Tag Archives: Black Dragon Eye Mandala

The Black Dragon Gate

Dedication

This series is dedicated to the sincere practitioner Scott (Om Vajrapani Hum), whose unwavering devotion to meditation and Dharma sharing has resulted in hundreds of contemplative offerings for the benefit of all beings. Over many years of practice, his work has revealed something essential about the Way of the Unborn: realization does not end in silence but flowers as compassionate activity within the world. Through sound, image, rhythm, and contemplative visualization, his meditative creations invite practitioners to enter the living field of the Dharma. His recent meditation centered upon the Black Dragon Eye Mandala serves as a powerful example of how the symbolic language of awakening can become a direct gateway into contemplative recognition. May this series stand as a gesture of gratitude for his dedication and as a support for all who seek to realize the Unborn Mind. read more

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The Ground (gzhi): The Uncreated Basis and Living Function of All Appearance

Chapter Three — The Ground (gzhi): The Uncreated Basis and Living Function of All Appearance. At the heart of Bön lies a teaching so foundational that everything else—ritual, cosmology, meditation, ethical discipline, visionary practice, and liberation—exists only as its articulation. This teaching is the Ground (gzhi). To misunderstand the Ground is to misunderstand Bön entirely; to recognize it is to see that Bön has never been concerned with belief, improvement, or spiritual attainment, but with the direct acknowledgment of what has always already been so. The Ground is not a metaphysical substance hidden behind the world, nor a first cause from which reality mechanically unfolds. It is not a divine creator, an abstract absolute, or a cosmic principle standing apart from lived experience. Bön describes the Ground as uncreated, timeless, luminous, and self-arising, yet these descriptors are deliberately provisional. They do not define the Ground. They prevent the mind from reducing it to an object of thought. The Ground precedes conceptualization itself. It is not something awareness observes. It is awareness prior to division. read more

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Final Integration; The Great Return

The Culmination of the Path

There is a moment in every spiritual undertaking when words grow thin, and concepts lose their persuasive grip. The long road of teachings, comparisons, distinctions, practices, and debates gradually exhausts itself, until the very act of seeking is revealed to have been occurring within what was never lost. This chapter begins in that exhausted hush—an echoing silence in which the Great Return announces itself, not as an attainment, but as the recognition that nothing needed to be attained. read more

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The Function of Practice

The Paradox of Practice in Non-Dual Traditions

The problem of practice is one of the most enduring paradoxes in non-dual spirituality. If the Absolute is already here—if Brahman is one’s very Self, if the Unborn Mind is the ever-present reality—then why should practice be necessary at all? Any effort to “reach” the goal seems already to betray ignorance, for it implies that the seeker is separate from the sought. Yet traditions across the world insist on the indispensability of practice: discipline, meditation, inquiry, devotion, or mindfulness. How can this contradiction be reconciled? read more

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Lankavatarian Synthesis: Bardo, Bodhi, and Beyond (Part Two)

A continuing series of Unborn Mind discussions with Grok

Lankavatarian Synthesis: Bardo, Bodhi, and Beyond (Part Two) read more

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The Secret Golden Light of the Unborn

The inspiration for this series dawned one day while recollecting an earlier episode in my life as a young man who had been living for three-years in the urban-wildness of South Florida. It was a deeply transitional time in the equally paralleled transitional living-modes of the South Florida experience; indeed, it was a home for “transients” of all types and from all walks of life. The year was 1981 and this young man of 23 found himself reading from a selection of works by Carl Jung entitled “Psyche and Symbol”, a Doubleday paperback priced at $3.50. This young man was deeply impressed by Jung’s erudite mind and quickly became enamored with his insights into the workings of the psyche. One particular chapter dealt with Jung’s commentary on the Daoist classic, “The Secret of the Golden Flower”. Returning to it now in the same old paperback—which has surprisingly survived the passage of time quite well—I’m reliving the mind of this young man who had studiously highlighted pertinent verses and also reinforced some of them with underlining, accompanied with some asterisks. Are these the same passages that I would highlight today, or were they only relevant to that younger mindset?  Whichever it may be it brings me great joy to revisit them now—or is it that young man’s mind returning to visit me?  One thing is certain—The Secret of the Golden Flower is as fascinating now, perhaps even more so, than when it was originally interpreted back in 1981. read more

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The Yoga of Vairocana

1.0 Vairocana is the Matrix of the Buddha Sun

Vairocana represents the Buddha family that houses the great light of the Buddha Sun—Mahavairocana—known among Lankavatarians as the Noble KA read more

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Mind Stabilization

i.35-39 The Means to secure Absolute Contemplative Focus

Patañjali utilizes a word in this section that will sound familiar to Lankavatarian adepts: pravtti. Fernando Tola and Carmen Dragonetti (mentioned in earlier posts) translate it as follows: read more

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Prometheus Unbound: Bardo 2, Part 3

The ancient Greek myth about Prometheus depicts his decision to steal fire from the abodes of the Gods themselves and bestow its illuminative properties to mankind. Zeus then reprimands him for his sacrilegious “action” by chaining him to a huge bolder for all eternity; during the day Prometheus, once an Olympian Titan-Deity himself, has to endure the agony and humiliation of having his liver plucked-out by a rabid vulture. At night, his wounds heal; but when the garish light of day arrives he has to endure his agony all over again. Quite an apt symbolism relaying how sentient beings are entrapped on the Wheel of Life, held bound by the severe laws of Karma that incessantly gnaws away at their entrails. It is also symbolic of how the “body consciousness” weighs one down with heavy samsaric burdens, whilst simultaneously dealing out old karmic wounds that never heal. This particularly becomes oppressive on the plane of Bardo One, wherein one’s spirit can become incapacitated with the heavy weight of sensuous perceptions that hinder self-emancipation and Recollective Strength in the Unborn Resolve. Bardo Realm Two, or the Sambhogakayic-field, can offer some respite from the affairs of the “Day Consciousness” as it becomes a portal into what is commonly known as the Dream Realm, where “Night Consciousness”—or the very Awareness Vehicle of the Manomayakāya itself—helps to foster the Illuminative Recollective Resolve of proper Lucidity that is key to becoming free from the chains of the Alaya-consciousness with all its karmic host. Prometheus Unbound. read more

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The Black Dragon Eye Mandala: A Singular Focal-point of the Unmoving Principle

The Black Dragon Eye Mandala is an auspicious medium in which to navigate through the turbulent and erratic seas (the Moving Principle). read more

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