This is a particularly brilliant approach to what the Greeks would call archetypes—the very first forms of manifestation to be produced by Spirit as it begins to emanate or manifest the entire world. Archetypes were often conceived, by various Great Traditions around the world, as everlastingly fixed ideas in the mind of God or Spirit, and thus left no room for evolutionary input. But the more evolution became understood, the more it appeared that virtually everything had some sort of evolutionary origins or at least connections (including what Whitehead called “the Consequent Nature of God,” although not what he called the “Primordial Nature of God,” itself unchanging; these two dimensions of God—Consequent Nature and Primordial Nature—are quite similar to evolving Form and timeless Emptiness, both ultimately nondual).2 Archetypes as traditionally conceived also had the inconvenience of being described only in premodern terms by the traditions, leaving out modern and postmodern characteristics—did that mean God Itself was unaware of the coming modern and postmodern eras? Not a very far-sighted God, that. But the Lankavatara Sutra’s version of the storehouse
