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Using The Power Of The Imagination
By Elizabeth Penning

One of the traditional forms of meditation is visualization, which involves the imaginative powers of the mind. Imagination is that mental faculty that is able to form concepts or images in the absence of sensory data. As the yogins of India and the magi of Europe have known for a long time, and as Carl Gustav Jung has rediscovered for Western psychology, imagination is the psyche's most powerful capacity. Unlike dreams or reveries, the yogic imaginative visualizations are consciously structured, are controlled processes, and have a specific purpose: to liberate, in psychoanalytic language, the practitioner from the clutches of the unconscious.

Broadly put, through our imagination we are able to create images, which need not necessarily be visual. These images can involve sound, touch, smell, or movement. Most people find it easiest to generate visual and auditory images, and the former can have an especially potent influence on the physical body. In most cases, however, the imagery we create tends to lack vividness and vitality. Therefore yogic practitioners, like initiates of the magical arts, spend A great deal of time strengthening their faculty of imagination. This enables them to create vivid three-dimensional images of their mediation object and hold them stably for a prolonged period of time, so that these images can have a profound and long lasting effect on the psyche and even the body.

Visualization is particularly cultivated in Tantrism, especially the Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism of Tibet. Here visualization of specific leities is thought to complement and surpass the practice of the virtue perfections (paramita) such as generosity, patience, and compassion, as taught in the Sutras of Mahayana Buddhism. This so-called Deity Yoga (deva-yoga) is explained in the Buddhist Tantras as combining both wisdom (prajna} and method (upaya).

Deity Yoga is the essential practice of what is known as the High- est Yoga Tantra (anuttara-yoga-tantra), which proceeds in two phases. The first phase is the stage of generation (utpatti-krama), consisting in the creation of vivid visualizations first of a deity apart from oneself and then of oneself as identical with that deity. The second phase is the stage of completion {nishpanna-krama) in which the transformation achieved on the imaginative or mental level crystallizes to the point of concreteness. First, one actually becomes the visualized deity and in due course realizes the deity's and one's own ultimate nature, which is the Buddha nature.

Author Details:
Elizabeth Penning, copywriter for various web sites writing articles about natural health and other related subjects for sites such as the A-Z of and Information Junkie.

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