Philosophical Speculations

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 11:17 pm Now someone may say "But why would I want to differentiate myself? This is what I dream for - all inclusive oneness, without boundaries, a spiritual soup of existence." The problem is that this is how one feels about it while still in a body. It's simply naïve to expect that things will remain the same after death, when we no longer have the physical sheaths around which revolves practically all our Earthly life.

Well, if your understanding of "Oneness" is "all inclusive oneness, without boundaries, a spiritual soup of existence", then it has nothing to do with what I was pointing to, of what Christ and Buddha meant by Oneness, so you apparently just did not understand what I was trying to convey. But I do not have any more steam left to try to explain it again

But anyway, thanks for the lecture, these words from Steiner are quite revealing and show that anthroposophy is actually incompatible with oneness, so I realize that all my attempts to steer anthroposophy into accepting oneness are futile and were destined to fail, and I now understand your resistance to it. Needless to say, this resistance is based on complete misunderstanding of what it actually is, both by Steiner and you. For Steiner, oneness is "the thoughts of all the hierarchies merging into one another", and for you, instead of or in addition to, it is "a spiritual soup of existence without boundaries".

It is precisely of this oneness-striving that one must be cured if one wishes to stand correctly in the spiritual world. Here in the sense world it is so easy to say: we must seek oneness everywhere, we must seek unity in the plurality, in the multiplicity. But that is something which only has significance for the physical sense world here. For when we pass through the gate of death then we do not have multiplicity, but something which comes before our soul as an overwhelming consciousness. When we have passed through the portal of death we have nothing but oneness around us, continuous oneness. It is then a matter of rightly finding plurality, multiplicity. We must strive there for nothing else than to come out of oneness into multiplicity.

That which surges around us at first is just this oneness. But what is this oneness? It is the thoughts of all the hierarchies merging into one another. What all the hierarchies think together; this thought-world of the hierarchies indistinguished as to what one hierarch, what the other hierarch thinks; — this is the Light-Being of Thought that surges round us, this oneness. ... Therefore we live in the thoughts of the hierarchies flowing together to a oneness. Therein we live.

So, apparently Steiner is describing a hierarchy which:
- Compels us to "strive there for nothing else than to come out of oneness into multiplicity"
- Completely rejective and ignorant, knowingly or unknowingly, of what Christ and Buddha meant by Oneness
- Is a military-type hierarchy where all our thinking life and all our thoughts are nested in thinking and thoughts of higher orders of the hierarchy. So, "Fascio" is indeed a good description of this kind of hierarchy.

I will leave it for people to exercise their spiritual discernment and decide for themselves what kind of hierarchy is this. Apparently, anyone who is initiated into this hierarchy and connects with them through occult practices during the human life will obviously be welcomed to enter it after physical death, which Steiner was exactly describing.

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 11:17 pm As explained in the lecture, differentiating ourselves is only the first step. Then we have to begin making sense of our new spiritual environment. I guess it will be very difficult to understand what it means that we 'obliterate thoughts and then beings approach us'. These things can become clear only gradually. The most important thing is that this 'approaching' has nothing to do with the approaching we know through the senses (when for example we see with our eyes a human approaching us). It is precisely this kind of images that we need to obliterate. Then the approaching of the being happens in our own being, when our intuitive spiritual activity resonates with that of the other being. In other words, to know another being after death (or in higher cognition through Inspiration and Intuition) we have to allow it to think through us, our "I" has to dance with the activity of the other "I", just like we can allow another person to be the leading partner in a dance. The great difference is that this leading doesn't impress in us as some perceptible spiritual phenomena (as it is in our Earthly state but also in the Imaginative) but has to be accommodated in our innermost being.

Thanks for sharing this lecture from Steiner and your elaboration, Cleric. It always astounds me how well you both communicate the experiential realities which are clearly so difficult to translate into the intellectual grunts we are accustomed to on the normal sensory plane. And it all relates back to the core of PoF and bringing our real time thinking through the World Content out of the blind spot. Then it dawns on us how flimsy our intellectual judgments of the nature of the perceptible world are, conditioned by the brain-bound sensory organism, let alone the imperceptible soul-spirit worlds we only come to know inwardly across the threshold or through initiation. We don't try to judge the latter by plucking words from scriptures and understanding them as we would understand a billboard sign on the highway. Instead we seek to "adjust our relation inwardly to the words", which is generally too much effort for the materialist or the mystic. In fact we could say that is a working definition of reductionism - an unwillingness to adjust oneself inwardly to words, perceptions, or experiences of any sort. In contrast, the initatory path actively resists the convenient compulsion to form rigid models, theories, and judgments of the World Process no matter what stage of development or level of understanding one attains. Only that open-ended humility and unending striving for inner growth is in keeping with the nature of spiritual truth, i.e. the Spirit of Christ.

Steiner wrote:The theosophist also knows that in every philosophical system a core of knowledge is that in every system, so to speak, a level of human knowledge is hidden.

It cannot be a matter of disproving Kant or Schopenhauer. Who strives fairly can be mistaken, but the next best cannot simply come to disprove them. It must be clear to us that all these spirits strove for truth from their point of view, and that we find just the core of truth in the different philosophical systems. That is why it cannot be a matter for us who is right or who is wrong. Who positions himself firmly on his own point of view and then compares the points of view with each other and says that he can accept only this or that, is in terms of philosophical knowledge on the same point of view as a stamp collector. The loftiest recogniser has not even ascended the highest summit of insight. Each of us is on the ladder of development. Even the loftiest human being cannot recognise anything absolute of truth, of the world spirit. If we have climbed up a higher level of knowledge, we also have a relative judgment only which always increases, if we have climbed up an even higher summit.
...
It is just that view which brings peace and tolerance everywhere. All these truths which I have given are steps to the real truth. Kant has moved some way, also Schopenhauer. The one more, the other less. They are on the way. However, it always concerns how far they have gone this way. Theosophy does also not dare to say that it is on the summit. The right way is the way itself, above all that which was inscribed on the Greek temples: recognise yourself (gnothi s’auton).

Ashvin wrote:Only that open-ended humility and unending striving for inner growth is in keeping with the nature of spiritual truth, i.e. the Spirit of Christ.

Christ wrote:"I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them." (John 17)
"Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." The Gospel of Thomas

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 1:12 am Well, if your understanding of "Oneness" is "all inclusive oneness, without boundaries, a spiritual soup of existence", then it has nothing to do with what I was pointing to, of what Christ and Buddha meant by Oneness, so you apparently just did not understand what I was trying to convey. But I do not have any more steam left to try to explain it again

But anyway, thanks for the lecture, these words from Steiner are quite revealing and show that anthroposophy is actually incompatible with oneness, so I realize that all my attempts to steer anthroposophy into accepting oneness are futile and were destined to fail, and I now understand your resistance to it. Needless to say, this resistance is based on complete misunderstanding of what it actually is, both by Steiner and you. For Steiner, oneness is "the thoughts of all the hierarchies merging into one another", and for you, instead of or in addition to, it is "a spiritual soup of existence without boundaries".

I anticipated this response. In fact I intended to put in parentheses personal notes to you at precisely these points because it was very predictable that you would hook at the words and miss the holistic meaning.

To put that into a comparison that even a child would understand, what we’re doing here is like speaking about an expedition to the North Pole. It is explained how the conditions there are different, how our activity should be correspondingly adapted and so on. Then someone says “These are all philosophical debris. What you speak of misses the most important aspect – that there’s all-encompassing whiteness there. Everything else is just fragments that pull you away from the essential.” However, what the latter position misses is that these statements are made from the comfort of armchair philosophy/spirituality. It neglects the fact that when we truly approach the North Pole and not only fantasize about it, we don’t need any special effort to continuously remind ourselves that there’s whiteness everywhere. This is a given fact there, we can’t escape that whiteness even if we try. But now we have completely different problems – things that we simply never considered from the comfort of our armchair in front of the warm fireplace. These are the things that we have been taking for granted all along, while we were fixating on the all-importance of whiteness. But as soon as we’re stripped of our warmth we would understand that we have neglected something important.

As simple as it is, this metaphor depicts the situation. I believe everyone here already knows what you mean by Oneness, which is effectively quite different from what Lou, Mike, Lorenzo mean, which would become apparent if they were willing to go down the road with you in the way we do. You are in general agreement with them only because you all equally celebrate the wildcard state for which there are no words. But if you were to go into details, your vision of post incarnational careers, nondual worlds and so on, would quickly diverge from, for example, Lou’s vision, who came here to be grounded in the mycelium-like network of being and not to ascend. Btw, in the past Lou’s main accusation to Western esotericism was that it is ascension based. I wonder whether in the light of these exchanges it is recognizable that the latter is much more grounded and committed to the evolution of our whole Cosmic context than the philosophy which sees the world only as a tangential sandbox of duality, without real significance except helping us reach the conclusion that it must be overcome and left behind. But such things only show how superficially everything is grasped – as long as words like ‘oneness’, ‘all-inclusive diversity’, ‘inexplicability of the great mysteriousness’ are mentioned, it is assumed that everyone is on the same page. When ‘finding our true relations to spiritual beings’ is mentioned, it is assumed that one tries to perpetuate the state of separateness and duality.

So as said, your vision of Oneness has been well explicated. You are God in the flesh and you assume your core sense of individual being is practically eternal and independent of whether you are in a bodily context or not. The post was not meant to doubt the fact that we’re all of One Divine Spirit but only to point out that after death this fact is overwhelming and in fact we need special skills to support our (nondual) individual perspective. To see the relevance of these things you would have to ponder on the question what keeps your nondual individuality after death from from dissolving into the truly all-encompassing Divine.

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 2:35 am

Ashvin wrote:Only that open-ended humility and unending striving for inner growth is in keeping with the nature of spiritual truth, i.e. the Spirit of Christ.

Christ wrote:"I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them." (John 17)
"Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." The Gospel of Thomas

***
"Now let us think of all that it signifies when the human soul is able to say to itself: “Yes, I have done this or that in the world. It does not impair my evolution, for I do not remain as imperfect as I was when I committed the deed; I am permitted to overcome that imperfection in the further course of my Karma by making compensation for the deed. But I cannot undo it for the Earth-evolution.” Man would have to bear unspeakable suffering if a Being had not united Himself with the Earth, a Being who undoes for the Earth that which we cannot change. This Being is the Christ. He takes away from us, not subjective Karma, but the objective spiritual effects of the acts, the guilt. That is what we must follow up in our hearts, and then for the first time we shall understand that Christ is in truth that Being who is bound up with the whole of Earth-humanity. For the Earth is there for the sake of mankind, and so Christ is connected also with the whole Earth. It is a weakness of man, as a consequence of the Luciferic temptation, that although he is indeed able to redeem himself subjectively through Karma, he cannot redeem the Earth at the same time. That is accomplished by the Cosmic Being, the Christ.

And now we understand why many anthroposophists cannot realize that Christianity is in full accord with the idea of Karma. They are people who bring into Anthroposophy the most intense egoism, a super-egoism; certainly they do not put it into words, but still they really think and feel: “If I can only redeem myself through my Karma, what does the world matter to me? Let it do what it will!” These anthroposophists are quite satisfied if they can speak of karmic adjustment. But there is a great deal more to be done. Man would be a purely Luciferic being if he were to think only of himself. Man is a member of the whole world, and he must think about it in the sense that he can indeed be egotistically redeemed through his Karma, but is not able to redeem the whole Earth-existence. Here the Christ enters. At the moment when we decide not to think only of our ego, we must think about something other than our ego. Of what must we think? Of the “Christ in me”, as Paul says; then indeed we are united with Him in the whole Earth-existence. We do not then think of our self-redemption, but we say: “Not I and my own redemption — not I, but the Christ in me and the redemption of the Earth.”"

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 8:40 am To see the relevance of these things you would have to ponder on the question what keeps your nondual individuality after death from from dissolving into the truly all-encompassing Divine.

You are conflating individuality and diversity with duality. The hierarchy of Divine beings are individuated spiritual activities of the Divine consciousness, but they exist in the nondual state and experientially know their Oneness with the Divine which is inseparable from their Manyness. It has nothing to do with dissolving into a soup.

The dualistic state is when souls, deliberately or out of ignorance, ignore of forget the Oneness and only perceive Manyness, in which case they perceive themselves as separate selves, and perceive the world as separate things and other separate selves. This is an illusory picture of the world in their minds, but they take it for real. Some souls in the dualistic state reincarnate as humans, some live in the discarnate state as a hierarchy of dualistic beings and have a strong influence on humans. For them it is an experiment, they honestly believe that they can build a functional realm and society while being in the dualistic state of consciousness and disregarding the Oneness, that they can develop a structural world of ideas, laws and forms, and then evolve and learn through it. It is a Cosmic experiment, the evolutionary route that they decided to take by exercising their free will. Within the dualistic realm there is a polarity of dualistically understood "good" and "evil", but as a whole the world of duality and its hierarchy are not "evil". So far it has not been very successful, we can see a lot of scientific and technological progress in humanity, but the spiritual state did not develop too far from primitive dualistic egotism, and as a consequence, the majority of humanity still live in consumerism, conflicting beliefs and exoteric religions, individual and group conflicts, political wars etc. This is not surprising, because the dualistic state is intrinsically egoic, unless it is stringently restricted by laws and controlled in a nested-hierarchical manner.

The Divine got alone with this experiment it but always keeps the door to the Kingdom of Oneness open, everyone is always welcomed back at any moment. The mission of Christ, Buddha, Krishna and other messengers was to bring this message to humanity. We can perfectly and more efficiently evolve as individuated spiritual activities while remaining in the nondual state without going into the dualistic mode and all its confusion, hierarchical submission and suffering.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 12:01 pm And now we understand why many anthroposophists cannot realize that Christianity is in full accord with the idea of Karma. They are people who bring into Anthroposophy the most intense egoism, a super-egoism; certainly they do not put it into words, but still they really think and feel: “If I can only redeem myself through my Karma, what does the world matter to me? Let it do what it will!” These anthroposophists are quite satisfied if they can speak of karmic adjustment. But there is a great deal more to be done. Man would be a purely Luciferic being if he were to think only of himself. Man is a member of the whole world, and he must think about it in the sense that he can indeed be egotistically redeemed through his Karma, but is not able to redeem the whole Earth-existence. Here the Christ enters. At the moment when we decide not to think only of our ego, we must think about something other than our ego. Of what must we think? Of the “Christ in me”, as Paul says; then indeed we are united with Him in the whole Earth-existence. We do not then think of our self-redemption, but we say: “Not I and my own redemption — not I, but the Christ in me and the redemption of the Earth.”"

The "world" you are talking about is the dualistic realm only. It is a kind of a "Casino" where beings play dualistic games and get addicted to them. The nondual beings of the Divine hierarchy are tremendously concerned about those who got stuck in the Casino, and they developed many routes to get the souls out of the addiction and out of the Casino. There are other places in the Universe where souls can exist and incarnate in a heathy nondual mode. And it can even be the Earth and the human race once it is freed from the dualistic hierarchy that controls the majority of humanity and shapes the lawful structures in their collective unconscious that in turn shape their state of minds and their evolution. In other words, we can perfectly live in the building of the former Casino once we get rid of the Casino corporation running it and once we rebuild its internal structures to make it habitable for a healthy way of life. The lie of the dualistic hierarchy is that they want us to believe that their dualistic "World" is all there is, while in reality it is only a tiny fraction of the Universe where souls exist in a distorted dualistic state of mind.

The redemption that Christ brought to humanity is exactly the redemption into Oneness to save souls out of the addiction to Casino. When this deep spiritual meaning is not understood or ignored, such misunderstood "redemption" becomes an abstraction.

"I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them." (John 17)

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 12:24 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 12:01 pm And now we understand why many anthroposophists cannot realize that Christianity is in full accord with the idea of Karma. They are people who bring into Anthroposophy the most intense egoism, a super-egoism; certainly they do not put it into words, but still they really think and feel: “If I can only redeem myself through my Karma, what does the world matter to me? Let it do what it will!” These anthroposophists are quite satisfied if they can speak of karmic adjustment. But there is a great deal more to be done. Man would be a purely Luciferic being if he were to think only of himself. Man is a member of the whole world, and he must think about it in the sense that he can indeed be egotistically redeemed through his Karma, but is not able to redeem the whole Earth-existence. Here the Christ enters. At the moment when we decide not to think only of our ego, we must think about something other than our ego. Of what must we think? Of the “Christ in me”, as Paul says; then indeed we are united with Him in the whole Earth-existence. We do not then think of our self-redemption, but we say: “Not I and my own redemption — not I, but the Christ in me and the redemption of the Earth.”"

The "world" you are talking about is the dualistic realm only. It is a kind of a "Casino" where beings play dualistic games and get addicted to them. The nondual beings are tremendously concerned about those who got stuck in the Casino, and they developed many routes to get the souls out of the addiction and out of the Casino. There are other places in the Universe where souls can exist and incarnate in a heathy nondual mode. And it can even be the Earth and the human race once it is freed from the dualistic hierarchy that controls the majority of humanity and shapes the lawful structures in their collective unconscious that in turn shape their state of minds and their evolution. In other words, we can perfectly live in the building of the former Casino once we get rid of the Casino corporation running it and once we rebuild its internal structures to make it habitable for a healthy way of life. The lie of the dualistic hierarchy is that they want us to believe that their dualistic "World" is all there is, while in reality it is only a tiny fraction of the Universe where souls exist in a distorted dualistic state of mind.

Eugene, it's obvious you are spinning all kinds of stories here to justify your personal desire to avoid responsibility for the Earth evolution as a whole. You project that responsibility into some vague, indefinite utopia where the revolution against the Casino has succeeded and you have free reign to micromanage the collective unconscious from afar. Ironically you then end up desiring power over the will of others exactly like the 'dualistic hierarchy' you keep mentioning. You imagine yourself to become the Earth's savior instead of working with Christ and what He already accomplished for the Earth evolution.

Anything which lawfully connects what we do here on Earth, in a living first-person and not abstract hypothetical way, with the development of our soul between death-rebirth is strenuously avoided, to the point where rebirth itself is avoided for you. It isn't imagined that everything you are thinking and typing here now is precisely the result of that lawful process, working in from the supra-sensory worlds. Your capacity to form intellectual thoughts which weave the stories together is only possible because you have already 'obliterated' Cosmic thought across the threshold to become conscious of the multiplicity within Unity. Everything in your experience right now points to this reality, because it is only unfolding the way it is because of that reality, if you only pay attention to what you are doing in your thinking instead of using your thinking only as a vacuum for more and more intellectual content about the 'nondual worlds'. No amount of quoting scriptures or referencing other peoples' NDE accounts can spare you from the task of thinking through your spiritual activity, as the place where the Divine immanently manifests itself and seeks to redeem all of humanity and the Earth as a unified organism.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 12:44 pm Eugene, it's obvious you are spinning all kinds of stories here to justify your personal desire to avoid responsibility for the Earth evolution as a whole. You project that responsibility into some vague, indefinite utopia where the revolution against the Casino has succeeded and you have free reign to micromanage the collective unconscious from afar. Ironically you then end up desiring power over the will of others exactly like the 'dualistic hierarchy' you keep mentioning. You imagine yourself to become the Earth's savior instead of working with Christ and what He already accomplished for the Earth evolution.

Anything which lawfully connects what we do here on Earth, in a living first-person and not abstract hypothetical way, with the development of our soul between death-rebirth is strenuously avoided, to the point where rebirth itself is avoided for you. It isn't imagined that everything you are thinking and typing here now is precisely the result of that lawful process, working in from the supra-sensory worlds. Your capacity to form intellectual thoughts which weave the stories together is only possible because you have already 'obliterated' Cosmic thought across the threshold to become conscious of the multiplicity within Unity. Everything in your experience right now points to this reality, because it is only unfolding the way it is because of that reality, if you only pay attention to what you are doing in your thinking instead of using your thinking only as a vacuum for more and more intellectual content about the 'nondual worlds'. No amount of quoting scriptures or referencing other peoples' NDE accounts can spare you from the task of thinking through your spiritual activity, as the place where the Divine immanently manifests itself and seeks to redeem all of humanity and the Earth as a unified organism.

Our spiritual responsibility for the Earth evolution is to steer it to the path of the evolution through the nondual state. Participation in the nondual Kingdom is voluntary and based on free will, there is absolutely no micromanaging, but there is freedom in harmony of Oneness and Love, as opposed to military-like nested dualistic hierarchy. It is done exactly through experiential realizing of our spiritual thinking activity as the individuated activity of One and the same Spirit, and then reshaping our perception of the world in a nondual way in harmony with this realization. There are always lawful processes in any state of consciousness, the question is what kind of processes they are and whether they shape our consciousness to function in dualistic or nondual mode. It would be silly to claim that nondual state denies the validity of lawful processes.

We can continue for another hundred pages, which I would like to avoid, but the key is, as Anthony said, you lack the "seismic" shift in the experiential understanding of Oneness, so all your knowledge is limited to the world of dualistic ideations. It is undeniable that you guys have a lot of knowledge of the structures of the dualistic construct, but you are missing a much bigger picture and much bigger Universe beyond this bubble of the dualistic form of existence.

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sun Apr 09, 2023 8:40 am I wonder whether in the light of these exchanges it is recognizable that the latter is much more grounded and committed to the evolution of our whole Cosmic context than the philosophy which sees the world only as a tangential sandbox of duality, without real significance except helping us reach the conclusion that it must be overcome and left behind.

The whole Cosmic organism is evolving, but it took two different evolutionary routes. One group of souls took the direct route that goes directly to the "South pole" (nondual state), and the other decided to go through the exploration of the "North pole" (dualistic state). Accordingly, they created two different lawful structures/realms where they can exercise their modes of existence (called "samsara" and "nirvana" in the Buddhist tradition, or "this worlds" and "Kingdom of Heaven" as Christ described it). The "North pole" route is not "tangential", evolution still happens there, it is just a different route, it is long and inefficient evolutionary path accompanied with a lot of confusion and suffering. Basically, most of its existence is trying and making mistakes, suffering form them and realizing that they do no work and we need to try something else, but whatever we try in the dualistic mode is mostly mistakes in one way or another. Not all of them of course, there are also good outcomes once in a while. Yet, beings still exercise their cognition, learn and evolve through these dualistic experiences. Eventually, when they sufficiently evolve, they realize that this dualistic way of evolving is too inefficient, unnatural and suffering-prone, and incoherent with reality as it actually is (and that is exactly why it is inefficient, because you cannot efficiently evolve your consciousness based on a fundamentally distorted perception of reality).

Ho! All that appears and exists, saṃsāra and nirvāṇa,
Has one ground, two paths and two forms of fruition,
The magical displays of awareness and unawareness.
Through this, Samantabhadra’s prayer of aspiration,
May all attain complete and perfect awakening.

The basis of everything is uncompounded,
A self-originating expanse, vast and inexpressible,
Beyond the names ‘saṃsāra’ and ‘nirvāṇa’.
This itself, when seen, is awakening.
But in their ignorance beings wander in saṃsāra.
May all sentient beings throughout the three realms
Realize the experience of the ineffable ground!

Continuously my emanations will appear
In their many billions, beyond imagining,
Manifest in varied ways according to need.
Through this, my compassionate aspiration,
May all the beings of saṃsāra’s three realms
Escape their plight among the six classes of beings.

From the very first, since awareness does not dawn
For deluded beings within the ground,
They are entirely mindless and confused.
This itself is unawareness, delusion’s cause.
And then, as if out of a sudden daze,
There is anxiety and mental disquiet,
From which notions of self and other and enmity appear.
As this habitual tendency is then reinforced,
Saṃsāra unfolds in its regular progression.
Thus, mind’s afflictions, the five poisons, develop,
And actions born of these five poisons never end.
Therefore, since the basis for beings’ delusion
Is a lack of mindfulness, an absence of awareness,
Through this, my aspiration as a buddha,
May all beings recognise their own awareness.

The unawareness that is co-emergent
Is a state of mindlessness, distraction.
The unawareness that designates
Is dualistic clinging to self and other.
These two, co-emergent and designating unawareness,
Provide the basis for the delusion of all beings.
Now through this, my aspiration as a buddha,
May the dark and murky gloom of mindlessness
Among all sentient beings in saṃsāra be dispelled;
May their dualistic perceptions be purified;
And may they recognise their very own awareness.

A mind of dualistic clinging is one of doubt.
From subtle attachment, once it has arisen,
Habitual tendencies gradually gain strength.
Food, wealth, clothing, home and companions,
The pleasures of the five senses, or dear relations—
Whatever is attractive brings the torment of desire.
These are the delusions of the world.
Actions based on dualistic clinging are unending.

All sentient beings throughout the three realms
Are equal to me, the buddha, in the ground of all,
Yet for them it is but a base of mindless delusion.
And now they engage in meaningless pursuits,
With sixfold karma as if deceived by a dream.
Yet I am the primordial buddha,
Guide to the six classes through my emanations.
Through this, Samantabhadra’s prayer of aspiration,
May all sentient beings without exception
Awaken within the dharmadhātu, the absolute sphere.

(The prayer of Samantabhadra, the Primordial Buddha)