Observations placeholder

Mircea Eliade – Shamanism Archaic techniques of ecstasy

Some tantric meditations [have as their object]  the practitioner’s stripping his own body of flesh and contemplating his skeleton.  The yogin is asked to imagine his body as a corpse and his mind as an angry goddess, with a face and two hands holding a knife and a skull.

‘Think that she severeth the head from the corpse …. And cutteth the corpse into bits and flingeth them inside the skull as offerings to the deities’.

Another exercise consists in his seeing himself as a ‘radiant white skeleton of enormous size, whence issueth flames, so great that they fill the voidness of the Universe’.

Finally, a third meditation sets the yogin the task of contemplating himself as transformed into the raging Dakini, stripping the skin from his own body.  The text continues ‘Visualise thyself as …. that thou … speadest it [the skin] out so that it covereth the Third Void Universe, and upon it heapest up all thy bones and flesh.  Then., when the malignant spirits are in the midst of enjoying the feast, imagine that the wrathful Dakini taketh the hide and rolleth it up ….. and dasheth it down forcibly, reducing it and all its contents to a mass of bony and fleshly pulp, upon which many mentally produced wild beasts feed.

Source  Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s rendering in W Y Evans-Wentz – Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines