To Find the Face We Had Before the World Was Made

 

I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

So W.B. Yeats declared, in his poem, "Before the World Was Made". What could he mean?

The couplet is with me as I read about the life of Yeshe Tsogyel, the Guru Dakini sometimes described as the Mother of Tibetan Buddhism. The first pages of her biography, channeled by an ecstatic 18th century yogin named Taksham Nuden Dorje, put us right  there: looking at a face that existed before the world. 

When we first meet Tsogyel she is in the form of the goddess Sarasvati, revered by Hindus and Buddhists alike for her learning, her devotion to sadhana or religious practice, and her lovely singing voice. As Sarasvati, she says to  Padmasambhava, known as Guru Rinpoche, and celebrated in Tibet as the Second Buddha, "It is time to project an emanation into the savage world." This confirms the Guru's desire to bring a female partner to Tibet to complete his mission of converting that wild and warring country - a militaristic empire at the time - to the dharma teachings. 

"Let the fire burn!" exclaims the Guru.
"We are burning together! “says the Dakini.

We are told that “the Guru's vajra and the Dakini's lotus are joined" and they enter the trance of union. They are surrounded and protected by the goddesses of the five Buddha families, and legions of fierce deities and dakinis. Beams of light blaze from where their bodies are joined and rush towards Tibet like shooting stars, to enter a royal couple who are joined in lovemaking.

The name of the mother-to-be is Getso. In the arms of the prince, Getso sees a swarm of golden bees, Making the sound of lute music, they enter the prince through the fontanel. In the same moment he sees a vision of the princess with three eyes holding a beautiful young girl. The visions multiply and spill into the world. Lightning flares, thunder rolls, a spring near the castle becomes a lake. And dreams flower into majesty.

In the night the prince dreams of an eight-petalled lotus that casts light across the multiverse. A coral stupa rises from the crown of his head - where his wife saw the bees fly in - and multitudes come from all over the world to pay homage or try to steal it. He dreams that he plays a lute, and the music reverberates through countless universes. In her dreams, the princess - now pregnant - is given a rosary of coral and conch shell beads from which red and white ambrosia streams in a never-ending fountain..

Nine months later, Getso gives birth without pain to a baby girl who already has waist length hair. When she is offered the traditional knob of yak butter, Tsogyel sits up in a half-lotus posture and explains herself:

I am an apparitional being, a yogini.
After eating immaterial essences for so long
The memory of coarse food has vanished But I will eat to complete my mother's happiness.

The Dakini proceeds to swallow the whole knob of butter with one gulp, and with it "the whole of samsara”. She is now fully in the world.

This can all be read as a magnificent tale of the descent of spirit from Light through Imaginal realms, in changing vehicles of consciousness - though here I am at risk of forsaking Buddhist terminology - to settle in a vehicle in the realm of Illusion known as the physical world. 

It is time to project an emanation into the savage world. Now that's a way to embark on a journey towards incarnation. If we can presume to make some part of the story our own, it may give us clues to how we can pursue Yeats' intent: to find the face we had before the world was made.

I have drawn here from a remarkable work by Keith Dowman, Sky Dancer: The Secret Life and Teachings of the Lady Yeshe Tsogyel (Ithaca NY: Snow Lion, 1996). In a lively and creative translation, Dowman gives us the life of Yeshe Tsogyel delivered as a "mind-treasure" to a yogin on "black days in a forest hermitage". Tsogyel is credited with seeding many termas (“treasures”) on behalf of Padmansambhava, and some of her own as well. These hidden treasures might be concealed in a landscape, in the clouds, in a dream or in a mind, to be revealed at the right times across generations. Taksham claimed to have received no less than Tsogyel's autobiography, and this is how it reads in Dowman’s version. As Dowman tells us, he “took poetic license to use the first person throughout” and to “convey the precise meaning and feeling-tone of the original in fluent English, rather than to reproduce the peculiarities of the Tibetan style and diction.” In my opinion, he has succeeded brilliantly.

Far beyond the Buddhist community, the story of Yeshe Tsogyel will be of compelling interest to those of us who want to reclaim the suppressed history of women and contribute to the restoration of the Divine Feminine. If you are drawn to the Dakini, you may want  to compare the oral telling dictated by Tarthang Tulku in Mother of Knowledge, The Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyel (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing. 1983) and the classic early text by Namkahi Nyingpo and Gyalwa  Changchub, Lady of the Lotus Born. The Life and Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyal, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambala, 1999)

“The Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal is the mother of all Buddhas– the Wisdom Consort of Guru Padmasambhava. Yeshe Tsogyal possesses inconceivable primordial wisdom, compassion, and the power of protection and manifestation of the enlightened activities…From a historical point of view, it is due to Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal’s compassion, wisdom and power of total recall that we have the entire teachings of Guru Rinpoche intact." - Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa (1951-2009)

The Cave of the Nymphs

The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry wrote a commentary on a scene in Homer's Odyssey that offers a remarkable allegory of the soul's comings and goings from embodiment in this world. A translation of Porphyry's text, new to the English language at that time, inspired William Blake to paint a picture full of codes for the awakening spirit.

For  Porphyry the Cave of the Nymphs is a “harbor of the soul”, a waystation between the worlds. Porphyry insisted that nous (mind, spirit) is never contained in the body, but only “acts in it” through affinity or gravitation. An affinity for what is moist and humid brings souls back into incarnation; a tendency towards what is dry and light and fiery carries the soul into the realms of the immortals. In the Cave of the Nymphs, Naiads (spirits of fresh waters and fountains) weave “moist envelopes” – “purple tissues” – on stone, and bees deposit their honey in stone urns. Images of taking on flesh, of coming into generation. 

The word-picture fascinated William Blake, who gave it visual form in a watercolor painting found only in 1947 in the clutter atop a cabinet in a stately home in Devonshire. The first experts to examine the picture decided to give it a title from one of Blake’s letters: “The Sea of Time and Space”. Kathleen Raine explains in fine detail that the picture is an illustration of the Cave of the Nymphs. It seems that Mystery rituals dedicated to Odysseus and the Naiads – and the soul? – were actually held in a cave near the beach of Dexa in Ithaca where Odysseus is said to have returned to his homeland, dreaming. 

Kathleen Raine discusses Blake's imagery in an essay in her book Blake and Antiquity. She finds ithat even with self-taught, self-driven Blake, it is true (as Yeats declared) that poetry is “the traditional expression of certain heroic and religious themes, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”  

In 1947 a stately home in Devonshire called Arlington Court was taken over by the National Trust. Among broken glass and junk on the top of a pantry cover was found a painting by Blake clearly dated 1821. The art experts provisionally titled it “The Sea of Time and Space”, after a phrase in one of Blake’s letters and in his poem “Milton]. Its actual nature – as an illustration to Porphyry and Homer – was not recognized for a long time because of the tendency to regard Blake as an “untaught original” rather than an autodidact who devoured and integrated huge bodies of literature. The symbols appear again and again in Blake’s own work, yet we see that they also have deep roots in mythic experience and Neoplatonist tradition. For Raine, 

Neoplatonism may be compared to an underground river that flows through European history, sending up, from time to time, springs and fountains; and wherever its fertilizing stream emerges, there imaginative thought revives, and we have a period of great art and poetry. [1] 

Blake was a contemporary of Thomas Taylor, who brought the Neoplatonists into the English language (and was often ridiculed for it). Taylor was a crusader for the philosophy of Plotinus, calling on the young men of his time to take up its “weapons of truth”. He published the first English translation of Porphyry’s De antro nympharum. 

Blake's picture gives s nymphs, weavers at a loom, a sea-god, souls entering incarnation, bright spirits reborn -  perpetual cycle of the descent and ascent of souls between an eternal and a temporal world. 

In Mystery traditions, the  voyage of Odysseus in its entirety was read as the type of such a journey of soul. The sea, in constant flux, is the world. The watery cave of Calypso is the world’s enchantments. The beggar’s rags in which Odysseus returns home are the body, which the soul discards when they are no longer needed. The sea crossing, as in many legends and myths, is the type of the soul’s journey to the Otherworld. 

Blake incorporates the image of Odysseus throwing something out to sea, his face averted. This borrows an image from Book V of the Odyssey where the  hero is washed up on the Phaeacian shore. Odysseus is the soul survivor of the wreck of his ship; the goddess Ino takes pity on him and lends him her girdle, urging him to swim to shore. When he lands he must throw her girdle back to her, turning his face away. In Blake’s painting, the hero has thrown the girdle; the goddess has caught it, and she is dissolving back into a spiral of radiant cloud.

Athena stands behind Odysseus, a figure of Divine Wisdom, pointing to the shining realm of the sun.

Things to look for in Blake's painting:

The source of life in the underground river or spring. 

The dry and the moist. Heraclitus sas “a dry soul is the wisest” although “moisture appears delightful to souls”. 

Womb and tomb: Birth into the cave is a death from eternity. The Cave of the Nymphs is the womb through which humans are born into the physical world. 

Bowls and urns: Blake shows them carried like water pots on the heads of winged nymphs in the depths of the cave. 

Bees: These winged nymphs are Porphyry’s bees, winged souls about to descend into the cave of the world through womb-like vessels. 

Weavers: Blake has borrowed from his own Daughters of Albion, who ply their shuttles to bind immortals into mortal bodies. In Homer, there are marble looms and purple garments. Porphyry’s gloss is that “the formation of the flesh is on or about the bones, which in the bodies of animals resemble stones.” There is a hint of cruelty in the faces of the weavers. 

The child enmeshed: To the right of the looms, in Blake’s image, a little girl is enmeshed in what the nymphs are weaving – she is being woven into a body. 

The tubs: borrowed from Porphyry (who in turn borrowed from the Gorgias and Hesiod): the tub or bucket of the evolved, temperate and “dry” soul that is intact and can hold its contents, and the one of the person ruled by passion that is pierced and spills everywhere. Seen in two figures in the right foreground of Blake’s painting: a resolute woman turns her back on the swirl and climbs the steps, holding a bucket in her right hand while her left is raised towards the heavenly world. She is opposed by the nymphs. Close to her, a “moist soul” lolls half-immersed in a tub which lies on its side, forever spilling and unfilled even as water streams into it; she looks happy but she disgusts Blake, because she is caught in the “deadly sleep” of physical life and is on her downward journey. 

The river’s mouth: the lowest stage of descent into matter in Blake’s painting. Here he introduces Fates who control the entry of souls into the Sea of Time and Space. Savage and cruel, one unwinds the thread, a second measures it, a third waits with shears to cut it off. Phorcys (who Raine sees as a variant of Proteus) bears the phallic distaff from which the thread is unwound. 

The sleeping sun god – when this world wakes, the other world sleeps.

1. Kathleen Raine, "The Cave of the Nymphs" in Raine, Blake and Antiquity: The A.E. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton N.J.: Bollingen, 1977) 4

 

William Blake, "Sea of Space and Time" (1821)

 

 

 

 

Through the Skylight: Adepts who take on bodies

The light comes on at the top of my head. It is bright, white and steady and I know there is no cause for alarm. It is like the opening of a skylight. I sense that a circle of benign tutelary presences has been formed, and is beaming a communication to me. The theme is the deliberate incarnation of a succession of adepts who teach and inspire humanity. I am able to record the following:

     “This is truth: there is a line of spiritual masters, known to each other across the ages, who watch over humans and are alert to the stirrings of spiritual understanding and intellectual achievement. From time to time they take on bodies voluntarily. Their descent into the body is both mourned and honored.
     “Born remembering, they are nonetheless exposed to the phenomenon of memory loss. Unless closely supported and protected, they are feared and resented, as unnatural, as “demons”, as illegitimate bastards. Hence the stories of efforts to put them to death: of Moses in the rushes, of Asklepios exposed on the mountain. Alternatively, in some traditions they are welcomed and even worshiped, but may become pawns for greedy and ambitious theocracies.”

Origin: This journal entry, from New Year's morning, 1999, surfaced during one of my bouts of bibliomancy (divination by book) in my old journals. It describes an experience unfolding in the hypnopompic zone, the place between sleep and awake - prime real estate for adventurers in consciousness. 

Skylight photo by RM