The Vampire Goddess
Essay #6 of Samsara the Goddess
Samsara is not a place, she is a Goddess and you are her!
This post builds on ideas from: Essay #1, The Two Natures Essay #2, The Superpowers of Samsara Essay #3, The Tragedy of Samsara Essay #4, Obscuration and Blindness Essay #5, Brambles, Traps and Obstacles
A ridiculous conundrum
Our inner Goddess Samsara creates the real world of things and forms.
The real world of things and forms has flaws (way too much suffering).
We discover Dharma to correct these flaws.
We remember Dharma insights, as things and forms in the real world.
Go back to step 2.
Introduction
The Goddess Samsara deceives all sentient beings, but she saves her most devious delusions for Dharma students. Dharma students interfere with her vital work of creating the real world in order to meet Basic Human Needs. Plus, they have this insane suicidal notion of subduing her.
So naturally she defends herself. Watch out! Just when you think you’ve got her cornered — your clarity vanishes — your Dharma becomes discombobulated and nullified — suddenly you’re stumbling in the dark. And the worst part is, YOU DON’T EVEN REALIZE YOU GOT ZAPPED.
(A personal note: I’m losing my marbles. Maybe Mara’s minions are shooting me full of arrows. Maybe I’ve taken a wrong turn and this essay is bullshit. I’m sick of working on obscurations. Each editing pass drains more life energy. I hope this helps somebody.)
Boiler plate stuff →→
These essays present an understanding of Dharma tailored to Westerners and smartphone addicts. While this perspective does not contradict a traditional understanding, it omits two ideas that often mystify Westerners: reincarnation and karma. Instead, it approaches the Buddhist path through a framework of Basic Human Needs, inspired by Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communications.
There are many understandings. This is just another one. Any understanding of Dharma that’s worth it’s salt leaves one calmly, firmly, on the doorstep of Practice. I hope to achieve that goal.
Why do I call the Goddess a vampire?
Calling her a vampire is pretty extreme. I call her that because:
Subduing her is the main challenge of the Dharma path.
She’s at the root of suffering.
She actively, purposely interferes with my Dharma progress.
She’s a double agent, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
She steals my ethics, my insights, my practice, my hopes and dreams, and uses them against me.
I can’t really blame a vampire for being a vampire; she’s just being her normal monstrous self. But us Dharma students, we get bitten and bleed. My feelings of frustration have reached the point where I’m wanting to call her ‘The Bitch’ but I’m going to try and avoid doing that. :(
A new list of needs and priorities
We inherited the Goddess and her to-do list of needs (and priorities), from billions of generations of sentient beings, all competing to survive.
Let’s refer to the Goddess’ list of needs as ‘samsaric’ needs. All sentient species from bugs to blue whales have their own list of samsaric needs, and each individual has a Goddess obsessed with fulfilling those needs.
Surprise! Surprise! As us sentient beings go about living, dying and reproducing, every once in a while, a NEW list arises. This list is similar to samsaric needs but the priorities have changed, and a mysterious new need appears. IT’S THE NEED FOR ENLIGHTENMENT! I refer to this new list of needs as ‘bodhisattva’ needs. Some would argue that bodhisattva needs are latent in all sentient beings.
So now we’ve got two lists: samsaric needs and bodhisattva needs. Sadly, samsaric and bodhisattva needs are incompatible. The Goddess Samsara seeks strategies for achieving material success in the real world. She’s in a hurry to get things done and inner peace is not a priority. Would she approve of spending a few years meditating alone in a cave? Nope.
Samsaric and bodhisattva needs have much in common. We’ve all got to survive. The most important need that they share, is the need to contribute to the wellbeing others. The Goddess is totally onboard with this. She just doesn’t like sitting around twiddling your thumbs and contemplating your navel.
How the Goddess sucks the blood out of Dharma
Samsara sees jewels emanating from Emptiness. She cannot resist stealing them in order to meet samsaric needs. The tiniest sparkle is fodder for her strategies and manipulations.
Our inner Goddess is obsessed with meeting samsaric needs. Our inner bodhisattva strives and aspires to meet bodhisattva needs. Here’s the weird thing. When samsaric needs conflict with bodhisattva needs, Samsara has the upper hand.
The Goddess devours ALL experience, including Dharma experience. She’s looking for anything that might help her to meet a samsaric need. And if she finds something that might help her meet a samsaric need, that is what she saves into the Inner Library. And that is what creates our real world. And that is what we remember.
(If this isn’t making sense please read the previous essays.)
Samsara — does not care — about precious Dharma insights. Our inner bodhisattva might work like crazy to invite a lovely Dharma insight. The Goddess examines the insight, finds way it might meet a samsaric need, and that is what she saves into the Inner Library. And that creates our real world. And that is what we remember and how we will think about the Dharma insight. Our Dharma experience which arose from meeting bodhisattva needs, is now remembered as a strategy for meeting SAMSARIC needs.
It sounds crazy. Our inner bodhisattva stumbles across a diamond, and then our inner Goddess transforms the diamond into a happy pill or a thing to impress people. She’s completely pulled the rug out from under Dharma. We have this vague recollection of the diamond, which we forget in the excitement of finding a pill which will get us attention and respect and relieve depression.
for example
(Trust me, knowing this craziness is happening does not stop it from happening. AND IT CAN HAPPEN IN SECONDS!!!)
First second: I’m on the porch practicing, and I’m flooded with the beauty of the junk in the yard.
Second second: My inner Goddess digests the experience. She thinks to herself, ‘That felt good. Let’s save it for a happy pill that we can take the next time we’re depressed.’
Third second: I turn to go back inside the house, feeling some sadness. My inner Goddess jams the new happy pill down my throat (just like with a pet). Does it work? NO!
Now we’ve got TWO Dharmas!
Yep. I call them ‘true Dharma’ and ‘delusional Dharma’. We experience true Dharma during practice. Samsara then digests the true Dharma with an eye to meeting samsaric needs, and poops out delusional Dharma.
True Dharma
True Dharma is our moment-to-moment struggle for Emptiness, Bodhicitta, Renunciation, and Enlightenment. Practicing! Concentration! Meditation! Visualization. Intense focus on the true nature of existence. Warm inexpressible sparkling Clear-light…
Delusional Dharma
Delusional Dharma consists of dharmic things and forms in the real world. Looking outward we see things like statues, gompas, monasteries, sanghas, gurus, rituals, lineages, organizations, views, books and so on. Looking inward we see things like memories of insights and practices, relationships with teachers and peers, retreat memories, hopes, plans, etc.
Delusional Dharma is vast and beautiful. It meets many samsaric needs: community, identity, status, connection, creative expression, leadership, CONTRIBUTION… It’s an excellent foundation for community and spirituality. It’s a Dharma that’s made to share. It’s a stepping stone or springboard into true Dharma. So much good stuff.
BUT IT’S A DELUSION. IT’S EMPTY. It ain’t the real deal. It’s a lovely story. And once you’re buried up to your eyeballs in it, it’s very hard to get out.
For me personally, no matter how far along the Path I travel, I always always always start, by craving, grasping, and clinging to delusional Dharma. I’m doing it now, as we speak. I may correct things later, but that’s how I always start. :(
Am I STUCK in delusional Dharma?
IT’S NOT OBVIOUS WHEN WE’RE STUCK THERE. We’re designed to be blind! (I don’t think the blindness goes away until we accept the fact that we are ALWAYS blind.) So how do we tell if we’re lost, blind and floundering in delusional Dharma?
We’ve given up on practice, or we never started.
Practices don’t deliver a payoff: no insights, no Clear-light.
Our Dharma is full of boredom, hopelessness or disappointment. Like what’s the point? Our Dharma is stuck in the mud; we keep spinning the wheels and get nowhere.
We have a DEEP craving for ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘progress’, or DEEP disgust for our very own Dharma stupidity.
We feel the buzz of power and success. Good work. Happy students. Veneration. Everything is a little too wonderful and happy. We’ve dipped our toe into the God Realm.
It’s easier for a newbie with a beginner’s mind. But if you’re advanced, or god forbid a teacher, well then you’re f**ked. By this point the Goddess has a death grip on your Dharma. Maybe do years of retreat, millions of prostrations, or sit down in a grove and either die or … Maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe not.
If you feel confident, if Dharma makes sense, if you understand the Right View and the Path from beginning to end, if you know what you’re after and what to avoid, in those cases — you are swimming in the real world of delusional Dharma. You’ve been scammed by that sneaky bitch Samsara. Ha!
We might as well laugh about it. We’re always having to go back to square one. And where is square one? Gibberish, poetry, play, curiosity, and innocent practice from the soul (offspring of that bodhisattva need for Enlightenment).
Suffering and delusional Dharma
Explanations and Views are Corrupted
hijacked by the Goddess’ delusional Dharma
The Three Jewels, Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, Five Precepts, Five Aggregates, Twelve Links, Four Immeasurables, Six Perfections, Sutras, Realms... It’s such a beautiful landscape. It’s a vast map of thousands of stepping stones into true Dharma. We could join the legions of scholars who spend their lives studying, teaching and commenting on it. That would be a good thing.
I need a name for this enormous cosmic Buddhist map-thing-presentation. How about the Bodhi-verse.
true Dharma
Is the delusional Bodhi-verse a problem?
The size and complexity of the Bodhi-verse can crush the spirit. It squashes beginners into hopeless immobility.
Studying the Bodhi-verse masquerades as engaging with true Dharma.
The Bodhi-verse is like a thousands fingers pointing at true Dharma. Pretty soon we become students of pointing fingers.
True Dharma is uncomfortable because it destroys our conventional sense of the real world. It’s easier to float from finger to lovely finger in the Bodhi-verse than face that uncomfortable truth.
The essential lessons of the Bodhi-verse might well exist in your fingernail, or a salt shaker. The vastness and majesty of the Bodhi-verse blinds us to this possibility.
Explanations and Views are beautiful stories on the shelves of the Inner Library. They are EMPTY. They are nothing more than invitations to examine our experience. False explanations and Views are not heresy, just more invitations. Realizing that the false is false, is just as important as realizing the truth.
One can understand the truth until they are blue in the face. But you worship at the feet of the Goddess Samsara, until you fully, directly, non-verbally, engage with the elements of your understanding. (This is the meaning of stupidly misnamed ‘Analytical Meditation’. It ain’t analytical!)
When explanations and Views become real, true, permanent, correct, right and worthy of grasping, beware beware beware.
Language is Corrupted
hijacked by the Goddess’ delusional Dharma
Words are slippery and Dharma words are super-slippery. Our inner Goddess transforms important words like Wisdom, Bodhicitta, Enlightenment, etc. into things we can crave and grasp. So sad.
I ask you, is Enlightenment Empty? In other words, is it a story, a made-up tale about some kind of heavenly light?
If your answer is ‘NO, Enlightenment is real; it is tangible; it is permanent (once you’ve got it); it is a goal and a solution AND I WANT IT!!!’ If this is your answer, than your inner Goddess has taken the wind, and cast it in concrete.
true Dharma
Dharma concepts are vague suggestions of experience arising from Buddha Nature. They are poetic guides for inspiration, exploration and practice, not well defined things and forms.
Enlightenment DOES — NOT — EXIST! Try defining it with parts, causes and conditions.
Perhaps it is impossible to speak or write the Dharma. Perhaps it is impossible to understand the Dharma.
Insights are Corrupted
hijacked by the Goddess’ delusional Dharma
Your cool insight will bring on a blinding celebration. You’ll be dumb as a stump until the Samsara gets tired of partying.
Your hard-won insight will be transformed into a thing or form, in order that we can remember and repeat the insight, and use the insight to meet samsaric needs. This blinds our direct access to the insight. The destruction can happen within seconds of having the insight.
true Dharma
Insights are what it’s all about. But they are always born or reborn from the present moment. They can’t be dredged up from the past. I think about remembered insights like they were ribbons on the wall of a child athlete; they’re a reminder of what’s possible.
Practice is Corrupted
hijacked by the Goddess’ delusional Dharma
I (the ‘me’ thing) is going to practice (do a practice thing) repeatedly, in order to move toward Wisdom (the Emptiness thing) or maybe I’m doing it to be a good Buddhist (one of them things).
We’ve have a tried and true plan, a schedule and an expected payoff. What could go wrong? Wait a minute. What happened to the present moment?
We try to re-create transcendent moments from a past practice. The memory comes from the Inner Library. That means Samsara has already infected it.
We have a well defined practice procedure. But we execute without awareness or curiosity. We’re just trying to get the thing done.
The Goddess doesn’t like doing the same thing over and over; it’s a waste of her energy. If you force her, she’ll try to run the repetitions on automatic. No matter how wonderful the practice, eventually she’ll turn it stale and ignorable.
I circumambulated a Stupa for 18 months. It was wonderful. Then suddenly my perception changed, in a way that nullified the Dharma benefit. It took two years to wear off and now I can occasionally go back.
true Dharma
A practice is a step, an intension, from the real world toward Wisdom and Enlightenment.
The same practice is always different. Every practice session is unique, and every repetition is unique. Always, by the law of impermanence.
Failing at a practice can be as enlightening as succeeding.
There are infinite ways to execute any practice. If you’re not moving toward Wisdom and Enlightenment, if you’re not getting a payoff in insight or ecstasy, try something a little different.
The Lineage is Corrupted
hijacked by the Goddess’ delusional Dharma
Near the top of our Goddess’ list of samsaric needs, sits our need for leadership: the need be a leader, and the need to follow good leaders. In order to fulfill leadership needs the Goddess Samsara transforms our gurus and teachers into SUPERHEROES.
They do not obey the laws of physics. They have it all worked out. They can concentrate forever. They are telepathic, omniscient, and explode with bodhicitta. We hang on their every word and offer endless veneration.
Is this a problem?
true Dharma
You must become the Buddha. You must climb the mountain. You must sit on the cloud. Only you can see the truth. No one else can see it for you.
If we believe the Buddha because he was a superhero, we are lost.
(By the way, the idea of knowing and understanding everything, is a complete fairy tale.)
The Path is Corrupted
hijacked by the Goddess’ delusional Dharma
I’m a Buddhist. Yay! I seek Enlightenment. I’ve gained concentration skills; I’ve done retreats; I have a Guru(s); I’m studying advanced subjects. I intend to walk the Dharma Path until I die or until I become Enlightened. I’m on my way to the Bhumis.
true Dharma
The Heart Sutra sez: ‘The Path is Empty.’ What does this mean? (I don’t even know.) We’re always at square one.
If by many many practices And much much practicing, We dial back our awareness to near zero We shrink our selves to less and less and less Until we are no longer bulls in a china shop. At that point a miracle occurs Which is incomprehensible to Western smartphone addicts Like me. Incomprehensible because it has no antecedents Incomprehensible because it arises from zilch Incomprehensible because although it is fundamental nature It is neither a particle or a wave Incomprehensible because we are atheists And how could something rich and warm and sweet Arise from pure nothingness Unless it was the work of God? Is this The Path? Is drowning a Path? Is self-immolation a Path? Is quiet immobility a Path? Is a gigantic exhalation a Path? A Path with no destination? The Path of giving up the Path? Bodhi-rapture hums softly under it’s breath Infant Clear-light barely opens it’s eyes (Were they both there all along?) That’s why buddha statues are are so quiet.
A Thousand Years of Corruption
hijacked by the Goddess’ delusional Dharma
Our Goddess Samsara is obsessed with meeting samsaric needs. To that end, she fills her Inner Library with useful things and forms and strategies. She herself discovers many of them. Others are learned from our parents, teachers and peers.
In other words, the Goddesses share what they’ve learned with each other. This creates a sort of culture-wide meta-Goddess, a culture-wide Inner Library, and a culture-wide reality, which is passed from generation to generation.
Whatever we experience, Samsara’s ultimate goal is to organize it, classify it, understand it, and control it, so that she can use it to meet samsaric needs. When our culture-wide meta-Goddess encounters a great mystery, she will NEVER cease trying to turn it defined, organized, classified and understood. Never never never. This is most certainly true of our meta-Samsara’s millennia-long assault on mysterious Buddhism !!!!!!
True Dharma
The Dharma will always and forever be a mystery. It cannot be encompassed by words and understanding.
All Dharma is temporary. It will be destroyed. And who will destroy it? You, you will destroy it. And how will I destroy it? By clinging to it and understanding it. If possible, you will destroy it in a second. If it survives a second, then a minute will do, Or an hour or a week or a lifetime. If you alone fail to destroy it Your friends will help. If a lifetime is insufficient, Your culture and descendants Will continue the work for millennia. Sooner or later What was Empty will become full. The unspeakable will be blabbed everywhere. The pure will degenerate. There is no other way. That is the nature of our Goddess Samsara. The Dharma, understood and remembered Is the corrupted work of the Goddess. For this reason we must seek beyond The understood and remembered Dharma.
Conclusion
Enough of obscurations. Now it’s on to LIGHT LIGHT LIGHT!
Thanks for reading.