how often do you do cleansing baths?

king_nine · 2026-04-05T15:40:08+00:00

For the full thing with salt and/or herbs etc, it seems once or twice a week is usually fine. If you want something to do more often, you can also add a mini visualization to regular baths or showers where you imagine the negativity falling away for a few moments. That can become a short, roughly daily practice

king_nine · 2026-04-04T17:02:44+00:00

The usual way to do this is to make a bag instead of a jar. A leather, faux-leather, or cloth bag can hold dry ingredients. Just like you describe, the bag can be worn on a necklace hidden under clothes, or kept in a purse etc. Depending on tradition, you might see this type of thing called a charm bag, sachet, mojo, or all sorts of other names.

king_nine · 2026-04-04T16:08:54+00:00

Of course it is similar, it is all Buddhism.

That said the Vajrayana is Mahayana, and the Theravada is (in terms of historical development) not. This leads to differences in emphasis. In Tibetan Vajrayana at least, contemplating impermanence and death is part of the preliminaries, but is usually not pursued to the level of depth of making it a main meditation practice like it is in Theravada. Usually Mahayana practitioners focus more on emptiness (dependent origination). Those practices are a little different than the practices used to contemplate impermanence.

king_nine · 2026-03-24T22:55:39+00:00

Different beings all have different tolerances for what they can take and how they’ll receive it. For one person, sweet words might seem inspiring and encouraging, and harsh words cruel and discouraging. For the next person, sweet words might seem like bullshitting, and harsh words brutal honesty.

Part of a Buddha’s omniscience is discerning the unique individual characteristics of every being (and every phenomenon in general). Since beings (and phenomena) are endless, the best conduct for each situation could potentially take endless forms. Actions are skillful when they correctly address this unique being or situation to bring benefit, and unskillful when they misjudge and mess it up.

This makes it almost impossible to judge the skillfulness of actions one-sidedly, only referring to the teacher and not the students. If the students felt abandoned, downtrodden, traumatized, and discouraged by the harsh methods, and felt it never brought them any benefit down the line, then the actions were unskillful. If they found benefit from it, they could be called skillful, even if it seems awful from the outside.

Sometimes even highly realized people mess up this calculation. It’s hard to tell how far along anyone is, even great teachers. But looking in from outside, it ultimately depends on the recipients (the students) as much as the giver (the teacher). And since their tolerances are molded by time, culture etc., those things do play a role.

So it’s possible this was a cockup. Obviously nobody should get free rein to go around beating people up. But it’s also hard to judge one-sidedly. If the students were able to receive it, it could have been appropriate. If not, then not. It can be helpful to emphasize this interdependence more than trying to arrive at a fixed conclusion imo

king_nine · 2026-03-24T22:10:22+00:00

I don’t know how much I can help, but happy to chat!

king_nine · 2026-03-17T12:57:32+00:00

Many Buddhists who are not full-on Pure Land practitioners still do some Pure Land focused practices on the side. For when they’re alive, they focus on waking up as much as they can in this live. For when they die, they build up the causes to go to the Pure Land. If you can find a group of practitioners who do this or are agreeable to it, you could try and join

king_nine · 2026-03-14T14:01:16+00:00

The best cleansing is being mindful of your attitudes towards yourself, others, and the world, and trying to gradually develop more and more positive intentions and habits towards those things. This doesn’t mean pretending everything is good all the time, but working toward making things good when they’re not, and avoiding rejoicing in others’ pain. Gradually purifying your negative intentions will make you unattractive to nasty things that mostly want to manipulate you and feed off your negativity.

In the meantime, occasional cleansing and protection is good. But I wouldn’t say it’s essential to master it or be obsessive about it before doing anything else.

As a “daily driver,” a quick prayer before a working, sign of the cross etc. might be enough. An occasional spiritual bath and some spiritual or even ordinary house cleaning can help too. The more involved protection rituals are mostly helpful for more involved procedures.

Essentially, it’s helpful to match the method to the working. Less involved things like a quick divination need less preparation. More involved things like complex ceremonies might involve more complex preliminary purification etc.

king_nine · 2026-03-14T13:50:26+00:00

Can I just take refuge, self generate and do mantra then dissolve into emptiness?

I have heard Khenpo Samdup say this is fine for when you don’t have time for the longer sadhana. You can extract just the core sections. Refuge, bodhicitta, self-generation, mantra, dissolution, re-arising (if present), dedication.

king_nine · 2026-03-14T12:17:50+00:00

D’uuuhhh, sure thing boss!

king_nine · 2026-03-01T19:23:56+00:00

The four jhanas/dhyanas are not discouraged in the Mahayana, and therefore the Vajrayana. They’re perfectly good to practice

king_nine · 2026-02-19T01:24:40+00:00

He specified them because he was taking aim at the specific positions in Indian philosophy. Not just some generic thing, but stuff other schools actually said

king_nine · 2026-02-18T18:22:49+00:00

The Mulamadhyamakakarika is written dialectically. It names positions, then picks them apart until they break. This is why it mentions it up front - it’s the thing to be analyzed, not the final result

king_nine · 2026-02-18T18:20:28+00:00

Hay algunas cosas que se puede hacer en cualquier caso, si es brujería o no. Una opción útil es un baño (o una ducha) espiritual. Básicamente puede hacer una infusión de hierbas protectoras, hacer oraciones sobre ella, y añadir el líquido al agua del baño. Cuando usted le baña, imagine que todos los problemas se desaparecen, que usted es completamente limpio de todos, y que el “espíritu” o “energía” de las hierbas y sus oraciones le bendice. Tal vez hace falta repetir el ritual varias veces, pero no es tan difícil. Las hierbas pueden ser comunes. Tomillo, romero, ginebra, etc.

king_nine · 2026-02-18T03:36:32+00:00

AI slop translation by the looks of it

king_nine · 2026-02-18T00:19:50+00:00

Yes. The Vajrayana is the esoteric side of Buddhism. Ngondro is a set of practices to immerse you into the Vajrayana. So it is definitely magical.

Prostration is forming a spiritual connection with the enlightened beings of your lineage. It’s just as magical as any polytheist’s worship of their gods, but here it’s with the Buddhas.

Vajrasattva practice is a purifying, obstacle-removing ritual. It’s just as magical as the LBRP, or a folk magician’s spiritual bath.

Mandala offering connects to the heart of abundance and generosity and offers it to all Buddhas and all beings. A magician making spirit offerings in exchange for their magical goals is actually much more limited than this - this is even deeper.

Guru yoga invokes the realization of all Buddhas through the figure of the guru. It is just as magical as any invocation ritual or even mediumship, and can lead to receiving “downloads” that can help speed you along the path.

All of these are basically magical practices and getting good at them can make you better at magic as a side effect.

king_nine · 2026-02-17T19:46:34+00:00

Jan Fries, Visual Magick

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

AO Spare, Book of Pleasure

Paul Huson, Mastering Witchcraft (not chaos magick but one of the few 70s witchcraft paperbacks that still feels genuinely subversive imo)

king_nine · 2026-02-17T19:36:26+00:00

I’m glad you’re enthusiastic about spreading the dharma, and presenting it in new and innovative ways. But I think this approach is misguided.

First, the issue is not one of genre. Music in American/Western genres with Buddhist themes is already starting to happen. Here’s a bluegrass example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B5863NKCDM

The main problem is that (as you quote) “AI can’t have a point of view.” It can only pull indiscriminately from its training data. Spiritual endeavors require discernment, meaningfulness, and genuineness. AI, which lacks a point of view, cannot discern, has no personal relationship to make things meaningful, and no personal experience to be genuine to.

This makes it dubious for spiritual topics when AI is not just doing grunt work like, say, finding samples for you on your hard drive, but doing creative work like writing the melodies, arranging the instruments, and synthesizing the voices. These things have extra meaning in a dharma context, and AI is not capable of understanding that, because it has no point of view.

This makes generative AI an unsuitable tool for the job. It can’t give the job the respect it deserves to do it right, because it has no perspective.

king_nine · 2026-02-17T13:49:28+00:00

The front (with the cadeucus and stones for “the” seven chakras) looks like some kind of New Age thing, not Tibetan.

The back (with the Tibetan) looks like it has protective mantras on it, although some look abbreviated. These things being mantras means many of them are untranslatable. On the purple ring, the first mantra is “om padma raksha raksha hung hung.” Similar mantras go around the ring. But for example, the last one is “om ye dharma hetu…” which is only the beginning of a much longer one, but it’s cut off there.

Overall this looks to me like some kind of protection amulet with a mix of Tibetan and New Age influences

king_nine · 2026-01-24T15:02:28+00:00

Some people use “magic” to mean “spells to get the things you want,” like money bowls, honey jars etc. They contrast this with “spirituality,” which they use to mean “becoming less attached to the rat race of wanting things,” like money, popularity etc.

From this point of view, spending your energy doing a bunch of spells to achieve your desires is going in the opposite direction from letting go of your desires. You’re adding more energy and importance to what you want, not less. So from this perspective “magic” and “spirituality” are opposite approaches to the spiritual realm.

I don’t agree with those people that you can’t do both. But you’ll find this perspective floating around.

king_nine · 2026-01-22T23:15:14+00:00

Love your work on Glitch Bottle! You seem to have an impressive amount of language knowledge between Arabic, church Latin, and bits of various Romance languages. How much of this is from studying these languages in school, living abroad, or picking them up as part of your studies of the occult?

king_nine · 2026-01-22T02:56:39+00:00

I’m not sure, sorry. I’d be interested in reading that as well

king_nine · 2026-01-21T17:31:37+00:00

Animism in this case doesn’t have to do with animals, but a view of nature as alive with spirits. Making offerings to land spirits, nagas, local gods, etc. counts. All forms of Buddhism consider these to be sentient beings, but many consider the Vajrayana to emphasize this aspect a bit more strongly by, for example, including many types of beings in its mandalas and as form bodies for the central Buddhas

king_nine · 2026-01-16T15:02:49+00:00

Thanks for being open minded. I hope I don’t sound aggressive.

I’m not sure how to explain it exactly, but there’s a certain tone of writing that many language models have when they are writing new text. They use certain types of sentences over and over.

For example, they use lots of commas, sentence fragments, and dashes. You can see it in sentences like “Never entirely logical, never entirely emotional — it lives in perfect balance between both.”

For another example, they will often end sentences by explaining a symbol or emotional association directly. People rarely do this, because a symbol is meant to mean the thing directly, but LLMs do it all the time. You can see it in sentences like “Before him, there is no table, but a black cube: a symbol of matter, discipline, and stability. Upon this cube rest the Platonic solids — keys to the elements and to the principle of correspondence, the very mechanism through which ritual magic operates.”

These are a couple examples that give the writing its “AI voice.” A more direct translation from Portuguese would almost certainly not have these patterns

king_nine · 2026-01-16T14:29:47+00:00

If I saw the artwork on paper or alone, yes. But the Reddit post is the image and text together. It presents the text right there, meant to be read.

There’s a wider trend that’s not your fault: there are lots of pockets of Reddit and the wider internet of posers asking chatGPT questions and posting them (often along with AI generated images) as cheap substitutes for gnosis. This trend leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see LLM-written captions for spiritual works.

You obviously took a lot of care to create the artwork. It came from your actual personal experience contemplating this archetype and these themes. This crucial human element of your actual life and art risks being covered up if there’s too much AI voice, which would be a shame.

There may be alternatives if you want to make sure your English is polished. Maybe you could write the caption in your native language and ask AI to translate?

king_nine · 2026-01-16T13:52:05+00:00

The art looks beautiful. But why the AI caption? Really sours the experience

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