Pragmatism

"Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man." Sophocles.

If you accept your basic ignorance, or your lack of complete knowledge, it's difficult then, and maybe even a bit stupid, to start believing in things. Actively disbelieving in things makes more sense to me. Having faith in something that someone has told you doesn't make much sense to me at all.

It seems to me that what's left is cause and effect, which is what we seem to have to live with, and what works and what doesn't work. What I mean by this is what makes you happier. We are conditioned by punishments and rewards and we must surely hope to do things that will give us rewards and a great reward is surely more happiness, or more positive feelings.

Meditation obviously works in this regard. Meditation does take the stress away and makes you smile more. That's just my personal experience, of course. If you meditated, you might go completely bonkers. What do I know?

I'm interested in what works, or what you can get to work. That's why this post is called pragmatism!

For about six or seven years I've been trying to do deity yoga, which basically means that you visualise yourself as a deity, and more importantly for this post, you visualise a deity in front of you. This is what, I think, is a bit different in Tibetan buddhism. 3D visualisations. It's supposed to be a very powerful way of combining method and wisdom, which is to say, emptiness (things not existing as they appear to exist) and meditation (concentration, focusing).

I must say that after trying this for seven years and doing it practically every day, I'm no nearer achieving a three dimensional visualisation than I was the day I started. This is not to say that I don't think it can be done. I'm sure it can be done, but you'd have to be working at it pretty much full time, I think.

Meditation isn't the sole preserve of buddhists. St Teresa of Avila describes doing much the same thing with Jesus Christ. She managed to get Jesus Christ to be in front of her and to speak to her and to tell her that he would do anything for her because he knew that she loved him. This is described in The Interior Castle, I think. She said you started with the hands. Get the hands first (I suppose this would be the hands together as in prayer) and progress to the rest.

I think I'm maybe supposed to be doing this with Dorje Sempa, but I've been using The Medicine Buddha, and I can't do either. But I think if the circumstances were right ... I also think you could do it with Donald Duck. It's your attitude that counts. It's a projection.

I think the difference between St Teresa and Tibetan Buddhism is that St Teresa might have thought it was Jesus Christ. I think in Tibetan Buddhism once you have the deity in front of you, you have to know that it's just an appearance, even although you might have spent an awful long time getting that appearance. I imagine that once you have that appearance, it should tell you something about how everything else is also mere appearance. I think we're trying to impress ourselves with insubstantiality here, as in nothing exists in the manner of its appearance.

I might have this all wrong of course, but I did use it while writing In The Land of The Demon Masters. The sage in the cave tells the heroine how to create a big scary monster, and what he tells her is how you do deity yoga, I think. Have the vision in three dimensions to the stage where you can even walk round it.

Once when I was a week in Purelands, which is a satellite of the Samye Ling, for a week in the winter, I was stuck there in this room from about four in the afternoon till the next day. No radio, no telly, just some dharma books. During the day, down at the centre, I was hardly speaking to anyone either... I know there is a change which occurs when you do mental calming so that you seem to be able to project colours and shapes much better than you imagine. Afterwards I thought of it as reverse LSD. It's like being given a toolbox to perception. This is before I even took refuge. This is where I have to go if I can make any money from selling books on Kindle.

I've just been reading this a little later. St Teresa says in one of her books that she can't tell the difference between spirit and mind and soul, and would leave that to more erudite folk than her. So it's a bit of a cheap shot and patronising to say what she thought about the vision of Christ that she had in front of her. Because I don't know. And she might well have.