Over and over again I tell people of the power of the white skeleton visualization meditation for health, anti-aging and spiritual attainments.
The story is that when Buddhism first entered China from India, many of the intelligentsia objected to this foreign import. However, many people decided to give its meditation techniques a try. So many people attained samadhi and superpowers from practicing two Buddhist meditations that the naysayers kept quiet, and Buddhism was accepted into the country.
What were these meditation techniques?
At that time only two had made their way into China: the anapana (pranayama related) breathing technique and the white skeleton visualization.
The anapana breathing techniques and the skeleton visualization, because they lead to real spiritual results, banish sickness from your body through natural chi channel detoxification, and lead to health and longevity. Practicing them, you get superpowers (psychic abilities) as well.
The in-depth details for practicing the white skeleton meditation, along with the supernormal psychic abilities you're likely to develop, can be readily found in a small report on the website, so we can only spotlight a few points in this short space. Nevertheless, here's some pointers.
To practice this technique it's best to first buy a little white model of a skeleton or to download some pictures of a skeleton from the internet. Then you must memorize what your bones look like fromt he pictures. You have to memorize them because you have to know what they look like in your visualizations.
In the olden days people would go off into graveyards where they would see rotting skeletons all around them, so they didn't have memorize anything. They looked, they saw, they experienced detachment because of viewing rotting corpses and they were then able to let go of their bodies and minds to enter samadhi.
So here's the basic meditation technique.
You visualize all your flesh, meat and organs rotting off your bones or simply being given away to all the ghosts or other beings you owe debts to. Then, starting with your LEFT TOE, you actually visualize all the bones of your body shining bright white. You start visualizing your left big toe, then all the toes of your left foot, then your right foot, then back to your left leg, then right leg and you work your way all the way up your body.
After you can visualize your entire body as being just a white shiny skeleton, you let the bones turn to dust so that only dust is left, which blows away to leave emptiness.
You first visualize your bones, then let go of everything, and stay in that emptiness to cultivate samadhi. From samadhi you go on to try and realize the stage of non-ego we call "seeing the Tao."
The skeleton method is a powerful meditation technique because it does many things simultaneously. It cultivates your chi, helps you cultivate detachment, teaches you to let go of the image and concept of being a body, teaches joyful giving to others, helps you pay back sentient beings you may owe and so forth.
Even the joy you're supposed to feel while giving away your flesh during the visualization is a way to cultivate the joy and bliss of the first dhyana called the "vitarka-samadhi" in Hinduism.
It's quite common for two things to quickly happen due to this meditation.
First, you can gain superpowers easily because you are cultivating your chi.
Secondly, because your vital energies rise it's easy to experience sexual desires and excess energy. If you lose your jing because you give into your carnal nature, however, then of course you are cutting short the road to a long life and won't make much spiritual progress. That's a teaching of almost every genuine spiritual school in existence.
Women also suffer a bit along these lines as well when they lose energy but not as severely as men since the uterus and vagina reabsorb much of the energy they lose. Their construction embodies the I-Ching principle that "yang offers and yin receives."
Now the topic of sexual desire, which arises because your vital energies arise and start circulating, brings up another meditation method.
One of my favorite meditation techniques, which many Buddhas and Bodhisattvas have used, is to imagine your body burning away and becoming dust, and accessing emptiness from there. A similar variation is to imagine your body as becoming one brilliant, shining sun and to stay in that one-pointed visualization to attain samadhi.
This technique, which often works because it burns the body away and is like staring into the face of one of the body's chakras, is also very powerful. Vairocana Buddha and a number of other Bodhisattvas are associated with this technique which can help you transform the five elements of your physical body.
Try it.
I advise you to also mantra Vairocana's 5-element transforming mantra when using this technique, and it runs "Ohm Ahh Bee Lahh Hong! Chit!" When you use this burning technique and make the flames of fire burn everything, make sure they burn away the sexual desire as well. That's why many people succeed using this technique.
For instance, in the Surangama Sutra, one of Buddha's students, Usschusma, reported that he was often tormented by greed and sexual desire and yet he succeeded in his cultivation. Usschusma said that many aeons ago a Buddha called "The King of Immateriality" taught him that lustful desires increased one's chances of hell karma, and taught him to meditate on the bones of his body and warmth of his chi at the same time.
This is equivalent to using some version of the skeleton method, along with anapana breathing techniques and kundalini arousal through fire visualization, which is a combination I often recommend to talented students. He cultivated the effects of heat in his body and mind, and burned away all vestiges of sexual desire by cultivating a blazing nature.
You can do the same thing and transform your chi quickly by visualizing that everything you are is burned away so that no body or anything else is left.
Despite his sexual desire, Usschuma stayed chaste and used this technique to reach past the Taoist stage of jing to chi and then chi to shen and emptiness transformations to get the Tao. None of it would have been possible, however, had he not first conquered sexual desire. So when sexual desire arises and regular emptiness meditation doesn't help, try using the nature of sexual desire against itself by visualizing that fire (or a sun) burns away your body so that nothing is left. Sexual desire will then having nothing upon which to take hold, and itself will burn away.
Like everything else it takes practice, but this is another way of offering that can help conquer the biggest obstacle for men in cultivation. For men the big problem is sexual desire whereas for women the biggest hurdle is emotions.
No comments:
Post a Comment