Last month, I gave an overview of vajrayana. One of the defining characteristics of vajrayana practice is transformation, transformation of how we experience life, transformation of thoughts, feelings and sensations, and transformation of basic energies in the body.
The purpose of transformation is to move the energies in your system to a higher level. When the energy in attention is at a higher level than, say, an ordinary thought, you are not distracted by the coming and going of the thought. In addition, when you experience thought without distraction (this is not the same as observing thoughts), the energy of thinking is released and is available to power attention. The same holds for reactive emotions and deeper patterns, such as the basic spiritual longings for eternal life, purity, universal selfhood or bliss. Like the warmth of the sun melting a piece of ice, higher levels of energy break up the blocks and structures that cloud and distort direct awareness. In doing so, however, they put us in touch with our internal material. As that internal material releases, the energy in it often generates energy imbalances and these imbalances may show up in dreams, in inexplicable body sensations, in strange and powerful emotions and even physical or mental disturbances. In Tibetan culture, these experiences were often attributed to demons, and the practitioner would do protector practice to address them. In Western culture, they are more likely to be interpreted as medical or psychological problems, but psychotherapy, traditional Western medicine and other methodologies are often unable to address the imbalances effectively.
Most protectors are the stuff of nightmares. They are clad in tiger skin shawls, elephant hide skirts, sorcerer's robes, bone ornaments, jewelry, and garlands of dripping severed heads. They hold various weapons and tools, choppers, nooses, axes, death sticks, bags of pestilence, and so on. They usually have bodies that are dark blue or black, flaming red hair, bloodshot eyes, and bared canines. They ride rabid bears, snake-eating hawks, mad horses, etc. They are associated with charnel grounds and other frightening places.
There is something disturbing and fascinating about the protectors - gruesome, fearsome, even frightening. They represent something that is profoundly true or real and, as is often the case when you meet and accept what is difficult and true, mind and body relax. That relaxation is key to addressing the energy imbalances that transformation practices may induce.
While I won't try to give any explanation, my own experience is that in spending time with these nightmarish figures, forming a relationship with them through your imagination, you are somehow forming a relationship with the dark, unreasoning and unreasonable aspects of life on the one hand and the dark, unreasoning and unreasonable parts of your own psyche on the other. Thus, when you encounter serious intractable situations in your life, you are somehow able to meet them with awareness and you do what needs to be done, directly, without thinking. Your ability to do so, however, depends on your prior training. You need to have mastered technique so that it is there when you need it.
The protectors are charged with creating conditions conducive to awakening and dispelling conditions not conducive to awakening. When facing internal eruptions or external conditions for which you have no explanation or understanding, you have to meet them. The protectors are your allies in these situations and they fulfill their charge through the four awakening activities. Chögyam Trungpa made explicit the connection between the four awakening activities and conflict, describing them as four stages in conflict: pacification, enrichment, magnetization and destruction. These translations emphasize the results of action. An alternative translation may be helpful, one that puts the emphasis on method. First approach the situation calmly and give things a chance to work out on their own. If the problem persists, then expand the picture - take more time, for instance. If the problem continues, then use your personal power to compel a resolution. This may take the form of saber rattling, possibility, or seduction or making the person an offer he or she can't refuse. Finally, if compelling doesn't work, you move to force, using force to end the situation or the aspect of the relationship in which the conflict arose.
In protector practice, you use sorcery or magic to implement these four kinds of activity. Here, you must have complete confidence that, in performing these rituals, something will happen. One might call this will, but without it, there is no energy to transform or direct. You use the forms of the protector rituals to focus your attention, intention and will to change what is happening - imagined presence (the way the protector is depicted in images), spells (the mantras associated with the protector, sigils (the seed syllables associated with the protector and the various forms of awakening activity), symbols (the implements the protector holds) and the drama of the ritual itself - to create the conditions that will transform how the internal material or external conditions are arising. And, if you have the ability, something may happen. You may have dreams or even a vision, you may have intuitions as to what to do even though they make little rational sense, you may find a calmness and clarity that allows you to see the situation in a different way, or something seemingly out of the blue happens to change the whole dynamic. There is often not a clear cut cause and effect relationship between what you do and what happens. In invoking protectors, then, you must be prepared to make use of whatever happens, because what does happen may not be your idea of what was meant to happen. Your commitment is to awakening, and in invoking the protectors, you are committing to use whatever happens to wake up.
Protector rituals typically have many parts. Each part is a way of activating their energy and power. By way of example, here are two: obligation and investiture.
In obligation, you put the protectors in obligation to you by giving them what they most desire, offerings that represent your commitment to awakening. Obligation rituals probably evolved out of ancient sacrificial rituals, such as we find in the Odyssey. Odysseus and other Greek leaders routinely sacrificed large numbers of animals, burning them on sacred fires, as offerings to the gods of Olympus. Animals were precious and the Greeks demonstrated their commitment and seriousness by sacrificing what was most precious to put the gods in obligation to them. In the protector rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, no animals are sacrificed or even imagined as being sacrificed, but the principle remains the same - you make copious offerings of what is highly valued by you to put the protectors in obligation to you.
In invoking the protectors this way, you don't control what happens. When the king sends a general out to take care of a problem at the borders of the realm, the general goes into the unknown and deals with whatever he or she finds there. And whatever he finds, he takes care of it. Once the king has dispatched the general, the king is no longer in control. The general may even discover that the king is the source of the problems and may turn around and depose the king. This is essential to understand. Once you unleash these forces, you have to meet whatever happens and use it to wake up, because that is what you asked for. You may find yourself in a nightmare and you better be prepared to be awake in the nightmare. When you're not awake in a nightmare, you have a problem.
The investiture ritual takes this principle a step further and is usually performed when there is special need. It is a magnetization or compelling practice, magnifying the power of the protector to bring everything you experience under his or her influence. As you present offerings to the protector, you imagine the protector growing larger and larger, more and more powerful, until he or she has the power to compel whatever you need to happen in your life for you to wake up.
Through all of this, it is good to remember that in vajrayana, once you commit to awakening, how you think your life should unfold becomes irrelevant. Indeed, how your life does unfold becomes largely irrelevant, because in committing to awakening you are committing to making use of whatever happens in your life to wake up. In fact, it doesn't matter what happens - you are going to use it. Period.
