New practices.

 

I'm glad I'm reading The Purpose and Practice of Meditation slowly. It's so rich and dense.

There's a practice called Kasina. You get a real colorful dot in front of you and you stare at it a long time. Then you close your eyes and stare at it. And the goal is to get it to a point where you see the internal dot as vivid as you see the real dot. I'm trying to do that to work on my visualization meditation.

Sangharakshita has visualization meditations, including Vajrasatva, the primordial Buddha, and one of his teachers said that saying the 100 syllable mantra 20 times a day is good for purifying oneself. There is also a sweet visualization. It got me looking at visible mantra to see the seed syllable. I want to get a hard copy of that book, in case the site goes down. The internet seems to have this illusion that it is permanent, but I don't think it is. I'm pretty sure people pay monthly fees to keep websites up.

On my first retreat, which was like 9 days, at midnight on New Year's Eve we chanted the Vajrasatva mantra at midnight. I learned it off a recording someone passed to me, which I have since lost.

There are all these special little things, that are hard to get, and disappear quickly. I have this weird mindset where I want to collect things in my brain in case I'm in a prison camp. I have a puja book that was typed out, and is now hard to find. I have lots of little puja things that I got here and there. Even pujas are hard to come by. There's an esoteric one included in The Purpose and Practice of Meditation, and I can't remember why I didn't think I would ever do it, but I was excited to see it. Anyway, hopefully Bodhipaksa will keep that page up and the website will be up for a while, hopefully.

I had the mantra memorized, but I found that I don't have it memorized at the time. I'm going to re-memorize it, and try to do it 20x a day. And I want to see if I can really see a visualization. I think these things have come to me just when I needed them.

Sangharakshita says westerners tend to want to try newer and newer practices, and talk a lot about meditation, while the Tibetans he knew tended to just do practice and talk amongst spiritual friends. I've been doing metta and mindfulness of breathing for 14 years and they are my 2 core practices, and can be expanded to the Brahma Vihara's and the 14 stage Mindfulness of breathing on a retreat or intense practice day, but I'd like to try these two new practices, to add in.

May all being be happy, may all being be well.