I wanted to share some
thought of encouragement to support the process that we are all moving
through as we move through the 12/21/2012 time marker and beyond. In
terms of a single thought, with only five words, this is the most
positive and powerful one that I know of. "Om" is the universal
frequency. When resounded we tune into the universal energy field that
permeates all of creation. It is the unified field of Einstein
manifesting as all that is and unifying all that is. It means that
separation is an illusion and that we are always one with each other
within this unified field. "Namo" means to invoke, to call upon, to
entrust into, to surrender to and allow, to open up to and be changed
by. "Amida Buddha" is the name for the Buddha of Infinite Love and
LIght and also the name for the Buddha of Health, Physical Regeneration,
Long Life, and even Physical Immortality. "Amida" is a fusion of these
two aspects and therefore means a Grace and Blessing Energy that can
heal life on Earth and transform it into a Pure Land. Amida Buddha is a
Dhyani Buddha or Archetypal Buddha, beyond the genders of male and
female, and both male and female at the same time. The female aspect is
called Pandaravasini, or Queen of Fire, and represents the enlightened
or subtle aspect of the fire element. The corresponding wisdom is
called the "wisdom of pure perception" which is the capacity to see
everything as it is, without the coloration of mental interpretation of
any kind, seeing everything as a manifestation of primal luminosity. It
is like removing all the colored windows of mental interpretation and
looking directly at the light itself. Amida Buddha is sometimes
designated as "he" because of Dharmakara, who was a Bodhisattva on
another planet who made the 48 promises of what he would gift if people
called upon him. He merged with Amida Buddha and became a Nirmanakaya
emanation of its energy. He worked hard at transmuting energy for many
vast numbers of lifetimes to create a "mercy seat", a place where all
karma could be burned away completely and liberation easily attained.
Because of his attitude of being gracious and his pure dedication, he
merged with the aspect of our inner being that has the same attitude,
the Amida Buddha within us, and brought this energy into dynamic
aliveness so that by chanting the name "Amida Buddha" we can access this
energy source and let us transform our lives completely and totally.
"Hreeh" is the seed vibration of this energy family, represents "karma
burning" and "the compassion that dissolves all karma completely". It
is a symbol for an awakened conscience that understands karma very
deeply. It is able to feel deep repentance and remorse so thoroughly
that the root of karma is wiped out. It is able to forgive so totally
that the karma of others is wiped out. When visualized and chanted,
this single syllable becomes the whole mantra, and when vibrated into
the cells of our body evolves our body into a light body. What is
required from us is only a small amount of sincerity, since love is
nonviolent and does not violate free choice ever. To the degree that we
sincerely allow ourselves to be transformed is the degree that it is
so. In the tradition, you chant long enough until the chant is sincere.
When it is sincere, then we are transformed. We first attain mental
peace and faith, then realization, and then even light body. It takes
roughly one million repetitions to become enlightened and one billion to
become a light body. Deep concentrated sincerity can accelerate this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I put this on FB and thought it was worth replicating here.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to add a few footnotes about this mantra. One is that I think that what is true for this mantra is true of many mantras, that any mantra empowered by an enlightened being can function to achieve liberation very rapidly, provided that it is a blessing tradition, and that the core belief of the tradition is that the spiritual path can be easy, rapid, gentle, peaceful, and natural. We may have many thoughts and beliefs that life must be hard, difficult, and stressful, that "sh**t" (bad karma episodes) must happen etc. But it is possible to chant through these obstacles in meditation, burn away the root samskara (imprints) from our subconscious mind, and not need to play out those karmas to remove them within our outer empirical experience. The harshest experience that we may periodically go through on this path is the experience of cleansing remorse for the unloving thoughts we acted out in the past. What is learned through this chant is that every moment spent not loving is a moment lost to entropy and every moment spent loving is life lived within its four purposes (survival, healing, growth, and celebration) and this becomes a good karma that amplifies upon itself many-fold.
ReplyDeleteIn the Pure Land Sutras, some are confused about whether it is the "mind made" place or a real planet, it is both, Earth will also be seen this way sometime in the future by its inhabitants. It is said that Dharmakara meditated the planet into existence within the pure wish to liberate all sentient beings from sorrow, to provide a place of peace where sentient beings could come to where the striving and struggle of their lives would completely end, where sentient beings could find a peaceful place to meditate where they did not have to struggle to survive or work at jobs that they did not like for the sake of little dollars, and where the inner powers of our buddha nature could unfold without trauma, naturally expressing themselves as servants of our own loving wish to help all sentient beings.
ReplyDeleteEarth is in some sense mind made also, but the thoughts that generate the energy matrix upon which matter is organized are not as pure. Humans have very mixed thoughts, many of them subtly repeating the past through the force of habit, many of them inspired by addictive craving, judgmental negativity, and obscuring delusions, as well as periodic noble thoughts based on wisdom, compassion, creativity, altruism, quantum humor, and peaceful clarity. It is the mixture of these thoughts blending together like rain drops in a river that form the greater present moment that unfolds on Earth and that we experience in echoes as the news.
ReplyDeleteWhen we chant a mantra like "Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh" we are vibrating our minds energy at one of the highest frequencies possible and sending waves of positive causal thoughts into our world, adding rain drop by rain drop, pure energy into the thought stream of the collective consciousness, uplifting this current, so that it chooses a higher destiny that it would otherwise, finding paths of least resistance into the best possible futures. It is like vector mathematics, the uplifting vector shifting the totality of other thought vectors as much as universal law allows.
ReplyDeleteMantras are positive thoughts, but without the booby traps of other positive thoughts. Many of our positive thoughts have hidden negatives within them. My favorite "hidden negative" comes from Norman Vincent Peale, the very person who wrote, THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING, and who said, "Positive thinking is the only way to survive in this sick and degenerate world." Many affirm positive things when they worry and are secretly affirming their worries. The reason why mantras avoid this is that they were birthed within the luminous emptiness of a compassionate enlightened mind and they are not caused by the karmaic chain reaction of the past, where positive and negative thoughts give birth to each other and do not transcend their origin. They do not bring anything new into the time stream because they were caused by the time stream of cause and effect. What is an effect of the past cannot really change the past.
ReplyDeleteThe greatest gift possible through a mantra is enlightenment itself. When we chant deeply enough to enter into "mantra samadhi" (total immersion/concentration into the single thought of the mantra to the point where the subject/object duality ends and we are in unity with the single thought), then we experience the birth place of the mantra itself, within luminous emptiness, within compassionate mind, within our own buddha nature. Thought is very different on this level, it is a "light pulse" of pure wisdom that is not separate from the massive wisdom field within the Dharmakaya, the body of universal law, the living energy the regulates all events within the universes and gives a sense of unified order and regularity. Conventional science describes many of the patterns that arise from this order as "natural laws" and describes them in equations like F=MA or E=MC^2.
ReplyDeleteIn the Surangama Sutra (the sutra of "courageously going forward" which is what we are doing at this time just by riding the Earth on its time journey), the Buddha dialogues with some of his most advanced students, those that had already attained enlightenment and who have chosen to stay on Earth to help others to attain enlightenment. He gives each of the 25 beings a method of liberation for safe keeping, for a time when the method of skandha analysis and breath watching of the earlier teachings would not be enough to liberate people any more. When the number of people who attain easy and fast liberation through the mindful breathing method (and it should work within about 2 to 3 years) is exhausted, then the other methods were meant to be introduced, according to what is truly needed. Out of the 25 methods, the two that are considered the best are "liberation through hearing the one who is hearing" and the chant to Amida Buddha. The former is very rapid, but is one where if you get it, then you arrive instantly and if you do not, then there is nothing to practice or cultivate. The latter has the advantage of "carrying each other" that when people chant together, their usually solo karma journeys combine and great a great vehicle where all can arrive at enlightenment very quickly. Like a boat where all are rowing, when one is tired and the others still row, it still goes surely forward. Like a fragrance, it spreads to everyone and uplifts them all. Like a house, what is built from previous work is not lost and lifetime after lifetime people can continue to support each other.
ReplyDeleteThe feature of mutual support is the most significant gift of chanting Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh. The chant then becomes something that people can join in to help each other and carry each other, not only for the liberation of the individuals involved, but also for the world that the individuals belong to. There is a level of life where our individual consciousness links with each other through a collective consciousness, and when the chant reverberates there it can set in motion creative healing forces to support the transformation and reformation of the Earth (or any other world). During one of the more difficult periods in Japanese history, Japanese people would gather into groups and chant with each other, help each other through the challenges of living on Earth. They were even inspired to build beautiful gardens that would reflect some of the radiant beauty of Sukhavati, the homeworld of Amida Buddha, a world made from a compassionate enlightened mind/heart, where trees have luminous pearls that radiate multiple rainbow colors and just to be present in the vibrations of those trees is healing. One of the chant masters of this lineage would sometimes shine out visible light from his mouth when he chanted, while an advanced nun would simply initiate people into this chant by chanting with them. When people did this, they would feel this massive joyful energy tingle through their bodies. Paul Reps, a Zen writer from the 1960s and 1970s in America chronicles his meeting with her and describes how in one shared chanting session he was awakened into his original goodness as a sentient being.
ReplyDeleteI decided to make 3 posts about this chant at this time, this being the last series of posts in this cycle, to give this tool/path for people to use. There is a lot more I could share about this mantra and what it can gift people who give it a chance. It is taught that if you chant it only 10 times when you are dying, it is enough to reach the Pure Land and be reborn there, even if you have committed thousands of horrible bad karma accumulating acts. If you bring lots of heavy karma with you, then you are placed in what is described a giant lotus that wraps around you (and which sounds a lot like a warp containment bubble from Star Trek) and waves purifying vibrations for 500 years (a symbol number as 5 is the number of the 5 senses and 100 is a number of a long process completing itself perfectly, meaning that all the addictions to sense experience are purified thoroughly in this containment bubble, in Sukhavati no one can harm another). There is a point where you, after much practice, chant the mantra in your dreams. This is an auspicious moment and it is where the mantra cleanses the subconscious mind of its thought imprints (samskaras) and produces very deep healing. It is also when the siddhis start to appear, special powers to help those in need on this world. When the siddhis do appear, it is best to keep on chanting and always dedicate those powers to the compassionate service of others. This way the powers cannot be abused and do not cause the accumulation of bad karma. When the siddhis appear, there is a joy with them, because now the chant has established itself inside consciousness and can radiate out to others to help them, thus drawing the Pure Land closer to Earth. The deep wish of Amida Buddha, and indeed all the great enlightened beings, is for Earth, too, to become a Pure Land, one where sorrow, poverty, disease, deformations, injustice, oppression, war, and any form of adversity cease to be. Part of the teaching of Padmasambhava is that earthquakes and tidal waves are due to imbalances in the five elements of life (earth, fire, air, water, and space) and through this chant (and many others) they can be brought into balance and cease to happen. During this transition, where lots of planetary imbalances may get stirred up, this chant can help liberate forces of balance, at least within the localized field where the chant is strong.
ReplyDeleteI mention this, because people do not understand the power of their thoughts and their consciousness, and what they may be chanting without realizing it. Any thought that is repeated often and with faith is a kind of chant that a person is involved in. This chant deeply structures the life of a person and his or her experience. People do not always notice that they repeat a series of thoughts very often and notice less how it structures their experience, channels it like a pipe or a lazer in a certain focused direction. It is something that can be experimented with and verified. For instance, a favorite American mantra called "sh*t happens" if chanted often can bring your life into deep ruin very fast. Although I do not recommend using this powerful mantra, I see many people verifying its effectiveness in a very scientific manner, much to their own unhappiness. You can also partly verify the power of Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh by slowly, gently, and peacefully repeating it 12 times, with Om on the inhale and Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh on the exhale, in your mind, silently, concentrating on this reverberating this thought without strain. Noticing your inner state before and after the repetitions. You will feel more peaceful. It might be a subtle shift or a dramatic one, but it will be there. Even one repetition makes a little shift, but most are not sensitive to feel this shift. When the mantra is repeated enough, the result crosses our sensory threshold and we feel it. Each chant needs to be done as if for the first time and not like a parrot or robot. It needs a little aliveness, sincerity, and focused intention. It does not need any faith, though faith will come later on when the results keep happening.
ReplyDelete