9/11/24
During post-meditation last night several significant things happened. My human bone mala kept sequestered on my altar back in Cambodia appeared very real and hung itself around my neck. It was like a blessing I didn’t quite understand until later the next day. Lying in bed in a state of profound pacification, I recited the King of Mantras. Remembering what the Guru said about the body of the Hevajra deity that day, I began to get a strong visual and feeling for his upper body like never before. All three spheres were abiding in a great deal of bliss and emptiness. And then my torso and limbs went into spontaneous yantras, with lots of contortions, writhing, and head shaking in a conscious spreading of the bodhicitta element. Not too long after that, while doing the fourth consecration wisdom meditation, with all the mandala chakras open and nectars and essence airs flowing, in a rush of upward moving energy I suddenly cried out, ‘I’ve had this dream before!’ It’s then a flash of all-encompassing reality—an outward opening sphere—manifested in an experience of all knowing, but only for an instance or two, communicating itself as the genuine mahamudra and not just an example of it. It was quite a poignant contradiction to my previous outburst that I’d dreamed this before. The point being, ‘the knower’ had just been defeated by a previously unknown experience. Ego’s consciousness, for the time being, had been utterly defeated.
The bone mala experience mentioned above, I later realized, was a premonition of a meeting I had in the Patan, Katmandu, Mahabodhi temple complex with an American artisan who had lived there for many years. He was a supplier to lamas, collectors, and dealers of hard to get ritual items, such as damarus made of real human skulls, thigh bone horns with remnants of human skin, and other cemetery accoutrement. We talked at length in his flat about many aspects of our respective tantric practices, both Buddhist and Shaivist. Then, being American, he wanted to talk about the landslide defeat of the liberal party. That discussion went on for awhile as I too needed to comment. But being in Lamdre retreat, where all such comments are seen as projections of one’s own negative propensities, I gracefully stopped it by saying it was a defiled subject matter. I feel he basically agreed, though his development may have allowed him a greater degree of karmic indifference. From my side, I had vowed to myself I would refrain from ‘following the news’ as for me it seemed an excuse to indulge in strong emotions of bias, partiality, and also wishing harm. Further, if one is attempting to realize all phenomena as being mind, mind as dependently arising—and all equally illusory—then why would a sane person continue to project and believe in it and continue to promote a world filled with anguished suffering and misery instead of one seen as a purified support and supported; of heavens filled with Buddhas, Bodhisattva, viras, yoginis and the like? From this brief transgression, my appetite for America and its latest dark dreams of a harming supremacy, a previous resolve too not indulge, even for an instant, in supporting anything like that, was redoubled.
Prelude to the above post-meditation experience, was a seemingly new disaster movie dreamscape in which I dreamed I was in a mall that had a Valentines’ Day theme. Everyone there was looking for romance and sex. But suddenly some kind of disaster struck and the petty pink paradise was gone. While we appeared clean and seeming unhurt, it was as if the disaster makeup had been forgotten to be applied, and then crowds of us were struggling to climb over these big chunks of concrete and stone. This ‘mall of America’ had been instantly destroyed and life was transformed into this arduous, destination-less journey. So the dream’s post election prognosis seemed to indicate what, just another lost generation?
Comments
Post a Comment