Tantric visualization practices at their best make powerful use of this fact. By definition, if you have visualized a 3D intelligent entity that is doing its own thing, you are in strong concentration in the fourth jhana and it is just a question of seeing the Three Characteristics of that to get some serious insight.
“Psychic powers” can also arise spontaneously from insight practice, particularly at stage 4. The Arising and Passing Away and sometimes at stage 11. Equanimity (see The Progress of Insight later). While the fourth jhana is traditionally said to be the basis for the psychic powers, simply getting so strongly into the first jhana that you can no longer perceive a body coupled with the previous intention to have these experiences can sometimes be a sufficient to make them occur. Get really into the jhana, leave it, resolve to have these experiences, and see what happens. Repeat as necessary. If that doesn’t work, learn to visualize the colors white, blue, red and yellow clearly as stable experiences and then repeat the above instruction. If that doesn’t work, find the rare teacher who will actually guide you into this esoteric territory. Better, find a good teacher before getting into this territory!
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If all of that is not enough, here is my best advice for working with the powers formally. Once you have enough concentration to get into hard fourth jhana with a range of objects and colors, here’s traditional Buddhist Magick 101 with some practical points thrown in:
1. Make the bases clean, meaning bathe quietly and put on clean clothes. This instruction helps but is not necessary.
2. Find a suitable place to work, meaning a place that is quiet and free of distractions. If you can’t find such a place or you feel compelled to do magick in less than optimal circumstances
(such as in public on the fly), obviously skip this step.
3. Think the whole thing through before you proceed. Never, ever skip this step if you can possibly help it. This step not only helps to keep you from seriously screwing up, it is actually part of the spell and a very important part of the set-up. Essential things to include are:
a. what you are asking for,
b. how to phrase it or intend it, being as specific as you
possibly can,
c. why you are asking for that, particularly if there is some more fundamental desire you hope to fulfill that you
should focus on while letting the less important specifics
happen as they may,
d. exactly who or what is involved,
e. and every single possible good and bad ramification of
what you are about to do that you can possibly think of.
Really take your time with this one, visualizing the whole
thing out in time and space as far as it could possibly go.
f. Note: if the ethics of what you are going to do feel at all strange in any part of your being, particularly your heart
or gut, you probably need to go back up to the top and
rethink the whole thing while looking at the problem
from other points of view.
4. Rise from the first to the fourth jhana. Build each one up carefully and fully along the way so that you have a good
foundation from which to work. Those who can access the
formless realms (discussed shortly) might rise all the way
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through them as well. Then leave the fourth (or eighth) jhana and formally intend to make whatever you want to occur
happen, which is to say let the full energy of your intention fly without hesitation or restraint. If you are going to do this, make sure you commit to it, which is why the third step is so
important.
5. Let it go and see what happens.
One last warning on the powers: doing these things in the private is one thing, doing magickal things in public that involve other people is something else entirely. If you do overt public magick or discrete public magick, you are bound to run into someone else’s paradigms, values, and sets of beliefs about how the world is and what is possible that are not in alignment with your own. The potential for bad reactions from others is very real for a large number of reasons. Consider the long, strange relationship between the Western mainstream point of view and everything from witchcraft to crime solving psychics. In short, if you do formal magick and anyone else finds out about it or thinks they were affected by it, be ready for the possibility of serious backlash and fallout.
The formless realms are the last option one can follow from the fourth jhana, and they can definitely be very useful for putting things into perspective and sorting out a few details about “awareness” (as will be mentioned below). Before I go into the formless realms, I will digress for just a moment to a brief and belated discussion of...
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Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
22.NO-SELF VS. TRUE SELF
This is one of those questions that tends to arise when Hinduism or Christianity come in contact with Buddhism. However, perhaps it should arise more when Buddhism is thinking about itself. I include this discussion here because it addresses some points that are useful for later and previous discussions. True Self and no-self are actually talking about the same thing, just from different perspectives. Each can be useful, but each is an extreme. Truly, the truth is a Middle Way between these and is indescribable, but I will try to explain it anyway in the hope that it may support actual practice. It may seem odd to put a chapter that deals with the fruits of insight practices in the middle of descriptions of the samatha jhanas, but hopefully when you read the next chapter you will understand why it falls where it does.
For all you intellectuals out there, the way in which this chapter is most likely to support practice is to be completely incomprehensible and thus useless. Ironically, I have tried to make this chapter very clear, and in doing so have crafted a mess of paradoxes. In one of his plays, Shakespeare puts philosophers on par with lawyers. In terms of insight practice, a lawyer who is terrible at insight practices but tries to do them anyway is vastly superior to a world-class philosopher who is merely an intellectual master of this theory but practices not at all.
Remember that the spiritual life is something you do and hopefully understand but not some doctrine to believe. Those of you who are interested in the formal Buddhist dogmatic anti-dogma should check out the particularly profound suttas, #1, The Root of All Things, in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, as well as sutta #1, The Supreme Net (What the Teaching is Not), in The Long Discourses of the Buddha.
Again, realize that all of this language is basically useless in the end and prone to not making much sense. Only examination of our reality will help us to actually directly understand this, but it will not be in a way accessible to the rational mind. Nothing in the content of our thoughts can really explain the experience of the understanding I am about to point to, though there is something in the direct experience of those thoughts that might reveal it. Everything that I am about to try to explain
No-self vs. True Self
here can become a great entangling net of useless views without direct insight.
Many of the juvenile and tedious disputes between the various insight traditions result from fixation on these concepts and inappropriate adherence to only one side of these apparent paradoxes.
Not surprisingly, these disputes between insight traditions generally arise from those with little or no insight. One clear mark of the development of true insight is that these paradoxes lose their power to confuse and obscure. They become tools for balanced inquiry and instruction, beautiful poetry, intimations of the heart of the spiritual life and of one’s own direct and non-conceptual experience of it.