Welcome back everybody! I want to thank you for continuing to read this mailout and I hope you are finding this newsletter helpful. I have quite a few subscribers now, about 45, but I am not really receiving any feedback so I don't know if anyone is reading this newsletter. But, I will continue to produce it in the hopes that someone is getting something out of it. Please feel free to visit my Visualization News webpage at http://www.geocities.com/visualizenews/ (best viewed with Explorer) which is in the process of being updated. I will have additional material and exercises on this site soon that will appear on a weekly/bi-weekly basis and will be different material than what appears on the newsletter.
In this edition, I would like to discuss visualization practice to enhance your devotional practice. In this edition, I will repeat some previous exercises and material in new forms, but I think you will see that using old techniques in new ways is a big part of visualization practice. Visualization tends to offer you too many ways to tie your shoelaces. There are a billion small approaches to everything and it tends to get overwhelming. Coming back to old techniques and making them familiar creates pathways of habit that allow you to make future associations that are helpful. Like creating a beaten path through dense foliage, you eventually create a free and easy path of association with the technique.
Exercise #15: Meet your Deity
Please select a deity to work with for the purposes of these exercises. If you do not presently work with any deities/angels/spirits/etc. then you might want to choose an idea to personify as a deity at this point. You can use "love", "joy" or even "Spirit" to work with as a deity for the purposes of these exercises. Use whatever you find interesting and non-negative. Let's begin by meeting your deity in your visualized workspace.
Relax and go there. Sit on your couch and get comfortable, and then invite your deity to visit you. You will hear and knock and you will let your deity in and make them at home. Pay whatever worshipful tributeis appropriate, i.e., make an offering, chant, namo prayer, etc. Sit on the couch across from them and look them over. How do they look? What feeling are you getting from them. Go ahead and ask them some questions. Make sure, as always that you treat them with respect, and that you listen carefully to what they say. It might help to write down notes. Respond and ask more questions or get clarification. Treat this as a real meeting.
Now you are going to do something peculiar. You will actually switch over and become the deity, sitting there, looking back at yourself sitting on the couch. Make this switch and get a feel for what it is like to be in this deity's body and see through their eyes. You now have their identity, not just their body. You are them in every way.
Get out your visualization notebook and write down the following questions. 1) How does it feel to be (name of deity)? 2) Looking at myself from the deity's eyes, how does the deity perceive me? Do they like me? What do they like and dislike about me, precisely? 3) What is the deity hiding from me or not telling me? 4) What is the deity's "agenda" for me, if I worship them? Where do they want to take me? What do they want to do with me? 5) How will this deity reward me for my worship and offerings?
You can break this down by prayers, physical offerings and meditation on the deity, if you wish. Now, take some time, seeing through the deity's eyes and write down the answer to these questions. It may seem a bit scary to attempt to extract secrets from deities, but I think the real danger is in worshipping a deity that you don't really understand. And, in terms of actual worship practice, my perception through the eyes of deities has been that to visualize yourself as identifying with the deity is the highest form of worship, even better than making physical offerings.
Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Deities are ideas, just as we are ideas, and they encompass huge amounts of information. It is important to remember that it takes tremendous time and practice to gain real insight into a deity. You can think of your own identity as being like the a 1989 desktop computer. The deity is like the present day pentagon mainframe computer. Trying to put that kind of information through your tiny computer would fry it. You get the idea! With practice, you can know more about the deity, and knowledge of the deity is the highest form of worship.
Exercise #16: Build an Altar
If you like what you see in the deity and what they have planned for you, you can go ahead and build an altar to the deity in your visualized workspace or in your room. The altar is usually a small bench or table with a colorful cloth over it, perhaps with a wall hanging behind it as well. Placing "sacred items" on the altar is certainly appropriate. These can be personal fetishes that you wish to be charged with the energy of the deity, such as precious stones or crystals, or they can be pieces of paper with prayers or requests for aid with certain problems.
The centerpiece of the altar should be a statue or picture of the deity. There should be a small bowl for offerings. If you burn incense, please be careful about fire. This goes double for candles and charcoal. You can place a picture of yourself or someone you wish to aid with the deity's energy, but the picture should be placed flat on the altar like an offering, not standing up. The altar is like the deity's temple or home, and it should be treated with respect and care.
You can create a 6" tall miniature version of the full-sized altar if space is an issue. Or, you can get around the issue of space altogether and keep your altar purely in visualized space in your visualized workspace. Don't place mundane items on the altar at any time, and keep it clean and well maintained. If you have a metal statue of the deity, consider buying some gold leaf and applying it to the statue as an offering. Doing namo prayers in front of the altar while kneeling is appropriate. Kneeling is best for any interaction with the altar besides the initial setup.
Visualizing the deity superimposed over the statue will charge the statue and thus the altar area with the deity's energy. In Indian tradition, a statue that is charged over time with a great deal of the deity's energy is known as a murti, and is treated as if it was the actual deity. If you are working with a deity that has no form or symbols, you can skip the statue and have it be implied.
You can, in this case, charge the actual altar itself with the deity's energy. When you get a sense of completion, you should "close" the altar creation process by sitting quietly and inviting the deity to actually come into your room and bless the altar themselves. You should avoid visualization at this point, sitting quietly and patiently, until you feel the presence of the deity in the room with you. Trust that it is a strong feeling and you will know when it happens.
Believe me, there will be no doubt in your mind when it happens; this is not a subtle feeling. You feel like someone is in the room with you. Wait until they (and the feeling) are gone before getting up. If you get no such feeling, go back into meditation and find out what the deity needs you to do in order to receive their blessing on the altar. Beings that serve higher beings may not want to be worshiped.
It is important to remember that deities always leave the mark of their values on their worshipers. If your values and lifestyle clash too radically with the deity, they may need you to change before they will work with you. Approach the deity with humility and ask for help to get to that point,if you run into that. If you aren't completely comfortable with the energy, aims, goals and values of a deity, avoid working with them, because those values will gradually become yours. Don't seek what you don't really want. Now you have an altar that is permanently consecrated, and will emit a certain amount of the deity's energy into the environment all day and night. It will be a doorway to the deity, that will help you contact them directly.
Exploring the energy of a deity is tricky, because it is so vast. I find it helpful to break it down into boxes. First, you have your mundane view of the deity. The deity is a literal being. You know a few things that the deity stands for and you perceive the deity as being out "there" somewhere. You tend to view the deity as a very powerful person. This is the most mundane box.
Here the goal is to get the deity to help you, and you pray and make offerings, ideally giving the deity something it wants in the process. Box 2 is approaching the deity. You visualize the deity and deal with them as an idea to be explored and felt. You see the deity in a less literal light, and can enter into them as a space and explore all the facets of that space with an eye towards learning more.
Here, your goal is to gain the energy and understanding associated with the deity, rather than a physical "fix". Your exploration may be enhanced by prayer, fasting, ritual offerings or normal offerings. You may undergo some sort of purification ritual to make yourself a more fit, receptive vessel for the deity's energy. Box 3 is partial identification with the deity. You see through the deity's eyes (partially) and perceive the world and yourself from that standpoint. You may make yourself the object of contemplation from the vantage point of the deity in order to see how to improve yourself.
You answer your own questions as the deity and take the advice you give yourself as if it actually came from the deity. You learn to trust your insights that come in this state over time. You take notes and capture your insights. Your goal here is a deeper understanding of yourself, using the deity as a Spiritual tool to do so. You begin to make your own self the seat of the deity and to transform yourself slowly into the deity. You do this by mimicking the deity's values, practices, thoughts, mudras (physical body gestures and positions that have a magical/symbolic significance to the deity).
Box 4 is formless. You lose all definitions of self and other and reside in the deity without form. You visualize a "brilliant darkness" that is neither dark nor light, or forgo visualization altogether. You meditate without thought on the deity without any differentiation. This can yield very strong understanding of the deity in the long-term.
So, that was a dense newsletter and if you have the patience to do all this, you deserve a merit badge. Please send me any questions/comments/insults and I will lap them up like a greedy pig! Bye!
(P.S. - If you would like to have your homepage listed on a links page on the new site at www.geocities.com/visualizenews/, or would like to have your email listed on a "members" page there, please send me your permission in writing and I will be glad to put that together on my site. I reserve the right to make the final decision on links, and would like to exclude purely commercial links from my page, but some self-promotion of your work is fine within limits. Thanks!)
Visualization News – July 2001
Hello again, hello again y’all. Yes, it is a new day and a new month. Today I would like to talk about limitation. We are all faced with limitation in many areas of our lives, and it is natural to attempt to use our Spiritual lives as a means of attacking that limitation.
I have heard a lot about how people who are Spiritually “well-off” are also financially prosperous. This is in stark contrast to the ascetics of India who define their Spirituality by their complete lack of possessions. As Westerners, we are always being reminded how “unspiritual” we are. We are informed that certain people have Spiritual high marks and that we are failing. Spirituality can become confused with religion, which become, in turn, confused with culture.
The idea that certain people or certain aspects of society are “unspiritual” suggests that life itself is not innately Spiritual. It’s not my job or anyone else’s to define what is or is not Spiritual. But we all suffer, we all face different kinds of hardship, and different degrees of limitation, and none of us get total satisfaction out of life. Behind our eyes, there is a being seeing the world. There is consciousness and awareness. We see conflict, limitation and differences, and this is reflected in our visualization. The world or our own consciousness is limited in what it can and what it wants to imagine.
Those limitations are partially a reflection of the limitations of our own circumstances. But, our internal world has the potential to be far more expansive and free than our external circumstances. We often wait for our situation to become more abundant and free before we feel comfortable indulging in imagining better possibilities. Often, cultural mores seep into our consciousness at a subconscious level and cause us to become creatively inhibited in our own consciousness. For example, we might find cultural Puritanism regarding sexuality or social behavior limiting our very dreams. So, how do you overcome the inability to imagine? I would like to address that in the next exercise.
Exercise #17: Chess Board
Relax, get comfortable and establish a clear, stable visualization of a chessboard. The only requirement is that the pieces be large and clearly distinguishable from each other. Look at the board and the individual pieces. Pick up the white queen piece and the black rook. Hold one in each hand and look at them. Here, in this visualized world, they are equally real, even though they are different and have different qualities. Look at each piece with the understanding that these are not just objects, but ideas. Before there can be the conception of a visualized object, there must be the idea of it. You are holding two different yet equal ideas. In chess terms, one is more powerful than the other, and yet they are equal in terms of being ideas.
All ideas are essentially equal, regardless of their power and importance. Now, put down the black rook and pick up a white pawn, the least powerful piece. When you break the piece in half, you will have a visualized experience of walking through a park on a sunny day. Go ahead and do that now. How was it? This should have been an experience of normal visualization intensity for you. Now, take the white queen and break it, knowing it is a more powerful visualization experience of the same scene. Go ahead and do that now. Did you experience more identification with your visualized self? Did you feel more emotion from that self, and see the scene with more conviction? If you didn’t go back and do it again, remembering that a more powerful visualization experience is, just like the queen, an idea that is equal to all other ideas. You should have a better result when you really have that idea in mind.
Sometimes, it is tempting to try to constantly improve your skill and get frustrated with visualization. You make quick improvement early, then can get discouraged as progress seems to slow down. I finally realized that progress later in the game depends on understanding more than skill. It is a game of understanding that all ideas, and thus all experiences are equally available to us at a conscious level. We have put up internal barriers to knowing this, and only we have the power to tear those barriers down.
One major barrier that many Spiritual practitioners run into is that they develop a perspective on themselves, as they become more “self conscious,” that causes them to tear down the walls of their own narcissism. Narcissism is “self-love” in an unhealthy sense, that comes from an identity that lacks empathy. As you progress, your ideas about yourself tend to fall away and you develop humility and perspective. But, we live in a narcissistic society, meaning it is the prevailing norm to identify with one’s wealth, possessions, achievements, social standing and power in certain communities.
Many people become involved in communities that tout themselves as being “Spiritual” but are really more involved in creating narcissistic, cliquish social groups where members are able to behave selfishly and inappropriately in a safe, supportive environment, unchallenged. People who enter these groups and draw attention to these behaviors are quickly made to feel unwelcome, blamed for their own perceptions, and pushed out of the group. There is a feeling that if you call something Spiritual, it automatically is. But we have all seen where religion has tried to own Spirituality and has ended up becoming a complete hypocritical farce.
Faced with the inability to find like minded people, you may come to the erroneous conclusion that they don’t exist. It is difficult to establish any kind of group without having various petty tyrants and narcissistic bullies set up shop and take over. Likewise, if you yourself attempt to reign in control of the group, it is easy to wonder how far you can or should go, and if your own negative tendencies are just being given free reign. Snobbery and smugness rule in our society because we have created the illusion of endless prosperity through marketing-created illusions. We are so busy identifying with crap and things that we feel like we can’t live without them and we also gain ego gratification and a sense of smug self-satisfaction surrounding our having them.
I am only mentioning this because it is precisely this kind of brainwashing that we have to overcome in ourselves and be able to identify in others. If someone states that they are “Spiritual” but says things that you find deeply disturbing, use visualization to look through their eyes, and while there, examine their level of narcissism on a simple high-to-low scale. Now, while still seeing through their eyes, lower their level of narcissism to “very low” and go back to the scene where they were speaking to you. What do they say to you now, considering that they now have a lower level of narcissism? I expect that what comes out of their mouth will be quite different. Visualization allows you do see through the eyes of everyone you know and understand more about them.
We can assume malice where there is none, or see love where there is malice. At this point in the program, you should make an effort to see through the eyes of everyone you are intimately involved in on a regular basis, and trust what you are seeing. This trust can be difficult, but you should get more comfortable with it as a new ability, and make it more of an everyday, normal part of your routine. It is tempting to want or need the approval of others to do this, but you won’t get it, so why wait. Keep it to yourself and over time you will gradually get the feedback and understanding you need to evolve into a different kind of person. Understanding others’ perspectives allows us to live as people in a society, rather than pieces of meat walking around with other pieces of meat.
For you homework, please take some time and look through the eyes of others and evaluate their degree of narcissism. Then, see through your own eyes in a third-person context, and evaluate your own degree of narcissism. Narcissism is really another name for materialism, which is the arch-enemy of your visualization and Spiritual practice. The next exercise will help you identify your own narcissism and overcome it. The result of removing your own narcissism will be not only increased humility, but a great deal of happiness and satisfaction that you are missing out on in life.
Exercise #18: Poker Chips
You are sitting at a restaurant booth with a small jukebox on it. You have in front of you a cup of poker chips. These are all different colors, and no two are the same. They represent your different narcissisms. Pull one out and stick it in the jukebox slot. The narcissism will “play” and you will feel it fully. Keep your journal handy and write down the color of the poker chip and what you feel when you play it. Now, hit a black button on the jukebox and it will play the complete absence of that narcissism. Go ahead and do that, and write down what you observe. Here are some examples from my own run through of the exercise:
Dark Green: Having a smug sense of being at peace in the world, and of being ok with myself. The lack of this is putting my importance in the world in perspective and appreciating others for all their contributions.
Black: Feeling that I have the right to turn any situation into something focused on me. I should be interested in what is going on and other people should be focusing on me. The lack is patience and the ability to not be at the center of attention but still enjoy that time.
Dark Purple: Feeling that I am more intelligent and interesting than others. The lack is appreciating the struggle and intelligence of others. Being able to really hear others, and being open to others. Really listening to others.
Brown: Rage, sulking, anger about not getting all my needs met. The lack is being able to take responsibility for getting my own needs met by making an effort, rather than depending on others to do it.
Gray: Feeling suicidal and depressed. Feeling disappointed with life. The lack of it is a lightness of being and an acceptance of things as they are, and also not feeling like every event is a personal attack on me.
Obviously, these narcissisms are major psychological and Spiritual obstacles that need to be overcome before we can enjoy life and our relationships. Make sure you write all of this down in your visualization journal. Also, it would be helpful to memorize these chips and their colors and meanings, so you can, in future social situations, consciously drop them and practice operating without them, to see what impact it has on your interactions with others. Also, you can use these understandings in conjunction with your meditation. Good luck and see you next month!
