when the lightning struck
Afternoon reading: Rubicon, Hillel the Elder.
Morning notes: Rubicon, Hillel the Elder.
I woke this morning to the sound of rain pounding leaves and pavement. Got up in the near-solstitial brightness and made the coffee while Kimmie loitered awhile longer in bed. Then down here to key more notes, feeling a bit bored with my research treadmill. Am I wasting my time?
I haven't talked about the origin of this project for awhile. As I've said before, its roots extend far back, at least to the late 1970s. But if I had to pick a moment when this specific project was born, when the impetus first rose in me to create something, and that specific something turned out to be this book, I would say it happened in the summer of 1994 while I was attending Vajradhatu Seminary in the Colorado Rockies.
Seminary was an 11-week intensive program of meditation, study, and work for Vajrayana Buddhist students of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche and his successors. Living in tent cities 9,000 feet up amid the quick storms and sudden heat of the dry mountains, we alternated 2 weeks of meditation with 2 weeks of classroom study in tents built on wooden platforms. I could say a lot about this demanding and very rewarding program, but here I'll just say that it took up all of one's time, day after day, from emerging from the sleeping-bag at dawn to crawling back into it sometime after dark each night, but the program was punctuated by a couple of days off. One of those days I spent in the dining tent, glued to a book I couldn't stop reading: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.
First published in 1982, the book persuaded me of 3 things: 1) that Jesus was in fact the (or a) rightful king of Israel in the line of King David; 2) that he did not die on the cross, but survived crucifixion and continued his dynasty by fathering children of his own; and 3) that his bloodline, aware of its own existence, survived into the following centuries, and became one of the strands in the mythological tradition of the Holy Grail.
I had been searching for some way of tapping into the creative wellspring of the Holy Grail since at least 1990 (in reality long before--probably since 1980, when I first read Campbell's Creative Mythology). Now, this book seemed to present a way of doing it. I agreed with the quote taken from Anthony Burgess among the reviews covering the first pages of the book: "I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel." Yes, I thought, it is.
I felt a creative fire fill me as I read, a kind of psychic magma that sought outlet. How would I tell this story? Where would I start? I thrilled as I speculated on these questions. The fact that I could give the book only a few hours on that day, before immersing myself in my Buddhist studies again, made it all the more precious and urgent. This story needs to be told, I thought. It needs to be narrated.
No doubt others would be narrating the same story. I understand that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code contains some of these ideas (I haven't read it). Be that as it may--I was willing to enter the sweepstakes, since I had such passion for the project, and do still. My life has been wrapped around these mythological ideas, so I'm not going to give up easily. I'll outlearn, outresearch, and outcreate them. I'll do what it takes to get my version of this story to its audience.
There were still many steps to go through before I could actually drop pen to page and start drafting a book out of this (that happened, as I've mentioned before, on 27 April 2002, also at a Buddhist center, while I was a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey). But the lightning struck first in the dining tent at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center in summer 1994.
Morning notes: Rubicon, Hillel the Elder.
I woke this morning to the sound of rain pounding leaves and pavement. Got up in the near-solstitial brightness and made the coffee while Kimmie loitered awhile longer in bed. Then down here to key more notes, feeling a bit bored with my research treadmill. Am I wasting my time?
I haven't talked about the origin of this project for awhile. As I've said before, its roots extend far back, at least to the late 1970s. But if I had to pick a moment when this specific project was born, when the impetus first rose in me to create something, and that specific something turned out to be this book, I would say it happened in the summer of 1994 while I was attending Vajradhatu Seminary in the Colorado Rockies.
Seminary was an 11-week intensive program of meditation, study, and work for Vajrayana Buddhist students of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche and his successors. Living in tent cities 9,000 feet up amid the quick storms and sudden heat of the dry mountains, we alternated 2 weeks of meditation with 2 weeks of classroom study in tents built on wooden platforms. I could say a lot about this demanding and very rewarding program, but here I'll just say that it took up all of one's time, day after day, from emerging from the sleeping-bag at dawn to crawling back into it sometime after dark each night, but the program was punctuated by a couple of days off. One of those days I spent in the dining tent, glued to a book I couldn't stop reading: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.
First published in 1982, the book persuaded me of 3 things: 1) that Jesus was in fact the (or a) rightful king of Israel in the line of King David; 2) that he did not die on the cross, but survived crucifixion and continued his dynasty by fathering children of his own; and 3) that his bloodline, aware of its own existence, survived into the following centuries, and became one of the strands in the mythological tradition of the Holy Grail.
I had been searching for some way of tapping into the creative wellspring of the Holy Grail since at least 1990 (in reality long before--probably since 1980, when I first read Campbell's Creative Mythology). Now, this book seemed to present a way of doing it. I agreed with the quote taken from Anthony Burgess among the reviews covering the first pages of the book: "I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel." Yes, I thought, it is.
I felt a creative fire fill me as I read, a kind of psychic magma that sought outlet. How would I tell this story? Where would I start? I thrilled as I speculated on these questions. The fact that I could give the book only a few hours on that day, before immersing myself in my Buddhist studies again, made it all the more precious and urgent. This story needs to be told, I thought. It needs to be narrated.
No doubt others would be narrating the same story. I understand that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code contains some of these ideas (I haven't read it). Be that as it may--I was willing to enter the sweepstakes, since I had such passion for the project, and do still. My life has been wrapped around these mythological ideas, so I'm not going to give up easily. I'll outlearn, outresearch, and outcreate them. I'll do what it takes to get my version of this story to its audience.
There were still many steps to go through before I could actually drop pen to page and start drafting a book out of this (that happened, as I've mentioned before, on 27 April 2002, also at a Buddhist center, while I was a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey). But the lightning struck first in the dining tent at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center in summer 1994.
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