Almost two years ago I was in London. I was sick as a dog from getting caught out in the rain. I was feverish. I was alone in little basement apartment near Monument.
We were in a fight for our lives against the BBC (and still are) and other giants. In a strange little basement apartment right where the Great Fire of London started, I started reading Born in Tibet by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
It’s a beautiful recounting of his early life in Tibet and his escape from Tibet to India. How we was identified as a tulku, a reincarnated lama, as a very young child, his monastic life until the communist invasion of Tibet, and his incredible escape from Tibet to bring the dharma to the west.
I have been fortunate enough to have been trained in Tibetan Buddhism, the Vajrayana or lightning path that travelled across from India into the land of snows and then to the West.
I have been fortunate to be ordained as a ngakpa (pronounced nagpa) or lay practitioner and empowered to practice various forms of meditations, by Lama Glenn Mullin, not only a Lama but great tibetologist, translator and author, and Drupon Chongwol. That is how that lineage works, you need to receive ‘empowerment’ to practice the meditation from a teacher in the lineage. I was fortunate enough to be taken to the Rubin Museum in New York by Nicole Daedone, who sits in prison for teaching these ideas. A few of us went to see a brilliant exhibition called Awaken, and it gave me an access point I would not otherwise have had. Nicole has said many times that she is a curator of doorways into emptiness. From pyschelics, to OM, to zen meditation, to the Kabbalah. And this one, she said, works.
The iconography and richness and variety of Himalayan Buddhism can easily overwhelm, but one of the things that struck me about it was that it was about holding in your mind the pure land, the spirit and energy of enlightenment, and absorbing and merging with these energies. You do it through these kind of “recipes” called sadhanas that are scripts for practice passed down through the lineage masters. And they include all the things you might be familiar with, the mandalas, the wild deities, the mantras, the description of jeweled palaces of light and the invocation and merging with these buddha energies.
No matter what is happening outside, you can access this wisdom and the spirit of enlightenment. You can merge with the karmic stream. On the Vajrayana path it’s not meant to be easy. Au contraire baby. You seek out difficulty. It is a path of alchemy of conversion of the stuck stuff in life, aggression, attachment, grasping, the depression, the collapsing in the face of adversity, into the energy of enlightenment. On this path you fly straight into the storm, Carl Jung style.
So sitting there in London facing off against the BBC (just one of the giants who determined we and our spiritual organization and community should die and be buried in a ditch for teaching heresies about women’s power), things looked tough. The podcast we are suing them over centered on the story of a person we proved 20 times over had given a dishonest account of her experience.
It was eventually established through evidence in California state court in LA and in Brooklyn Federal court, that she was not only not telling the truth, but had perpetrated massive criminal fraud in her desire to see us destroyed, and financially benefit herself from our destruction. Confronted with all this, the BBC have recently taken the worst episode of the podcast down, but they knew long before that that the story they had published was untrue.
It was in this little basement where I really actually dedicated myself to Tibetan practice. To finding every day the inner fire that can burn bright through any outward circumstance. My practice was alive and bright. Trungpa’s book helped. No matter the hardships I faced (and trust I can be a whiner of note when faced with hardship), nothing could compare to what I was reading that he had experienced. His country attacked by the communists, his spiritual teachers murdered or imprisoned, he fled the country with a small group and travelled, lost, through the Himalayas to India with no path, no map. Literally boiling the saddles from their few horses and chewing on them for some sustenance from the oil left in the leather. Some of their party starving to death. For a year. Imagine living that for a year. What could keep you going and not just prefer to die in the cold in the snow?
It was his practice that helped him make it through. To bring Tibetan Buddhism to the West. To have something deeper to tap into than the hunger and the fear and the cold and the seeming hopelessness.
Ironically the woman who committed these crimes in our case, who sought to cause all this harm, who fabricated evidence, went to the university Trungpa Rinpoche established in Boulder, Naropa University. So life is funny that way.
But that book, and the practices taught to me by Lama Glenna and Drupon Chongwol helped me to see beyond the appearance of things and find a resilience that is eternal, that is universal, that transcends the madness of a prosecution based on a film based on a fake account that was the result of criminal conduct that Netflix supported and encouraged and the government turned a blind eye to or supported.
Things like that will drive you mad if you are not able to dive deeper. Indeed they are intended to. That is how these systems work. Get you lost in outrage while they screw you over. But Vajrayana teaches that there is always something deeper to tap into beyond the appearance of things. Enlightenment is always here right now. And enlightenment is the source of limitless creativity.