God is indeed both good and terrible—but ‘terrible,’ as I said, in the sense Jacob used the word when he awoke trembling from his dream of wrestling with the angel:
How terrible is this place! this is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven.
Genesis 28:17.
God’s terrible aspect, Jacob is dazzled to discover, is a Stargate.
Moreover, in one of those uncanny parallels, the Tibetan Buddhists have a whole wonderful pantheon of wrathful deities. They, like the terrible face of God, are nothing more, the Tibetan Buddhists tell us, than the “ruthless, unyielding quality” of “the nakedness” of Über-Mind, an ardor “not allowing sidetracks of any kind.”*
*The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 14.
Their wrathful fire is the exotic energy that keeps open Jacob’s Stargate—“a perpetual creative situation”†—the very energy we need to keep us from getting sucked back into our cozy little, dreamy little womb in The Matrix, the very Stargate through which Jesus materializes and dematerializes, dazzling his disciples.
†The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 26.
The divine mimics beer cans in gutters, remember, because beer cans in gutters are gaping security holes in The Matrix, gaping because they’re the stuff The Matrix has programmed us to step over, to not even see. The terrible face of God, the wrathful deities are the flip side of that coin. “Perpetual creative situations”—the endless creative potential of the ceaseless spontaneity of the inherent playfulness of Naked Mind—are vulnerabilities in The Matrix’ firewall so massive it’s impossible for The Matrix to get us to just not notice. So The Matrix instead has us wired to freak when we encounter them, to freak and flee. After all, they’re not just eensy little security holes, they’re friggin’ Stargates.
The wrathful deities of Tibetan Buddhism are total wild-ass genius, wonderfully over the top, more wildly grotesque and fantastic than anything you’d dream encountering even in the most unrestrained Hollywood gore-fest. Let me introduce you to “he who is called Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka”:
Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka, dark-brown of color; with three heads, six hands, and four feet spread wide apart; the right face being white, the left red, the central dark-brown; the body emitting flames of radiance; the nine eyes wide open in terrifying gaze; the eyebrows quivering like lightning; the protruding teeth glistening and set over one another; he laughs aloud with shouts of “a-la-la!” and “ha-ha!” and piercing whistling sounds; the hair of reddish-yellow color, standing on end and emitting radiance; the heads adorned with dried human skulls and the sun and moon; black serpents and raw human heads forming a garland for the body; the first of the right hands holding a wheel, the middle one a sword, the last one a battle-axe; the first of the left hands a bell, the middle one a skull bowl, the last one a plough-share; his body embraced by his consort, Buddha-Krodhisvari, her right hand clinging to his neck and her left putting to his mouth a red shell filled with blood, making a palatal sound like a crackling and a clashing sound, and a sound as loud as thunder; flames of wisdom shoot out from between the blazing vajra hairs on his body; standing with one leg bent and the other straight and tense on a dais supported by garudas* will come forth from your own brain and shine vividly upon you.
Fear that not. Be not awed. Recognize him as the form of your own mind. As he is your own guardian deity, do not be terrified. Do not be afraid, for in reality he is the Blessed Vairocana† with his consort. Recognition and liberation are simultaneous.
Recognize your guardian deity, and merging inseparably with him, become a buddha in the sambhogakaya.
The description of Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka is mostly from the Evans-Wentz translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 137. I’ve taken a phrase here and there from Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 60, when their translation is clearer.
*Garudas are mythical creatures with the head of an eagle and a human-bird body, with human arms and the wings of an eagle. They personify energy and aspiration. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 137, n. 3.
†Vairocana is a Primordial Buddha who typically represents sunyata (emptiness), what Father Tiso is getting at when he speaks of “awareness understood to be self-arisen primordial wisdom, free from the characteristics and the qualities of phenomena.” See “Vairocana,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vairocana).
The dazzling twist comes at the end of the first, long paragraph when we get to the punch line: the terrifying Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka comes forth from our own brain. He’s not a monster at all, he’s the champion Dick’s been telling us about, the one who’s invaded our world ready to do battle with his sword and his battle ax. He is, in fact, Vairocana, the primordial buddha who’s the very embodiment of Naked Mind. And if we recognize who Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka really is (Vairocana, dude!), bam!, we’re free, we’re through the Stargate—recognition and liberation are simultaneous. If we merge with him, bam!, we become him. Vairocana.
We become Über-Mind.
And what’s true of Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka is true of The Matrix as well. It’s not evil. It’s all just spontaneous play.
I remember when my nephew was a little kid, whenever we’d get together, he’d always want to play “monsters.” Kids are way closer to self-arisen primordial wisdom, to its luminosity than us grown-ups.
The truth is—kids, grown-ups—we never stop wanting to play.
The Matrix is after all a movie. The Wachowskis wrote a script—a screenplay—and then they got Keanu Reeves to play Neo, and Laurence Fishburne to play Morpheus, and Hugo Weaving to play Agent Smith, and they got us all to go to the cineplex, and sit in a room, and turn out the lights, and totally immerse ourselves in their make-believe world, play along, totally make-believing for a couple of hours that it was real.
We do that all the time. Think how much time we spend immersed in Netflix.
Think how much time we spend immersed in role-playing games.
Except we become as little kids, Jesus keeps telling us, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.
We cannot not play, we’re hard-wired to, but even so we don’t take its luminosity seriously. Play, we think, is just play—even when Jesus keeps telling us otherwise! Why? Because hard-wired though we may be, The Matrix’s got us counter-wired to dismiss it—because The Matrix suspects what Clarke uncannily intuits…
Coming 10 December 2021
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 
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