Telepathic Link Yoga 1

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a practice called "Guru Yoga". This is a ritual where you link with a higher being like Padmasambhava or Tara. The ritual is often used to empower mantras for practice. The ritual makes mantras more effective by laying in some energetic circuitry into the aura, by creating clear understanding, and by focusing clear intention. When this ritual is done, then merely chanting the mantra activates the energetic circuitry and produces results more rapidly. I prefer the name "telepathic link yoga" instead of "guru yoga," because Amritayana Buddhism is more democratic and nonauthoriterean than other spiritual traditions. While the blessing energy, wisdom energy, and mature compassion of a higher being is very valuable to the spiritual path, the higher beings are seen as friends and guides who have worthwhile help, instructions, and advice to give us, rather than authorities to be obeyed. In terms of our culture, they are more like good psychotherapists and energy healers, rather than rulers to be obeyed. While many traditional spiritual seekers have taken beings like Padmasambhava and Jesus as spiritual authorities to be obeyed, my feeling is that those higher beings only chose with work within an authoritarian framework because is what those seekers were used to. From their own viewpoint, being an authority was not really necessary. In the Gospel according to Saint John, Jesus is reported to have said to his disciples, "No longer do I call you slaves; for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from my father I have made known to you (John 15:15)." The passage contrasts following out of obedience, not really knowing why, with following from understanding and also as equals to Jesus. The Sufis have sometimes given Jesus the title of "elder brother" to symbolize this. He is older, wiser, and more mature on the evolutionary path than we are, but not really different from us. We do not have a master to slave relationship with him or all the other enlightened beings, but have a relationship of friends who are on the same journey. The precepts still need to be kept, but we accept them not because we must obey them, but because we agree with their ethical idealism from our own conscience. In other words, we do not obey them because a spiritual authority tells us to. A spiritual guide gives us the precepts because they are aligned with the dharma, with nature, and with what truly works, and because of this they will help guide us.

Linking with a higher being can be a powerful evolutionary accelerator for a lot of reasons that would be hard to explain. My feeling is that we are presently homo sapiens and are mutating into homo telepathicus. The shift is as profound as the shift from primates to humans. The ability of humans to communicate through speech and through writing, to build tools, and to form rules was an important evolutionary step. Just as humans evolved beyond primates through evolving complex conceptual communication to transmit knowledge from generation to generation, homo telepathicus will learn through sharing pure thoughts within a kind of group mind. Telepathically linking with one higher being is a mental yoga that will allow one to join a collective mind where we will be learning from each other more deeply, intimately, and rapidly. Compared to homo sapiens symbol communication, there is less room for error because we do not have to encode our understanding in symbols and decode what another says back into understanding. The encoding and decoding process is one step removed from direct transmission. Much human sorrow has to do with misunderstanding each other, not knowing how to listen to each other, and not knowing how and what to share with each other.

In meditation practice, it is very common for psychic abilities to awaken and develop in individuals. This is because the emergence of these abilities is part of our next evolution, just as speech, writing, and tool use are part of homo sapiens. Telepathic humanity will be empathic and compassionate in a different way than homo sapiens. An isolated sense of self will no longer be the reference point for forming an identity. In a real sense, the ego consciousness of homo sapiens is based on a kind of self symbolization process that is not part of homo telepathicus. A being who has made the shift, feels identity directly as a radiant energy field that they are resting in. I like to call this, "abiding in awareness as awareness". When Buddha talked about the idea of no self, it was an antidote to this self symbolization process inside homo sapiens. The very effort to symbolize our identity through a series of concepts is different than feeling awareness and resting in awareness as awareness. It is not that the Buddha could not give a symbol to represent who we truly were. He did not want people to settle for this self representation. Latching on to any symbol, however philosophically and psychologically accurate it might be, is not the same as resting in awareness beyond all thoughts, emotions, sensations, impulses, and bodies. When we are able to abide in awareness as awareness, beyond the need to symbolize ourselves to ourselves, and beyond attaching our sense of identity to any symbol, then we have shifted our consciousness and are operating differently in life. Paradoxically, once we are free from the hypnosis of conceptual thinking, then the thinking function operates differently and telepathy begins to develop.

When we link telepathically with a higher being, then the very relationship itself accelerates a kind of growth in us. This is akin to how we would grow in playing a game like Chess by merely playing against good players who challenge us and inspire us, except that the relationship is supportive rather than adversarial. Learning to trust someone, be open to his or her blessing, and be guided by someone develops a lot of abilities within us. The Sufi principle of learning on this level is called "rind" which roughly translates as "osmosis". We absorb something through exposure to the energy and spontaneously learn something through this interaction.

The first preliminary is to embrace "ethical idealism" (sila parmita). You commit to living a compassionate and ethical life. You want to learn to be harmless to others. You want to not cause them pain. There is a verse in the Buddhist teachings, "Because we wish to end sorrow completely in our own lives, we vow to not inflict sorrow upon others." There are several gates where sorrow enters our lives that we need to close. These are the gate of sensation, the gate of unconsciousness, and the gate of actions. The gate of sensation we watch, because the samskaras, the stored tendencies accumulated from many lifetimes get activated by sense impressions. If I have an alcoholic samskara, the smell of alcohol may activate a craving to get drunk. The key is to "remain with the sensation" and let it arise, abide, change, and pass away without acting on the impulse. Then this samskara fades away and ends. The second gate to watch is the actions that we do. If we keep our actions ethical, then we do not create any more adverse karma to work through and can concentrate on the accumulation that we have already made. The last gate is unconsciousness, where wedo not notice what we are doing with our mind and how we are creating karma on this level. If we bring our mind into silence or immerse our mind in a mantra, then this root can be cut down. This is the deepest way of burning away our karma, but it needs the support of our commitment to ethical idealism. We can also soften our adverse karma by doing simple good deeds. Later on we can open up to the blessing energy of the Buddhas and burn karma directly. Part of this is feeling purifying remorse for unkind actions done in the past and resolving to live a compassionate life from now on. We can visualize sending love as light to everyone we meet and everyone we know. Jesus and other enlightened beings recommended that we "love our enemies" and send love as light to them especially. It is our hatred of people we have labeled enemies that keeps us locked in the most painful karmas. We can be chemically addicted to feeling hatred towards others, to the adrenaline rush, and not realize what this is doing to us and our life condition. Unfortunately, the American political realm has encouraged people to become hateful of other political factions and is teaching people to generate adverse karmas. We can insist on ethical idealism from those we choose to represent us, insist that the parties play fair when discussing issues and competing for votes. It is about moving beyond winning and losing, about going beyond cheating to win, about going beyond using malicious speech to win, and just focusing on living dharma, trusting that the long term process of staying aligned with dharma will heal even politics. I trust that the law of karma does operate and balance the total political equation of this planet. I do find it interesting how many people do not believe such a law is operating below the surface and balancing the equation, how many believe that evil beings are getting away with something, and can get away with something. Eventually bad karma does get exhausted and good karma fully ripens into the life that we want to live. If we are focused, then this process can happen faster. Voltaire talked about "tending your own garden". He meant this on two levels, one being literal and the other being that you take care to uproot the unwholesome karmaic seeds that have already been planted and water the wholesome karmaic seeds so that they can flourish. This can be done anywhere, under any government, and even in the worse of circumstances.

The first level of telepathic link yoga is a kind of immersion in the energy and example of a higher being. Some people do this accidentally when they immerse themselves in the writings of a favorite author and eventually feel the life and thoughts of the author behind the words. Some people who have studied a religious sutra sometimes have a vision where they are sitting near the original teacher and hearing the original discourse that inspired the sutra. It is a kind of time travel experience that can sometimes pick up on some of the things that were shared that did not survive the writing down process. There is something called "living time" where these events can still be joined and felt.

The second level of telepathic link yoga is to visualize the higher being in a bubble of white light above the crown chakra, the soft spot at the top of the head, and visualizing a beam of white light enter this soft spot, move down the spine, and energize all the chakras along the way. This is an alignment with the higher being. There are different visualizations which are possible to do this, but they have the same basic essence. The higher being is asked to enter our visualization and enliven it. There is a coordination of the visualization, intention, and breathing that makes this process work. If there is a lama or spiritual guide walking us through the process, he or she sometimes visualizes with us and makes the link stronger, sometimes filling in the missing elements of the process that we might not be able yet to do for ourselves. This is why in Tibetan Buddhism they usually wish that we get initiated by a qualified lama who is part of a practice lineage associated with the higher being who is being linked with.

It is important that the visualization linking process works right, because it is designed to empower a karma burning mantra. By chanting the mantra associated with the higher being, we invoke the energy and presence of this being, and he or she sends his or her blessing energy into us so that we can burn more karma more quickly. The mantra activates the visualization that we have done. It is like the visualization lays in new energetic circuitry inside our energy field and it gets activated with each mantric repetition. We are meant to chant the mantra for at least 21 days in a row for at least 42 minutes in a row per a day. We are meant especially to repeat the mantra for the next three days or get another telepathic link empowerment. If we skip a day after the three days, then we have to start the count to 21 days over again from zero, until we do 21 days in a row.

If we have enough time, then it is recommended to repeat the mantra 111,111 times to burn enough karma away to establish us on the spiritual path. This number really refers to 100,000 repetitions, but part of Tibetan Buddhist psychology is that we lapse in our chanting about 10 percent of the time by losing attention and intention, not making each repetition count fully. So they found that we need to repeat that 10 percent more consciously (which means that 10 percent of the remaining 10 percent will also have a lapse and so on). During this initiation period, the mantra gathers enough power so that we will have flashes of past lifetime memories appear on our visionary horizon. We may feel intense repressed emotions surface and sometimes intense remorse for harmful actions we did to others in past lifetimes. We are meant to fully feel the remorse, resolve to live differently, and then let it go.

When we notice that we are repeating the mantra even in our dreams, then the mantra has penetrated into the unconscious and can start directly cleansing the samskaras found there. It is possible to have many paranormal events happen when the mantra has penetrated to this level. It is important to stay on track when we have reached this threshold and not get distracted by the new abilities that start to surface then. It is important, too, that we maintain our ethical idealism and not be tempted to abuse the new powers. If we do, we can build up even more karma to work through. Karmaic actions done with the new found force of psychic powers can hurt us many times more than mundane karmaic actions. We can totally mess up our lives if we abuse them. Ideally, we are getting even more sensitive to the ethical precepts on a more subtle level. For instance, "Not to steal, but to take only what is freely given." If we put pressure on a person to buy something from us and he or she gives in to our pressure, then we have stolen from him or her. Or, "Not to kill, but to cherish all life." We can, through harsh and condemning words, kill an altruistic motivation inside someone that may have helped them to become liberated later on. The cherishing of all life in this precept extends itself beyond merely being kind to our own species and goes toward all animals. It even extends to being kind and supportive of our ecosystem and not wasting the resources of the planet. We will notice more subtle levels of precept violations and purify our minds more deeply when we explore on those levels. As we do so, the new abilities will grow and flourish inside us and allow us to help more people in more ways. But if we use the abilities for something negative and merely selfish, at the expense of others, then the abilities can become twisted inside, attract a lot of painful karmaic experiences, and cause much sorrow for others. It will also shut down our telepathic contact with the higher being. It is not because they are abandoning us, but because we will not want to hear about what we are doing. Telepathy and the development of conscience evolve together, and if we shut down hearing one we will shutdown hearing the other.

The above is a general outline of the telepathic link yoga. I would like to do another essay on showing how to link with one higher being in particular. It is possible to link with any being through this yoga. It is highly recommended that the being chosen be a fully enlightened being, because if the being still has some strong karmas to work through then we may get affected by those karmas or the being might not be able to guide us beyond the grip of the karmas that he or she might not have transcended in his or her own life. You can rely on the beings that have been traditionally honored in a meditative religion or you can feel the enlightened essence of a higher being directly. We want to link only with a high being who inspires you to be more kind, loving, sensitive, and at peace. Some spiritual teachers express "tough love" to the point where they might not notice their urge to dominate others, get egotistically attached to having a following, or to feel superior to others. Tough love should be used rarely and only when absolutely necessary. Ideally, it is intense medicine that works very fast and, once done, then the natural more gentle methods are used. There are deeper transmissions of energy, wisdom, and support that can only be given in absolute gentleness and must wait until the receiver freely opens up to them without the slightest pressure to do so. The receiver must willingly drop a kind of defensive shell from himself or herself in order to open up to them. They need to want those gifts without greed, status ambition, or power lust infecting their motivation or at least be willing to have those things purified from their energy field first. Many teachers seem to be playing with gross or subtle karmas and would not be ideal beings to link with in this yoga. It has to feel right, even more so than choosing a romantic partner.