Experimenting With Visualization
 

Hello ladies and gents,

I'd like to talk about a friend I made today. His name is Vajrapani and I hear he looks something like this

Wait, don't leave yet! I promise I'm going somewhere with this. As you may have figured, I'm an analytical and religiously disinclined person. I don't care much for faith and prefer experience to intuition, intuition to conjecture and conjecture to blind acceptance. To me, reasonable skepticism is just the mental equivalent of chewing one's food.

So what's with the angry blue man then, you ask. I answer, he's an awesome visualization aid. This morning I stumbled across some interesting information on Buddhism and I found myself quite liking the character of Vajrapani. Just for kicks, I a rather peculiar visualization-based meditation based around him. Know what? I felt great afterwards. I had a strong sense of clarity and an abundance of proactive energy. I was even in a very long conversation with someone I find it very draining to talk to today and felt none the worse for wear even after making some rather confrontational remarks that I feel I might not have said otherwise.

At any rate I'm still a Deist as far as religious labels are concerned but I like this form of meditation and I'm going to stick with it for a bit, experiment, learn and profit. If anyone else on this neck of the forum is a nosy bloke like me and wants some links to my reading material, I'll just put it up in a subsequent post.

Cheers,
Ted/Mike/Whatever

This Vajrapani deity and meditation sounds interesting and effective. I'd be interested in any links you post for sure. Or maybe I'll just google Vajrapani and see what I can see. Thanks for the heads up!

http://www.wildmind.org/mantras/figures/vajrapani
True Buddha School Net English Homepage

The first link is a little bit about him and the second is the meditation I tried. Again, I'm not really an adherent to any religion but I find the imagery associated with him and his theme of "virya", proactive and compassionate power or action, resonates with me. And it doesn't hurt that my inner child thinks that a giant blue man who likes being on fire is inherently awesome :)