Five flasks are used to symbolise the washing away of dross that has accumulated to make an individual blind to her own potential. There is the evolution of the mandala, or a spiral movement involved in the empowerment process, where the starting point is identical with the ending result – each flask illustrates the interdependence or correspondence with the structure and function of the flask.
To start, the flask in the center is lifted above the initiate’s head and a drop of water serves to cleanse the dynamic regime. The first utterance is pronounced at the same time:
This flask of Being’s possibilising dynamics in it’s field-like expanse
Is filled with the natural water of Being’s openness/nothingness radiance
My dear child, being empowered by it
May you understand the abidingness of the field-like expanse.
The field-like expanse is the source of all meanings.
The next, eastern-point flask is raised to the initiate’s heart, representing the mental/spiritual dimension, with the words:
This flask of Being’s vitalising core intensity that is something not born, thus that will not die
It is filled with the natural substance of it’s incessantness.
My dear child, being empowered by it
May you understand Being’s reality in not posing any danger.
This is the dynamic of the mirror-like pristine awareness mode. The vibrant dimension of pure experience that is without birth and open like the sky, an ecstatic intensity that does never cease, this is the presencing of Being’s pure actuality. This complementarity and indivisibility of the field and it’s excitation as experience is what is meant and is illustrated by the flask and the water in it. Gunther highlights that via the establishing of a relationship between subjective, inner reality and objective, outer reality, access to a holistic and self-consistent reality is gained.
The next, southern-point flask is lifted to the throat, symbolising the dynamic regime of the linguistic, symbolic:
This flask of Being’s self-existing pristine awareness in action
Is filled with the natural substances of objects and sensuous pleasures.
My dear child empowered by it
May you come to possess the power of your thoughts, becoming spontaneously realised.
This empowerment consists in exploring the wealth of qualities the world holds, a venturing into what has always been there, but has been un-noticed, in being there. From this vantage point, all that we ever need is available to us, and everything that comes into existence must be consistent with itself and everything else.
Gunther notes here the sheer ecstasy that intensifies, with each level of the initiation.
At which point I must admit - I’m so easily carried, on words. :-)
The next western-point flask is raised to the navel – for the dynamic regime of the person’s physical/physiological dimension, which has been set acourse by the sexual act in excitement, plateau, climax and resolution, the whole of which has a physical and a spiritual dimension.
This flask, of Being’s impassibility, that is not something that has been born,
Is filled with the streaming profusion of bliss supreme
My dear child, being empowered by this
May you come to possess the power of a passion that is not subjectively appropriated.
This empowerment takes us to bliss supreme, which is the impassibility of pure experience that is without birth but has been so since time before time. The fundmental forces moving through the hierarchically organised dynamic regimes shifts energy, from descending into details, to ascending into enriched meaningfulness, as well as damming up the psychospiritual potential, which is the bliss supreme.
The process ends in pure creativity at the northern-most point, extending over all levels and establishing it’s own dynamic dimension, with the words:
This flask symbolising Being’s pristine awareness in its insubstantiality
Is filled with the substances of the five kinds of motility that never stop.
My dear child being empowered by it
May you come to possess the power of Being’s superb creativity, in all it’s completeness.
What is meant here is illustrated in the complementarity/indivisibility of the flask and the water, the vibrant dimension of the in-substantiability of Being’s pristine awareness as a function of it’s ecstatic intensity, that acts in ultimate emancipation, since time before time.
There is a subtle distinction, threaded through here, between understanding and possessing. The possibilising dynamics of the whole mirrors itself in us, and we are now called upon to act out the possibilities of what we see, so that they become our assets in the true sense of the word. The power which is our attention is drawn by the empowerments, and roused into self-realisation we possess and then understand, in, and of, ourselves.
Outwardly, by having acquired and possessing the power of experiencing, this enables us to symbolically recreate the presencing of the condition of dissolving into supramundane reals;
Inwardly, by having acquired and possessing the power of experiencing the ‘phantasmal’ body, the material concretisation of beliefs about one’s body dissolve into sheer lucency;
Arcanely, by having acquired and possessing the power of oneself as Being’s vastness and ecstatic intensity, the trend of being divided against oneself and slipping into mistaken identifications stops by itself.
The empowerment seeks to effect a transition from the narrowly circumscribed, nonimaginative discursive mind to a place of lowering of conceptual restraints, releasing into emancipatory dynamics. Imagination is indispensible for coming to an understanding of the self, in the perception of a gestalt structure, embodying a meaningfully organised experience. The cognitive principle is immanent, not in a solid spatial structure, but in the way the system organises, renews and resolves. The meaning rich gestalt, in own-space, ends us where we started.
In Being’s core intensity that is Being’s superdiaphaneity that has no name
There is neither possession nor non-possession.
Non-understanding gives rise to duality.
Ref:
Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.
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