Building Vajradhara's Mausoleum

Joseph Campbell makes the point -- drawing it I think from Jung -- that religious symbol and ritual, which originate as a way of invoking the numinous, can solidify rapidly into a way of warding it off. (In much the same way, funeral rites generally function not only to celebrate the dead, but also to make quite sure that they stay dead.)

He's speaking in terms of cultural history, but the point is well-taken in personal history as well. In some ways I think when I began blogging about Ngondro part of my enterprise was to tame it, circumscribe it, disarm it.