A PLANETARY TERMA Open Source Earth Wisdom for Kali Yuga

Standards of Authenticity for the Terma of Gaia Awakening This essay will serve in some respects as a disclaimer for the author, but in others it will present some claims regarding the principles and practices of Planetary Tantra to be found on this site. Paradoxically, I will disclaim some possible assumptions about PT and openly state my claims about it at the same time. Just wishing to be helpful. - JLL. July 21, 2011. 3rd anniversary of the Ronda Moment * JLL reading this essay The Mahanirvana Tantra is an 11th Century Sanskrit text that anticipates in some ways the emergence of Planetary Tantra one thousand years later. A foundation text of Hindu Tantra (distinguished from Tibetan Tantra). it takes the form of a dialogue between Shiva and Parvati who represent the ideal tantric couple. Addressing his consort, Shiva says: When the degenerate Kali Age is dominant, Kalika ways should be practised truthfully and without concealment. Truth is divorced from concealment. There is no concealment without untruth. Therefore the tantrika dedicated to Kali should treat sexual rites with total openness." To my mind, what the Mahanirvana Tantra says of sexual riteswhich belong, properly speaking, to practices of Kala Tantraapplies equally to the elementary rules and practices of the more general access path, Planetary Tantra. There is no mumbo jumbo in my treatment of PT. No metaphysics, either. Absolutely no make-believe. But there is plenty of genuine mystery to be explored without indulgence in mystification. I don't have a hidden agenda. I like to keep my pretences and claims right out in the open. Time is at a premium in Kali Yuga when, as the Tantra says, human attention spans becomes reduced to a few minutes at a time. My commitment to everyone who would now consider the option of Planetary Tantra is: I will not waste a second of your time if I can help it. You will know right up

front what my claims and pretences are. That way you don't have to hang around and investigate and peruse and ponder for months and years to find out what JLL is laying down, where the Maine terton gets it from. I'll let you know as rapidly as I can and you can take it or leave it, compelled by your autonomous passions and whatever wisdom guides you and guards the course of your life.

Anthropos altar, terton casita, Andalucia There is an immortal luminous child, the Anthropos, who came into existence before you and who will appear among your spectral forms... Terma and Terton Human nature being what it is, the human gift for language being what it is, people expect an individual to be identified in some manner, by a name, a tag, a label. We all carry some form of ID as a syntax accessory. Be it a driver's license, a passport, or just a role ("single mother") etc. JLL carries the Terton ID. That is to say, I identify myself as a terton. This is not a make-believe or magical claim. It is not even a mystical claim. It is just a statement of fact that others by now have also attested. Traditionally the words terma and terton come from the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Scholar and historian Tulku Thondup wrote the first book to disclose this exotic tradition to the West: Hidden Teachings of Tibet. The Tibetan ter means "treasure, something discovered [in the earth]". Interestingly, there is the root of terra, earth. Add -ma and you have terma, "wisdom treasure or treasure teaching." Ma is of course a phoneme universally associated with mother, earth matrix, the source of life, shakti, the telluric powers, etc. It could be said that a "treasure teaching" is a spontaneous revelation deriving from "the Mothers," the mother powers of the cosmos. In a more specific sense, the infernal or telluric dakini powers of Gaia. Tibetan tradition attests that termas, said to be initially formulated by Padma Sambhava and his consort Yeshe Tsogyal, were implanted in the wisdom sphere of the dakinis. You can't be more explicit than that. In my experience, that is exactly where the Terma of Gaia Awakening originates. But I add this

spin, that those dakini powers are aspects, modalities, or frequencies of the full-spectrum intelligence of Gaia, the living earth. Where is the wisdom sphere of the dakinis located? In the subliminal zone of your ordinary mind AND in the external body and atmosphere of the earth, simultaneously. Shenrab Chamma, Loving Mother of Wisdom Bon / Tibetan thangka 19th C. Rubin Museum Collection. A close equivalent to Gaia-Sophia can be found in the pre-Buddhist lore of Bon, the indigenous shamanism of the Tibetan plateau: Shenrab Chamma (above). At a still deeper layer of the Asian psyche, you encounter the sacred mother of the mountains, an archetypal figure of telluric numinosity even closer to the present Gaia-Sophia. On Infinity Ridge, I was directed to the name Zangsa Ringstun as a version of Gaia in pre-Buddhist mysticism. This figure represents the graphic portal of the Gaian emanation of Kali as a stream of brutally intense tenderness that strips away all illusions, especially the illusion of compassion. In an immense, shattering paradox, you receive the highest elixir of compassion when you surrender your egoistic notions of being a compassionate person. Such was my experience, anyway. An experience that utterly and permanently changed my view of my "humanity", and indeed, my generic concept of humanity itself. Termas belong roughly to two categories, earth treasures and mind treasures. The former are said to be physical artefacts such as small coffers or scrolls buried in the earth or concealed in a cave. When Buddhism reached Tibet from India around 750 CE, the indigenous Bon shamanism had to be repressed so that the doctrines and hierarchal system of the new religion could prevail. This story is told -- more honestly, mindlessly repeated -- with triumphal pride by pro-Buddhist historians. Visiting the Rubin Museum in January 2009, I saw a thangka showing the mountain mother pictured as a woman's body merged into the features of the land around Lhasa, being chained and held down by spirits of the invading religion. The conquest of Tibet by Buddhism is typical of the anti-goddess tyranny of divine paternalism seen in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (In her magnificent book Buddhist Goddesses of India, Miranda Shaw, attempts to correct this error and set the record straight.) In the effort to save their sacred heritage, the Bon shamans buried scrolls and tablets to be recovered at a later

time. Hence arose the rumor about earth treasures. Mind treasures are said to be concealed in the hidden layers of the human mind, symbolically represented by clouds and sky. However, I would attest that mind treasures are in some manner actually stored in the sky, in the register of the unknown atmospheric properties, especially nitrogen, but also argon. Physically, my investigations show that dakinis are labile fractures in the nitrogen zone of the atmosphere. These fractures catch the eye by erupting first into fractal patterns and then often, but not always, assume the form of naked dancing women. In Tibetan iconography, dakinis are often pictured naked with the genital slit clearly shown (above, detail of Vajrayogini: www.tharpa.com). I have often wondered how this convention originated, who instructed the thangka painters to portray dakinis in just that manner. I was uncomfortable with this image for many years, regarding it to be salacious and sexist, at worst. I took it for a ploy used by clever but prurient old men to appease the sexual cravings of Buddhist monks vowed to celibacy. Condemned to live in an all-male environment, secluded to the mountain fastnesses of Tibet, many monks might not have had the opportunity to see a naked women even once in life. Yet they could ogle a glorious set of tits and the muffless cunt to their heart's content. Where is the mystical significance in that vision? How the iconic convention arose, I don't know. I can only speak from my own mystical adventures regarding the spontaneous eruption of dakini imagery in the sky. Such visions as I have encountered accord closely with the testimony of Longchenpa, the legendary shaman and terton. In The Seminal Heart of the Dakinis, a female acolyte possessed by Yeshe Tsogyal explains: "This type of sky appears when a lama who is a spiritual guide who will accomplish vast benefit for others is appointed to his religious seat of authority." Note the paternalist jargon and the appeal to male authority. That I can do without. Nevertheless, the nature of the celestial vision is clearly indicated: "It is an apparition of the field of buddha bodies and primordial gnosis." LCP and his gnostic cell of Tantrikas attest vividly to "the external radiance of emission of Emanational Bodies (Nirmanakayas)," breathtaking sights seen in the sky. Seminal Heart recounts a long group session of shamanic trance, comparable to the orgia of the telestai in the Mysteries. Significantly, there are sixteen participants, the number observed in Gnostic

cells. Longchenpa's team are inspired by drinking beer strained through "malt dregs," i.e., fermented barley producing LSD-type effects. similar to those of the kykeon of the Mysteries. LCP is frightened and asks a luminous presence, "Who are you?" The dakini replies, "I am in all phenomena.... I am Namdru Remati, I am guarding your terma, the wisdom treasure I am going to give to you." Still in shock, LCP is doubtful about how to regard these vivid, luxuriant, sentiently active visions. The dakini counsels him, "Being pleased or displeased are both a miraculous show of mind. You can come to be whatever I am!" As the shamanic party concludes, all those attending witness "the sky filled with rainbows and the expressions of the dakinis" (Tantra in Practice: "Longchenpa and the Dakinis," David Germano and Janet Gyatso). The Tibetan word for dakini, khandroma, means "sky dancer." The nature of these nubile maidens is said to be of a diamond-thunderbolt, dorje. Also called adamantine: "The samadhi (supreme concentration) of the vajrayosana (adamantine girl) is the way to the ultimate bliss" (The Chinese Hevajra Tantra, XII.32). The Tibetan name for the Terma of Gaia Awakening is Dorje Namkhai Khandro Nyig Thig, "Seminal Essence of the Diamond Sky Dakinis". Diamond Sky refers to the fractalization of the nitrogen zone into a dome of hexagonal cells (Bnard cells), an immediate effect of seeing the sky with the dreaming attention. When you observe the sky with the second or dreaming attention, it turns green. I have witnessed "the external radiance of the emission of Emanational Bodies" in the presence of others who saw what I did. My own guardian Kali often assumes the nirmanakaya of a vulture in the skies above my house. The vulture is a real phantom presence, as well as an actual bird. She flies in a particular manner to distinguish herself from others in the flocks that spiral effortlessly in thermals over the rugged hills of the Serrania de Ronda. There is a characteristic splash of color on the upper side of her wings, buff tinted with the color of dried blood. Shamanic practice generates "true hallucinations," to borrow the felicitous term of Terence McKenna.... But to return to the dubious topic of the muffless cunt. I had seen a good many dakini fractures in atmospheric nitrogen, and conversed with these glorious apparitions, before I got the trick. The revealed slit is the cue to an event. Unless you undergo the event first hand, you miss the cue. For

instance, if I wear a tie with a thick blue ripple on it to indicate that I am a tour guide at Niagara Falls, you might be puzzled by the design of my attire. Standing before the falls, you would immediately realize what the ripple means. The entire power of the rushing, thunderous waterfall is compressed in that detail, that adornment. Just so, there is a specific (super)natural power indicated by the genital slit. No Tibetan master has ever revealed what it is, to my knowledge. But in Tibetan Buddhism you encounter a great deal of prattle about the generation and completion practices, touted as the pinnacle of lamist magic. Also called the development and perfection stages of Atiyoga: utpannakrama and sampanakrama in Sanskrit, bsKyed Rim and drDzogs Rim in Tibetan. In this presumed act of sympathetic magic, the lama visualizes a particular tantric deity (generation) and then dissolves into the visualization (completion), thus assuming a divine status for the aim of realizing the primordial nature of mind. Volumes and volumes of endless, archontically routinary lists and tedious inventories, categories within categories of mental states and practices, present the rigamarole that dresses up this practice. Making the goal nearly inaccessible due to baroque trappings. But the time for male hierarchal monopoly over the spontaneously arising dakini wisdom is over. Lamist mumbo-jumbo goes down with the male power elite whose foundations are currently being demolished by the wisdom goddess herself. Since summer 2008, the highest goal of Tibetan Tantra is now an open source adventure. My message to all those fopped up lamas and tulkus and rinpoches is, thank you very much for preserving the decor and dogma, revered gentlemen, now get off your parasitic power trip and get the fuck out of the way. There's a new kid on the block. The Anthropos. What the Tibetan lamas have never said to the world perhaps because they do not know it themselves is that the iconographical convention of showing the genital slit is a cue to the sublime event of being at the receiving end of generation. Note this point about the traditional practice: the lama directs a monumental focus of attention upon the yidam, the dakini pictured in lavish graphic detail in meditation at the first stage, generation. To generate means to concentrate one's power of visualization toward that image. Now imagine the opposite process: the fullbore concentration of the dakini's magical power turned upon you. Coming in your direction like a torrent. The exposed slit has to be dissociated entirely

from biological connotations. It has nothing to do with giving birth, even metaphysically, or any sublimation of reproductive processes, etc. The object of dakini generation is the Unborn in human guise. The genital slit of the dakini does not reproduce anything: it introduces the pure force of originality, the awakening of original mind. "You can come to be whatever I am!" In practices of Gaian Tantra, I realized that what comes from the revealed slit is the generative torrent of the wisdom dakinis of the earth, pouring our way. It is the generative power of the Aeonic Dreaming of Gaia-Sophia directed upon and into the human mind. To stand upright, hold steady, and receive this current is like standing in a wind tunnel. The full power of the Shakti Cluster is an eighteen-bore torrent of pure, crystalline animation erupting from the nitrogen zone of the terrestrial atmosphere. Such is my instruction. So much for termas and those who guard and transmit them supernaturally, the wisdom dakinis. A terton is someone who discovers a terma, a treasure finder. The most famous terton of the Nyingma lineage was Jigme Lingpa, initials JL. Figure it. This is not a hint, hint, wink, wink. I am not the reincarnation of Jigme Lingpa nor of Longchenpa, whom Jigme Lingpa claimed to have been in a previous life. I am the avatar of Lash LaRue, the cowboy revenge of the Goddess. Look out there, old boys. This planet many not be big enough for both of us. Tertonic Privilege Having received the Terma of Gaia Awakening in the summer of 2008, I found myself in the role of a terton, a treasure finder. But a rather unusual one. Without a lineage, without an entourage, without sacerdotal qualifications or initiations notched on my belt, without the traditional framework that supports and to a large extent legitimates the "Tibetan Treasure tradition of channeled authorial voices" (Germano and Gyatso, ibid). I don't channel and I have no authority based on paternal precedents. I am the son of a widow. Also, whereas termas in the Nyingma lineage all derive from Padma Sambhava the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, the one I received did not come down from that source; although it can be said to have some deep affinities with that source (an untold story, there). This Terma comes directly from Gaia, the planetary animal mother. This Terma is her explicit instruction on how the human species can be

interactive with her to the highest attainment of its divine potential in planetary magic reaching the cosmic dimension of awareness, integral with the Pleroma. It short, it carries the instructions for achieving the potential that Sophia encoded into the human species in the first place, acting with her consort Thelete ("Intended"). For lack of a better term, or any preexisting framework to determine how I would be recognized and identified, I had to look upon myself as Gaia's first terton. I may not be the last. I expect others to show up, women and men tertons, but there is a faint chance I could be the only one she requires. Maybe one is all it takes. I really don't know because I cannot predict or preconceive how Gaia-Sophia will act in correction. No one can. Anyone who claims to know the ultimate plan of the wisdom goddess is a selfdeluding fraud. Perhaps well-intentioned, but bound to mislead others. So what do intentions count if they are based in error? No one can know the plan of Sophia because she has no plan. She has a course to navigate, but not cosmic design to observe. Error, spontaneity, and novelty are intrinsic to her adventure. And ours with her. Those who claim there are no accidents in the universe may need some reality therapy to restore their damaged faculty of common sense. Shit happens. The empirical evidence of the senses is authoritative. That accidents and unanticipated events occur even at the galactic level is unacceptable to small minds in need of reassurance that cosmic order will prevail. This viewpoint is dangerously naive. Even a Pleromic Aeon is not omniscient. How bored it would be to know in advance how it is all going to play out. Sophia doesn't know everything in advance. She has a pact to honor, but no preformulated agenda to complete. Sophia is a free agent. The Pleromic Aeons are avid gamblers, placing bets on how experiments in the galactic spiral arms are going to turn out. No Aeon knows the outcome of any experiment generated from the galactic core. Otherwise, they would be bored stiff in a mere million years. If you know the stakes of Pleromic gaming, you are party to divine delight. Kali instructs that in her Age all phenomena, human and divine, may be mastered by putting them into a gaming metaphor. The Pleromic Aeons dance, romp, and gamble. For them the game is never rigged as it can be in human affairs due to the deviant effect of the archons. Freedom is inherent to all cosmic experiments. But there are designs called "fate" that determine the bias or spin of an experiment.

In the initial moment when I received the Terma, certain of its features were vividly disclosed to me. Its fail-safe mechanisms, for instance. These guarantee that it cannot be turned into a religion or twisted to fit a cult agenda, although participation in the Terma is necessarily tribal in nature, thus assuming a cultic look. By definition, any small group of people devoted to something -- constructing ships in bottles, raising rare orchids, playing the ukulele -- make up a cult. As it comes into practice by small groups of people, Planetary Tantra will appear to be a cultic activity. But due to the way the Terma propagates in human imagination somatically aligned to the earth, it has immunity to the usual problems and pitfalls of cults. This claim may be hard to believe and I don't ask anyone to take it on faith. The obvious objection is, any kind of message of a religious or spiritual or metaphysical nature, purporting to carry cosmic truth, can and most likely will fall into the cultic syndrome. The results are predictable: the original message will become distorted and turned into dogmas and rules, infested with fanatism, riddled with secrecy, perverted from its original meaning, broken up by competing factions, run into the ground by egomaniacs, and so forth. It is often argued that "the original messsage of Jesus" was initially a true and valid teaching that got corrupted and coopted. I have argued firmly that it was corrupt from the get-go. I stand by that view. On this note, how about I go out on a limb and say this: it is difficult to conceive a spiritual-religious message that cannot be corrupted or coopted, perhaps for the very reason that the world has never seen such a message SO FAR. All such propositions have gone down the same road, so far. I ask you to consider this: no teaching so far has had the kind of origin that this Terma has. If everything proceeds from "initial conditions" -- a trusty proposition there, and well worth observing -- then we, the human species, may have not yet produced teachings from original conditions that would insure the preservation of its pure intent and operational integrity. But if the Terma of Gaia Awakening satisfies those conditions, it may well be the first teaching produced SO FAR by the human species that is truly incorruptible and cannot be coopted. When I received it, I was indeed given this assurance. I do not say that no one will TRY to corrupt or coopt it. This may well happen. But no one can succeed. Again, don't believe me. Time will tell.

Evangelist choir: precisely the kind of organized religious fervor you will not see with Planetary Tantra and the Sophia Mythos. If it comes to this, it can only be a fraudulent cooptation that will fall apart all by itself. The Terma of Gaia Awakening comprises Planetary Tantra, Kala Tantra, and the Gaian nautical adventure which is an actional metaphor for human participation in Sophia's correction. To a large extent, the features that preserve and protect this Terma cannot be straightforwardly explained in the syntax of the first attention, that is, logical linear thinking. These protective features are rooted in the Supernatural where the Terma itself originates. You understand them when you enter the Nagual and see them operating, vividly disclosed to the dreaming power of your attention. You realize, for instance, how the dakinis hold a second trigger on the occult skills (siddhis) they confer -- such as the power to paralyze someone, or strike them dumb, or the power to sexually attract someone you desire. If a dakini of the Shakti Cluster like Idris confers such a power on you, you cannot misuse it, you can only use it correctly or not at all. Each power is rigged with a double trigger and only works if the conferring dakini pulls the trigger at the same time you do. That is an example of a supernatural fail-safe. Pretty exotic. A little too mysterious, maybe. But perhaps there is another way I can suggest in conceptual terms suitable to the first attention what is so special about the Terma of Gaia Awakening that I would dare to claim that it is immune to co-optation or distortion. What I say now could have only been put into language with Sophia in correction since March 2011. Before that moment, it was humanly impossible to conceive it. To assist the first attention in a user-friendly way, I resort to narrative syntax. You see, the first attention can follow a story, but it cannot invent one. The second attention does the inventing. Now that Sophia is recapitulating her history as an Aeon that morphed into a planet, her terton tracks her recall with the second attention and brings it to the first attention as narrative. To tell the entire narrative as she recalls it, I would have to remain in ecstatic trance 7/24 and recite it to a team of scribes. The best I can do is present snippets of her recall process. So here is one snippet, the one that applies to the unprecedented conditions of the Terma. Don't panic, it is short and sweet.

In her solitary dreaming in the Pleroma prior to her plunge, but after the human genomic design had been projected into the Kenoma, Sophia dreamed an experiment for one strain of the anthropos that exposed it to a particular risk, and made a pact with that strain to insure they would not be annihilated by the risk, the very factor in the experiment that made it intensely fascinating to the Aeon. So there you go. That is the snippet in its entirety. If you reflect on that narrative snippet, you will perhaps be able to grasp the terton's claims concerning the Terma he discovered in August 2008. I live in the absolute certainty that the Terma of Gaia Awakening is the direct transmission of Sophia's instruction to the human species, that will allow the species to complete the pact she made with us before we emerged on earth, and even before the earth itself existed as a planetary body. The Terma presents Gaia's instruction for interactivity with her, reflecting the original pact she made with our species, period. The instruction is blood simple, consisting of three lines, a secret name, and a Vow to be ritually performed. That is the totality of the operative core of the Terma. Practice involves learning Her Story in its recovered and restored form, and eventually encountering the wisdom goddess directly in the Organic Light, and receive instruction from the Light, the primary substance body of the Aeon. Kala Tantra is a particular practice of interactive magic using sexuality. The Gaian nautical adventure is an experiment in interactivity with Gaia-Sophia that comes to definition uniquely in correction, and could only have been formulated after correction began. It is as simple at that. There is no makebelieve or metaphysics in Planetary Tantra. That is the whole enchilada. Now consider this: Interactivity with the wisdom goddess, undertaken in this visionary frame of practice and guided by the Sophianic myth, is a singular, unique, and totally unprecedented opportunity for the human species to realize its divine endowment and nothing SO FAR has ever presented this opportunity, exactly in this way. This message cannot be corrupted and coopted as all preceding spiritual teachings have been because it fulfills the pact Sophia made with our strain of the Anthropos . No other religion or spiritual teaching or metaphysical system has EVER contained that factor.

This Terma does not go the way of anything that proceeded it. That is monogenes, singularity. Novelty. Pure innovation, the mark of genius in our species. The signature of our divine endowment. I don't know what anyone thinks of my claim to be Gaia's first terton, and I really don't give a toss (to use a British expression). But I would tell you this, up front: if you appreciate anything in this teaching, and you wonder (naturally) about its origin and presumed author -- I am the finder, not the author -- then imagine what privilege I enjoy if what I am saying it actually true. And I can only hold that privilege as long as I confer it. So I confer it to you. When you feel that privilege as well, you are approaching the right attitude to discover with me and others the exact terms of that pact. Meeting TT The Terma of Gaia Awakening is the first planetary terma, and could be the only one, for all I know. Maybe one is all it takes: one terma to a planet. One story to a planet: Her Story, the Sophianic myth... Nevertheless, this terma is an open-ended, open source experiment in cultivating the wisdom of our species, a project fully amenable to elaboration and extrapolation. It is a serial, group-generated terma with a duration of 208 years from October 2008. Potentially, any number of people could participate in the ongoing development of this wisdom treasure. Right up to the end of Kali Yuga in 2216. If they wish to count themselves into the process, that is. That's a big IF. Sadly, counting oneself out of enlightenment is the routinary and mundane stancea cheap bourgeois tactic, no lessfor maintaining narcissistic self-concern under the false pretence of humility. "I can only say this about my enlightment: it's yours." Alas and alack... I find that human ingenuousness is deeply lovable in spite of its glib, shallow, feckless, self-deprecating and self-defeating tendencies. But I care less and less whether or not my love reaches those to whom it is directed. Or reaches anyone at all. The role love plays in the Terma and the divine experiment as Sophia conceived it is a dicey subject I am have to get around to, one of these days. But I digress. I have said before, the practice of Gaian Tantra is generous but the elaboration of this terma is not an anything-goes proposition. There is no make-believe or metaphysics in Gaian Tantra. The only way to elaborate the terma is by dakini instruction from the Shakti Cluster. No other elaboration of content from

any other source whatsoever can be integrated into this terma. It simply will not take. It will flake off, fray, disintegrate. It will look ridiculous, foolish, trite. This terma is invested with enormous apotropaic properties, repelling fakery, warding off contamination, repelling fanatic projections. The dangerous protector of this terma is Kurukulla, and the titulary guardian is Durtro Lhamo, patron of termas and tertons. Mess with these powers and you get a messed up mind, but the Terma of Gaia Awakening goes untouched. Don't believe me. Do the Vow, call to VV. Try it out, then try to bend it to your likes, and see what comes your way. No one can promote Planetary Tantra by seminars and class or lectures, for which a fee is charged. There can be no commercial profit attached to the propagation of this Terma, no instructional fees, but ritual objects and shamanic tools used in the practice may be traded or bought and sold, as happens among indigenous peoples. Anyone charging you to teach PT or expound the Terma of Gaia Awakening is a fraud and a huckster, and delusional into the bargain. Anyone who claims to have my approval to transmit PT is a liar. Such are the terton's rules. Disregard them at your risk. I cannot impose those rules on anyone, of course, but I can state them, and there, I just did. Now let me tell you the rules to which I am subject in my role as Gaia's first treasure-finder, the Maine terton. During the nine years of my association with the Marion Institute, I had the privilege to meet privately with Tulku Thondup. Does that name ring a bell? Above I noted that his book, Hidden Teachings of Tibet, which came out in 1986, broke a taboo of oralonly teaching and disclosed the acrane topic of termas and tertons to the English-speaking West. It so happens that Tulku Thondup has for many years been supported by the Buddhayana Foundation set up by Michael Baldwin, one of the founders and funders of the Marion Institute. Now there is the most ingenuous person I ever met in this life. Through Michael and his genial and intrepid brothers, Ian and Philip, I was brought into a circle of contacts that allowed me to meet privately with Tulku Thondup. This I did in Cambridge, Mass, around 2002, as I recall. It may have been November 2001 after the Marion conference on Gnosticism with Elaine Pagels, or the next year. I am not certain. TT did attend that conference and expressed keen interest in my unusual view of Gnosticism and the Mysteries. He encouraged me to write a book on the subject. Five years later, Not in His Image appeared.

At my meeting with TT at his apartment in Chelsea, I brought up something that had been shifting around in my mind for years. I asked TT if he thought it was possible for a terton to appear who would in effect be "free-lance." That is, not associated with the Nyingma lineage or any other Tibetan tradition. I asked him point blank, "Could treasures from the wisdom sphere of the dakinis surge up in anyone's mind, producing the revelation of a terma, or is that privilege reserved exclusively for people in the centuries-old lineage of Tibet?" His face brightened at the suggestion, as if the idea delighted him in some way, and he replied, "Sure, certainly, it could happen to someone outside the existing framework. That's entirely possible." Then he paused for a beat, looking thoughtful, pensive. "But they would have to have criteria for testing it. To determine if it was legitimate." I was deeply struck by the added comment. In posing the question to TT, I had described a number of experiences throughout my life that appeared to resemble termas or terma-like eruptions of inner wisdom. One characteristic was special: the eruptions came intact like a Zip file. The total content of the teaching or insight received was present all at once, compacted. This is also how termas come to tertons, I understood. Although I was convinced of the similarities between my terma-like experiences and the traditional instances, I was totally at a loss on the matter of criteria for assessing the authenticity of the terma. When TT put that point to me, I was nonplussed, unable to imagine in that time and setting how I would ever work out such standards. It seemed an impossible challenge. Needless to say, the exchange left me feeling somewhat insecure. In short, I was certain of my terma-like revelations, but totally unprepared to legitimate them. That meeting occured just at the time when I was conducting my first conversations with Gaia on Infinity Ridge here in the Serrania de Ronda of Andalucia. What I could not have known or guessed at that time was that the criteria would become evident to me once I had advanced that contact and delivered the supreme terma, a mission for which I had been prepared through my entire life from the age of four. With the treasure revealed, it did not take long for me to recognize how to legitimate it. But it was rather a tricky process, let me assure you. In her biography of Jigme Lingpa. Apparitions of the Self, Janet Gyatso devotes considerable attention to the problem of legitimation among tertons. Traditionally,

legitimation is huge concern and may require years to resolve. Gyatso shows that the Nyingma JL himself doubted the authenticity of some of his termas.Rather like a schizophrenic, he struggled to steady his mind at the shifting boundary between the real and the imagined, the actual and the invented. Divine Mania I have suggested the term mythophrenic for someone who lives in the mix and merge of the actual and the imagined, and may take the imagined as being more real and having a higher value relative to truth. I contend that mythophrenia is not a mental disorder but a liminal state normal to human beings. Supernatural forces push the mythophrenic one way or the other, inducing destabilization. People who can't handle this condition become "borderline personalities" or otherwise unstable cases. Those who handle it well become notable artists such as Herman Hesse, Philip K. Dick, Frido Kahlo, and many others. Some mythophrenics like Antoinin Artaud handle it for a while and then crack up. I contend that the Supernatural, including the wisdom sphere of the dakinis, exerts considerable pressure on certain mythophrenics so that it can break into the human psyche to inspire and even fertilize the ordinary world. But many mythophrenics resist this call through denial and evasion, taking refuge in the mundane, in convention and conformity. I am convinced that this failure of nerve happens primarily for one reason: they are unable to stick with the supernatural guidance they receive from the same zone of powers that induce destabilization. i.e., put their sanity at risk. I was contacted by my guardian dakini Kali at the age of four. I had lucid dreams in my adolescence, spontaneous eruptions of kundalini, and other psychic and paranormal experiencestypical signs of the Supernatural breaking into the human psyche. I am convinced that almost everyone has such experiences, but the trouble is, the vast majority of people do not manage to stick with them. They discount them, they relegate it all to weirdness, or they are discouraged from taking it seriously by others, they succumb to conformity, etc. But if you do not hold steady to the guidance given by the supernatural powers that destabilize your psyche, you cannot bring anything of value out of your mythophrenia. To return to Jigme Lingpa, my Nyingma counterpart. There was an accomplished mythophrenic who had the training required to handle the influx of the Supernatural and balance the actual and the

imaginary. Still, he went through considerable insecurity with his termas. JL was supported intellectually, spiritually, and materially by the institutional system of Tibetan Buddhism to which he belonged. He had an entourage of students who assisted him in assessing the termas he received. Yet even with institutional support and an entourage, he faced considerable difficulty with particular termas, unable to fit them to the received criteria, or verify them by reincarnational recall. And worse still, unable to determine if he was faking them. You have to read Gyatso closely and empathically to get the tortured feeling of such a mystical dilemma. Now imagine my dilemma. Without institutional backing, no tradition to rely one, and not one single person for a sounding board, I had to determine all by myself how I would establish the authenticity of the Terma of Gaia Awakening. No one around me was willing to engage that particular challenge with me. In fact, the people I knew at the time fled from me, they turned tail. I saw a friendship of 25 years betrayed. Others cut me out of their loop. I don't hold it against them. The flare of the Supernatural that played around me during the initial months of receiving the Terma in 2008 and going into 2009 was truly terrifying. It was a blaze of Dionysion madness, an outburst of divine mania drenched with erotic vapors of a lurid hue. I had sixteen infernal bitchs of the Shakti Cluster breathing down my neck. The intensity was daunting. It blew away everyone who was close to me. Everyone split, but for one simple and decent person. But one is all it takes. That intensity also tore the flesh off my bones and stripped my humanity down to a gleaming carcass. I care much less about humanity in general now that I have delivered Sophia's instruction to her pet species, the Anthropos. You don't have to love the human race to give it your best. Come to think of it, it may be better if you don't. Nine Standards Over the course of three years since discovering the Terma of Gaia Awakening, I have come to define the criteria for authenticity that Tulku Thondup proposed, the standards for a free-lance terton. I will list them here without elaboration as that would require me to write an entire book. 1 Source determined, named: who is transmitting this terma. In this case, Gaia herself is the source of the Terma of Gaia Awakening. In turn, the terma reveals the full-spectrum, 18-channel

console through which she transmits openly to the human species at large, depending on individual receptive to her telluric frequencies. 2 The source identified: background of the Terma, allowing the terton to determine its source. Unlike channeling, telestic audition of dakini wisdom does not produce experiences in which the source declares who it is by name. As for instance, Seth told Jane Roberts who he was, or Ramtha announced his identity to j z knight. On the contrary, this process requires the terton in Ganain Tantra to identity and name the source. 3 Sky omens, astronomy, celestial timing specific to the terma. This standard entails a long process of observation and inference that allows the terton to trace how the terma was anticipated by a sequence of sky omens involving planetary and stellar patterns of an outstanding kind. In my case, I detected a pattern involving jupiter that showed me that the Terma was due to be revealed, i.e., decoded, up to one and a half or two years before I got it. Needless to say, divining those celestial omens I did not know what I was anticipating! The elements of surprise and novelty figure strongly in terma transmission. 4 First line of instruction. Each genuine planetary terma opens with a brief and explicit line of sacred instruction: "You cannot become anything but more beautiful." I have said before, dakini syntax is cogent, composed in lapidary grammar. Discursive drivel, metaphysical propositions that cannot be verified, elaborate claims about divine order, predictions, volumes of spoonfed speculation, wild stories of Atlantis or other worlds witih no reference to the Sophianic vision storythis kind of material tells you that you are definitely NOT receiving on telluric dakini wavelengths.

5 Frame of instruction, overall design of the Terma. By this standard, the terma has to show a simplific and elegant design. Simplific, not simplistic. By simplific I mean that it has to have cogent esthetic integrity, crafted like a well-made object. It cannot be complicated with a mass of diagrams and schemas, for instance, maps of other dimensions, etc. It must be complex but elementary. Minimalist in terms of conceptual design. The Terma of Gaia Awakening presents one simple and singular schema, the Shakti Cluster. 6 Ritual elements provided by the Terma. Included in the transmission are the ritual and practical aspects that cannot be contrived or devised by malemind abstraction. Rather, the ritual arises as a spontaneous and obvious counterpart to the opportunity presented in the instruction of the terma. In the Terma of Gaia Awakening, the ritual of the Gaian Tantra Vow is an obvious and spontaneous technique for achieiving interactivity with Gaia. Along with the design features, ritual elements are also minimalist, streamlined. 7 Community entrusted with the Terma. In this case, the community that receives the Terma consists of the nine generations of the Black Time of Innocence, the Tribes of Kali. Generation one, 1945 - 1975, generation two, 1976 - 2005, and so on until 2215, the last year of Kali Yuga and the conclusion of the great Kalpa of precessional timing (25,920 years). 1945 is the birth year of the Maine terton. 8 Terton. By this standard, the biography of the terton must present a record of events that infer the role of treasure-finder, including dakini connections from an early age, supernatural interventions, lucid dreams, acts of magic and power, esthetic and voluptuary highlights, as well as whatever contributed throughout life to training and grooming the mythopoetic sensibility required to handle a terma.

And last but not least, 9 Location. A terma in the Gaian Tantras must be discovered in a place of great natural beauty, purity, and serenity, compatible with the sublime esthetic of the wisdom goddess. Her priorities are esthetic. She also requires there to be a specific historical refraction between locale and terma. A Gaian terma cannot be received just anywhere, arbitarily. For it will come forth in a place where the nightmare of history interfaces decisively with the Dreaming of the Aeon. In the case of the Terma of Gaia Awakening, it was received in a place of spectacular natural beauty located about fifty miles from Sanlucar de Barrameda at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River the place from which Columbus set out for the New World. Waterfront of modern-day Sanlucar de Barrameda So, such are the standards to which I hold myself, and anyone else who would contribute to the expansion and extrapolation of the Gaian Tantras. Item 3 is especially crucial in the wake of Sophia's correction. If you cannot exhibit some mastery of astronomy and star mythology, you cannot play any directive role in developing this Terma. There is no place for metaphysics and make-believe in Gaian Tantra. Such contrivances are neither desired nor required. One-on-one veracity is the hallmark of this experiment. Interactivity with the wisdom goddess has nothing do with individual empowerment, however. It is a power-sharing arrangement, a rite of consacration, not a ploy for self-empowerment. I have described Gaian Tantra as Shaktism reinvented, Shaktism being the "worship of power." but I revise this syntax as follows: not the love of power but the love of handling power, is the mark of a Shakta. The power you handle is telluric, erotic, infernal, voluptuary. Everything I describe about my first-hand mystical experience in Gaian ecosorcery can be verified by independent winesses, and should be. I do not claim to have had any spiritual revelation from the Godhead in a state of transport or out-of-the body experience in which I was shown abstract principles of cosmic order. I refuse and refute any metaphysics that derives from out-of-the body transport. I recognize only those

events of mystical illumination undergone in the body, firmly grounded to the earth. I also reject all false polaric notions of male and female powers in the cosmos, and other mental contrivances that purport pefection and balance in the cosmos. While I recognize the gendering of the Aeons and telluric powers, I do not claim there is or must be a state of balance between these dyadic energies. On the contrary, there is imbalance, extremity, and assymetry. Therein the Dance. It is my wish that the Terma of Gaia Awakening be shared by all tribes to emerge in the Black Time of Innocence, the end of Kali's Age, so that each kula or tribal community will find its own elaborations of termas, the basis for ritual practices of healing and learning, love, war, and earthbound magic. jll: Andalucia Written July 21, 2011, posted February 5, 2013 with reading. The Tantric Conversion, I From Sophia to the Shakti Cluster After the publication of Not in His Image in November 2006, I received inquiries to this site, and questions from people I met here and there across the land, all posing the same question: Where do we go next? For me, that book marked the completion of a life mission undertaken at the age of seventeen (as explained in the Foreword). It was a huge relief to complete this mission. You can well imagine that I was also asking myself where to go next. Truth be told, I made a pretty stretch down the road, pursuing my shamanic practices with Gaia (with and without the guidance of sacred plant allies), divining the skies, dancing to sarod music with Lydiabut I could not shake off that question. I felt an urgent responsibility to say something about how others might investigate and apply the Sophianic vision presented in my book. My intentions in Not in His Image were threefold: deliver the samurai death blow to patriarchy, deconstruct the messiah, and restore the Sophianic vision story from the Mysteries, the mythic biography of the earth, including the scoop on those pesky Archons. This done, I scanned the horizon, uncertain of how to proceed. I was inclined to advise people: Go practice Gaia-oriented shamanism with sacred teacher-plants. But I sensed that this response was unsatisfactory.

Crackdown I could not ignore the strong interest in entheogenic shamanism expressed by people who responded to my book. I had made a pretty good case for the role of sacred plants in the ancient Mysteries of Europa. Others are doing likewise these days, with some variations not to my liking or standards: for instance the revival of the Allegro thesis (Jesus was a mushroom), and the claim that Moses smoked weed, or ingested some other psychoactive plant (Benny Shannon), suggesting that that patriarchal mind control scams like the Ten Commandments could have been received in a trance induced by sacred plants. I considered debating this (in my opinion) deranged notion and presenting a counter-argument: earth-alienating messages could not come from the instruction of the plant allies provided for us by Gaia herself, precisely so that our species can compensate for its Archontic tendencies (rejection of nature, religious other-worldliness, preference for simulation over the real). But the prospect of blogging endlessly on the Internet just did not appeal to me. A lot of blather in analogic ciphers, so little pleasure. My first project upon finishing Not in His Image was the Paris Eadwine Psalter. Early in 2007, I considered doing a book on it. But circulation of a proposal with sample chapters and an outline produced no takers. So I dropped the book idea. Meanwhile, I added Psychonautics to the site, completing generation one, 1935 - 1965, then I left it hanging. A statement in that section of the site still resonates strongly for me: Where an individual stands on the issue of access to psychoactive plants will determine, more than any other issue, how that individual engages in the coming planetary shift. I stand by this statement. In the time since I wrote it, the paternal authorities have implemented a massive crackdown on psychoactive plants. In a major powerplay launched from the Christian right, fresh magic mushrooms have been banned in Amsterdam. I was there in the "smart shop" of my friend Charles the day the new law came into effect. It has not yet been rigorously enforced, but its symbolic impact is more powerful than its legal implementation. Conversations with Dominique Guillet of Kokopelli have convinced me that control of food is going to be decisive in the planetary crisis now upon us. The authorities are not merely intent to prohibit the use of psychoactive plants, they are also cracking down on

time-tried natural remedies, such as stinging nettle. They are blocking the distribution of heritage seeds. If the frightening message of Esoteric Agenda is even partially true, there is a global program for massive population reduction via a double-whammy tactic of restricting food and poisoning the food chain. A UN document outlining this plan gives December, 2012 for the deadline when conditions for implementation of the grand scheme will be fully in place. Reflecting on these matters, I realized that Gaian shamanism with psychoactive plants will rapidly become more and more difficult. Even without authoritarian control, such practice is not so easy for many people, especially those who live in cities. Psychoactive mushrooms and other natural entheogens may readily be purchased in large cities, but they cannot be used there for experimental nature mysticism. Other considerations as well impede such experimentation. Shamanic trance induced by natural entheogens such as ayahuasca and iboga has widely been co-opted for therapeutic rather than visionary aims; or it falls into the genre of shamanic tourism. The consistent, long-term community setting of the Gnostic cells would be difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce today. But without it, instruction by the Organic Light cannot be properly established and maintained. Through 2007 and into 2008, I pondered long and hard on the future prospects for entheogenic shamanism, as it is now fashionably called. This practice will and must continue because sacred plants are essential to the course-correction of our species, and they aid enormously in the healing of both personal and social ills. There is no question of letting the current crackdown prevent anyone from exercising what Martin W. Ball, writing in Reality Sandwich, calls the human right to practice entheogenic spirituality. Entheogenic shamanism is problematic, and not suited for everone due to the rigors of the discipline and the need to shed egobound concerns about identity and purpose. I wondered what other kind of practice might be less problematic but equally pertinent in leading our species through the current crisis of social insanity and unsustainability? Reduced to Kaka Another question often came up after NIHI came out: How do we recover and revive Gnosticism? How do we recreate the Mysteries? My response to these

questions was/is clear and definite: we don't. Gnosis is a timeless endowment of the human species: our capacity to perceive nature intensively (Goethe's method) and know the cosmos as the gods know it, in rapturous heightened awareness. Gnosis is cognitive ecstasy, knowledge that arises in a state of ecstatic beholding and selfless immersion in nature. This way of knowing is present, immediate, and inalienable, for it is rooted in the innate divinity of our species, the faculty of nous, divine intelligence. But "Gnosticism" is just the theological phantom of a dead movement. A revenant, not a living creature. I am completely bored by the revival of Gnosticism in sunday school sects with regalia and ritual, self-appointed priests and priestesses (Magdalene wannabes), liturgies, all the baggage and pretences that come with religiosity. Brave readers, if you find anything that smacks of religiosity in my presentation of Kala Tantra, call me on it, please. I dedicated twenty-five years of my life and studies to the sacred whore, but the romance of Mary Magdalene has precious little appeal for me any more... The Da Vinci Code ran that bodacious babe into the ground. Such a disgusting orgy of banal slander, crypto-fascist disinformation, and plain silliness. It's a sad day for Sophia when devotees who recognize her beauty and embrace her story cannot find a way to live cogently and passionately into the wisdom of the planet. Of course, many of you Sophia-lovers out there can and do just that, in your own way. There is no single way to realize the Sophianic vision of the Mysteries. But as the sole person who restored and delivered that vision, I hold myself to a high standard for its application. Throughout this year, 2008, I pondered the future of entheogenic spirituality side by side with the obsolescence of Gnosticism. Over time, one realization hit me front and center: I could not advance in application of the Sophianic vision using Gnostic materials, even if I extrapolated them wildly. Why not? The basic problem with Gnostic studies is crappy syntax and inadequate vocabulary. There are in my view no "original" Gnostic documents. I maintain that the Coptic writings from Nag Hammadi, and others found elsewhere and earlier, are no better than shambolic class notes hurriedly scribbled in the lecture hall. Coptic itself is a contrived language, invented to convert hieroglyphics at a time when almost no one could read them anymore. Every fourth or fifth word in

Coptic is a loan from Greek. The grammar and syntax of Coptic is awkward. In NIHI, I compare it to hiking boots on a ballerina. Mud-caked hiking boots, I might say. Scholars admit that the NHC is riddled with inconsistencies, grammatical flukes and spelling errors, warped syntax, obscure pronomial referents. So much for the problems of the linguistic medium. The content of this mess of pottage is equally muddled and exasperating. A single text from Nag Hammadi can contain as many as six different viewpoints, mixing genuine Gnostic illuminism with Christian and anti-Christian elements. Worst of all is the paltry vocabulary of the Gnostic materials. Evil was a huge issue in the Gnostic worldview. Gnostics arrogantly claimed that only they had the right explanation for evil, an assertion that drew brutal hatred from their Christian adversaries. The deans and teachers of the Mysteries refuted the Christian dualist view of evil, derived from the Persian dualism of Zoroaster. They carefully distinguished error from evil. They elaborated the scenario of the Archons, interpreting them as messengers of deception and simulation, not agents of evil who can control and overpower humanity. What is the Gnostic term for evil in Coptic? Kaka, borrowed from the Greek word meaning, literally, "shit." Put yourself in my place: I am eking out the Gnostic expose of the Archons, paraphrasing their brilliant theory of error, correcting the Christian idea of evil, and refuting Zoroastrian dualityquite an elaborate and sophisticated exercise, if I do say so and all I have linguistically for building my argument is kaka. The Gnostic theory of error is one of the most sophisticated creations of the human mind. If there's a better one, I'd like to see it. Yet I had to detect and develop that theory using so few terms: hal and sorem in Coptic, plan, anomou, and apathon in Greek. The challenge was spooky and often demoralizing. It left me convinced of the total inadequacy of surviving Gnostic materials to set up and support the Gnostic vision for today. I was lucky I got across what I did. Sophia Amplified Enough about the problem, let's cut to the solution. How did I steer the Gnostic Sophianic vision beyond the limits of Gnosticism in the direction that will now determine the principal content and future goals of metahistory.org? I did it in a New York minute, like this: SOPHIA = WISDOM = VIDYA

Some readers may be familiar with the view of philologists (those who study languages), initially proposed by Sir William Jones, that Greek and Sanskrit have the same origin. This observation is the basis of a vast science, the study of Indo-European languages. Dictionaries use IE to designate the IndoEuropean root of a word. For instance, the IE root of "wisdom" is vid-. The v turns into w by what is called consonant shift, a linguistic phenomenon defined by the brothers Grimm around 1820. The two brothers who compiled "Grimm's Fairy Tales" were deeply involved in cross-cultural linguistic studies. Excuse me for coming off academic, but consonantal shift is more than a tea-time topic for experts, or the passing fascination of a self-taught scholar such as I. Discovered at the key moment of the Romantic Movement, consonant shift proved to be a tool that transcended its specific use for philologists. With the study of IE roots underway, East and West converged with a spectacular, surf-like crash of affinities and parallels. In the introduction of Planetary Tantra, I said that I was going to show how Romanticism was seeded by Eastern mysticism, preparatory to the planetary shift today. Well, Greek-Sanskrit correlations contributed hugely to that epochal event of cross-fertilization. The equation SOPHIA = VIDYA permits me to correlate Eastern and Western identities of the goddess embodied in the earth. The Sanskrit root vid-, "wisdom, inspired or divine knowledge," generates the English word wisdom, but also wit. It is perhaps related to the Latin videre, "to see," which gives us video. (Sanskrit-Latin liaisons are a bit more dubious than Sanskrit-Greek.) It also appears to produce the word "guide". An on-line etymological dictionary says that guide is from Old French guider, first used textually in 1374, but is further traced to the Germanic root witan "show the way," from wit- "to know". Vid- generates vidya, "production of vid." All scholars of Asian philosophy, Vedanta, the yoga sutras, Buddhism, etc., translate vidya as wisdom. But the Greek word sophia also means wisdom. The Online Etymological Dictionary says that sophia is from sophos, "of unknown origin." Sophia yields no direct linguistic resemblance to vidya, yet sophia and vidya both have exactly the same meaning. Gnosticism was a vast spiritual movement in Europa, encompassing the Levant, Africa, and Europe. It spread eastward to the Hindu Kush, the region of the Pamirs where Alexander the Great pushed his

campaign around 330 BCE. This meeting of East and West produced Gandarvan art, a synthesis of Greek and Buddhist styles. Under the reign of King Asoka (270-232 BC), the next century saw the extension of Buddhism into the west, right down into the Nile valley of Egypt. In his Edicts, the Asian sovereign declared: " The conquest by Dharma has been won here, on the borders, and even six hundred yojanas (5,400-9,600 km) away, where the Greek king Antiochos rules, beyond there where the four kings named Ptolemy, Antigonos, Magas and Alexander rule, likewise in the south among the Cholas, the Pandyas, and as far as Sri Lanka"(Edicts of Ashoka, Rock Edict 13). East and West converged, Gnosticism and Buddhism merged. Way back then. Today, I propose a re-merge, using the formula SOPHIA = VIDYA. Sophia was not merely a philo sophical principle with her name embedded in the word, she was the wisdom goddess of the West, the supreme divinity of the Levantine Mysteries. Due to paltry vocabulary and poor construction, Gnostic texts offer little opportunity to amplify Sophia by correlations and extrapolations across the full range of her qualities, themes, and attributes. Classical images of Sophia, represented either as a cosmic deity or an earth goddess, are hard to findDiana of Ephesus being one notable exception. Into the Middle Ages, images of Sophia tend to appear under the allegorical figure of Sapientia, Latin translation of the Greek Sophia. Little or nothing of the grandeur of the Gnostic vision of Sophia survives in these crude medieval caricatures. The Divine Sophia is, of course, the dominant figure in Greek Orthodox religion, but so deeply co-opted to the salvationist agenda and inflated Mariology of that faith that her tellurian qualities are lost. The Fallen Goddess is a magnificent strange attractor, indeed, but isolated in the Gnostic Coptic material Sophia does not constellate a wide range of affinities and associations. The Greek-Sanskrit equivalence SOPHIA = VIDYA unlocks a realm of such affinities and associations, It is key that opens the door to the vast treasury of Asian goddess lore, including Hindu, Dravidian, Shaivite, Vishnaivite, Buddhist and Tibetan divinities. To amplify Sophia, I go to Asian sources and re-merge Gnostic teachings with Indian and Buddhist Tantra. With SOPHIA = VIDYA, the

Sophianic message of this site extrapolates in ways that I could not approach or even imagine while restricted to the Western Gnostic framework. I can now absorb and translate the rich legacy of Asian goddess lore into the visionary practice centered on Gaia-Sophia. This is the Tantric conversion. The new orientation triggers a cascading series of correlations, a kind of fractal mirroring of the fluid identities of the goddess, beginning with SophiaSthavara and culminating in the fireworks of the Shakti Cluster. Let it be known to all who are attracted to this revelation, that I did not discover or contrive the Shakti Cluster by an exercise of mythological correlation, or mere word-play. I did not attain the interactive vision of the Gaian Shaktis by constructing linguistic parallels or shuffling the deck of Jungian correspondences. I was introduced directly to the Cluster in my shamanic practice . Over the course of the summer of 2008, I integrated this numinous vision and came to understand particular details and dynamics of the composite deities in the Cluster. I would describe it as a pyrotechnic display of the Divine Feminine, a visionary eruption in the aura of Gaia, the atmosphere. Living into this vision, I hit upon the SOPHIA = VIDYA formula and went to town with it. So be assured, brave readers, that the Tantric conversion is not an academic game of nameswapping or an indulgent exercise in contrived parallels. Contemplate these cascading identities and you will enter the white water rapids of your own imagination. With this simple conversion, the GaiaSophia mystique goes interactive and sky-borne. Beyond talking about the Divine Feminine, this is how you get to talk to it. Earth-Touching Mudra In the last sentence of her book, Buddhist Goddesses of India, Miranda Shaw expresses the hope that, "in view of its extensive female pantheon, Buddhism may rightly take a place among the world's goddess religions." I noted in the introduction of Planetary Tantra that I will not be citing scholars or backing up my outrageous claims with textual quotes and statements from the experts. But I would crawl across Times Square at rush hour to kiss the feet of Miranda Shaw for the gift of this book, the follow-up to her equally magnificent offering, Passionate Enlightenment. Shaw is one of a small band of

fearless woman scholars who are breaking Buddhism out of its patriarchal mold and liberating the goddess elements. She is more than a champion of the Divine Feminine, she is a divine feminist. Buddhism as a goddess religion? How can this be? Well, Shaw opens with an argument that can hardly be refuted, if you ask me. She recounts the classic legend of the enlightenment of Shakyamuni, focusing on the theme of victory over Mara, the lord of illusion. Various biographies describe how the earth goddess, called Prithivi or Sthavara, intervened to dispel the illusions of Mara, leaving Shakyamuni in the perfect concentration required to attain enlightenment. Still, there came a moment of confrontation. Mara claimed that the Indian prince had nothing to show for his alleged superlative acts of generosity, not a single witness to attest that he, the man who would be a Buddha, had benefited humanity in any way. In other words, Mara accused Shakyamuni of being a narcissist, hung up in a selfcentered quest for liberation. Shakyamuni replied to this challenge by the words, "Let this great and solid earth be my witness," and by a movement of his hand, the bhumisparsa mudra, the gesture of touching the earth. Miranda Shaw says that, because the "seat of enlightenment" is the earth itself, the earth goddess supports enlightenment. Through 519 pages she elaborates on a wide range of Asian earth goddesses who represent enlightened wisdom in ways that correlate to the Gnostic Sophia, without however once mentioning Sophia by name. This oversight does not mar the book. Rather, it clears the atmosphere and prepares reception for the Tantric conversion. The earth-touching gesture of Shakyamuni at the moment of his enlightenment speaks volumes. Without the blessing of the earth, there is no foundation for Buddhahood. Without the acknowledgement of the feminine divinity of the earth, under whatever name, be it Prithivi or Sthavara or Sophia, no human being can receive or sustain full awakening to the nature of mind. The earth goddess, the mind of nature, enables realization of the nature of mind. The living presence of the earth goddess actually grounds that supreme realization. Even though the legend of the Buddhas appearing through time does not include a single human woman who attains enlightenment, Buddhism is the godchild of gynocentric mysticism, the favored offspring of

Asian goddess religion. Shaw's book invites and prepares recognition of Female Buddhas, Shaktis, Yoginis, Dakinis, and Dangerous Protectors that we will engage lavishly in Planetary Tantra. The earth-touching mudra guides the Tantric conversion. The Ten Mahavidyas Hindu religion, the matrix of historical Buddhism, presents a staggering array of god and goddesses. This is polytheism gone wild. A short list of female deities in the Hindu pantheon could easily run into hundreds. However, there is a single, outstanding constellation of female divinities that might be compared to the navel or belly-button of the human form. The navel is a unique point in the human torso, not a sense organ like an eye or ear, but the anatomical locus of vital force in the body. The solar plexus is the seat of prana, vitality. The navel is not only the anatomical feature that locates this plexus, it is also the point on the body that connects us to our birth. At the navel we were connected to the umbilical cord and the placenta. The navel pucker reminds us that we all emerged into this world from within the body of a woman. This elaborated analogy fits the Shakti Cluster to a T. The Cluster is a unique locus of gathering power for the Divine Feminine. Scholars cannot explain why this ten should be configured just as they are. Although there are a couple of origin story for the Cluster, there is no explanation for its composition. The first reference to the Cluster occurs in the Shiva Purana. Purana means "from ancient sources." The Puranas are elaborate commentaries on the Vedas, often containing mythological tales. The earliest reference to the Shakti Cluster in the Puranas dates from around 500 BCE, the time of the historical Buddha, exactly at the midpoint of Kali Yuga. According to the origin story in the Shiva Purana, a demon named Durgama gained control of the Vedas and caused a drought all over the earth. Here "the Vedas" signify not just the ancient religious texts that go by that name, but the primeval wisdom in those texts. Veda is of course derived from the root vid-. Since VIDYA = SOPHIA, we can say that the Vedas represent Sophianic truth, intimate knowledge of the earth and its intelligent, self-animating powers. The origin myth confirms this connection by stating that a planetary disaster, a drought, arose when that truth was jeopardized. Now comes the wild part. All the male gods led by

Brahma called upon the Goddess or Mahadevi to confront the demon, reclaim the Vedas, and save humanity from annihilation by drought. To do so, the Goddess emanated from her body the ten Mahavidyas, the Ten Great Wisdoms. Maha is the Sanskrit word for "great, supreme." All ten Mahavidyas are forms of the Goddess herself, but of these ten there is one who focalizes her fury: Kali. As the head deity of the group, Kali defeats Durgama and acquires the name Durga, "invincible," denoting her fierce warrior aspect. (Below: Typical image of Durga, the warrior goddess.) So, the Mahavidyas consist of Kali and nine emanations of herself. In Yantra, Madhu Khanna introduces the term "Shakti-cluster" for the group of ten Mahavidyas. He cites a variant origin myth in another text, the Devibhagavata Purana, describing a quarrel between Shiva and his consort Parvati, in which Parvati transforms herself into the tenfold Kali. This myth does not refer to preserving the Vedas or saving the earth from a natural catastrophe; rather, it points to the consort yoga of the Shaivite cults of ancient India. A "quarrel" between Shiva and Parvati is a state of heightened energy generated by their mystic union ("consort yoga"). This myth suggests the advantage of engaging the Mahavidyas by pairing, working in couplesthe Tantric buddysystem, if you will. I will describe the nature and necessity of consort yoga here and there throughout the forthcoming writings on Planetary Tantra. The Instant In August 2008 I initially understood the Shakti Cluster as it is described by Madhu Khanna and other scholars of Hindu religion, such as David Kinsley (Visions of the Divine Feminine ). At the head of the group is Kali herself, who contains and emanates the other nine Mahavidyas. The usual order for the goddesses in the Cluster is: Kali: power of eternal time in the instant, Kala Tara: passage beyond time, deliverance Shodashi: generation of beauty in time; also called Sundari Bhuvaneshvari: fruition of time in sensory forms Chinnamasta: awareness beyond selfbound sense of time Bhairavi: annihilating tide of time Dhumavati: closure of time, extinction Bagala: illusion of time, the passing

moment; also called Bagalamukti Matangi: mastery of past and present, beyond temporal causality Kamala: total beautification of each moment This is quite a lot to digest. May I suggest printing out the list and putting in on the fridge? Tape it to the roof visor of your car to flip down and consult occasionally. Keep it at your bedside for a short recitation before turning out the light. To recite these names like a litany is one of the first practices of Planetary Tantra. They are pronounced pretty much as they appear. The longest is Bhuvaneshvari: BOO-vahNESH-varee. Accents are on the first syllables: SHOdash-ee, BAG-uh-lah, but first and second syllables can often have almost the same emphasis. For a full tour of images with descriptions, see kheper.net My treatment of the Mahavidyas emphasizes how each of them is an aspect of time or reflects our consciousness of time. Kali herself is the representation of Eternal Time as it erupts into the passing moment. Think of the stream of passing moments as ripples on the surface of an ocean that is relatively calm and quiet. The regular movement of ripples across the surface marks the flow of moments, one after the next, like advancing and receding waves. The transient moments of each day recede into the past and advance toward the future in steady, regular intervals that can be measured. Such is ordinary experience. With Kali, the power of the entire ocean rises into the rippling waves. This goddess uniquely represents our capacity for a non-ordinary experience of time that obliterates the habitual sense of past and future, even the habitual sense of the present. "Kali is the Shakti of Kala," the power of the Instant: intensive, nontransient time. Kala is this instant, right now, but encountered as the Instant, the still moment in Eternal Time. It is quite different from what we experience as the passing moment, for the Instant does not pass. Planetary Tantra is Kala Tantra, the practice of observing and entering the Instant. Many of the practices of Kala Tantra are improvised in the moment they are performed. And the results of those practices are almost instantaneous. This factor of instantaneousness makes Kala Tantra unique, radical, and direct. Planetary Tantra, considered as a practice with Kali ("Kali worship," crudely speaking), has considerable

shock-value. Some teachings of Planetary Tantra are totally unprecedented. Because they have not been stated before, they can induce shock when first encountered. Kala Tantra is a fast-track, highintensity discipline that will blow the fuses of many people who do not even practice it, but just get near someone who does.At first view, the Mahavidyas may appear forbidding and offensive, even gruesome. Durga, the warrior goddess, demands patience and sobriety of the spiritual warriors who seek her alliance. Scholars emphasize that the Mahavidyas are not sweet-hearted, nurturing mothers. Far from it. "They tend to be rough, not soft, in nature," Kinsley notes.That's putting it mildly. The Mahavidyas are generous in granting boons and occult powers to their devotees, including the power to kill, paralyze, and render deaf and dumb, cast spells on people, or get anything you want out of anyone. These female divinities have a lot to do with magic and nothing to do with maternity. "They have little or no connection with motherhood, fecundity, and growth... They are not depicted as mothers, and they are rarely referred to by maternal epithets. The Mahavidyas are seldom worshipped for progeny or fecundity... They are almost always depicted or described without reference to a [male] consort" (Kinsley, p. 62). In the last respect, the Mahavidyas resemble certain Tibetan Buddhist figures called dakinis who also appear without consorts. This parallel links the Indian Mahavidyas with certain Tibetan female divinities, a connection to be explored as the conversion continues. What does this outrageous flock of supernatural witches signify for humanity and, more specifically, for those individuals who would seek an interactive relation to the Mahavidyas? This particular manifestation of the Divine Feminine is uniquely timed to the close of Kali Yuga. Hence Kali heads the lot. The Mahavidyas offer an opportunity to enter a non-ordinary experience of time, and much more as well. But they do not present a warm, welcoming impression. If they are aspects of the earth goddess, Gaia-Sophia, as I am proposing, it remains to be seen what they represent on Gaian terms, and how they offer interactivity with the animating presence of the earth. This essay continues in part two, From the Shakti Cluster to the Tantric Zodiac.

jll: 26 November 2008 Andalucia The Tantric Conversion, II The Shakti Cluster and the Tantric Zodiac I am splitting the description of how I discovered the Shakti Cluster into two parts. Initially, I understood the Cluster to consist of ten components, the Mahavidyas of Hindu religion, following what scholars say. This is received material. In part two of The Tantric conversion, I will explain the advance from ten to eighteen components: that is to say, how I modified the received material into an expanded view of the Cluster. A related essay, Trance Learning, explains the experimental method (shamanic technique, if you will) that I use to engage the Shakti Cluster. Shri Vidya Complex I did not derive my view of the Shakti Cluster from books and studies. Rather, it began to emerge spontaneously in my shamanic practice during the summer of 2008. The groundwork had been laid years before in my involvement with the supernatural guardian I call DMD, "Devi My Dakini." My first encounter with this entity occurred in a lucid dream at the age of four. She appeared to me as a terrifying hag, similar to the famous vision of the Indian sage Naropa (1016 - 1100 CE). Herbert V. Guenther, whose 1963 book The Life and Teachings of Naropa is a modern classic, identified the witch of Naropa's vision with Dorje Phagmo, the Daimond Sow or Adamantine Sow of Tibetan Buddhism. Her name in Sanskrit is Vajravarahi. She is one of the more prominant dakinis of Buddhist Tantra. Guenther compares her to the Jungian anima, the numinous female component of the male psyche. Below: Tibetan thangka, typical image of Dorje Phagmo. This dakini is of high status, considered to be a Female Buddha. Her dancing power is iconic, repeated in almost all dakini images. Like Kali, she wears a garland of severed heads. In her right hand she holds a knife used for cutting away illusions, including the illusion of separate ego identity. With the dorje handle of the blade, using the butt, she shatters all mirrors of subjectivity. In her left arm she cradles a magic staff adorned with banners. In her left hand she holds a skull-cup filled with blood hence the term, blood-drinking dakini.

The five-skull crown signifies the Tantric principle of transmutation of the poisons of the five emotions (variously named): anger, jealousy, greed, hatred, and obtusity or denial. The dakini drinks these emotions ecstatically, for to her they are taste delicious and converts them into wisdom nectars.

Such visionary encounters are common in Tibetan Buddhist lore. The dakini who so appears is a tutelary deity, a supernatural agent who guides and instructs. Almost always, the person who has the vision, if not someone commenting on it, will identify the supernatural agent by name. In shamanic encounters with the Otherworld, it's good practice to know exactly who's on your case. In one of the initial rites of Kala Tantra, the individual identifies a specific spiritual guardian with whom she or he maintains a steady long-term alliance. My guardian appeared to me vividly when I was four, but it was not until fifty years later that I learned to identify her and place her in a cosmic setting. Through experiments with and without the aid of psychoactive plants, I was led to understand that DMD is the Paramita ("supreme one") of an array of female divinities identified in Hindu religion as the Shri Vidya Complex. Shri is an honorific title meaning "sublime, glorious." Shri Vidya is "Glorious Wisdom." Once again, the word wisdom proves to be the guiding motif. All my work with the Gnostic Sophia was the outgrowth of my inner connection with Hindu goddess religion centered on the Shri Vidya Complex. I made the Hindu connection in Southern India at nineteen, years before I delved into Gnosticism. I did not have to grasp this connection intellectually for it to be effective, but eventually I did conceptualize it. Over many years, I did not directly associate the Gnostic Sophia with the Vidya goddesses, but I was certainly guided in my Gnostic studies by my guardian, she who holds a paramount role (paramita) among those sublime deities. There are 90 million Shri Vidya divinities, all female so I learned by sacred instruction beneath the Devi Tree on Infinity Ridge. I call them by the Sanskrit name dakini, "sky dancer," because they operate in the sky, in the atmosphere of the earth and, by extension, in the starry regions. Of these 90 million, a group of 10 million are intimately associated with the central star of our solar system, Savitra, and within this 10 million is a sub-set of dakinis who are aligned

in a particular way to Kali: the Kalika Dakinis. Kalika is the adjectival form of Kali; hence, Kaliesque or relating to Kali. Over time, I understood that my guardian DMD is the Paramita of the Kalika Dakinis of the Savitra array of the Shri Vidya Complex. Thus she is a dominant Kaliesque deity. It could be said that Devi My Dakini focalizes Kali in a subtle and particular manner. She appears to be in the class of the blood-drinking Dakinis of Tibetan Buddhist Tantra. For occult reasons, I am not permitted to know or pronounce her name. She is not Dorje Phagmo, I can tell you that. Dakini is a word of obscure origin, loaned into Sanskrit from an unidentified source. It may derive from the Dravidian cultures of Southern India, ancient stronghold of goddess worship. The Tibetan word for dakini is khandroma, "sky dancer." In the accelerated learning I have experienced since July, I have come to regard the Mahavidyas as dakinis, so I now lump them into the lot with Tibetan figures such as Vajravarahi. For some years, I have had a general sense of the Kalika Dakinis, simply because DMD, who is on my case, leads the pack. Quite rapidly, through the summer of 2008, I recognized the specific names and actions of these supernatural witches. You have to be there to see how this kind of recognition emerges... I would compare it to the way a painter sees a canvas evolve from colors and indefinite forms, with distinct figures taking shape as the entire composition emerges, all by itself. The process is the same in any creative activity, be it writing a novel or composing music. (For more specifics on this experience, see Trance Learning.) Hindu Earth Goddesses You may wonder, If dakinis are celestial deities who dance in the sky, what do they have to do with the solid earth? Well, Gaia herself is a great dakini who dances through the sky. Yet she provides a firm foundation for sentient life, and the basis for enlightenment as well; hence the name Sthavara, "stable one," for the goddess who supported and witnessed the enlightenment of Shakyamuni. In Buddhist Goddess of India, Miranda Shaw covers a range of Gaian deities from Asian tradition, starting with the Vedic goddess of the earth, Prthivi (pronounced PRI thi VEE). This name for mother earth means "vast one." Hence, PRTHIVI = GAIA, another Greek-Sanskrit correlation. In part one of The Tantric conversion, I used the concept of the belly-button or navel to describe the

tight whorl of the Shakti Cluster. The Sanskrit word for navel is nabhi. Buddhist writings compare the navel of the world, prthivi-nabhi, to the seat of wisdom where the Buddha sits, bodhi-manda. The navel or hub is the still point of the spinning world. This still point is both the axis of the planet, astronomically, and the axis of enlightenment. Commentaries on the enlightenment of Shakyamuni such as the Buddhacarita assert that the stability of the world-navel alone makes it possible for the mind to be steadied and concentrated for ultimate awakening. Enlightenment depends on the wisdom goddess, Sophia, embodied in the living planet, Gaia. There is nothing remote from earth or other-worldly about the ultimate state of awakening in which mind spontaneously recognizes and reverts to its own nature, the non-originated state of pure beholding. Liberation is not escapism, not a flight from the sensory world. It is clear and steady centering in this world of sentient life and sensory impressions. Total recognition of this world as all there is, is nirvana. To show the total dependence of Buddhist philosophy on the mystique of the earth goddess, Miranda Shaw considers Prajnaparamita the supreme wisdom goddess of luminous discernment, Parnashavari the leafy plant goddess, Marici the sunrise goddess, Janguli the snake goddess, Sarasvati the divine muse, Vasudhara the bountiful lady, Cunda or saving grace, Sitatapatra the invincible goddess, Usnisavijaya the bestower of long life, and Tara the one who delivers or saves. She concludes with a close look at five Tantric Female Buddhas: Vajrayogini, Nairatmya, Chinnamunda, Simhamuka and Kurukulla. This fall when I came across Shaw's book, I was already engaged in forming a visionary synthesis of the Mahavidyas, but doing so, I found myself pulling in a few more goddesses from here and there. Initially, I had no fixed number in mind, but I had a clear hunch that ten was not the full deck. Among the Hindu deities Shaw considers is one of the Mahavidyas, Chinnamunda, also called Cinnamasta. She is noted for the remarkable feat of severing her own head and letting the blood that spurts from her neck be drunk by two attendant goddesses. Again, this is not an image that is going to charm everone who comes down the block. Cinnamasta is one of the more gruesome Mahavidyas. Her headsevering act represents the attainment of egoless awareness and immersion in the potent knowledge

that courses in the bloodstream, iron-bound thunderbolt wisdom. The blood surges in three streams to represent the three inner channels of subtle anatomy, right, left, and center. Some folks may not go for Cinnamasta, but I know one person who certainly did: Joseph Campbell. When I saw him lecture at the Saint Francis auditorium just off the plaza in Santa Fe, the place was packed, with people stading three deep along the wall. Campbell's eyes gleamed as he spoke at length of the subtle anatomy of the chakras, and their corresponding states of awakening, especially relishing the image of Cinnamasta. I recalled Campbell's riveting talk this fall as I contemplated the expansion of the Shakti Cluster into a dazzling coven of blood-drinking dakinis. I rapidly verged toward the moment when the Mahavidyas would morph and be absorbed into a larger array of what I now call Gaian Dakinis. Shapeshifting Zodiac Cinnamasta was a breakthrough because she linked the Hindu Mahavidyas to Buddhist Tantric lore on subtle anatomy. She also brought up an image from the Zodiac, an odd mutation spontaneously produced by my imagination years ago, which I had never quite been able to place in my mythological studies. It involves a way to visualize the constellation of Aries, the Ram. Be reminded that I refer here to the observable, real-sky constellations, not the invisible signs. The Ram is not to be identified with the astrological sign Aries. The Ram is a diminutive constellation situated almost entirely above the eclilptic, the apparant path of the sun (Ill. J. Stahl, New Patterns in the Skies).The three brightest stars mark its horns and head. Below the Ram is a large, sprawling constellation called Cetus, the Sea Monster. This is a vast devouring critter, a kind of Ahrimanic demon to use a Steinerian trope. In my way of drawing the Ram, I put a kind of aura over its head and associated it's head-stars with a neighboring constellation called Triangulum, an isoceles triangle to the left (east) of the Ram composite. Why did I do this? It's hard to say. Such impressions arise from continuous skywatching and poring over sidereal mythology... It's the creative imagination at work, sorting, selecting, arranging, and extrapolating the material one supplies to it. Imagination is the sorcerer's apprentice.

Eventually, I tried a modification of the Ram in which I represented that figure like a Bodhisatta, incorporating Triangulum and other stars in the region directly above the classical composite. This modification represented the interactivity of celestial images that comes up so often and so strikingly in skywatching. The Bodhisattva is poised majestically above Cetus, the Ahrimanic threat or satanic jester, comparable to Mara, the lord of illusion who taunted Shakyamuni at the moment of his awakening. I imagined the Bodhisattva to stand for liberated awareness that not only frees us from the mental fictions of Cetus/Ahriman/Mara, but also may free the monster itself -- hence I portrayed him with a pleading gesture. This draft of the metamorphosed Ram with the pleading Ahriman was drawn for a specific moment: the conjunction of jupiter and saturn at the feet of the Ram in May, 2000. Considering the self-beheading Mahavidya Cinnamasta, I was reminded of the way I had placed the severed head of the Ram in the lap of the Bodhisattva, without any intellectual notion of why I did so. The conceptual association, if you want to go into it, would run something like this: bodhi, the awakened mind, severs the ego consciousness and defeats or dissipates the illusions of Mara, the samsaric mind. This proposition is close to the received interpretation of Cinnamasta as a representation of egoless awakening. With the Ram/Bodhisattva image brewing in my mind, I began to sense how the other Mahavidyas might fall into order around the Zodiac, encompassing the entire array of thirteen constellations. However, I had no intention to sit down with pen in hand and run off those correlations, as if it were merely a matter of mix and match. Truth be told, correlations of this kind arise by the process of free association, letting the subconscious work by itself, but I have learned to restrain the process in order to get better results. In other words, correlation of this kind is not a mental exercise that can be executed rationally, it is a subliminal experiment better left to run its course. So, I did not allow myself to contrive a set of possible correlations between the Mahavidyas and the constellations of the Zodiac. Instead, I delegated the task to my subliminal mind and let the matter float without conceptual interference for a few days. What come out of my subliminal brooding was a

provisional set of correlations that I then proceeded to confirm by sessions of shamanic trance in parallel with more comparative studies in sidereal mythology. What a job description! No wonder I can't find a slot in the workplace. Cinnamasta obviously fell into the Ram position, with a soft clunk. But there are thirteen constellations and only ten Mahavidyas. I knew initially there would be no point-by-point match. Anyway, I strongly sensed that the ten-element Shakti Cluster had to expand. But how? And who else would be included? The Mahamudra Sky To describe what came next, I need to relate something that happened at the end of July, the week following my experience of the blue sky heart emptiness in Ronda, the culmination of the 108-day initiation. Enlightenment builds. In the days immediately after I sent off the black box offering to Emma, I found that what I experienced in Ronda did not fade out: it just kept happening to me. I was in a steady-state of wisdom-filled bliss, exceptionally open to everything. Little did I know that my lifelong observations of the night sky would be transformed in this sublime mood of heartfelt emptiness. The new moon fell on August first in 11 Leo (Sign), putting it in the constellation of the Crab. The last four days of July would be the time to perform a sunrise crescent divination, the most precise and penetrating method of divining the skies. It involves careful observation of the lunar crescent that rises before dawn. It takes four days, optimally with four hours of sky-gazing each evening in the darkness before dawn. At the final observation on the dawn of the fourth day, the crescent is a mere sliver that dissolves into the light of the rising sun. The divination culminates with close observation of how the crescent rises in the immediate setting of nature, the background stars, the horizon, trees, clouds, passing birds, any and all local conditions. All these factors merge at a certain, unpredictable moment to produce the fruit of the divinationthe precise answer to a specific question. I won't specify what I asked at that particular divination. It was about the fate of someone I know and love, an intimate personal matter. To get the desired result, I performed an owlfeather divination. This is a ritual using an owlfeather held in the right hand to focus the mind on silent knowing and inscribe on the body the incoming emanations that define the divined response to the question posed.

This "inscription" is made by flicking the nub of the feather, the part that would be used for writing were it dipped in ink, on the ball of the thumb of the right hand. The sunrise crescent divination with an owlfeather proved to be quite an intense experience. And so beautiful, given that I was bestowed with magnificent skies all evenings. Four shifts of four hours of uninterrupted sky-gazing in total silence has a cumulative effect that can produce some remarkable perceptions. Midway through the second evening, I noticed something extremely odd. Before my eyes, something was happening to the way I visualized the constellations. This effect has nothing to do with the ritualized concentration required for the owlfeather divination. It just happened as I scanned the celestial dome. Returning again and again to familiar constellations in the zodiac, such as the Fishes, Ram, and Bull, as well as to extra-zodiacal figures like Cassiopeia and Auriga, I found them morphing strangely. For over forty years I have been habituated to picturing the constellations primarily after their Greco-Latin identities. For intance, I would view Perseus in terms of the composite described by Greco-Latin astronomy and in the visual imagery of Greco-Latin myth: the crouched warrior brandishing a sword to cut off the head of Medusa. The same for Cassiopeia, Auriga, the Bull, the Ram, and the entire panorama of starry actors. But now, deeply immersed in the owlfeather divination, I found these long-familar images dissolving before my eyes. Looking at the Ram, for instance, I did not see the usual image pictured in the above illustrations. The composite stars of that constellation seemed to dissolve before my eyes, or the stars were as if oddly displaced, like letters in an alphabet soups slowly re-arranging themselves. This was a non-conceptual process witnessed in silent knowing, mental radio turned off. And all the more vivid for being so. I found that I was being shown a whole new way to view the night skies. The GrecoLatin images dissipated and in their place emerged great looming animal shapes, demonic faces, ritual objects. Above the Ram emerged the head of a deer, the graceful spread of its antlers adorned in bluish light. A name came to mind: Mystic Blue Deer. I recalled the blue deer of Huichol myth. I glimpsed a buffalo-headed demon that I recognized as a heruka, a wrathful male diety of Buddhist Tantra. In the region of Auriga, the Charioteer, saw a jeweled mask of Shiva that shifted into the darkly radiant face of his

Greek counterpart, Dionysos. In the place of the Pleiades, I beheld a spindle. Stretching from the Fishes to Aurigahovered a huge vulture with wings outspread in a majestic gesture of shelter. I was witnessing the spontaneous revelation of the Mahamudra Sky, magical images of blissful emptiness. This revelation came to me all on its own, with no mental contrivance of any kind. If I attempted to think out the emergent figures, the process faltered. Into the fourth evening, I realized I was undergoing a kind of overwrite of all my previous skywatching skills, so that a totally new order of perception could be installed. The process was effortless and without stress, extremely pleasant. As I brought rational understanding to bear on this immense imaginative makeover, I concluded that I was being shown the sky as seen by Bon Po diviners of pre-Buddhist Tibet that is, the sky of indigenous visionary trance. Gaian Dakinis So, I received the vision of the Mahamudra Sky almost as if it were a side-effect of the owlfeather divination. Yet what a momentous shift it was for me! Almost immediately, I began to apply the animations of the newly revealed panorama to my contemplations of the Shakti Cluster. In this metamorphosed view, some but not all of the Mahavidyas assumed their places around the Zodiac, and others assigned themselves to extra-zodiacal regions. Where there was no point-by-point correlation between Mahavidya and constellation, other female deities entered the scenario. They just showed up, fresh from an all-night rave at the Vajrayana Club, dancing rapturously and delighted to be included in the new and expanded configuration of the Cluster. Over a few weeks, I developed a provisional array of dakinis matched to the thirteen constellations, plus half a dozen more that did not. I was gradually arriving at a novel configuration of ten Hindu Mahavidyas with other female deities drawn from Buddhist Tantra. The overall picture of correlations was irregular and anomalous, which I found pleasing. The magic number, so it appeared, was going to be eighteen. I decided to call the entire group Gaian Dakinis. Why? I had an intuitive flash that the Shakti Cluster, expanded in this manner, was leading me to a revelation about Gaiasomething to do with the plot of her lucid dream. The owlfeather ritual triggered the opportunity to re-envision the entire celestial globe with indigenous graphics: the Mahamudra Sky. At the same time, I was drawn to convert the habitual

Greco-Latin constellations, Ram, Bull, Twins, etc., into female tutelary deities from Tibetan and Indian religion: the Tantric Zodiac. Why would Tibetan and Indian Tantric imagery give an imaginative rendering of what's happening to Gaia in her lucid dream? Well, first of all because this imagery is intrinsically derived from religions of the goddess! I would expect that the goddess sees herself in the imagery of the religous imagination in which she has been sought for millenia. In any case, that is the best chance, if not the only chance, for humans to imagine how Gaia's dream-life operates from her own perspective, inside it. My shamanic practice in communication with Gaia has convinced me that she reaches us through the imagery we use to reach her, but not through all of it. We cannot reach the planetary goddess, for instance, through the imagery of the Virgin Mary or the Divine Sophia of Greek Orthodoxy. I am quite aware that this outrageous statement will infuriate some folks. It will be deemed totally unacceptable to claim that some imaginative approaches to the Divine Feminine are better than others. But I do say so. Most emphatically. Religious scholars, including feminists such as Rosemary Radford Reuther (Goddesses of the Divine Feminine), tend to play the game of syncretism, finding valid allusions to the Divine Feminine in diverse religions and cultures. New Age mystics such as Caitlin Mathews (Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom) make it look like any vision of the Goddess is as valid as any other, given that the devotion of the heart is pure. Even venerable Buddhist scholars such as Thomas Cleary (Twilight Goddesses, written with Sartaz Aziz), do not play favorites among the goddess figures and female buddhas drawn from various cultures. It's all the same to them: people of different faiths and cultures who use religious imagination to reach the Goddess are all going to get equally valid results. But will they? When it comes to religious imagination, I feel compelled to ask, How do we know how well anyone is using this tremendous capacity? And how can we tell if are they succeeding with it? How do you measure success (read: truth) in the use of religious imagination? The above scholars don't bother to pose such a question. I draw a strong distinction between religious imagination that produces a fictional icon of the Goddess, and that which enables direct access to Her, experientially rather than through the blind man's bluff of faith. Faith is the booby prize of religious imagination. You do not get a direct line to the planetary mind via the Virgin Mary, even with the

help of Wine and Host. You do get a genuine planetary connection of the Divine Feminine with Dorje Phagmo and her chorus line of naked blooddrinking dakinis. With the Shakti Cluster comes the full-bore connection, eighteen channels at once. Here is my claim: the Gaian Dakinis of the Shakti Cluster, eighteen strong, are channels into the lucid dream of the planet, or eruptions from the dream, either way. In their totality, these eighteen female deities comprise the identity of the planetary goddess as she experiences herself in her waking dreamthat is, as she awakens lucidly to conative awareness of her dreambody, earth. The noun identity has no adjectival form that would mean "of, or pertaining to, identity." I might propose the adjective idential (I-DEN-chul): for instance, your driver's license is an identity document, telling the authorities who you are. This works pretty well, but to keep it simple let's use the word identity as an adjective or compound noun. For example, your family history is an identity narrative, telling you who you are in geneological terms, etc. The historical chronicles of a nation make up the identity legend of its natives, the basis of their agreed collective identity. The Gnostic story of the Anthropos is an identity myth for the human species, telling us who we are in cosmic terms. Here again is my claim, using the word identity as just demonstrated: The Shakti Cluster is the identity node in the lucid dream of Gaia, the imaginative configuration through which she comes to recognize herself and act deliberately in her waking dream, and through which we, in turn, can participate in her dream. Gaian Dakinis are so-called because, quite simply, they are aspects of Gaia, the planetary entelechy. Put otherwise, they are channels of her identity node. I use the word node provisionally, for lack of a better term. Wikipedia says: In communication networks, a node (Latin nodus, knot) is an active electronic device that is attached to a network, and is capable of sending, receiving, or forwarding information over a communications channel. A node is a connection point, either a redistribution point or a communication endpoint (some terminal equipment).

As channels in the identity node of Gaia, the Dakinis of the Shakti Cluster are part of a communication network that opoerates both from Gaia to humanity, and vice versa, from humanity to Gaia. Within the lucid dream of Gaia, the planetary mind has configured itself into an eighteen-channel console, a medium for two-way communication. The Dakinis of the Shakti Cluster are specific figurations of Gaia's imagination of herself as the main actor in her lucid dream. Not all dakinis play this role. Gaia awakens in her dream by seeing herself reflected in these eighteen facets. But we also can recognize, and engage, the living intelligence of the planet through the same facets. The Dakini configuration that enables Gaia to awaken in her lucid dream also enables us to participate in her awakening. Such is the wild and outrageous, unparalleled and unprecedented opportunity presented by the Shakti ClusterIF you go interactive with it. Detail of initial sketch of the configuration of Gaian Shaktis in the Tantric Zodiac jll October 2008 More in this vein in the forthcoming essay, Dakini Dance: Interaction with the Shakti Cluster. jll: 27 November 2008 Andalucia