Sentient Light wrote: ↑Thu Dec 13, 2018 6:53 pm
Seeker12 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 13, 2018 1:57 am
In the autobiography of Dudjom Lingpa (A Clear Mirror), he recounts a journey to Sukhavati, and he exclaims something like, “I thought that all things had no true existence apart from the mind, but this seems utterly real!”
Do you have any other notes on his descriptions? You can PM me.
I think I've posted about my Pure Land experience after my grandmother passed somewhere in the PL subforum, but I'll reiterate here also that it did seem incredibly real, to the point where comparing it to "waking existence" here made this world seem far more dream-like. I don't know any other way of expressing that. However, the Contemplation of Amitabha Sutra also explicitly mentions when the Buddha is speaking to Queen Vaidehi that he is speaking in imagery that she can understand.
I only saw this one little area, and very briefly because we were quite high above it and... I wasn't really paying attention to the environment and didn't understand what was happening for a long while. But coming away from it, I still felt that the Buddha had just allowed my mind to see and perceive something comprehensible, so trees looked like trees and water looked like water and the clouds--although a different color--looked like clouds, but I am not sure that it looks anything like that to a being actually born there, rather than a, uh.. guest.
I have the book at home and will try and look. Offhand I don't recall much detail, though it seems in line with what you said about seeming 'more real' than 'waking existence'.
I have heard a story from another person who is quite accomplished, I think, with a Phowa for Amitabha's pure land who almost died and basically went there for a time. I think I have mentioned it to you before on a different forum (if you didn't know who this was before, you probably will after this comment), but he saw a very large form of Amitabha and I think (I may be wrong) he was on his hand or something, and anyway, before he 'came back' to his regular Earth life, he described that he perceived this immense, perfect complexity even down to where there was the appearance of microscopic organisms that essentially kept everything perfect or something like that.
I imagine that when it comes to such experiences, there is an aspect of sort of 'selective perception' in the sense that what one perceives is basically exactly what one needs to perceive for one's particular current circumstance. And that perception may be very different, at least to a degree, from one to the next.
“Whoever wants to find the wisdom beyond intellect without praying to his guru is like someone waiting for the sun to shine in a cave facing the north. He will never realize appearances and his mind to be one.”
Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche