deity | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Amitabha's Pureland

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo given on Saga Dawa 2016:

Would we ever be able to get to another galaxy? I don’t think so. Because we think the galaxy is far away and it’s not. It’s not. As long as we think it’s far away, we’ll never get there. If we look at a star and we think, ‘Oh, that’s a star over there’, we don’t understand that not only is the star within us, but we are within the star. There is nothing separate. Nothing. It’s very difficult to understand. When we try to understand it, we try to understand it with our ordinary minds, and we can’t. No matter how hard we try.

The ticket is we have to wake up in our practice and, in doing that, wake up the deities within. When that occurs, we’ll understand that we are not separate and that the different dimensions not only connect with each other, but they are within each other. That’s why sometimes I can see things from other dimensions, because they aren’t somewhere else. They are layered together. These dimensions are not only connecting, they are in the same place. Nothing is separate from you. It’s hard to learn that and hold that in our minds in a strong way. Instead we are not kind to each other. We think negatively, and things like that. In fact, we are the same nature. We are the same nature. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a car. Out of the corner of my other eye, I see the corner of a building. Then I don’t see it anymore. I’m not schizophrenic. This is just the way I see. I know that these are different dimensions, but they are in the same place. You can’t even say in the same place because that indicates that everything is solid, and it’s not.

From The Spiritual Path: A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

As you generate yourself as a Buddha or Bodhisattva, reciting mantras and devotional prayers, your mind arises as a pure form. This is different from the ordinary mind that struggles to wake up each morning, dragging along its ego-clinging baggage or karma and looking for happiness in futile ways. This pure form is an expression of pure cognition, free of conceptualization and limitation. It is pure awareness, a state of pure luminosity. The deity we generate is an expression of that pure state. All phenomena are understood to be the deity’s body, voice, and activity. Thus, phenomena cease being something we grasp.

Generation-stage and completion-stage practice disassemble the entire time-and-space grid, disassemble the moment itself. You dissolve into emptiness and purify all things into their natural state. Thus, the mind relaxes from the tension that is gathered around “I,” and it becomes possible to reconstruct the moment naturally through the creation of the mandala and through allowing the mind to arise as the deity. This great skill is accomplished when the entire process becomes effortless.

“How,” you may ask, “can it be effortless? The mandala, the whole process, seems very complicated.” Actually, it is less complicated than what you are currently perceiving. You have a mandala going right now. Look around you. You sit on a world that sits in a galaxy that sits in a universe, and it is all lit up. How do you ever manage to conceive it? And on top of that, you pay your electric bill, call people on the phone, feed your pets and yourself. You enter a metal thing that flies through the air from one place to another. It is an extremely complicated mandala. In addition, you are constantly moving through a chain of lives in six major realms in a completely un-predictable pattern.

The generation of the deity is far easier. It is natural and spontaneous because it is not built on the assumption of ego. It is not constructed of tension because the deity is understood to be real but insubstantial. It is understood to be that which does not need to be constantly maintained. The tension of survival associated with desire and egocentricity is not there. With the continuation of this practice and the skill developed through good concentration and an effortless effort, all perception is purified. The five senses are not given their lead. They are not permitted to feed back information that satisfies the need of self to be self. They are purified by the mind naturally arising as the deity. The karma of endless cycles of birth and death is purified at last.

Awakening the Deities Within

Generating the Deity