Talking about Deity Yoga with Peter McEwen
Host Michael Taft talks with meditation coach Peter McEwen about devotion in meditation practice, the need for stability in groundlessness, the ontological status of deities, common failure modes of practice, how to handle formless panic, the magical matrix, and the lasting power and beauty of deity yoga in the Vajrayana tradition.
Peter McEwen is a meditation coach and the founder of The Field, which offers training, community, and the demystification of basic contemplative practices. Peter McEwen has been an ordained Vajrayana yogi since 1993 under the tutelage of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, Lama Pema Dorje Rinpoche, and Bruce Tift. He has completed the traditional 3-year retreat curriculum of Vajrayana Buddhism.
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Full Transcript
Michael Taft: Welcome to Deconstructing Yourself, the podcast for metamodern mutants interested in meditation, awakening, Vajrayana, non-dual Shaiva Tantra, Care Bears, non-duality, consciousness, Jhanas, darkness practice, and much, much more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and in this episode, I’m speaking once again with Peter McEwen. Peter McEwen is a meditation coach and founder of The Field, which offers training, community, and the demystification of basic contemplative practices.
Peter McEwen has been an ordained Vajrayana yogi since 1993, under the tutelage of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, Lama Pema Dorje Rinpoche, and Bruce Tift. He has completed the traditional three-year retreat curriculum of Vajrayana Buddhism. And now I give you the episode that I call, Talking About Deity Yoga, with Peter McEwen.
Peter, welcome to the Deconstructing Yourself podcast.
Peter McEwen: Hello, good to be here, thank you.
MT: Yeah, it’s good to have you here. I hear about you a lot, even though you and I, of course, are in direct contact. We’re both super busy and don’t get that much time to talk either online or in person. But I hear about you a lot from many of my students who are also in your classes. So I hear good things.
PM: Oh, that’s gratifying to know. I hear great things about your practice also, your teaching practice and the practical applications the students come away with. So really lovely movement we are participating in.
MT: Yeah, me too. And I think one of the things that has really caught my interest and caught the interest of many people recently is that you just started up a new class on deity yoga. I’m not sure what you would call it. I call it a class on deity yoga, and it looks really interesting.
PM: I’m teaching a course on deity yoga, and it’s functionally based on what we call the Maha Yoga, which is the seventh vehicle in the first inner tantra of the Nyingma system in Tibetan Buddhism. I think just using the word deity was probably more broadly appealing because I do think people are interested in it. There’s not a lot of information about it in popular culture, and you don’t really hear too much about it on podcasts or social media outlets.
I thought it would be interesting to give my point of view on 30 years of practice doing this Maha Yoga or deity yoga, and how one can integrate it into their other practices of open awareness or Metta or Jhana, etc. And also psychotherapeutic models, too, which many of our colleagues and students are engaged with.
MT: Yeah. So let’s start out there. I think for a certain number of people, the whole idea of like, oh, deity yoga. And it’s interesting because for a certain amount of people, it’s sort of like an exciting, interesting, cool, weird thing. But I would say for the vast majority of the people I run into, they’re skeptical and suspicious of it. And why would you want to do such a thing? Isn’t that culturally specific and part of the tradition that we can just dump? And let’s get to the neuroscience base, bare metal core of how this all works, and throw out all that stuff that’s sort of dusty and covered with cobwebs and woo-based, and let’s say irrelevant to us as we gobble our psychedelics and use brain neurofeedback software and et cetera, et cetera. It seems like there’s a real idea that this is somehow outdated and can be hokey and stupid and useless and a distraction and that’s with deity yoga.
And if we go then even to the more general idea of just devotion at all. I don’t know about you, but to me this is an incredibly important area of practice. But when I use the word devotion, it really bugs a certain percentage of people. They do not like it. It’s almost, I would say, that it’s a bad word. So I’m kind of exaggerating here, but I’m just setting it up because I wonder if you notice something similar. And what do you say to people who have that sort of outlook if you do run into them, which I’m sure you do?
PM: I tend to prompt a practitioner to examine the many things that they are consciously or unconsciously already devoted to. Whether that’s identity patterns, types of foods they like, their type of companion that they prefer, all these kinds of preferences that are coming and going that we seize upon, fixate upon, and enact, that to me is a form of devotion. And then, in terms of spiritual devotion, I typically want to draw attention to this sort of clunky black and white way we organize our orientation towards spiritual practice.
We tend to either identify solely with the fruitional experience, which tends to be more of the science-based practitioner. They’re very impressed with these fruitions that are possible by doing X, Y, Z practice. The problem with many of the results of the work of Richard Davidson or Rick Hansen, some of them are notable neuroscientists that have tested meditators, is many of these meditators themselves have devotional practices, which have actually magnified their ability to alter their neurochemistry, or perhaps they have greater neuroplasticity due to these devotional practices.
You know, specifically people like Mingyur Rinpoche or Matthieu Ricard, people like that. And then on the other side, I get a lot of students who are almost solely interested in devotion at the expense of their own discriminatory investigation of what it is they’re devoted to. So I think, you know, there are two kinds of practitioners, those who tend to have a more secular thematic they’re interested in, and they kind of shit on the idea of devoting themselves to anything other than their own historic, safe pattern of organizing reality.
And then on the other side, I have practitioners who just want to go all in on being a devotee of Green Tara, Padmasambhava, things like that. So I think my interest is to bring to bear the idea of staying in the complex middle of neither just throwing ourselves into a devotional practice or investigating what we’re already devoted to and asking ourselves, okay, well, is there a modeling that may supplant and improve my capacity to be devoted and do that devotion practice iteratively? You know, you don’t have to go all in all at once, whether it’s a scientific study or Shinzen Young’s work or Jhanic practice, you could stay in the complex middle and do these little micro-investigations.
And then over time, you may find that your devotion towards a deity or a teacher or a mantra have given results and then built confidence that then can become fuel for additional practice. So I think just engaging at our capacity and, you know, staying in our adult sense of self without just throwing it all to the wind or just completely disregarding it as hocus pocus. That’s my view on it.
But yeah, the moment I bring up mantra or devotion with students, there tends to be a lot of resistance to engaging with that style of practice.
MT: Yeah, so there’s a lot of different points you’ve made there, all of them interesting. First of all, something that I agree with is that everyone’s already devoted to something, and it’s just that we don’t normally use that word or we wouldn’t think about it that way. But I think it’s an aspect—easy, natural aspect—of being a human being that we are devoted to things.
It’s not somehow required to be a big deal, right? But it’s also really important to recognize what you’re already devoted to. I’m curious, though, you made this interesting formulation where you’re saying, well, there’s kind of maybe two kinds of people, the secular people, and then people who kind of want to go all in and do the full deal all the way in kind of a traditional context, traditional manner. And I’m curious, of course, these are the extremes. But where did you start out on that spectrum way back when?
PM: I think for me, well, when I was 21, I had some very impactful and potent opening experiences, which left me quite dazed and disoriented. Someone, maybe in a traditional framework, would call it referencelessness, basically. So no ground to stand on. And I felt kind of in freefall for a few months. And two big kinds of events for me, one was seeing the Gyuto Tantric monks come to my university and I heard their beautiful throat singing. And then also Lama Tharchin would come down to UC Santa Barbara during that period. Alan Wallace was actually on the faculty at that time. So there were some Tibetan teachers who would come through. And so it was less of a devotion and more of a, oh, these practitioners are sort of speaking about an experience and using a lexicon that seems reasonably descriptive of what I was experiencing during that episode of openings.
So to me, it was more of a, almost like going to see a rock band, and it piqued my curiosity enough that I started investigating. And then I started reading the mind and life transcripts from each annual event with the Dalai Lama and various scientists. So I went from seeing more traditional practitioners perform and speak, and then reading these discussions between Western scientists and the Dalai Lama and other traditional Tibetan Buddhists. And that just kind of opened up a whole world of, oh, there’s a lexicon that is really interesting. There are experiences that are profound, but also help you become a functional and loving human being. This is for me. And then over time, over many years, I developed more and more devotion towards my teachers by watching how they behaved with other people.
So it was definitely an iterative experience over probably a decade. And now 30 years later, I have a lot more devotion for my teachers than I definitely did when I was in my early 20s. You know, I was very skeptical at the beginning. So I have a lot of empathy for our friends, students, and colleagues who have, you know, this kind of maybe overweight skepticism towards this notion of devotion. And I try to make the journey towards devotion an option that is supported if that’s the direction they want to go, if it’s in alignment with their intentions.
MT: And so would you say you started out way more on the skeptical side or?
PM: Yeah.
MT: What brought you to this experience, this life-changing experience of referencelessness?
PM: Panic, sheer panic. The panic of being 20 or 21. And I grew up in an indigenous family, and my grandparents had about a third-grade education. So it wasn’t sort of like an intellectually rich environment. They were just hardworking, loving, supportive people. But, you know, it wasn’t like a haven of great emotional intelligence. I think a lot of it was about survival-level dynamics. And so then I was kind of released into this world of the university and the pressures of kind of accommodating. Not to get too woke about this, but like a white culture that I didn’t grow up fully grokking or understanding. And I was really curious about the sciences and neurology and environmental science. And so that was sort of like my track.
And I was just experiencing a really severe panic during this period. And at a certain point, I just decided I had to completely let go. And I was either going to throw myself off of a cliff or I was going to have to directly confront this panic. And when I confronted the panic, I found, actually, it was rootless. And there was no substance to it, that I had been orbiting this panic all of my teenage years into my twenties. And then once I confronted this core fear, something really opened in me. It wasn’t drug-related or anything like that. It was just sort of like a spontaneous opening. As you know, sometimes these things are causeless. They’re just sort of random. They can’t be manufactured, so to speak.
MT: Yeah, it’s just time for them to happen.
PM: Yeah, so there was a flowering there. And as it abated, I think I used spiritual practice during that period to create the simulacrum or simulation of the opening experience to sort of stabilize myself. That’s the best way I can really describe it.
MT: Yeah, and this brings up an interesting point about deity yoga practice that you make in your sub-stack post called Identity as Instrument. I’ll just paraphrase it in my terms, which is one of the purposes of having this kind of practice relationship with some entity; one of the purposes is that we, in a way, need some kind of stability to hold us when we’re completely formless or have fallen utterly apart. One of the functions of this is to have a—even if it’s groundless—there’s some kind of stability in the groundlessness that comes from this practice. Can you talk about that aspect?
PM: Yeah, my perception as a practitioner is that once we discover the ground, so to speak, and then we almost get interested in the journey we took to that peak of experience, and then we almost want to retrace the journey back into the human mess.
MT: Yeah.
PM: And so, I think the deity yoga, which to my limited understanding, is a formula or practice of early Indian Tantra, that the Tibetans sort of migrated to Tibet around the 8th century. It’s a really useful support for giving form to the formlessness, but also having this ability to oscillate between the form of the deity, back into this dissolution or open experience, and then return to the deity, never quite taking a side with either orientation or view. So staying in the messy middle, in the freefall of our living, messy, complex human experience, but being able to train ourselves to recognize identity complexes, work with them, maybe improve those complexes by introducing ideas that we are in fact sublime creatures with the power to express compassion, love, kindness, and power within our day-to-day experience, but also being able to oscillate back to that formlessness quite elegantly.
And as I began our discussion, you know, we tend to have a more clunky kind of back and forth between open experiencing and then spiritual practice or day-to-day experience. And I really like the deity yoga as a method to smooth out that oscillation between the two views, what the Buddhists would call the two truths, fruition and relative experience.
MT: Good. So let’s back up a minute. And, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to hear your description of what deity yoga even is for people who might not know or who may have a misconception about it.
PM: I think I see deity yoga as a method that helps a practitioner maintain a relationship to form and formless experiencing without taking either view as having an essential nature. So let me unpack that a little bit. We have familiar identity complexes, and those can include archetypal dramas, childhood traumas, fixations, addictions. And from the Vajrayana point of view, what we’re trying to do with deity as a method, Vajrayana, in this description of deity yoga or generation stage practice, is a replacement of those, maybe what would be regarded as more neurotic or out-of-date identity patterns. So we have this confluence of identities, behaviors, and patterns. What the Vajrayana view is, is that, oh, okay, well, you think you’re this, what would happen if you were actually this sublime being made of radiant light, holding these beautiful ornaments in your hands, wearing a diamond crown, and you were basically the monarch of your own world. Instead of this, maybe more out of date, vision of ourselves as being a victim, a perpetrator, someone who has patterns of neurosis or closure, who is terrified to experience openness or uncertainty.
So when you identify with the deity form, you can sort of play “as if”—your body doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and probably what’s going on in your immediate reality. So you start to use these deity forms as a way to replace these out-of-date patterns. And then the upgrade of the deity form is that it is made of open experience and luminosity, whereas our more neurotic patterns that we tend to try to escape or suppress tend to have this almost material, persistent existence that tends to breed like a struggle, as though there’s something to get rid of. Whereas the deity seems to be more of the tenor, where you want to invite it, open to it, express it, and be it, without necessarily concretizing it. Because when we concretize something, then unconsciously we believe that there’s actually a person with a significant solidity to it, relating to this solid sense of identity.
And then the deity yoga is nice, just because right when you receive the deity empowerment or transmission, it’s impressed upon the practitioner that, oh, this is just the appearance of your own empty, luminous nature. It has no substantiality. There’s nothing really to hold on to here. So I think that’s how I would contrast our familiar Western notion of ourselves as a noun or an it. In the Guhyagarbha Tantra, it’s sort of known as a magical matrix. The deity is there, but it’s not there. And so that to me is Buddhism in a nutshell. Like our whole life is there, but it’s not there. And we can never fully take a side with the open and fruitional experiencing nor with the messy, luminous, colorful appearances of everyday life.
MT: Yeah, this is almost like the definition of emptiness right there, but not there. Such a wonderful way of talking. And I really like your phrase, the magical matrix. Now, something that people often ask me and other teachers is about the ontological status of these deities, which I don’t find to be that useful of a question. And yet, I have to answer it a lot. And I’m curious, hey, Peter, are these things real? How do you respond to that?
PM: Well, in Buddhist philosophy, if we want to use more philosophical language, they’re regarded as imputed. So that means by imputation, I think we’re suggesting that they’re linked to the methodology that’s being trained into you. I also want to say from the imputation side of things or philosophical perspective, the ornamentation, the postures, the mudras, the outfits are actually a way to rewire the brain to sort of include a whole spectrum of Buddhist philosophical values into the practitioner without necessarily having to school them in a more traditional scholarly way. You can take the deity and break it into, why does it have four faces? Why does it have two hands? Why does this deity have 16 hands? Those are all related to various evaluations of what reality is from the Buddhist philosophical canon. Now does it have ontological existence? I then have to ask a student, does your identity have ontological existence?
MT: Right, exactly. This is the answer that, for me, makes the most sense, which is, well, again, that’s not the most useful question, but if I have to answer it, I usually say, well, they’re just as real as you are.
PM: Right. And then a Buddhist teacher would say the reason they might be more real than you are, or your sense of identity, is because they also have the emptiness function of having no truly existent characteristic, and therefore they’re reflective of a complex, unified reality. So they have the appearance of the world around you, which seems to have some sort of like material ground to it, but then they have this open aspect, which makes it sort of realer because it’s the union of the clarity functionality, which is appearances, and then the emptiness functionality, which is, oh, there’s nothing there, but you can’t say there’s not nothing there, right? So this is kind of like philosophical argumentation. Yeah. I spend so much time imagining the questions from the practitioners I help or instruct, and I spend a lot of time just at home alone deconstructing their argumentation. So I almost have like stock answers ready for a lot of this stuff. I’m sure you do too.
MT: This is the thing. It’s not that they’re stock in a bad sense. It’s just that this is what we get for teaching a lot. You run into the same questions over and over.
PM: And they’re valid questions. And I think I’m aligned with Bruce Tift. If I meet a practitioner and deity yoga doesn’t seem like it’s it for them, I’m definitely not going to encourage them to do it. If it’s not in alignment with their values, intentions, and goals, they might want to try some therapeutic modalities. There are all kinds of great methodologies out there. But I think for people with a more visual–maybe they’re right-brained in certain ways, they are interested in the magic of experience or bending reality or manifesting or investigating what identity is through the auspices of various therapeutic modalities. I think deity yoga is really great because it includes all those things, but it also transcends those things.
MT: Yeah, that’s right. Now, something that I find to be quite interesting and I’m curious about your viewpoint is, to me, one wouldn’t necessarily have to use a traditional bodhisattva or deity image to do this. I mean, of course, the tradition offers tremendous support and an entire, I don’t know what we would call it, canon or lexicon of songs and prayers and images and poetry and all that to support us doing the practice. And so, that’s incredibly helpful. But I also find that for a lot of Western practitioners, there’s a lot more juice and charge and connection available for other figures. Let’s just say something like an angel or Jesus or something. I’m curious if you’ve run into that and what you think about that and how you handle it.
PM: Well, I think they’re alien to Tibetans too, because we’ve never seen a Tibetan walk around with four arms. Not that I know of. I think that’s like we unconsciously attribute to Indians and Tibetans as though, oh yeah, they’re just so used to this. But we’ve never seen a red lady walking around with a bunch of skulls around her neck, not outside of Burning Man anyway.
MT: Good point.
PM: We want to bear that in mind, but at the same time, I’m a huge fan of Jeffrey Kripal and his investigation of anomalous experience and how whatever cultural formatting we have tends to frame how we experience anomalous experience or spiritual breakthroughs. So I think that’s a rich ground we can investigate as practitioners is like, okay, so I’m having a breakthrough or an opening. How is this rendering into form through the Western psyche?
I think a lot of that work is being done—for better or for worse—in the world of Ayahuasca, DMT, and various plant medicines like psilocybin. So maybe that’s an area where we can make contact with our own notions of what is the form archetype takes, how does spiritual experience crystallize? Until that point, and I think until we have a richer tradition, it’s good to at least start with the existing mapping, just like a musician would want to learn basic chord structure, harmonies, composition, and then begin to improvise later.
Maybe I’m a little rigidly old-fashioned, but I find that if we know the music of the spheres, so to speak, of our own psychological underpinnings, it might be easier to see, oh, Green Tara already sort of resonates with that music or those harmonies. And now that I’ve created an engagement and a relationship to this deity, yeah, let’s change the color that she’s radiating or let’s like give her, instead of a crown, give her a MAGA hat or something, do whatever you want, you know what I mean? Whatever it is that is gonna make you recognize that our immediate experience is not to be taken too seriously. Like, if we try to materialize these illusory forms, then we’ve kind of lost the thread. So I’m kind of not really saying much, but saying a lot of words here. I think I’m skeptical, but I’m encouraged by the idea that, yes, eventually we should probably construct our own deity forms that are more Western-focused, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater, of course, and just get rid of Shiva, Kali, Tara, Chakrasamvara.
But maybe there’s some gentle remodeling of those forms that would be really beneficial and invite more clarity and investigation for modern practitioners to engage with this work.
MT: So, we talked about the beginning of your Deity Yoga practice. What’s that like for you now? How has that evolved over these many decades?
PM: So, this is one of the nice things about devotion, is they do have devotion towards my main root guru and Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. And one of the axioms, I would say, of the inner tantras is that you sort of loosen your grip, as your spiritual practice evolves, on the deity form. So, this really detailed, rich environment of the mandala and palace of the deity, over time, that just maybe turns into a more of a, oh, okay, well now, I want to enact the deity through the auspices of the channel system, the prana, and the kundalini essences in the subtle body. And then, illusory forms will arise from those practices. And then you might say, oh, yeah, learning that chord structure to play a three-chord rock was really great, but now I know how to compose a more sophisticated composition, which would be the next step after the generation stage practice, deity yoga. And then the deity itself takes on almost a more simplistic experience.
And then finally, that deity yoga will dissolve as more of a just general luminosity in the later vehicles of Mahamudra or Dzogchen. So really, what the early deity practices is to get us to trust the simplicity of what is open experiencing. And the Vajrayana genius is knowing that people love to collect spiritual teachings and deities and to try to feel sublime and transcendent. And we love superheroes. We love rock stars. We love elevating certain forms above the uneducated masses. That’s just something kind of built into human culture. So Vajrayana leverages that and says, Okay, great. Here’s this deity form and its mandala and its palace and its infinite wealth. Now you’re this.
And then you kind of move past that and you kind of say, Oh, that was really great. But this is even better. And then you sort of enact the deity by becoming it. And then various illusory forms, dreamlike and luminous, will arise in a more sort of realistic way. But in a way where they’re diaphanous or without material existence. And so there’s this process of always, you know, we go from Matchbox cars and then we get our first car. And then we’re having our midlife crisis and we buy the drop-top BMW, or whatever. So similarly, in these inner tantras, we’re given really detailed simulations, which then yield more advanced or sophisticated experiences of simplicity, so to speak. Until the simplicity is so evident that you have no reason not to do deity yoga, because it’s become really fun. It’s like jamming with friends and playing music. That’s sort of a practical way I would do it.
And the devotion to the teacher is you’re trusting this person that, yes, there is a next step after this. And this person embodies that next step. So you’re willing to go through the trials and tribulations of learning and inner technology, knowing that someday you will have to give it up for something even more inclusive.
MT: So interesting. From what you’ve seen, what do you think is the most common failure mode of deity yoga for Westerners?
PM: I think the comparative approach, which I see in a lot of practitioners, which I have a lot of respect for, because I grew up watching—I think I was in eighth grade when Power of Myth came out on PBS, Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell. You know, it just thrilled my adolescent mind, and it took me out of the field of growing up Roman Catholic into this notion of syncretism and comparative investigation of religious forms and the pedagogy that sort of informs how culture operates. But I sometimes see practitioners get so enmeshed in the intellectual comparisons between the Indic Tantric traditions, and then they’ll try to compare that to Theravada Buddhism, and then they start breaking apart Tibetan Buddhism.
It can become a whole distraction from tasting the water yourself. By that point, you have a home centrifuge, and you’re testing to see what’s in the water, but you never drink it. So I really encourage the students, while we’re on retreat or while we’re doing the course, to try to limit their philosophical investigation or their effort to create some sort of unified theory of how all this stuff works together.
MT: Yeah, in the long run, sure, that can be interesting, but in terms of practice, it doesn’t really help that much, and I’ve certainly done enough of it, and I see that it functions as a big dodge. I was gonna say distraction, but it’s a little more insidious than that. It’s like you think you’re doing the thing when you’re doing that, but you’re really avoiding doing the thing.
PM: Yeah, and I think that’s one area where—maybe not devotion so much—but just having some sort of spiritual mentor to challenge–maybe that, okay, you’ve done some intellectual investigation, but maybe you’re taking it too far. Maybe it’s time to simplify things and actually do some practice. But I only recognize this in other people because I am guilty of having done it for so many years. So I mean, we wouldn’t be interested in this stuff if we didn’t have that orientation. So I get it. It is interesting and it’s completely irresolvable. Therefore, you can investigate it forever and ever and kind of get nowhere with it. Just within my lineage, there’s all different ways to be a Tara, you know, the various deities that reside in her heart or in her head or in her abdomen. You know, there’s all kinds of ways to do these things, and they’re not necessarily consistent across each tradition. The things that are consistent is that there’s relative experience and ultimate experience, and dissolving over time any notion that they’re fundamentally different or there’s actually two ways to have a view or a perspective on reality. That’s what is consistent, and that’s experiential.
MT: Yeah, in the end, that’s very hard to talk about.
PM: So Michael, I’d like to hear in your opinion how you see the evolutionary arc of a practitioner evolve through the Indic form of deity yoga into the more formless practices of deity yoga and working with the subtle body. Just from my own information, as someone who has so little exposure to that world. In my world, first, you create sort of this alternative universe of the deity, then you enact that deity by activating your relationship to the subtle body. And then finally, you dissolve that subtle body into luminosity or just pure knowing. And then you recycle the whole methodology. But I was curious if that’s consistent with the way your yoga practice also unfolds for your students. If you’d be open to talking about that.
MT: Yeah, I think it’s exactly that sequence, although maybe done in slightly different ways. It’s very important to do the whole thing together with energy practices. And the main doorway to getting it to really work, in quotes, is the energy practices. And so combining it with essentially pranayama and visualization and energy work is sort of the key to making the whole thing function. Now, I might not always start there. Sometimes we do more obviously external devotional-type practices and visualization, and so on. But I think pranayama-type practices and energy-type practices take a very long time for your body to be able to handle, or to put it alternately, you kind of gotta grow your energy muscles, so to speak. That’s not something that happens overnight. That takes a lot of training.
And so I do get people going with the pranayama work early because, you know, you might as well start training. But over time, the devotional image generation track, you want to bring—slowly bring—that together with the energy, subtle body, chakras, and nadis track, and start to weave those together. Because when they do eventually join up, and then start to really act and dance, that’s where it gets really powerful.
PM: Yeah, so in the generation stage practice, we have the three samadhis, which are open experiencing, then the world of illusory forms and luminosity and emotion, and sort of like this free-flowing samadhi, and then we have the world of cause, the nirmanakaya or emanation world of material existence, thinking, things like that. So I was just curious what these three samadhis do is sort of train into the student this notion of bardo. And okay, boom, you’re dead, now there’s open experiencing. How long can you tolerate that open experiencing before you start this unconscious process of looking for fixity? How long can we stay in a non-dual experience? And that tends to be very short because it’s happening all the time.
MT: Yeah, maybe just fractions of a second.
PM: And so you’re suggesting that using pranayama sort of steals the person’s physiological orientation for this encounter with open experiencing. And then emotionally, how do you find the practitioners respond to that sense of what Bruce Tift would call formless panic, uncertainty? How do you help them with that really difficult transition of just learning to love uncertainty?
MT: Yeah, it’s incredibly common, and it’s a big deal, and maybe everyone goes through it. Certainly, the most useful thing that I found is just to acknowledge and validate it.
PM: Yeah.
MT: Oh, you just got really scared right there. Good. That’s normal. That’s gonna happen a lot. Here’s why you’re getting scared. Here’s what’s going on. Just that kind of very basic orienting stuff, repeating it over and over again, is, I find, very helpful for people. Normalization of it. This is how this goes. And then the understanding, even outside of whatever technique we’re gonna use and whatever support we’re gonna use, that probably you, practitioner, are going to encounter this, we’ll use Bruce’s term, formless panic, hundreds or thousands of times. And eventually, you just get more and more used to it. It’s less and less threatening. It’s less and less alien. It’s less and less devastating. It still has the shocking power of total openness. But you just can’t be that afraid of something you’ve encountered hundreds or thousands of times.
So the main way that I orient people is, give it time, let yourself be afraid. If you’re afraid, and just know that this is your friend, nothing bad will happen. This is part of why the repetition works, because nothing bad happens.
PM: Right.
MT: You just get afraid. And then, with all that kind of framing and context and understanding, then when you’ve got a deity figure who’s helping you, or at least a devotional orientation towards awake awareness itself, or other methods we can use, that will speed that up quite a bit. And I found just the orientation of rinse and repeat with this sense that this is familiarization. It’s never going to be familiar in the normal sense, but we can still become familiar with it. Even that can be enough, but when we add in these other elements, I think it really expedites the process.
PM: I think this is rich territory for any changes we do make to the more traditional modalities of deity yoga. Is this language around confrontation with uncertainty or openness, or maybe you want a true nature. In the tantras and in the sadhanas I practice, they usually call them sort of like demonic forms or obstructing forces. There’s this mythological personification of what these energies are. But I really prefer therapeutic language for these kinds of tasks of confrontation with the ineffable. And then the body mind reacts to that in very intelligent ways to carry itself on.
And then over time, building a tolerance for it to recognize, oh, this reaction I’m having towards this open experience is not about me. And these seemingly threatening apparitions are just that, you know, their identity complexes or whatever therapeutic language is most effective. I’m not a therapist, of course. But I think that’s a change that would be really beneficial for doing these practices. And that’s something I’m trying to work in without losing the flavor of, yeah, there are obstructing forces, but they’re not outside of you. They are you.
And I think Lama Sultrim Alioni is also doing this working with demons practices, her Chöd practices. So I think that is like a really rich territory. I’m glad to hear acknowledging, validating and encouraging them to keep going, because it’s now or some other day. So I feel like we might as well make a relationship with what’s already there at our capacity.
MT: That’s right. And something that to me is both interesting and maybe a little bit of a problem, but rich territory is for most Westerners, I don’t think this comes up as demonology. And so that might be a more normal type idea or language in ancient India or Tibet or whatever. It’s just not the first thing that comes to most people’s minds here. And so adding that all in, it’s like, oh, we want you to understand this poem, but first you have to learn this foreign language. It doesn’t help.
On the other hand, my main experience with this, which was my first big gigantic life-changing experience with it, which was on psychedelics, was demonology. It actually appeared in the full demonic way. So it’s kind of home base for me in another sense. So I’m willing to talk in that language. And that feels in a funny way, kind of natural for me. But I recognize that it’s just not that helpful for most folks that I run into.
PM: Yeah. And what is your opinion on these deities, demons having an agency that’s somehow disconnected from the person’s psyche? Do they have some sort of inherent agency or nature, the deity forms? Can they act upon a human being?
MT: Yeah. It’s an interesting question. It’s almost just a restatement of the ontological question I was asking before, right? How real are they? And I feel like it comes down to the same answer that you were suggesting we have for anything about relative versus absolute. Because it’s really a relative versus absolute question in the final analysis. And it’s like in one way, yes, and in another way, no, and it’s both at the same time. But I will say, even if that sounds like a dodgy answer, it’s my real answer. But I will say, notice, I’m not saying that they definitely don’t have that.
PM: Yeah.
MT: It’s certainly my experience, and maybe it’s a deluded experience, but of a lot of stuff that I can’t explain happening when doing this kind of work. So it’s certainly not an instant answer of, no, not at all. It’s all just psychological, blah, blah, blah. If someone wants to put it in that box, I’m okay with that, but I wouldn’t limit it in that way.
PM: I would say, philosophically, I have to say, no, they don’t have agency. But experientially, I have to say, yes, weird things happen. I’ve done pujas or practices, and very strange things happen. And it seems to be affecting people, and there seems to be an energy behind it.
MT: Or even an entity doing stuff, yeah?
PM: Right, exactly, exactly. Obviously, an energy or personage that didn’t have anything better to do and was attracted to the puja or something like that. But that brings up my one last question for you is: do a lot of your students come to work with you with this real interest in making, you know, like magic, working spells, doing manifestation techniques, things like that. How do you work with that?
MT: Oh, I tell them to go somewhere else to do that stuff.
PM: I see, okay.
MT: I am absolutely not teaching that in any way. Again, it’s not that I think necessarily that that isn’t real or is wrong, but it’s just not the direction that is interesting to me. I’ll go back to St. Carlos Castaneda, right? About the man of God versus the sorcerer, right? And the sorcery part, even though, again, that’s a big part of some of the traditions, I just don’t feel competent to teach that. I’m not that interested in it at all. On the other hand, I’ll just make an example. If you’re doing a mantra practice, sometimes you can do mantra practices and see external effects. And so, even though I wouldn’t teach that as a main thing, I might say, sidebar, this mantra is also said to do this.
MT: Right. So, every once in a while, throw that in there. But no, that’s not point. How about you? Same question.
PM: Ah, the magical matrix, you know. There’s always sort of contradictory messaging in these sadhanas, because at the end of a retreat, you receive the blessings of doing the retreat, right? And so, a deity form is to appear and endow you with the blessings of having done 30 days or however many days you’ve chosen to do at that retreat. And so, you receive the blessings, and there’s a form that’s there, but not there. And yet, there’s a dramatic and real effect happening. And so, that, of course, is magical in the sense that it reinvigorates our belief in a good and caring and loving world, but also recognizing that it’s not necessarily about us, and that in fact, perhaps this vision of the world is us, and it’s just distributed.
So, those are just things that come up for me on the magical spectrum, because as a deity, if you’re enacting or engaging with a deity form, say it’s green Tara and her activity is compassionate love for sentient beings, and she’s a saviouress, yeah, you want to manifest that. That’s one of the axioms of spending your time and energy doing the practice, is to have fruition of the practice. So, at the same time, you can’t take it completely seriously. So, I’m like you, I’m unable to give an adequate explanation of how any of this shit works, but it’s my favorite pastime.
MT: If you land on any one side of it, it’s just wrong.
PM: There we go. Thank you. That’s all we actually needed. This could have been a podcast of about 10 seconds.
MT: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Peter. I guess your class has already begun.
PM: Yep.
MT: That’s the first round of it, correct?
PM: Yeah, it’s the first round. I realized I was teaching an introductory Tummo class, and many of the students didn’t have a lot of experience with the generation stage, so that’s pre-requisite, probably, to—traditionally it is—and then more practically, maybe it is. It’s fun, it’s educational, it’s the union of Vipashyana and Samatha, so it has that going for it. You clearly see the appearance, but you also, from the Vipashyana perspective, you know the appearance has no fundamental nature, so it has that discriminatory quality to it too, which is a great practice. And then, later in the year, I’ll be teaching a sort of introduction to the Karma Mudra practice of sacred intimacy through the Tantric lens, and then I’ll do the Wintertime Tummo cohort. So I’m working all these things into more of a fluid progression, so.
MT: Very cool.
PM: And going really well. And if you want to talk further about deity yoga, you mentioned you might go into two parts at some point. Let me know. Or if you ever want to talk about sacred intimacy and, you know, like moving the energies between the bodies, that’s another great interest, experientially and philosophically for me.
MT: Peter, if people want to learn more about what you’re doing, where do they find that?
PM: You can go to thefield.us.
MT: thefield.us. All right.
MP: And we always feature the upcoming course, and I’m really always proud to work with my most esteemed Western Buddhist practitioner, Bruce Tift. I love working with Bruce. He almost always teaches the courses with me. And then I feature a revolving group of guest teachers, people like Michael Taft, Kelly Boyes, Johnny Miller, and Bruce. And I’m just trying to get as many amazing teachers, opportunities to teach, and to expand the practice bandwidth of students. So we would love to have you in any of our courses.
MT: Excellent. Well, it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you today. And let’s do it again.
PM: Thanks, Michael.
MT: All right. Take it easy.
PM: Bye.
MT: That’s it for this episode of Deconstructing Yourself.
