BUDDHA NATURE.COM Songs and Meditations of the Tibetan Dhyani Buddhas


Vajrayogini

The Door of the Soul


Vajrayogini drinking and transforming the negative karma of her devotees

Vajra Yogini comes in a storm of red light, with dark thunderclouds and lightning. She is sexual, dangerous, transgressive.

She says:

What is a yogini? It is one who brings the fragmented, finite consciousness to union. We are the forces of discipline, the guides to the practice. When invoked, we structure the spiritual pathway for the person to follow and guard the gates.

The physical world is a fine place full of richness and intensity, a place to experience the range of joy and sorrow. But the supernatural worlds, the worlds of transcendence, include greater ranges of creativity. One can create not only objects and ideas but selves and worlds as well. People are complex beings with millions of layers, and the physical world focuses on only a few of them. The supernatural world deals with deeper layers of identity and experience which are dismissed by materialists as imagination.

As we understand it, the imagination is a shallow layer of experience generated by the conscious aspect of the mind. Occasionally, repressed and traumatic material may be included in a disguised form. The imagination does not penetrate to the realm of spirit.

Imagination is like ice on a lake. It allows people who live on hard ground to believe that water is hard ground too. They cannot perceive what is below the ice, and that the ice is only a shallow layer that hides the depths. And beneath the ice of the imagination is not a puddle or a lake but rather the ocean. The imagination hides the depths, as does ice.

Yoginis and dakinis are clothed by the imagination. We are supernatural beings who take on form through memory and fantasy. As a yogini, I can take on the memory forms of an individual appearing as a friend or a relative. I can take on the memory forms of the group appearing as a leader or an ancestor. I can take on the stereotypical form of a religious figure, as a living statue or an icon. I can also appear as pure presence, an empty state that is aware.

For those of narrow education and limited artistry, I appear as familiar and secure. For those of more wide-ranging interests, I combine the art forms of many cultures and historical periods. Thus you have seen me take on forms from symbolist and romantic art, from expressionism, and mixing surrealist painting, Byzantine mosaics, and Greco-Roman sculpture. For visionaries, I am a delight - a living museum of art and culture.

But all these forms have a deeper purpose. I choose the forms from both individual and species memory that best express the ideas and emotions suited to the practitioner. Memories and archetypal images are the pigments with which I paint, the forms that I take to express ideas. Both yoginis and dakinis have a strong sense of drama.

But the magic theater we create for the practitioner has a back door. In the individual's mind, it is a gateway, the labyrinth through which the soul must pass. Life experience has distorted the soul which has been blackened and calloused by karma. We are the remakers of souls smoothing the knots, opening the secrets, taking the earthly treasures that are grasped so tightly. The door to spirit is small and the soul cannot fit with the loot stolen and accumulated in life after life. Attachments and grasping must be left behind.

The entrance to the supernatural and divine worlds is small and easily missed. Preoccupation with power and pleasure blocks the door and those who look inward see nothing when they are there. They need guides but cannot find them.




Home

This Web Site © Copyright 2012, J. Denosky, All Rights Reserved