Vajrayana is the creative process

the 'real magic' of Vajrayana seems to be the way it conjures with personal possibility

early on in my apprenticeship with the Aro lineage, a friend of mine asked 'Do you want to become a mahasiddha and fly around and stuff'

I thought, "who wouldn't?", but also wondered if this was missing the point

Vajrayana seems to offer something which is beyond:

• hope and fear
• praise and blame
• gain and loss
• meeting and parting

"Vajrayana does not concern itself with salvation and damnation as polarized possibilities -- or with heaven and hell as polarised locations. Rather, Vajrayana engages with neurotic energy as the fundamental creative malleability of the situation in which human strength and weakness -- openness and constriction -- become inextricably woven as the energetic context of liberation"

I guess this statement could seem abstract if you aren't already a vajrayana practitioner -- but to me it suggests something about feasting on the apparent paradoxes of life, the pain and pleasure inherent in every situation -- something totally unconcerned with conventional viewpoints or rules about 'how to be & what it is & why'

precision and passion

to me, Vajrayana seems to be the recognition that reality itself is this continual series of creative opportunities.

There isn't any sort of persistent personage or enduring identity, you keep changing, your environment keeps changing, no single thing endures -- but the play of form dissolving into emptiness and emptiness producing form is endless -- nothing endures. no thing endures.

that could be terrifying, that could be ecstatic, that could be utterly beyond description

buddhism

buddhism as a term doesn't point to a single, unitary religion as such

you could say that we use the term 'buddhism' because 'totally clear, awake awareness-ism' doesn't roll off the tongue so nice

because form is limitless in it's arising (things are always changing, never the same), there are all sorts of methods for realizing that form and emptiness are inseparable

the methods all fall under the general cultural umbrella term of 'Buddhism', but it seems important to say there's no belief there in the one-true-way

dharma means "as it is". The teachings point to reality "as it is", and the practices help one see reality "as it is", and that's all there is to it

that could be disappointing, because it dispenses with any illusions & delusions about what reality is

that could be quite freeing, because there is no energy spent contriving or coercing reality into something other than what it already is