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I don't know; I just did it, and it was fun. Hey, anybody can put anything on the Internet and this is proof! And the First Amendment is alive and well here in Boise. But, maybe a few things should be explained. "Dakini" is a word that means many things to many people. The concept can also be understood on many levels. Perhaps one could list the catagories of dakini: 1. Enlightened energy; 2. Female goddesses who embody this energy; 3. The human karmamudra, a woman, the visualization of whom, engenders passionate energy; 4.Common flesh-eating dakinis that are generally an annoyance; the list goes on and on. As the tantrickas say, "See all women as the dakini." The male counterpart of the dakini is the "daka." Presumably the daka is as versatile as the dakini, although less has been written in that area. (A great area for exploration and report?) But seriously, dakinis on the level that concerns us here, are really genderless, colorless, formless, so we don't need to be female to identify with the dakini. Enough said about that. Gee, in sum, I guess just about anything or anybody could technically be a dakini! Now, "Dakini," in post-modern Buddhist Tondrel Loosetalk is a woman with all kinds of sought-after attributes. The sky's the limit! Many women are casually referring to themselves dakinis and that is great. They are, for sure. No problem there. "Chod" is a practice from Tibet, originated by a real woman, Machig Labdron, that involves visualizations that include chopping off one's own head, dismembering ones body, etc. The chod iconography is fascinating (see the Nechung Monastery). These visualizations can (maybe "better" is a better word here) be understood metaphorically as chopping or severing one's ego, "seeing" the world as if it were all where your head used to be (see Harding, Links). They can be seen as a type of tonglen also in which one visualizes feeding other beings with one's own flesh (see the Bible). In any case, and this is the important point, so nota bene: The dakini who has also severed her head has made serious progress into seeing her persona for the aggregated compound conglomerate of goo that it is. Would this person really go around referring to herself by an appellation that implied that she was somehow more "special" than other lumps of goo? Well, we don't really know for sure. You can say, "Hey Samsara IS Nirvana," but then, let's get real... So, the issue is not so simple as we can see, although we at HD can be a bit simple. Anyway, you can never tell by outward appearance and besides, judgments are but the fingernails of a real headless dakini. The important thing is that, at least you took a look. You did your best. You found some wisdom and courage and bliss too. What else can a dakini with a head do?
From TM, Santa Fe: "Lots of women go around calling themselves dakinis but that's just a big ego trip, like, Hey, I'm a dakini so I am special. So the real dakinis don't act like they are special or sexy or beautiful and they don't wear dakini jewelry and all that; The real dakinis have chopped off their heads and their sad little individual narcissistic identities." |
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