Vajra Diaries Vol I, #1 11/23/22 I fell back asleep and an exalted personality, with dark black hair, whose face was turned away, laid down next to me and we embraced. Filled with love and affection, pure like a guru or consort, he was also in great emotional need. Melding into me, it was a blissful, loving experience. That vision then became a dream that I was with a spiritually upgraded version of an ex-girlfriend. But I’m thinking now it was my wisdom consort, the one given to me in this last retreat, as she often assumes different appearances. Anyway, we were both very joyous walking through this extraordinary dreamscape and she pronounced that something ‘mysterious’ had just happened. This morning during Birwapa’s Yoga, I began to receiving vase consecrations from Akshobya and then, successively, the four other Wisdom Buddhas as one does practicing the Hevajra sadhana. I immediately recollected my deceased spiritual friend, (designated DSF), as I’d been trying to share all my meditations with him. I also recollected the Chenrezig practice, according to Master Tsembupa, where light goes out from the HRIH, invoking all the tantric deities and yidams who then return in the form of Chenrezig and enter oneself as such.
During this meditation, I remembered that our DSF had taken the reading empowerment for the Collection of Tantras from His Holiness in India. Reflecting on that DSF, whom I’ve been visualizing as being next to me since his passing, fully absorbed into me as he had done just the night before. This time we began receiving vase consecrations from all the different tantric deities. This, and an extraordinary accompanying bliss, went on for quite some time. As I remember it now, it was an absolutely auspicious, salutary coronation for DSF transitioning out of an ‘impure vision’ into a ‘pure’ one. And as if in a meditational slipstream, I was along for the ride, of both our lives. A samadhi ‘mind wave’ had accumulated, and from this arose different kinds of meditative experiences—consecrations, various emptiness lights and absorptions—similar to ones I had been documenting during retreat. Only this was more vibrant and progression. An extension of Guru Yoga perhaps, the supreme interpersonal relationship. But also because it’s DSF, our dear friend with whom our continuums are so closely interwoven and bound. Especially those of us who entered along with him into the Vajra Masters profound body mandala during yidam empowerments. And now here he is, manifesting stages of the Bardo and our own consciousness is involved.
As it turns out, it’s an occasion for experiencing the love a mother has for her only, now belated, child. Only it’s us surviving him—the Vajra Family left behind—who are experiencing this profound vulnerability. Evoking, as it can, an unspeakable compassion. A dreadful caring, as if he really was that mother’s child. So one just might find his form melding into one’s own, just like the chosen deity, and experience the inseparability of beings as Rinpoche had taught us. The complete reconciliation of all differences between one being and another. Equality, and the great Equanimity of objectless Compassion. This, I believe, is the common (virtuous), or uncommon (wisdom of emptiness), siddhi of having Vajra siblings who then pass away—or go beyond.
11/27
While meditating Hevajra, a vision of both DSF and His Holiness came to me. They were seated in a sand colored room with a low throne. They’re images were non-differentiated from the environment they were in. It was blissful to apprehend them. His Holiness was down from the low throne, seated next to DSF. It was like they were waiting for me to arrive. I didn’t know whether to appear to them as Hevajra or Sonam, as it seemed important to be real, bringing into question my practice of ‘pride of deity.’ Is it enough or too much? Can it ever be too much?! Now I’m thinking that while in retreat that time His Holiness moved across my shrine table and was looking out in my direction but didn’t acknowledge me was because he was looking for our deceased spiritual friend. 11/27 After opening the five wheels of the Primordial Buddhas, then seal them and send them in combinations throughout the Vajra Body. (Not sure whether this is a quote or taken from personal experience.)
11/30
Having sent the sealed Wisdom spheres throughout the body which behave something like the photons in a Wilson cloud Chamber, appearing randomly in both location and combination of five colors, the conventional body dissolves, or instantly disappears, and the illusory body of the deity can be emanated in its place. Then whatever degree of clear light experience (in this case slipstreaming off of a deceased friend’s meditation in the bardo, guided by his Guru) can be mixed into one’s form as the deity. Alternately emphasizing the form and then the clear light. In the ‘Avalokiteshvara Practice According to the Master Tsembupa’ this is done in several ways. While the mantra recites itself, one concentrates on visualizing the deity, celestial mansion, and all beings as Chenrezig. Then, alternately, one listens to the non-duality of sound and emptiness generated by the rotating mantra. One can also emphasize one’s Guru as red Amitabha and then, alternately, oneself as the white Chenrezig. (Thus also recalling the red and white indestructible drops of one’s parents seeded in the heart.) “The animate and inanimate universe dissolve into light and is absorbed into me. From a state of Clear Light I appear as the unified form of the Great Compassionate One.”
12/1
I’ve been ‘borrowing’ our DSF’s clear light death experience, and illusory bardo form intensified consciousness, to meditate upon the yidam (both Hevajra and Chenrezig as embodiment of all the yidams, including Hevajra) in a unifying non-dual clarity emptiness. It reminded me this morning during Birwapa’s yoga of my abortion clinic experience with another former girlfriend from a prominent Jewish, Long Island, family who had taken the Chenrezig initiation with me from Deshung Rinpoche and had had a strong reaction against it afterward. She said, “Jews don’t bow down to anyone.” And of course all Buddhist services begin with Namo, meaning, I prostrate, usually to the Three Jewels.
At the clinic, I experienced a strong presence of Chenrezig because of this same clear light death experience arising from the abortions—I think. So, concerning the cult of Kapalipa, formally arising in the 6th or 7th century in Oddiyana (Swat Valley, Pakistan) and later having a heavy presence in Southern India, Mysore, Bhubaneswar, and elsewhere, makes sense. The tantrik, whether Buddhist or Shivaist, goes to the cemetery to slipstream samadhi upon the deceased’s death experience, both ‘clear light’ and intensified bardo consciousness, so that they can unify their chosen deity with it and achieve deathlessness and other siddhis.
12/4
Concerning the ‘37 shades of Dr Gray’ (referring to the author of a recent translation and exegesis of the Chakrasamvara Tantra) I have some actual experience in, mostly from my three long retreats over the last four years. Especially as he graphically goes through the anuttaras (indexes), Explanation Tantras, and commentaries, of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras as they relate to his critical presentation of the Chakrasamvara Tantra. Regressive elements such as having sex with one’s own mother, sister, daughter, and maternal aunt, I have had—especially the first one—much imaginative experience. Today, I bound to me with my imagination (now seemingly realer than ‘real’) both my birth mother and first step mother as dakinis or yaksinis for the express purpose of mixing the red and white primordial elements, arising from sexual intercourse, that are both my birth right and most precious possession. Evidently, Sugatagarbha, the Buddha’s nature of Great Bliss is realized by imagining the most outrageous sex and swapping of bodily fluids with them even while my own father (the Guru) looks on in Great Passion.
This explains the nidana (opening verse) to the Guyasamaja Tantra: “Thus have I heard, while the Buddha was residing in the vulvae of lotus ladies…” (Gray, 2020?), which presents the literal as literal and then explicates it as not. Perhaps in the land of tantras, where ‘existent’ versus ‘nonexistent’ does not apply, this is the best way to proceed. Do I actually penetrate my own mother? Well, that’s pretty much what it feels like. There are certainly some dakinis and goddesses—meditational consorts—that seem more sensually real than the sensuous incarnation that have produced my own children, as well as the hundred plus exploits that sullied my karma. But having finally understood that creating ‘spots of time’—beginnings, middles, and endings—like when one climaxes, spewing semen after working up the most sense gratifying experience, only to then dump it, and all one’s energies, in an experience of oblivion, is the source of all sufferings.
Yes, there are real women, karma mudras, and ‘unreal’ women, non-karmic—those purely of simultaneously arisen wisdom—of which one might avail themselves. Those 37 Shades of Dr Gray are the salvation of a sex-addict, who love the vulvae of the Lotus Ladies, the bhagini, yaksini, dakinis, and theriomorphic Tramen messengers same as the Gurus, who are one with the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, by virtue of the Dharma and the Sangha—clear-clean conduct, meditation and view.
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