After the abhisheka, life gets very hard, and the reason given is diagnostic rather than moral.
"To help open the channel pathways other beings must first see the lay of the land, and thus you will be thrust into all sorts of extreme situations where you are forced to go through enormous emotional situations or make incredibly large emotional decisions."1
The difficulty is a survey. Not punishment, not purification through suffering, not a trial of worth. Something needs to know where your channels are shut, and the way to find out is to press on them.
"The heavenly beings overseeing and dispensing such assistance will test you, trick you and confuse you in countless ways to see what channels they must concentrate on helping to open."2
Which means the situations are tailored. "The type of tension-release situations you will be subjected to all depends upon your mental traits, attachments and afflictions."1 Two practitioners in this phase do not get the same year.
And it is not brief: "the transition phase of opening your channels this way can be emotionally and mentally difficult in the extreme, and the process lasts for a very long time."2 See The Abhisheka Is a Somatic Event.
The most specific thing the survey looks for is a particular kind of moral grip.
"You will be temporarily exposed to all sorts of societal prohibitions you have fiercely adopted — such as not eating meat, not drinking wine or refraining from sexual relations — to determine which channels you have forcibly shut close with hard rejection."2
The claim underneath: a rule held with force closes something. The same rule held easily does not.
Fiercely adopted. Forcibly shut. Hard rejection. Three phrasings of one variable in a single sentence — and the variable is not the conduct.
Which is why the contrast is put in terms of cost rather than behaviour: "A true master refrains from what is wrong naturally, without need of mental force or strain."2 Two people decline the same thing. One strained; one didn't. The conduct is identical and the interior is not. See Samadhi Is the Highest Discipline.
What is being mapped is where you clench — and this is the mechanism that the reinterpretation of left-hand tantra rests on entirely. See What Left-Hand Tantra Actually Is.
Alongside the situations, a review.
"Having access to your memories, every good or bad deed you ever did will come up during the process, and you will be challenged on them."2
Access is not yours. You are not doing the remembering; the material is being reached.
The set is total. Every deed, good and bad, without selection.
And the mode is challenge, not review or confession.
No protocol is given for it — no right answer, no procedure, nothing to say. Which follows from what the phase is: the challenge is an instrument, and your responses are the reading. There is no examination to pass because nothing is being assessed. Something is being measured.
Two things about the shape of it are stated, and both are useful in advance.
It gets less violent as it goes. "The enormity of the situations eventually dies down over time as more refined levels of channel structures are reached."1 The coarse material presses first; the finer work is finer to undergo.
And it does not feel like a blessing while it happens. "If I really were to go into all the various types of emotional ups and downs, afflictions, pain and suffering you will go through from the genuine, rather than the ceremonial abhisheka empowerment, you might wonder why this transformative assistance is called a 'blessing.'"3
There is one first-hand marker of severity, and it is withheld: "I don't even want to go into the various initial extreme situations I was put through and what I almost lost during the process."1
What I almost lost. Nothing further. Which is the only measure of scale given, and it is left as a shape rather than a story.
The clearest worked instance is a Tibetan one.
"The famous twelve major hardships of the famous Tibetan cultivator Naropa, overseen by Tilopa his enlightened master, exemplify some of the difficult experiences you might mentally be put through during this process."4
Naropa's twelve are the complete version — an extended sequence, escalating, each one an ordeal, overseen by someone who knew what he was doing.
Against that, Abraham's episode is a fragment: "The single event reported from Abraham's life is just a subset of the overall process represented by Naropa's example."5
Which gives a scale. One overwhelming demand is a piece of this. Twelve in sequence is the shape of the whole thing.
The other instances named — Yeshe Tsogyel's empowerments, Hui Ko hearing a voice while his skull channels opened, Socrates and his chorus of inner daemons — are all placed in the same category: "all linked to chi and channel purification in conjunction with 'heavenly' (Bodhisattva) assistance."6 See The Second Patriarch's Skull and Socrates' Daemons as Gongfu.
There is no technique here. What there is instead is orientation, and orientation is the entire point of knowing about it.
That is stated outright as the reason the material was written down: "with these words you will be able to keep your balance and sanity through the process when you are unfortunate not to be near your master."7
So, concretely.
Don't interpret the individual episode. The situations are tailored to your particular attachments and the methodology is explicitly undiscoverable — "you will never be able to determine the methodology."7 Reading meaning into any single catastrophe is effort spent on a cipher with no key.
Watch the clench, not the rule. The thing being surfaced is force of rejection. Noticing which of your prohibitions you hold with a clenched fist is the one observation that maps onto what is happening.
Keep behaving well. Nothing in this licenses anything: "naturally you should always act with virtue and wisdom in all life situations."8
Never act on a voice — below.
And know that the intensity curve bends down. The worst of it is the beginning.
One thing to be plain about. Extreme emotional states, voices, and a conviction that unseen agents are arranging your circumstances are also how serious psychiatric illness presents. Nothing in this framework distinguishes them, and it does not claim to. If you are in that territory, that is a matter for a doctor first.
One instruction cuts across everything else in the phase, and it is the most important sentence in it.
"You will see all sorts of things such as attacks by demons, visits by other beings, trips to heaven and hell, that are all fictitious visions. You should never believe anything you hear via 'heavenly voices' during these experiences either."4
Everything you see in this phase is scenery. Demons, visitations, heavens, hells — fictitious, all of it.
And nothing you hear is to be acted on. Not softened, not "weigh it carefully" — never believe it.
Which sits inside a phase where unseen beings are said to be actively arranging your circumstances. The two together give a workable posture: something is happening to you; nothing that speaks to you during it has standing.
It is consistent with the standing position on visionary content everywhere else, and with the flat denial that anything is testing you in the moral sense. See The Visions Are Fictitious and God Does Not Test People.
The payoff is stated as a direct relation between the difficulty and the opening.
"Every time you go through some difficulty due to these interventions yet more channel blockages will disappear and your chi and channels will further transform."4
Each episode survived corresponds to blockage cleared. Which is why the intensity declines: the coarse blockages go first, and what remains needs less pressure to reach.
And the phase is not optional on this account: "Without this help — called heavenly dan in Taoism — it is very difficult to transform the body."4
Which puts the whole thing in the sequence rather than beside it. The testing is not an obstacle between you and the transformation. It is the mechanism of it.
Evidence. [PRACTITIONER SOURCE]. One first-hand account with its content withheld; five historical figures asserted as instances with no texts cited. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY. [SPECULATIVE].
Tension — obey, and never obey. Abraham is offered as an instance of this phase, and what Abraham did was act on a voice — the one thing the phase's own standing instruction forbids.
Tension — nothing tests you, and you are being tested. The flat position elsewhere is that the original nature has no agency and karma simply happens; here, agents deliberately arrange extreme situations.
Open question — what separates a test from an ordinary catastrophe? No marker is given, and the category will absorb any difficulty whatever.
Open question — is the clench claim checkable? Prohibitions held with force close channels is the substantive assertion here, and something like it — that rigid moral suppression carries a bodily cost — could be examined without any chi at all.
Two things you are told about the same year, and they produce different postures inside it.
You are being worked on. Beings are surveying you, the difficulties are instrumental, every one of them clears something, and the process is help. Under this, the right response to catastrophe is to endure it as treatment.
And you are being deceived throughout. Everything you see is fictitious, nothing you hear is to be believed, and the methodology is permanently beyond you. Under this, the right response is to trust nothing about the experience, including its framing as help.
A practitioner holding the first reads each disaster as meaningful and looks for the lesson. A practitioner holding the second treats the whole texture as noise and simply keeps practising. The source gives both in the same passage, and the second is the one it puts in the form of a rule.
The convergence is with the force doctrine: what the survey is looking for is where you clench, which is the same variable that runs through the discipline material and the tantra reinterpretation.
Authority Testing: Creating Loyalty Through Obedience Demands — behavioral mechanics.
There is a well-described structure in which escalating demands produce compliance: an ambiguous order is obeyed, the obeying itself becomes the evidence of loyalty, and refusing later would mean conceding that the earlier compliances were choices — so the investment locks, not through fear, but through the cost of admitting what has already been done.
Set beside this phase, the resemblance is exact in form and missing one part.
The form matches. Escalating trials, tailored to the individual, no disclosed methodology, no pass condition, and an interpretive frame in which every difficulty confirms the process is working.
And the missing part is the order. A compliance ratchet needs something to be demanded, so that complying constitutes a demonstration. Here, nothing is asked of you. Circumstances arrive; emotions are provoked; prohibitions are brushed against — and your responses are described as readings, never as obedience owed to anyone. That is why the structure produces no lock.
The instruction never believe a heavenly voice is what keeps it that way. A testing phase whose voices must never be obeyed cannot become a ladder of commands, and that single rule is the whole difference between undergoing this and being captured by it.
Which yields the practical caution the phase actually needs. The ratchet doesn't require a person at the top of it. Any frame that absorbs every difficulty as evidence of its own operation accumulates investment on its own — after a year of reinterpreting disasters as beneficial intervention, the cost of reconsidering is enormous, and no one has to be issuing anything. The brake is a standing rule about what you will never act on, decided in advance, while nothing is happening.
What the source leaves undetermined is what a practitioner is supposed to do with the tailoring.
The situations are said to be matched to your particular traits, attachments and afflictions. That is a strong claim: it means the content of what happens to you is informative about where you are shut.
And you are told you can never determine the methodology. So the one piece of information the tailoring generates — this is what they pressed on, therefore this is where I am closed — is declared unreadable.
Both cannot be fully true. If the situations map your blockages, they are legible in principle; if the methodology is beyond you, the map is being drawn for someone else's use.
Which leaves the practitioner in a strange position for a very long time: undergoing a diagnostic whose results are not addressed to them. Whether there is anything to learn from your own testing, or whether the correct posture is simply to survive it without interpretation, is exactly the question the passage raises and does not answer.