The Cache

Views Toward Alignment

The Indian sage Saraha [9th C?] was the son of a noble family who became a revered teacher in Tibetan Buddhism.
In a vision he saw a Bodhisattva disguised as a mysterious woman making arrows. Later, in a local market place, the young Brahmin sighted "a young woman cutting an arrow-shaft, looking neither to the right nor to the left, wholly concentrated on making an arrow." Observing her closely, Saraha realized that her actions were symbolic of non-dual awareness and he spontaneously entered that awareness.

(Tanka and quote from The Royal Song of Saraha, translated by H. V. Guenther, Shambala, Berkeley and London, 1973)

Saraha means "one who aims through the heart of duality." I propose that the image of the sage making arrows might stand for the discipline of developing aligned views, one of the principle aims of Metahistory Quest.

Tree and Well explains the mythological images conjoined in the Metahistory logo and indicates the role of poetic-visionary knowledge in facing the challenges of our time.

Insane and Inhumane probes the assumptions inherent to the metahistorical critique of belief and answers the question, What beliefs are fundamental to Metahistory Quest? It proposes the criteria we require to distinguish between sane and insane beliefs.

Children of the Damned takes a classic sci-fi film as the occasion to explore what we mean by the term "humanity". This essay touches on the issue of alienation, as related to alien intervention, a major theme in ancient religious scripts dating back to the 3rd millennium BCE. It suggests a definition of homo sapiens sapiens in terms of innate learning capacity.

Myth in Metahistory is a long study in three parts, exploring the role of myth in the stories we tell ourselves about human origins. It considers the possibility that myths may preserve, albeit in a fragmentary and jumbled form, memories of actual events that occurred in the far distant past.