Prologue
Phil’s stay at the Buddhist monastery in Santa Barbara was not what he expected. By now, he mused as he walked the sunlit path through the landscaped grounds, he knew he should expect the unexpected.
Vanni, the abbot, told Phil he experienced the Great Death a while ago. Phil interpreted it to mean he finally stepped across the boundary between ego-identification and Self-identification. While this was superficially true, he now realized the Great Death was more a process than an event. In fact, there were distinct stages to this process, and he had marginally completed the first.
As he now understood it, due to the efforts of his Buddhist tutors over the last six weeks, there was an indwelling Divinity in everything. It brought consciousness to inert matter. Yet as man became conscious and the ego developed, the lure of the material world snared man with wealth, status, sex, and power.
The first part of the Great Death was to escape identifying with all that. He had to die to the Flesh. In order to die to the Flesh, however, the law of karma demanded satisfaction. All his transgressions required atonement. From one point-of-view, every adventure the Archangel Manuel took him on so far fell into this category: atonement for sins against his own Divine Nature.
Until that was achieved, he could not shift his identity out of his ego. Now he had. He knew himself to be a child of God, but that identity came with its own problems.
Phil reached the end of the gravel path and turned around. He wore jeans and blue sweatshirt. His brown hair was receding and shot full of gray. After years of surfing, though, he was fit and tan. A weak chin jutted below intense brown eyes that scanned the bushes and trees lining the path.
He took a couple of steps and paused. Off to his right a thin coyote stood broadside some twenty feet away. Its sharp-pointed ears cocked towards him. Its tan body quivered with tension. It flicked its tail, which ended in a pure white tip, and bounded silently away.
“It begins again,” Phil smiled to himself and sighed.
He strolled back to the monastery, which was a converted motel. At the main building he asked to see Vanni. After a short wait in the lobby, the receptionist showed him into the abbot’s office.
Vanni wore the saffron robe of his order, and a smile beamed out of his shaved head.
“I hear good things about your progress,” he told Phil.
“They say Sambhogakaya is hard to reduce to words, yet that is the state I’m striving for.”
The abbot agreed as he met Phil at the door. “It’s especially difficult for Westerners like you and me to grasp. We did not grow up in the Eastern traditions where the soul’s progression is a given.”
Vanni shifted toward his chair and went on, “Sambhogakaya is sometimes explained as the communion of the absolute with the relative. Or as Sogyal Rinpoche says, ’Sambhogakaya is the dimension of complete enjoyment, the field of total plenitude, beyond dualistic limitations and beyond space and time’.”
Vanni sat behind his desk and invited Phil to sit as well. Then Vanni asked, “What do you wish to know?”
“How am I to understand what I’m doing?”
Vanni pulled a book from his desk and opened to a marked page, “According to Saint John of the Cross, in the Dark Night of the Soul, ‘this night…produces in spiritual persons two kinds of darkness or purgation, corresponding to the two parts of man’s nature -- namely, the sensual and the spiritual’.”
Vanni closed the book and said, “The sensual battle you won. The spiritual battle, which Saint John says is more difficult, lies before you.”
“So you clear your karma first,” Phil reiterated, “and then somehow you purge your spirit.”
Vanni nodded. “Mind, emotions, and body -- the ego and self-will: these are the first hurdle. The next is your history of connection to an ego, your total karmic debt. Not only that, but as you transferred your identity out of this ego, you must now transfer it from all the egos you ever inhabited. In a way, you must escape the collective unconscious you share with the whole human race.”
Phil chuckled, “Piece of cake.”
Vanni smiled, “You sound like Becky.” Then he continued, “Your attachment to the Flesh goes back to Adam’s Fall. For hundreds of lifetimes you have labored to find meaning or make the Flesh work for you. It’s a lot of momentum to reverse, but that is what you will do.”
“How will I do it?”
“I don’t know,” Vanni shrugged. “Buddhist students follow the eight-fold way, but you are not on that path. If you were, I’d estimate it would take another lifetime or two to complete the task.”
Phil raised his eyebrows.
Vanni snickered. “We have a long view.”
Phil replied, “Manuel said that once the Enlightenment process begins, it goes quickly.”
Vanni continued to smile. “Angels have a longer view.”
Phil chuckled and changed course, “But I’m a catalyst for change. My growth in spirit is different.”
“And your archangel is instrumental in pushing you along.”
Phil chuckled again, “Even he is changing. It’s got him worried.”
“Angels are an instrument of change.”
“Well, they think their job is to keep the Universe in balance.”
“No. Their primary purpose is to aid you in cleansing your soul of attachments.”
“They think it’s guarding Yin and Yang.”
“They do that, too, and I know they consider it of primary importance, but think it through, Phil.”
It took only a moment before he realized what Vanni meant. Phil said, “They are the adversaries we must defeat to earn every spiritual advancement.”
“And they provide comfort and inspiration so that you can advance.”
Phil ran a hand through his hair, “But why don’t they see that?”
“Some do, I’m sure, but bureaucracies operate off of measureable results. Keeping things in numerical balance is something a bureaucracy can accomplish. Their primary task, though, is beyond bureaucratic control.”
Phil smiled, “No wonder Manuel detests bureaucrats.”
“And perhaps he is growing into someone who can bring change to the angel bureaucracy.”
Phil laughed, “That would be a sight to see.”
Vanni smiled back and rose from his chair, “Your tutors tell me there is nothing more they can do for you. Do you agree?”
“I suppose so,” Phil answered and stood. “And I saw a coyote an hour ago.”
“The Trickster calls you back to the quest.”
“I suppose,” Phil sighed. “I’m not looking forward to the next adventure if it’s as difficult as you say it is.”
Vanni smiled and opened the office door. Standing outside, in the lobby, was the Archangel Manuel.
Vanni said, “I took the liberty of summoning your angel.”
Phil grimaced and addressed Manuel, “What is it this time?”
Manuel grinned, “Have I got a deal for you.”
They walked out to the courtyard separating the main building from a row of rooms. Manuel bounded forward in tan slacks and white polo shirt. His golden curls and boyish good looks exuded an exuberance Phil hadn’t seen in a while. In fact, the last time he saw Manuel, he was sulking in a corner of his garden patio.
“What deal?” Phil demanded.
“Ever heard of the Mantichora?”
“No.”
“Well, let me quote to you from the The Revelation of St. John the Divine, chapter 9:
"3: And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.
"4: And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.
"5: And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.
"6: And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
"7: And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.
"8: And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.
"9: And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
"10: And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.”
Phil shook his head at the archaic descriptions and commented, “So this time we’re unscrambling the Apocalypse.”
“See. You’re almost healed of your stupidity,” Manuel chuckled, and then he disappeared.
