The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP 103
public world
awareness-
-contemplation -
effigy
binding
symbolic being
empowering
sealing
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divine power
-knowledge being
In both cases a "receptacle"—an image that the practitioner possesses—is
prepared through contemplative generation from Emptiness;
into this is magically drawn the link with the realm to be controlled,
the victim's awareness or the divine knowledge being; and finally
these are bound or sealed into a unitary simulacrum—the completed
effigy or the yogin's own body—which may be manipulated toward
any end. The effigy, we may note, requires no extra step to prepare
it for the entrance of the victim's awareness, but the symbolic being
must be "empowered" before it is a fit vessel for the divinity,
especially if the practitioner is himself the symbolic being in selfgeneration;
without the strengthening and armoring of the senses,
the simultaneous casting away of ordinary ego and the influx of
divine power could be overwhelming.
Now even an ordinary man, driven to the extremities of desire,
might mold an effigy and make it work, might coerce events with a
fortuitous visualization. But the yogin "firmly grasps the appearance
and ego of the deity," and this control guarantees his success;
it is the deity himself who manipulates the effigy and links it to the
victim. A fallible magic is available to everyone; an unfailing magic
belongs only to one who has gone through the prior ritual service
and has acquired the power of the god. And it is this same process
of feedback—this growing control and power—which allows the
yogin gradually to coerce the divine appearance itself with ever
greater assurance, to be himself more of a god each time he evokes
the god.
It is, after all, only this divine presence that sanctifies the yogin's
contemplative reality; we must distinguish the Process of Generation—the
evocation of the divine, at whatever locus—from the
simple generation of the effigy as the victim, or the mere creation
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vivid appearance in lust or hatred. Thus Tenpe nyima 157
says
that to know appearances to be without truth is the "illusory