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illnesses solely through the process of creative visualization. Instead of holding onto the view: “My body is filled with cancer and I am dying,” these people see themselves as whole and healthy. The image of being diseased is released from the mind and replaced by an image of radiance and vitality. On many occasions this approach has proven effective even after doctors have given up all hope.
     
    The health of body and mind is primarily a question of our self-image.
    Those people who think badly of themselves, for whatever reasons, become and then remain miserable, while those who can recognize and draw on their inner resources can overcome even the most difficult situations. Deity yoga is one of the most profound ways of lifting our self-image, and that is why tantra is such a quick and powerful method for achieving the fulfillment of our tremendous potential.
     
    The biggest obstacle standing in the way of our successful transformation into such a deity is our persistent belief in ordinary appearances. As long as we maintain the ordinary vision we have of ourselves, there is no space for seeing ourselves as an enlightened being. We cannot truly see ourselves as possessing a deity’s transparent body of light if we continue to identify so strongly with our gross physical form. And we will never be able to contact the essentially pure nature of our own being if we continue to think that our mind’s fundamental nature is nothing but the delusions and gross conceptions that pass through it.
     
    Therefore, if we truly wish to achieve the satisfaction of complete self-fulfillment, we must find a way to break free from the tyranny of ordinary appearances and conceptions. We must gain a heartfelt appreciation of how disastrous it is to continue relating to our body and our mind, and therefore our self-image, in the gross and limiting ways we do now. We need to understand that our naive acceptance of ordinary appearances only makes us more and more confused, insecure, and dissatisfied.
     
    Any tendency we have toward indecision and fear is a symptom of our dualistic mind, the mind that churns out a seemingly endless succession of contradictory thoughts. “I hope I look good but I’m afraid I look bad.” It also demonstrates how superficial the judgments we make about ourselves usually are. After all, physical appearance is not a true measure of the actual worth of any man or woman. Nevertheless, slight physical imperfections, whether real or imagined, are enough to cause us great anxiety. There are even people who feel so ugly, so utterly worthless, so full of self-loathing, that they starve themselves to death. This is an extreme example, of course, but I think most of us put ourselves down and make ourselves miserable for one reason or another.
     
    TH E MI ND DI STRACTED OUTWARD
     
    It sometimes seems that our mind is running in every direction at once, turning to this and that in a desperate search. But for what? We are looking for an unnamed something that will satisfy our longing for stability and security. We pass from one thing to another hoping that the next experience will contain whatever it is we are looking for. As a result our mind is constantly distracted. It is difficult to focus all our attention on what we are doing because part of our mind is already dissatisfied and has begun to search for that elusive something else. Even when we are doing something that we enjoy we lose our concentration so easily. Thus not only do we fail to discover a higher meaning and purpose to our life, we are often unsuccessful in our mundane affairs as well.
     
    The inevitable result of our limited self-conception—limited by our unquestioning belief in ordinary appearances—is our tendency to look outside ourselves for the answer to our problems. Having grown accustomed to seeing ourselves as incomplete or lacking in some fundamental way, it does not cross our mind to look toward our own inner resources, our inner