Zen Miracles and Visions 

I trained at centers associated with Shasta Abbey for 6 or 7 years, did retreats, and heard Jiyu Kennett speak several times when I first started doing Zen. She concentrated on karma and rebirth as is traditional in Buddhism. Many practitioners told me of their experiences of past lives. I don't think they were lying but wonder if they were somehow primed to have these experiences. Shasta Abbey interpreted these as lessons, usually of some past mistake not to repeat. They interpreted four kenshos as stream entry, once returner, never returner, and arahant as in the Pali sutras. Also, the gaitan outside the meditation hall had stained glass windows with illustrations from "How to Grow a Lotus Blossom." Her visions involved going back and finding what set the karmic stream of suffering rolling. When talking to teachers from other centers about Jiyu Kennett's third kensho, I got the impression that they didn't believe her but were too polite to say so to my face.

My dad is a Sant Mat practitioner, and has about 50 years of meditation practice under his belt. He told me that for the last 4 or 5 years he's been hearing very distant bells while meditating. He finds them useful to keep his mind focused, but otherwise makes nothing of it. Sounds wise to me :D

Seeing auras is quite common among meditators and trippers. Find the sparkle of the sun on rain drops amazing.

Maybe when people suggest we keep our childlike qualities, they mean that awe and wonder that often children have toward those parts of the world that adults can view as mundane or ordinary and take for granted. When I find myself longing for escape or change or what I mistakenly assume will be "better," I try to recognize how amazing it is that I am even here at all.

Miracles and visions, bells and whistles got to love it.

Dzogchen is often broken down into two stages, Trekchod and Thogal. Trekchod is similar to or identical with shikantaza, while thogal is the practice that works with "visions." It includes sun-gazing, dark retreat, sky-gazing, and other such visionary practices that are engaged in when trekchod has been stabilized. The goal is to remain "in the nature of mind" and not be taken in by the visions. Essentially, taking the visions to be real or attaching to them is "failing" at thogal. (It is thogal practice that leads to "rainbow body.") I've wondered how society would be different if makyo/visions being the product of our own minds was recognized in all other religious traditions. How many times have people's hallucinations culminated in people being killed? The Abrahamic traditions seem to be peppered throughout with people who go on a 40 day bender in a desert and come out of it convinced their hallucination was a message from god to fulfill some mission. If there had been a knowledgeable teacher there to give them a smack and say, "Just keep sitting," where would we be?

All that magic stuff is really not important part of the teaching, but...it seems to be an important sign of a genuine teacher.

Fascinating! Sounds like her experiences were HER experiences … which is great for her! Not sure she should try to spin off a new spiritual practice from it, but who am I to say?

I've done some retreats at Shasta Abbey which is a wonderful place to practice. Anyone there can have mystical visions of shining Mount Shasta floating in the clouds. I know I did.

Great post 🤟

Great summary at the end (15:13) 👏

Thanks Brad!

Thanks Brad, really informative

06:00 - its the siddhi of far hearing, ma maaaan...

🙏

Shout out to language! Cool stuff

Just completely coincidentally my aunt channelled Isis and ran a new age cult until she was committed. I like how much Zen values Nothing.

Ziggy is good boy💕

"How strange it is to be anything at all".

🙏🧘‍♀️👍

Could the prolonged illness cause the visions? Or, could the condition that caused the illness also bring on the visions? Was an autopsy done on her brain? Or did she just really, really want to have visions?

C'mon! We all know what caused those bells, flowers, clouds and lights to mysteriously appear. Aliens! 👽🛸 Just sayin'. Thanks for featuring these stories.🤙

James Ford, Roshi has a short video on a vision he had. It's interesting how he talks about Zen's ambivalent attitude toward visions and his own complicated feelings about it. Coincidentally, I believe he received dharma transmission from Jiyu Kennett. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BkKsSZECRQg.html

whatya think of all the supernatural stuff in Tibetan Buddhism? I'm into the anything possible but also fisherman tell tal tales and salesman tell lies

Whoah, was that about the barking? Or an example of how it's amazing humans can communicate with each other, but not as well with dogs? :)

That bio isn't quite right, she wanted to be a Church of England priest but women weren't allowed to at the time, (changed in 1992)

Faure is pronounced like "fore".

Are you saying that the reality of experience is not experienced reality when people can't grasp the minds of others?

You were led down a Rabbit what???

kensho can be directly visionary or something may occur that you only notice by a change in yourself so figure something has happened, though unsure when and what, diffuse or sudden without the visionary you will never understand and of course hardly anyone ever does, and they just 'manufacture" the usual nonsense i think zen like any historical monastic system always has huge problems with mentel illness so its a bit of a fraught area and you have to be "enlightened" to handle it with the real deal you can tell whether the experiences of others are genuine or relevant, this skill has been lost for centuries the visionary does not fit into western zen because it does not fit into its philosophical rationalist take and actually seething snakes of mentel illness below the surface, so for instance you get dogen's visionary experiences in china dishonestly translated as dreams when they are not the not understood fact of true understanding of the "spiritual reality" of the universe is schizophrenia, autism and psychosis that happens to be true, a narrow long road hardly ever travelled, but it can be, but never even thought of by all the "sane" pretenders

Ghost Dog, commenting on "Rashomon" (Gate of the Angry Spirits, tales from the century [sic!] of Civil Wars): "This mediaeval Japan must have been a strange land!" The German sociologist Max Weber might have said: "Master Dôgen lived in an enchanted garden"---but, during M. Weber´s life-time Chán/Zen was practically a terra incognita in Europe, even for most scholars, like the Scotsman James Legge. In the USA, after having performed at the congress of world-religions in Chicago[?], D.T. Suzuki started his half missionary, half ecumenical work... We may, with good reasons, assume that Dôgen Kigen lived inside an "enchanted garden", a "world of wonders", indeed. The mind-set of the people in the Far East was quite different from the typical "rational" one in "today´s West", even if some forms of re-enchantment gain, once again, some momentum. We may visit, for example, the mentioned Kiyomizu-dera (Clear-water Temple) in Kyôto. The "objective space" would not seem to be totally different, although it changed considerably since Dôgen´s time in not only some minor details. But, you still can experience some self-same features of the layout, the "profane geography": a temple-areal, overtowering the city, the famous platform, the hill behind, the spring at the foot of the hill. But, you most certainly cannot authentically ("jumping back in time") experience the "lived space" around the "sacral geography", like Dôgen did. All was heavily "meaning-loaded" for nearly all the folks, then. Especially such holy, spiritual places, like the Kiyomizu-dera were (and for many still are) surrounded by a halo of meaning surplus, so to speak. One can notice features of Fengshui-design, watch/observe associated rites, listen to related narratives from older and newer times, and so on, and so forth. In sum, the Kiyomizu-dera was designed and received by all people, who habitually/intuitively/rationally knew the cultural-code, as a "world in a nutshell", which, again, fit well with the holistic paradigm... This was the (natural-bio-)cultural background for the person, called Dôgen Kigen. It was his "second nature". Now, as a practitioner of the Law in the Zen-variant, which laid special stress on Zazen-meditation, Dôgen, additionally, also spent much time in the realm, conventionally called the "dhyâna-dhatu". In sum, he thereby followed a tradition of "elite culture": The Zen-people were, de facto, always eager to stress the superiority of their "way" in comparison with "lesser" cults and folkways. In one of his studies, Bernhard Faure demonstrated via several typical examples, how the Zen-people again and again tried to "appropriate" the narratives and holy geographies of popular "folk-cults". From this, one may conclude: Master Dôgen intentionally "bracketed" the "lesser folk-vehicles", at least in his "cosmo-theological" writings, if probably not always in practice, and partly substituted them by his own "mystic realism" (with some marked transcendentalist tendencies, as hinted at, not at least, by the term of the "Dharma-eye"). That would be some of my cultural-historical hermeneutics. Thanks for sharing.