11/17/24
Vajradharahood? After the yantra demonstration a little girl bounced out of the gompa imitating the crouched position of the instructor. She reminded me of a Vajradhara image I both saw and then visualized. The luscious light forms of Vajradharma and Vajrayogini (crimson red) I experienced in my Three months Vajrayogini retreat are occurring more frequently the last few days. It has something to do with the pooling of elements at the bottom of the three channels. Also, the conscious blocking of sun and moon there. But more than exhausting polluted elements or stopping grosser airs it’s just one’s generation of purities out of faith and diligence.
11/19
I’m trying to recover my experience of the Guru turning end over end—the image was something like that—in a post meditation extravaganza the other night. Now that I sleep little and dream less, it’s hard to keep track of circumstances from prolong periods of post meditation and siddhi enriched sessions. But it came to me during teachings on the Secret Consecration that it signified refined elements and their airs freely flowing up and down the Central Channel. Symbolically, this matches quite well with recent developments, all greatly advanced by recent Lamdre teachings.
Post meditation starts around 2 or 3a every morning and takes me through sunrise. Numerous visions of clear, consecrating liquid bodhicitta in cups or vases, are consumed by me, or poured over my head and into my mouth by consecrating deities, spreading great ease and ecstasy throughout my being. A featured highlight of this morning was the visitation of Sonam Tenzin (Douglas Rhoton), my Sakya Gurus’ translator, who died in the early nineties. His presence came to mind and his face arose in my mind’s eye. I requested him to give me his knowledge of Tibetan and Sanskrit. What came next was something like a medical scope of all my vein letters within their sheaths being washed in consecration liquids, then in light. Energetic, psychophysical airs began uprighting themselves. The animated images of these letters looked something like the Sanskrit letters on Newari Thangkas of the cavorting Chittipati skeletons, which I’d been previously viewing. Eventually, they ascended up the avadhuti, replanting themselves onto the inside of my skull. Yantra movements were ongoing and a flash of pale blue, twilit sky burst thru in another glimpse of mahamudra. It was slightly preceded by the flash of my partner’s face. At the time, I took this to be a sympathetic degree of enlightening upon her continuum. Either that, or a death premonition of someone equally close, as the visual of her face was somewhat palled and contorted.
(Warning: advanced anuttara yogic experiences. For initiates only.)
There have been many more intra Lam dre experiences, some of them new and now somewhat difficult to believe. First, there was a third consecration with the wisdom consort—the Buddha figment Nairatmya—and the four joys ecstasy in union with her of an intensity and rapture like never before. The empties—substantive-less, wishless, and signless—also made momentary, symbolic appearances. There were untold secret entrances and exits, from and into, the Vajra body, unbearable ecstasy, and then a catapulting into the realm of Vajradhara: a hollow, luminous, light blue and indigo, entity of reflexive great bliss from an utter and supreme revelation of emptiness. Another new element in this post meditation experience was an analyzing mindfulness of body, feeling, phenomena, and mind, leading to a stabilizing and tempering of the sometimes volatile, heart rate changing, trances and concentrations. I finished up by saying Hevajra mantras. As I now review this, remembering the psycho-series of events, I find it hard to believe. But such is the power and influence—if only situational—of the precious Lamdre teachings given by the glorious masters of Sakya for nearly a millennium.
11/21
It’s not about lifetimes—lives and deaths—but episodes of helping beings and witnessing one’s bodhicitta ceaselessly spread within all beings’ bodies throughout the ten directions.
(IMPORTANT: The following paragraphs are only for initiates of the Highest Yoga Tantra/Anuttarayoga.)
Through the ultimate kindness of the Guru, the Vase consecration, destroying anger of the afflicted disciples’ experience, is given during the cause empowerment for deity yoga. After one is then ripened by the correct view of the purified vision, the real vein-letter-element-air body mandalas are seen, after the very fortunate initiate is bestowed the Secret Empowerment, on the basis of the Guru’s own body mandala. The example primordial wisdom should arise during the Third Consecration when the Four Joys are experienced through the movement of the father’s and mother’s element, first down and then up the four mandala chakras, now purified skandas of the five Wisdom Buddhas. At that time, the wisdom mind of nondual clarity and emptiness arises, and again, during sadhana practice of generating the deity. Given one’s previous karmic circumstances, and one’s great efforts, these secret mandalas, nirmanic expressions of the sambhogakaya are ’revealed’ and not really ‘generated,’ projected, or fabricated. At the time of this experience, one should be entirely grateful to the Guru for having bestowed such an indispensable, salvic example. Only in this way can there be a successful Mahamudra experience.
As an authentic pith teaching from the Buddha Vajradhara—and one’s qualified Guru—once the disciple experiences the above stated ‘example experience’ of the higher consecrations, it’s an indisputable experiential authentication of one’s Buddha—or vajra—nature. This, as opposed to what one experiences simply from a ‘pervaded’ understanding of the Prajnaparamita, which would not necessarily be the Mahamudra experience mentioned above. This is because it’s just the first part, the realizing of nondual clarity and emptiness, and not the second part of a revealed inner and outer ‘body/phenomena’ nonduality—preparing one for a total merger with the mother clear light and a supreme nonduality at the time of death. This ‘body method’, the ineffable experience of an imagined or actual sexual union with a consort, and the resultant primordial wisdom, as opposed to an analytical pointing out, validates the ‘mudra’ aspect of Mahamudra.
In this way, the Sakya position in such doctrinal matters is also validated over the Kagyu/Gelugpa assertion that Mahamudra can also arise after merely hearing an analysis of primordial wisdom given by the Guru without a path initiation into its experience during the three higher consecrations, facilitating the arising of the four mandalas out of which Mahamudra reveals itself after the disciple has made a supreme effort and realized a ‘second diligence.’
Perhaps it’s this ‘supreme’ virtue of diligence then, the actual transcendence of effort, that confuses the Paramita Vehicle’s facility with the Vajrayana’s, concerning the dawning of authentic mahamudra experience in an uninitiated disciple. One has to wonder why the wisdom Paramita vehicle can be unduly elevated to the level of the lightening quick method and wisdom of the resultant Mahayana path, Vajrayana, which exclusively employs the body method of the three higher consecrations. Unless, one also has some kind of yogic union with the mother, Prajnaparamita, and then a detachment from her during a fourth, if not fifth, ‘consecration’ essential to all Highest Yoga Tantra practice.
3/12
What is the path of mindfulness of body, feelings, mind, and phenomena? Not to live in delusion of ‘outer’ isolated extremities—random characteristics—but coming ‘inside’ by knowing them as reflections of emptiness. Rest in mind’s ground luminosity by contemplating these two analogies: waves upon the ocean and a gold nugget mired in excrement. Neither are they the same nor different in their apparent separateness of substance and qualities. Water and water, excrement and gold—a matching sameness of materiality and an unmatched difference of it—are indistinguishable in a supreme nonduality. Clarity’s partiality becomes emptiness’s impartiality, out of which comes whatever you like, unimpeded. These are the luminous fruits of imputed sense datum—unrealized dharmata—the clarity of ground luminosity, non-entities in truth’s formless body of Dharmadhatu. The path of abandoning and realizing becomes less as in one’s comings and goings nothing moves. In reality, nothing is taken up and nothing is put down. The echo of emptiness is simultaneously reflecting only ineffability. Who at this point can say what—or what can say who—is doing anything?
4/12
At the bottom of this
our siege's sea
we take small pleasure
in bits of string or soiled silks
Others’ discarded wants
As cinders of a dying sphere
we’ve paid a price
made amends and are wise
Reckoning this to be
our deepest dive
Occasionally we surface
Bask in sun
and breeze
Or the new moon’s magnetic
cooling rays
Upon each a seated muni
holding all in space
A blissful frozen frieze
A prayer praying
the Three Times end
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