Thoughtforms

[petra]

Hi All, it was a job figuring out where to post this. Maybe it could be moved to somewhere more appropriate. I put it in mind control because I feel like I’m being mind controlled into thinking about “thoughtforms”. There’s no results for “thoughtforms” in the title search either.

What does everybody think of it?

My mom tried to teach me and my brother about them. I just didn’t care at the time but now I do. It just feels important.

What do I know about Thoughtforms? Nice my autocorrect wants to capitalize it all of a sudden. Well, I thought I could see them a couple of times. It looked like pictures coming out of peoples heads. My brother told me he could see them too. We don’t talk anymore so I don’t know how he’s doing.

What else do I know about Thoughtforms? Well, the stuff my mom was trying to teach us came from a channelled book called “In the light of Truth” by Abd-ru-shin. Beware of that book it’s very controversial.

Anything else to add? Well.. I don’t think Thoughtforms should exist. It just doesn’t seem right to me. What are they FOR? Something feels off.

Are they evil? How the F should I know.. kind of feels evil to me.. anyone else have any thoughts?

Grok says this:

Thoughtforms are mental constructs or energetic entities believed in occult and theosophical traditions to be created and sustained by focused thought or emotion, capable of existing independently or influencing reality.

Influencing reality? Sounds pretty important to me. We need this topic! Please discuss

[petra]

I think I recall something about Archons being Thoughtforms but please don’t merge it into there. I think Thoughtforms with a capital T deserves its own entry on Avalon

Edit: From Grok:

An Archon, in Gnostic tradition, is a cosmic ruler or intermediary power (often malevolent or ignorant) that governs the material world and seeks to keep human souls trapped in illusion, preventing their return to the divine source.

[Johan (Keyholder)]

Hi Petra.

Actually, the concept of "Thoughtforms" is quite old and there is more to be found about them than you would think.

There is even an 84 pages book, "Thought-forms", written by A Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, two well known theosophists.

You can find it for free here: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet...13512/mode/2up

This is just one approach on the subject of thought-forms.

Carlos Castaneda also wrote extensively about them (not under that name though). You may want to read the chapter "Mud shadows" in his book "The active side of infinity".

Just remember that the word "thoughtforms" is only "one" word that defines something that is known under many different names, in many sources.

One could make a study/dissertation about "Thoughforms", thoughout history and cultures.

It would be a very good idea if someone would actually do that, in my opinion.

[petra]

Yes!! A book that is not channeled! Thanks very much Johan

Page 32 talks about the meaning of the Colors. I’m so excited

That’s interesting about Castanedas work. The active side of infinity is an amazing title, I’ll try out online ordering.

[Johan (Keyholder)]

You're welcome Petra.

The complete works of Carlos Castaneda are available in 1 pdf.
Let me know if you want it sent to you in an email.

[petra]

Posted by Johan (Keyholder) (here)
You're welcome Petra.

The complete works of Carlos Castaneda are available in 1 pdf.
Let me know if you want it sent to you in an email.

Yes please! I PMed you my email. I’m anxious to read about the “mud shadows”

[petra]

One interesting thing about the book on archive.org - there are no Colors. It insinuates there should be Colors but it looks black and white. What a shame.

I’m particularly interested in purple but so far haven’t found any mention of it. This stuff is complicated.

[Johan (Keyholder)]

You can find these colours here Petra:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-Forms

[petra]

Posted by Johan (Keyholder) (here)
You can find these colours here Petra:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-Forms

A wiki page? Oh blessed be! Thanks again. What a difference now that I can see the Colors and I didn’t even notice the key on the first page. How beautiful and organized. They must have put a lot of work into this

Edit: Here is what’s under Criticisms. The “who” after science made me laugh.

Science[who?] considers thought-forms to be pseudoscience, because they are based on a concept of the extrasensory perception.[109] The belief in existence of thought-forms "remains influential today"[quote needs citation] for Theosophists, followers of New Thought, New Age, and in neopagan movements, including Wicca.[110][111]

[Isserley]

Hi Petra, take a look at this thread as well, there are some connections with what you are talking about here ->

Remote viewing the Egregore

[petra]

Posted by Isserley (here)
Hi Petra, take a look at this thread as well, there are some connections with what you are talking about here ->

Remote viewing the Egregore

Hey you're way ahead of me, I came over to my laptop to link that here but you've already done it.

[Sue (Ayt)]

And here's a poem I've always loved about the subject, written in 1892:

Secret Thoughts

“I hold it true that thoughts are things
Endowed with bodies, breath, and wings,
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results - or ill.

That which we call our secret thought
Speeds to the earth's remotest spot,
And leaves its blessings or its woes
Like tracks behind it as it goes.

It is God's law. Remember it
In your still chamber as you sit
With thoughts you would not dare have known,
And yet made comrades when alone.

These thoughts have life; and they will fly
And leave their impress by-and-by,
Like some marsh breeze, whose poisoned breath
Breathes into homes its fevered breath.

And after you have quite forgot
Or all outgrown some vanished thought,
Back to your mind to make its home,
A dove or raven, it will come.

Then let your secret thoughts be fair;
They have a vital part and share
In shaping worlds and moulding fate --
God's system is so intricate.”

― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

[shaberon]

Posted by petra (here)
I put it in mind control because I feel like I’m being mind controlled into thinking about “thoughtforms”.

Yes.

Some of the linked material is about the moment-to-moment changing things that come from a person, and then, something more deserving of the word "Form" like an Egregore, that seems to stick around, and perhaps be influential.

This is a better way to talk about it than simply Evil, since they are more or less the same. And in that regard, the story, and therefor the thoughtform, of Big Evil, is in the pre-Achemenid lore of Azi Dahak and the Savior from ca. 700 B. C. E.; and so it is from that area, going westward, that you get this increasingly black-and-white concept of the Devil and a battle against evil, very obsessive, in a way that lacks correspondence in the east.

That's partly because the outlook is similar to this:

I don’t think Thoughtforms should exist. It just doesn’t seem right to me. What are they FOR? Something feels off.

So, the responsible thing to do is get ahold of what one is producing. You would have to quit supplying them before you could truly complain that one out there in the ether somewhere has an unfair influence.

The removal of all of that is caused by the meditative states called Formless Ayatanas:

Fifth jhāna: infinite space (Pāḷi ākāsānañcāyatana, Skt. ākāśānantyāyatana)
Sixth jhāna: infinite consciousness (Pāḷi viññāṇañcāyatana, Skt. vijñānānantyāyatana)
Seventh jhāna: infinite nothingness (Pāḷi ākiñcaññāyatana, Skt. ākiṃcanyāyatana)
Eighth jhāna: neither perception nor non-perception (Pāḷi nevasaññānāsaññāyatana, Skt. naivasaṃjñānāsaṃjñāyatana)

Nirodha-samāpatti

Beyond the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception lies a state called nirodha samāpatti, the "cessation of perception and feeling".

The states themselves are not necessarily wisdom, nevertheless, they are to be experienced. Obviously it is thoughtform-free.

It's like a wheel, where those are specific meditation states, and then I turn around and go back out in the world with a conventional thought process, but, I am trying to be mindful of the quality, and to make things produce better forms with actually the intent of beauty.

In the distant past, I would say I was bombarded by thoughtforms, of inner and outer kinds, but because I followed this work, it worked.

It doesn't say you can't think, it says not to think wrongly.

I am going to post something else about how Evil, but, described more as Mind, is Buddha, that is, Enlightenment, which the Gospel mirrors somewhat. Some of this I know by rote but I also learned something. It will take up some room.

[shaberon]

I am going to post Buddha's Enlightenment, but, I am going to add some background from the Veda. Moderately long comparative analysis.


This is not arbitrary, because, Buddha was a Sage in the primordial Angiras lineage of Rishis; from the Jataka Tales, he was Mandhata, one of the very first of them; and he personally says the Veda mantras are pure, while the Brahmanas are distortions.

If read in its own light, it is about fighting evil in many forms. That's not all it's about:


Indra conquers, Varuna rules.



It has a robust theology mostly in metaphor. Like if you recently say something about "doom", a good example is Vedic:


down a well.


It's a metaphor which has been turned into literal stories about rescue from a hole in the ground. That's what the Brahmanas do. These hymns are more like a poetic license where that is a feeling of personal agony.


This even has a direction.


Nirrti


5) The bottom of the earth.

6) The asterism Mūla. -m.


Mula or Root is Sagittarius A* which we call a supermassive black hole at the galactic core. This has been seen as the most undesirable or evil thing from time immemorial.

So, down is unbearable in this terminology.

It totally is a proper name in the Veda with evil context:

“Soma and Rudra, expel the widespread sickness that has entered into our dwellings; keep off Nirṛti, so that she may be far away, and may prosperous means of sustenance be ours.”

I would suggest the Veda is about encountering evil in multiple ways, especially Vrtra and Vala, Nirtti and some of the others. Most of these are meaningful; you might say Vrtra is a bit like Plato's Cave, and so on. In some cases, it is about actual people and some evil thing they did. It covers the spectrum. Its main point is victory over everything. And so it dwells on these enemies very little, and the closest thing it has to any description of hell is a few times of andhaka "may you sleep in darkness."


It lacks a total adversary; the Vrtra is there when need be, but the purpose is to go on to other things.





The main story of Gautama Siddartha becoming the Buddha is mostly about Evil, and then a small question will come in.


Buddha has a nucleus answer in the vast stem mr- which includes Latin mors (death) and Sanskrit maraya (to kill), but this is not in the Rg Veda at all as a "character", just a word. As a name, it comes from Atharva Veda:

Mrtyu and Agha Mara

But Buddhism is the only place it continues as Mara:

Māra (मार).—m. (= Pali id.), the Evil One, the adversary and tempter; regularly with epithet pāpīyāṃs; often styled Namuci, q.v.


The usual standing epithet is pāpimā “the evil one, ”

Kaṇha, Adhipati, Antaka, Namuci, Pamattabandhu

Evil is an interpretation, since it more literally means death/killing.



Mara is Buddhist because the rest of India has shifted most of the burden onto Yama.

But Yama is the founder of the Veda.

He becomes king of the dead in heaven quite simply because he discovered the path and is still there, with company.

But it's not ancestor worship in the sense you have to earn your way in. You don't just go. We should, instead, ask which if any may have done it. If we could just assume so, there wouldn't be any need to sit around and talk about it. It says you can fail even if you perform religious rites.

If our Buddhist formula is using a post-Vedic word, what does it mean?

There are four kinds of māras:

the affliction-māra (kleśamāra),
the aggregate-māra (skandhamāra),
the death-māra (mṛtyumāra),
the son-of-god-māra (devaputramāra), chief of the Parinirmitavaśavartin gods.

By attaining the state of Bodhisattva, these Bodhisattvas have destroyed the kleśamāra; by acquiring the dharmakāya, they have destroyed the skandhamāra; by being always one-pointed (ekacitta), by not adhering to any (heavenly) sphere and by entering into the immoveable concentrations (acalasamādhi), they have destroyed the Paranirmitavaśavartin devaputramāra.

When we look at this, it's why Buddhism is the only Indian system of Seven Heavens:

“King Māra is the leader of six classes of gods of the world of desire or kāmadhātu: (Caturmahārājika, Trayastriṃśa, Yāma, Tuṣita, Nirmāṇarati and Paranirmitavaśavartin)”.

Those represent various arenas of temptation; the last two are a state where anything you want to think of, happens, and finally a state where you don't have to think, because others are serving you incessantly. That is where the most powerful Mara is like the whole Brahma Loka. We see this as a temptation in a world of form that may be enduring but it is not truly permanent. If you can withstand that and rise above it, you are in Akanistha or the Seventh Heaven, related to immoveable or formless concentrations.

And, yes, this is saying the devil goes to heaven.




I grabbed a list of synonyms for a reason.

Those were Pali. But they were clones of Sanskrit.

Occasionally we find the expression Evil One such as from Hsuan Hua Surangama Sutra commentary:

One Must Cut Off False Speech
N4 One must cut off false speech.
O1 He discusses the intent of precepts or provisional dharmas.
P1 False speech is very harmful.
Q1 Traces false speech as a reason for becoming demonic.


What I have said here is the Buddha's teaching. If you explain as I have explained here, it will be the doctrine spoken by the Buddhas. Any explanation counter to it is the teaching of Papiyan.

and yes it is in several sources:


māraḥ pāpīyān, the evil spirit, the devil, [Lalita-vistara]

Mahaparinirvana and Vimalakirti Sutras use it.





But the Rig Veda pretty specifically lacks Evil and Death.

It uses the same root, papa, for "sin". We're going to burn someone alive in V.3.7 for:


agham aghaśaṃse


The first is a harmful act, the second refers to evil speech.

The commentary breaks it up like this:

offence, āgas or aparādha, and sin or wretchedness, enas or pāpa

Referring to an action, and its associated mental conditions.


The expression enas is used in I.24.9:

keep afar from us Nirṛti, with unfriendly looks, and liberate us from whatever sin we may have committed.

The commentary draws the conclusion:


Nirṛti = deity of sin, pāpa-devatā


I'm not sure it says that anywhere in the mantras, and here, the responsibility for sin, appears to be my own. The liberating agency is the devotee petitioning a deity for the expiation. Nrrti is more like the consequences of sin.


And then we don't give anything good in I.190.5 to:


manyamānāḥ pāpā


The mean and sinful.

We could keep going with several examples, but, the point is, there is no Evil One or Papiyan here. But I got those Pali synonyms, because something is in the Veda, Namuci.




It's used as a proper name, wherein the root muc- has to to with liberation. His name is a negation, the un- or non-liberator, which is a perfect metaphor for Vedic Drought. That's because it's not a summer frying pan drought, it's a clammy, cloudy one, because it means rainclouds that do not liberate the drops.



I never paid attention to this, but, there is a Vedic Un-liberator by name, and the only way to know what that is, is to throw away what everyone else did and take it from first principles.



What comes up if we prioritize the mantras?


Namuci is in one of the first hymns by Bharadvaja in VI.20.6:

“And the hawk bore to Indra the exhilarating Soma, when, bruising the head of the oppressor Namuci, and protecting the slumbering Nami, the son of Sapya, he provided, for the well-being (of the sage), riches and food.”

Almost the same expression is carried forward in V.30.7-8:

...you have bruised the head of the slave Namuci.

“Verily you have made me, Indra, your associate when grinding the head of the slave Namuci like a sounding and rolling cloud; and the heaven and earth (have been caused) by the Maruts (to revolve like a wheel).”

"Cloud" is asmana, stone. Grinding his head like a noisy, rolling stone.

"Slave" has a certain meaning from a previous verse:

all the waters, the brides of the slave

That's hugely, deeply metaphorical of the whole thing. Especially the Rivers Hymn. These aren't just battle markers to show who took what territory. Those are probably events the metaphor is drawn over. Waters are slave brides because it won't rain. Waters are slave brides because an enemy took over the river. Those are probably both true and then it carries to further meanings.


We'll find a change that may not really apply.

Notice in a comment to X.61.8:

cast foam around: an allusion to the destruction of Namuci by Indra in the shape of the foam of the sea

That actually does have a mantric counterpart in VIII.14.13:

“You have struck off, Indra, the head of Namuci with the foam of the waters, when you had subdued all your enemies.”

The expression here is:


namuceḥ śira indrod avartayaḥ


which we were just given as "bruising":


namuceḥ śiro yad avartayo


the original "bruising":


śiro dāsasya namucer mathāyan


is elsewhere grinding. Yes, it means this. That much is certain.


In the Mahabharata and other places, Namuci is considered a Brahman, so, Indra has committed Brahmanicide and for once he hides as a tiny size in a lotus and things go on from there. Here, Namuci has only been called a slave or Dasa. I don't think they used the detail as given by Sukirti Kaksivata:

“You, O Aśvins, lords of light, having drunk the grateful (libation), jointly preserved Indra in battle against the Asura Namuci.”

So, what you have is the Aswins assist Indra with a form of grinding, as if by stones, with also another expression that could specify complete removal of the head, and, finally, in one place, the agent is foam.


A bit more rationale is given by Gauriviti Saktya:

“You have slain the slave Namuci endeavouring (to disturb) the sacrifice, making his illusions powerless against the Ṛṣi; you have made easy for Manu the paths to the gods, so as (to make) the ways straight.”

And in one more area he is also called an illusionist or Mayinam.

But the quote has no real basis for "endeavoring to disturb the sacrifice." The conditional term is a strange one, that is, a wish for something along those lines; another instance of makhasyu is given:

At your birth the three voices of the worshipper are uttered

leaving it with the "worshipper are uttered" part. Mega-destroying Namuci out of the picture:


kṛṇvāna ṛṣaye vimāyam


makes the sage free of Maya.

The strange phrase about "uttering our words" then has connotations of cheerful, merry, lively, exuberant.


So, you see a kind of crisis and resolution here; what you don't see is anyone victimized by Namuci. Maybe they were before. But in each case it is Indra blasting him away.


Well what was the foam all about? In the Veda, it would spill from a damaged Ukha, a vessel or cauldron for boiling.


It's important enough to be stolen by Kuyava and then:

“The abiding-place of the vagrant (Kuyava) was concealed (in the midst) of the water; the hero increases with the waters formerly (carried off), and is renowned (throughout the world); the Añjasī, kuliśī and Vīrapatni rivers, pleasing him with their substance, sustain him with their waters.”

That's not sea foam.

It's a stage in Soma preparation when the contents were boiled.

We don't know exactly how it was done, but, there are some grinding or mashing stones, and boiling is involved.

So it can be a guy praying nothing goes wrong with his Soma.


In the oldest version, it sounds exactly like a stage in Soma pressing.




For the case of evil people, exactly what a "Dasa" is, is a bit unclear.


X.22 begins with two verses comparing a place or country where Indra is famous, to another place that Mitra is famous, which obviously means Zoroastrianism. It appears to be accepted as basically equal, in another country. It then goes on to call Susna "non-human" (amanusa), and then Dasyu and Dasa are closely related, perhaps identical:

“The Dasyu practising no religious rites, not knowing as thoroughly, following other observances, obeying no human laws, baffle, destroyer of enemies, the weapon of that slave.”

alternate version:

Around us is the Dasyu, riteless, void of sense, inhuman, keeping alien laws.
Baffle, thou Slayer of the foe, the weapon which this Dasa wields.

A weapon however could be launched by either a Dasa or Arya, meaning there are evil people of the same country and culture.

And a couple more uses of Maya where you don't know what to keep as a proper name:

the bull-jawed Dasa's wiles and magic

the devices of the slave Vṛsaśipra

It goes on to other evil groups such as the Druhyu or Druj, and the Panis or holders--takers, i. e. Greed. Superficially, a lot of this must have been based on actual battles, tribes, and lands, some of which is re-told as moral and spiritual struggles.

It's intriguing, and you have to be into puzzle work to really appreciate it.

It doesn't really have teachings, whereas Buddha explains everything.

Is Mara cribbed from what they say is the prior source? Not really. I was able to dig up the reference taken from AV VI.93.1:

Aghamāra (अघमार).—a. [aghaṃ mārayati nāśayati; mṛ ṇic-aṇ] destroying sin, an epithet of Gods (yamo mṛtyuraghamāro nirṛtaḥ).

Those words are present in Sanskrit VI.93.


But the definition has flipped the subject and object. It's not an epithet of a deity destroying sin; it is its own name as in the Translations:

Yama, death, the evil-killer, the destroyer, the brown Çarva, the blue-locked archer, the god-folk that have arisen with their army—let them avoid our heroes.

So it is telling Mrtyu, Agha Mara, and Nrrti (among others) to be gone.


A couple of other agha references from Monier-Williams:

the constellation usually called Magha, RV. x, 85, 13


-marshana, mfn. ' sin-effacing' N. of a particular Vedic hymn [RV. x, 190] still used by Brahmans as a daily prayer

N. of the author of that prayer, son of Madhucchandas ; (plur.) his descendants, Hariv. ; AsvSr. -mara, mfn. fearfully destructive, AV

I know what that stuff is; the first is a difficult argument because it may have just meant destroying agha.

The second case is a question even in 2024, why this hymn would be used for daily bathing as well as corpse washing.

That's not how I found it; this is the next-to-last hymn in the whole Rg Veda, and its subject is Creation, Bhavavrttam:

“Truth (of thought) and truthfulness (of speech) were born of arduous penance, thence was night generated, thence also the watery ocean.”

“From the watery ocean was the year afterwards produced, ordaining nights and days, the ruler of every moment.”

“Dhātā in the beginning created the sun and moved the heaven, the earth, the firmament, and the happy (sky).”

So, yes, the author's name is sin-destroyer, and if, colloquially, you name it for him, then you might think it is purification. I never heard of that. There is another daily bathing purification hymn which is far more important, and much more appropriate for the use. The quoted one is kept in the Taittiriya Aranyaka, Mahanarayana Upanishad, but we would have to check again for it there. I don't know what it says. The real one is heavily tied in to how the subject of Waters is far more than what kingdom controls a river.


Turning the page in Atharva Veda, VI.94 is a mental duel:

1. We bend together your minds, together your courses, together your designs; ye yonder who are of discordant courses, we make you bend [them] together here.

2. I seize [your] minds with [my] mind; come after my intent with [your] intents; I put your hearts in my control; come with [your] tracks following my motion.

3. Worked in for me [are] heaven-and-earth; worked in [is] divine Sarasvatī; worked in for me [are] both Indra and Agni; may we be successful here, O Sarasvatī.

This is quite common. Throwing someone's mental work in the garbage. Intolerance. Expurgation. I'm not sure I can find a prayer for peace in here. A hundred ways to crush your mind. Stealing back what you stole. Many many defenses. But it still falls short of having an Evil One in any significant way. There are a handful of Atharva Veda links to Death, Mrityu.


Some of them are highly complex and include overcoming Mrtyu, however, one in particular is about overcoming it through and through, IV.35 uses a refrain that I am going to defeat death by offering Odana, cooked rice.

Well, I did not know that, because Vedic culture is dependent on rice, which has a Gangetic origin not much earlier than 3,000 B. C. E., which is useful information but it was based on pindar or a "ball" of rice,

It is in the Rg Veda a few times, where Indra makes the Odana possible, i. e. by bringing rain to grow the rice. So, this is a given. But then we run into a phrase where suddenly Odana is a Cloud:

“Śakra verily overpowers, Indra overpowers all his enemies; he, worthy of love, abiding beyond, cleaves the cloud smitten by his thunder-voice.”

It looks to me like it would be a rice cake smashed by the stone of a mountain; it is a rice cake three or five times until the specific context of Indra defeating everything.



Well, we find something about Indra's adversaries in VIII.77.

mantra:

...it is Indra who slays the water-stealing boar.

comment:

...the boar hid behind twenty-one stone cities. The seven mountains are the four dīkṣāsor initiatory rites and the three upasads; the boar vāmamoṣa (stealer of precious things) is the personified ceremony of pressing the Soma.

That makes sense; to be made, soma would have to "steal" water, and perhaps rare herbs, and maybe it is a bit like a boar destroying and eating everything. And the hymn is using the standard name, varaha, for boar. It comes back in another hymn by Nodhas:

...he, the pervader of the universe, stole the ripe (treasures of the asuras); the vanquisher (of his foes), the hurler of the thunderbolt, encountering pierced the cloud.

commentary:

Cloud = varāha.

Viṣṇu is the personified yajña; he attracted the accumulated wealth of the asuras; then, he remained concealed behind seven difficult passes, or the days of initiatory preparation for the rite. Indra crossed the seven defiles or went through the seven days of initiation and pierced the sacrifice. Taittirīya expands this further: Varāha, the stealer of what is beautiful, cherishes beyond the seven hills, the wealth of the asuras; Indra, having taken up the tufts of grass, and pierced the seven hills, slew him.

next line:

To that Indra the women, the wives of the gods, addressed their hymns, on the destruction of Ahi.

"This" Ahi appears to be "that" varaha of the previous line.



Also in X.99:

“The sovereign Indra attacking him overcame the loud-shouting, six- eyed, three-headed Dāsa, and Trita, invigorated by his strength, smote the water-laden (cloud) with his iron-tipped finger.”

It's not "iron", it's "metal" (aya). Exactly what a metal finger is, and what it does to a boar cloud, was obvious to the audience of the time, and all these nuances have been absolutely wrecked.



The details are challenging, but, I think we could say "Indra vanquishing foes" is mostly about the successful preparation and use of Soma.

Varaha has a minor meaning as a cloud. Different derivations make various meanings appropriate. The cloud "has good waters", the boar has stolen or "has good food", or if derived from *-han it is a destroyer, and Indra has a double meaning of at least causing it to rain, and, causing Soma to be ready, which is noisy and violent. And certainly all the parts, the Grava or Stones, the Filter, those things are all dressed up in poetic language as well, serving dual meanings.


So if meditation is a symbolic Soma Offering -- which it is -- then, yes, the vanquishing of foes makes sense; But in the much later Buddhism, the foes are clearly focused on Klesas and Skandhas, our own eruption of thoughtforms.

Death itself and the total power of illusion or Deva Child are obviously more subtle.

Klesa is wide-ranging for pain, misery, affliction, distress, that could be counted as the Three Poisons, or lists of ten, or twenty, or up to 84,000, which can be banished by somewhat outer means:

Kleśa (क्लेश) refers to “defilements” (which are cleaned using flowers and water during Pūjā), according to William Stablein’s A Descriptive Analysis of the Content of Nepalese Buddhist Pujas as a Medical-Cultural System (with References to Tibetan Parallels).—The tshog shin (sacred tree) is also mentally visualized.—[Cf. Dīpa]—Another light is used for a special nīrājana [light purification]. A wick is placed in an earthenware dish that contains mustard seeds, which are the standard substance for nullifying forces of bhūta [disease], flowers and water which clean the kleśa [defilments], three balls of rice that designate the dedicating of one’s merits to all sentient beings, and the dish itself, symbolizing the removing of the cover of ignorance. The light is waved in front of the flask where the main divinity is thought to dwell.

So the Skandhas are what qualifies as specifically-Buddhist doctrine. Curing Klesas can be claimed by any similar practice; and so when we come to the Skandha Mara, that is the core of the teaching.

The difference is that other methods suppress these things temporarily; ours makes a permanent end to suffering. And I found that once I learned to think in terms of Skandhas, the point started proving itself.

It's a constant focus on one's own thoughtform-making process, with little regard for the concept of the external.


Keeping that core, the scriptural struggle was basically re-written as Maheshvara Subjugation:

Rudra-Maheshvara eclipses Mara in tantric Buddhism as the primary adversarial being and Satanic-figure.

In the Maheshvara myth, as summarized by Sa-chen from Guhya Tilaka and others, Vajra-Ghasmari was the actual subjugatrix of Isana-Mahesvara, while Heruka converted Indra, Brahma, Mara, and the like (Heruka tramples on Brahma, lndra, Kamadeva, and Mahesvara, while Ghasmari tramples on Isana-Mahesvara, apparently considered the principal variety of the species Mahesvara).


Well then what is a Ghasmari? The Devourer. But what is that? Purified Mind. Sort of like a boar eats all the good stuff and Indra kills the boar. This is ultra violent imagery, because, realistically, that is part of experience. It's effectively the same teaching that is in the plain Pali Sutras but far more vivid and powerful.




Subsequently, Maras have almost no iconography; here they are in an Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita from Nalanda:

[petra]

Something else really important about Thoughtforms is you have to know when to tell them to stop. I remember mother teaching me that. It worked yesterday when I had an evil thought about my kid being adopted by a social worker. I just got so mad but I immediately recognized what I was imagining was evil so I told it to stop and laughed out loud.

[Sue (Ayt)]

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