Introduction
(1:17 - 1:45) [Speaker 2] Welcome to the occult rejects. In this episode, I’m very, very excited to have this guest on. It is somebody that has been suggested to me from Headless plenty of times, and a few other people actually have suggested to have this guest on.
And I cannot be happier to finally get Jin the ninja on. What is up, Jin? Thank you very much for coming on and let everybody know what your deal is and who you are.
(1:46 - 2:52) [Jin the Ninja] Sure. So thanks, NYPD, for having me. It’s kind of like amazing.
It’s like the apotheosis kind of to come on this show. So I am a semi-retired magician, we’ll say, who had a chance encounter when I was 13 with Kalachukra initiation. And then I kind of like went about my life and kind of got into more left hand path practices.
And then about 2018, I kind of like really started had like life things happen and I sort of came back to the Dharma. But obviously, I had to kind of navigate that path as well as like, you know, when you engage in left hand path practices, it can screw things up for you. And so I felt like I had to learn how to rectify some of the things that I had done.
So that’s basically my story.
The Mahavijas and the Tree of Life Project
(2:55 - 3:20) [Speaker 2] And you have, you know, in today’s topic, we’re going to be trying to tie like we’re going to be tying Tantra to like, you know, Kabbalistic stuff, Kabbalah. And I do know that you have done some extensive stuff on this on the, you know, in the past.
(3:20 - 7:14) [Jin the Ninja] Okay, so there’s a syncretic grouping of the 10 goddesses who are called the Maha Vijaya, which means just greater wisdom. So Maha means greater, Vijaya means wisdom. And usually, especially in Buddhism, although this isn’t necessarily true for Indian Tantra, the female principle is considered to be the embodiment of wisdom.
And the male consort is considered to be the embodiment of method. So like ritual method or exterior method, but the females, the interior wisdom. So these are greater wisdom.
So it comes in a very syncretic time when different kinds of practices were coalescing and it really takes place in Nepal. And but it doesn’t just take place in Nepal. It was like it’s a complex, a Tantric complex that spans all the through the Himalayas into China, into South India, into Pakistan.
So it’s kind of a wide ranging, we’ll say, complex. But there are different schools and there but there is this one concept of the 10 goddesses. So I was listening to this show and hearing you talk about the Kavala a lot.
And then I realized that I kind of understood and could see and remember some of the colors, maybe the textures of the spheres, maybe the relationships between spheres. But I understood it through the goddesses. So I kind of started mapping it out, just putting it on like a tree, seeing where I could go with it.
And then I started using the astrological associations. So obviously, when you get to when you’re at, I started from the bottom. So I’m just that’s how I that’s how I kind of mapped it was I started at Malkud because the idea is you start as like a householder.
So you start as like kind of the child looking upwards without the words to describe the universe. But you learn through the action of doing. So that’s kind of how I conceived of it.
So then, you know, you kind of flow through the paths and the spheres. And I tried to figure out who could go where. And then at the top at Kether and Chokmaw, I realized, well, there is no real there’s no traditional planetary association for them.
But there is a tantric planetary association, which has to do with the dragon. So the top is Rahu, who is the head of the dragon of the eclipse. And Ketu is the is Chokmaw, who is the smoky tail of the dragon.
So I was just also looking at the contemporary associations for those spheres. So I also came up with astrological contemporary astrological kind of correspondences that I felt would match the goddesses that I put in those spheres as well.
Vajrakalya and the Hexagram
(7:59 - 11:32) [Jin the Ninja] So I thought we would the reason why I think this is a really interesting image is that.
Well, okay. So let’s just say who it is first. So it’s Vajra Kalya with his concert who’s named Dipta Chakra.
So this is obviously a Buddhist iconography. It’s a new worry, meaning it’s from Nepal. So it’s more syncretic.
So it could be understood as being both part of like the Indian Tantra or part of like Vajrayana Buddhist Tantra. So he has an Indian identity. His name is Skanda.
And his wife also has an Indian identity and her name is Kumari. So Skanda is kind of special because he is the sun. So that’s what Kumara means is the sun.
So he is the sun that is produced when the upward facing triangle. So the Shiva and the downward facing triangle, the Shakti, so the female energy. They meet and they create Dharma Daya, which means ultimate reality.
So it’s like the hexagram. So when those two triangles coalesce, they become him. And he is very unique because he is the God in Indian Tantra.
Obviously in Buddhist Tantra he has similar qualities, but they’re not exactly identical. But he is the God of locks and keys, logic, and war. So one thing I know you did a long form series on the chakras.
So the chakras are not really my specialty, but he is very important because so with this, I don’t know if you covered this, but in the story of the chakras, he throws away the Tantra. So he throws away all of the magical texts. He throws one booklet of them into the supernal ocean where they are swallowed by a giant fish.
Four hundred years later, there’s a great yogic sage named Motsanjanath. So Motsanjanath also refers to someone who’s swallowed by fish, sort of like Jonah and the whale. He is one of the nine nath yogis.
So they were a grouping of nine yogis in the 1200s who they weren’t tantrics. There’s only two of them who were initiated into tantric practices, but they kind of reinvigorated the chakra system and sort of the Indian medical system.
And his spear is very important because it is the spear that opens the locks and the keys. So when we show the image of the Sri Chakra, which is a series of five downward-facing triangles and four upward-facing triangles, so when you see the image together, it makes 64 triangles. So that will be a very important concept for later.
But his spear can open and close all the triangles in that configuration.
The Swastika as Time Wheel
(11:46 - 15:50) [Jin the Ninja] So I’m kind of interested in looking at why that is because there’s been a lot of that, but I think that there’s a very normative kind of Indian history of the Huns. There was a group of Huns called the Alcon Huns. They pushed from Persia, Turkestan, like northern Asia.
They pushed into India, and they had a solar lunar bull cult. So very Shiva-like, if people are familiar with Shiva iconography.
The idea is the sun can overtake the father because Shiva kind of abandons our world. That’s kind of the more Shakta ideal, the more goddess-oriented idea, that Shiva as is the godhead, but he kind of abandons the world to go live on the Mahashma Shana, which is the carnal ground of ultimate reality, which I placed in death.
He’s kind of like sitting there meditating. His eyes are closed.
It’s a very important idea because he sometimes can open his eyes, and then that’s not always the best result. So I think that they pushed Skanda south, and I think that the Buddhists also obviously preserved his left-handed practices, and he becomes apotheosized in the form of the Vajrakalaya, who’s the image, the blue image, but it’s also a knife. So it’s a three-pointed knife, and Skandas and Buddhism are also, besides his name, are also considered to be the three…
Well, there are five aggregate, afflictive emotions. But there are three main ones from the older texts. So it’s aversion, meaning like fear of death, ignorance, and desire.
So he kind of is able to purify those. So he’s considered to be a very purifying practice, and he also overcomes demons. That’s kind of his thing, you could say.
And then, so the swastika is really important because I think it’s very misunderstood because people will say, oh, it’s for luck, it’s for this, or it has like the negative connotations of World War II. But really, it means it’s the time wheel. It’s the wheel that spins on the axis of time.
And people will make a big deal about it going clockwise or counterclockwise. But when you see it depicted in iconography, it’s usually depicted on its axis in Buddhism.
But in Indian, they will be the clockwise because that is the auspicious direction. So you want time to move in an auspicious way. So bring in fortune.
So this inverse one, we’ll call it, is actually from the Bon religion. And I’m not going to talk about Bon, but it’s really, really interesting because they purport it to be a Turkish religion from 24,000 years ago.
That’s their own dating. That’s not necessarily like the correct date, but that’s what they think of their own practices. That it’s kind of like this pre-Buddhist Buddhism.
Skanda, the Peacock, and the Yazidis
(15:50 - 17:26) [Jin the Ninja] And if you remember, I know you had a show on Gnosticism it was a long time ago, but they were talking about the Yazidis. So you see the familiarity if you know the Yazidi imagery, which is what they worship, the peacock god.
So this is Skanda sitting on his Vahana, who’s a peacock. The Vahana just needs Mount. And this is the Dharma Daya.
So it’s the Shiva, the upward male energy and the Shakti, the downward female energy. And when they create, it creates Skanda, the sun. So you can see there’s kind of a triune aspect that is sort of perennial.
We’ll say perennial to Tantra, but there’s other formulations. It doesn’t just have to be Shiva and Shakti and Murigan. It can be, there’s other kinds of formulations that happen.
So Vishnu takes 10 forms. He takes more than that, but he takes 22 forms actually. But there are 10 forms reduced down for the goddesses. So for the 10 goddesses, there are also 10 forms of Vishnu.
And he can also appear in the spheres. But he’s a lesser character. He’s considered a Viras, so a hero.
So he is the Virasic path, the path of the heroes. So he’s not necessarily the god head of the spheres, if you want to say it like that. He is more of a character that appears in the spheres.
Vishnu as God of Space and the Dragon
(18:00 - 22:50) [Jin the Ninja] So he, particularly Vishnu, is god as space. So we should also refer back to like the Aristotelian dialectic that was happening in the third century. So it’s the assignation of good qualities to god.
So if you want to break it down in those ways, Vishnu becomes god as space.
Vishnu is the only, is also the, within the tantric idea, he’s also the god that dies. So he becomes Narayana, the sleeping god. So sometimes he will be sleeping on, well, there are three oceans, well, there’s more than three oceans, but we’ll just, we’ll stick with the three because I think that’s a more understandable way to describe it.
But he can sleep on the Chthonic ocean, he can sleep on the milk ocean, and he can sleep on the freshwater ocean at the very top. So, and he will have seven serpent crown behind him. So you could say that he has some Aromon-like qualities.
But he isn’t evil. He just is a flawed human character. So for a tantric, you’re looking at it as, yes, he embodies the flawed traits of humanity, but we should try and overcome them.
However, if you’re thinking of it in a more esoteric way, you can also say the avatars of Vishnu create a ring in a mandala, so like a sort of a conceptualization of a shape or a fortress, and then you place the gods and different deities within the fortress and different kinds of configurations. Similar to like, I mean, people can look it up, it’s like a Calatakra. There’s, it kind of looks like a microchip in a way.
So he goes on the outer ring of greater heroes.
So he’s not the god of the core. He’s not placed in the central part. Although there is obviously in normative Hinduism, he is like the main character.
There is a dragon in Buddhism who’s more important than, per se, the dragon in Indian Tantra, but he’s also not understood to be Vishnu.
So I’ll just say that there is a kind of like a connection that one can make, and it’s not just like a syncretism. It’s actually like understood as part of the… There’s multiple…
So one of the famous stories of the Puranas, which are the Puranas, are the kind of exterior texts, kind of like maybe remixes of the earlier Vedic stories or the earlier Pranashads. So the Puranas kind of narrate the story of the turning of the supernal waters. And so if you follow all the Puranas, which are written…
It’s probably spanning like a 700-year period from about 1 CE till about 6-700 CE. They relate three turnings of the supernal waters. So I’ve heard a lot of the concept of like there’s been three turnings of the wheel of time.
So the Puranas, even though they’re an exterior text or an outer text, they do relate that story.
So he plays a very important role as well as the dragon plays a very important role in those stories. So if you understand it in a more metaphysical way, him as the dragon completely makes sense.
The Seven Naga Kings
(23:11 - 24:43) [Jin the Ninja] So there are seven dragon kings, naga kings, of the different… So, okay, so we’ll just break it down like this. So just like the hexagram has like six quadrants, we’ll say, there are also six planes to one reality.
So we inhabit a plane as humans, animals inhabit a plane, there’s also a ghost plane, there’s a god plane, and then there’s a heliplane. But nagas are considered to live in a subtle realm so they can understand to live under the earth. Sometimes, that’s one way to describe it very frequently, or in the waters.
So they will sometimes be said to inhabit both the animal realm and the human realm. So there are seven primary naga kings, just like there are seven luminaries in the sky, and they rule specific, I guess, kinds of knowledges, or maybe you could say it as spaces, different kinds of conceptual ideas.
Mapping the First Eight Spheres
(24:44 - 27:23) [Jin the Ninja] I mean, it gives you a map… No, it gives you a map for the first eight spheres at least, or for like if you’re working, like I worked for Malkuth to Benah, let’s just say that. It gives you…
There’s a clear sort of astrological map, I think, that you could very easily make and say that that’s not a problem. And then it’s when you get to the top other three, then it’s a challenge. But I think that I can make a good case for my correspondences to work.
So there you go. You can see the 10 avatars of Vishnu.
So I’m not going to talk about them, but they could honestly be like, I could do an hour on each avatar of Vishnu and how they relate to the goddess, because they are just like how I’ve often heard you say, there are four layers to the saffara. So there’s actually more layers in tantra, and you could say there are seven layers, but you could also say there are nine layers, and you could also say there are 11 layers.
I mean, that is how it’s conceived of. Like, you know, Vishnu has 22 forms that is obviously going to sound magical for people. Ganesh, who’s the elephant headed son of Shiva and Shakti, he has a form that has 22 arms.
He also has 32 forms that he takes in a tantric conception. So you can see that there’s a lot of overlap just at the base.
That’s what I kept seeing is that there’s something there. It doesn’t seem like it’s just me matching things that don’t necessarily culturally go together. It felt like I was doing something that fit together already.
The Adi Buddha and Ejection from Kether
(27:24 - 29:37) [Jin the Ninja] And then next you have the Adi Buddha. So yes, I did sneak in a little bit more Buddhism, but obviously I’m a Buddhist, so that’s how I kind of conceive of it.
So if you want to be really cosmo, like you want to give like a sociological goal for climbing the tantric tree in a Buddhist way, this would be the sociological goal. This would be the point of ejection. So it would be after Kether.
So you would push yourself off from Kether and then unify with the Godhead up beyond the tree.
[Speaker 2] Do you think the white and the blue have anything to do with kind of going up?
[Jin the Ninja] 100%, because she, just like in the Gnostic story, she is the concert who looks over her left shoulder when she hears the cries of her devotees, which is us, obviously, and she falls all the way down the tree. And in fact, her body comprises material reality. So in the Contra conception, this is true for Buddhism as well as Indian Contra, we exist on her breast.
So the nipple in the center is called Mount Meru, which is kind of like the, I don’t know, like it’s kind of the mystical, the celestial mountain, the mountain at the center of the world. And in Buddhism, they often call it Jambu Vipa, which is like referring to a world tree or a world island.
So I just thought he’s an interesting character because even though I’m going to talk about the spheres using the goddesses and in more of a Shakta Tantra way, which means more focused on the goddess as the Godhead, I just thought that’s also an interesting way because really her goal, even in Shakta Tantra, is to unify with Shiva or Bhairava or whoever you conceptualize as the male concert.
Her set state is unification. She just gets distracted.
And also, people can interact with her in specific ways that make her more distracted, or you can give her, she can become fixated on things she finds pleasurable. But one thing I’ve found different is that at the inner core of every sphere, she can be the complete Godhead of her own. And just like in the picture, she’s always white in the inner core.
So I know Cordovero also made the case that every, all the cores of the spheres are also white in their truest core. So I thought that was very similar as well.
The Colors: Turquoise as White, Blue as Black
(29:43 - 35:44) [Jin the Ninja] And he, no, 100%, and he, you have to think he represents like his, he’s blue in the picture, but he’s also blue-black. So he’s like the color of the night sky. So when they combine, they’re still a turquoise color.
Turquoise in Sanskrit, like kind of cosmology, is really a white. Not so much, it’s like turquoise is considered to be more of the perfection of all the colors. It’s like, it’s pristine.
It’s like the color of lightning. So that’s more of a whiter sky color. It’s not necessarily blue or turquoise.
We look at it like that, but really it’s white. So when you see turquoise and Indian things or Buddhist things, that is really a white color. And the blue, the dark blue, is really the black.
Shiva Bhairava and the Eight Time Lords
So this is Shiva by Rava. So this is Shiva, as I said, he’s sleeping in the carnal ground of the world. So that’s kind of the tantric conception.
There’s two important conceptions, although there’s more than two, but really we live on the great carnal ground of the world. And we just don’t know it because we, again, we begin as the bride or the child, and we don’t have conceptual meanings to assign to the things, everything that we see in the universe, we don’t understand yet. And it’s hidden behind something called Maya, which is like the illusion of the world.
But why the goddess is really important is she is considered to be the one who’s able to touch the strings of fate, touch the strings of the play, the Leela. That’s what we call in Sounds Great. It’s like the divine play.
It’s a cycle that continues over and over. Sometimes you’ll see different characters, but generally it’s like a perennial thing and you have different characters are more important in different yugas and different kelpas, so different ages. So this is God as time.
So when God delineates out into time, he becomes the ashtabhairava, so the eight by ravas. But there’s actually nine, because as you can see, there’s a central image. So he’s, and you’ll find this interesting, I think, he has his mount as a dog.
And he has another form called batuk by rava, who’s a little boy riding a black dog. So you could say that the image in the center is at da, but really when you’re thinking of kal, of like the by ravas, they really emanate from kal by rav.
So kal by rav just means the ferocious time king. So maha kala, I’ll use them interchangeably. So they really emanate from him.
So you could also think of them as different times in the play, different times in the story. And so he kind of controls the goddess in a specific way, or she can control him in a specific way and put him in specific orders. So by ordering things, she can order kind of like how the flow of the cycle of creation and destruction goes.
So they kind of have this interplay Shiva and Shakti that they control, they sort of control the strings of the universe at different times in the story.
But you can see he ruled, he has a different mount for every sort of form and then he would expand outwards, obviously eight times and then there’s nine.
But then there’s also batuk, so then there’s 10. And then there’s also this other form called the Pancha Mukeshiva who he has five heads. And from each five heads, speaks one of the gross elements of creation.
So fire, earth, air, wind and void. Yes, void, that’s right. So just like Yahweh Vahyeh, I thought that’s quite interesting as well.
But the goddesses don’t really fit per se that formula. And I’ll give one example is Hoed. So I know that you’ve often, I’ve heard you often say that it’s the prince, it’s like, you know, it’s the female can’t manifest in the fire.
But for that sphere in Tantra, she is really the goddess of fire and flowers. So I think that’s quite interesting. And she also has three forms.
So she can manifest as the queen, she can manifest as the princess, and she can also manifest as sort of, she is the goddess of the will. So she manifests as like a beautiful woman as well, kind of like a maiden figure.
The Ashta Matraka: Goddesses of the Pleiades
So then this other image that’s beside the eight Vairavs is, these are the Ashta Matraka.
So these are the eight mothers is what Matraka means, but they are the goddesses of the Pleiades. So why include them is because it’s another kind of formulation of the female godhead, and it’s an older system of Tantra. So it predates like the first Tantra text, is this worship of the goddesses of the Pleiades.
So I think that they’re really interesting, and some of them are Mahavijas. And when we get further and we look at the Yogini temples, I have pictures of that, they are also Yoginis. So they are also within the greater collection of 64.
And I’ve also come to know now that there are, some people count 64 stars in the Pleiades. So I think that’s very interesting.
Chamunda: The Birthing Goddess of the Blood Ocean
(36:04 - 38:33) [Jin the Ninja] So this is two pictures, and it’s the same character, even though they look totally quite different. And so it’s Chandaka, but it’s in Chandaka in two different times of her story.
Just like we said, there are nine time lords. So this is Chamunda. So this is the first image where she’s sitting on the skull throne, and she’s in birthing position.
So she’s bleeding, like in menstruating position. So she’s bleeding out the blood ocean where Malkuth would float. So we float on the world island or the world, and so that is the ocean that directly surrounds Malkuth in the Tantra conception would be a blood ocean.
So she forms the blood ocean. And you could also say she’s very similar to like a Lilith character, or maybe like an Ashira or an Astarte. And I do actually think that you can make an entomological connection and sort of like a linear history.
But she is not really like those goddesses, because the way Tantra understands the goddesses is in different stages of their consciousness. So she would be considered to be like a low goddess in the other conceptions. But Tantra considers her to be a fully enlightened being, because she was subjugated in the 8th century by a Tantric sorcerer.
So who blinded her, and I think that’s also very interesting since he just did the eye series. So he blinded her of her worldly eyes, and she only can open her third eye. But she is considered to be the queen of all the matrakas, so the queen of all the Yoginis, and the queen of all the Pleiades stars.
So then you see her in a different conception where she takes on more of a younger form, which also can arise on Nutsok, which is in Shakta Tantra, so goddess Tantra, Nutsok is really perhaps the most important sphere, because it’s considered to be like the sphere where she can fully manifest without externalities. Like she can just be fully in herself. She doesn’t have to be married to Shiva.
She can have her kids, and she can populate the rest of the tree, but she can also just self-manifest there.
Color, Vision, and Material Creation
(39:27 - 41:08) [Jin the Ninja] So, she is the emanating goddess of creation in that way, if we want to say material creation. So, but more associated with natural phenomena. Obviously, she has war-like qualities, she has occult-like qualities.
And in Buddhism, she’s not really considered to be in that kind of Venus, Natsok area. She’s more considered to be a middle-pillar goddess, and that’s like a whole other explanation, but I’ll just, I’ll leave it at that. But when she descends from the sky, the sky is seen to be bleeding red.
So, when she descends, it’s red. And then when she, and I also have pictures of this, so we’ll hit it when we hit it, but there, she becomes, when she lands on the earth, she causes discord. That’s kind of her thing, it’s very discordant, it’s like heiress-like, I’ve always thought.
And she, and in the Buddhist conception, she can also be a werewolf goddess. So I know everybody loves that, so I always make sure to throw that on her.
Green and Red: Netzach and Geburah
(41:08 - 42:43) [Speaker 2] That’s interesting. It makes it so much more interesting, right? Yeah, so you said some interesting stuff about, you know, you said how she could be war-like goddess, and you said almost like a middle-pillar-type goddess.
I’ve said it before, and I know when, at least when it comes to talisman, again, just because of the colors that are suggested for ceremonial magic, if you’re looking at, you know, Crowley or Steven Skinner’s tables, or anybody else who has tables, they’re going to, you know, show you the colors and flesh and colors. Green and red, you know, if you are using netsoc, which would be green sphere, your flesh and color is going to be red, which would be guburr, and that would be more war-like, you know? Or if you’re using the red sphere, guburr, your flesh and color would be green, and that would be netsoc.
There is some sort of relationship, and, you know, connecting the two, you have in the middle, the middle-pillar, because you’re going from one side to the next. So maybe it’s more of like you’re seeing both spectrums in a sense.
[Jin the Ninja] Yes, that’s exactly, because she is sort of the one, so this is the interesting thing. It’s not really polytheism, so I’m sort of giving a spoiler for the end, but it’s not really polytheism. She’s really the whole thing, but she doesn’t know it yet.
The Goddess as One Being in Many Forms
(42:38 - 43:50) [Jin the Ninja] No, and that’s also the story. It’s like she descends to Earth. Yes, she descends with 64 yoginis, but she really is the one who bursts them all into creation, so aren’t they all also her?
So she lands on the Hell Worlds, so she lives in the Hell Worlds, but she also gives rise to other forms of herself. You could say that she is the Opasika. She is taking the sorcerer or the magician’s path upwards together.
You could also say that. So that’s what the Shakta Tantra narrates, is like the goddess’s story, instead of it being focused on the gods and just how they appear in the sphere, and they are only partly the sphere, but they’re not the whole thing. You could say she is the whole thing.
However, it depends on your sect of Tantra, and there are different sects, but there are some that are very focused on one of her forms called Kamakya.
The Dragon and the Goddess
(44:53 - 49:25) [Jin the Ninja] No, I totally, I’m on that train that you’re talking about. I’m totally, because you know, Buddhism is really about the middle pillar. Obviously, Tantra has different, there are seven stages of Indian Tantra, so the schools that still exist.
So after you get to the fifth stage, it’s all Vamacharya, but, and everyone thinks that they’re a left-hand path master now. I sort of realized this online. I didn’t really know this.
But, you know, left-hand practices are much, I think that they just really are not the same thing. I think when people hear it in Tantra, it’s really not the same thing of contemporary like esotericism. It doesn’t have the same meanings.
There’s a different kind of like worldview, different cosmology, and the reasons why you would do it is also different. So I think that she is kind of the goddess who directs us one path to the other but always kind of reminds us to like come back into the middle because that’s what the mantra marga, the path of the mantra, when you recite the mantras, it’s to rectify the middle pillar.
It’s not to go play over here or go to this extreme over here. It’s really to bring it into the middle and to rectify our sins that we’ve done, just like she kind of creates the world and also destroys the world in one way of thinking. I think that she’s telling us to like create and destroy ourselves.
And also she births the dragon. So when we get to him, you’ll see him and you’ll be like, oh, she didn’t birth him.
And so she didn’t birth him in like the narrative story. But in one way, you could think of it as that the dragon realizes that she’s the OG. The dragon respects her.
So the dragon might respond to the power of the male deities, but he is himself a Shakta Tantra. Well, in Buddhism, we say he’s a Buddhist, but in Shakta Tantra, he is a Shakta Tantra. So he respects the goddess the most.
So she is the only one who can really tame him properly. OK, so the male gods could slay him. And obviously he comes back to life because Vishnu reincarnates.
But she is able to use his power. And the way I think about it is the dragon is like magic, but the dragon is also inside of us. So it’s like our also our divine spark, as well as like the impetus to go higher, sometimes for better or for worse.
Chandaka at Netzach
(49:25 - 51:26) [Jin the Ninja] So then you see her.
This is when she appears fully at Natsok as herself. So this way we would call Chandaka. So it means the shining golden one.
So and you can see the dragon is at her feet. And she’s kind of, you can’t really tell, but she’s giving like a boon giving gesture and kind of he’s drinking in the blood as also breathing out the flames of creation. So he’s doing that.
And then this is kind of like the idea of the Jambu Vipa, the world island with the great tower or the great tree. Sometimes it’s depicted differently, it depends. But that’s just like so people can see it like visually there’s four quadrants, just like Malkuth.
And there’s like a tower in the middle on a platform that can turn either clockwise or counterclockwise depending on your perspective.
[Speaker 2] You know, even when you get into Natsok, like sometimes people can attribute, well, I mean, you can attribute Venus to it or people will contribute like Lucifer. Even though it’s on, you know, it’s a female kind of image on the right pillar, which is interesting to begin with. I sometimes like the glowing.
In my opinion, that would be the Lucifer part of it. It’s actually like kind of like the light that, like if you switched on a light bulb, the light that is actually shining outside of the glass, that would maybe be kind of, you know, kind of the Luciferic part of it. It would be what’s shining outside of the light bulb.
[Jin the Ninja] So I think you’ll really like this. So in Vedic astrology, the Venus is ruled by an Asura. So like the planetary gods, so they’re very minor in Tantra generally, obviously except for the dragon, but they are the grasping planets.
That’s what they’re called. It’s called the Navgraha, so the nine graspers. So you could say they’re like archons in a way.
So he is represented by a diamond. That is his gemstone in Jyotish. So you could say when he shines, and he also turns counterclockwise, and Venus also turns while they say, I don’t know whether space is real or not.
I’m very flexible with those things. It doesn’t really matter to me. But I think it’s interesting that they say that Venus turns counterclockwise.
Venus is ruled by an Asura, so an anti-god. I think that’s very interesting. But I do agree with you.
I think that the godhead of the sphere takes that form. Like I think that that makes sense to me. Whether she appears in more of an outer form or more of an inner form, I definitely think it’s like a female-oriented sphere.
Tara as Chesed: The Star and the Milk Ocean
(52:11 - 53:33) [Jin the Ninja] Well, that’s also very interesting, because when we get to Chised or Tara, her name means star. So I think that makes a lot of sense, and she is the mother of the milk ocean. So she is the one who creates or you could say, I sort of think of it as she affixes things into reality, suspends them in like a liquid solution.
That’s kind of where my thinking goes, because her story is that she breastfeeds, so Shiva gets poisoned, they’re churning the waters of a supernal ocean, okay? He, the poison comes out, Shiva drinks it, she manifests as Tara, she breastfeeds Shiva, and he turns into a little boy. So that would be, so that is kind of where her power is, she’s the Salvatrix, she’s the saviouress, she’s the star that appears after the storm.
[Speaker 2] That’s so like really interesting that whole, like what you just said with the, because like that goes into so many things, like Tarot, there’s a star card, and there’s always like a female involved with that. I mean, even the way you’re explaining it seems very, like, no for Crowley. So it seems to have its impact on a lot of things, the female and the star.
[Jin the Ninja] No, I totally agree, but you could also think of them as all being a star. You could think of all the goddesses, because when there’s another form that the goddess can say, I think they might all be explaining the same thing just in a different character or a different name, you know what I’m saying?
I think of it as more expanding outwards into the tree or expanding outwards into the mandala, but it’s really one person, it’s really one figure. And it’s just how she can manifest, or they can manifest, or God can manifest, whatever you want to call it, and they manifest in specific ways so we can understand.
Durga at Netzach: Slaying the Buffalo Demon
(54:54 - 56:23) [Jin the Ninja] But there is another form that she can take, which is more exterior when she’s at Netzach, and she can ride a lion or she can ride a tiger, and then her name is Durga. So I think she’s really interesting, and I always hear you talk about how you used to, when you used to play in Netzach a little bit, that the Egyptian goddess would ride a bull. Well Durga slays an Asura, so Durga slays an anti-god who is a buffalo demon.
So I think I’ve always found that very interesting.
So there you see, this is Durga. So the more exterior goddess, and then you can see her slaying the buffalo demon in the second image. So she’s riding her lion.
The lion is also very interesting because the lion is the word, so the logos, of all the piranhas.
[Speaker 2] That even goes with tiferet, and there’s like a lot of the color. I can see that matching. It’s interesting.
[Jin the Ninja] Well she is, you know, they do say that she is the blazing of 10,000 suns. So there you go.
But this other image is the nine forms of Durga. So this is a more older form of understanding Durga, specifically expanding into her own mandala eight times. So you could say it also like that.
So there’s also a way to map the nav Durga’s onto a tree, which I’ve also done, but I won’t get into that. But it’s a different, you end up with a kind of a different formulation. So the goddesses, it doesn’t like match the Mahabijas one to one, but maybe you think of it as like, this is how they can sort of manifest into the tree at different yugas or different times of like our cycle.
Rahula: The Dragon, Head of Vishnu
(56:30 - 1:00:18) [Jin the Ninja] So this is Rahula. So he is the dragon or the beast, if you want to say that. So in Buddhism, so this is a secret information, but I’m just going to say, because I’ve already said it on a different episode, but Rahula is Vishnu.
So in the higher tantras of the dragon, he is equated with Vishnu. So the story is, is Vishnu chops Rahula’s head off during that same episode of the turning of the supernal waters, even though Rahu did the right thing and sort of saved the universe. Vishnu doesn’t want him to drink the nectar or the amrita of the gods.
Rahu thinks he deserves it, so he lines up. He sits in between the sun and the moon, and through the light of both the sun and the moon, his magic kind of shows that he’s half dragon, half demon. So then, so Vishnu says, you’re not supposed to be here.
He throws his Sudarshana chakra, which is the six-pointed star. It’s from Shiva’s insides. Shiva took his own chakras that he had purified all the elements with, gave it to Vishnu.
Vishnu used those as a weapon, decapitates him. His head falls on the ground, but he’s already drinking the nectar of the gods. So he’s actually immortal, and when his head falls on the ground, all poisonous medicinal plants grow.
So things like aconite or tobacco or anything like that, anything that’s toxic and medicinal, that is kind of his purview. So he’s considered to be the god of eclipses.
His tail is obviously because his head and his tail were separated.
So his head, he has all the nine heads of the planets, but his tail is actually a subtle body, so a smoky body. So this will obviously be more important when we get to Chokmaw, but the smoky tail of the dragon is a shadow planet, so it’s considered to be the south node of the moon. So the tail is what eclipses the sun, and that head, which is the physical body, is what eclipses the moon.
So people can have their own birth chart, and you can have the two dragon planets, so the north and south node of the moon, can appear in any of the twelve mansions. So he can also block the regular planets as well. But he is considered to be like the god of desire.
He’s not a bad guy. He is a Buddha. He was subjugated by the Tantra Buddha.
But he’s also like the demonic, not demonic like demon, but like demonic representation of the shadow armies of the planets and the stars sometimes.
Sadashiva: The Meditating Godhead
And then the next image is Shiva.
So this is Sadashiva. So this is him just meditating on Mount Kailash, so he has like a mountain that really exists, and he supposedly sits on the top of it, and he’s just meditating. So this is more of a normative Hindu image, but I think it’s a really good image, just so you can see.
Like Shiva is always depicted with his eyes closed. And the river Ganges, so the celestial river, flows down over the moon on his crown, and it cools off his kind of fiery nature. Because Shiva is a more recent innovation.
He used to be called Rudra. So anyone who’s ever read the Vedas will obviously know Rudra. Rudra is like a storm god, a god of lightning.
And so Shiva is then syncretized with Rudra and then later called Jashiva.
The Tiger Skin and the Bull
(1:00:23 - 1:01:19) [Jin the Ninja] Okay, so he sits on the tiger skin. So that means he has overcome all his fear, and he also rides the white bull, so the Nandi bull. So that can also be the wish-granting bull.
So there’s another bull that has like a sphinx kind of look with a woman’s face, and that can be considered the wish-granting bull, but he rides Nandi bull. So it can be, so you know, Headless talked about this the last time he was on, but the Shiva lingam, like how they would do Shiva puja in India, they have like a black basalt stone with three lines on it, and then they pour milk over the top. So you could say that the bull sort of fulfills the function of ritual worship for Shiva.
Oh, he also wears the snake. He also wears a dragon king around his neck. So that’s actually very important.
So people can remember his name is Vasuki.
The Leopard Skin: Overcoming Bliss
(1:01:33 - 1:05:52) [Jin the Ninja] So I totally, I tend to agree with you that I definitely think, I think it has, well, okay, so if you’re like a forest ascetic and you’re sitting there and you see like a tiger and it’s coming for you and then you manage to slay it, that would be, you could say that that’s also a metaphor for your own fear and you could also say, because sometimes they will also have like a leopard skin. So you’ll see some of times the Yoginis, not the main goddesses, but the Yogini entourage goddesses, they will wear leopard skins. So the leopard skin means you’ve overcome bliss.
So when you’re performing like wrathful practices on the cremation ground, and sometimes that is the real cremation ground. Sometimes it’s not just a conceptual one. So instead of being overtaken with the left hand practices, like with blood drinking or whatever, the conceptual idea is and losing their kind of, losing themselves in the ecstasy of the moment, when they wear the leopard skin, that means they’re fully in control of themselves at all times.
The Holy Family: Shiva, Parvati, and Their Children
So this is like the, I called it the holy family because I thought that was like a funny way to describe it, but you can see it’s, so Shiva, as I said, he’s really an ascetic. So he becomes a householder when they are married. So when they are married, he’s a householder, but generally he, she gets very annoyed with him because he’s always in a householder.
So he’s always hanging out with ghosts and demons and vampires and all of those like cremation ground, like the host is what it’s called, the Ganas. So he’s always hanging out with them. He’s never really at home.
So she has to also be kind of like the, she has to kind of pull everything together. So she creates, so you see she’s holding Ganesh, which is the elephant-headed son. She creates him through like an alchemical process.
You can maybe say even that he’s a homunculus in a way of speaking, but, and then that’s the god Skanda. So that’s the god with the spear, the other little boy, but they actually have more children. They have a daughter, two daughters, and you can see also their mounts, the lion and the bull.
So I always think that’s really interesting because when you add in Skanda rides the peacock and Ganesh rides the mouse. So then you could also say that’s like a four animal kind of alchemical combination.
The Cosmology: Three Worlds and Material Incarnation
And then the picture on the right is like the cosmology in like a more Buddhist way of thinking, but you can see how the sun and the moon are on their own axis, and they kind of rotate around the island.
So I always thought that was really interesting when I heard different people kind of like describe how space is fake. Just that we kind of have that same idea and then also Sirius B, so the star right in between the two mountains is like a green star. So I think that’s really interesting when you look at like the color of Tipareth as well as the color of the goddess who said to sit there.
So I just think that’s interesting, but you can see that there’s overlap between, so basically how it breaks it down is into the three world system. So there’s heaven, hell, and earth. So there’s bleed in with the three, you could say there’s bleed in with the lower heavens and the upper hells with our world.
So there’s like ability to kind of traverse those three kind of planes of existence, you could say.
Sometimes people will say that like being born on the material plane is bad, but really in like the dharmic religions, whether it’s tantra or not tantra, it’s actually not bad.
This is where we come to reset our karma, as well as we are able to kind of ascend the mountain, ascend the tree from this point. So this is kind of the optimum for us because we get to decide where we want to go.
The Yogini Temple: A Physical Mandala
(1:17:29 - 1:20:37) [Jin the Ninja] So this is the Yogini temple. These are a bunch of these.
It’s a grouping of temples. They’re all high-patriole, meaning that they don’t have groups. This one is a 64 Yogini temple, Chosap, Yogini and Sanskrit.
So this is in Madra Mahapradash. So it’s also the temple that probably was the inspiration for Indian parliament, because we know the two British architects were Freemasons. They would go out to this temple, which is kind of out in the middle of nowhere, on a plateau.
And you can see, if you look at pictures of Indian parliament, there’s a definite similarity. So this one has the 64 goddesses of the Pleiades, but they’re also Mahavijas and they’re also Machikas. So you can see where the whole grouping was a singular grouping at one time.
And then in the central shrine, so now it is a Shiva image. But perhaps in the older times, it was Chamundas, so the queen of the Machikas. So these temples would have been for Vamacharya practices.
That doesn’t necessarily mean like bad things happening. It just means that they were probably doing like corpse sadhana, sometimes like sexual tantra. But I don’t like to talk about that.
It’s not that I don’t like to talk about it. It’s just that people way overemphasize it and they get very stuck on those ritual things that are like very, it’s really like a ritual procedure. So people should just think of it like that.
It’s not really, those are not standalones. It’s not just do whatever you want. It’s like you follow the shastras.
You follow the ritual procedures that are laid out in the text. It’s a hermeneutic process.
But in an esoteric, in a more inner way of looking at the yantras is that these are like the goddesses in their subtle forms. So, you could worship every yantra as if it were the goddess herself. So, if you don’t have a statue or you didn’t have a thing. And often, in the south of India, they will affix different, the different yantras for the different goddesses underneath the statue.
So, that could said to be the generating force of the spirit of that inhabits the statue.
The Mahavija Grouping and the Central Goddess
(1:25:27 - 1:27:31) [Jin the Ninja] So, this is the Mahavijaya, so this is the ten goddesses, the grouping.
So, you see, in the central position, they have Tripura Sundari, Lalita Tripura Sundari. So, she, in this grouping, is called the Sri Vijaya. So, this is a specific school of tantra, where they place Lalita Tripura Sundari, so the goddess of hold.
She is the goddess of the whole thing, in this conception, okay? Although, they’ve also given hold her own goddess, you can see her, she’s almost at the bottom, she’s the little girl. So, when she’s the little girl, that can also, that’s her direct emanation.
So, that’s called Bala Tripura Sundari. So, that’s when she takes form to play in her own creation, through innocence. So, she does not necessarily understand all the things in the universe, but she takes a childlike form, so she can enjoy all the things in the universe.
So, then the next one is Kali Kola. So, this is where Kali is the primary goddess of the ten.
But, people often get hung up on Kali, because of many reasons, which you won’t get into this time. But, you can also think of them as all Tara, as well. Like, that’s a different, that’s a more Buddhist conception, but like, Tara can also be a central figure.
And then, there’s, I mean, they all can be a central figure. And, they all can be your Ishta Devata. So, you don’t have to have the central deity be your personal deity.
But, you’ll have to maneuver through all of them to understand all of them, if that makes sense.
The Sri Chakra and Metatron’s Cube
(1:27:41 - 1:31:37) [Jin the Ninja] So, this is the really important thing. This is the Shri Chakra. So, this is, when you look at the three-dimensional image of the, of the image on the right, it looks just like a metatrons cube.
Like, when you look at it in three-dimensional. And, so, there are different, and I’ve heard many people describe, like, the crystallization process that takes place, either at Saturn or Bena, if you want to describe it like that. And, Kali, obviously, I’ve placed her in Bena.
So, maybe you could say that she is the crystallizing force. I don’t personally think she’s as crystallized. Like, I think the Western esotericism places more emphasis on Bena as the crystallizing sphere.
And, I think that she has different qualities than is necessarily assigned to that sphere, usually.
So, I think it’s interesting to talk about, but also, the sphere can be said to be birthed by Lolita Tripura Sundari. So, the goddess that appears at Haud. And, it can also be the sphere that appears at Natsa.
And, it can also be the sphere that appears at Kether. So, I just, or the shape. So, it’s kind of like, well, one way to think of it is called the garden of lotus seeds.
So, the bijas. So, bijas are like magical words, we’ll say. That are, every goddess is assigned a specific bija.
So, just like when we are at Malkuth, and we’re the bride, or the householder, or the child even. And, we’re learning all the things in the universe. So, we learn the bijas.
We don’t necessarily have them bloomed. So, they’re not, so you will often see goddesses will often hold lotus flower. So, Tara holds a blue lotus.
She’s not the only one. But, sometimes they will hold lotuses that are not bloomed. So, that’s really important to understand like, what their individual bijas is, and then also like, how to kind of align your will with their will.
Like, what kinds of things can you do in that sphere?
Ganesh: Guardian of the Gates
(1:35:01 - 1:38:00) [Jin the Ninja] So, this is Ganesh. So, he is really important. He’s really important in both Indian Tantra and Buddhist Tantra, depending on your school of Buddhism.
But he has 32 forms, like we said. He also has a form called Maharakta Ganapati, which has 22 arms. So, I just think he’s really interesting.
He also has a lot of Arahman-like qualities. He can ride on Rahu’s back. And in an astrological way, he is said to be able to clear the smoke.
So, the smoky tail of the dragon. He is said to clear the smoke from the paths. So, not necessarily the spheres, but the paths between the spheres.
Like, we know what I’m talking about. So, that’s what his astrological power is. Sometimes people will say, oh, he’s the god of Mercury.
Like, he subjugates Mercury if you have a negative Mercury in your chart. But that’s not really true. It’s really catchy.
So, people want the real Jyotish correspondence. That’s what he sort of subjugates. But he doesn’t clear it all the way.
So, once we get into Chokmah, you’ll understand what I’m saying. He clears the smoky tail, but he clears the smoky tail from below. So, let’s say you’re below Tiporeth.
He clears the smoke from those paths. But he doesn’t do it necessarily when you’re above the supernal ocean, or above the higher waters. But he appears there.
So, I’ll just say he appears there, and he can appear also in tantric forms because people always see him, and he’s just an elephant-headed god, and he looks like kind of silly, as like a little kid sometimes is often how they depict him. But there’s actually like a tantric meaning to that too, just like we talked about with Bala Tripura Sundari, where she takes the form of a child to play in her own creation. You could also say that Ganesh also takes the form as a child to play in his own creation, and also makes his mother happy.
So, she kind of softens in all of her spheres like the goddess of Chokmah. She’s extremely ferocious. She’s like an outcast goddess.
And he can exist in that sphere as a very tantric deity, as a very tantric, like a left-handed deity. So, then it kind of softens her presence when he’s there. So, he’s considered to be like the guardian of the gate.
So, he is the gross speech of the mantra. So, you cannot even really begin doing a mantra practice if you do not like at least acknowledge him.
That’s well said. Well, that’s why he’s important, right? Like we just have to acknowledge him, and then whether you have a practice with him or not, his tantric practice didn’t really survive into the contemporary time.
But I will say there’s something interesting about him, is that some of the richest families in India now have Ganesh as their kola deva. So, they’re clan deities. And they are also the merchant caste.
So, he’s considered to be like a very mercantile god. So, he’s the god of obstacles. He can place obstacles before you as well as take them away.
Closing
(1:38:17 - 1:40:56) [Speaker 2] Yo, thank you very much, man. That was a lot. That was a lot.
I think this was great. Okay, go ahead. No, I’m glad I had the idea of doing two.
Because beforehand, when you sent me this stuff and I was looking at it, I was like, there’s a lot here. So, I think this worked out perfectly. Thank you.
[Jin the Ninja] Well, thank you. I mean, I wanted you to see the colors. I know it was a lot of pictures and stuff, but I just thought it was part of it, right?
Like, you have to see it to know if I’m selling the truth or I’m just like bullshitting.
[Speaker 2] No, I think it’s great. The visuals really help with something like this. Hopefully, maybe in the second part, we will get Headless on with us.
We were supposed to have him on tonight, but something came up, I guess, and he was not able to join us. So, yeah. Hopefully, fingers crossed, we’ll get Headless on for part two when we get into the actual tree of life.
[Jin the Ninja] Okay, well, thank you so much, MYP. It was really cool. It was really fun to pick your brain and hear what you thought of my project I’ve been doing, and thank you so much.
[Speaker 2] No, I thought that was great. I thought that was really good. Very interesting, too.
And the colors and a lot of the numbers, it’s like the same. I see the correlation. It’s a lot of the same things you get over and over again.
[Jin the Ninja] No, I totally agree. And I think it’s different enough from the Egyptian stuff that I think it’s kind of new. Like, I think it’s fresh, in a way.
That’s all I felt about it. I was like, oh, this is kind of different, because I’m really bad at the other pantheons.
[Speaker 2] No, no, this is very interesting. This is all new to me, so I appreciate the schooling. You want to let everybody know what your deal is again and where they can find some of your stuff?
[Jin the Ninja] Sure. So, I’m at on Twitter, Wukong Reborn, W-U-K-O-N-G Reborn. I’m on Instagram, Threshold Saints, which will be the name of my RSS feed when that drops eventually.
We’re still working on it. I’ve done 11 episodes on this subject, on Subconscious Realms, so people can check that out. I was just on an episode of Deplorable Janet.
I have a series on Who Killed Tupac Shakur. I’m going to be… I think that’s it.
Oh, that’s on Union of Unowns. Shout out to Ashley. I think that’s it.
I actually am missing something, but I totally forgot. It’s okay.