O’Kaïros O’Kaïros, O’Kaïros: it has wide ranging significance. An ancient Greek word with many different meanings across a wide range of cultural, philosophical and metaphysical applications. It is the name of our non profit association, involved in constructing one of a series of message transmitters highly significant for our age. We refer to it sometimes as a time capsule. O’Kaïros means Time. The time. It is time. Now is the time. A significant time. The opportune time. The moment. Opening. Energy, direction, force. There are no limits to the circumstances in which it can be used. O’Kaïros reflects an expression of reality: it isn’t anything in particular but can be anything whatsoever. A word can on occasion convey something beyond its ordinary meaning. It can be applied in countless contexts, expressing feelings beyond the ordinary meaning and usage of a word. O’Kaïros. It’s a rare use: reflecting admiration for a project or a piece of art, a drunken state or Zorba’s dance. Vocabulary is a body of words; language is usage of those words. O’Kaïros is somewhat beyond the mundane that cannot strictly be defined. We could say it is beyond the rules of intellect. A great expanse. Potential without limit or boundary. Where yes and no do not struggle for supremacy – the domain of intellect. The reasoned view seeking agreement. O’Kaïros, a critical time when groups of yogis and mystics, tai chi and ba gua players, artists, musicians, poets and dancers engage in a unique process aligned with reorganisation rather than persuasion. O’Kaïros; a time capsule, a message transmitter, a message from one time to another. A message from no time to all times. Who sent the message? Your heart. You sent the message. Be happy. A wish to be happy, to live in peace. it’s a dream-like quality known well by gods and angels. They seek it too. All beings seek happiness. What does the message instruct? In no particular order: find a suitable place, suitable people. A willingness to move across continents and oceans. Certainly, the willingness to accept the need to move and act beyond perceived limitations, beyond habit and belief. To let go of opinions. To use material to bind stone, to make forms. Make painted images in great detail. Large and small. Compile and redact sacred texts in minute detail. Sometimes print them, sometimes use microfilm. Sometimes write in hand. Sometimes in English, in French, in Sanskrit, in Tibetan, in Arabic. Recite while involved in diverse activities. Make geometric designs: specific mandalas that have meanings known and yet to be revealed. In some measure, use every skill, every means, skilful means. This is the being of skilful means. Much of the message has yet to be revealed. How could a message speaking of boundlessness, limitlessness be definitive? The message is an invitation to our potential. Participating in this it’s a mystery. Yet it is immensely practical, real and undertaken in this instance by people who have strong roots in community, in the world in which all ordinary people function. The world of challenges at every level: bodily, emotional, mental. I hear the invitation to take part recognising that not knowing goes fully against the mainstream of modern life. Where not to know is unthinkable. To know the outcome of action requires we calculate and so we calculate, estimate, gauge, guess, reckon, tally until we have collected enough data to mask our confusion and act because the data mask is in place. We learn to deceive ourselves and others with statistics. We are governed by them. By percentages, by expectations based on assessment of the past. It’s simply how it is, it’s not a reason to be sad or cheerful. O’Kaïros implores us discreetly to enter not knowing as a gateway to knowing beyond. Beyond what? Beyond the known. More than we know. More than can be known. Where is that: more than can be known? The riddle, paradox, keeps the brain alive, fights the demons of old age brought about by retaining only the knowledge of the known rather than embrace the limitless potential of the unknown. Modern medical science has glimpsed this and trains the elderly, the injured, the broken to re-educate by entering that which was not previously known. Unexpected challenges. Beyond the known is the healer. It has no end, no limit to our need for healing. Healing that leads us to wisdom rather than knowledge and leads us beyond rather than back to where we were. There is advice: there is no need to understand – except when it is essential to understand. It’s a critical time. Yet the advice is to let go of the past, the future and perhaps most importantly, the present. How is the present let go? Get to the place beyond time. The message source is from no time. O’Kaïros; it does not give the listener or the reader the information required: the question arises: what is this all about? Describing O’Kaïros as building a stupa, does that satisfy? O’Kaïros is a greek word. Stupa is a Sanskrit word. It’s most common meaning is a dome shaped building erected as a shrine. A monument which offers a most beautiful process and exploration. Nothing in particular, anything whatsoever. The great expanse of freedom that can’t be restricted or captured. We are building it. Engaged in a paradox, manifesting an edifice which like a pharaoh’s tomb contains countless useful and valuable items. They are preserved in the stupa for the benefit of all beings, not for any individual. And they are not only for the after life yet also for this life. Especially for this life. Letting go of the present makes them useful for this life. Remembering the direct advice, try not to understand. The message from no time to this time, to another time, is redolent of synergy. The way the contents of the stupa are collected, the assembly of people sourcing them, receiving them, transporting them assembling them arranging them ordering, measuring, distributing. Synergy. A task here, a song or a dance, a chant, a morning call to awaken not just today, but henceforth. A call to support others who may benefit from help beyond the ordinary. If every yogi paid attention to the message, they would enter the heart of Patanjali’s sutra, the heart of our earth mission. Synergy is the heart of the yogi’s path: we can be more if only we could just be. A stupa is a building beyond what it represents. A reliquary, a monument, usually to Gotama Buddha. But equally it represents O’Kaïros: an axiomatic time. We are building a monument to a brahmin yogi called Gotama who passed away over 2,500 years ago. Thousands of stupas, monuments, have been built over that time in the same spirit- to honour, to engage in skilful means to produce a structure. To explore O’Kaïros, the axiomatic moment, not just this axiomatic time. The structure has contents at each of its several levels. The contents are rare and sacred objects that have been sourced from various countries, monasteries and donations. They include incense powders, semi precious stones, statues, medicines and voluminous written copies of teachings. There are manuscripts of prayers or discourses, sutra, dharani or mantra. And most significantly there are relics of realised masters. Relics that are thousands of years old. Relics from one time to another time. There is no dogma. The message comes with clear and precise instructions. Strict orders. Two orders. The first order is to follow the instructions. The second order is that there are no instructions. The building of a stupa follows certain traditional practices. Yet the overall message delivers a transmission, a message that is beyond fixed traditions, beyond fixed dogma and beyond any cultural constraints. By taking part we experience; the message is received, delivered. The actors are carried by the unwritten plot to deliver a message transmitted across ages. If I had to use a single word it would be smile. All the great sages, saints and angles, gods and benign spirits seek to help us come out of suffering. Sages unconcerned with dogma. Dogma emerged as a natural consequence of the need of subsequent generations to secure the continuity of the message. We heard the message, it came on the wind. We tried to secure it, tame it. And then the deviations, the distancing from the message. What’s the message? Taking part in the process reveals it. Of course I want to know. Each time I feel that need to know I smile, relax. Trust. We are already assembled yet there is no limit to how many might join in this work. We are assembled across continents, across invisible landscapes. This is real work. We do not describe ourselves as anything in particular: just the O’Kaïros association. We are no more special or well informed or erudite than any other. We all have the same potential. What did we do? We found a suitable location. We procured an accurate scale drawing of the structure we wish to build. Determined its most expedient height and dimensions in relation to the location. Finding that some of our ratios required adjustment as we build to accommodate unforeseen characteristics, we fluid: despite an accurate scale drawing, we are able to depart from its strict confines while still maintaining an agreeable relationship between all the different aspects of the structure. While still respecting the constraints of the process. Still following the instructions. This is already a wise learning. Where we deviate, we look at the overall meaning and impact. We have done that and we are doing that and will continue to do that until our first time capsule, message transmitter stupa is completed. We have begun to build and continue to build. Materials that are available in southern France, our chosen location, are not the materials that have been used in the great ancient stupas of Asia. We have used local stone, we have used lime and sand and our own hand craft and labour. Some elements never change regardless of the time, the place and the people. Stone. Pink granite, abundant in our location was used in the foundations. That most ancient stone used in part by the builders of the Pyramids of Egypt and coincidentally by the builders of the Palace of Versailles. We study, research and enquire. We searched for and continue to seek advice from living masters as well as textual transmissions. We seek answers in meditation, from past lives, from future lives. We remain rooted to this earth, we remain practical and are guided by common sense. Past lives, future lives. Past results, results we anticipate. If it is thought about, there are concepts. If it is meditated on, there is ordinary consciousness. If it is described there are words. If it is looked at there is dualistic perception. If it is left alone, there is the true nature of phenomena, while if anything is done, that is samsara. We willingly enter samsara. How else could a stupa be built? A stupa covers an enormous variety of traditions, styles, meanings purposes. There is no single manual on how to build a stupa. All instructions have limited application because the scope, the purpose is so much wider than ordinary intellect can contemplate, no matter how brilliant. A stupa is not just an edifice. It is an offering: to be involved in its creation is an offering and in itself it offers us opportunity. It is a container. It is a transmitter. What it transmits is as complex as the contents. A map of how we can evolve. If we have ever asked the question – who am I? Where am I going? What is the purpose? What is my potential? The stupa map can answer that. Being a transmitter, the stupa is like a radio or a wifi signal. It carries limitless potential information. No one needs all of it yet all of it is there if needed, if sought. Some familiarity is required with the code of this unusual map. To be open and willing to let go the constraints of ordinary perception is extraordinary! Empowered by ease. Perhaps another paradox. The power of ease, the power of being relaxed, without worry or fear. Our goal is not to influence but to share, to inspire so that others might enquire: might this help? Me? Others? What can I offer to this project? What can I offer myself ? A stupa – O’Kaïros – meeting and working collectively produces the means by which we begin to decipher the code. It brings the code to life. The transmission becomes comprehensible and it soon becomes obvious: there is a message for all of us. Collectively. And individually. The individual messages are the opportunity to see beyond dogma, they offer true non conceptual freedom. You are invited and will be welcomed to experience it. Psychedelic substances, sacred or recreational, have a significant impact on perception. The impact is produced by the substance, not limited by it. A stupa is a buddhist monument, yet it is not just that and it is not limited by that. The source of a stupa is time: in reality, nothing, yet it can govern our lives and our behaviour. Time has no substance. There’s a paradox in building a stupa made of substance as a means to discover the essential source has not substance. These are the kind of paradox encountered that break down our boundaries of perception. Like time, there is no limit. Boundaries are not broken down in order to arrive at new ones. Building a stupa – O’Kaïros – can be the application of dogma, or it can be the application of principles. Principles are guides. To adhere to them honours the source of what we often convert into dogma. We make dogmatic that which was established as a principle. Thus we adhere to time, to dogma and lose the essential source meaning which has the potential to reorganise how we feel, how we move and how we think. The buddha’s teachings was emphatically non dogmatic in spite of the thousands of instructions and advices he gave. The practice is the practice of paradox: using dogma to arrive at no dogma. Using the the tangible edifice of the stupa as a means to see the essence source as nothing in particular, no identifiable thing. No first cause. No creator despite those involved being very much responsible for creating the physical edifice. Ideas and thoughts arise endlessly. Some ideas are based on knowledge, experience, some are based on imagination some are based on opinions that have no foundation in our experience: adopting words and phrases we have heard without any experience of what they describe. Hearsay. A collective addiction to editing hearsay which by chance produces influences that encourage us to seek yet more and more outlandish hearsay that can be edited, redacted and presented as if we knew the true source of what we speak or write. All that can be known of a stupa is what has been experienced in preparing it, building, collecting its the contents. Perhaps visiting one of the famous stupas of India or Myanmar or Sri Lanka or Bhutan or China. And now there are enormous stupas to be found in Andalucia, in Colorado and in Occitanie. There are some rules. Many rules. Ultimately they lead to the most consummate of paradoxes: there are no rules. That is the only rule. The buddha is no thing, the dharma’s nothing in particular and the sangha provides the energy that might encourage us to pursue the path to nowhere in particular which could be anywhere at all….. A guide is not the work being guided, it’s not the outcome. A guide has so many different forms. Perhaps it is understandable that we resort to dogma since a true guide has no real intention. Like a guide on a saw table. Without it our work will lack precision, it may not even see completion. But there is no limit to what that guide can help us produce. Are we guides? Is O’Kaïros a guide? Are we being guided? All of us, leaves in the wind. To that extent, yes. And many of us struggle because we wish to land somewhere in particular. There’s a formula in all teachings, messages. The first part of the formula is that there is a sense of need to do something about a situation, or write something. What we feel we need to do, the action awe need to take depends on the situation. The next part of the formula is that there is an audience who are sought to be persuaded to engage in the action proposed. And there are certain constraints: the factors that restrict our ability to persuade, such as personal beliefs and prejudices and motivations of the audience. A teaching, a message, a stupa, is an influence. The influence unlike the edifice, is not visible. The subtle energetic significance of a stupa is that it transmits on a subtle level. It is not concerned with the innumerable coarse influence of ordinary life: money, fame, position, power, opinion. These can be highly sophisticated to the point of erudition, yet they remain coarse influences because of what they encourage in us. There is a level of influence which is more akin to inspiration. It is best described by the feeling produced by certain types of sacred music. The feeling produced by entering or seeing certain architectural structures. By hearing or reciting certain text, prayers, mantra, sounds. And there is a third influence, the influence that is direct perception or transmission or experience. This is how the stupa functions: in direct transmission. From the heart essence to the heart where essence may be experienced and reveal the sublime reality that often unbeknownst, we all seek.