True Nature of the Mind

According to the Mahamudra and Mahasandhi/Ati yoga systems, considered the most advanced philosophical sciences of Tibetan civilization, the true nature of the mind is complete and perfect awareness; the underlying purpose of reality is to achieve a greater level of creative awakening through the self-observation of the Original Mind.

The human body perceives reality in terms of waking, dreaming and sleeping states of consciousness in which material, dream and primordial levels form the structure of the mind. The completion stage of meditation results in a union of the three bodies—material, subtle and super subtle, which is both the trikaya of Buddhist meditation theory and the Trinity of Christian Gnosticism. The Christian Trinity is also the description of the three bodies, known in Sanskrit as nirmanakaya, sambhogakaya and dharmakaya. In Latin alchemical terminology we have corpus (physical body), anima (soul), and spiritus (original spirit).

The true Philosopher's Stone of Western civilization is the deepest level of the unconscious mind and is represented as the Secret of the Golden Flower in Chinese alchemy and as the kundalini in Indian yoga. In Buddhism this primordial level of awareness is described as the dharmakaya truth or reality body, which must be united with the sambhogakaya (subtle body) for true Buddhahood to occur.

The concept of the three bodies and their union is the basis of non-theistic Asian inner science. These inner sciences are based upon thousands of years of thought- experimentation in which full-brain activation is sought using a variety of techniques that access the original energy of the body. Inner science includes internal alchemy, the Six Yogas of Naropa, meditation, breathing exercises and sexual yoga.

Until recently, it was not understood that the Spiritual Embryo of Taoist cultivation was the Truth body of Buddhism, the kundalini of yoga, and the hermetic androgyne of Western alchemy. The Tibetan description of the completion stage of meditation is the union of mother and son lights, with the mother light representing the dharmakaya body and the son light representing the sambhogakaya. In China, the union of mother and son lights is described originally as the marriage of the dragon and tiger. All these terms used are really trying to describe the same concepts—the dragon and tiger are the dharmakaya and sambhogakaya bodies, the causal and astral bodies, and the spirit and the soul. The process of uniting material, subtle and void levels of reality into a single whole is represented as the Tao, as well as the Western term The Great Work.

The Christian Gnostic description of enlightenment is based upon the union of body, soul, and spirit. The human body is composed of interdependent fields of matter, sound and light. The completion stage of authentic meditation is based on the unification of sound and light, which is the basis of Tantric Yogic theory. In many cases, the theory and methodology of subtle body activation has been lost in modern times.