I got inspired to take a picture of a small two inch statue of a Buddha and Mahadakini in the Yab-Yum meditation pose. The rainbow lights are emanating out of the third eye of the Buddha and a highly focused "hreeh" fire is being generated at the sacrum of the Mahadakini. Energy is rippling as waves in all directions.
I have written about this dual vehicle meditation in some earlier blogs, but thought this picture would be a good supplement to the written material. As a reminder, I prefer the "ascension circuit" mudra (middle hold of three interlocking holds) where both the male and the female place their right hand at the sacrum of their partner and the left hand at the base of the neck (near C1) and then do rebirthing breathing. It is rare that the heights match up so that the female is face to face with the male when she is on his lap. But both people can be sitting on the ground, or near to this, and be closer to matching up. Both of them can have the legs wrap around the partner. It helps to have mastered rebirthing breathing to the point where you get reliable tingling sensations within about 15 minutes of solo breathing, to visualize the "hreeh" symbol at the sacrum, be able to pulse the symbol in neon red in sync with the exhale, let go of going to orgasm (it will probably happen anyway) in order to be fully present centered, and either understand the Tumo Yoga teaching of the "hollow body" or understand the body as "the unity of appearance and emptiness".
I had a dream a few nights ago which wanted me to share and empower a mantra for the healing, transformation, and evolution of sentient beings. The mantra is the title of this writing and is as follows:
Om Namo Amritayana Dharmakaya Hreeh.
If you look at various Tibetan and Sanskrit mantras, especially in the Vajrayana tradition, they have a similar structure to them. They always begin with "Om" which is the universal energy field that permeates space, time, and matter. Not all of them have "Namo", but all of them imply this word. It means, "I call upon, I invoke, I open up to, I take in, I surrender to." It is the pure thought intention that activates a connection with the universal energy field. Some spiritual teachers share that mantras do not really mean anything or that they are a higher understanding that can be put into conventional thought. But "Namo" is meant to be understandable in simple human terms, it makes the mantra into a scientific prayer, and focuses consciousness within a pure thought intention. It is the repetition of this intention that purifies the mind of all samskaras, since inside every samskara is a thought intention that we once gave energy to and is the basis of our karmaic habits and reactive patterns. Samskaras are thought impressions within the subconscious mind which are activated by sensory experience and is how karma is stored within us. This "Namo" through repetition purifies us of all adverse karmas or "bad karma".
"Amritayana" translates into "vehicle without death". Early Buddhism is consider "Hinayana" or "small vehicle" because it is meant to carry one person to enlightenment, a solitary meditator who has renounced the world and chosen to live to attain nirvana. This person has renounced worldly ambition and worldly desires that entangle one with the world. It is why in this vehicle there is the ideal of celibacy, because sexual love entangles you with the world through linking with one person and through this person everyone. It is possible to "remain nonattached", to still enjoy a loving relationship, and still remain unentangled with the world, to be, as Jesus taught, "In the world but not of it." But the difference is that you do not look to another to complete yourself, you look within and release the self to find fulfillment in nirvana. Later Buddhism called itself "Mahayana" or "great vehicle" which could carry more people to enlightenment. It emphasized compassion (mahakaruna) towards all sentient beings, renouncing nirvana to stay in the world and serve others.
There are some who make it sound like Hinayana is an inferior path, but in some sense we all have to start there. We have to get our own life in order and oriented toward enlightenment. It is enough to learn how to take care of ourselves and handle a small vehicle. When we have mastered this, then we can share with others something that might help them. In my early meditation practice, I focused more on "not being a problem to others" and "not adding to the sorrow of others". I was not trying to liberate the world, but not contribute to its demise. I was learning how to be a truly harmless and gentle person. It was more work than I realized. While it is relatively easy to not lie, cheat, steal, kill, abuse sexual energy, or eat a pure diet, easy to not violate the precepts in a big way, it takes time to master the teachings on a more subtle level. For instance, the whole precept is "not to lie, but to speak kind and truthful words". It means being very clear and honest with everyone, yet also be kind. This is especially true when you point out the faults of another. It needs the motivation of compassion. There is a learning, too, of when to be silent. We can point out faults that are real and feed our own tendency to be negative, the second poison of the mind that binds us to the wheel of sorrow. The intention to speak both kind and truthful words prevents us from using true words to put another person down and condemn them. The feeling inside when we align with this, when we do this enough, feels very clean inside. When a person takes what we say in a bad way, feeling hurt by what we said, unless we are very clear and kind inside, we will feel guilty, ashamed, and anxious about what we said. Sometimes people will feel hurt by what we say no matter what we say, but we will feel bad about what we said unless we have a kind intention. We can be silent about something and not say something. It is important that when speaking about faults that they are put in a constructive context, where the pointing out of the fault helps a person to heal and grow. It requires us to be psychologically aware and to listen differently to others. It is also realizing that words have a lot of power to them, to heal and to harm. If we are unconscious, we could accidentally say something that could tip a suicidal person over the edge and make him or her want to commit suicide. While we are not karmaically responsible for him or her killing herself, we were one cause among many for the event happening and do accumulate a certain amount of karma. Right speech is about being sensitive on this level to what we say and even what we do not say, since silence sometimes has its consequences too. Sometimes it is important to say something that might also stop a person from committing suicide. It is a delicate equation we work with, since to be attached to these outcomes also entangles us in the world more. It is generally wise to let each person have their own process, their own life, and leave them alone. If we cannot allow everyone to have their process, then we are too entangled in their life to help them. The right kind of compassion gets cultivated in this vehicle and deepens our meditation.
The vehicle is "Mahayana" which emphasizes compassion and selflessness. There is a point where we begin to feel that merely taking care of ourselves does not transcend a certain kind of selfishness and clinging to self. This subtle level of sorrow shows up in a kind of indifference and nonfeeling about the plight of others. There are four words used for love in Buddhism, (1) metta, (2) karuna, (3) mudita, and (4) upekkha. I prefer to translate them as (1) kind friendship love, (2) sensitive empathic love, (3) joyful contagious love, and (4) eternal unconditional love. The fourth one has sometimes been translated as equanimity. It is a kind of unattached love that accepts things as they are, wishes beings to be free from sorrow, does what is possible, and accepts that sorrow will still arise in sentient beings for a long while to come. I feel it is a mature love which does not get excited when things go well and does not get depressed when things go badly. It has learned to be steady and constant. Because of this, it is not attached to results. It is confident that it always does some good, but that the harvest cannot be hurried. It allows everyone to own his or her process and arrive at enlightenment when his or her process matures to this point. The main love that is cultivated in Mahayana Buddhism is sensitive empathic love, though the other loves mature around this naturally. Through sensitive feeling and caring for others, a certain kind of selfishness and dullness burns away. We are more peaceful and happy as a result. With a group of people helping each other, a community, the interactions with each other form a kind of field that accelerates our growth and maturity. Love is profoundly interpersonal and how we interact with each other is a cause of healing or sorrow. Collectively we form a larger healing vehicle that carries each other to the other shore.
The next vehicle is "Vajrayana" which emphasizes the "indestructible" aspect of enlightenment, how we are beyond sorrow. This path is sometimes called "the path of accelerated transformation" or "buddhahood in one lifetime". There is a deeper psychology and highly structured meditation processes behind this. It requires that we have some mastery of the samatha (calming) practice of the Hinayana and the vipassana (insight) of the Mahayana, because the structured meditations need the "big sky mind" to function rightly. There must be enough ability to just be with our inner experience without trying to force it to be what it is not. Simple passive accepting awareness watches our experience without interference and without judgment. In this quiet receptive place, insight flashes across the open mind and we are healed. Then the structured meditations of the Vajrayana can deepen this "big sky mind" and establish our life force within this.
The Amritayana vehicle continues, in some sense, where these paths leave off. There is an even deeper psychology which understands the psychosomatic equation of our lives. It is implied in the earliest Buddhist teachings about the interdependence of the five skandhas of consciousness, thought, emotion, sensation, and body. It touches upon the idea that the Buddha had conquered aging and death, and had an immortal physical body (which he later sacrificed by taking on a measure of planetary karma and burning it within his body, heart, and mind). It looks upon aging and death as a kind of karma that we can transcend. Whether we choose to remain on Earth or not, whether we choose to keep our bodies youthful, alive, and involved on this planet, or gently set it aside when we are done with our use of this body, we see aging and death as not necessary and as the result of causes and conditions that we can ultimately learn to control and take responsibility for. We do not see aging and death as something that merely happens to us. We see our karmaic part of how and why it happens. The Medicine Buddha sutras talk about the connection of the three poisons of the mind, addictive craving, resistant negativity, and obscuring delusion, and how these cause imbalances in our physical body. Aryurvedic medicine is based in this kind of awareness. The implication is that if we take care of ourselves and purify our minds of the three poisons, then our bodies will not have to age and die.
That humans do age and die is not contested by Amritayana Buddhism. All the many forms of Buddhism are really scientific about life. The research tool is awareness, the laboratory in the human body, and the teachings give us an idea of what to investigate, what to notice, and what to do with what we see. They teach principles that can be verified in our experience, methods that we can use to heal ourselves, and assert that certain results can be attained by certain practices. Buddhism is not a tradition that is afraid to look at death. There is a very detailed analysis of death in terms of what happens in the body, what happens after the release of the body in the various bardos, the different ways that one can die, and what one can do. In the first noble truth, the truth of sorrow, there is a list of the different forms of sorrow that we can experience as a sentient being, sickness is sorrow, aging is sorrow, death is sorrow, losing people we love is sorrow, interacting with intense negative people is sorrow, poverty is sorrow, and accidents are sorrow. The first noble truth is a simple and clear observation of how humans suffer. It is meant to be accepted that this is true. It does not deny that there is also happiness, but happiness is not a problem for most people.
In Amritayana Buddhism, aging and death are looked at more deeply, to the point of seeing its deepest causes in the three poisons of the mind, but following the chain of cause and effect to the point where it manifests in the body as illness and imbalances. This allows our bodies to give us feedback on our spiritual path. Our body can then be a mirror that people on other paths may not want to fully look at and look through. One can imagine that one is very spiritually advanced, when the body is telling us otherwise and telling us that some mental poison is still being held by us and that it is hurting our bodies to hold it. The body then becomes a basis for humility, helping us to imagine we are spiritual hot stuff when we are not. When we understand this, we "kiss the Earth" and become an ordinary gentle human being and dedicate our lives to burning away adverse karma until there is none left, realizing that "it takes as long as it takes".
When the word "Amritayana" is chanted, we dedicate ourselves to this kind of understanding, process, and path. We also connect with the principle, wisdom, and power behind this path, which is in the universal field of "Om". We dial into this aspect of the universal field and its wish for us to be healed of everything, including aging and death.
The next word is "Dharmakaya". Buddhism does not believe in an anthropomorphic supreme personal g-d. In part of the Madhyamika texts, there is a refutation of this idea, based on the lack of interdependence between the creator and created when you assume this separation is real. When a certain kind of understanding of interdependence reaches its deepest level, then the idea of a creator g-d standing apart from its creation is seen to be impossible. For this reason, many theistic religions are uncomfortable with the almost agnostic and atheistic flavor of Buddhism. Yet this kind of view, which many Buddhists actually have, is not true either. If we were to use theistic categories to define Buddhism, it would be pantheistic in flavor. It would affirm there is there is a holy sacred infinite field of energy called the Dharmakaya which permeates all of space, time, and matter, and in which all matter is a temporary expression of. If material things have an illusory separateness from each other, then they must have a real unity with each other. This living unity is the Dharmakaya. We are always within this living field of energy. It is the "unborn, the unchanging, and the undying" that we experience when "nirvana" happens, when, even for a moment, the three poisons cease to operate inside us. The word "nirvana" literal means exhale. It means "exstinguishing the self" so that it no longer ever happens again. This teaching has been severely misunderstood as a kind of nihilism where our self goes into total annihilation at death. But our real self is completely untouched by this annihilation. The self that ends is the most subtle level of the three poisons of the mind. When we go deep enough into meditation, we see a subtle sense of self is keeping the three poisons alive and visa versa. This subtle feeling of a separate self is a construction that we unwittingly keep alive through how we think "I" and attach it to objects through all the sentences we speak. This subtle feeling of "I", that we identify with deeply, are attached to, and cling to, keeps the three poisons alive, keeps the pain of anger, fear, and sadness alive, causes the thousands of daily stresses we experience each day alive, wears out our bodies through aging, and kills our bodies through death. Parinirvana is the final and complete extinguishing of this false self, totally and completely, so that it never gets reconstructed and never causes sorrow for us ever again. I do find it interesting how there are some Buddhists that are not clear about this. In the ending of the three poisons and the subtle sense of self and the web of thoughts and emotions that the subtle self holds together and uses to define and establish itself, nothing eternal or truly real ends. What we have always been becomes conscious and aware of itself and we are free.
In a sense, the word "Dharmakaya" links with every word before it. The Dharmakaya is the "Om", the universal energy field. It is also the wish and compassion behind the Amritayana path, the place where the blessing energy, support, and grace that heals us comes from. The word part "dharma" means universal law, what orders and structures all the events in the universe so that there is order, regularity, an order so precise that it can be expressed in mathematics and scientific laws, that very accurate predictions can be made from these laws, no matter where you are in space and time. I find it interesting that many scientists do not wonder why the mathematically precise laws that they find work everywhere in the universe. Why does "F=MvA" work everywhere and everywhen? Why do we have so much faith in this order? So much so that we will assume we miscalculated if the predictions do not tab up or suspect some factor is interfering with our prediction (and even find this factor or miscalculation). The simple conclusion is that there is some "something" that is everywhere and everywhen that allows universal laws to work with such consistency and regularity. Even the compassionate blessing energy within this field has a mathematically precise and reliable way to access its energy and bring it into our lives. Certain exact conditions must be met. The key is that this energy is nonviolent and needs our genuine permission to be allowed to work in our lives. The slightest resistance from us and it honors our choice and stops. We need to keep giving permission every moment of our life, need to make this openness, sensitivity, wisdom, and permission a consciously created habit in our lives and remove all the unconscious habits from our lives, formed over maybe millions of years of lifetimes. So "Om" represents universal energy, "Amritayana" represents "universal wish", and "Dharmakaya" is "universal basis". It is why everything works the way it does. It empowers our path of liberation and explains why we must eliminate karma, since cause must produce effect.
The last word "hreeh". It is a seed syllable whose very sound is meant to produce change. It is related to the Sanskrit word for conscience. The soft aspired "h" sounds signal that the mantra rides the breath, the exhale. The "ee" sound raises energy up the spine. The "rr" sound activates a purifying fire. The remorse over uncompassionate deeds that we have done in past lifetimes burns away the samskaric imprint that they leave in our subconscious mind. Images will flash up in meditation and remorse will burn them away. We have a deeper alignment with the precepts of the Buddha, we vow not to kill anything, not even a good feeling in someone else, not to steal anything or even want to take anything from another, etc.
The "hreeh" sound vibrates within us and purifies our perception, our awareness, of clinging, resistance, and identification, until we see the world as it is, not as we projected with our minds and our illusory self. What emerges is another world, a new Earth, which is pristine, radiant, translucent, and beautiful, and since our perception arises interdependently with the world around us, our very act of seeing it differently changes what we see. "Hreeh" is the catalyst. It brings the energy down to Earth, in our experience, in our life, and uplifts our life, raises our life condition, and brings us home, back to primal luminousity, to the Dharmakaya, the ground of being, the unborn, unchanging, and undying, our true refuge that will never let us down and always be peace for us.
Most the mantras are related to enlightened beings who have reached the "Siddha" state, the 12th consciousness, where they can perform miracles. It is good to invoke them. I use "Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh" for this kind of activation. There are many such mantras. They all work provided that the name is of a real Siddha and not merely 10th consciousness enlightened being, and that this Siddha has empowered the mantra to be an access for him or her. It helps, too, if there is an alignment with the basic teachings of this being, since the teachings are the first grace or blessing of this being. Then we need to really commit to chanting the mantra 111,111 times. We really only need to chant the mantra 100,000 times, so that extra chants are part of a psychological realism about humans. 10 percent of the time we will "go robot" and chant without consciousness and intention behind each and every repetition. So we need to chant 10,000 more repetitions to cover those lapses in the 100,000 repetitions we commited to (and then 1,000 times for the lapses in the remedial 10,000, etc.). The whole practice takes about 3 to 6 months. It will transform one.
The advantage of this mantra is that it does not invoke any Siddha, but the Dharmakaya itself, through its Amritayana aspect (aka grace, healing, and blessing energy versus its universal order which supports the law of karma aspect). Since the Dharmakaya is our real home, we invoke it immediately and directly, and feel its wisdom, love, and creativity as primal luminosity (Om). Because of this, the mantra is more universal and generic. It can be used by all sentient beings to liberate themselves without needing for them to commit to or align with any particular enlightened siddha, and therefore can be chanted by different seekers without violating their yidam relationship to whatever diety they are working with. We directly chant our way back to our original home and take our mind, heart, and body with us.
One of the differences between conventional Christianity and Buddhism is the law of karma. Christianity and many of the other prophetic religions believe in a creator g-d, some kind of supreme being who is separate from creation and makes it. Buddhism generally does not believe this idea of g-d, but believes in the Dharmakaya, an energy field infused with love, wisdom, and creativity that permeates and manifests creation, and is the basis for why all the universal laws operate, including the law of karma. According to Buddhism, karma creates the universe of events. All events are linked with each other through a web of interdependence and causality. There are, therefore, no accidents, everything happens for a reason.
The law of karma is usually stated as "what you sow is what you reap". This theme appears in both the Old and New Testament of the Bible. It seems every religion has some understanding and acceptance of the law of karma. Although it does not follow perfectly, Yahweh can symbolize the operation of the law of karma and Adonai can symbolize the operation of the law of grace. The anthropomorphic idea of g-d an some kind of personal powerful entity who rules the universe can be seen as symbolic of the more impersonal Dharmakaya and how it operates through universal laws. I say "more impersonal" because there it is still infused with unconditional love and love is always personal in some sense. Yet because this love is unconditional, it is impartial, available to all equally, operates in the lives of all sentient beings equally, and does not favor one person over another. Anything that operates without exceptions, as a consistent principle, across all space and all time, is a universal law.
One phrase that is repeated often in the Dhammapada is: "Trust in the Dharma (Dhamma), not in people." The Dharma sometimes means the teachings of the Buddha and sometimes means the Dharmakaya which is the basis for everything that the Buddha taught. I take that this phrase means the Dharmakaya and only secondarily to the teachings of the Buddha that illuminate how it operates. The gesture that makes one a Buddhist is to take the "triple refuge" in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Although these three refuges are really very deep subjects and could each be expounded in long discourses, to summarize, taking refuge in the Buddha is taking refuge in the truth that someone just like us attained nirvana, a state of consciousness beyond sorrow, and therefore we can do the same, taking refuge in the dharma means to harmonize with universal law so that we can do the same as Buddha did, and taking refuge in the Sangha means to live in community with others who are doing the same as us, living in accord with the dharma with each other. There are other meanings to the triple refuge, like taking refuge in the Buddha means to open up to the help that Buddha can give here and now, because Buddha did not die and did not vanish from human history. In the Lotus Sutra, there is an affirmation that the Buddha is still alive, on this Earth, and still teaches and helps advanced Bodhisattvas and Dakinis serve and heal this world, still emanates teachings telepathically to help and support those who are open to his guidance, and has an immortal light body beyond aging and death that can move at the speed of thought to go anywhere he is needed. In some of the initiations and empowerments of Vajrayana Buddhism, we can be attuned to the Buddha or some other enlightened being, a member of the Mahasangha, and chant to stay in this connection and be healed through this connection.
The law of karma is not the only universal law. There is also the law of grace which can burn away the seeds of bad karma that are stored in our subconscious mind. The laws are scientific in the sense that we can verify their operation in our personal experience, rely on them, and use them to heal ourselves. Part of the healing of anger is to recognize that karma has no exceptions. As painful as it is to accept, when bad things happen to us, some part of the causation is our bad karma accumulated in past lifetimes by our own doing. Sometimes it is possible to see the chain of cause and effect clearly and see why some things are happening to us right here and right now. Sometimes it is not possible to easily see this without going into a past life regression trance and finding out. It is possible to ask the subconscious mind to reveal these patterns. After having done a lot of processing, linking past causes with present effects, I mainly just assume these days that karma is operating and do not have to analyze the exact chain in detail. If someone has wronged me, the first thing that I do is just assume that I behaved similarly to someone in my past and repent of the actions, seeing now how it felt from the other side, and thereby deepen my compassion for others.
It is tricky to use hypnotic regression to verify the law of karma, because the subconscious mind is very suggestible and very creative, and can manufacture things to prove whatever we believe. It takes a very precise mind to frame the right kind of suggestions to keep the process open-ended, not locked into any preconceived conclusion. This is partly why very few Buddhist texts talk about using hypnotic regression. Some talk about "tracing memory backwards". This is where, at the end of the day, you trace your memories backwards for about a week, reviewing the last 24 period of time, like rewinding a videotape backwards at about 24x speed and slowing down when we are reacting emotionally to what is happening and need to process something. After a while, you go back and review a month, then a year, and then go backwards into other lifetimes. It is possible to do this discipline and go back to past lifetimes this way. It is a very rigorous and scientific way of getting reliable past lifetime information.
It is possible to do a faster way, through free association, through regular psychotherapy with a larger context. Our usual memory does not have rigid partitions between our different kinds of memories, information is always flowing from one kind of memory to another. We have short term memory, working memory, long term memory, dream processed memories and bardo processed lifetime memories. When we go through various life phases, we tend to review our memories. If we are open and sensitive, we can open up to any memories that might be relevant to what is happening in our lives now. The feeling that we met someone before is valid one. I find that my long term in this lifetime memory has been a little sluggish lately and I usually get this feeling of having met a person before in this lifetime and if I hang out long enough it will get verified by a memory flash. There is a kind of relaxed and open space, free from a kind of worry and thinking, that makes these memories available. It is trusting the subconscious mind to bring up what we need.
There is one psychotherapist who accessed past lifetimes without hypnotic regression protocols through free association. People just tuned into the stream of consciousness and stayed open to whatever impressions were arising from the subconscious mind and shared them. I call this "the floating space" where the conscious and subconscious mind have a more fluidic and sensitive boundary and interaction with each other, become a functional whole, and can process things more easily within this unity. I think this space is accessed with Jung's active imagination method, with process oriented hypnosis, and with the Buddhist approach of "nonclinging and nonresistance" to whatever is. The therapist/guide mainly is sensitive to when a person moves into resistance to feeling something or clinging to some other feeling, and helps the person to let go of each to keep the impressions flowing into nirvana.
What happens is the images will arise from other lifetimes, they will feel like memories and have an emotional resonance to them. Because American culture does not always validate past lifetime memories, sometimes these images are discounted, resisted in some way, and so we move into a edited worldview where we live only one lifetime and die, and either, atheist version: become compost and annihilated as a personality, theist version: are judged and go to eternal heaven or eternal hell. Since I remember past lifetimes and since I have helped others to remember theirs, if these memories are valid, then neither of these two views is correct. Buddhists do believe there are hell worlds and heaven worlds, and we might reincarnate in one of them when we die. The Tibetan Buddhists map a larger landscape than just two possibilities, there are rebirths as animals, hungry ghosts, demons, humans, asuras, and devas, as well as the dharma aligned worlds of bodhisattvas and dakinis, and Buddhas and Mahadakinis. Tibetan Buddhism maps six kinds of samsaric worlds of sorrow, with the human world being one of them. Tendai Buddhism maps out 10 kinds of worlds, though six of them have sorrow and four of them either do not have sorrow or sorrow is dissolving through a meditation process. One of the higher worlds is of the genius/scientist types who eliminate the outer causes of sorrow, like poor sanitation, poor diet, and the like, but have not eliminated the deeper inner causes of sorrow at their root in the three poisons of the mind (addictive craving, condemning negativity, and obscuring delusions).
There are several sides to the law of karma. One is how our choices (causes) interact with universal law to produce effects. Two is how our choices become habitual, form attitudes, and create our life condition. If we are angry all the time, this becomes a general causation which creates our general life condition. For instance, it is harder to become close and intimate with someone who is always angry. Intimacy entails mutual vulnerability and anger does not make such a vulnerability safe for another person to do. Repressing anger still does not stop the anger from producing effects in our lives. Overtly expressing anger towards others will increase the karma. There is a difference between feeling our anger and sharing how we feel with someone and speaking from anger and attacking the other. The first one is being emotionally honest and the second one is attacking the other and creating a bad karma wave. It is possible to feel our anger and process it in solo meditation or with a guide, to come to a complete resolution about what we feel, and shift how we feel. It is possible to have a loving partnership that knows how to support this process in each other and create a mature loving space for healing to perpetually happen. How we choose to think and feel are all part of what life condition we create. When we just react to events and act out whatever our conditioned mind is, then we live a level of karma and it manifests our life. Part of meditation is to raise our life condition, sow good seeds in our life so that they sprout into a better life condition.
Although it is highly underrated, it is good to do good deeds. When I share this, a lot of people question the motive. If you are doing good to others because you are raising your own life condition, then is not the motivation selfish. The answer is "yes". But it is a better way of being selfish than the less wise selfishness where we lie, cheat, and steal from our relationships and produce tons of bad karma and a bad life condition. If we do good deeds because of a good intention, eventually we will forget our selfishness and move into a deeper altruism. We will trust the process of karma and relax our self clinging. We will learn that we need to be awake, sensitive, and aware to find valid opportunities to do kind acts. It is not as easy as it first seems. You cannot force kindness on people. If you do, there is a subtle aggression that negates part of the good deed. One way of translating a passage of the prayer of Jesus is, "Save us from poor timing". It is like playing Tennis, only a right swing at the right time will hit the ball at the sweet spot and zing over the net. There is also "stupid compassion" which does not have this sensitivity. Where, for instance, money is given to a homeless person to further deepen a drug addiction and weaken themselves, versus giving an apple for real nutrition, showing where an apple tree is, or sensing a homeless person who is really trying to break free and giving the needed money. The very intention to be sensitive, awake, and aware of where real help might be given opens us in a certain way and changes our karmaic fate.
The law of karma, too, links us to a different kind of temporal flow than the usual chronological time. The past, present, and future have a kind of interdependence to them and are constantly changing each other. For instance, we have impressions in our subconscious mind. These impressions, called "samskaras" can be triggered by external stimuli. If a certain word is said to us about us, like "you idiot", it will produce an automatic emotional reaction. We might become angry, afraid, and/or sad. This impression, too, is not merely a passive potential waiting to be triggered. It is a subtle pattern of thought, a kind of internal story, that is actively trying to fulfill itself and validate itself. It will project itself on to situations, mold them and make them fit the story, and prove itself right even by ignoring certain features of the situations. Most karmas run a victim/abuser story. We usually feel ourselves to be a victim in the story and sometimes use the story to justify revenge/abuse in return or use the feeling of abandonment to leave somebody.
What I find interesting is that behind these patterns is usually a negation of the law of karma. When we feel like a victim and hold ourselves in that feeling, we do not open up to us doing anything to have chosen the karma we experienced. There is always a history of choices leading us up to the karmaic events. For most of them, no one put a gun to our head and forced us to make them, and even if they did, what we choose to do when a gun is pointed to our head will also have karmaic effects. If we are choosing one abusive relationship after another, then we are the common factor in all those situations, we are the ones who is running the pattern and repeating the pattern. Something in our conditioning, our accumulated thought impressions that we identify and believe in, that has woven into a story and a personality, is choosing over and over again, attracting the same situations to itself and being attracted to the same situations, forming our life condition. This is what karma is about.
Below all the patterns of cause and effect is a stable and impartial law. The stability of the law of karma is something we can relax into and bring order into our lives. We can see the wisdom of living by some basic precepts, (1) not to kill but to cherish all life, (2) not to steal but to take only what is freely given, (3) not to lie, but to speak kind and truthful words, (4) not to misuse sexual energy, but to conserve sexual energy and only have sexual communion with a willing and consenting partner within an atmosphere of love, honesty, and respect, and (5) not to intoxicate the brain and body, but to keep the mind calm and the body clean. Most bad karma events in our lives can be traced back to violating one of these precepts. These five have a deeper side that opens up inside them. For instance, "not to steal" means also not pressuring someone to give you something that they do not want to. The precepts also have exceptions to them. Sometimes, sadly enough, some killing is needed in human life, like when invaders come and attack a peaceful village. We have a right to defend ourselves and sometimes need to shoot back. When such things happen, though, it is good afterwards to "treat war like a funeral" as Lao Tzu (chapter 31) says, and feel remorse that the whole karmaic pattern had to manifest, to look at whatever causes one contributed to the invader attacking. For instance, some of the messy corporate politics around the getting of oil in the middle east may lead to anger against the US and a terrorist response. The unfoldment of karma in the middle east can be very complex, meaning it can have multiple causes on many levels. It would be very wonderful if we could have political leaders who grasped the immensity of the law of karma and entered wisely into the political world very awake, aware, and sensitive to how this law operates. My sense is that the US government would be working very hard doing "repentance" practice, like the Vajrasattva Empowerment, to burn away as much karma as possible. Some of the relief programs to other countries, to help after tidal waves, earthquakes, and eruptions, has helped the US some to soften its karma, but much more needs to be done. Part of remorse is to consciously do some balancing karma, like in the AA "making amends for the wreckage of the past".
Because most of my American friends do not really believe in the law of karma, they see corrupt politicians getting away with murder, lying, and stealing. I see people to be pitied, who are accumulating so much bad karma that I want to cry for them, because they are ignorant of this law and are delusionally imagining that they are beyond cause and effect, yet it is showing up in their faces, in how they are getting worn out, and in their conscience. The politicians seem to age very rapidly and may need to ask why. It is not a group known for its long life. Sometimes you can see in their aura the shadow of their next lifetime, of where and how they will be reborn next. Sometimes one only picks a kind of darkness and a slightly creepy feeling. The reverse happens when a saint or enlightened being dies. There is a wonderful glow of energy and sometimes one sees advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis welcoming them home or massive rainbows appearing in the sky. Some signs of accomplishment will happen to show something of where they are going.
The best way to get the feeling for the law of karma is to do some experimenting with the law. Experiment with generating some good karma and see if you feel better and see if positive life events start to happen. One simple practice is to visualize love as light radiating towards everyone that you meet. Visualize this as you go about your day. Keep it up for about 21 days. When you have to work with someone, send this light first into the situation. When you are having trouble with someone, send this light first into the situation. You do not have to look for results too quickly. We need to do this until it changes our mass of habitual thoughts. If you wrote down all your thoughts for one hour and just slotted them into "positive", "neutral" or "negative" and notice what percentage of your thoughts in each category is, you might notice how little the positive category is and you might not even be entirely honest with yourself about what category each belongs to. For instance, there is corruption in the world, this is a fact, and facts are always at least neutral thoughts. But notice how you might be spinning stuff around the facts, how you are taking them in, how they are making you feel, how they might be used to justify anger and a feeling of victimhood inside, how they might form a karma story that you are living out, and then it becomes negative. The same facts may have a different frame around them, about how all this corruption is appearing so that karma can manifest, complete, and be transcended, and how we can use this mirror to cleanse ourselves to our own deepest roots. In any case, from a scientific view, you would need to practice enough radiating compassion to change the percentage of positive thoughts in your mind by at least 20 percent. For me, every single loving thought raises our energy, but we will not notice it unless there is a mass of them. It is like adding a drop of blue dye into some clear water. Even though every drop is coloring the water, it will seem clear until a certain critical mass of blue drops is reached and we notice the water is at least tinted blue.
I found it interesting in some fundamentalist Christian writings that they thought the law of karma is cruel and exacting. I found this odd, since eternal damnation has no balance between evil cause and evil effect, how a finite number of sins produced infinite torture without parole forever. But I found it also interesting that those writers must feel that they do not want their own negativity to boomerang back to them and feel that THIS is cruel and exacting. It is a curious thing to say to an impartial mirror that is not adding anything to what we radiate out. I think there is some wisdom in feeling that there is something exacting about karma and how it reflects back what we radiate out. We do know that we do put out a lot of negative stuff and we suddenly wake up and see that it is not only hurting others, but it is coming back to us. This shock of awakening can inspire us to manifest greater compassion. We can then ask Divine Grace to burn away all our karma, forgive everyone who has hurt us, and feel remorse for having hurt others. This purifying remorse is part of compassion. We see that no one is truly evil or negative. It is only out of ignorance and it is forgivable. This energy can enter into our subconscious mind and burn away the samskaras, uprooting the karma at its most subtle cause, and finishing it there. Some outer causes may reverberate for a while and we might need to endure them. For instance, there was one woman who kept saying harsh things to the Buddha and the Buddha peacefully endured her talk. When his disciples asked why she was so harsh to him, the Buddha said that in another lifetime as a sannyasin he was harsh to her and that this karma was coming back. He was just letting it finish. The inner root was done, but some of the outer momentum was still playing out.
I wanted to do a write up to share one side of my research into health and longevity. I have shared some about breathing, about diet, and about resting in the primordial state. But there is an intermediate modality and awareness that has to do with our energy field. According to esoteric science we have seven bodies, only the last one is really know well by humans and by conventional science and is called the "physical body". The next one deeper is called the "energy body", the next one "the emotional body" or "astral body", the next one the "mental body", the next one "the soul", the next one "the cosmic body", and the last one "the nirvanic body". The last two are sometimes not considered bodies, because there are only one of each them and they are shared by all sentient beings. The last two can also be considered the manifest and unmanifest side of the same macro-body.
The lower five bodies interpenetrate each other and some teachers, like Gurdjieff, do not consider the inner bodies to be fully developed and therefore consider them to be more like potential bodies, rather than fully functional bodies. The main body that seems to be fully functional is the adult physical body with the inner bodies in a kind of growth process that is usually stunted at some point. The emotional body in many humans does not evolve much past what a 14 year child on another world might attain through normal emotional development. Ordinary human psychology is in its infancy still and most humans, as result of trauma, learned emotional repression, and mood altering drugs, do not learn to honor and evolve their emotional life beyond a certain point. Many humans do not want to much emotional inner work to get in touch with repressed emotions and sometimes want to keep them repressed. The popularity of addictive substances, addictive habits, and mood altering drugs, both prescription and nonprescription, prevent a certain kind of emotional evolution from happening. Part of the culture of meditation is to breathe, relax chronic muscle tensions, open up to our repressed emotions, reown them, let them flow again, and ride with them until emotional resolution and completion. When we are able to do this, then our emotions can be considered resources, food for growth, rather than things we have trouble with and want to repress and disown.
If we do reown and flow with our emotions, then we evolve our astral body or dream body. Our physical body will feel better also, since the emotions that are repressed and disowned get pushed into chronic muscle tensions in our physical body. The four bodies below the soul body interpenetrate each other and influence each other. Many illnesses are the result of things happening in the inner bodies. One esoteric teacher said that 70 percent of our illness is the result of the inner bodies and only about 30 percent are the result of physical causes (like diet and falling and hurting our knees). At a certain point, develop our dream body to the maturity where we have lucid dreams and learn how to navigate them. We can also see that ordinary waking life is a sub-dimension of a larger dream world and that the physical body is a kind of dream body in its own special dream. When we first navigate the dream world, it seems wild and chaotic, because our emotions tend to be more turbulent and intense. Repression actually makes our emotions stronger, more rigid, and more intense. They are meant to grow within the light of awareness, just as plants grow under a warm and nourishing sun.
The mental body evolves through mental discipline, logic, empiricism, scholarly study, intellectual games and puzzles, reading high quality literature, having deep discussions, etc. It matures when it learns to question dogma, question social conditioning, form a philosophy of life, sense contradictions and learn how to resolve them, know how to derive valid data from observations and how to test hypothesizes, and learn how to go beyond either/or thinking. It is also necessary to evolve a kind of ethical idealism and live it. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism, Gnostic Christianity, and Qabalistic Judaism are examples of evolved and mature systems of thought that have much to share. Even so, unless they become integrated and become our personal life philosophy, they will not evolve the mental body. Every time we see a truth for ourself, from our own eyes, and from our own experience, we evolve the mental body. What we learn, too, is carried with us, from lifetime to lifetime, as a kind of intuitive knowing that takes on the language cloak of the next society we are born in. I found, for instance, in this lifetime that I solved a lot of Zen koans very rapidly and was puzzled why others had so much trouble with them. I later understood that the reason why they were easy for me was because I had undergone my learning process with them already, in another lifetime. It is like you remember having solved them in the next lifetime, rather than actually solving them. Shifts in the mental body will affect the emotional body, energy body, and physical body. learning in the mental body often happens with tingling energy sensations in the energy body, a feeling of lightness infusing physical body, and a feeling of warmth and coming home in the emotional body.
The energy level, one step deeper than the physical level, has what is also sometimes called "the etheric body". This body can sometimes appear and look exactly like the physical body, because that is the picture of how we see ourselves in our mental body. Sometimes, this etheric body, after death, will appear to others, look and feel physical to them, and is even able to be touched and to touch back. It can become "dense" enough to interact with the physical realm, but it does not like to stay at that density and prefers the freedom and lightness of its usual realm. It takes a kind of concentrated intentionality to "move" things in the physical dimension. This etheric body indirectly shows up with magnetic resonance scans and thermal scans. My sense is that these tools might be used later on to evolve "energy anatomy" and help people to heal more quickly. We might then evolve those star trek like healing devices we see in sci fi movies and we be able to understand people who exist now we can lay hands on people and send healing energy through them, and maybe even understand the Master Jesus and why he considered healing miracles to be a sign of the divine dimension (Kingdom of God).
I wish to share more about a technology that relates to physical healing through the energy body that called the Photon Genie by Ed Skilling. This researcher went further than Rife, taking advantage of the new frequency ranges that Rife did not have available to work with at his time, and also developed his technology from Rife's later notes. Rife found that certain frequencies would "blow up pathogens" by finding their resonance frequencies. Later Rife followers, including Rife, started to compile lists of pathogen blow up frequencies. But Rife noticed that certain frequencies were starting to recur on many lists. He concluded that these frequencies were not blowing up any pathogens, but were boosting the ability of the body to heal itself. He later called them, "universal healing frequencies". Many of them were the Solfeggio scale used in some music and others were not. Ed Skilling compiled a number of them and created a machine that would cycle through them. They are like honing signals that our immune system and regeneration system can use to improve its function. They create an energy matrix that allows the body to more easily go back into homeostasis and balance. They feed the energy body actual energy and in turn produce healing effects in the physical body, like the blood stream alkalizing, the lympathetic system cleansing, cell membranes repolarizing and able to repell junk proteins, ADP converting to ATP (stored muscular energy), and recharging our cellular bio-electric charge. When we are infants, our bio-electric charge is about 120 microvolts, an adult can have it drop to 70 microvolts, and then in old age it can go down to 20 to 30 microvolts. When it goes too low, then our cells cannot repell the junk proteins and the cleansing routes can become congested. Without properly cleansing channels, the cellular debri accumulates and we age/die.
There are perhaps a number of Rife type technologies that can assist in balancing the energy field. I felt grateful to find this one. When I had studied these things online, I found that they were selling for about $3k. It was a bit much for me, especially at that juncture of my life. But then I had a vivid dream where the number 1499 appeared in neon lights. I immediately got up from the dream, went to Ebay, and found that one had appeared for that price. I put my bid on it and was confident that I would get it, and did get it. The Skilling device has been working ever since and helping lots of people. I feel it treats what the holistic nurses diagnostic manual calls "energy field disturbance". It is good for energy healings like myself to use for self treatment.
I find it interesting that it is very compatible with laying on of hands energy healing, though when I am using this tech on someone, I will wave my hands in Tai Chi fashion over the person and move the energies that way. The tech and energy healing seem to synergize well, overlap a little. The tech does not replace the energy healing. The latter is more focused on blocks, resistances, cysts, confusions, knots, chords, and artifacts embedded in the aura and what kind of process is needed to release things formations. They sometimes can be released by just moving energy and other times that person needs to involve his or her conscious intention to complete a process.
There is also a kind of "basic tune up" that is possible with the Skilling device, supported by a far infrared thermal mat (Skilling found that at 106 degrees the body activates certain deep healing processes) and a far infrared reflecting blanket (from Nikken). I rub some essential oils neet (undiluted) on the spine (lavender, clove, and peppermint). Do 15 minutes of energy work over the key meridians and release all the big blocks, turn on some ambient healing music, and have the person do deep, slow, and full rebirthing breathing for about one hour. I give them a glass of ionic fizz and microclustered water beforehand so that the body can use the water to cleanse itself of toxins. I place some extra sheets, because sometimes they get drenched. This has been powerful healing cocoon. There is a variation where a person chants key bija mantras rather than does rebirthing breathing (though these can be combined by maintain the basic breathing flow and only chanting on the natural exhales).
[Just a quick caveat: This technology is still experimental and is not intended to replace conventional medical treatment or visits to conventional doctors. It also may not be what any specific person needs, since some people are not ready for the heat part of the cocoon and/or may need other kinds of care first before they are ready to use this kind of tech. If you have any doubts, you may wish to consult a qualified medical health professional. I personally have assumed personal responsibility for my health and am willing to assume the risks and responsibilities for choosing which healing modalities work for me. I have found this technology to be more than merely useful, very safe as long as you respect a technology based on high voltage, and have felt it shift me into feeling good many many times. But I have also realized that not everyone has committed themselves to their own healing process and may still need to check in with a doctor that they trust, even though the beliefs and worldview of the doctor may not be able to wrap around this kind of healing modality. Choosing which doctors to entrust oneself to is still part of our responsibility and is part of the risks we take with our own health. When one commits to one's own healing process in the right way, it means that you honor the knowledge that you already have and do what you know you need to do. If you know you have a habit that hurts you, then you work on letting it go. If you know something you are eating is not healthy for you, then you do not eat it. If you know that you need to exercise to stay healthy, then you find something that works for you here. Once you have those things down, then more knowledge comes to do it better. When something does not work, you do not blame others, but look at your own program and fix it.]
This is more of just a footnote on my favorite chant "Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh". In the deeper practice of this mantra, you visualize something that I have been calling the "Omari". This is (1) visualizing "Om" in Tibetan script in white at the 3rd eye, (2) "Ah" in Tibetan script in silvery blue at the Heart Chakra (center of the chest) with golden rays also, and (3) "Hreeh" in Tibetan script at the sacrum in neon luminous fiery red. When I looked up, "Omari" online, I found it was Swahili for "God the highest". This is the second association of Amida Buddha with an alternative line of tradition. The first one is "Amita" meaning "standing" in Hebrew and it is some phase of a ritual prayer service ("the amita"). I could not decode more than this. It was on a cassette that I brought that had some Hebrew chanting. I did find it curious that Amida Buddha is usually depicted in the Pure Land Sects as standing and sending golden rays of compassion on the world (on the altar). There is also Amida Buddha sitting in the "mudra of perfect peace" or "cosmic mudra" in serene meditation or in yabyum with Pandaravasini (technically the pair is Amitayus and Pandaravasini aka "Queen of Fire" with the two combined to become the yin and yang aspects of Amida Buddha who is beyond gender polarity [I have not yet worked out how to express this in totally gender equal expression while referring to a history where male dominant language was used, so right now I am naming my challenge and stating my intention to honor both genders as best I can, I am reworking some of the symbolism to match this ideal more closely, but it is tricky when I refer back to source material which is not structured that way]).
The Omari is the visualization part of the chant to Amida Buddha, where "Om" and "Hreeh" are done first and like Tumo meditation represent the male (Om) essence as a cool white liquid and the female (Hreeh) essence as fire moving up the spine. The white drops go down the spine to mix with the fire rising up the spine to mix in the Heart Chakra and produce silvery blue radiant energy which is then pumped to all the cells (orgone life fore energy, Mahavairocana Buddha) as we breathe (slow rebirthing breathing does well, deep, slow, and full on the inhale and soft, slow, and long on the exhale with no pauses between inhale and exhale or between exhale and inhale forming one smooth rhythmic circle of breathing). I sometimes call it Amida Buddha Tumo Meditation. It is a fusion of nearly every meditation practice that I have studied in this lifetime.
One caution is that this meditation starts to restructure the internal channels and evolves the energy body to a new level of functioning which starts to happen automatically and unconsciously. The practice transmutes sexual energy. Some Tantric Buddhist Lamas share that such a practice is necessary especially when we are in a celibate phase of our journey or when we are celibate period. I have found this to be true. I was celibate for 34 years and did find that the L4-L5 juncture got tight and locked without my knowing. When I did a forward bend in Hatha Yoga, it would take a lot of effort to open this spot up and the stretching took a long time to do. I was only able to touch the back of my feet after stretching 90 minutes a day for 30 days. When I got initiated into Tantra sexual practice and ordinary loving sexual communion, I was able to touch the soles of my feet easily even without the support of Hatha Yoga in a manner that very much surprised me. By running the bindus in the Omari, sexual energy is completed and fulfilled so that the unconscious instinctive sex drive is transmuting to a new functioning. One can still have sex after the Omari initiation, but it changes. The body may superheat during love making in a manner which a tantric partner might notice (like sleeping above the covers where it is cooler, even on a winter night). A person might experience a temporary lack of sexual desire as the inner circuits reorganize. None of these things really poses a problem, but I thought I would just caveat that these changes might happen and to be ready for them. The celibate lack of sexual desire lasted for a few months and then the system reset and sexual desire came back. It has felt different since then. One result is that sometimes if I am feeling some low level attraction/arousal, it is felt as a tingling energy for about a minute or two, and then I can feel the circuit kick in and turn it into a heat sensation, then I feel the cool drops mixing with it, and everything calms down again. Sometimes the desire energy fades out again. It is like the energy can still get stimulated by the external senses, but it gets routed into the circuitry and transmuted.
This Omari meditation level leads to other changes. You become more sensitive to another level of the 4th behavioral precept of the Eightfold path "not to misuse sexual energy". You become sensitive to how sexual energy can be wasted in sexual pleasurable indulgence and do not wish to do this. You wish to conserve and circulate the energy in the inner meridian flows, the microcosmic orbit of Taoism (the fusion of the central and governor channels that join by visualizing "Hreeh" in white on the roof of the mouth or by teeth lightly touching each other, I prefer the Tibetan white Hreeh method because it is a more permanent activation). The Tantric level of the fourth behavioral precept is to conserve sexual energy either through celibate internal circulation via this kind of meditation or to circulate within a dual vehicle with a Tantric partner doing "yab yum" or an equivalent mudra union. I do feel that the right activation of the heart chakra during sexual union automatically regulates how energies circulate during love making. It means making sure that sexual communion does not fall into bonding-security-possessiveness of a partner with jealousy-fear-anger appearing (false yin) or addiction-lust-pleasure-arrogance (false yang) appearing toward a partner.
Just to complete the picture, I think it is important to visualize a triple force field of three bubbles around the body. The outermost is the "hreeh fire ring" which burns away anything that is not love from entering the bubble. The middle ring is the "ah heart transmuting ring" which transmutes the unloving energy that penetrates and passes through the fire ring, it converts the negativity into compassion, appreciation, and gratitude and sends it back to the other. If the energy is so negative that it penetrates and passes through this ring, then there is the "om karma bounce back ring" that sends the negative energy back to the creator so that the creator experiences the reverse polarity of his or her own energy. It seems that this triple ring of protection is what is needed to protect our aura fully. This is the alchemical container that we need to set up before activating the Tumo circuit of the Omari.
Blessings.
The mantra that composes the title of this blog entry is one that I received from dreamtime. I have written about this mantra in many places. When I first had found it in a book, THE LIGHT OF A THOUSAND SUNS, it was simply "Namo Amida Buddha". There was only about two paragraphs about Amida Buddha, but it was enough for me to feel that this mantra was an access point for the blessings and grace of this aspect of the Dharmakaya (the body of universal truth). I would simply sing it in Gregorian chant plainsong, making up whatever tune seemed to feel right in the moment. I was at a university then and would usually walk around the campus quietly during the evening singing this. I noticed after a while that I was peaceful, calm, and happy after singing this mantra, and keep on doing this "practice". It deepened immensely, eventually revealing spaces within me where I could send healing energy to my "path friends". Even later on, I had dreamtime flashes of Sukhavati, the pure land of Amida Buddha, and especially the "training places", like the lakes where you sit on the rock in the middle of the lake and gently say, "calm, calm, calm" until there is no ripple in the lake, gently waving your hands above the waters with tai chi like slowness. It is a beautiful training place that helps bodhisattva/dakini healers learn how to bring others into inner peace. It was in two dreams, spaced years apart, that Amida Buddha appeared and asked me to add "Om" to the mantra and later "Hreeh". The "Om" was added to release the mantra from "Buddhism" so that it could be used by all seekers of whatever religion or nonreligion, as a blessing, support, advantage, and benefit that did not require them to renounce anything from their chosen path, except maybe some negativity. The "Hreeh" is the anchor syllable that brings the blessing power deeply into our mind, heart, body, and life, and is the gift of Amida Buddha to the Tanran Reiki Healing System that I teach.
I finally completed a translation and update of the 48 vows of Dharmakara, a Bodhisattva who upon enlightenment merged with Amida Buddha, became Amida Buddha, and radiated the enlightenment energy of Amida Buddha into all worlds. When we chant the mantra that he empowered, we undergo a similar process and also become Amida Buddha, merging with this enlightened energy of unconditional love, letting it fully heal us, letting it shine into and through our whole life, and even radiating it naturally outwards to heal all others. It is Dharmakara who "stamped" the 48 vows into the Amida field and empowered this specific wish focus. It is his dharma expression:
The 48 vows of Amida Buddha
through Tenabah, copyright 2010
I am here writing a modernized and revised version of the 48 Amida vows. This is done for a few reasons. One is that the original version used some specialized terms that do not make immediate sense to many English readers. I want the particular vow to be understood by those who are not familiar with those terms. Two is that there are some verses whose wording or phrasing does not honor the ideal of male and female equality. It seems in some areas of the world there has been a belief that women are inferior to men on the spiritual path and even resorted to teaching the esoteric practice of helping women to reincarnate in the next lifetime as males. There might have been some practical reason for this, because in some of those societies the life of women was worse than males, not because of gender inferiority, but because of the oppression or prejudice that women may have endured in those societies. In one version of the vows, one verse talked about women being reborn as males in the next lifetime or reborn as "daughters of kings" (aka princesses). This indicates that some women were doing okay socially and would not be impeded in their enlightenment process. Buddhism has had a practical realism about the difficulties and challenges of becoming enlightened, and that women have, at times, have had some social difficulties that males have not had. I did find that one Tibetan Lama reinterpreted those verses more psychologically in a way that I liked and I am following this lama's lead.
Part of Amritayana Buddhism is to address the gender imbalances of the last Kali Yuga. I follow Sri Yukteswar in his assertion that the last Kali Yuga ended in the 1800s with the "orb" of the Kali Yuga ending 200 years later. I would revise his more general calculations by aligning them with the Mayan astrology of Jose Arguelles who has calculated the importance of the 2012 solstice as a key transition point in human history. In this revision, the Kali Yuga would have ended on the solstice of 1812 and the orb of the Kali Yuga will end on the solstice of 2012. Using the same Arguelles calculations, I would also recalculate the Kalachakra prophecy dates from either 2024 or 2027 also to 2012. This would match the magnetic field null zone that we are starting to move through where the pole shift happens. It would be an approximate 500 year transition from the Piscean era dominated by faith and dogma to the Aquarian era dominated by futuristic vision and universality. In this recalculation, the Aquarian era would begin on solstice of 2512. In the Kalachakra teachings, there is a kind of "final war" which happens between 2412 and 2512, where a false religious power which seems monotheistic, dogmatic, authoritarian, and political, organizes an attack on Shamballah and fails to win. Afterwards there is, at last, world peace. I do gather that this war is mostly metaphorical, though it could take the shape of a literal war. It is more of a struggle between dogmatic monotheistic faith which characterized the previous religious orientation of the Piscean era and the universal vision of the Aquarian age (which is necessary for world peace). The latter is based on esoteric science, internal psychological processing, and personal knowing.
My feeling is that during a previous Kali Yuga that there was a Matriarchal oppression of males, who were considered inferior to females. It was a parallel to the Patriarchal oppression of females during the Kali Yuga that is finally passing away. My way of characterizing the Matriarchal Kali Yuga is that it was the "egg fertilizer" era. This is where the feminine was considered to have the mystery of birth, that females always gave birth to children through a "virgin" process, with the male only "fertilizing the egg" or activating the egg. During the Patriarchal era, the metaphor was reversed. It was the "seed soil" era. Where the male had the "seed" which was planted in the female and the female was only the "fertile soil" (or "barren soil" if not productive) for the seed. This made the female like an oven to bake the bread, with the males giving the loaf to the oven. The next series of yugas will be the "zygote" era where the male and the female share half of each of their DNA to make each child. This more accurate scientific metaphor will allow gender equality to fully appear. There are many differences between male and female around the mystery of birth. But it seems that nature herself wants males and females to be in near 50/50 ratio to each other. Although the odds of giving birth to females should be equal to giving birth to males, nature has birthed more males than females. This is because more males die than females, for all kinds of reasons. Nature has a kind of future seeing so that by the time males and females reach adulthood the ratios between them are close. It is usually about 52 percent female to about 48 percent male. I also feel that nature is inspiring people to not have children or as many children as before, and even inspiring, biochemically and hormonally, many pairings to be homosexual so that they are not reproductive units. This is because the planet was not meant to carry 6 billion humans and nature is trying to gently reduce this number through nonlethal population control. It seems, too, that a number of people are being inspired to change their gender through science, with males usually wanting to become females than the other way around. I wonder if many of these people were women in previous lifetimes who bought into the "reincarnate as males in the next lifetime" teaching of various religions and who are unconsciously correcting this. These science created gender shifts would be characteristic of the Aquarian scientific uptopian vision and would also lead to nonreproductive pairings to help the population gently come to more balance with the ecosystem. I suspect that there are more female homosexuals (lebians) than male homosexuals (gays), too, because of the 4 percent difference between males and females in the overall population.
Part of Amritayana Buddhism is to revise the Buddhist teachings in such a manner that gender equality is more clearly apparent. I feel that the general sentiment of Buddhism has been male and female equality, but as Buddhism spread from culture to culture is oftened got colored by the patriarchal energy of the various cultures it encountered. Unlike Christianity and Islam, which, upon converting others to their religion insisted that people renounce their previous religion as being false and often even unholy, Buddhism never required that people give up their previous religion but merely to add the Buddhist teachings to them. In some circumstances, Buddhism would question and challenge some beliefs of other religions, just as the Buddha challenged the caste system of Hinduism and Padmasambhava challenged the animal sacrifices of Bon Shamanism, but it was more on a case by case basis. Buddhists were more inclined to see if all the elements of the Eightfold Path were already present in other religions, to see which ones were missing, and add them back, especially their emphasis on effective meditation practice.
Strictly speaking, the 48 vows were not done by Amida Buddha, but by Dharmakara, who was an advanced bodhisattva who was soon to become another Buddha during a previous aeon in galactic history. When a person becomes a Buddha, he or she creates what may be called a "dharma expression". Their teaching is not a carbon copy of the previous Buddhas. Every Buddha teaches something similar but different to the other Buddhas. They follow what the Sufis call "time, place, and need". There was a story where the Buddha took four leaves from a tree and placed them in his hand. He asked his disciples how many leaves were in his hand and they said "four". He then asked how many leaves were on the tree and they said, "more than we can count". The Buddha then said, "On the tree are how many teachings I could teach to you, in my hand are the teachings that you need to hear and learn right now." The four leaves, of course, are the Four Noble Truths, the Fourth Truth being the Eightfold Path (and the first precept of the Eightfold Path being the 12 Nidanas and the fourth precept being the five behavioral ethical ideals aka one teaching naturally leads to all the others). A Buddha has the goal of helping all beings to become enlightened. The goal is not to create believers in a religion, but to awaken each person to his or her true nature as a direct and living experience. What this requires changes from time to time and place to place, and even person to person.
Dharmakara chose to open up a "path of tariki" or divine grace. It is a blessing energy that carries those who trust this energy all the way to supreme perfect enlightenment. It is meant to be an "easy path" since the "other power" (which is what tariki means) does all the work. Our part is to open up, surrender resistance, allow ourselves to be carried by the energy, and trust the process. Because divine love is nonviolent, it cannot force us to become enlightened. It can only work with our moment to moment permission. The "grace fire" will burn away all the obscuring karmas that prevent us from "pure perception" of our true nature. We need to allow this grace fire to burn away all that is within us that needs to be released. As our karmas burn away, our own true nature will manifest a higher and higher life condition with more happiness, more love, and more material abundance for us and those we care about, and even eventually conquer aging and death, and even eventually transform our physical bodies into a light body. This is what is behind all the 48 vows.
I am writing the 48 vows as "intentions" to simplify the verbal expression. I am also translating the meaning of the vow into politically and psychologically correct English. People are invited to compare this translation with the originals and to ponder why I am making the changes that I am. I may occasionally make some commentary to explain why I am shifting the words and their meanings some, but on the whole I would like the words to explain themselves, since the entire 48 vows is really a commentary on what Tariki can do for us.
(1) In my pure land, there will be no places of fighting, torment, and pain, no places of unconscious compulsive addictive habits, and no places of anguished unfulfilled longings or people searching in vain for satisfaction.
(2) In my pure land, people will not fall into lesser life conditions of chronic fear, anger, and sadness.
(3) In my pure land, people will radiate health, compassion, and happiness.
(4) In my pure land, all people will feel themselves to be members of one species and feel each other to be equally beautiful.
(5) In my pure land, all beings will remember all their past lifetimes.
(6) In my pure land, all beings will have an awakened third eye able to see all the infinite Buddha worlds throughout this universe.
(7) In my pure land, all beings will have the inner ear to hear all the teachings of all the Buddhas within all the Buddha worlds throughout the universe.
(8) In my pure land, all beings will be telepathic, able to read the thoughts of each other, and able to commune with those who are also telepathic.
(9) In my pure land, all beings will be able to travel throughout the universe at the speed of thought, by simply intending to appear at a certain place and immediately arriving there.
(10) In my pure land, all beings will be completely, perfectly, and permanently free of the central mental poison of self clinging and have no thought of self clinging ever bring their consciousness down to a lesser state of happiness.
(11) In my pure land, all beings will be blessed with the secure and realistic faith that they will without fail attain supreme perfect enlightenment.
(12) From my pure land, a radiant light that will illuminate every actual and potential Buddha world with a supportive and powerful blessing energy able to illuminate and release all obscurations and able to carry anyone to supreme perfect enlightenment.
(13) In my pure land, my life span will not be subject to aging, diminishment, or death, and will be eternal, so that my support for all those who take refuge in me will be unfailing forever.
(14) In my pure land, there will be no limit to the number of people who will be liberated by hearing the dharma that I radiate forward through the mantra that I teach, no limit to the number of beings that I can support, and no limit to the number of beings that I can bring to supreme perfect enlightenment.
(15) In my pure land, all beings will be free from aging and death, will be free of any karma of disease, accident, poverty, or any life condition that could age them or kill them, and will only be able to age or die if it is their conscious choice to release their body in accordance with their chosen loving service or mission to any world.
(16) In my pure land, even the thought or rumor of evil will not arise in the consciousness of anyone.
(17) The energy I radiate from my pure land will be known to all the Buddhas of all worlds because all Buddhas commune with each other and honor each other.
(18) The energy I radiate from my pure land will connect with those who use my mantra for even just ten repetitions or even just one sincere repetition, who joyfully entrust themselves to me, who wish to be reborn in my pure land, who allow me to bring them to my pure land, who repent and have deep remorse for having done any of the five most negative karmaic actions (killing their innocent and kind mother out of malice or greed, killing their innocent and kind father out of malice or greed, killing a saint, killing a buddha, and creating discord, conflict, and division among the community of spiritual seekers), and who repent and have remorse for any unwholesome and unloving actions, and who are transformed into the unconditionally loving mood of my pure land, and then I will carry all of them into my pure land and they will be reborn in my pure land.
(19) The energy I radiate from my pure land will inspire many to awaken the motivation to attain supreme perfect enlightenment, to do meritorious deeds of compassion, to be reborn in my pure land, and those who live in this manner will, upon their death, see me appear along with other saints and enlightened beings to welcome them into my pure land.
(20) Those who hear my mantra, concentrate their thoughts on my pure land, visualizing aspects of its landscape and its noble inhabitants, are inspired to do meritorious compassionate actions and dedicate the merit to rebirth in my pure land, and wish to be reborn in my pure land will, without fail, eventually be reborn in my pure land.
(21) In my pure land, all those who are reborn there, or who live in the energy of my pure land in whatever worlds they are on, will evolve the 32 physical marks of the Buddha and have perfect balance, harmony, and integration of their inner male and inner female.
(22) All advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis who even visit my pure land and open up to the teachings, blessings, and trainings found here, will reach supreme perfect enlightenment without needing to involuntarily die and be reborn ever again, will quickly pass through the maturing stages of the path, will have the protection and blessings of my energy, will commune with Buddhas from all other worlds and learn from them also, abide in the primordial presence at the heart of all the paths of all the genuine religions, liberate sentient beings from sorrow and teach others how to become liberated.
(23) All advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis who appear in my pure land will be able to commune with Buddhas from all worlds, honor them, receive their blessings, and learn from them with the ease and speed of eating a simple wholesome meal.
(24) In my pure land, all advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis will be able to increase their merit by chanting the mantras of all other Buddhas, honoring and revering their blessing energy and deeply receiving their wisdom and teachings with my support, help, and blessing so that it will be easy to reach them all.
(25) In my pure land, all advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis will be able to teach the Dharma with confidence and mature all knowing wisdom, infused with a living energy that will help and allow people to understand its deepest meaning.
(26) In my pure land, all advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis in my pure land and within my supportive energy will attain bodies immune to illness, filled with strength and health, and invulnerable to any harm.
(27) All advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis in my pure land will awaken the highest divine aspect of the third eye and be able to see in great detail all the wonderous manifestations of all the Buddha worlds, their teachings, their manifestations, and their attainments and even be able to number them and expound on them as precisely as needed.
(28) Even bodhisattvas and dakinis who have accumulated only a small amount of merit will be able to see a radiant many colored Bodhi tree from my pure land, feel blessed by its energy, and feel wishes spontaneously fulfilled.
(29) In my pure land, advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis will be able to recite sutras and expound on sutras with wisdom and eloquence.
(30) In my pure land, advanced bodhisattvas and dakinis will be able to speak peacefully, eloquently, clearly, and insightfully about the dharma.
(31) My pure land will illuminate and reflect all other Buddha lands within its radiance, like images reflected in a mirror.
(32) My pure land will be composed of precious gems, crystals, fragrant woods, and medicinal herbs, generating an energy field that manifests beauty such that those who experience this world will be inspired to deeply meditate and move towards supreme perfect enlightenment.
(33) My pure land will radiate a light will penetrate into all the Buddha worlds and bless them with inner peace, contentment, and happiness.
(34) Within my radiant light, sentient beings in the Buddha worlds will gain insight into how the causes of sorrow will never have to arise and know dharanis worth chanting to deepen this insight.
(35) Within my radiant light, may the life condition of women be infused with the courage, protection, and concentration of ideal male energy and may the life condition of men be infused with the caring, sensitivity, and devotion of ideal female energy.
(36) Within my radiant light, all the bodhisattvas and dakinis will be inspired to perform sacred practices and daily meditation until they reach supreme perfect enlightenment.
(37) Within my radiant light, those bodhisattvas and dakinis who chant my mantra with devotion, bowing, and prostration, rejoice in their faith, and practice daily meditation will be respected by all the devas and people of the world.
(38) In my pure land, all material needs, when they arise in the minds of those in need, will appear immediately and spontaneously, and even be of fine quality.
(39) In my pure land, the paths of householder and renunciate are fused together and transcended so that everyone has the comfort and happiness gained by both journeys.
(40) Within my radiant light, permeating the entire universe, bodhisattvas and dakinis who chant my mantra will be empowered to see all the buddha worlds with the ease of seeing their face reflected in a mirror.
(41) Within my radiant light, permeating the entire universe, bodhisattvas and dakinis who chant my mantra will have all their sense organs fully healed.
(42) Within my radiant light, those who hear my mantra will attain the concentration upon the enlightened space of pure liberation, be able to dwell within this space without distraction, and through pure immediate intention will be able to make magical offerings to all the Buddhas of the entire universe, accumulating merit able to heal all sentient beings.
(43) Within my radiant light, those who hear my mantra, receive and hear the energy of the mantra, will at least be reborn into superior life conditions within noble and compassionate families.
(44) Within my radiant light, those who hear my mantra, receive and hear the energy of the mantra, will rejoice and dance, do wonderful spiritual practices, and accumulate great merit for the sake of healing themselves and helping others.
(45) Within my radiant light, permeating the entire universe, when bodhisattvas and dakinis everywhere chant my mantra, they will rapidly attain the concentration and abiding in the enlightenment space of universal equality and feel all the beings moving towards this space with them and feel all those who have arrived.
(46) Within my pure land, bodhisattvas and dakinis will be able to hear, immediately and spontaneously, whatever teachings that they wish to hear and whatever teachings that they need.
(47) Within my radiant light, permeating the entire universe, those who hear my mantra, receive and take in its energy, will instantly attain the stage of non-regression, never falling back to an inferior life condition and always from that point onwards, advancing and maturing on the spiritual path.
(48) Within my radiant light, permeating the entire universe, those who hear my mantra, receive and take in its energy, will instantly gain three insights into the nature of all the material elements composing the universe, seeing their nonsubstantiality, their interdependence, and their arising within the field of cause and effect, and through these insights firmly abide in all the deep truths that allow the Buddhas to fully realize supreme perfect enlightenment.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Om Namo Amida Buddha Hreeh.
Opening up, letting go, and allowing Tariki
to burn away all obscurations,
Opening up, letting go, and allowing Tariki
to burn away all obscurations,
Sincerely opening up, letting go and allowing Tariki
to burn away all obscurations,
Totally opening up, letting go, and allowing Tariki
to burn away all obscurations,
Fully trusting, fully rejoicing, fully awakening,
Calmly abiding in the Presence of Inner Peace
within the radiance of the Dharmakaya
effortlessly touching all sentient beings in all worlds
with the blessing energy
of radiant compassion.
Namaste.
I have written about this theme before, but it came up in a recent conversation and I wanted to share about it again. Much of Buddhist and Hindu meditation practice uses Padmasana or the Lotus Posture. Buddhists add a little more to this teaching by sharing the Vairocana Posture which is the Lotus Posture with a number of wise check points, like whether your teeth are lightly touching or whether they are clenched. It is a wise meditation pose in many ways. But I do not recommend using it, at least not immediately. Here are my reasons:
(1) As a healer, energy worker, and bodyworker, I have found that even many fairly advanced meditation practitioners, even teachers and Zen masters, have postural defects that I feel are exacerbated by prolonged use of sitting meditation. This also includes myself. If a person has the intention to master Padmasana, they really need to commit to a full Hatha Yoga routine and wisely master this whole yoga system. It would probably be wise to do other kinds of bodywork to support this. Most of us cannot really maintain a loose and erect sitting posture. We have been raised in a culture where unwholesome postural habits abound. We hunch forward too much and thereby put a strain at L4-L5 (lower back) and C1 (upper neck). One person that I worked with, who was a Zen teacher with about 30 years of sitting meditation, had to have a surgical intervention near C1. I have had a childhood scoliosis which is still slowly straightening out, but which still requires some strain to hold the posture erect. Prolonged sitting puts a vertical pressure at L4-L5. Also, because people normally do not really do Padmasana, but have an asymmetrical cross legged pose, the stretch to the lower back is unbalanced and can make the posture even more unbalanced. These things are correctable. When Padmasana is combined with a wise and devoted Hatha Yoga practice, it can even be healthful in the long run. But it needs this kind of support or a similar bodywork system to pull this off.
(2) If you are lying down in Shivasana and go through all the check points, checking your jaw to see if the upper and lower teeth are lightly touching, checking the shoulders to see if they are raised or dropped, checking the chin to see if it is pointed up or opened gently towards the heart, checking the lower back to see if it is relatively flat, checking the knees to see if they are relaxed, checking the ankles to see if they are relaxed, checking the palms to see if they are opened upwards and relaxed, and generally traveling with relaxed awareness through the body and intentionally relaxing as much as possible every part of the body, and then checking again a few times, then you can keep your spine loose and erect (straight). The support of a level surface helps to restructure the spine to become looser and straighter over time. I would still recommend some Hatha Yoga poses (asanas) to help even here, but you do not necessarily need the support of a whole systematic practice of Hatha Yoga. With Padmasana, more of your body needs to be in proper alignment and balance in order to hold it. With Shivasana, a little support is definitely helpful and a whole Hatha Yoga is very helpful too. It is no surprise that a very large number of Hatha Yoga teachers end their practice sessions with Shivasana.
(3) Inwardly, Shivasana is about totally and completely letting go of all effort, which is the final mudra of the Heart Sutra in Buddhism. With Padmasana, there is still a subtle effort required to hold the body erect. It is still possible to do the deep and full letting go in Padmasana, but it makes simpler and more logical sense to do it in Shivasana. All the effort of meditation is taken out of the practice from the very beginning.
(4) Many Buddhist teachers have not recommended meditating in Shivasana with eyes closed, because you are likely to fall asleep. However, this is really a minor obstacle. With daily practice, people will learn how to not fall asleep. I also find that people are spontaneously learning "Yoga Nidra" in the process. They are learning how to fall asleep and get regenerated by a deep sleep. The kind of sleep that you get through such a practice is deep and renewing. Also the kind of attention that requires effort and strain in sitting to keep alive does not long serve a meditator. Attention needs to have the quality of being relaxed and allowing. Beta frequency brainwave attention is usually tense and is the mastery of "type A" people who are productive in the world, but run the risk of aging and dying soon because of stress. If there is any risk in Shivasana in this regard is that when the right kind of attention is mastered, one can be both relaxed and alert, and one can regain so much internal energy that it is actually harder to fall asleep. Then Yoga Nidra needs to be mastered in order to fall asleep (BTW the secret is to just keep on meditating). I find that Shivasana is superior that even the Tibetan Buddhist Dream Yoga pose (this is like Shivasana but has the legs crossed and the body tilted at an angle, partly raised up). But either the Tibetan Buddhist Dream Yoga pose or Shivasana addresses similar postural concerns in a similar manner. I do recommend trying a variety of meditation poses to get some direct experience of these things.
(5) I do feel that it is good to "deep retreat" and have meditated for very long stretches of time, even 14 hours straight. Shivasana is vastly superior to Padmasana when it comes to handling these long stretches. I usually do some Hatha Yoga and bodywork before these long stretches of time, do Rebirthing breathing in a hot tub (or at least take a hot shower) before and after these long sessions, and drink some herbal tea. I find that hunger shuts down during these times. The body lowers its metabolism and does not need as much food. Usually a light soup, a small green salad, and some herbal tea is enough. Drinking some very pure water is helpful at this time, because the body kicks into regeneration mode and likes to excrete toxins into some surplus water. I do recommend microclustered/ozonated water if possible.
(6) Shantideva, the favorite Bodhisattva of the Dalai Lama, reached a very deep level of enlightenment solely through lying down meditation. Although story does not say which lying down posture he used, it was most likely Shivasana, since there is really no other lying down meditation that is as completely effortless. If it was not Shivasana, then it was a variation of Shivasana. At one point, Shantideva levitated while channeling the words of the Bodhisattva Mansjushri. For some reason, lying down meditation seems helpful for levitation. One will feel a lightness come into the body. Gravity is more of a mystery than we realize. We still imagine it as a kind of impersonal force pulling us down and do not see it related to "curved space" like Einstein did. I see it as "the embrace of the Earth" and much relaxation is about allowing ourselves to "be held" by the Earth, releasing ourselves into this greater power that meets us in "gravity". When doing Padmasana, one might still struggle to maintain erectness against gravity and not arrive at this space.
(7) There are deeper levels of meditation beyond the physical body, like moving into the dreambody and traveling to various places, like Sukhavati, the homeworld of Amida Buddha. When the physical body is totally relaxed and we leave in the embrace of the Earth, then we can peacefully let it go and travel to these worlds and learn much from them. There are Dream Yogas which can be mastered when our attention is released from the need to maintain our physical body and our physical life. Paradoxically, from this larger world and larger space, we can often more easily heal or help the physical body, our physical life, and our friends in the physical world.
(8) In Shivasana, one can immediately learn "psychosomatics", how our mind and emotions tenses and makes our body ill. One can become aware of all the tension we hold in our physical body and how we are causing it psychologically and how in order to relax the body we need to "let go". This becomes an ideal learning space for the deepest lesson in meditation.
(9) Shivasana is still "mudra yoga". By taking on the posture of an enlightened being we can learn to enter the mind of the enlightened being. There are Buddhist masters like Shantideva and the supreme Hindu master, Shiva, behind this one.
