Green Tara appears as a golden vajra studded with emeralds. Her symbol announces her presence or signals that she wishes to speak.
She says,First, a note on the earthly Buddha and Bodhisattvas: They came to announce the existence of the inner worlds, and give introductory teachings. Getting the person detached from the physical world and into an identity of empty space is not the end goal. Enlightenment goes past emptiness - that is just the selling point.
Indeed, dying when your soul is partially empty is very destructive to the soul's development. If you have no self, you cannot defend against the stored karma from when you did have a self. If you have no self, you have no free will, and cannot resist ignorance and delusion. You cannot choose to be free when you have no self to make choices. A weakened self can be drawn into the hell worlds if there is past karma that was not recognized and dealt with.
What is beyond emptiness? Only the realms of universal creation. There are layers of emptiness between each form of existence. One enters the bardo worlds through emptiness and leaves them through emptiness. Being empty of the current life's attachments does not mean all attachment is gone. It means that the person has blacked out a tiny corner of a vast tapestry, and now convinced himself or herself that he or she has darkened the whole universe.
At the very least, the person must go beyond the first layer of emptiness.
So, how should one proceed? Die with a self that is unattached to the life that is being left behind, and with a strong intention to travel towards truth.
This intention guides the boat of the soul. It holds the wheel and the rudder and is the motor that powers the soul's inner travel.
For my devotees, the inner intention should be to go to my realms of beauty. The soul must know my paradise before entering its essence. The major function of the paradise is to cleanse the unconscious area of the soul of desire and guilt.
People do not go through many worlds of reincarnation without accumulating hordes of sins, which are invisible to the conscious mind. The paradises of the Vajrayana Bodhisattvas are places where these hordes of sins can rise to awareness. Then they can be dealt with by burning them in a ritual dissolution of the past by sprouting the karmic seeds into dramas in which compassionate behaviors overshadow the past selfish and cruel ones, or by taking on suffering deliberately to atone for bad behaviors in the past.
Buddhist paradises are not like many of the paradises of other gods where karma is left at the gate, but returned if you choose to leave. They do not leave your karma stored in a locker with your halo and harp as the key. Forgiveness of sins by the gods does not mean the sins are destroyed. Instead, they are just put in storage. Buddhism believes in responsibility, not letting other save you from your sins.
In our paradises, souls do useful things. They learn to be bodhisattvas themselves when their karma is dissolved, and they learn the techniques of creating universes. The goal is not just sitting there doing nothing. We help all sentient beings and create worlds where they may learn and grow.
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