Exit from samsara?

In a comment to a recent post, anonymous said that he didn't think anyone could escape from the cycle of samsara without a lot of help. That sounds true to me. In Buddhism, we go to three sources for help: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The Buddha and other highly realized beings that have come before us have had great compassion, and have left us with teachings and tools which we can use to transcend the cycle of samsaric suffering. Teachers alive today are precious and help to spread the dharma. They give us tools we can use, but ultimately we need to have the will to use them. I have heard many excellent things from such teachers, usually prodding me out of my self-complacent peace. In fact, we heard an excellent talk today at our center by a remarkable Buddhist nun.

One of the teachings that is propagated in Tibetan Buddhism is deity practice, like the Red Tara practice. When we were practicing today, I felt joyful and happy, as though I had an abiding connection with this female Buddha Arya Tara, who has such depth of compassion, that she vows to help all sentient beings who even mention her name. She responds to requests to help people in the bardo find a fortunate rebirth. No wonder Chagdud Rinpoche introduced this practice to Westerners, I thought. Tara really seems to be playing the role of Jesus (or Mary?) in Christian traditions.

But then there's a part of the ceremony where it says Tara's form dissolves into the natural sphere of emptiness: AH AH AH. Your mind rests in this state of natural awareness for the duration of the meditation session; then you reappear spontaneously in the form of Tara. Appearances are perceived purely as the body of the deity, sounds as the speech of the deity, and thoughts as the mind of the deity. this perception of pure phenomena is held as extensively as possible throughout the day.

This is a significant difference. Here we recognize that Tara is not ultimately real. Like all other concepts, she is a raft to be discarded once we've used it to cross a river. That's my interpretation of why we visualize her dissolving. However, as we cannot at this stage live beyond concepts all the time, at some point we bring her visualization back, as an important method of improving ourselves and guiding our behavior.

It's as if when praying to Jesus, you were to transcend the concept of Jesus, gaining access to a much wider mental space.