NOTES FROM THE CONVERSATION START HERE:
Interface 1: Mutual presence of real and appearance:
To begin with, we need to think about this golden lion. It’s a metaphor. what is the lion and what is the gold and the gold backing and all the different ways that these go together. Real and Appearance are in the same place, and not. They are not the same, but there is no separation between them. They are mutually exclusive if you focus on one or the other, yet they blend as one golden lion, or lion-shaped gold. The gold is present entire in each part of the lion, but doesn’t have to go anywhere.
The lion is what APPEARS. It’s the universe of infinite appearances… it has form. It has a smell. It has a taste. We have thoughts about it. Is all that stuff. It’s what appears. It’s what you can grasp. And that’s where we start: the world.
And then there’s gold. Gold is a metaphor for the dimension of reality… true nature.
It stands for that which you can’t grasp, you can’t see, can’t touch.
He’s going to flip everything around and tell you that what you can see, what you can feel, what you can touch, what you can think, is less real than that which you can’t think, you can’t see, you can’t feel. He will look at each separately, more deeply. And then he will consider them together. And AS together. And as co-revealing and concealing. And as two dimensions of One Nature.
But before he does this Fatsang says, listen, Empress, this is a very special lion: The lion is infinite. It’s got an infinite number of hairs. And at the end of each little hair, there’s another little golden lion. And each those golden lions has an infinite number of hairs. At the end of which is a golden lion, even smaller, slightly different, ad infinitum. Each Lion is a unique form of the whole original… like a hologram.
when I first heard this description, I was like, oh, my God. I know that image. That image is something that shows up in very recent fractal mathematics, and is called the Mandelbrot set. Except it’s not made out of gold. It’s made out of. almonds. Because it’s mandelbrod. And also Mandala, of course!
About 25 years ago, there were some monks here and they were doing a sand mandala. And the sand mandala, of course, is an image of the whole universe. Which is also in us and outside, but in the sand mandala, there are four main parts to it. And in each part there’s a different color. For example, here’s a part that is yellow, and the yellow is made up a little pieces of sand. But my monk friend told me that there is a visualization or imagination they do when they’re making the mandala. And it goes like this. The yellow part of the four parts is made up of little yellow bells. And each grain of sand is a little yellow bell. And each of those little yellow bells is made up of tinier particles—which look like yellow bells. And so on. All the way down. So to my surprise, the visualization the monks are doing when they’re out there moving sand, is also a visualization of infinity.
INSTEAD OF GOLDEN LION, WE HAVE MANDEL(almond) BUDDHA…
We are going to zoom in on the Mandelbrot set. See… it looks like it’s a Buddha on its side. Think about the head lying down on its side. And we zoom in to the neck of the Buda. And there is our golden lion –Buddha –so many hairs, at the end of each one, a little Buddha image. And you zoom in more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD2XgQOyCCk to about 1.5 minutes
Maybe ten to the minus 20th and you zoom in. And looks like it goes on infinitely and it would if we could go in for now.
Now we see the infinity. Right. Look at all those hairs. And at the end of each.
And now there’s more hairs zooming in even that Buddha. You see the little Buddhas at the end, the big chair and little or Buddhas all over the place. And it and zooms, I’m not going to bore you with the whole thing. It keeps zooming. No, beautiful. It’s just beautiful. I won’t tell you what it is just now. Don’t worry. It’s a mathematical object. But all of a sudden, you’re zooming in the middle of nowhere.
And look at this. Oh, my God. OK. And now the whole thing’s going to start again. This Buddha is one of at this scale probably 10 to the 10th of these, which is about the number of stars.
It’s Buddhas all the way down. It could have been turtles, but we made it Buddhas. US.