Phowa E-Book

Óscar Mateo Quintana

• Herausgeber: Kolima Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Serie: Desarrollo espiritual
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 248

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This book introduces us to a visualization technique based on ancient traditions from Tibetan Buddhism, which is used to trans-fer consciousness to higher states. This is «phowa», a tool that Óscar Mateo grants us to help us recover the meaning of our existence. It is an exciting journey through transcendence, which completely reconsiders the meaning of life, facilitating numerous arguments and testimonies that allow us to suspect that death is nothing more than a threshold to another state of being. Accepting the idea that we are mere guests passing through this world raises very deep questions but lead us to understand life as a wonderful opportunity to accumulate experiences, learn and, above all, grow. There is no task more important than this. It is time to accept the fact that our existence is eternal. From there, what is dramatic is no longer death, but the loss of reminding our true spiritual identity and the purpose of the present life. This is a book for awakening, to raise one's consciousness, and also a message full of optimism with essential keys to understand reality and what happens to us.

Leseprobe

Original title: Phowa, una llamada desde la trascendencia

© 2018 Editorial Kolima, Madrid

© 2023 Editorial Kolima, Madrid

www.editorialkolima.com

Author: Óscar Mateo Quintana

Editorial direction: Marta Prieto Asirón

Cover layout: Sergio Santos Palmero

Layout: Desirée Sánchez Campos, Silvia González González

ISBN: 978-84-19495-46-4

The total or partial reproduction of this work is not allowed, nor its incorporation into a computer system, nor its transmission in any form or by any means, be it electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or other methods, rental or any other form of assignment of the work without the prior written authorization of the intellectual property owners.

Any form of reproduction, distribution, public communication or transformation of this work can only be carried out with the authorization of its owners, except as otherwise provided by law. Contact CEDRO (Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights) if you need to photocopy or scan any part of this work (www.conlicencia.com; 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 45).

In honor of Palmira

November, 5th 1925 / September, 4th 2008

INDEX

IS THIS BOOK FOR ME?

I: MY MEETING WITH PHOWA

Living outside the coherence

An unexpected event

My encounter with phowa

Palmira

An impossible call

The true path to trascencende

II: TRANSCENDENCE?

The challenge posed by the end of life

An excepcional yogi who speaks of trascendence

Countless footprints throughout history

The moral apocalypse and the review of one's life

III: THE ORIGINS OF PHOWA

The concept of bardo or intermediate state

The Bardo Thodol: its true meaning

The arrival in the west

History, legend and myth

What tradition tells us

On the figure of Padmashambava

IV: THE PRACTICE OF PHOWA

The exercise of phowa according to tradition

Benefits for the one who left and for the one who practices it

Other modalities

V: KEYS FOR A TRANSCENDING UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY

Preparation for death becomes more and more necessary

The real drama is to fall into oblivion

Preparing oneself for eternal life

A human game board governed by the laws of the spirit

You are nothing more but consciousness

Spiritual coaching: towards an integrated and transcendent vision of life

Some guidelines for the awakening of consciousness

Do not settle for waking up, go beyond

Phowa in action

Phowa as a process of raising consciousness

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GLOSSARY OF AUTHORS

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

IS THIS BOOK FOR ME ?

“For the one who believes, no proof is necessary. for the one who does not believe, no proof is enough.”IGNACIO DE LOYOLA

If you are one of those people to whom death has scratched because you have suffered a loss that leaves a void that does not seem to fill even with the passage of time: this book is for you.

Perhaps the scar has not been caused by the loss in itself, but by the feeling that something was pending because there was no time or opportunity to resolve it. There were open issues of great importance to you, which were not said or done.

You have to know that there are still things you can do. That which was halfway and is so important for you can still be retaken and, in some way, resolved..

It could also happen that you feel the need to be an active part in the accompaniment of the person who is in the process of dying. Even to ask yourself if there is something that can be done beyond the moment of death. All this is possible and your intervention could have an influence of unimaginable reach for both.

You may even be someone who thinks strongly that things do not end at the end of this existence, since there is much more and there is no reason to end a relationship of friendship or a deep feeling of love just because one has abandoned this stage.

Here you will find answers and access to an ancient practice of meditation created specifically for these purposes called phowa1.

If, in your case, you do not identify yourself with some of the above situations because yours is simple curiosity, then you can go as a guest and, as such, I beg you to do so with respect.

1   The term phowa derives from an ancestral practice of Tibetan Buddhism that is described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead called Bardo Thodol. Textually, the term phowa means “transfer of consciousness.” For this reason, when I refer to the practice of the exercise, I will use “phowa” in small letters, while when I refer directly to its meaning, I will use “Phowa” with the first letter in capital letters.

LIVING OUTSIDE THE COHERENCE

“Most of us have so little respect for life, that we reach the point of death without having lived at all”.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

How many times have you made statements that you have not fulfil? There are so many people who say one thing and then do the opposite.

We repeatedly check this every time we try to give up a habit, considering it harmful or unhealthy. It is like when we want to impose the healthy purpose of losing some weight. After a while of turning around that decision, when you want to realize, you are already eating again in excess, filling you beyond your feelings of appetite or satiety... eating again what does not benefit you, but that has that flavor that you find so appetizing... Or the same thing that happens when you want to quit smoking and at the moment you are again with the burning cigarette in your mouth, because “this will be the last one”.

In all those moments you are living out of coherence. It is as if two opposing personalities coexist within you, which will become a constant source of irritation and inner noise that will feed your suffering.

To all this we should add that despite being inside you the cause of discomfort, with your mind you will always look for it outside. However, as much as we look for those responsible people, we will not be able to find them because, in practice, we will be blaming people or circumstances that do not have a direct relationship with the discomfort we experience.

Very few people do what they say they will do, that is, those who fulfil their purposes. Most of these people live in the fantasy of what they would like to do or to be in front of what he (understanding the personal masculine pronoun “he” as a human being from now on) is and does. This distortion between one thing and another means living outside coherence.

If that state is reduced to small things, such as those slightly uncontrolled habits, small addictions, promises of little value and, finally, ruptures of small commitments, then, you can live or coexist, with more or less discomfort, living outside the coherence.

Another issue is that in that state of confusion, the person comes to believe his own lies, systematically justifying a thousand false reasons, why he finally made that decision or did that, what has always kept him within a life script that does not bring him happiness or fulfilment. The easy thing, as we said, is to blame the other or the circumstances. The difficult thing, the really difficult thing, is to take responsibility for everything and have the courage to exercise change, first within oneself and then extending it to the circumstances around us.

When these states (of internal disorder) are expressed, another is invited to also leave their state of order or coherence. For example, imagine a situation within the work environment in which the boss tells the subordinate something like: “Resolve it! I do not care how you do it” What a phrase! On the one hand, he gives him an order and at the same time he tells him that he does not care how he is going to do it2. He is giving two contradictory mandates... Someone who acts in this way proves to be completely outside his centre, dominated by states and desires that directly conflict with each other. The serious drawback of this is that this internal conflict overflows and is thrown outward, reaching in our example a poor subordinate who has the impossible mission to fulfil such an order because nothing will be adequate: if you do not try something, you will be disobeying; and if you obey by providing some kind of solution, you already know that it will not be valued at all... As one can intuit, in this way we can stay within an infinite loop of incoherence. Coming out of such insane interactions usually requires great inner clarity and great value and psychic and emotional energy.

If we take this issue to humanity as a whole, it shows a strong lack of coherence when, for example, it acts by destroying the same ecosystem that supports it. That is to remain out of coherence!

Humanity lives or, better said, lives badly, in a state that seems to move away a little more every day from coherence. It happens that we are traveling along a path that distances us more and more from happiness, no matter how much the system insists on building false messages about the life model that their individuals should live to be more successful and happier.

But what does this have to do with the matter we are dealing with? Well, there is a direct relationship.

Think of any of the following extremes. Imagine that a person claims not to believe in anything beyond the present life. Then the passage through existence would be a truly extraordinary opportunity, something incredibly exceptional. The truth is that, seen like this, every day should be a pure celebration, similar to the explosion of vitality that young children express when they get up knowing that it is Three Kings Day or that an event will take place that day. It really excites them. This is how life should be from that point of view, in case of remaining in a true state of coherence.

On the contrary, let’s go to the other extreme where a person firmly believes that death is not the end of existence. Eternity is yours. The rush is over, the desire to quickly get out of undesirable situations and the desire for wonderful successes to come. Because nothing is permanent, he is in a continuous becoming in which only the being remains. Everything would become relative before the magnitude of a thought as solid as: “eternity belongs to me”, “I am eternal.”

However, we can meet people who defend more or less vehemently any of these extremes. What is not so easy is that some of them reflect such convictions in an entirely consistent life with those ideas.

Even worse, most people do not even consider being in transit through this existence, whatever comes before or after this life. They live in a state, like a dream state in which they are carried along by the tendencies that society marks, without really questioning things. In such a state, they will not even reflect on the consistency or inconsistency of their lives.

All perfect. Everything will work until that day comes, that unexpected and always inopportune event in which life, that orderly and predictable thing, that monotonous existence without frights, vanishes under your feet.

AN UNEXPECTED EVENT

Suppose that at this time they told you that you only have a few weeks left to live, that you will go to bed and you will not wake up again because it is your time. Try to imagine it with realism. Then, think about everything you would like to do before leaving and also what you would not do more during those weeks. Think about who you would like to see and why, what would you say to that person.

We are not talking about doing things outside the limits of reasonableness but about continuing with your life as you have been doing up to this precise moment only by taking away the small pending issues from your vital agenda. The difference from that moment is that we decide to perform all those small actions, those small changes that would bring enough (and I mean “enough”) order to your life, so that you could leave with an acceptable degree (and I mean “acceptable”) of satisfaction and fulfilment.

Surely they would not be great changes, it is even possible that they were a handful of things that you have always postponed by giving them relative attention and that suddenly, before a near end, they would gain an outstanding relevance.

There is something, which is very paradoxical, in all this, because those small actions would surely be the trigger for major changes that you would like to introduce into your life. However, being out of coherence, you would not start them or even think about it. Otherwise, if you arrange these meetings with those people, say what you need to say and perform those four actions or experiences that you would like to have had, probably the changes you would experience would be profound. It does not matter the size of the seed as much as the fact of sowing it and letting nature do the rest. You are still on time, the moment is now.

Do you know what is the worst of all? That this absurd simulation could be real right now because nobody is certain that they are not within that limited time.

In reality, none of us can say that he will continue here tomorrow, next week, next month or another year. We do not know when our time will come to leave everything, where it will occur and what will be the circumstances that will surround us then.

I will always remember what happened to me in the summer of 1998. I was about to enjoy a long-awaited summer vacation. My former wife, after several attempts, had managed to pass her difficult entrance exams, which for us was undoubtedly a cause for great celebration. On the other hand, my father had been diagnosed with cancer very few months ago, already in a very advanced stage. At that time we lived far away from my family and we wanted to spend a part of our vacation with them to accompany them and share their circumstances. Everything had a sweet but bitter taste at the same time.

We arrived at my parents’ house and immediately we could see the state of depression in which my father was. He was having a hard time assimilating the new physical situation towards which he was progressing. In addition, the diagnosis had been given without any contemplation or delicacy. In just a few hours of being together, he had been repeating that he had a few months to live.

That Saturday, the first of August, my father asked us to accompany him to the city centre to run some errands, for which we were delighted. We had to leave a computer to be repaired in a very central store. I stopped the car in front of the store and crossed with the computer. When I left the store, I saw my wife and my father waiting for me inside the car. I was standing in front of them, waiting to cross and leave. At that moment I felt a slightly warm and strange air that reached me from the left. In an instinctive gesture I turned my eyes to that side and I could only distinguish a red mass that was on me. Then a loud explosion and my body that took an impossible position in the air while I flew out. A bus that skimmed the sidewalk hit me unexpectedly.

Hours later, already in the hospital, my father crying approached me and said: “Son, I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead.” A few days after my accident, we talked and I stressed that none of us really knew when we were going to die, or if the circumstances could be predictable in any way. At least for a few weeks his worry about himself dissipated completely because of my accident.

If every morning when we get up we quickly evaluate the course of our life to see if we live a day, if the script of our life is what we would like to be living, that very brief reflection would be enough to guide us on the direct path to happiness.

Experiencing things for yourself is essential

One more of the many problems of society that we are building is that people are ceasing to live on their own experiences.

The technological revolution in the media and information allow the person to have access to a large number of images recorded in the first person of people who parachute, surf a great wave, descend on a mountain bike down a hill, dive in some beautiful seabed, looks out at the caldera of an active volcano, survives extreme conditions... and all this from the sofa of his house fantasizing and believing (once again living out of coherence), which can already be considered in himself an authority over what he has seen.

In this scene I describe two coinciding issues, both undesirable. On the one hand, the fact that people are beginning to live their lives vicariously, that is, another does it for them and they access to ultra-realistic images of the situation, which allows them to get very close to the fantasy of putting them in the first person. Unfortunately, there is a chasm between reality and living from the sofa at home. It is the problem of approaching a virtual reality that, as always, is very useful for certain purposes, but very harmful if with it individuals replace real life with the fantasy of living it. The experience is lost and with it the true learning.

There is no choice but to experience things in the first person to be able to talk about them. It is one thing to speak from the point of view of a mere observer and quite another, to do it from the one who has had the experience.

The second issue that derives from the previous one is that the richer and more intense the life a person has, when he faces the end of his days, the fact of carrying his backpack full of experiences allows him to say goodbye more easily. What a great paradox that the more alive you have been, the easier it is to die. Confucius said that “if you learn to live, you will know how to die well.”

I have always been very impressed being close to a dying person to verify that what produces the greatest regret in people is, above all, what they failed to do.

Thus, it becomes transcendental for the person to experience in the first person as much as possible, always within their means. It is not necessary to go to extremes, there is always an acceptable way of approaching things in the measure of the economy of each one, of their physical circumstances and in general of the limitations to which each one is subjected.

Preparing properly to face death requires the person to display a rich, intense and full life, full of experiences of all kinds.

Going even further, that brave and exploratory attitude should reach even higher levels. If you realize, we live constantly submerged within the paradigm of scarcity. People wear tight clothes, fashion is thinness, the millennial salary, adjustments, cuts... Such a social program ends up generating in people even a narrowness in their thinking.

It is time to change this paradigm so limiting for another that gives rise to the growth and expansion of people and societies.

The point is that, in order to progress and move forward, an exploratory mood and the search in the limits of the known and the possible is essential because only at the border of things is where the map can be enlarged and where discoveries occur.

When people do not leave their comfort zone, when the scientist is more concerned with the defence of dogma and his status than with the search for new limits and fields of knowledge, then society does not progress, but instead decays. Only at the border of the known and explored is when discoveries occur: when you travel to where the fissures of knowledge begin, where the limits are confusing, where traditional explanations fail. It is in the unexplored where the advance occurs.

Not satisfied with staying in their security space, many people not only do not participate in the exploration but also allow themselves the audacity to judge those who do take the trouble and assume the implicit risks of reaching those challenging and uncertain places.

Reflect, so you can broaden your perspective of things. It is essential that you get up from the sofa in your house and test things for yourself, without complying with what others tell you. It is necessary that you deepen contents that are within the limits of what is accepted, where knowledge begins to be diffuse, where your schemes run the risk of having to be reviewed or even rewritten.

There is a security measure that you will need to enter those territories of uncertainty. It is necessary, so as not to get lost in that exploration path, that you always go to the sources, that you consult the first one who said it, the first one who tried it, the first one who experienced what interests you so much. Otherwise, you run the risk of following false leads with deformations of the original message and, in general, corrupted, altered or perverted information.

Yes, exploring means taking risks, visiting awkward places, making mistakes and having to return to points that were believed to have already passed. This is the price. On the contrary, the value of the reward grows the harder the exploration becomes.

If something took me to phowa, if something characterizes me and differentiates me from the majority of the people I know, it is my exploratory spirit and my orientation to live life in the first person, testing what others tell me within the limits of the reasonable and my possibilities.

MY ENCOUNTER WITH PHOWA

Understanding my experience with the practice of phowa and how much I will share in this book requires starting with the way through which I came to this ancient practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

For my approach to phowa, my previous training in Zen and yoga has been essential. Both disciplines taught me to keep my mind focused, to distance myself from my own thinking by becoming an observer of it and to be widely familiar with ideas and concepts that phowa takes for granted. Along with it, the challenges and discipline that some of my initiations have demanded from me has made the road traveled in phowa naturally paved. Thanks to this, everything I share now has gone through a long process of assimilation with my own personal growth.

From a young age I have felt transcendence as something inherent in my nature and that of everything that exists.

I have always believed that what we see is nothing but the tip of an immense reality sustained by something that is beyond our human understanding and undoubtedly what our most advanced senses and technology are capable of capturing and measuring. I have never struggled with it, nor have I had to undergo endless dialectics that reach nowhere. I simply knew or, better, felt that perceived reality is just the surface of a vast ocean.

This approach helped me to seek information, broaden my point of view and understanding of things and thus deepen more in what I was exploring and experiencing for myself.

On very few occasions I have been able to chat in a relaxed way with people whose attitude allows them to question the most common beliefs about existence and what lies beyond. Few people address these issues with foundation and rigour.

I am actively curious. I have found topics of real interest to me and I have not stopped until I deepen everything possible in those contents, especially because I am passionate. Thematics as varied as biology, transpersonal psychology, meditation techniques, the so-called altered states of consciousness and in other order of things, technical sports activities, such as flying or diving... and, especially, everything that allows consciousness to grow. Because, ultimately, everything we are going to expose here is not about anything but consciousness.

1993 was a truly special year. There is a turning point in my story before and after that year.

In June, a dearest friend of mine, a Catholic priest whom I had at that time as a student in anthropology and social psychology classes, arranged to meet with me to take a long walk through a beautiful park to chat with some depth.

We talked about many things and in that conversation he could see my deep spiritual sense. It was in that context when he told me about Zen meditation, in which he had some experience. That aroused my curiosity and I wanted to know first-hand what this practice was.

In October of that same year, I had my first initiation in the practice of Zen, in the only zendo that was at that time in our country (Brihuega-Guadalajara), performing my first five-day sesshin3.

From there, the search would be relentless, sometimes at a frantic pace, sometimes at a slower pace. The discovery was already made and the world for me, life, death and all the great questions of humanity would become the central axis. Everything else, although necessary and important, would come to occupy a secondary place since then.

My encounter with phowa was very simple and discreet. In 2000 I was reading with great interest the version written by Sogyal Rinpoché of the “Tibetan Book of Life and Death” [3], delving into it from that moment on.

On the content of this work (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), its origin and other related aspects, we will expand later. At the moment, I will only point out that it is a text originally written in the 8th century, loaded with all the symbolism, mythology and ancestral culture of those lands. Its original version, read by a Westerner of S.XXI, can lead to very deviant interpretations. It is for this reason that I recommend reading a commented version, in which the author reveals the true meaning of what is described there and one can easily extract the essential messages it contains.

That is what I was doing at that time, until I reached that page, where I found, in a very discreet way, the practice of phowa, described in just a few paragraphs. I read it carefully and somehow that information was fixed in my mind like so many other jewels of that magnificent work4.

Not much time had elapsed, when unfortunately death came to visit my closest environment: my father.

I remember traveling to my hometown, the sadness of those days and especially the mass that many people attended. At that funeral, I lived with great strangeness the fact that the person who was saying mass introduced my father’s name in his texts, making some direct allusion to his person and without knowing him. That was empty to me and did not honour the memory of what my father had been until a few hours ago. There were missing many of his best qualities and wonderful events from his biography that I would have gladly shared with the people who accompanied us. I fully understand that this is normal at any funeral, but that time, I found it insufficient and with this I do not question at all the service of that good priest.

After a few days, already back home, while trying to fit the loss, somehow that Tibetan writing and the practice I described came to my mind. I did not hesitate and began to introduce my particular phowa practice with my daily meditations, focusing it on my father’s memory, doing so for a few weeks.

From those days I remember getting to feel his presence next to my mat, as if he were physically by my side and this experience, because of its intensity, became distracting. However, accustomed to the discipline of meditation, I redoubled my concentration and focus to continue with the practice of phowa. Being faithful to my training, any subjective experience or sensation, any thought other than the practice I focused on, even any surprising information that came to my mind, everything, absolutely everything that had nothing to do with following the protocol marked by phowa was considered a distraction. Therefore, in the face of distraction, discipline, refocusing and moving forward with the practice.

The experiences remained on the subjective level, while I spent those weeks doing my phowa practice for my father. One of those days, I was in the hall doing my practice. The experience had been the same as any of the previous ones. I was already done and in fact I was beginning to stretch my legs and to move myself with the purpose of getting up and continuing with the day-to-day. At that precise moment, my former partner opened the door and without entering the hall she let out an exclamation. I looked at her and then she said, “My God!, it smells of Paco!”5. Yes, she, without knowing what I was doing, had just objectively perceived something that I had repeatedly noticed: his particular smell that permeated the room, since my father used to make himself a particular combination of alcohol with herbs, so he always had a very personal smell.

That practice with my father, in which I did not reach 49 days, allowed me to capture some important things.

I had no doubt that I was doing a practice that, after its apparent simplicity, displayed an intense experience. Apart from that, my duel was elaborated in a fluid and very natural way that integrated the facts with full awareness. During those days focused on his memory, I had a space of total intimacy and deep serenity so that the flow of my emotions could manifest freely, without forcing anything, simply leaving the necessary space.

Along with this, as I went through the steps of phowa