RE: Diety yoga question

Rousseau Matt, modified 1 Year ago at 1/8/23 4:54 PM
Created 1 Year ago at 8/28/22 9:47 AM

Diety yoga question

Posts: 136 Join Date: 5/1/22 Recent Posts
Is diety yoga the act of using  a particular diety as the object of meditation  and then entering jhana (probably up to fourth) on it. Could somebody start to embody the powers of that diety  after the meditation and integrate that into their life?   For example meditation  on Jesus and then ha ING the power to heal?      Could we make up our own archetypes  of dieties with special qualities.? 
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Chris M, modified 1 Year ago at 8/28/22 9:56 AM
Created 1 Year ago at 8/28/22 9:56 AM

RE: Diety yoga question

Posts: 5117 Join Date: 1/26/13 Recent Posts
Matt, many answers can be obtained at The Google Machine:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Deity_yoga
T DC, modified 1 Year ago at 8/28/22 11:27 AM
Created 1 Year ago at 8/28/22 11:27 AM

RE: Diety yoga question

Posts: 516 Join Date: 9/29/11 Recent Posts
Diety yoga is completely unrelated to jhana practice, it involves visualization of yourself as a particular diety (and chanting, mantras, etc) in order to spark personal identification with that dietys' enlightened qualities and thus speed ones own personal realization of those qualities and the awakened experience. 

Could it potentially be fused with the jhanas - sure, why not.  Would that result in some kind of genuine powers transferance - unlikely.  Think of the experience of the enlightened qualities evoked in diety yoga more along the lines of metta - pleasant, beneficial, and sometimes powerful, but not a guaranteed thunderclap-style transformative experience.

Truly the quickest and most surefire way to "powers" and actual transformative mystical experience is via the "thunderclap" of insight.  And if diety yoga is what helps get you there, more power to you.
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Dream Walker, modified 1 Year ago at 8/28/22 3:02 PM
Created 1 Year ago at 8/28/22 3:02 PM

RE: Diety yoga question

Posts: 1657 Join Date: 1/18/12 Recent Posts
Matt Jon Rousseau
Is diety yoga the act of using  a particular diety as the object of meditation  and then entering jhana (probably up to fourth) on it. Could somebody start to embody the powers of that diety  after the meditation and integrate that into their life?   For example meditation  on Jesus and then HAVING the power to heal?      Could we make up our own archetypes  of dieties with special qualities.? 


There are so many ways to approach this question. Depending on the results you want there would be different approaches. In the case of your example you are assuming that you DON"T HAVE the power to do healing. If you used an approach that allowed you to believe that you COULD heal with strong "intent and concentration"; that being the important parts to doing magick, then the likelihood of success would obviously be greater than not.

Daniel Ingram's post discussing aspects of magick.-
https://www.integrateddaniel.info/magick-and-the-brahma-viharas

A couple other of his posts related-
https://www.integrateddaniel.info/a-z-blog/2016/8/3/the-magickal-shamanic-imperial-ethical-and-tan
https://www.integrateddaniel.info/a-z-blog/2013/4/13/some-fun-party-questions

There are a variety of ways to look at this-
Traditional ways within Buddhism
Shamanism
New age
Jungian archetypes
Dan Browns book about mixing classic Tibetan deity practice with attachment therapy
Shinzen Young's experience of awakening from the tradition he did
Tom Campbell's explanations within his book 'My Big Toe'
etc
(Just off the top of my head) 

Any of these would be a long conversation with various belief systems involved
Dig in, I've had fun learning about these things.

Good Luck,
~D
rj k, modified 1 Year ago at 8/30/22 3:38 AM
Created 1 Year ago at 8/30/22 3:38 AM

RE: Diety yoga question

Posts: 2 Join Date: 6/20/22 Recent Posts
To add to what has been said above, deity yoga also has a "completion" stage in which you dissolve the visualization and identification with the deity, and rest in emptiness. When you do this, you notice that the entire experience you just had, in which you visualized and became the deity, was an empty construct of your mind. Secondly, being your normal self is also an empty construct of your mind. With that insight, you can see that the deity-ness is accessible to you at all times, and doesn't depend on special states. All experience is shaped by beliefs and assumptions, and in deity yoga we observe ourselves taking on some very powerful beliefs and assumptions in order to see how this process works.

Could you meditate on Jesus? I suppose you could, yes. But in deity yoga it's important for you to recognize that the deity is an empty mental construction. You are not truly contacting a being from a spirit world, or appealing to someone who resides in heaven, or having a vision of an alternate dimension. You are producing deity-ness in yourself using your mind. Depending on your relationship to Jesus, it might be difficult for you to think of him in that way. It might seem disrespectful to think that you can spontaneously manifest Jesus-ness without external help, or that your Jesus-experience is an empty mental construct.

Perhaps you could use an archetype, but Jung's concept of an archetype is that they are real things that truly exist "deep within" our consciousness. This might also make it more difficult to see them as empty.

In my (limited) experience the Tibetan deities aren't that difficult to work with. I would suggest trying that before trying to come up with alternatives.

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