Be mindful of ‘where you are’. Sometimes you’ll be completely engrossed in the physical world, with the physical senses, and other times you’ll be ‘a million miles’ away, so enraptured in a daydream that you completely forgot where you were. What to aim for is a mixture of both, but generally, try not to lose sight of the inner world, always be visualising something, for different reasons. A large part of the practice is ‘disavowing’ the world, which I’ll come onto, but you have to, over time, detach feelings from outer-perceptions.
You have a double-vision, even when you are looking at some physical thing in the world, there is a mental counterpart if you care to look at it. You can see a thing with your eyes and imagine it with your inner eyes at the same time, perhaps on the inner-screen in another world, or perhaps you ‘push it out’ into this world and give it ‘cubic reality’ in relation to the world your senses are perceiving.
Yes, this is ‘just imagination’ to begin with. But really IT’S ALL IMAGINATION and the inner part is closer to you, in time and space, and when this becomes your real world then an end to suffering is in sight. As the inner begins to shine out and the two worlds mix, then the mastery of your mind becomes the desired and harmonious circumstances of your life — but experienced in a way that is beyond pain because it is beyond impermanence. It is based on your Pure Land, your own controlled astral light. The steps of abundance and awakening training are:
- Alter and heal negative ‘knots’ real time
- Disavow the physical
- Project the inner with double vision
- Surrender and hold Nembutsu
It hugely helps to have various routines and structures in place to live life; all spiritual practices do this in some way. Often, this becomes cultural and people do things as a tradition and the mystical purpose behind things is lost, whereas you can create this structure with that purpose foremost. You already have all sorts of routines and structures in place to do with the various aspects of life, but you can adjust and adapt them with a growing knowledge of the higher worlds.
It starts with waking up, which I’ll cover more in depth in a dedicated night practice section. Perhaps, because of existing routines, you have to be woken with an alarm clock, and a good practice then is to instruct your mind to try and awaken naturally five minutes before it goes off. Whether or not this works out, try and make the first thought of the day Nembutsu of the central image, the symbol of all your manifesting life, with high emotion before you rise from bed. Then hold it as you get up, go to the toilet or whatever you do. Try and keep it exclusively in concentration for at least one minute or so as it is essentially a part of the Four Great Efforts, i.e. it will stop any negativity you have woken up with (hopefully a rarer occurrence if you are falling asleep in the right way) and prevent it arising — and it commences positivity and maintains it. At the start, the mind could just revert to negativity or mundane mindlessness quite soon, but a general mindfulness will arise with practice, and this is now hopefully a lifelong journey.
You need to practice what I call ‘firings’. The more you practice mindfully, both passively observing and also creating mind events with will and disciplining the mind, the more consciousness detaches from observed, external reality and the ‘freer’ emotions are. When you practice creating certain emotional states in reaction to willed internal events rather than delusions at the sense doors, then emotional states can be created, willed, the same way as mental pictures of conscious self-talk. You are the adiBuddha of your inner-realm, the God of your Pure Land.
It isn’t possible, or probably desirable, to create a state of free independent ecstasy 24/7 based on nothing. However, it is possible to create an intense feeling of joy for ten to twenty seconds. It’s easy after a long period of living mindfully because you see then that the emotions in your mind are actually physical sensations. Yes, they come from an underlying state and they co-occur with congruent mental pictures and innertalk. You don’t have intense feelings of joy based in your feet and ankles with mental pictures of people living in poverty and inner-talk about how pointless life is and how stupid you are. When the Buddha first gave the talk explaining how to be mindful, he gave the example of a sack full of different beans, kidney beans and moung beans, all mixed up, and imagine someone opening the bag and separating them all apart. So the instruction was to be mindful of body, feeling, mind and mental objects. (mind means state and mental objects are the things created in imagination, including self talk).
“Imagine a sack which can be opened at both ends, containing a variety of grains – brown rice, wild rice, mung beans, kidney beans, sesame, white rice. When someone with good eyesight opens the bags, he will review it like this: ‘This is brown rice…
“Monks, just as if a sack with openings at both ends were full of various kinds of grains—such as brown rice, white rice, barley, and so forth—when someone with good eyesight opens it and examines it, he would see all the different kinds of grains. In the same way, a monk remains focused on the body in and of itself, on feelings in and of themselves, on mind in and of itself, and on mental qualities in and of themselves. He understands that these are just phenomena arising and passing away, not self.”
This was from the instruction to be mindful, which is passive and leads to the insight, as explained, that there is no self in any of these phenomena, Elsewhere in scripture there is the instruction to actively direct the mind, such as in the four efforts, and also my favourite quote, ‘A disciplined mind is a happy mind’.
Observing these separate phenomena in the mind gives dominion over them. When you know what the sensations of joy are detached from the co-occurring phenomena, then you can will it like anything else in the mind. It’s an actual energy, so it might not be possible to sustain it for hours on end, but it can be felt intensely for fifteen or twenty seconds. A feeling, an emotional sensation can arise which would be the same if it was linked to a great event, like winning the lottery or achieving a long-sought after goal.
So why would you want to do this, why is this a useful skill in reality creation and the spiritual path? The answer is ‘naturalness’. The inner-world of our mind manifests on the outside, but clearly it’s not as simple as that, or we could create the outerworld as effortlessly and instantly as we create the inner world. We could just think of mansions and piles of money and gold and there it is in the mind and there it is in the world. Clearly that doesn’t happen. What is the difference? Naturalness, … and frequency.
The things in life that manifested from our minds we kept seeing in the past, creating internally, repeatedly and frequently and with a feeling of ‘naturalness’, of it being a reality of ourselves and our lives. With the mental picture of living in a mansion surrounded with piles of money and gold bars, I can instantly create that in my mind and it can be realistic, but it wouldn’t be ‘natural’, I’d find it hard for that to feel that it was ‘real’ in my world, and I also wouldn’t do it frequently as I’m not interested in that anyway.
In the unwatched mind, there are constant ‘firings’, mental pictures of expectations and self concept, with naturalness and frequency, and a fair bit of this will be something you don’t want to manifest but do anyway. But now you have a sequence of set goals or themes you are consciously creating, within and without, and a series of mental pictures you have chanted to and internalised. Away from the shrine, say brushing your teeth, it doesn’t take long to cycle through the eight or so broad themes, with an associated mental picture or two for each while feeling intense joy and gratitude. One of the themes can be things and situations you already have, and so there is gratitude shining into the past, present and future. You can observe the feeling between the things you have already and the things you are now manifesting, to check that the feeling, the ‘naturalness’, is the same — that there is no belief that you have one and not the other, only a single, unified sublime abiding of gratitude. Half a minute would be the ideal ‘firing’, because with this practice, it is the frequency that counts.
On that basis, the ‘firing’ practice can be incorporated into a ‘salutations’ practice. Around the world, people attune their worship to a schedule based on the sun’s passage through the sky. There are distinct periods of the day due to the earth’s rotation. The sun rises, it sets high in the sky, it disappears from view and then is gone. So there are four practice times naturally, waking, noon, sunset and going to bed. These four times can be the trigger to use this day practice, of new pictures with new naturalness attached and although it might feel pretty airy-fairy or trite in the beginning, the frequency will indeed imbue these pictures and intentions overtime, and at that point they become your reality.
Also, don’t forget that central symbol, the enso or whatever you have chosen, includes all the manifesting themes and also the intention of your own awakening and can be held with joy at any time; it itself is a reason for joy as a symbol of your own awakening future, and now. This simple, abstract symbol of your awakening is also a symbol of surrender, of letting go of the individual pictures, themes and goals to an inner-trust and positive state. A trust that the underlying Dharmakaya/astral light will manifest your needs and best wishes, both known and unknown.
When I focus alone on the central symbol as existing in my chest, I often find my crown chakra activating, i.e. the skin over my crown contracts and there is a strong energetic sensation at the top of my head as the highest spiritual energy awakens and my intentions flow up from my chest to my heart. I help this sensation along with the direct energy techniques I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT ELSEWHERE. The positive state held is gratitude, and when there are no specific mental pictures existing to attach that gratitude to, it is to the dharmakaya/astral light itself, that you live in your mind with the full power of creation, to see, create and feel whatever you want, a world where the senses are your slaves.
Imagine if that wasn’t the case. Imagine if you tried to visualise a red rose but saw a pink elephant. Imagine if there was all this negative self-talk in your mind and when you had enough and decided to reign it and say positive things, but you cannot and it’s like having schizophrenia — there’s a voice saying how stupid you are then there’s nothing you could do about it. But hopefully, in terms of your inner-world, this is not the world you live in and you are indeed a god with the power of creation, and so you should feel the gratitude of someone who can instantly create anything they want in the universe, because this is what you are and this is what you can do — and how do you feel about that?
You could look forward to doing this. At times when your schedule allows it, say a coffee break in the afternoon, you could do a longer period. Lie back with the drink, savour the atmosphere, raise the joy and only allow the pictures from your practice to be in your mind with an intense emotion for a minute or a minute and a half. You do this to change the contents of your mind and so manifesting life over time, but also because it’s fun. It is JUST PURE FUN.
There is one caveat, and that is not to go mad. In the past, when I’ve raised very intense joy and held it for a long time, more than five minutes and also very frequently throughout the day, I’d find myself crashing sometimes. I don’t know why, but it might be to do with dopamine. Perhaps if it’s produced for an extended period in an ‘abnormal’ way, then it’s depleted and you have a low mood until it replenishes. I have no idea if that’s what happens. I think it’s one of the reasons that narcotics are addictive and cause problems, and your life becomes highs and lows.
Also, this is abnormal if taken too far. I don’t want to walk around in ecstatic joy 24/7. I want to feel other things. I want to have a compassionate response to other peoples’ suffering. Sometimes I want to feel dissatisfied so I change something or — bored so I do something or — ashamed so I stop something. Once you have the capacity to spark independent joy or any emotion, then it can become an escape. Any power of will can, such as maladaptive daydreaming. I think this is why the Buddhist scripture refers to the base states of mind (the habitual resting places of consciousness) as being SUBLIME ABIDINGS, i.e. not intense and wild but peaceful and background, and based on the Four Viharas: compassion, loving kindness, equanimity and joy. The joy part has a focus on other people rather than (although not excluding) self (as it avoids grasping). Equanimity never means not caring or being detached, it means a background state of being DETATCHED FROM THE SENSES, not triggered.
Personally, I like to keep a written diary. If you’ve followed a lot of the writing you may have kept a log of thoughts as a part of the practice, but it helps to make this a permanent practice, if you enjoy it. Include what you did in life but it’s mainly about your inner-world, themes that you see coming up, the things that trigger you, linking mental events to things that manifest in the world. It helps to be mindful, to see things in the mind and make an effort to remember this subjective world to be able to write it down later. This in itself increases concentration and mindfulness, and also strengthens the night/falling asleep practices I present elsewhere. Another benefit of this is that, new issues can come up in the mind, new obsessions or new things that need new pictures added to your Nembutsu practice to counter them, new affirmations, new replacement thoughts. Remember, every negative thing in the world came from a place in your mind somehow and the more you can see and control it, the freer you will be.
One last trick I do for the end of the day practice (preparing for bed) is to have an imaginary routine from my future. I.e. if you had fully manifested into the world all the things you wanted, then what part of your routine would be different? So act it out both physically and in the mind. For example, I run a website where I help homeless people, so I know a lot of needy people and do what I can. If I manifested a LOT of money, I would support them financially, more than I already do. I would send them money when they needed it.
So once a day I take my phone and physically imagine I am in my banking app and I press the (black) screen and visualise the banking app and type in (imagine) the amount of money I am sending them. Then I (pretend to) write a little message to let them know it’s on the way (in my mind, projecting the messaging app onto the phone in cubic reality, using my physical fingers to type on the keyboard). I remember to do this daily and it feels natural and of course there is the frequency of the manifesting intent. I remember to do this each day before I retire at night