10-28-2010, 12:00 AM
This is from the wonderful book 'Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism' by Anagarika Govinda.. This bit highlighted for me how, when you are on the path of living consciously, you can often find yourself living in a completely different world from people who are not committed to that path.
The leap over the chasm, which yawns between our intellectual surface
consciousness and the intuitive supra-personal depth-consciousness, is
represented in the ecstatic dance of the 'blood drinking dieties',
embraced by Dakinis.
The
inspirational impulse of the Dakinis drives us from the protected, but
narrowly fenced circle of our illusory personality and our habitual
thought, until we burst the boundaries of this circle and of our ego
hood in the ecstatic thrust towards the realisation of totality.
In this ecstatic thrust, all bonds, all worldly fetters, all
prejudices and illusions are destroyed, all conventional concepts are
swept away, all craving and clinging is cut off at the root, past and
future are extinguished, the power of karma broken, and the Great Void
is experienced as the eternal present and ultimate Reality and
Suchness.
The violence and power of this breaking through can only be
visualised by a supra-human demoniacal many dimensional being....Such a
being cannot appear other than terrifying on the plane of mundane
consciousness, because in the warlike symbols which it wields, and which
indicate the inner struggle, the worldly man does not see tools of
liberation, but weapons of destruction, which annihilate all that
belongs to his world. They are represented in the Bardo Thodol as the five Herukas...
The leap over the chasm, which yawns between our intellectual surface
consciousness and the intuitive supra-personal depth-consciousness, is
represented in the ecstatic dance of the 'blood drinking dieties',
embraced by Dakinis.
The
inspirational impulse of the Dakinis drives us from the protected, but
narrowly fenced circle of our illusory personality and our habitual
thought, until we burst the boundaries of this circle and of our ego
hood in the ecstatic thrust towards the realisation of totality.
In this ecstatic thrust, all bonds, all worldly fetters, all
prejudices and illusions are destroyed, all conventional concepts are
swept away, all craving and clinging is cut off at the root, past and
future are extinguished, the power of karma broken, and the Great Void
is experienced as the eternal present and ultimate Reality and
Suchness.
The violence and power of this breaking through can only be
visualised by a supra-human demoniacal many dimensional being....Such a
being cannot appear other than terrifying on the plane of mundane
consciousness, because in the warlike symbols which it wields, and which
indicate the inner struggle, the worldly man does not see tools of
liberation, but weapons of destruction, which annihilate all that
belongs to his world. They are represented in the Bardo Thodol as the five Herukas...