The Rainbow Body

The Tibetans have practiced a meditation discipline that involves stilling the mind and having loving thoughts. If you could have every thought be a loving thought, and meditate on your own consciousness as being the “empty awareness” of the universe for thirteen years, your body would dissolve into pure light. They call this the Rainbow Body. There are 160,000 documented cases of this happening in Tibet, India, and China alone.

The old and new testaments of the Bible, as well as ancient Greek and Egyptian texts, include stories of those who defied death via forms of ascension, but to many, the most compelling tales of transcendence are accounts from the Tibetan Buddhist rainbow body tradition.

While ascension stories are from the distant past, i.e. Enoch and Lazarus (Old Testament) are debated as to whether they are fact or myth, examples of rainbow body events from this century are documented and available. Some believe that ascension and attainment of the rainbow body are the same things, but arguably, there are differences — the Tibetan Buddhist rainbow body is the result of years of specific, disciplined practice with a motive of profound compassion for all beings.

In Tibet and Central Asia, the Buddhist rainbow body tradition goes back to the 8th century, beginning with the great master Padmasambhava, but 20th and 21st-century documentation show that this is no myth or legend — practitioners, from the highest lamas to the most humble laypeople, have attained rainbow body.

from gaia.com on March 6, 2020