Is Practicing Tantric/Wrathful Meditation Dangerous Without a Guru? Some time ago, I found a mala in a shop that I was quite drawn to for reasons I cannot explain. At the time I thought it was wood but as the stain wore off I saw it was bone. This lead me to do some research into Bone Malas and I learned about tantric buddhism and wrathful meditation. This in turn lead me to a mantra I started repeating with the mala 108 times every day. Everything I read said I needed a master or guru to help initiate or guide me. So my question is how dangerous is this? Do I need a guru, and how on earth does one get initiated into a a type of buddhism?
This is like with children playing doctor: most of the imitation activity they can come up with is going to be harmless, but if they get their hands on real medications and start actually taking them at random, then they can get into real trouble.

Similarly with Tantra, as long as all you do is mindlessly repeat some mantras and get a tattoo of a wrathful deity on your arm, you'll be alright. But if you were to read some serious self-visualization guidelines and started imagining yourself as a random yidam, then you might very likely exhaust all your energy and consequently die, or worse, get stuck in a nightmarish realm.

What's nice about gurus, they know what you need to do, and most importantly why. In other words, they see your energy configuration, and they know what the right configuration looks like.

The easiest way to get initiated into tantric Buddhism, is to go to a lecture of a local Tibetan lama and sign up for an interview (it is he who interviews you, not the other way around). Based on the interview, if you look serious enough, and most importantly cooperative enough that the guru won't have to argue with you over every little practice ("why do I have to do 100,000 prostrations?!") -- then you may get accepted for a Ngöndro course. (Many teachers tend to have all their new students begin NGondro at the same time, so you may hear "Lama such-and-such accepts students for a new NGondro, to start the next spring.") Ngondro may take anywhere from one to three years during which you will not see anything remotely exciting or interesting. If you have enough diligence to last through Ngondro, and you prove yourself as smart enough to pick up hints and subtleties, but also psychologically stable enough, then you might be accepted into an actual tantra.