where do you place it? Before the light radiates, there is not even a trace of
Buddhas or sentient beings—where do you find the mountains, rivers, and
lands? “
This exercise stops random imagination and empties routine
compulsion by stopping them at the source.
The teaching of Pure Land Buddhism expresses a similar experience by
saying that one single-minded recollection of the Buddha of Infinite
Light erases eighty eons of sins. The idea is that habits of false thought
exist only to the extent that they are continually tended, groomed, and
renewed. Deprived of center-stage attention, these habits lose their
power over the mind.
6. Being rhythmical, breathing is thought of as going through four seasons
with each breath. One of the founders of the Complete Reality school
describes the intensification of time in the process of spiritual incubation in
Taoist alchemy as the experience of the mental equivalent of thirty-six
thousand years within one year of concentration. This represents a process
of accelerated conscious evolution.
7. Here "conformity" is defined as pursuing objects. The idea of a
"netherworld" is not confined in this context to a state after death, but
stands for a condition of depletion in which there is no more creativity left
and one lives through sheer force of habit.
