The Future of Dharma: A Map and a Lighthouse for Future Generations

This talk was given by our beloved teacher Qapel Doug Duncan in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Clear Sky, on September 22, 2024, two weeks before his passing. It is a beautiful and essential summary of his vision of the future of Dharma, and the role of Qapel and Sensei’s home center of Clear Sky – and it’s future temple – as a lighthouse for future generations.

Qapel speaks on the Fifth Turning of the Wheel of Dharma – the next evolution in Buddhism, which has always recognized the need for change as life and consciousness evolve. Qapel speaks about including and transcending Buddhism into a new map, Integral Spirituality. He names this new approach Integral Evolution. He finishes by connecting this to the mission of Clear Sky as a refuge for the work of modern-day awakening, and describes Clear Sky’s planned Temple as a lighthouse for future generations.

Watch the video here, or read the talk below. May all beings be well and happy!

00:00 Buddhism: a Long History of Adaptation
00:55 The First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma
02:25 The Second Turning of the Wheel of Dharma
03:28 The Third Turning of the Wheel of Dharma
04:53 The Fourth Turning of the Wheel of Dharma
06:18 Transcend and Include
07:09 The New (Fifth) Turning: Transcending Buddhism
10:59 Evolving into New Territory
11:53 Integral Spirituality: a New Map
14:10 The Newest Territory for the Namgyal Lineage
17:14 Transitioning into this New Paradigm
19:15 A New lighthouse Li

Read more on Integral Evolution from Sensei here: Integral Evolution: A 21st Century Collective Awakening

The Transcript

One of the core principles of Buddhadharma is investigation. Investigation includes changing and adapting as human conditions and understandings evolve. The Dalai Lama himself said that if Buddhism is found to be in error, or partial, or inconsistent with modern discoveries in science—any of the hard disciplines, or even the soft disciplines like sociology, developmental psychology, and so on—then Buddhism has to change. This is a bit unusual, as you might understand. So, Buddhism has a long history of this adaptation, and it starts with the First Turning of the Wheel. They consider there to be three. We talk sometimes about four, and we’re presenting a fifth. The fifth is brand new.

So the first turning, as taught by the Buddha himself, was called Theravadin after he died, and its principal tenets such as karma and the nature of suffering, a.k.a., dukkha, its causes, and its release, a.k.a Nirvana, was based on understanding the nature of impermanence, anicca, and a true depth understanding of the absence of an inherent self identity, which is the hardest ones for us to wrap our heads around, called anitta, not self. The nature of freedom depends on understanding that path, the elucidation and the interdependence of causes and conditions.

So, then you have the Wheel of Dependent Origination, which Sensei is going to be covering in October, and the elucidation of the path to freedom, which amongst other things is the release of the obstacles to your recognition of your nonself, which helps if you have the paramis and bojjhangas and all the other methods that Theravadin Buddhism has inculcated, grown, and developed, which are as invaluable today as they were 10,000, 3,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago. So that’s all good.

Basically, it was complete freedom as it was understood in its day, and I’d like to underline that point. It was complete freedom, complete awakening, as it was understood in its day. But things move along.

The Second Turning was epitomized by Nagarjuna, basically around 200 of the Common Era, and focused on shunyata, this idea of emptiness, and the equivalence of the world you live in, Samsara, and this kind of freedom thing called Nirvana. And he said, basically the world, and Samsara and Nirvana, are the same. I’m not sure that one’s penetrated through the Vajrayana minds of the modern people, or the Theravadins, but nevermind, we’ll just carry on. And it’s centered on the path of the Bodhisattva, which is the person who’s gonna go in to help people let go of their illusions about, well, principally anitta. Non-self.

The Third Turning, a little bit later, 8th-century Common Era, was introduced by the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. They went further and claimed, not only is everything empty—empty is empty. Okay, you lost everybody now. Everybody’s gone back to Netflix.

Empty of emptiness. Whoa, yeah. Empty is empty. Which is a subtle removal of having a position to stand on. So all you green types, raise your hand. Oh, there’s a few of you. All you greed types, there’s always looking for some place to set the foot. Vasubandhu and Asanga said, “Nope!” because the foot setting itself nowhere is still empty.

So this is getting pretty abstract. But you have to understand, it’s a real realization. It’s a realization that comes from sitting in your own being and seeing it, that not only are you empty, but you’re empty of being empty, which really kind of removes any kind of ground. But then along came Tantrayana and said, “Yeah, good, cool. Now what?” So around the 11th century, what could be called the Fourth Turning Tantrayana came back in because it reintroduced richness back into the picture, right? It reintroduced the world.

So the Mahasiddhis, who were monastics, principally, walked out of the monasteries. They just walked out! They said, now, there’s something missing. And what is missing is your engagement with form.
So their engagement in form: How do you maintain emptiness of emptiness if you’re in the world of form? Well, you have to see everything that appears in form as divine, as radiant, as inherently blissful, empty, clear, radiant, and amazingly exciting to be part of. So it made the world shiny again.

But everything you have to contact in that world—greed, hatred, delusion, love, like, dislike, money, no money, pizza, no pizza: You have to see it all as divine, all as radiant. And that created methods and embraced form while still seeing itself as empty, typified by the deities, typified by Tantrayana.

Okay, so each of these included and transcended the one before, right? Yielding a stark principle to our views of reality. Anybody want to name that principle?

The present change includes and transcends what came before. That is the principle of evolution. That is the principle of personal development. That’s the principle of psychological development, and that’s the nature of spiritual development. The present change includes and transcends what came before.

The ego does not like change.

So it’s been a thousand years since any new understanding has been seen as a new Turning. This is largely because the changes that are needed to be incorporated are outside Buddhism. You can’t find them inside Buddhism. The nature of the beast is it’s now time to transcend Buddhism.

As mentioned previously by the Dalai Lama’s comment: Even he said Tibetan Buddhism is probably done. It should be said that other major religions aren’t doing particularly good on this one. At least Buddhism incorporates the idea that change is supposed to be happening, right? We give a tip of the hat to the Catholics for getting around to recognizing that Mary should be co-redemptress, along with Jesus Christ. That is about as big as it gets. A woman has the same power as Jesus Christ to redeem your soul. Hey, cheer, ladies. But that just happened in the 1980s; fundamentally, the religions don’t really allow for much change at all, do they? Just kind of keep everything in its place.

Okay, so you’ve heard of the Ox-herding pictures, I hope. There are 10 of them, typically. There are various versions of these Ox-herding pictures of Zen. It’s Zen’s teaching, and they’re about training the mind to see the emptiness and live there. So basically they’re trying to do the Asanga-Vasubandhu thing, see the nature of emptiness as being empty. And, the last Ox-herding picture ends with either an empty thing—which I’m not sure how you’re supposed to do that and wear sunglasses at the same time. You can leave them on, right? But they end with the adept, with the student returning as a master to town. Maybe you’ve seen it, this kind of tenth guy dancing into town. But they don’t show the town, and they certainly don’t show what he or she gets up to when they get to town, right? Because they had no idea. They had no idea how to deal with that, or they didn’t think it was part of their business. They end with the adept returning to society and being of service, but we never see how, and we never see the problems and difficulties that they’re faced with in doing that. So that’s it; from the Buddhist point of view, game over. It was never really addressed.

Vajrayana comes closest by jumping into society and throwing out tantras and yantras and emptiness teachings like Dzogchen and Mahamudra and so on. But they don’t say anything about how that teacher lives and works and communicates and exists inside the culture. And therefore there’s a kind of a spiritual bypassing that happens, where as long as I have my robes on and I act the part, and I get treated as that part, then everybody treats me in a certain way and I treat everybody in a certain way. But they don’t really engage in real life as such typically. And if they do, they often get into a huge amount of trouble, because there is no methodology for that. So that’s it. Game over. It’s never really addressed. So why do so many people with realization still have problem-filled lives?

And this is what the next journey of the Wheel needs to address. Its subject matter is social and involves areas where religion and the pursuit of a perfect self has ignored the breakthroughs of Darwin and Freud in areas of evolution and psychology, led into research and discoveries in the hard sciences like physics and the social sciences like psychology, developmental psychology and so on. These could and should be incorporated into a new Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. Seems common sense. For this reason, many Buddhist teachers have become psychiatrists and therapists and social scientists and environmentalists. Sensei addressed some of that this morning. But how to put these new understandings of the human condition onto our Buddhist map? Well, the point is, you can’t really do that. You have to put the Buddhist map onto the new map, right? So rather than trying to incorporate something into the Buddhist map, the Buddhist map has to be incorporated into this new map.

And the best name for this new map that I’ve come across is integral. Integral spirituality.

But spirituality kind of by definition leaves off the rest of your life. Leaves off relationship, leaves off business, it’s kind of “spirituality is over here.” So, I prefer to call it “evolutionism.” So, I’ve changed my name. I am no longer a Buddhist, I am now an Integral Evolutionist. And I think that incorporates everything. It takes Buddhism with me. All the great understandings and realizations of all the major religions. Christian, Buddhist, and other, are incorporated into that. Social sciences are incorporated. Business is incorporated into that, engineering is incorporated in that, physics is incorporated into that. Developmental psychology is integrated into that. Having relationships is integrated, gender changes is integrated into that. Everything is integrated.

Integral spirituality, under the icon of Ken Wilber has done just that, without sacrificing any great realizations to the previous Turnings. Integral spirituality has integrated and enlarged the map to include all this new material without sacrificing an iota of the realizations that have come out of the major cultural religions and so on. Here at Clear Sky, we embrace this new map. And while the map has gotten better, the territory itself has not changed at all, in fact. It’s included and transcended. As far as we know, very few spiritual organizations have embraced this material so far. And as far as we know, none are incorporating it as part of a live-in community. So as far as we know, if we’re not the only ones, we are a rare few that are living this new idea.

And in our opinion, that is the heart of the Namgyal lineage: To reach into the unknown and embrace tools and methods to help liberate people more fully and completely, not only in their spiritual cushion where they enter into these radiant states of bliss unity, samadhi, but also can take it to the kitchen table when you get into a set-to with your worthy opponent-partner where the spiritual realization may not help all that much on some of these little domestic problems because the map doesn’t touch that. But also to explore nature.

You see, the spiritual life is really narrow when you think about it. Religion, religion, religion, right? But Namgyal was a great intrepid explorer. Nature, science, the arts, community living—well, he didn’t do that much—including the four bottom lines, A generative environment, a generative economy, a generative society, and a generative spirituality. The guru principle is about knowing and having an understanding that unifies consciousness in peace, clarity, and illumination. We see this transforming from the solitary model of the past centuries, like the Buddha in Jesus, for example, into more of a group manifestation. However, old patterns die slowly, similarly to how relativity and quantum mechanics have not really yet penetrated the group mind of how people live their lives. We still don’t live really understanding how relativity changes our world or how quantum mechanics says nowhere is there an inherent object to be found anywhere. This understanding doesn’t seem to reach us when we order that second beer!

The emerging concept of group mind has yet to embrace the idea that you and someone else are not different entities. If we have a hard time getting to the fact that I’m not an entity, you can see how difficult it would be to see that you are not a different entity than me. We are in fact one organism, kinda like bamboo. You just can’t see the roots going down through the soil. So this may take a while and transitions will be our minds. It’ll be the nature of our mind work that that transition.

But we’ve tamed our interactions with the world. And so to tame the world, to tame our interactions in the world, we have no other choice in our opinion, but to recognize not only, uh, Karen and I, the same organism, but the planet and Karen and I and all of you sensei are the same organism here at Clear Sky. We’re trying to establish a refuge for this work to provide delight for seekers who wanna forge into the unknown and make their spiritual practice wider and broader than it has been in a very long time to include and transcend. In that sense, we might call ourselves, as I said.

Integral as compared to integral spirituals. Get the engineers in there, right? Not everyone can live and work in community. S many serious practitioners don’t have access to a center that allows this new path. So for those that need a palace, oh sorry, a place to call their spiritual home while building their own version, wherever they are, we hope and intend to provide a reference point, a beacon, a light, a satellite, a place to rejuvenate and be inspired to give you encouragement and motivation to go to your various places where you might live, build your centers with that kind of understanding, assuming you agree with those. So we need a lighthouse. We need a lighthouse that can be seen from inner space. And we’re calling, we’re calling that lighthouse, our new temple for the wider world as an invitation to those seekers to come and share in this work, if only temporarily, to take it back with you. Currently, there is no such place on the planet that we know of that has such a broad and inclusive vision. And with this particular take, we’re calling it the fifth turn. Well, you know, I’m leading up to something.

So therefore ask that you help us make it the first of many that are to come worldwide in the future. We greatly appreciate any help logistically, practically, or financially that you can contribute. Thanks for joining us today on our 20th anniversary, and we look forward to seeing you all here again soon. Either in person or online, either in retreat or part of the Karma Yoga program. Where’s that young lady that’s coming in November? Carrie, or in one of the many other offerings that happen, world War, world War Worldwide such, such as Dharma Europe or Spokane or Australia or New Zealand, or wherever you end up, uh, that allow you to spend time here with our ever expanding awakening community. Thank you.