Enlightenment - May 10, 2015

Today began as a lazy Sunday. I was dragging myself through Professor Malcolm David Eckel's rather dry account of Buddhism (Great Courses - "Buddhism"). I had been getting more than a bit disappointed -- "Too much information" on Buddha, especially the absolutely central role that reincarnation plays in Hinduism and its offshoots (including Buddhism). There is a huge amount of more or less accurate recollections of Buddha's teachings (he taught for over 40 years and died at about 80). This is quite unlike the "teachings" of Jesus as presented in the New Testament -- always filtered through at least 50 years of interpretation and nascent Christian theology. You hear the voice of Jesus very faintly in the New Testament, if at all. For better or worse, you can "listen in" to the Buddha for as many hours as you have time.

Plodding on through Eckel's lectures, I was dragged through the first 1,000 years or so of evolving Buddhism, along with all the offshoots, controversies and elaborations.  Eventually we got to Tantra, the concept of Emptiness and Tibetan Buddhism came within sight. At some point the lights came on ...

• Reincarnation makes sense after all, if we assume that the "self" is basically an illusion but made up of the influence of tens of thousands of (also illusionary) selves that have gone before. This is an insight I arrived at independently a couple of years ago.

• I remembered a vivid dream I had in my 20's of Llasa -- before I had seen a picture of the place. At the time I wondered at the significance. Now I'm wondering again ...

• The Tantric use of Mandalas struck a deep chord - they were used in exactly the way I visualized the person of Jesus in my short-lived Sunday School classes. They were perhaps over the heads of my students but a breakthrough in understanding duality. This preceded a rather mild "breakdown" in which I checked into hospital to restore my sleep patters - this in turn lead to the end of my Ministerial ambitions but that's another story ...

• Inspired by the Mandala collection, I revisited some of my other "breakdowns" and the attempts I have recently made to explain what really happens in these episodes (fashionably called bipolar illness). For example, one "breakdown" featured the powerful analysis/synthesis duality, which of course made no sense to anybody but me.

• During my times in hospital, especially the early ones, I spent a lot of time patching together pictures in a way that had strong echoes of the mandala ...

• My *first* breakdown featured the "Spirit" system, which presaged the Internet as a way of bringing all of humanity together in a single "mind" or "spirit". This was in 1969, at least 20 years before the invention of the "world wide web" in 1989. This powerful vision lead me straight into a French mental hospital and a series of (involuntary) shock treatments.

As I write, the past is opening up and making much more sense. My story has turned from a disconnected series of disasters into a prelude to enlightenment. 
My "manic" episodes have often been characterized as "breakdowns", but they have felt like "breakthroughs". I certainly don't deny the fact that these mental adventures tended to "burn me out" very quickly, leading inevitably to hospital and general personal disaster. What is new and mysterious is how so many of the ideas trace back to a specific Buddhist outlook that I knew nothing about until today.