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VISUALIZATION AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Mahayoga visualization practice is related to your everyday life and to very domestic things. For example, you visualize the herukas or yidams in union with their consorts, eating and drinking, treading on the enemy, and so forth. But unlike everyday life, in visualization everything happens at once. Everything that we do in our life, the deities manage to do simultaneously. From the samsaric point of view, if we could do everything at once, it would be delightful. It is the essence of our wishful thinking. But since we only have one body and one state of mind, we can only do one thing at a time, which makes us very tired and regretful some of the time, and very confused at other times. I think that is why the deities use samsaric images on a nirvanic level, on a type of ambidextrous or all-pervasive level.

In visualization practice, the emotions and energies are all concentrated at one level, which is an outrageous idea. It is an extremely perverted idea in many ways, which is why it is a secret. You cannot understand what it is all about. You cannot be all that outrageous; nobody would dare to do it. People are usually very cowardly about their own habits, their own wishful thinking. So if you are actually able to get into this by means of transcendental practice, it is extraordinarily refreshing and crazy at the same time. Finally you are able to actually make some sense out of your life and your emotions and your longings and your pains and your pleasures and everything. That seems to be the basic point.

Visualization practice is right to the point of our life, rather than trying to replace our life with some cosmic livelihood. That is the essence of visualization, and that is why we can identify with all the herukas and yidams. That is why there is this possibility. The deities are not protectors and they are not objects of worship, but they are states of mind that we can identify with. All our hopes and fears, all that we want, is embodied in those particular images.

When you are visualizing, usually your eyes are closed; but when you are meditating, your eyes are usually open. In the case of meditation, if you close your eyes you begin to get caught in fantasies of all kinds, whereas if you open your eyes, you just see the naked world. However, in the case of visualization, if you open your eyes you begin to project superimposed hallucinations on your rug, your pillow, or your wall. That is why your eyes are closed; you close them so you can have a completely clean world. The purpose of both techniques is the same, but they are done in opposite ways.

In postvisualization practice, you do not see the herukas serving tea or driving your cab, but you have a sense of their presence constantly. It is similar to the way we always experience things. When you feel depressed, you see everybody as depressed; when you are drunk, you think that everybody is drunk with you; and when you are angry, you feel that everybody is mocking you. You have that kind of attitude toward the deities in the visualization.

The visualization is part of your daily activities, the daily experience of your life. It is not so much that since herukas are clad in human-skin shawls and tiger-skin skirts and wearing bone ornaments, you are trying to hallucinate everybody wearing tiger-skin skirts and running around in bone ornaments. But there is a very personal and experiential sense of the presence of various herukas. So the visualization is happening in the post meditative state as well.

It is essential to know the various philosophical and experiential attitudes regarding one’s practice and one’s phenomena. If a person does not have a great deal of understanding in terms of utpattikrama and sampannakrama, if the visualization practice and the meditative practice are not properly done, these practices may become dangerous. It has been said that they are even more dangerous as you get into higher tantra. If those two practices, visualization and formless meditation, are not combined together properly, you will

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