Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

The Mind Is My Doctrine

19 June 2025 · 2 min read

Laugh with me for existence is divinity and divinity is madness1.

The sin of the inhabitants of Plato's cave2 is ignorance of reality, but what if once you exit the cave you decide to go back in? What if you cultivate ignorance of truth as a means to know truth? What if the shadows teach better than forms, so long as one knows they're forms? Divine autistic masking.

What makes man powerful is our ability to shape & manifest reality with our wills in a myriad of ways, ignorance lay in believing the shadows are all there is, yet believing the forms is also a kind of ignorance, the truth of their essence is revealed in this paradox.

True enlightenment not lay in the perfection of a taxonomy of dualism, or the perfected mental realization of non-duality, but rather wielding duality as a weapon and non-duality as a shield3, hacking and slashing your way through samsara4, smiling, manifesting your own pure land5.

One must manifest destiny6 your own happiness, this is your providence, you await superiors to save you7 but you're the at the top of the chain of command, so go ahead, draw your sword and say your prayer, and become a master of your own genesis.

If man is said to be god8 then surely we have built heaven upon the bones of hell9 for man is not alone but numbered in billions and thus humanity; god's pantheon.

The world generates with a set of defines, structure, physics, causality, all of these things generated by the seed, including a set beginning and end, yet it is manifest at the exact moment10 self-awareness can manifest, this is the true beginning of the world.

The meaning of life has always been to hack and slash through samsara laughing in mania, you must live! Manifest destiny!

It cannot be overstated, you must live, you must continue on, you have to pick up the fucking sword and fight11, you have to smile, you must find beauty in this, you must find acceptance that the game never ends, have fun a good time but remember; you're the player not the avatar.

Without death you do not see, you do not hear, you do not smell, you do not remember, you do not love. You are unmanifest, undifferentiated, perfect, knowing everything yet knowing nothing, not awake nor asleep. Is that truly ideal? Giving up? Returning to the cosmic egg12?

There's nothing you can do, release yourself, laugh and cry, twirl around, this is it! This is all its ever been, this is will ever be, everything around us is fleeting, this life, these people, these nations; the only constant that the wheel never stops spinning, remember?

You gain nothing in wisdom or ignorance, pick up an axe and start swinging at the unmanifest, when you feel yourself forget this truth take that feeling and behead it like a demon, drink its blood, that is the ambrosia of actualization13.

My teaching is not wise nor ignorant, you may taste its fruits in the falling of leaves, the beating of drums, the blossoming of flowers, a soft and warm smile, a feeling one lacks words for14. This is the fundamental doctrine of my teaching; go forth and fight.

My teaching is the same as the mind, the mind is my doctrine15.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Plato makes the same claim in the Phaedrus (244–245): Socrates says 'the greatest of blessings come to us through madness' when it is sent as a gift of the gods. He names four kinds: prophetic madness from Apollo, mystic initiation from Dionysus, poetic inspiration from the Muses, and the madness of lovers from Aphrodite and Eros. Zen poets such as Hanshan and Ikkyu were later counted among its heirs. source ↩
  2. The allegory is in Book VII of the Republic (514a–520e). The freed prisoner, once his eyes adjust, pities the others, but on going back down is blind in the dark (516e) and the prisoners would kill anyone who tried to drag them out (517a). Plato then says those who reach the highest knowledge must return to the cave and dwell with the prisoners (519c–520e). Going back in is Plato's own answer too. source ↩
  3. This is the doctrine of two truths in action. Nāgārjuna's Root Verses on the Middle Way, written about 150 CE, say there is 'nothing whatsoever of samsara distinguishing (it) from nirvana' (25:19). In What the Ghosts Actually Are she quotes verse 24:8, that the Buddhas teach resting on two truths, the world's convention and the highest meaning. source ↩
  4. Samsara is the Buddhist cycle of birth, death and rebirth, without beginning and driven by craving and ignorance. In Tibetan Chöd, 'cutting through', the practitioner takes a knife as the symbol for cutting ego-clinging: the tradition's Machig Labdrön (1055–1145) says no devil is greater than the present ego-clinging. The sword here cuts the self, not the world. source ↩
  5. In the Vimalakirti Sutra (composed about 100 CE, by Burton Watson's dating) the Buddha tells the young Licchavis that 'the Buddha field is pure when the mind is pure'. A pure land is made by mind, which is how she can speak of manifesting her own. The line fed Pure Land readings in East Asia. Sukhavati, Amitabha's realm, is the best known. source ↩
  6. 'Manifest destiny' was coined in 1845 by the journalist John L. O'Sullivan in the context of annexing Texas, naming the belief that the United States was destined to spread across North America. She turns the slogan of conquest inward: the destiny to be manifested is your own happiness, and the territory is the self. source ↩
  7. The warning is one she makes at greater length in Carve Your Own Block, whose summary begins with the claim that nobody can save you, and that waiting for a rescuer, whether God, a lover, a parent or a course of therapy, is what keeps a person stuck. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she states it flatly: nobody can save you except yourself. ↩
  8. Scripture says it too. Psalm 82:6 in the King James reads 'I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.' In John 10:34 Jesus quotes the verse to answer the charge of blasphemy. Michael Heiser reads the psalm as a scene in a divine council, among beings under a sovereign Creator. source ↩
  9. The oldest Indo-European image of a world made from a body is the dismembered cosmic being. In Norse myth Odin, Vili and Vé made earth from Ymir's flesh and the mountains from his bones. See the note on Ymir in True Polytheism Has Never Been Tried. Her heaven is built the same way: on the remains of what had to die first. source ↩
  10. John Archibald Wheeler's participatory anthropic principle, which Barrow and Tipler read as the claim that 'Observers are necessary to bring the Universe into being', is the physicist's version. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she writes that the universe's first act was indeed being aware, and that consciousness is the bed of creation. source ↩
  11. The Bhagavad Gita (dated roughly 200 BCE, with scholars proposing earlier and later) opens its teaching with Arjuna despairing before battle. Krishna's answer is to do his warrior duty without grief or attachment to the result. In Japan, Yagyū Munenori's Heihō kadensho (about 1632) applied the sword school of the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū to life and politics. source ↩
  12. The cosmic egg is a creation-myth motif in which an egg hatches the universe or its creator. In the Chinese Pangu story, a formless egg opens after 18,000 years. In the Rigveda it is the golden embryo, the hiraṇyagarbha. She treats the egg as the undifferentiated state before life; see True Polytheism Has Never Been Tried for the myths, and Is Life Made Great Through Death? for the claim that without death there is only Nothing. source ↩
  13. Ambrosia comes from the same root as the Sanskrit amṛta, 'immortality', the nectar the gods and demons churned the ocean for. When the demon Rahu tried to drink it, he was beheaded. That is her scene, with the demon as the forgetting. Chöd treats demons as hindrances within, not beings outside. The Ambrosia of Actualization is the poem of the same name. source ↩
  14. This is the Flower Sermon's teaching in other dress. In The Flower Sermon she writes that the Buddha held up a flower and said nothing, and that the highest teaching is that wordless transmission rather than the Perfection of Wisdom. A doctrine that can be tasted in falling leaves and drums needs no further text. ↩
  15. The Chan master Mazu Daoyi (709–788) taught 'this very mind is Buddha' (即心是佛) and that the ordinary mind is the Way. She says the same of the Buddha elsewhere: in What Does It Mean to Kill Buddha? the Buddha in Chan is the mind, which is why meeting him on the road means meeting your own. source ↩