure of the Indo-European worldview out of Being into existence. It does this by representing all the nondual levels within the western worldview as part of the Buddhist path. So for instance the Buddha set down the rules of the order of Buddhism among the Sanga of his time. And they have been basically the same from the time of the Buddha till now. This is because the Buddha taught 40 years or so and thus there was plenty of time to transmit his teaching wholly to his disciples. There are three jewels: Dharma, Buddha, Sangha which correspond to the three Special Systems, Dissipative Order (Prigogine), Autopoietic Symbiotic (Maturella and Varella) and Reflexive Social (O’Malley, Sandywell). These jewels seen as special systems are models of nonduality. Buddhism is modeled on the Special Systems that separate the Meta-levels of Being from each other and form a multi-schema picture of nonduality. Non-duality is based on negative entropy, and negative entropy is the introduction of order and organization locally against the pressure of entropy globally. Thus Buddha by the way he led  his life, by his teaching (the Dharma) and by his ordering of the life of the Sangha gave a complete picture of his way of viewing existence within the framework of the Western worldview, which is by seeing the nondual core of the worldview. So the first and most superficial of the nonduals in the Western worldview is order, and the Buddha orders his concepts by numbers as seen in the Abhidharma, and he orders the lifestyle of his followers by his rules of ordination of monks into the Sanga.

Next level below order of the Indo-European nonduals is RTA, and we have noted how the eight fold path is the focus on this nondual in every aspect of ones life.

The next level down is the Good and that is approached though the four noble truths. Note the emphasis on the Aspect of Truth. Buddhists reject identity by saying the self is empty Anatman. They reject reality because they do not believe in external reality. They reject presence because their goal is absence, absence of suffering. So in Buddhism there is a symmetry breaking in the aspects and only Truth is embraced fully, and since truth has to do with speech, it is the truth of the Dharma that is paramount. With respect to the other Dharmas buddhism emphasizes Difference, Illusion, Absence as fundamental nature of things. The Four noble truths emphasize Dukkha and says that life is suffering. Basically suffering or dissatisfaction arises from attachment to desires, and when desire ceases then suffering ceases. And the cessation of suffering leads ultimately to complete cessation of karma and thus to nirvana.

In the Theravada version and the version translated by An Shigao, the Four Noble Truths are given definitions:

1. The Nature of Suffering (or Dukkha):

“This is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”[5][6]

1. Suffering’s Origin (Dukkha Samudaya):

“This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”[5][6]

1. Suffering’s Cessation (Dukkha Nirodha):

“This is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.”[5][6]

1. The Path Leading to the Cessation of Suffering: (Dukkha Nirodha Gamini Patipada Magga)

“This is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.”[7][8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

Now the good is opposite bad and evil both. So the four noble truths emphasize the negative side of life and how we suffer, but not only that how even in pleasure there is suffering or dissatisfaction ultimately. It is interesting to think about the ephemeral nature of life in relation to knowledge. Every experience good, bad otherwise is fleeting. And this fleeting nature of experiences leaves us with dissatisfaction and that dissatisfaction becomes a craving for more of what is good, and even if we do achieve it it just leads to more desire and craving. So ultimately the negative view of existence as fundamentally dissatisfying has to do with our own nature of finite living creatures in a fleeting world of experience where the only thing that has any permanence at all is knowledge. So the Four Noble truths seek to give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of our existence, which is that we seek good, rarely find it and if we do it is fleeting.

But the Four Noble truths are even deeper than that because the Good is actually intrinsic variety production. And Buddhism emphasizes that we ourselves are not unified or totaled or supported by a continuous substrate of Being, so that we ourselves are sources of variety, the variety of desires that relate to the variety of the things in the world we deem good. But what is good for one is not good for another, and so what we seek may not be ultimately what is good for us, and thus not only are we caught in illusion, but also delusion as we work toward ends that are not in our own best interests based on who we are in our uniqueness. The Four Noble Truths are actually a very deep critique of the goodness of life. It says that actual goodness in life comes from enlightenment which is a kind of knowledge, because knowledge is the most permanent thing. Getting actual Goodness out of life is through prajna, a kind of knowledge about our relation to the good, i.e. the intrinsic variety production, in nature, in ourselves, and due to our uniqueness. It basically says that the pursuit of happiness is a false path, because even if you get everything you think you want, you will still be dissatisfied.

The next nondual down in the Western worldview is fate. Fate we see in the wheel of Samsara and the idea of Karma and rebirth based on past actions in former lives. This is a metaphor for each moment of consciousness being produced by dependent arising from the last moment. In other words there is no real causality, but only the arising together of phenomena. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra_(Buddhism); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_Life)

Wheel of Birth and Death
http://quietmountain.org/dharmacenters/buddhadendo/wheel_of_life.htm

This wheel of Birth and Death describes the Buddhist view of Fate, It’s sources, the three posions, how it is generated by a cycle of causation, and how what it leads to the Six Realms.

The next level down beyond fate are the Sources, and this is dealt with in Buddhism with the idea of Dependent Origination. The sources are in a kind of quasi-causality which does not arise nor does it ever dissipate, where everything arises together already connected so that the idea of the separation of cause and effect is an illusion.
Dependent Arising http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da

Finally there is the Root which is Nonduality.
Non-dual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondual

Buddhism addresses all the layers of the nondual within the Indo-European and thus the Western worldview as well as the Hindu Worldview from which this heresy was originally spawned, taking its core structure with it. Now Buddhism is coming to the Western worldview, which is completely dualistic, and has fought a long battle with its own nondual heresy Islam that has taken over the center of the Western worldview, now called the Middle East, as if it was oriental. Nothing oriental about Islmo-Greco-Roman culture based on Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s metaphysics was itself an attack on nonduality explicitly citing the Tetralemma.

The Indo-European worldview is nihilistic at its core even though the kernel is nondual, constantly producing artificial extreme opposites which are then discovered to be actually the same, and thus sapping meaning from the world as those caught up in its struggles who find that they are for nought. Buddhism uses nihilism as a form against the worldview itself in order to take people out of Being into Existence interpreted as emptiness. On the surface is the myriad dualities. At the Core is the production of nihilism where the artificial extreme opposites are always from some point of view achieved by an anagogic swerve ultimately the same sapping meaning from the world. But at the kernel of the worldview is its nonduals which hide in the interstices and discontinuities inscribed in the core of the worldview. Buddhism takes these nonduals as its core pattern, and then addresses each one with an appropriate analysis. Because Buddhism is directed at the nondual kernel of the worldview it is actually a way to avoid nihilism and get out of it by using the tricks of the Indo-European worldview against itself. And because it has this basis in the Hindu version of the Indo-European worldview it also works for the Western version which has become world dominant via colonization, economic dominance, and now globalization. All other worlds are becoming subservient to the now dominant Western meta-worldivew. But that dominant Western worldview rooted in dualism has a weakness which is its nondual core. Buddhism draws out that nondual core and by that transforms the selves that are conditioned by the structure of the Western worldview by dependent arising. By dependent arising we are connected not just to the dualities on the surface, or on the core nihilism production, but also the nondual core. Each of us also has that same nondual kernel. And it is to this kernel that Buddhists appeal with all the various turnings of the Wheel of dharma.

In my opinion Buddhism started as an Indo-European Heresy denying Being and trying to return to Existence as the fundamental stance toward the world. Being is only in Indo-European languages and is a unique anomaly in linguistics. So Buddhism is trying to return to the norm of viewing things through the lens of existence (what is found Wajud) and to get rid of the illusions of Being. But any enemy you fight you become like them, so Buddhism has the core structure of the Western worldview and especially is mapping the nondual core of that worldview. Buddhism was adopted easily in non-indo-european lands because it already accorded with their worldview based on non-being. But it died in India where it was reabsorbed into Hinduism, when hinduism adopted nondual approaches to their own tradition based on Nagarjuna’s critique of logic. Shankara was key in reinterpreting the Upanishads in a nondual manner, and via this nondual perspective was able to unify the various approaches in the Upanishads, basically he reinterpreted Being as Emptiness.

So the reason that Buddhism diffused into non-indoeuropean centric lands is that it was consonant with their worldview, but more sophisticated due to the encounter with the Indo-European worldivew which had very complex philosophical systems that had to be overcome by buddhists in order to survive the polemic wars with non-Buddhists. Basically Buddhism is like one of the super-viruses. It lives off of worldviews with Being by denying Being effectively, but then it catches on in other worldviews that do not have Being, because it is more sophisticated than anything they have to offer to explain the nature of existence. Anyway, this to me is the reason it survived outside India but not in India. It was coopted in India, but elsewhere it was merely a better description of what people already knew and believed based on their non-indoeuropean traditions and languages.

Yaddrasil – World Tree; Horse of Odin

If not the most beautiful then at least the most wyrd.

http://www.germanicmythology.com/PoeticEdda/images/cosmoscrossleyholland.jpg
http://www.germanicmythology.com/PoeticEdda/GRM31.html

Odin hung in this tree for nine nights and days as a sacrifice from himself to himself in order to learn the secret of the Runes.

http://retrorpg.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/yggdrasil/
http://www.germanicmythology.com/PoeticEdda/Grimnismal.html

The Well and the Tree is the Primal Scene of the Indo-European worldview

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_scene
http://books.google.com/books?id=Spkk4Rlmo7cC&lpg=PP1&dq=intitle%3Aprimal%20intitle%3Ascenes&lr&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is&as_brr=0&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=HcAoAAAAYAAJ&q=the+well+and+tree+bauschatz&dq=the+well+and+tree+bauschatz&hl=en&ei=StCQTqSUOunViALXi8HNCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA

http://urbanheathen.co.uk/articles/thewellandthetree.pdf

https://docs.google.com/document/d/117Ix1GTbRxjzfvBIhfs8o3p7DOxYwdQE5U69LHyHobM/edit?hl=en_US

I am interested in Meta-novels. And in my dissertation I offer as proof that there are basically four viewpoints on phenomena that appear in consciousness which show up in the novel which are Writer/Reader//Narrator/Character. I offer it as proof that Schemas are fundamental. See http://about.me/emergentdesign.net. I think this formulation is analogous to the definition of the world from Socrates taken up by Heidegger: Heaven/Earth//Immortals/Mortals which is the positive fourfold. See my Fragmentation of Being and the Path beyond the Void at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer. Techniques of Narration have to exist within the matrix that supports the existence of narration itself. And that framework is the basis of the Meta-novel where Writer, Reader, Narrator, and Character come into conversation about the creation of the novel itself. Novel means something new. The creation of the novel is an emergent event. See my first dissertation on the Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence at http://archonic.net/disab.html. So if we are going to look into styles of narration we should first look into what Narration is. Narration is the projection of an omniscient voice within the text of the novel. The narrator is equal to the Immortal in the fourfold of the world. The writer is Heaven, and the Reader Earth. The character is mortal and the Narrator is Immortal. So the group of characters that appear in the meta-novel is a simulacrum for the world’s structure. Now this is the structure of the world in the Mythopoietic era. Socrates is looking back at the Mythopoietic era nostalgically from the Metaphysical era where we find ourselves entrapped hoping for its end that never seems to come, like the characters in Waiting for Godot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot

Of course, Waiting for Godot is a meta-novel presented as a play. Pozo and Lucky represent the Master/Slave dialectic so famous in Hegel. They represent the relation between Narrator and Character. Vladamir and Estragon represent the Writer and Reader. Godot is the missing transcendental ground, and the boy who is the messenger is the immanence, i.e. the embodiment of the transcendental that is all that Vladamir and Estragon are going to actually see of the transcendental for which they are waiting. They are all in an unspecified place, and at an unspecified time, Waiting, Waiting. Reader and Writer change places, Character and Narrator change places. Everything circles around, Godot never comes, the boy always appears, Pozo and Lucky continue to circulate, and Vladamir and Estragon don’t go anywhere, but wait in anticipation of the end of the Metaphysical era. Heidegger says the metaphysical era is the fleeing of the Gods who ruled in the mythopoietic era, and it wont be over until the last god, Godot, has fled. Or perhaps he has already fled and that is why he is not showing up. Reader and Writer are both human and outside the story. Narrator and character are both inhuman fictitious masks of humans, but one knows the thoughts of the other and the destiny of the other. However, as in Four Quartets narrators can change in different stories. The omniscience of the Narrator is in sharp contrast to the finitude of the character. The activity of the writer is in sharp contrast to the receptiveness of the reader. Vladamir is the active protagonist while Estragon is his sidekick and more receptive of the two. The four together represent the meta-novel and the structure of the world in its barest essentials. Those that are waiting for Godot actually see the boy who is a messenger for the transcendent in immanence. Nothing happens in the play, it is like No Exit of Sartre, but rather we see the primal scene of the Well and the Tree from the Indo-European worldview. There is a tree on the stage but the wells are missing, because the sources (wells) have dried up. We are when we view the scenes of the play we are looking at the structure of  the world though an existentialist lens. There are only two kinds of relations equal and hierarchical. Here we see them both negated, by the reversal in one case and by the impotence of the equal relation in the other case.

So if you realize that the Narration has to take place in this world structure seen in the meta-novel but also played out in myriad ways in all novels, then it is possible to understand more deeply what the various narrative styles mean. Each person plus the non-person “it” or “they” may be any of the four viewpoints. It is this fundamental permutation of the persons with the viewpoints that creates the variety of styles by the interaction of language with the four fold nature of the world-structure. When the written word in the novel says I it may be the writer, the reader, the character or the narrator talking about himself. When you is said it could be talking about any of those viewpoints. When the third person is used that is most likely the narrator talking, but actually could also be any of the viewpoints that are being discussed by the voice which is speaking. In Hegel for instance we see this structure. There is sense certainty (the character) and there is self-consciousness which is objective looking at sense certainty, which is the narrator. There is also Hegel taking up the position of others whose positions he is explaining, and there is Hegel himself criticizing those positions. It is difficult in the Phenomenology of Spirit/Ghost/Mind to know which of the viewpoints are operative at any one point in the text. This this ultimate meta-novel of the rise of self-consciousness and absolute spirit represented by the state, has all the point of view of the meta-novel as did the first novel Don Quixote   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote). In Don Quixote the second part is a response to a fake second part which he makes fun of in the actual second part. It was a conversation with a reader turned writer and imitator. It is interesting that the first novel is also a meta-novel.

So if we use the middle English declension we can see this as the basis for categorizing the voice of the various viewpoints.

Middle English Declension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou#Declension

First person:
Writer I
Reader I
Narrator I
Character I

We becoming royal we if used by an individual:
Writer we
Reader we
Narrator we
Character we

Informal Second Person:
Writer thou
Reader thou
Narrator thou
Character thou

Formal Second Person:
Writer (ye) you
Reader (ye) you
Narrator (ye) you
Character (ye) you

Third Person:
Writer s/he
Reader s/he
Narrator s/he
Character s/he

Third non-person (slave)
Writer it
Reader it
Narrator it
Character it

Third person plural:
Writer they
Reader they
Narrator they
Character they

There are seven voices and four viewpoints that gives 28 possible narrative stances. Now it just happens that this is a perfect number like 6 where all the parts add up to the whole exactly. And it happens that this perfect number is the number of paths or pairings between eight things like the trigrams for instance. So all the narrative stances that give voice to the views are the relations between eight eventities. We can think of these eventities like the hexagram as a stack of structural opposites that define a situation. But we can also think of them as interpenetrated 2^3 states of different qualities.

What we need to keep in mind is that the human brain can think to about five meta-levels of relationship before it loses track, so it can think he thinks that she thinks that he thinks . . .  up to the fifth meta-level which corresponds with the fifth meta-level of Being. At each of these metalevels we can use all seven declensions and all four viewpoints. Since the aspects of Truth, Reality, Presence and Identity are different at each of these five levels, that means that besides each level becoming harder to think, it is harder to place the declensions in each level.

So he (being) thinks that she (pure) thinks that they (process) think that thou (hyper) thinks, that you (wild) think that we (ultra.existence) think that it (manifest) thinks goes just beyond the bound of the thinkable, if the first level is ontic. The aspects are different at all those levels. So you can see that there is a vast open space for the permutations of narrative styles. And that is only if we shift meta-levels of Being at each recursive level which is not necessary.

So narrative styles are just about endless. And probably many of these styles have never been explored in the whole history of the novel up to this point, because the field of possibilities has not been explored.

Descartes said “I think therefore I am.”

So we can say I am, we are, s/he is, thou art, you are, it is, they are.

We see in this the play of the indo-European roots of Being that appear in Anglo/Saxon. But actually those roots are as follows:

Roots of Being:
sei/sey (sindon)
es (sindon)
er (sindon)
bheu (beon)
wes (wesan)
wer (wesan)

Heidegger taps into the first few with the Sein/Seyn (Being/Beyng) distinction. Es is related to essence, presence. Er is related to Ereignis, bheu is physus, becoming. Wes is wessen. and Wer is werothan not mentioned by Heidegger.

If we go back to old English (Anglo/Saxon) that seems to be more archaic than high German somehow, we can see that any of these roots of Being can be called upon and basically they are distinguished by the sindon which is above the bheu (beon) and the wesan that is below the bheu. But actually each root is its own level within the roots of Being. Sindon and Wesan are duals on either side of the bheu (physus) but wesan is deeper. Sei and Sey as Sein and Seyn are the surface phenoment that aries from the es (presence, essence) Deeper still is the Er of Ereignis, which is related to movement. Bheu (Physus) is related to unfolding. Below the bheu there is the deeper reflections of the es and er in the Wes and Wer that is in the wesan.

Pronouns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Pronouns
See table of pronouns
Being
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Anomalous_verbs
See table of forms of Being

This is the richness we have lost as the stances that used to exist in our worldview related to Being. All these stances suggest the possibility of a corresponding narrative style now lost in the oblivion of our changing language. A good introduction to the changes in language which over large scale time every aspect changes like the tattvas or dharmas, are the books and lectures of John McWhorter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter. Everything changes in language, and writing it merely slows this process down somewhat. It is an utter flux as suggested by Heraclitus that all things are ultimately. But it is in that flux that the linguistic structures that affect the possible styles of narrative are hidden.

The key thing about Multiple Universes theory of Everett in relation to the Copenhagen interpretation is that it is simpler, i.e. it has fewer assumptions, but on the other hand it sends us in a direction that we really don’t want to go which is the proliferation of universes at each observation of a quantum probability wave that collapses. Now I think the existence of Dark Energy pouring in to our universe and making it at the macro scale a far from equilibrium system which is accelerating in its expansion to be the most compelling evidence for the multiverse. This Dark Energy, which Penrose says we should not call Energy because it is not conserved, has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the “Multiverse” what ever that is. Also Dark Matter suggests that there is a multiverse because in string theory, one of the variations, suggest that our universe has a twin with which we only share gravity. So that would mean that half of the dark energy could be explained as being in our twin universe, and then we can consider the rest to be either in blackholes or non-lighted matter. Now that we know we are living in a world where the earth has rings of anti-matter, and there is no Higgs particle within reach of LHC and where super-symmetries are not yet confirmed, and where neutrinos go faster than the speed of light, really we are certainly going to have to go back to the drawing board, unless something happens soon, like finding an error in experiments, and suddenly finding the Higgs particle where it is expected. We spent a lot of money building the LHC in order to find out that the Higgs is just no there, so far. It will be interesting when we find out what really is there at those energies and that will probably send all our theorizing about multiverses in a different direction.

So I would like to mention a completely different way to come at this problem of Multiverses, a more Kantian Copernican Turn sort of explanation. I have invented something called General Schemas Theory in my research. I came to it by asking what is the next level of abstraction up from Systems Theory. What are the other things like a “System” but different that are ways to organize Spacetime into what Umberto Eco in Kant and the Platypus calls Mathematical and Geometrical Schemas. The other candidates for templates of understanding that are at the same level of abstraction as Systems, but essentially different are things like Monads, Patterns, Forms, etc. It is surprising that such a discipline has never been created in our tradition before, but I cannot find it. You would have thought that it would have been created in Architectural Theory or in Art Theory, or in some other domain. But I guess that Science is just too specialized to think in these global terms about the way we organize phenomena as a species to ourselves. Schemas are Ontological rather than Ontic organizations. Ontic organisations are what one would normally think of as emergent levels in nature. These are things like quarks, particles, atoms, molecules, macro-molecules, organelles, cells, multi-cellular clusters, organs, organisms, ecologies, social organisms, Gaia. All these are ontic emergent levels of organization we find in nature. But they way we understand these emergent phenomena is via templates of understanding that we project as intuited a priori syntheses as Kant called them. But Kant believed that these were unstriated, in other words he thought there was only one kind of time that created schemas, and only one kind of space (homogeneous objective space) which means he believed in unstriated synthetic a priori projections prior to experience. But what General Schemas Theory posits is that these existant singularities of space and time are not only fused into SpaceTime but also are striated into different types of mathematical and geometric schemas. The key point is that you can view any ontic emergent level of organization in the universe via multiple ontological schemas, and much argumentation between scientists who are looking at the same phenomena via different schemas. Schemas are templates of organization projected on phenomena a priori as intuited syntheses. They are ontological because Being is identified with intelligibility. These schemas in comparison to the ontic structures we find in nature are what serves as the reference background in which we come to understand the actual organization of nature. Without the projected reference background we would not know what differences make a difference ala Bateson in the phenomena we are studying.

Now in order to kick off General Schemas Theory as a discipline I created a hypothesis that there are only ten schemas and that they are related by a rule which is that there are two schemas per dimension and two dimensions per schema. This leads to a configuration of schemas as nesting at different scopes of the following organization which I derived empirically by studying science for many years.

F theory = 12 —-> Two orthogonal timelines
M theory = 11
String theory = 10
—————————-
Pluriverse 8, 9
Kosmos 7, 8
World 6, 7
Domain 5, 6
OpenScape (Meta-system) 4,5
System 3, 4
Form 2, 3
Pattern 1, 2
Monad 0, 1
Facet -1,0

These Schemas are nested without gaps. Most of my work in my research has been looking for the gaps in these schema, and also trying to verify the dimensional relations.

Now one thing we notice is that there are only 6 of these schematic levels that actually are completely experienced and those are the central six. The two on each end are like scaffolding which we do not completely experience.

So based on this hypothesis, which I am working hard to refute, so we can get on to the next hypothesis in the development of General Schemas Theory, there is a “Multiverse” because that is one of the a priori syntheses that we intuit, in fact the highest one. Just like Quarks which are never seen in isolation that is the lowest schema. We never see a Quark on its own, or at least not yet. So to we never see the Pluriverse on its own. These are scaffoldings that supports our understanding of the limits of experience.

It is interesting that Bernstein in his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ultimately says in his regressive reading that the problem with Kant’s theory is that he thinks that there is only one kind of time, just as he believes that there is only one kind of space. So if there are multiple kinds of time projected as a priori syntheses, and space and time are fused, then that means there must be multiple kinds of space as well, not just objective physical space. And since spacetime is fused (as either spacetime or timespace which together I call the Matrix) that means that the schemas are the striations of this existential singularity of spacetime into different kinds of temporal and spatial organizations of experience that are projected a priori on ontic phenomena, which in turn has its own ontic organization. Many times we assume the ontological organization of the template of our own understanding is the organization of the phenomena until we learn differently by questioning closely the phenomena itself. For instance Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell saw little lines on Mars at the resolution of his telescope and he projected that there were canals there on Mars and so Edgar Rice Burroughs populated that planet with dwellers that lived along canals. It was not until we got higher magnification telescopes that we could see that the lines that were thought to be canals were in fact either artifacts from the low resolution telescope, shadows on the landscape, or projections from an overactive imagination. But what ever they were we projected our pattern schema on the surface of Mars to understand and connect what we saw there into something we could understand given the level of data we had.

http://www.emmetlabs.com/pair/Giovanni-Virginio-Schiaparelli_321/Percival-Lowell_192
http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Exploring-Mars/Early-Observations-and-Beliefs.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Schiaparelli

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell
http://www2.lowell.edu/Research/library/paper/lowell.html
Better map: http://www.jimloy.com/astro/canals.htm

Lowell’s book http://www.archive.org/details/marsanditscanals033323mbp
Related articles:
http://www.space.com/13197-mars-canals-water-history-lowell.html
http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=4257
http://www.factsaboutmars.net/mars-in-history-1800s/

Threshold phenomnea: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Threshold/
Other Pseudo Science: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/auxiliary.html

http://palermoproject.com/lowell2004/site.htm

The point of all this is that we project patterns on what later are found to be random data. This is just one example of what has been called Threshold phenomena. But it is one example that allows us to bring home the point that the idea of Kant that there are a priori intuited syntheses flowing from out imagination is credible.

Once we believe what Kant surmised then it is only a small step to saying that there are a series of such schemas and that they themselves are organized into a hierarchy of organizations of Spacetime, so there is more than object time and space as absolutes but instead there are striated nestings of different templates of understanding that we project a priori, and to understand ourselves we ought to understand the structure of that ontological projection of Being (which is illusion) but which makes possible much of what we call the intelligibility of things we encounter.

There are many things about the theory of S-prime hypothesis (abduction) that are interesting but the most interesting to me is the fact that out schemas stop exactly where String theory takes up at the tenth dimension. The five variants of string theory are united into M theory in the eleventh dimension. And finally F theory in the 12th dimension really throws a wrench in the works by giving us unexpectedly two orthogonal time lines. In the Fourteenth dimension this becomes three orthogonal time lines. I searched for a precedent for this and found that Dunne had suggested the idea of orthogonal time lines in the twenties, and his ideas influenced Tolkien. Hinton had earlier popularized the idea of the fourth dimension which influenced Lewis Carroll in his Through the Looking Glass story which takes place in a tesseract. Later Dunne came up with the idea that there might be multiple dimensions of time and that would explain the soul. Tolkien took that idea up as did other writers and for tolkien it was the mark of the different types of beings that populated middle earth that they all experienced time in slightly different ways.

Since Philosophy for a while now has been looking for a reason for the Metaphysical Worldivew which has been in existence since Thales after the Mythopoietic worldview to be over, it seems to me heterochrony is one good way to end it once and for all since the Metaphysical worldivew definitely assumes either one linear or one circular timeline. Why should time be one dimensional when space is three dimensional. We note that the nine dimensional manifold of S-prime hypothesis is just big enough to hold an eight dimensional matrix of the various symmetry breakings of space and time. Ultimately the manifold of the A priori synthesis is just large enough to hold four dimensions of space and four dimensions of time fused relativistically.

So basically what this is saying is that there is no pre-given schemas to integrate string theory into our understanding. That is one reason we have such a hard time working with it and understanding it. But on the other hand S-prime hypothesis says that we are working with 7 plus or minus two dimensions in our short term memory all the time and that explains our propensity for transcendental idealist philosophies and our abilities to understand very complex things. Basically we have schemas to support understanding things up to nine dimensions in extension and it is the proposition of my dissertation that this is what we are using all the time to design complex systems. See http://about.me/emergentdesign.

So my basic thesis here is that the evidence that the multiverse exists is inside of us not outside. It is the very highest schema called the pluriverse and it is a threshold of understanding, and so there we see artifacts of what is beyond it and we call that string theory. It is at the limits of what we can think and is at the limits of what we can see, and thus it generates its own threshold phenomena and speculations. Essentially the pluriverse was in us from the beginning, just like the Li of the pattern in which spiders weave their webs making visible that Li. Chi is of course the unfolding of that patterning. The Chi might be called the energy behind the a priori projection of the synthetic whole of the striated spacetime singularity which we intuit, i.e. which we see reflected back to us in the organization of the phenomena until we look further and find that the phenomena has in effect its own order different from that we expected. For instance we did not expect super-conductivity as a phenomena but it was there and it took 20 years to come up with a plausible explanation for it. We did not expect to find black holes but now few people think they don’t exist because of all the phenomena that are explained by them unveiled in astronomy especially with the Hubble telescope and other sources of pictures of space which for instance see the background radiation from the big bang in detail. Ideas of the Big Bang, Black Holes, acceleration of the Expansion of the Universe, Dark Matter, Dark Energy all contribute to this uneasy feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. The universe itself has its own unconscious that we are just seeming to get data which indicates its reality. There is a meta-system (general economy ala Bataille) beyond the system of our universe (restricted economy) and that is projected by us prior to any phenomena appearing to indicate it, which we can see from Science Fiction and Fantasy where we project other universes all the time without any difficulty. In fact what is amazing is that we can create other universes easier than we can do almost anything else. Just like we can invent new programming languages easier than we can learn existing ones. This ease of projection of alternative worlds seen in Leibniz (Paingloss) where he says this is the best of all possible worlds is astounding and that leads to David Lewis’s idea that all those imagined universes are actually real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_(philosopher)

POSSIBLE WORLDS: WHAT THEY ARE GOOD FOR AND WHAT THEY ARE
Alexander R. Pruss, Ph.D. http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/papers/PhilThesis.html

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xQ9f6by0g25d-lKaaTgvsTWLmtyp9rrelC4yHg25jyM/edit?hl=en_US

http://bit.ly/yPgMGX

There are scholars who say that the differences is not that great because the editor of the Pali Cannon is said to have been a Mahayana buddhist. It is said that he subtly introduced certain nuances that made it coherent from a Mahayana point of view. I don’t know if it is true. My own teacher Alfonso Verdu wrote a book showing that everything in Mahayana Buddhism can be traced back to the original Hinayana scriptural tradition in Pali. So whether the Mahayana was infused later or whether Mahayana was there from the beginning. The fact is that the difference between Mahayana and Hinayana is not as stark as it might seem.

My own view is this. Buddhism and Jainism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism) were both similar heresies which offered escape from Karma by realizing Nirvana. Jainism was older than Buddhism by about three centuries so we can see it as preparing the way for Buddhism. They were both non-dual in character but Buddhism was more radical because it gave up on Being. I am still not clear whether this is true of Jainism. It appears from what I have read that Jainism did not reject Being but had another idea established in the seven principles. But it is clear that the seven principles are an approach to the nondual similar but subtly different from the tetralemma. So I believe that Mahayana is a combination of Buddhism and Jainism at the theoretical level plus other elements that make Mahayana Buddhism more logical, for instance the recognition of the contradiction of Nirvana as a goal and the substitution of the Bodhisattva ideal. Or getting rid of the split between dharmas that are real and those that are empty. Mahayana is vast but it is characterized by the push toward consistency in the belief system with a refocus on compassion as the key characteristic that is emphasized over personal spiritual ends.

In Jainism there is the seven principles.

“Syādvāda provides Jains with a systematic methodology to explore the real nature of reality and consider the problem in a non-violent way from different perspectives. This process ensures that each statement is expressed from seven different conditional and relative viewpoints or propositions, and thus it is known as theory of conditioned predication. These seven propositions are described as follows:”

• 1.Syād-asti — “in some ways it is”
• 2.Syād-nāsti — “in some ways it is not”
• 3.Syād-asti-nāsti — “in some ways it is and it is not”
• 4.Syād-asti-avaktavya — “in some ways it is and it is indescribable”
• 5.Syād-nāsti-avaktavya — “in some ways it is not and it is indescribable”
• 6.Syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavya — “in some ways it is, it is not and it is indescribable”
• 7.Syād-avaktavya — “in some ways it is indescribable”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahavira

We can see this as a proto-tetralemma that does not yet leave Being for Existence as the Tetralemma does. It introduces a third state which is not describable rather than existence without Being.

The tetralemma shortens this to A, ~A, Both, Neither and then points in silence toward emptiness which is outside this logical set. If something is indescribable that means it cannot be expressed in language, and therefore one would not be using Being in ones description of phenomena, so saying that something is indescribable is a way to avoid Being, without actually giving it up. The key point is that the seven principles are logically exhaustive, they point to what exists that cannot be described, and thus is not attached to Being, and it produces a third state which could later be seen as existence which is a separate stance toward phenomena created by the Buddhists as the locus of the undescibeable outside of Being, especially the Being of the self. However, in Hinayana the indescribable existence as a nondual standing beyond Being is only attributed to the self. Other dharmas are accepted as having Being and thus reality. Dharmas are really tattvas (small independent mechanisms that function to support life very much like the Sumerian Me, which is also the copula in Sumerian.

Because the Buddha taught for 40 years we can be reasonably assured that what is in the Pali Cannon is pretty accurate as to his teaching. And it is pretty focused on things like the meditation on corpses as ways to realize the reality of impermanence in life. Actually watching the corpse decompose is a sure way to know that it is really an aggregate that disperses. Buddhism was similar to the philosophy of Heraclitus, believing that everything is flux of aggregates in continual change with no stability. However, interestingly Hegel sees in his Logic the Buddhist concept of emptiness (nothing) as the antithesis of Being, and he recognizes that the philosophy of Heraclitus is the philosophy of Becoming which is the synthesis of Buddhist nothingness and Being. Thus of all philosophers in the Western Tradition, Hegel is the one to recognize that the fundamental opposition is between Being and Existence (as nothing, as emptiness). And it was recognized by the Arab philosophers that Being had some residue of Wajud in it, but that it was much more than what is implied by existence in Arabic, so they coined the term Kun (making) which then become existence when retranslated back into Latin. Of course, no one took much notice of this core of existence within being until the Existentialists came along and wanted to create a fundamental reversal in the tradition by saying that existence precedes essence, which is obviously true because you have to exist before you can be something of a particular kind from a purely logical point of view. But everything that exists is already of a particular kind so it never was an issue, until there was a desire for an alternative to Being, with all its confusions, contradictions, paradoxes, and absurdities. Existence suddenly focuses us on the individual and its viability, and leads in Biology to an Autopoietic orientation (Maturana and Varella) rather than a species centric orientation.

So Hinayana Buddhism is the original form of Buddhism probably almost exacty as taught by the Buddha and established in the Pali Cannon. Mahayana is rooted more in Sanscrit and takes up a position against various Hindu philosophies and strives for coherency so that its arguments for its point of view can be taken seriously. These are of course very general characterizations, because there are many schools of both vehicles, but I think more of Mahayana because this later school was willing to go with new Suttras beyond the Pali Cannon in which the Buddha is seen saying more and more interesting things as time goes on.

My recommendation if you want more detail is that you read the History of Buddhist Philosophy by David J Kalupahana:

http://bit.ly/xPt0bW

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOI0Em-DyicxlokPz-2UjGxfzPviNpOzvZHH2v3Kicc/edit?hl=en_US

Amanifest? What does it mean?

You ask a deep question. A rare delight. Thank you so much for your question, and your curiosity about the utter depths of existence.

I would just like to say I owe a lot of these insights to Dr. Scott Anderson with whom I have been discussing these issues many years. And if not for his probing questions I would have little to say on this subject.

I began reading DzogChen because of my general interest in Buddhism. I have an undergraduate major in East Asian Studies and was taught Buddhist Philosophy by a great teacher Alfonso Verdu at the University of Kansas. He also taught me Heidegger and Husserl and set me on an intellectual journey by linking these two great philosophical traditions in my mind. I have always thought Fa Tsang’s Hua Yen Buddhism was the deepest thought that anyone had ever had about existence. And I have always been partial to the Awakening of Faith which Verdu taught me. But I went on to study Western Philosophy rather than going to the Orient to study Buddhism as I had expected. And this was because I encountered a cultural mirror when I was taking Japanese in Summer School I had a teacher who when I told him that I was studying Japanese to study Zen Buddhism in Japan he said that Zen was the most conservative part of his culture, and much evil had been done in the name of Zen by the conservatives of his country, and that he had come to America for the very reason of escaping what I wished to study. This moment changed my life because I realized I did not know my own tradition and I needed to understand it before I tried to go elsewhere or I would make the mistakes of the Orientalists and just interpret everything I found in the orient by occidental standards without knowing my own prejudices and how they were affecting my sight.

So I studied Western Philosophy, but never lost my interest in Buddhism and Taosim and so I read sutras on a regular basis, and the new Tibetan translation opens up a new world to us of a tradition that never stopped from the Buddha down to today. A living tradition is always so much more interesting. And with Tibetan Buddhism you get the Spiritual equivalent of CIRQUE DU SOLEIL to boot. So I started reading all the original texts that had been translated from that tradition about DzogChen that I could find. But I was very disappointed because what I found was not up to the standard I usually found in Buddhist Sutras. The clarity just was not there. But eventually I focused on Manjushrimirtra and Mipham. Mipham is the soul of Clarity. One of the most brilliant commentators. I trusted him. So if you only have two points you can trust in a tradition, that is not good. But then I found the Bon Book and that confirmed for me my interpretation based on reading Manjushrimitra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%B1ju%C5%9Br%C4%ABmitra) based on the Beacon of Certainty. So if you take Manjushrimitra seriously then you can see that what he is doing is destroying Buddhism by using the very logic of Nagarjuna against it. It sees the two truths as a dualism, and the only way to get out of that fundamental dualism is to go outside Buddhism. I think it is quite possible that Garab Dorje (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garab_Dorje )was not Buddhist or at least was saying heretical things. And that is why Manjushrimitra went to challenge him for what he was saying, traveling from the school where Manjushrimitra taught to challenge him to a debate, on the Cemetery grounds. As in so many of such stories the teacher has three statements that summarize his teaching. In this case it was:

• One is introduced directly to one’s true nature or “Direct introduction.” (Tibetan: ngo rang thog tu sPrad)[4]
• One attains certainty about this natural state or “Remaining without doubt.” (Tibetan: thag gCig thog dug Cad)[4]
• One continues with confidence in liberation or “Continuing in the non-dual state.” (Tibetan: gDengs grol thog du ’cha’)[4]

I interpret these verses in relation to the Special Systems. Each statement indicates a Special System.

• One is introduced directly to one’s true nature or “Direct introduction.” (Tibetan: ngo rang thog tu sPrad)

The first special system is the Dissipative Ordering of Prigogine that manifests negative entropy. Direct introduction is transmission, and that introduction is the spread of a dissipative ordering of the anti-Dharma, the Dharma that destroys the Dharma. This is a heresy spreading in Buddhist lands that is essentially destroying the duality of the the two truths. Which is odd because one truth is dualistic and the other nondualistic, and so this destruction must point to a higher nonduality between dualism and non-dualism as indicated by Majushrimitra. This is the first jewel the Dharma, but it is really an Anti-Dharma that is spreading in Buddhist lands rather than a Buddhist heresy spreading in non-Buddhist lands.

• One attains certainty about this natural state or “Remaining without doubt.” (Tibetan: thag gCig thog dug Cad)

Dharma and Aniti-Dharma in an autopoietic symbiotic dance. The autopoietic system is stable, and thus remains. It is an anomalous natural state. This is a closed state in which mind and body are one symbiotic whole. It represents the stability of the transmission between Garbe Dorge and Manjushimitra in their conversation, and dispute and dialogue. Like the meeting of Rumi and Shamsa Tabriz, the one was disseminating heresy and the other orthodoxy and these two speeches because stable and indicated the second Jewel which is the Body of the Buddha, but in this case it is two speeches that cancel each other out. It does to Buddhism what Buddhism had already done to everything else, show its emptiness. It shows the emptiness of the distinction between the two truths.

• One continues with confidence in liberation or “Continuing in the non-dual state.” (Tibetan: gDengs grol thog du ’cha’)

Two Autopoietic Systems of Dharma and Anti-dharma, or four Dissipative Ordering Special Systems point toward the reflexive special system. There are therefore two dharmas and two anti-Dharmas circulating around each other. So lets think about Buddhism and Bon. There is the Dharma of Buddhism, and the Heresy of Dzogchen. There is what ever is the equivalent of Bon teachings (prior to their adulteration by Buddhism, we assume something like Shinto and Taoism) and the DzogChen heritage that collapses what ever their equivalent to the Void might have been. Buddhism and Taoism circle around each other in China. If you understand each well enough you can skip from void line to empty line and back again as Stonehouse does. The poetry of Stonehouse shows us the reflexive circling of Emptiness and Void around each other.

I am assuming that the secret of Gareb Dorje three statements are the perfect statement of nonduality by pointing at the Special System. If the Autopoietic Special System is stable then the Reflexive Special System is meta-stable. It is the third jewel the Sanga.

I call this the fourth turning. It is Buddhism turning on itself going beyond itself, having Najarjuna’s logic applied to its own structural dualisms. But since one of those duals is the nondual itself, then we have to go to a deeper level of nonduality. If void and emptiness are dual nonduals, then there must be ‘manifestation’ beyond them which is completely nondual with no structural dualisms to base itself on. It thus encompasses the three jewels Dharma, Buddha, and Sangha. Dharma meets Anti-Dharma in the application of the Nagarjuna’s logic to the Dharma itself. Buddha meets Taoist Sage. Sanga meets Taoist recluses. For instance in StoneHouse and his criticism of monks who beg, and his praise for the life of the hermit that supports himself. StoneHouse was was ordered to come out of his hermitage to become the head of a Monastery. And when he was released from that obligation he returned to his hermitage. How many people are there that can stand both in the shoes of the Zen Monk and the Taoist Sage? From that vantage point he turns either toward Void or Emptiness and differentiates them. But I have searched in vain for a hint of an understanding of manifestation that goes beyond emptiness and void in his poetry. He remains both a Zen Monk and a Taoist Hermit, but he does not step over the line into pure manifestation where even that duality between Emptiness and Void is effaced.

What helps us is the fact that we can understand these turnings of Buddhism as meta-levels related to Being of the Indo-European tradition, which is the source from which Buddhism came and the place to which it must return. And it is returning with the interest in Nonduality among Spiritual practitioners and through the refuge immigration of a population of monks from Tibet who represent a non-reified living tradition of Buddhism. In essence the Dali Lama has become the Good Pope. We  can relate to religions with Popes (or their equivalent), i.e. heads of the church. One thing that we can relate to in Tibetan Buddhism that it is organized. And it also satisfies the wish to have Shamanic as well as Religious experiences. We can more or less find out Don Juan and our Zen Master at the same time in the same person. And this is to be expected because Taoism, Shintoism, Bon are shamanic essentially based on extraordinary people with extraordinary experiences, and Buddhism is a religion based on beliefs and with meditation, non-experiences and non-conceptuality of the embodiment of emptiness. So Tibetan Buddhism just happens to be a way we can have our pristine religious spirituality of the cake, and eat the shamanic icing too.

However, it is really DzogChen which is considered the pinnacle of Tibetan Buddhisms nine ways that is of interest because it is Buddhism going beyond Buddhism which legitimates the combination with Shamanism that Tantraism tends toward anyway. And it is interesting because it opens up the possibility of the fourth turning of Buddhism which has now come to the West and captured the interest of Western Intellectuals which has been in the process of trying to find nondual ways in order to escape the nihilism of the West and its inherent dualism. It is intellectually deep and also experientially fascinating, and of course the refugees that have brought it are colorful characters, many of whom like the Dali Lama clearly embody wisdom.

So to understand the future of Buddhism we must understand what will happen when Tibetan Buddhism which has been living in isolation in Tibet for hundreds of years unaffected by the world until the Chinese invasion, comes into contract with the Western worldview which has cherished its Duality for so long and rejected, and even killed anyone who had a nondual perspective. Many of those who had a nondual perspective became Muslim Sufis in the past when civilization was being safeguarded by the Greeco-Islamo-Roman empire that preceded Colonialization of the Middle East (which is really just the heartland of the Western Worldview).

So it is necessary to go further and to look at the points that are made about the fourth turning. One way to do that is to look at my commentary on Manjushrimitra’s sutra [LINK]. But another way to do that is to look at the eleven Adamantine points of Longchenpa. (See Germano, David Francis (1992). “Poetic thought, the intelligent Universe, and the mystery of self: The Tantric synthesis ofrDzogs Chen in fourteenth century Tibet.” The University of Wisconsin, Madison. Doctoral thesis.

(http://vajrayana.faithweb.com/Poetic%20thought%20-%20The%20Tantric%20synthesis%20of%20Dzogs%20Chen.pdf) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longchenpa) (http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Longchenpa)

1. the Ground and basis of reality (Tib. གཞི་, Wyl. gzhi), how that ground dynamically manifests itself (Tib. གཞི་སྣང་, Wyl. gzhi snang);
2. how sentient beings stray from the Ground;
3. how all beings have the essence of Enlightened energy;
4. how primordial wisdom (Tib. ཡེ་ཤེས་, Wyl. ye shes) abides within us;
5. the pathways, and
6. the gateways, and
7. domain for primordial wisdom;
8. how primordial wisdom is experientially accessed;
9. signs of realization,
10. signs in the dying and bardo transition; and
11. ultimate fruition as the manifest realization of the kayas.

DzogChen would not be the fourth turning of the wheel of Dharma, i.e. the Anti-Dharma, if it did not reveal a deeper level of enlightenment, that was hither to revealed. The fact that this deeper level is also approximated in different ways by Hau Yen and Tien Tai Buddhism in China also tells us that this is not just an isolated phenomena, but a very profound shift in understanding of the nature of enlightenment. And what is revealed is the basis of reality or what is called the Ground above. Because of its Western Connotations we prefer not to use the term ground, and so I will use the term manifestation following M. Henry’s use of Meister Eckhart’s nomenclature in The Essence of Manifestation. There is from this point of view three standings beyond existence with are manifestation, the Unmanifest Essence, and the Amanifest which is the nondual root of the Manifest and Unmanifest Essence. But to understand what these phase transitions of standings beyond existence might be we must take them one at a time and do a careful dialectical thought process in order to make sure that each is really different from the last. What we are concentrating here is upon the Four Turning so we can build a basis on which to explore what the Fifth Turning of the Wheel of Dharma might be which I call the Homeward Path, because it is the point where the heresy of Buddhism, and other nondual ways that differentiated from the Western Tradition come home, and this is what is beginning to happen in our time, so we ought to try to understand it.

Now there are many terms used for the translation of Ground, or as I prefer Manifestation, because it is relatively unpolluted by Western Philosophical meanings. However the term is གཞི། (Wyl. gzhi) n. Pron.: shyi = substratum, basis. The problem with using Ground as a translation is that Western philosophy is all about First Philosophy and Grounding, and has recently discovered the impossibility of grounding, and thus we get anti-foundationalism that denies there can be grounds, and it goes on and on. Manifestation is not burdened with all these extrinsic meanings. But the actual terminology does not matter as long as the concept is clear. And the concept is that what you see when emptiness and Void evaporate as being different from each other is a deeper nondual of Manifestation. Just to be clear, the equivalent term in Islamic Sufi nondual tradition is Sifat, which is usually denoted as the attributes of Allah. But the idea that Allah has “attributes” is a Greek theological idea, and misses the essential point. But we are not interpreting DzogChen based on Islamic ideas. Merely pointing out that other nondual traditions have similar standings to Manifestation that is revealed in the Fourth Turning of the wheel of the Dharma in Buddhism. Many of the ultimate concepts in various nondual traditions are the same. It helps to be aware of these parallels.

Here what gzhi means is a very different kind of ground than one might expect. It is what manifests when the difference between nondual emptiness and nondual void collapses. There is a domain wall between these two kinds of nondual existence (Striated and Unstriated) which as we have said elsewhere is Ultra Being, i.e. the part of being that is extant, i.e. illusion seen externally. When that collapse happens we cannot have Buddhists who do not believe in the External Physical world anymore, nor Taoists (Bonvivants) who reduce everything to nature. Both have to accept the other’s position and the nihilistic opposition between them collapses. And thus these nonduals cease to be duals of each other. When the duality between nondual interpretations of existence collapse, basically what is collapsing is the distinction between inside consciousness and outside in the physical world. Nonduality at its depths does not accept this distinction and the fact that both Taoism (Bon) and Buddhism have these limits means that their interpretation of Existence is flawed to some extent. Existence is what is found (Wajud). There is what is found inwardly and what is found outwardly, and Buddhists are clinging to one and denying the other and the Taoists have the opposite position. When there is no difference based on position looking outward from the inward or inward from the outward, then we enter into the nonduality of the nondual completely without reservation. If Existence is what is found, then we are talking always about local things found. But what is the global source of all that finding, that is what manifestation is. Things are manifest in order to be found. Manifestation as the root of nonduality is the spontaneous, non-fabricated coming into manifestation which supports existence. In this sense that manifestation supports existence then it is gzhi.

We hear terms like primordial, pure, direct experience etc as well as others. But the one phrase from DzogChen that sums it up best is ‘Mind is like Space’. Literally when the domain wall between Emptiness and Void collapses then mind is like space and space is like mind, and there is no difference that can be pointed to which is a nihilistic distinction between them, even though they are in fact already nonduals. Buddhism and Taoism can be seen as Monisms that have suppressed their opposite non-duality, just like dualities suppress their opposites to try to become Monisms. These are nondual monisms and to me that is not nonduality because Nonduality means to me Not One! Not Two~ Not Many! Not None! Something else than all the logical possibilities. That is the key from the point of the Tetralemma. And it also cannot be distinguished by the difference between inward and outward which is probably one of the most fundamental distinctions. It is utterly distinctionless in the sense of having limits. It is what appears how it appears in each moment without any fabrication, any elaboration, and any distinctions of a theoretical type projected on it, especially not inward/outward, or number of any kind. Badiou calls this the ‘Multiple’. The heterogeneity prior to the arising of the Ultra One. But Badiou believes that this is Being. We are talking about a standing beyond the Meta-levels of Being, beyond existence, and which by itself can be called manifestation meaning by that what is meant by gzhi.

One thing we can say is that this is not the ‘Ground of Being’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_of_Being_(Dzogchen)) See “Caveat lector” of the semantic field of the sanskrit term “ashraya” (आश्रय; Etymology: आ- √श्रि. ) the best terms seem to be source or origin, but the other nuances are also interesting and should be kept in mind. It is really the semantic field as a whole that should be considered, because the whole field is what has arisen naturally, spontaneously, in language and that is what we value in manifestation.

“Process-oriented rdzogs-chen has as its pivot the notion of gzhi which means both ground (the static, sort of steady-state) and reason (the dynamic, the intensity with which the unfolding of the initial pure potential occurs). As such pure potential (gzhi ka-dag chen-po) it is discussed in terms of a triune dynamics, referred to as facticity (ngo-bo), actuality (rang-bzhin), and resonance (thugs-rje). “  in Goodman, Steven D. & Davidson, Ronald M. (1992). Tibetan Buddhism: reason and revelation. SUNY series in Buddhist studies. SUNY Press. ISBN 0791407853, 9780791407851.

“Dzogchen-as-process where the praxis albeit ‘natural’ (Wylie: lhan skyes; IAST: sahaja)[6] and ‘effortless’ (Wylie: lhun grub; IAST: anābhoga)[7] has the sense of ‘spontaneity’.[8][9]”

“The Ultimate Nature (rang bzhin) is said to be unaltered (ma bcos pa), because the Basis is spontaneously accomplished (lhun grub) in terms of its innate potential (rtsal) for manifestation (rol pa). The non-duality between the Ultimate Nature (i.e., the unaltered appearance of all phenomena) and the Condition (i.e., the Basis of all) is called the Identity (bdag nyid).“[28]

Sentient Beings stray from this gzhi or ashraya or the standing of manifestation which is non-fabricated, non-elaborated, pure appearing of what appears as it appears without distinction between inward and outward, quality and quantity or other categorical distinctions. We might call this primordial upwelling phenomena. In one of my books I called it Primal Archetypal Wholeness. (See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96sel_(yoga) concerning rig pa translated as reflexive apperception). Straying must be explained if we are to recognize that all there is ultimately is manifestation which is nondually nonudal in every sense, not just outward globally unstriated void or inward local striated emptiness.

Probably the most interesting of the meanings attributed to manifestation is spontaneous accomplishment. A good example of this is the fact that nature calculates the optimal surface area of bubbles so they are minimal in each moment, and it does this spontaneously and instantaneously and effortlessly. There is no need for calculation to determine that structure, the bubble surface just snaps to that minimal configuration which is the lowest energy formation “Naturally”. In DzogChen everything does that production of the optimal effortlessly. That is what Manifestation is the spontaneous, un-fabricated, un-elaborated, natural, production of optima in appearance where appearance is no different from reality, identity, presence, or truth as one merged aspect that cannot be differentiated into separate aspects. Existence of things found still has separate aspects like Being. Existence unlike Being is unstriated, yet it still has the differentiated aspects. Manifestation loses that differentiation of the aspects as it like the Multiple of Badiou, loses the ability to differentiate quantity at all, either one or many, and as it loses the ability to differentiate quality and quantity or any other synthetic a priori categorization.

When humans stray from Manifestation the first things that appear are the differentiation of the Pleroma. These are the striated and unstriated opposites such as in our worldview: emptiness/Void; Being/Beyng; Forgetfulness/Oblivion’ Clearing/Open; etc. Emptiness/Void is merely the center of the cyclone of the worldview. But all of these striated and unstriated oppositions evaporate at the level of the standing of Manifestation.

So with this background in mind we can begin to think about the Fifth Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma, one that to my knowledge has not happened yet and is announced here first (or rather in my various working papers on the subject). It has to be an even deeper nondual that manifestation. It is unclear how deep the levels of nonduality go. We are having a hard time just thinking the fifth meta-level of Being. We noted that the the Fourth Turning responded to the fourth meta-level of Being as illusion. So we are suggesting that the fifth turning has somehow to do with Ultra Being. But Ultra Being as we have seen previously is what separates the dual nonduals into emptiness and void, at it is exactly the getting rid of it that reveals manifestation. There is in fact a strange turning here.

At this point I would like to mention just for the sake of comparison that this deeper nondual than manifestation is called Dhat in Arabic and is seen as the core of the attributes of Allah. It is sometimes called the essence, but of course this is merely more Greek theology and has nothing to do with the Dhat, which by the way is often noted to be a linguistic mistake due to the feminine nature of this word.

So the fact that there is an equivalent to this even deeper nondual in another spiritual tradition, i.e. Sufism within Islam, gives us hope of discovering the nature of the fifth tuning of the Dharma. I have also equated this final turning with the Homeward path. That is the path to the nondual core of the Western worldview itself. Something so extremely dualistic as the Western worldview cannot help but turn into its opposite, and so that opposite is the nonduality that is made accessible though its fragmentation into the meta-levels of illusion, or Being. Each meta-level of Being is a more intense form of Maya/Mara, Dunya, Dukkha. Each needs its own homeopathic treatment. Existence is unstriated but it responds to the various meta-levels of illusion differently based  on its ultimately skillful means. But Existence as a standing transforms into Manifestation, and then the Amanifest as we enter the higher standings beyond Being which are in fact deeper nondualities. Perhaps there are even deeper dualities than these but we will be doing well if we can understand these. In order to approach the fifth turning we have gone back and taken up the fundamentals of DzogChen which are part of the fourth turning. It is the Turning that informs us about what is Beyond Buddhism, which we also see in Hua Yen and Tien Tai Buddhism.

To go back to Special Systems theory for a moment we can know that there is a difference between a system and a meta-system (what Bataille calls the Restricted and General Economy). We discussed how the three statements of Garab Dorje can be seen to correspond to the Special Systems. We can see that any given religion like Buddhism or Taoism even though they are nondual have their self-imposed limitations which make them a restricted economy. Then we saw that Garab Dorje opened the door of heresy and opened up ways to both Bon (Taoism, Shintoism) and Buddhism to go beyond themselves to discover the ultimate and perfect path. What we neglected to mention is that Systems and Meta-systems are duals. System (restricted economy) is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, while the Meta-system (general economy) is a whole less that the sum of its parts, i.e. a whole full of holes like a sponge. The Special Systems are the interstices between the meta-levels of Being, and so we see that Ultra Being is on either limit beyond the system and the Meta-system. Special Systems are wholes exactly equal to the sum of their parts, and there are three of these like the perfect, amicable and sociable aliquot numbers. Thus we can see that what is beyond the three statements of Garab Dorge that frees us from limited religions that are systems or restricted economies, is the Meta-system (also known as OpenScape). Thus the fifth turning must have something to do with the Meta-system that lies beyond the Special Systems that come between the System and the Meta-system. Ultra Being appears on either side as the limit beyond both the System and the Meta-system.

Now we have a framework for appreciating more fully what Garab Dorje taught Manjushrimitra. Garab Dorje manifested the rainbow body at his death. And he called back down the three precepts to his disciple when the disciple pleaded for more guidance. But this guidance abounded in the celestial realm before it was absorbed into any human form. Garab Dorje discovered how to break out of Buddhism or Bon or any religion without leaving it, and without permeating its boundary. Thus this is a heresy that never quite throws you out of the religion you are pursuing, but then once you adopt this viewpoint then you are never really in it completely again. And this can only be done because of the connection to the Special Systems which are ultra-efficacious (hyper-efficient and hyper-effective). What is beyond Garab Dorge’s three statements that point at the special systems is the meta-system to the system of religion, i.e. the system of thought and belief which strives for communal coherence.

So this suggest that the Homeward Path is into the Wilderness of belief and thought that is the meta-system beyond any given restricted economy of belief or thought, or for that matter experience. Actually when you think about it the three jewels as Dharma, Buddha, and Sangha are basically the same as these special systems as well. But there is a difference because there is Dharma and Anti-Dharma (Najarjuna’s nondual logic applied to Buddhism itself). There is buddha and anti-Buddha (Garab Dorje). And there is Sanga and Anti-Sanga the monks of Bon, the ulterior Buddhism. So the three jewels in conjunction with their anti-jewels give rise to the Meta-system which is a set of endless complementaries. (See Complementarity by Arkady Plotnitsky). The deeper ground beyond the Basis Source, Origin revealed by the Fourth Turning is revealed. The Basis, Source, Origin are a figure on this Ground.

Did I mention that the Western worldview is a meta-worldview, it is not merely a world like other worlds, which are destroyed continually along with their languages by colonization, global economic war and globalization. The Western worldview gobbles up other worlds and destroys them extremely efficiency and that is because we are actually living in a meta-worldview. That meta-worldview has its roots in  settled Egypt, Sumeria, nomadic Semitic and Indo-European worlds. At the traditional center of western civilization, i.e. the Middle East there was a blending of the various worlds that abided there where humans met Nanderthals and interbred. We have only recently became aware of what the writings of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians contained which were recently retrieved from Oblivion. So now we know quite a bit more abut the deeper roots of the Western worldview. And if we say that it is a meta-worldview we are also saying it is a meta-system or OpenScape as well. Therefore, as the Fifth turning deals with meta-systems beyond the Special Systems, so to it can deal with the world dominant meta-system called the Western worldview.

M. Henry in his book The Essence of Manifestation, argues against Heidegger that there is a part of Manifestation that does not ever reveal itself, never becomes manifest, but is therefore implicitly manifest within manifestation itself by its very holding itself away from manifestation. He equates this with the Godhead of Meister Eckhart. He says that Heidegger’s fundamental assumption is Ontological Monism, or Badiou criticizes Deleuze for saying that Being is Univocal, where he is following Aristotle. Badiou wants to introduce a true heterogeneity prior to any numericallity called the Multiple. Henry only wants to introduce what amounts to the ontological unconscious which he calls the Essence of Manifestation. This Essence which is the opposite of manifestation itself cannot be utterly nondual, so we specify that there is something deeper than either of these called the Amanifest, which neither shows itself nor does not show itself, yet both shows itself and hides. In other words the Amanifest is the tetralemma applied to manifestation. This idea has resonances with The aconceptual mind: Heideggerian themes in holistic naturalism By Pauli Pylkkö. Except here we are trying to avoid all dualisms, even the dual to Manifestation which would be the Unmanifest, or the equivalent to the unconscious of manifestation. Of course, we could construct a Greimas Square and contrast Anti-Manifest to Non-Manifest and produce the Chasm of Non-Anti-manifest and Anti-Non-Manifest but this is unnecessary since I don’t think we can go beyond this finite level because our ability to conceptualize fails us. And also it is unnecessary to go any further because we have reached the Meta-system, and what is on the other side of the meta-system, only the singularity of Ultra Being (ultra-one for Badiou) which by the way is also prior to the System, and is the limit of the entire series of Systems that are interlaced with the Meta-levels of Being. So this is why it is Ultra Being that appears at the level of the fifth turning, i.e. it is the generation of the singularity of illusion, for instance the iron ball that gives rise to the hundred cousins of the Pandavas. These are as the Greeks are called autocathonic. They stand opposite the Trojans who are the Pandvas the children of the Gods married to the same woman (Helen had five lovers we are told my myth) which the Avatar Krishna helps.

It is from the advent of Ultra Being, existing illusion and delusion, that causes the straying from Manifestation into the morass quicksand known as Maya/Mara, Dukka, Dunya which is straying into the meta-system or OpenScape beyond the belief and thought systems that strive to make life coherent which are the religions.

Dzogchen believes that primordial wisdom (Skt. jñāna) abides in us all just as we are without taking on anything, which is a very Chan/Zen like position to take. In DzogChen there is no distinction of meditation from any other activities, just like in Chan/Zen. In effect one could argue that DzogChen is the Zen of Tibet developed out of Tantra. The Tibetans early rejected Chinese Buddhism, and so they would have to produce their own version if the were to reach that level of spiritual development. Of course, there are many differences between Chan/Zen and DzogChen but the fundamental similarity at a deep level is striking. This is a story similar to Buddha nature being in everyone, but with the twist that it does not have to be Buddha nature as we know it, but something beyond Buddha nature that means you don’t have to be a Buddhist to partake in it.

We are just at the beginning of understanding the nature of the fifth turning of Buddhism but I believe that it is a Homecoming in the sense that Buddhism sprung as a heresy from one branch of the Indo-European worldview, and now it is returning to a different branch, that of the Western Meta-Worldview. Since the Western Worldview itself does not understand that it has a nondual core due to the fragmentation of Being, and the fact that the Special Systems separate the meta-levels of Being from each other. But the Western worldview has become a meta-worldview and thus a meta-system, and the only place to go for the fifth turning is to the level of the meta-system, and so I predict that Buddhism will yet again transform and have a flouring in the west as it and other nondual faiths exploit the nonduality in the heart of the Western worldview. Embody the nonduality of nonduality in nonduality and stand in the core of the Western worldview and it will transform around you because duality is like the desert of the godhead of Meister Eckhart, and the boliing of the godhead is like the production of nihilism, and the appearance of the nondual avatar is like the appearance of Christ or Krishna. As Jung says Christ is the nature of the Self in the Western worldview, and we all have to deal with it. He also said that we have to deal with the archetypes of our own tradition and it is impossible to substitute other archetypes from other traditions for our own night monsters and goblins. Nietzsche wrote that the fundamental duality in Greek Culture, and thus our culture was between Apollo and Dionysus. But, we think of Apollo as the good of Reason forgetting that he was the wolf god of initiations. Thus both Apollo and Dionysus are not exactly the most savory characters. But in the Hindu Tradition they are Brahma and Shiva. And the primal scene of that tradition has Vishnu, like Blake’s Albion, sleeping. He is asleep on an ocean floating on the back of a serpent with many heads, i.e. the dragon of existence. Vishnu is the nondual manifestation of the Godhead beyond the duality of Brahma and Shiva or Apollo and Dionysus. Below Existence is the ocean upon which Vishnu sleeps, i.e. manifestation. And there are unmanifest depths to that ocean. But the surface of the ocean which is a mirror from both sides is the Amanifest. In Hua Yen this is known as images in the depths of the ocean. The analogy here is the Birds and the Fishes. When it is calm the fish look up and see reflections of themselves and the blur of the  flock of birds above the surface mingling with their own reflections. When it is calm the birds look up and see reflections of themselves and the blur of schools of fish below the surface mingling with their own reflections. The two sets of reflections and dark vague shapes mingle in the surface of the sea. There is only that surface. I call it the cliff edge of existence from which you see the surface of the sea of manifestation. There is the manifestation of the entire sea, but its depths are unmanifest. However the surface with all its reflections and ominous darknesses is Amanifest because the two sets of reflections and shadows cancel out.

Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas.

“3. Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father’s) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.”

“8. And he said, “The person is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!””

“20. The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us what Heaven’s kingdom is like.”
He said to them, “It’s like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky.””

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html

Marvin Meyer Translation

http://bit.ly/AdZHhQ

When we say what applications philosophy has then I think the missing word is “practical” — practical applications, and this draws us to the distinction established by Kant if not earlier between Practical and Pure Reason. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Practical_Reason) I recently wrote about this in my last chapter of my dissertation at http://about.me/emergentdesign. Practical reason in the Greek world was called Metis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metis_(mythology)). Odysseus had metis as his singular quality (http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/course/ingenuity.html). It tended to have the meaning of trickery. But Kant raised the question to a higher level as meaning to excel at the practical arts but also considering ethics as the epitome of Practical reason. Pure reason had to be reigned in, but practical reason is useful. The person who in modern times explored this question in the most interesting way is P. Bourdieu in his logic of practice . . . and other relevant books pictured here. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu)

This is his ground breaking book on Practice and how it is different from Theoretical reason’s understanding, and basically about how it is a black box which we cannot see into.

This book is a summary of his position on Practice.

This book is basically a rewrite of the Logic of Practice, seemingly meant to just sell more books, no substantive difference.

He was concerned with the question that Levi Strauss raised in Structuralism which was how cultures can produce structural pattens and not be aware of them. There is clearly a distinction between Theory and Practice, and practice can produce structural patterning that escapes our knowledge but exists, like in the relation beween Kinship patterns and village layout.

But the wonderful thing is the answer M. de Certeau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Certeau) gives to this question. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Everyday_Life)

de Certeau points out that there is practice in the art of narrative and that we can get insight into other types of practice though the rhetorical and stylistic practices within narrative composition.

So what Certeau is saying is that Practice is not a completely black box as Bourdieu believes.

Whether philosophy has an application depends on how we take this relation between theoretical reason and practical reason, because anything which ‘an application’ must the the result of practical reason. But basically the way things have gone since practical reason was basically ethics and crystal clear as application of rules to behavior, until recently practical reason became more and more opaque to theoretical reason. Then Certeau made that a grey box rather than black by noting that narrative, by which we explain practical behaviors itself has it own rhetorical and narrative and stylistic devices. And since we can understand narratives, we must get some insight into practice from by seing how these stylistic devices are used.

For Plato, and his version of Socrates, the practical application of philosophy was civil life of the man of leisure in the interaction with others in the politics of the city. Socrates gives us many narratives with dramatic settings, historical characters, and plenty of rhetoric, irony and other tricky devices such as the use of made up myth. So from Certeau’s point of view the practice of philosophy would be seen in these stylistic, rhetorical, and tricky ways that Plato uses dialogue to express his opinions though the voices of others. The one thing you can be sure of in a Platonic Dialogue is that Plato is not saying directly what he believes, but he is presenting us endless veils of irony to indirectly indicate what he might believe, but one can never be sure. Thus if we take Plato as the guide in this the application of philosophy would be elevated civil discourse among equals searching for the truth together in a dialectical form of discourse. But actually we see little of that and much more pontificating by Socrates, or the Stranger, or the Statesman or the Sophist . . . See John Sallis Being and Logos fur the most accessible introduction to this side of Plato. In someways the forging of a civilization by civil speech in public seems to be Plato’s idea of the application of Philosophy (the love of wisdom) but it is also the elevation of the soul and the giving of laws to society, organizing society for the human good. Since it is a narrative from Certeau’s point of view, we can have insight into that practice via the rhetorical, stylistic, and twists and turns of tropes that appear in the dialogues.
One good source of some insight into this is Alan Blum’s books on Theorizing and Socrates.
My belief is this. The application of philosophy is the way that it changes the way you look at the world and the way in which it helps to understand the worldview in which we find ourselves living. The structures of the worldview are incredibly ancient at the level that Philosophy understands them. And this understanding is quite different from our everyday understanding from the naive point of view within the lifeworld. We have just forgotten so much, about our own worldivew. It is a great mystery to us, what seems so mundane and ever-present and real. But there are features to the worldview that have persisted for a very long time in spite of new facts, novel theories, disruptive paradigms, shattered epistemes, smashed ontologies, pulverized existences, and obliterated absolutes. There are certain things that all the emergence that has occurred in our worldview has not changed like the meta-levels of Being for instance. They were there in the vedas as the difference between the Gods, they survived in mythology, and they were known by Plato, and finally they were rediscovered in continental philosophy. Knowing that the world has stair steps to nowhere through kinds of Being completely alters the view of the world. Knowing that Nihilism is the fundamental thing produced by the worldview, and that is so that it can have its nihilistic opposite emergence recognized when it occurs. But that emergence does not change the basic structure of the worldview in the slightest even though it changes everything else. To know that myth preserves these ontological differences and makes them accessible though its stories offering a handbook to the worldview. Knowing that every novel operates within these constraints. There is always Author/Reader//Character/Narrator, just as there is always Heaven/Earth//Mortals/Immortals. The entire worldview is laid out for us to read, but we cannot see it because we are looking at things, not at Being (Sein), less well at Beyng (Seyn). The structure is found in the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) structures of Being verbs. It is found in the Philosophical Principles discovered by Peirce and elaborated by B. Fuller. And it is ensconced in the great philosophy books of our tradition, such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze, Bataille, Baudrillard, Zizek, Badiou, etc. Continental Philosophy rediscovered this deep structure of the worldview lost in our tradition in our own time. Thus we live in a renaissance in which we finally can have some insight into the our worldview which is dominating globally, really for the first time in thousands of years. It is like when they found the rosetta stone, or they could translate Mayan or Cuneiform of the Sumerians, or the text of Ugarit. Whole worlds opened up to us, just as we are destroying world and languages throughout the globe, if not the viability of life on the globe itself. People read fake mysteries like those of Dan Smith and get all excited, but are missing the greatest mystery adventure of them all, which is here right before our eyes and effects everything in sight within the world. Anyway it is an available intellectual adventure for any that are up to the challenge. I really believe that in my works I have only scratched the surface of what is available now that we can read the kinds of Being as meta-levels in the worldview, and thus in all phenomena in our lifeworld around us, including in the depths of our Self, because what are we but a reflection of our worldview.

So for me the application of philosophy is finally knowing something significant about our selves and the worldview which all who live on the earth should be interested in because though colonialization and globalization it is affecting everyone on the planet profoundly. We should know something about it, and perhaps if we did we could limit in some way its greatest excesses and perhaps save ourselves and some of the other species we are killing off at such an alarming rate. This i an intellectual adventure on the scale of an Indiana Jones spectacular but which everyone can participate in because of the plethora of open questions that abound once we get a glimpse of the structure of the worldview.

As has been pointed out DzogChen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzogchen) spans Tibetan Buddhism and Bon. Thus it has relations with what is Mahayana Buddhism and the Tibetan equivalent of Taoism. However, in their competition just like Taoism, Bon became a lot like Buddhism.

I spent about a year reading this literature trying to figure out the answer to this question. So this may not be right but it is at least based on a hearty attempt to understand this tradition.

For the most part I was very disappointed in the DzogChen ‘classics’ that have been translated and are now available. Sometimes because of their content and sometimes because of the low quality of the translations. One thing that I do not like is when a foreign religion is presented as a species of Western philosophy which happens all to often. And I am afraid that this is part of the problem here.

So in order to understand the answer to this question requires quite a bit of background, some of which I have covered elsewhere, so I will not belabor these points here but merely mention them. My understanding is based on the first text of DzogChen in a classic translation by Manjushrimitra, and Beacon of Certainty by Mipham. But there was only one other book that I thought was decent and it was in the Bon tradition. That book was Unbounded wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon, and the logic of the nonconceptual By Anne C. Klein, Tenzin Wangyal

So my take on the subject is deeply influenced by this book which is the best I read out of all the secondary texts on the subject.

But in my reading I kept coming back to the work of Manjushrimitra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%B1ju%C5%9Br%C4%ABmitra) as being the key to this tradition. Slowly I started to get a handle on what he was saying and it is very interesting.

http://www.amnyitrulchung.org/lineage/masters/Manjushrimitra/

The crux of the matter is that Manjushrimitra does to Mahayana Buddhism what Nagarjuna did for Mahayana Buddhism in general. Thus in some ways Manjushimitra is just like Nagarjuna but applying his logic to Buddhism itself and the idea of the Two truths, just as Nagarjuna applied his analysis to the relation between Illusion and Buddhist Emptiness. The reason it can be practiced by both Buddhists as the ultimate school and truth and by Bon is that it is a heresy of Buddhism that denies the Two truths (mundane and absolute, i.e. emptiness).

Be sure you do not read Mañjuśrīmitra. Primordial experience. An Introduction to rDzogs-chen Meditation. (Translated by Namkhai Norbu and Kennard Lipman in collaboration with Barrie Simmons. Shambhala, Boston & London, 2001) first like I did. It is a very bad translation. There is another more traditional translation on the web which makes much more sense as a whole. This book was translated as each sentence was separate from all the others and makes no sense at all.

Better to read this more traditional translation.
http://www.dharmafellowship.org/library/texts/cultivation-of-enlightened-mind.htm

I would also be aware that the work of ELÍAS MANUEL CAPRILES ARIAS at http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/elicap/en/ is tainted by reducing Dzogchen to a form of Western Philosophy which I think is merely a form of Orientalism. However, his work contains a lot of useful information as long as you don’t accept his conclusion that DzogChen is basically saying what Sartre said.

Now that we have my prejudices out of the way, we can start laying the ground work for understanding the relation of DzogChen to both Mahayana Buddhism and the equivalent of Taoism or Shintoism, i.e. Bon. I think some how the Bon version of Dzogchen did not get as corrupted as the Buddhist version and thus still makes sense. I am assuming that Mipham was right in his Beacon of Certainty and that he did not lose the thread between his time and that of Manjushrimitra. I am also assuming that Tenzin Wangyal is essentially the only person I could find who seems to have stayed on the same wavelength that is alive today. If this is not true then I really don’t know what to make of the rest of it, because it is really a mess. I kinda assume that the anti-Dzogchen elements basically succeeded in stamping it out in Tibetan Buddhism and that what we have today in Tibetan Buddhism is a sad shadow of what Dzogchen once was. However, if DzogChen has the character that I have interpreted it to have then it is incredibly important, and at least in the work of formulating this hypothesis, true or not, I learned a lot.

So we have to start at the very beginning. Buddhism is a heresy of the Indo-European tradition, i.e. the Hindu branch in India along with Jainism. Basically the way things work in traditions is that there is some set of primordial opposites that get produced, and the tradition tries every single variation and permutation of these in some random order. Structuralism assumes that over time every possible combination of these primordial structural distinctions will be tried and that they form a field, and that any one of these configurations can only have meaning in relation to the whole field of possible configurations. This goes on with competing views within society until someone stumbles on the idea that beyond all possible permutations there is another possibility that is not part of the field, and in fact has no place in the map of the field, and that is nonduality. It is only accessed by what is called supra-rationality. And since our worldview is basically dualistic and its only recognized limit is contradiction, paradox, absurdity and its principle is non-contradiction and excluded middle, this nondual possibility means nothing to us, we say, but then historically we have killed anyone who held this kind of opinion or belief, so it must have some importance. Its importance is that once you go into nonduality, all duals cease to be effective and power systems tend to crumble. So a good example is Meister Eckhart, who was targeted by the inquisition, but they did not get to him before he died. He definitely had a nondual position and the only reason he escaped the inquisition is that death claimed him first unlike many others who were put to death.

Now Nondual means Not One! Not Two! The best introductory book on the subject is that of Loy called Nonduality.

The only problem with Loy is that he considers Monism to be nondual, and so we definitely reject that idea. Monism and Duality are themselves duals, so nonduality has to be nondual all the way down, not just at the surface level of concepts.

Now the dynamic which has played out in the major traditions we know is that there is dualism such as that in confucianism, and eventually someone comes up with the concept of nonduality as in Taoism, and then this causes problems because no set of dichotomies can capture the nondual position which is outside the combinatorial field but precisely nowhere, nowhen. Basically dualisms cannot handle this position and it escapes their net, and so it is very dangerous and disruptive. In China we see this in a pure form because Chinese is a non-Indo-European language with no Being in it and also based on Masses with a Mass logic. So it is a kind of pure case, and with the recent documents that were discovered that gives us insight into court Taoism we know a lot now about the dynamics between Confucianism and Taoism that was eventually suppressed in the tradition. There was developed in the Chinese tradition a rapprochement between these two irreconcilable views with the idea that you were a confucian as long as you were in office but became a Taoist when you left service among the upper classes. This dichotomy was reinforced by the destruction of all the court Taoism texts. So nonduality as the ultimate heresy was pushed to the periphery. But still played a cultural role as an escape valve from the pressure cooker of Confucian dualism. Also Confucianism had some pieces that could be interpreted nondually and so it was possible if you were really smart to be a Confucian Taoist as we see in Knowledge Painfully Acquired by Lo Chen Shun.

The nondual in Taoism is the Void, which is basically empty space and called Wuji, the absolute (literally no ridgepole) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei) or Wu Wei NonAction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei) It does not mean doing nothing, but means acting with the Tao or Way in a way that produces Te or virtue. (in more modern texts these transliteration ‘T’s are ‘D’s) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao)

In a completely different Indo-European tradition in India, the Buddha had a similar idea that was outside the combinatorics of structural distinctions in the Hindu tradition. But here there was a different factor because the Indo-European is unique among languages because of the grammatical presence of the concept of Being (Sat). Buddha believed that the ego had no Being, and was thus Empty. He did not claim this for the other Dharmas (Tattvas). But this was a crucial turning point in the Indian intellectual history. This was amazingly disruptive within the Indo-European tradition. This is because unlike in Taoism Buddhism was a rejection of the central concept and central grammatical construct in the Sanscrit and other related Indo-European languages that were dominant in northern India. But on the other hand there was also the non-Indo-European influences of the marginalized Tamil and other languages. We can see that in the adoption of the idea from the Tamil tradition of Tattvas as a central concept called the Dharma. How deep this influence from the south was I don’t know but it could be that the idea of confronting Existence and escaping Being could have come from the relationship between northern and southern cultures. But it is more likely that it was a sui generis discovery which then called on those resources after the discovery was made. For instance it is interesting that Buddhism continued to be strong in Shri Lanka and other southern countries like Thailand. Buddhism was definitely a counter cultural trend that appealed to non-Indo-European speakers who had interaction with Indo-Europeans who considered themselves superior and were dominant politically and culturally in India.

Eventually Hinayana Buddhism transformed into Mahayana Buddhism as some of the contradictions within Buddhism. So for instance all Dharmas were seen as Empty. And the ideal of the BoddhiSattva replaced the idea of the Buddha. And Buddhism became more and more philosophically sophisticated. This was helped by the fact that although Sanscrit was an Indo-European language it had a Mass Logic rather than the Syllogistic Set based logic, and so Sanscrit could handle very sophisticated ideas of pervasion relationships unlike Greek Logic. There were many kinds of Mahayana philosophical schools as the tradition explored the space opened up by introducing a nondual idea of emptiness at the center of an Indo-European worldview. Buddhism carried over a lot from the Indo-European Hindu worldview, and transformed it in light of the rejection of the concept of Being and the fundamental turn toward existence as primary while Being was seen as an illusion (Maya, Mara). This challenged the central concept within Hindu philosophy SAT or Being. SAT CITTA ANANDA. Being Consciousness Bliss. Atman was seen as the ultimate transhuman actor of consciousness (What is seen through everybody’s eyes) and the Buddhists declared ASAT and ANATMAN negating these key concepts of Being and the WorldSoul. The key character in this challenge of the Buddhists to Hindu assumptions was Nagarjuna. He was a skeptic that just deconstructed everything and tried to show that everything was empty. But his major success was the attack on logic itself, showing that there were primordial discontinuities in logic between AND, OR, NOT where emptiness lived, so that emptiness could not be separated from Logic itself. This convinced the Indians that they could not escape nondualism and so under the auspices of Shankara’s reinterpretation of the Upanishads based on the idea of emptiness AS Being they reabsorbed this dangerous philosophy and thus saved logic, and Buddhism faded away in India. But it continued to be strong in South Asia, China and Tibet, all non-Indo-European contexts to which it was transfered and which it found to be a natural milieu because of the lack of Being as a central concept in those languages and cultures.

What is significant is that in Tibet the Buddhist tradition lived on as it waned elsewhere and continued to have very erudite scholars and great philosophers who continued to develop the Buddhist tradition understanding it and adding to it Tantric strands taken over from Hinduism. In Tantrism you actually visualize deities and other powers and then see them as Empty, so it mixes in a strange way the projection of the illusions of Being and the philosophy of Emptiness. It is out of Tantrism in Tibet that Majushrimitra comes. He is trying to give a foundation for the MahaMudra and other Tantric practices. In a way Tantrism is the reabsorption of Maya back into the religion, but to reabsorb it you ultimately need to go to the next higher meta-level and at that meta-level the two truths must go. So what Manjushrimitra does is basically reapply the logic of Nagarguna back to Buddhism itself and denies the duality of the two truths, so that in fact Buddhism evaporates. And at the same time the difference between Void in Bon/Taoism and Emptiness in Buddhism evaporates. It is thought of as the supreme school of Buddhism because it is something that takes you beyond the limits of Buddhism back to something more like Taoism. It is as if in DzogChen Taoism swallows up Buddhism instead of the opposite. There are some schools in China like Tien Tai and Hua Yen of Fa Tsang that come close to doing the same thing, by keeping distinct the ideas from Buddhism and Taosim but finding a middle way between them. One of the most interesting characters in this movement is StoneHouse who was a Taoist and Zen Monk and Hermit who wrote poetry. In his poetry there is sometimes one line of emptiness and then the next line of Void. This kind of fine distinction between emptiness and void and its interleaving is a very sophisticated way of looking at existence, and I believe that unadulterated DzogChen is a philosophical counterpart of this kind of sophistication that goes beyond Buddhism to re-appropriate Taoism. And similarly it can be used to go beyond Taoism to re-appropriate Buddhism. It hints that there is a deeper kind of nonduality that goes beyond both Emptiness and Void. And if this is true this is very deep. We can call this the fourth turning of the Wheel of Dharma. The first was Hinayana, second was Mahayana, third was Tantrayana, and fourth is DzogChen/Hua Yen/Tien Tai which although very different from each other are all pointing to this next level of nonduality.

Now what I want to do is attempt to consider the relation between this fourth turning of the Wheel and what I call the Homeward Path, i.e. the idea that the Western Worldview has at its center a nondual core. We just mention briefly that the equivalent of this in the West is Sufism within the Western nondual heritage of Islam. Islam is just as disruptive in its nonduality within the extreme dualistic tradition of the West as Buddhism and Jainism was in India. This nondual aspect is only seen in Sufism, not in normal Islam which is just as bound to Aristotelianism as the Western Worldivew, because it is basically the same as the Western worldview, i.e. a thin veneer of religion over a deep foundation of Greek and Roman culture. Only difference is that it did not have its own Inquisition and it accepted the Christian Heretics in droves, and thus Sufism became a medley of non-dual beliefs that was allowed to persist at the heart of the Islamic religion. But this is not the core of our argument but only a side light to show that this problem of the advent of non-duality affects the Eurocentric Indo-European branch too. Developing a non-dual heresy is a global cultural phenomena within sophisticated cultures.

Now if we think about this Fourth turning of the wheel and the fact that there may be a deeper nonduality beyond Emptiness and Void, in relation to the Western worldview this give us a very interesting view of the possibilities of our worldview. The Western worldview is fragmented and dualisitic outwardly, but inwardly nondual. Tibetan Buddhism has transfered itself to the USA due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Tibetan Buddhism because it is a continuous living tradition from the Buddha down to the present day has a lot of vitality. But, of course, because it is very old and has a lot of things mixed up in it from different periods this form of Buddhism is a real mess. And the fact that DzogChen does not seemed to have survived whole within it, at least judging from the texts, makes the whole thing somewhat problematic. However, we hope that somewhere in there a thread of the fourth turning of the wheel exists. However, we can at least point to one one Bon practitioner who seems to be elucidating the same point of view as Mipham and Manjushrimitra. The key is that because the fourth turning is free of any particular nondual surface phenomena such as we see in Buddhism or Taoism that can be dual to other nondual approaches. The Fourth Turning is purely nondual and it is not even dual with other non-dualities. So it is a fundamentally trans-religious approach. When this comes into contact in some real way, being embodied by someone who is in a line of transmission, with the Western worldview then interesting things should happen, because the Western worldview has a nondual core. The Homeward Path is the embodying of the fourth turning at the core of the Western worldview.

Buddhism is a fundamentally Indo-European phenomena. Because the West has eliminated physically anyone who advocated anything like nondual paths before this is why in modern times when traditional religious views have waned there is a fascination with nondual religions. Among these Buddhism is the one which was from the first adapted to the Indo-European worldview and has a structure based on the levels of nonduality within that worldview. So when DzogChen/Tien Tai/Hua Yen (the theory behind Chan/Zen) comes to the West it immediately goes to the core of the worldview. But since the fourth turning is not dependent on any religion, and the Western worldview is so based on religion as a determining differentiation, it is as if this fourth turning completely slips though the net of distinctions that the Western worldview is based upon. It does not matter what Nondual tradition you adopt, the matter of the deeper nondual is the same for all of them if it can be indicated in any of them. Buddhism has found several ways to indicate the fourth turning. Sufism has its own ways of indicating it. But whether you are Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist, Bon, or any other truly nondual way, the forth turning level is the same, it is utterly nondual even in its nonduality. So it is impossible to pin down in any one Nondual Way. In this way Tibetan Buddhists, Bon practitioners, Sufis, Taoists, Zen Buddhists, etc are all on the same path in some sense. Of course, it is mandatory to be on some particular spiritual path in order to make progress. In other words this is not a repudiation of Non-dual paths, and also it is not saying that all Spiritual paths end up at the same place, because they don’t. But it merely says that the Fourth Turning of the wheel indicates a state which can be attained in any Path where the nondual nature is perfect and whole and utterly nondual in every respect. Such a nonduality cannot be captured by any one path. And it is expected that this path when embodied and transmitted will have profound effects on the Western worldview because of the worldview’s nondual core.

So now lets talk about the nondual core of the Western worldview for a little while. The concept that has always been prominent in the Western worldivew is that Being is One, there is one supreme concept built into the language, organizing everything which is unified and totalized. Being is the highest concept but also the most empty, but on the other hand it actually organizes everything though the aspects of Being which are Identity, Presence, Truth and Reality. But when we look more carefully we see that Being is in fact Being is fragmented into the Meta-levels (Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild, and Ultra). And due to this fragmentation of Being we can show that Emptiness is there in the discontinuities between the meta-levels or kinds of Being, and between the aspects of Being. Basically anywhere that there are fundamental discontinuities we can posit the presence of emptiness as the discontinuity. So just like emptiness is there in the fundamental distinctions between the logical operators so to it is there between the discontinuities between the kinds of Being. And thus emptiness is present in the core of Being, i.e. in its meta-levels.

Another important point is that the meta-levels of Being are like stairs to nowhere. It turns out that there is a phase transition as you go up the stairs of the meta-levels at the fifth meta-level into existence. Ultra Being is what being looks like from the point of view of Existence, i.e. a singularity, and because of the uniqueness of Being in Indo-European languages alone we can see that singularity as a unique feature of this family of languages. But also at the Fifth meta-level we see two interpretation of existence that stand out as Emptiness or Void, and Ultra Being is the Domain Wall between these two kinds of nonduality.

This shows up in DzogChen. Void is like Spacetime without anything in it. Emptiness is defined by interiority. So Void is the the physical lack of anything except the singular existence of spacetime everywhere. This is why the Taoists only believe in nature and the alignment with nature and they reduce consciousness and sociality to nature. This can be seen in the works of the court Taoists recently recovered. On the other hand Buddhists do not believe in the physical reality of the world, but reduce everything to consciousness which at base is seen as empty. All things are empty because they are transient states in consciousness, and they have no reality beyond that. Physical things are reduced to their phenomenal appearance in consciousness and then are seen to be empty aggregates. Of course, both of these views are true. But the interesting thing is that we know from studying Bose Einstein condensates that there are different kinds of singularity. You can have point singularities, vortices which are around string singularities, and you can have two dimensional singularities which are domain walls. Space can be broken up into different pockets with different characteristics separated by domain walls. Ultra Being is a singularity that with respect to Void acts as a domain wall that produces various cells of interiority which have the character of emptiness. Basically Void is unstriated nonduality and Emptiness is striated nonduality. Both of these kinds of nonduality separated by illusory domain walls of Ultra Being, i.e. dual kinds of nonduality, both are the same, and that sameness is what is indicated by DzogChen, Hua Yen, Tien Tai and other paths that indicate the fourth turning of the wheel of the Dharma. Notice that the turnings of the wheels of the Dharma are a lot like the meta-levels of Being. However, Existence is unstriated while Being is striated. So Existence in itself has no differentiation into Emptiness or Void. Rather these are different interpretations of Existence as intrinsically nondual. However, be that as it may we can still see that Hinayana Buddhism corresponds to the level of Pure Being, i.e. with Nirvana and escape from the wheel of Samsara we are trying to reach some sort of permanent state of non-being free from birth and death. With Mahayana we have something like Process Being where the goal is that of the Bodhisattva and not the Buddha. In other words the Bodhisattva vows to enter Nirvana only after all other Sentient beings have entered, so the Bodhisattva takes part in the infinite process of the unfolding of Karma and has resigned himself to continual rebirth inorder to help all other beings, thus attaining humility and compassion. And in fact this is seen as a higher kind of enlightenment than Nirvana. There is no thought of Pari-Nirvana anytime soon.

Tantrayana is a lot like Hyper Being. I really don’t understand why Buddhists would want mess with illusion again doing tantric practices, once illusion has been left behind. Calling up images of deities only to see them as empty seems counter productive. But if you put this in the context of Hyper Being or what Derrida calls Difference then I can make from sense. If Emptiness is Form and Form is Emptiness then playing with the relation between form and emptiness is certain to give you more insight into the distinction between the two and how that distinction keeps slip sliding away. However, playing with this distinction can devolve into Magic. So there is a danger.

Now when we come to the Fourth Turning we are really in new territory that has not been explored completely. But this is a lot like Wild Being. When we say that these kinds of emptiness are a lot liken the kinds of Being what we are really saying is that these various kinds of emptiness are the antidotes for the sorts of illusion represented by the particular meta-level of Being. In other words Emptiness has an antidote for each kind of Being. Wild Being is the most fragmented, and the most difficult to think kind of Being. Its image is the Mandelbrot Set. The emptiness is the lack of continuity between the points in the Mandelbrot set that comes from Complex numbers and the loss of the unity of the conjugate that occurs in the advent of imaginary numbers. At this level each point has a line of flight, that is its acceleration toward infinity, which gives it an intensity that represents the coloring of the Mandelbrot set. In the Mandelbrot set you can see how the pattern is shot through with emptiness. You can also see how that permeation by emptiness is infinitely deep, it is at every level no matter how much you zoom in. And there are equivalent three and four dimensional analogs at the levels of the Quaternions and the Octonions. This is the analogy for Wild Being. Wild Being is very hard to think. It is basically a two dimensional imaginary plane. In Western Philosophy this level has been explored by Deleuze, but also John S. Hans, and others who have tried to develop philosophies at this level of Being. What is clear is that at each of these higher levels of Being the cracks and discontinuities in Being become more prevalent and thus the emptiness is much more easy to see. So at the Hyper Being level there are discontinuities that appear in the play of DifferAnce, but at the Wild Being level the whole imaginary plane is shot through with separation between the points that each have their intensity and line of flight acceleration.

This brings us to a speculation that beyond this fourth turning there is a fifth turning, that we have not gotten to yet which is like Ultra Being. We will not explore that here but the possibility of yet another turning is important to recognize.

So back to the question. The difference between Mahayana and Dzogchen must take into account that between the second turning and the fourth turning there is the tuning of the wheel of the Dharma related to Tantrayana. Dzogchen is a specific departure in an orthogonal direction from Tatrayana. And so there is no specific difference between Mahayana and Dzogchen, outside of the difference between Mahayana and Tantrayana and between Tatrayana and DzogChen. To understand this difference in question we must understand the other differences. These differences between the different turnings of the wheel of the Dharma are the striations of emptiness, its own fragmentation into kinds. But Existence has no differentiation, and so that means that these kinds of emptiness only appear to be there in response to the specific needs of the kinds of Being, each kind of Being needs its own antidote. The difference in these two turnings of the wheel of the Dharma depends on the depth of illusion (Being) that you are addressing.

This takes us to the concept of the Alayavijyana (Storehouse Consciousness) as we see in the Awakening of Faith. In that storehouse is laid down the seeds of karma and we can see that these seeds are probably working at the Wild Being level. The Seeds are intensities laid down within the emptiness itself which later sprout forms. Here again the Mandelbrot set gives us an interesting model. The points in the Imaginary plane do not move, but it is only their self iteration that allows us to measure their escape velocity toward infinity along their recursive line of flight. But when we look across the various points that are near each other we see the pattern that they make together which is fractal, and changing at each level of zooming in, and this zooming in goes on forever. The patterning never ends is ever changing now matter how deeply you go, but none of the points ever change or move, they are there frozen forever, there intensity is only recalled when they are recursively iterated upon. This model of the Storehouse Consciousness is the way the relation between karma and emptiness are understood. Normally you would think that with emptiness there can be no Karma which requires continuity and substance to carry the fate of the reincarnating individual. But here we see that it is possible for those seeds of karma to be laid down in the emptiness itself, only activated again to form a pattern with adjacent points if their recursive iteration allows them to be reactivated.

Now back to the Western Worldview. For each meta-level of illusion, i.e. Kind of Being there is an antidote with a turning of the wheel and a reinterpretation of emptiness. There is a perfect isomorphism here because Buddhism came from the Indo-European wordview and retains its internal structure with respect to the levels of nonduals within its core. Those nonduals are Order, Right, Good, Fate, Sources, Root. So Buddhism addresses each of these levels with a kind of Emptiness. The emptiness disrupts the dualistic surface phenomena of the worldview and allows the inner light of the worldview’s core to shine through. The positive fourfold of the worldview is Heaven/Earth//Mortals//Immortals as defined by Socrates and taken up by Heidegger. However, it is the negative fourfold given to us in the theogony of Aristophanes in the Birds which says that the first principles were Chaos, Abyss, Night and Covering. When we reverse these we get Order, Ground, Light, and Uncovering (Aleithia, Process level truth). So the first nondual is Order which is one of the first principles on which the worldview was founded. The successive nonduals take us deeper into the core of the worldview. Grounding is the attempt at self-grounding of the worldview in Being which always turns out impossible, and thus emptiness appears as this impossibility go ground ourselves and thought. When the emptiness disrupts the surface dualism then it is seen as a burst or Novum of White Light. This is the light of consciousness itself with which the emptiness is identified. Finally, the emptiness unlocks the truth at each of the meta-levels of Being. And that Truth is simultaneously  a Reality, Presence and Identity. This is called Prajna.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_in_Buddhism)

Because Existence itself is unstriated. In some sense there is no difference between the kinds of emptiness that appears in response to the various meta-levels of Being. So in a sense there is no difference between Hinayana, Mahayana, Tantrayana, DzogChen, etc. These differences are only apparent because emptiness itself is only striated to the extent that the homeopathic medicine for each deeper sort of illusion supported by the meta-levels of Being are different. We are talking here of deeper and deeper miasms of illusion with each level having its own homeopathic level of cure. Emptiness is reinterpreted in the context of each deeper miasm to which it brings a homeopathic cure. But Existence itself is unchanged by these reinterpretations in light of the meta-levels of Being.

Now when we bring this back again to the Western worldview and its fragmentation, darkness, groundlessness, disorder and conflict, and covering up of the truth through the nihilism it produces, we see that the emptiness at each level of Being has the cure for the Maya/Mara that exists at that level, and each of the levels in turn. Thus the five turnings of the wheel of Dharma correspond to what is necessary to unlock the nonduality at the core of the Western worldview itself. And by the way, each of our selves are built on that same structure because we are beings-in-the-world, In other words the Worldview is the same structure as that of our Self. So deconstructing the worldview though the various turnings of the wheel of the Dharma is tantamount to the deconstruction of the self by a homeopathic tincture or a ruse or skillful means of one kind or another appropriate to the situation of the person who is seeking enlightenment. Now if we posit that DzogChen is the fourth turning of the wheel of Dharma, then we can know that there is at least one more turning of that wheel before it goes full circle. That is the fifth turning which accesses the deepest level of nonduality. It is interesting that this turning does not appear to have happened in the history of Buddhism so far. Buddhism in DzogChen transcends itself. The only place to go after that is back to the immanence within itself. The fifth turning of the wheel of Dharma is that which brings it back to the beginning. It answers the call of Ultra Being by revealing beyond the deeper nondual of manifestation, the essence of manifestation. For this terminology we should look at M. Henry’s Essence of Manifestation who basis his work on Meister Eckhart and his theory of the Godhead and its emptiness, which is like a boiling desert with no limits. If we call the deeper nondual between Void/Emptiness manifestation, then there is only beyond that the Amanifest. In the Amanifest the singularity of Ultra Being as the existence of Being evaporates. Emptiness and void become the same thing, and as is said in DzogChen “Mind is like Space.” The source of manifestation is not the unmanifest, the so called Essence of Manifestation, but instead the even deeper nondual of the Amanifest.

What all of this says is that in the difference between DzogChen and Mahayana arises the Tantrayana. And out of Tatrayana arises DzogChen a heresy of Buddhism, that is freed from the constraints of any one nondual way, and thus is practiced by Bon practitioners as well. But freedom from the specific nondual paths is not the end of the story. There is a fifth turning of the wheel yet to be discovered and explored which I call the Homeward path, it is the path back to the nondual heart of the Western worldview beyond all its superficial dualism. Stand in that core and you are finally at home with your Self.