The Prayer to Grandmaster Wong

With the greatest reverence and respect,
I humbly and sincerely request divine Grandmaster Wong,
To hear this prayer and to grant what is right in His wisdom,
For the good of myself,
For the good of my family and friends,
For the good of my ancestors and children,
For the good for all future generations,
For the good of all the souls related to me,
For the good of all sentient beings,
Now and forever.

OM AH HUM! OM AH HUM! OM AH HUM!
 
May all beings be free of physical suffering and enjoy good health,
May all beings be free of mental suffering and enjoy serenity,
May all beings be free of poverty and enjoy great prosperity,
May all beings be free of negative karmic connections and enjoy happy relationships,
May all beings be free of obstacles and enjoy smooth lives,
May all beings be free of delusion and see wisdom,
May all beings be free of struggle and achieve effortlessness,
May all beings be free of attachment and achieve enlightenment.
 
May all beings discover the right view,
May all beings have the right intention,
May all beings engage in the right speech,
May all beings choose the right actions,
May all beings exemplify the right livelihood,
May all beings engage in the right endeavours,
May all beings achieve the right awareness,
May all beings attain the right concentration.
 
Please bless all the world leaders and spiritual leaders with wisdom and insight.
Please bless the earth and help it to achieve balance.
Please heal the sick and the suffering.
Please alleviate poverty and teach people the true causes of wealth.
Please bless all people with happy and long lives.
Please provide abundant guidance to light the path.
Please save the beings lost in ignorance and delusion.
Please release the karmic burdens so enlightenment arrives.
Please save the souls of the dead so they may attain liberation.
Please bless all beings to ignite the compassion heart and to attain enlightenment.
 
Please guide me to do what is right in Divine wisdom,
When I pray, please come immediately,
And grant my prayers that are True and Correct,
Make ineffective any wrong doing or intention,
Purify the ignorant mind,
Please multiply the merit of my good deeds,
So that I can play my part according to Heaven’s Divine Will.

Divine Grandmaster Wong, please hear this humble prayer of a sincere aspirant and
grant what is right in your wisdom.
Please act as my representative to deliver this prayer to the appropriate Buddhas,
Bodhisattvas, deities and beings, so that all souls may be saved in the correct way and
Truth will prevail.
On this auspicious day and auspicious hour,
I maintain my faith and release this prayer to you.
I genuinely and sincerely mean what is in this prayer, and I continue to cultivate the wisdom sentiment in myself. I know that it is my sincere intention that allows this prayer to be fulfilled.
May the merit of this prayer go to _____________________.

OM AH HUM! OM AH HUM! OM AH HUM!

Karma and The Secret - Can a Butterfly Change its Spots?

Source/Copyright: Richard Bartz/Wikimedia

Yes, before you ask, that's a Leopard Lacewing butterfly in the picture. I could have used the real leopard but that particular saying was getting a little cliched.

So, I was at yet another PhotoReading event presented by my friend Marilyn Devonish yesterday and this issue did come up in passing. With all the hooha about The Secret, has anyone cared to observe the karmic consequences?

Kaye, what the heck does karma have to do with The Secret?

Rather a lot, actually. Basically, it impacts it in three ways:

1. If you're attempting to manifest something, your past manifestations will play a part in it. The old energetic blueprint will be active unless you know how to deactivate it. That's personal karma.

2. If your manifestation impacts the fabric of the sea of awareness (which it assuredly will, since by definition you are affecting the flow of energies when you manifest), you will be subject to the kickback from the ripple effects from that effect. And contrary to what you may intuitively think, doing good doesn't necessarily mean you get good back in the short run. It certainly pays to be good in the long run.

That's because you also have to deal with group or social karma. When you change something, you are stopping a karmic event. That's the same as hitting the brakes on a car headed off a cliff. In the long run you may save lives. In the short run you may have to deal with the attendant problems of the smoking brakes. Make sense?

3. If you are doing multiple manifestations that are not congruent with each other, you are self-sabotaging. The butterfly is a good example of this - nice wings, no? But to get the perfect design it has to get into a cocoon and build from scratch. Somehow people think this has nothing to do with The Secret. As Byron Katie would say, "Oh, honey..." If you like polka dots, wear polka dots, but drawing polka dots over a Van Gogh canvas is a bad idea. Trust me. Been there, done it, got the t-shirt.

So what do we do?

Learn to manage karma. It's rather dangerous to ignore it, even after one attains enlightenment. I believe that in Tibetan Buddhism it's considered a cardinal mistake. Anyway, karma management as I see it has to do with two things:

1. Pacification of obstacles - inner, outer and secret. Outer obstacles are the usual ones related to the material world. Inner ones are delusions that prevent us from effectively achieving our goals. Secret obstacles - unseen ones. I prefer the Alex Viefhaus (my great friend and mentor) version - a block isn't a block until it blocks you from something.

Obstacles can be pacified by energetically paying off and releasing past karmic "debts". They can be pacified by forgiveness, such as the Hawaiian ho-oponopono. It depends on the particular energetic knot you've tied, really. People are so creative about how they get themselves into trouble. The only one-hammer-fits-all-nails solution I have found to cutting these karmic knots is to master the essence of shunyata, or emptiness. See two posts previous to this one - my commentary of the Three Words Hitting The Essence.

For those so inclined, listening to the Vajrasattva Hundred Syllable Mantra helps too. So does understanding what it means, which is really a much more complex issue.

For those who wish for a shortcut, pray to Grandmaster Wong. I will put it up in the post after this one.

2. Attainment of merit. This one is interesting, because one first has to decide what merit is. Now, if one asks me, I must say I can't really say. However, I vaguely recall a line in a Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche book which says something like, "Merit is a sense of satisfaction." Unfortunately, I haven't been able to relocate that quotation. However, I think it is accurate. I don't think it is so much about accumulating brownie points, but to congruently hold an energetic state. This is done through offerings, through the energy of enjoyment, faith and trust. More on that another time.

Ask me questions if you want to know more.

Sometimes a Prayer is Enough

So I'm back in Malaysia on a short holiday. I was exhausted last week and was suffering from eyestrain, thanks to my work as a trader. The eyedrops weren't quite cutting it too. Anyway, one evening I decided it was time to get in some extra help. So, I knelt down and prayed for a solution, did the incense offering, and got on with life. Later that evening, the strain started in again. These things can be rather peculiar - it feels as if your eyes can't stay open any longer, and also objects start looking blurred. A very frustrating experience. Before I knew it, I found myself reaching over to my kit of massage sticks, which I keep next to my bed. Getting a few out, I started massaging certain key points around the eye area, something I had never thought to do before. Solved the thing in about 5 minutes. In fact, the nerves responded immediately. I've been giving myself repeat treatments but that one seems to have done the trick. Eyestrain gone for good.

Sometimes, a prayer is enough. Then, of course, when it happens, you say, "Thank you!"

A New Message for Spiritual Seekers - Enlightenment and Manifestation

As I was meditating last night, preparing for a flight back to Malaysia, I had another interesting insight that I believe is crucial to the next level of spiritual and inner development. I am sharing it here although I suspect that my convoluted language will do little to make it much clearer to anyone else but myself, and I doubt that even I know what I'm talking about, so if I sound even more vague than usual, many apologies.

The nature of enlightenment and the state of emptiness is certainly one that is attainable by the Buddhist path. You can see this stated in many sources, but lately I have come to favour the Three Words Hitting the Essence by, if, unless I'm much mistaken, Dza Patrul himself. If anyone is interested in the content of that particular text then I highly recommend reading the Dalai Lama's interpretation of it in the book Dzogchen. Although I usually prefer the words of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in this case I found the explanation remarkably exciting.

Keeping in mind the usual rules about not exposing the teachings of Dzogchen and Mahamudra to the uninitiated, I still feel that I would be out of order to offer my country boy explanation of the three "words", which are really three principles about the ultimate nature of emptiness and how to engage in it. The Dalai Lama talks about the View, Meditation and Action. The three words are about the view, which I believe is where all the action (no pun intended) is anyway. Meditation is about mixing the realisation of the pure nature of awareness with compassion. Action is about moving that whole process into physical expression. The realms of the bodhisattvas, in other words.

Back to the view. My version of it:
1. Get past all your thoughts and perceive the pure space of emptiness.
2. Make a commitment to sitting in that state of pure awareness no matter what.
3. As thoughts arise, meet them with your conscious awareness seated firmly in the awareness of 1. and 2. and they will dissolve naturally.

That's all I want to say about enlightenment today. I'm far more interested in making a slightly different point.

Once you actually have the connection with emptiness, the question arises as to how to maintain a relationship with the realisation. In this sense, I have come to suspect that the Dao De Jing, the bible of the Taoists, is more convenient. Whilst I am highly convinced that the Buddhist approach is a valid and useable path to enlightenment, once you have that realisation, engaging it in the unhindered manner which the Taoists encourage is much more interesting.

It has to do with grace in managing the energies. The enlightenment experience allows you the perspective of emptiness, a glance at the canvass upon which thought, perception and manifestation arise. Even if you have attained the view, thoughts still will arise. It remains for you to engage with them in grace, to dance with the energies as smoothly as you can and to remove any remaining fear or resistance to them. In this sense, I have often propounded in the past the use of the Feeling Exercise by Arnold Patent, particularly in the exploration of fear. However, once you have attained a certain facility, I am now beginning to be re-sold on Lester Levenson's approach of letting it go. Releasing is a powerful method of manifestation, and indeed it was the one that started me on my many adventures through the realms of advanced metaphysics. I find myself returning now with an awareness that sometimes, I thought I was releasing when in fact I was not. There was a deeper root. That root can be found by following the fear. However, once one knows how to follow the fear and is no longer threatened by it, one can directly perceive the cause of that fear and release on it directly. This is the essence of dancing with the feminine principle.

I believe that even though the higher level realisation has to do with that of emptiness, one ultimately has to return to engaging the energies. Even if one knows the mother, one has to engage the sons, is my response to the Dao De Jing's exhortation to stick with the mother. Why? Because we reside in the manifestative realm. It is no surprise that Lester and Byron Katie both sail through life and seemingly have miracles fall on their lap. It is a matter of releasing and then riding the energies with grace.

That is another point that was brought to my attention recently, and this may well be of interest to the "advanced" practitioners of "The Secret". If you put out energies at a very disembodied level, the energies struggle to manifest. In order to truly bring the energies into the physical realm, you have to actually ground them, and come more into your body, where you wish the manifestation to appear. Otherwise, it will tend to remain a floating thing in the spiritual realms. Interesting little point. I had not thought of it previously, but it agrees with my experiences of the past 15 years. Indeed, it agrees with all of my life experience.

The other point, which I did know about, but had tended to forget, was that in manifesting one had to access the feeling of the reality already complete. This would eventually mature into a knowing. But let us backtrack and observe that process. It first starts with an intention, as all things manifestative do, but then it engages the automatic aspect of the feminine principle. It is up to the manifester to notice the bumps and insecurities (fear is again a good signal to sniff after) and to resolve them. Also bring those energies into the physical realm. Release on them. Add the energies of faith and trust. Also add softness and warmth to it, or it will tend to become cold and impersonal. Be willing to be vulnerable. Finally, add humility, modesty and surrender. Compassion is always a useful one for taking bits of self out of the mix.

Then, enjoyment and relaxation. These last two are incredibly useful indicators of what is going on. If you are not enjoying yourself, there is a part of you that still takes this as a project, and you can be sure that there is fear associated with letting go and trusting the process in that. If you are not relaxed, then you are not relying enough on the feminine principle. In the lingo of an earlier era in my life, you are not programming into the subconscious, but instead relying on the conscious mind.

Happy exploration!

Vajrasattva Hundred Syllable Mantra

I just remembered that Jeddah once asked me to have this recorded for her, so here it is.

World in Union

This one is pretty close to my heart. I definitely want to rerecord it once I have had time to rehearse a little, but here's the rough initial version. I'll stop torturing your eardrums now.

Love Changes Everything

My excuse for the poor notes on this one is that it was completely unrehearsed. Yes, I did fudge it a little, but hey, if I do rerecord it I'll replace this one.