I was amazed and so pleased that the Beatles film, Magical Mystery Tour, has now been fully digitized and released anew. For years since its inception, way back in 1967, there have only been some bootleg copies circulating around with such a low quality that it was barely watchable. It’s interesting how the arrival of this Mystery Tour DVD in tomorrow’s mail synchronistically coincides with what this Bardo series will be focusing on next—the Deep Samadhi section of Bardo 3. As our study of the Lanka back in Jan-Feb articulated, all the phenomenal gibberish that flows out of the obstructed Mind is nothing more than projections filtered through the Five Skandhas. As the commentary shared at the time:
“Rabbit horns and Gandharvic Castles in the air; the mind, will and consciousness; the five dharmas and modes of reality; long and short, is and isn’t, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob, ect—all are nothing more than a magician’s conjuring trick, designed to keep the great Ferris Wheel of Samsara turning round and round. Red Pine states, “Just as a magician fabricates forms that people imagine as being what they are not, thus does our repository consciousness produce our world of objects as well as our sensory bodies, both of which we imagine to be real, out of the seeds of habit-energy from past discriminations that we once more imagine as being what they are not.” Interesting take on how the defiled seeds of the alaya vijnana, if stirred into motion, create our apparent reality as such–thus initiating that magical mystery tour. One continuous action that dependently originates from all the accumulated habit-energy since time immemorial; as the Lanka itself expounds, “it is based on a dependent reality that the myriad projections of an imagined reality arise—the myriad projections of appearances that are the habit-energy of attachment to projections.”
Our recent study of the Five Dhyani Buddhas hopefully provides a course for halting the conjuror’s trick once and for all. The Skandhic outflows are transmuted into the Wisdom attributes of those Tathagatas. But the transformation doesn’t end there. There’s more work to be done in order to transcend the onslaught of imagery that occurs in the Bardo-proper—the Bardo of re-becoming that will send one spiraling-down into another samsaric-womb unless that womb entrance is sealed by making Full-Stop to the arisal of all-karmic seeds within the alaya receptacle. As stated in the introductory blog of this series, “one awakens to the Diamond-Body, a body impervious to the defiled body consciousness and freely propels the spirit to enter its unborn and imperishable spiritual foundation: the unoriginated Dharmakaya.” As the Śūramgamasamādhisūtra indicates, this “spiritual-body” is “diamond-like, Real, infallible and indestructible.” This great Diamond-Body of the Tathagatas can only be Self-Realized in Deep Samadhis. It is through the Ten Stages of Mind-Development that this Diamond-Body, through Deep Samadhis, is actualized. These Ten-Stages will be our focal-point in subsequent blogs.