Laughing Man Magazine, Vol 8, NO 1, 1988
Visions Are a Kind of Washing
from a talk by Adi Da Samraj, July 14, 1987
ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is generally assumed in all traditions that because death is such a profound process, such a profound transition, help can change things – the help of others, the help of your tradition, but also the help of your own intention or exercise during that time. Because death is so unusual, so profound, it is assumed that a new option has somehow been given to you because you are dying. It is true that changes can occur because you are dying. But most basically what you have realized through the total exercise of your life will determine the event, will certainly be enforced there, even though you have something of an option through help of all kinds and through your own endeavor. In the process, there is also, of course, the option of further growth in the death process and afterward.
PRACTITIONER: You said the other evening that a Tibetan Buddhist may actually not go through the process of dying described in the Tibetan doctrine.
ADI DA SAMRAJ:: He or she may have the prescribed Tibetan visions, and – who knows? You could have any kind of vision. Nonetheless, your psyche is predetermined by how you have lived altogether. As you know, because I was brought up as a Westerner in this life, when I was having all kinds of subtle visions, particularly in the earlier period of my mature sadhana, I had many very powerful Christian visions that required response on my part. But then they were understood to be just the local psyche of this life’s adaptation. I therefore played it all with some humor, and they passed. But I did not have only Christian visions. I had visions that belonged to all traditions, even visions that did not seem to relate to any tradition at all.
The psyche has many layers, and the local psyche – in other words, the psyche you have developed by adaptation in your present lifetime, the psyche of the basic tradition in which you were brought up – is the first layer, if you will. Therefore, when any of you may begin to develop a visionary life, if you should enter into the ascending stages, you will tend originally to have visions that are associated with the traditional adaptation of your childhood to begin with. They will pass, and other visions will also very likely appear. But the first level of the psyche will manifest itself. This is why you must have a humorous, if you will, or truly serious, understanding of the whole nature of vision itself. It is not something that appears for its own sake. It is really a kind of washing, a phenomenon of purification.
The phenomena associated with the ascending process are most basically signs of purification of the psyche, the relinquishment of psychic limitations. You will tend, therefore, to have visions associated with your earlier life adaptation, the expectations you might have psychically, from the most gross and most ordinary level of your adaptation while alive. Then, if you have become familiar with other traditions or visionary or mystical possibilities, they will also appear. If you take them seriously, hold on to them, seek them out, stay with them, look for them each time you meditate, look for them in dreams, they will persist. But if you practice the Way of the Heart and if your orientation toward such phenomena is the correct one, the liberating one, then they will be allowed to arise and pass away. They have their term, and after they have arisen and passed away, (he snaps his fingers) that is it, dead, corpse there, terminal, the end of that. When this washing occurs, therefore, to some basic degree that is the end of such visions and the end of the implications of that type. □
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