dreaming in the void: The Treasure Map

Check out first the posts "Alien Within" and "The Great Mystery".

Excerpt from Aldous Huxley's book "The Perennial Philosophy", chapter "Time and Eternity":

"(...) The Sufi", says Jalal-uddin Rumi, "is the son of time present". Spiritual progress is a spiral advance. We start as infants in the animal eternity of life in the moment, without anxiety for the future or regret for the past; we grow up into the specifically human condition of those who look before and after, who live to a great extent, not in the present but in memory and anticipation, not spontaneously but by rule and with prudence, in repentance and fear and hope; and we can continue, if we so desire, up and on in a returning sweep towards a point corresponding to our starting place in animality, but incommensurably above it.
Once more life is lived in the moment - the life now, not of a sub-human creature, but of a being in whom charity has cast out fear, vision has taken the place of hope, selflessness has put a stop to the positive egotism of complacent reminiscence and negative egotism of remorse. The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. That is why the Sufi and, along with him, every other practising exponent of the Perennial Philosophy is, or tries to be, a son of time present.

(...)

In the idealistic cosmology of Mahayana Buddhism memory plays the part of a rather maleficent demiurge. "When the triple world is surveyed by the Bodhisattva, he perceives that its existence is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past, but wrongly interpreted". Lankavatara Sutra, the word here translated as "memory", means literally "perfuming". The mind-body carried with it the ineradicable smell of all that has been thought and done, desired and felt, throughout its racial and personal past. The Chinese translate the Sanksrit term by two symbols, signifying "habit-energy". The world is what (in our eyes) it is, because of all the consciously or unconsciously and physiologically remembered habits formed by our ancestors or by ourselves, either in our present life or in previous existences. These remembered bad habits cause us to believe that multiplicity is the sole reality and that the idea of "I", "me", "mine" represents the ultimate truth. Nirvana consists in "seeing into the abode of reality as it is", and not reality quoad nos, as it seems to us. Obviously, this cannot be achieved so long as there is an "us", to which reality can be relative. Hence the need, stressed by every exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, for mortification, for dying to self. And this must be a mortification not only of the appetites, the feelings and the will, but also of the reasoning powers, of consciousness itself and of that which makes our consciousness what it is - our personal memory and our inherited habit-energies. To achieve complete deliverance, conversion from sin is not enough; there must also be a conversion of the mind, a paravritti, as the Mahayanists call it, or revulsion in the very depths of consciousness. As the result of this revulsion, the habit-energies of accumulated memory are destroyed and, along with them, sense of being a separate ego. Reality is no longer perceived quoad nos (for the good reason that there is no longer a nos to perceive it), but as it is in itself. In Blake's words, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would be seen as it is, infinite". By those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit, Samsara and Nirvana, appearance and reality, time and eternity are experienced as one and the same. (...)"

The treasure map