Through meditation, we can alter that situation so that we can, at will, visualize and create a particular patch of color within our mental experience. The idea of emptiness and the idea of the creative power of the mind are clearly present in the structure of the Vajrayana techniques of meditation, which we will be looking at in greater detail in Chapter 29. Emptiness and the creative power of the mind together give us the ability and the methodology needed to transform our experience. We can transform our experience because nothing has any nature of its own, and the way we transform it is through using the power of our minds to create and determine the way we experience objects. As mentioned in Chapter 22, the Vajrayana is one with the Mahayana both in its starting point and in its goal.
Skillful means is the ability to reach all sentient beings at their own levels.
The phenomenal dimension of the Buddha appears to all sentient beings according to their particular needs and abilities. In many Mahayana discourses and treatises, the Buddha manifests himself in the form of ordinary people or gods in order to assist sentient beings along the path to liberation. It is in this way, too, that the Buddha manifests himself in the special forms of the deities of the Vajrayana pantheon according to the needs and propensities of sentient beings. For example, in the case of the five celestial Buddhas, the Buddha manifests himself in five special forms that correspond to the particular karmic propensities of sentient beings. Thus he manifests as the Buddha Vairochana especially for sentient beings whose primary affliction is ignorance, while it is Akshobhya who appears to those whose primary affliction is ill-will and Amitabha to those whose primary affliction is attachment.