Stories about Lamas

When I was young and heard my first stories about Tibetan stuff I wondered if it could be all true. Later I grew up and still sort of wondered but I was no longer a child. However, along the way I had started as a toddler telepath and had matured into a much more developed person because unlike many people I had had to develop my gifts in order to survive childhood epilepsy because I wasn't allowed by my father to take phenobarbitol which was prescribed for me because he thought it was an evil drug. So all I had left to survive it was mind over matter. So in order to survive the terror of childhood epilepsy I became very aware of everything I felt and thought at all times. So when it ended at age 15 I was already developed just trying to survive the last 5 years and then I didn't know what to do with my developed intuitions.

Since I was raised a Christian mystic it was a long road to get to non-dualism and seeing the universe like weather. It took a long time to understand a universe in which one did not apply external rules but lived in a universe based upon compassion for all beings in the universe as the only real criteria.

My second wife got me to study with Tibetan Lamas and Native American Medicine men. In some ways I found their laughter and attitude very similar. Other people when they realized just how intuitive I was became afraid often of me because they couldn't find a way to understand. However, Lamas and medicine men had a system in which someone gifted like me was an asset to the tribe. I was a natural shaman, a naturally gifted person and so they saw teaching me as helpful to all beings in the universe.

I began to hear stories about the Karmapa when he visited the U.S. Americans and others who lived with him in the U.S. when he traveled and taught here told me amazing experiences they had had. They saw him do his fade out where hundreds and sometimes thousands of people could see the wall clearly behind him when he faded almost completely out like a ghost or something. Stories about an elderly female relative of his having to take a bathroom break and walking through the wall because she just couldn't wait to go another way around the wall. Of Hundreds of people seeing things like this. It got me wondering more as people witnessed these things first hand.

Later, I started meeting Tibetan Lamas myself. By then His holiness, the Karmapa
had passed on in the U.S. and then was reborn in Asia.

I met a lama in Ashland, Oregon and he taught me and several hundred others there. As I first walked into the room I was two places at once. Now, I had never experienced anything like this before. It seemed very different than soul traveling. But it was like literally being two places at once without any effort or understanding how or why on my part. I was still Fred walking to my seat but also a being in a loincloth in the springtime in Tibet somewhere. The lama said to me to this body in Tibet, "You don't belong in any church. Your place is to do research for all mankind. You are a yogi." This was the first time I realized that I had been a cave yogi and a siddha in one or more lifetimes. As I sat down I realized that there really was something to all this stuff, much more than I had even imagined.

I thought to myself, "I need to ground myself into a religion that came up out of the ground in the United States like Tibetan Buddhism sprang up out of the ground of Asia and Christianity sprang up out of the ground out of the Old Testament and Moses and Jesus in Israel and the middle east." I thought that I needed to study with a native American medicine man so I could study with the lamas and not become unbalanced with all this supernatural power that I would have to learn to deal with based completely on compassion.

So I asked God in that moment to send me a medicine man. Two weeks later he arrived in Mt. Shasta at a friends house. I studied with him with my family for 3 years. There came a moment when I had to go my own way and I asked the Lama if I should come study with him. He said, "NO. I'm not your teacher in this lifetime. I'll send someone." A week later I picked him up hitchiking on the road to McCloud then in 1983. He said, "I want to do a puja on Mt. Shasta in my tent." I thought this guy is really different to want to do a puja in two feet of snow in a tent." But I took him to a good remote place as he asked. However, two more feet of snow came down and I said to my wife, "This guy has no 4 wheel drive and no car at all and these two feet of snow will collapse his tent. I'd better go rescue him." She agreed so I started up my 1974 Scout II IH 4wd and went and rescued him. A friend had left his RV Camper parked on my land for the winter so I let the guy with the collapsed tent stay there until the storms abated. He began giving my family and I Tibetan initiations and empowerments and then we all went to Berkeley and Santa Cruz and met several Tibetan Lamas through him. One Lama Geshe Lobsang Gyatso became a friend of the family(Geshe means spiritual friend)until he passed away nearer to 2000.

Then in 1985 I was guided to take our family to India. I was working as a fire lookout at 4000ft for the CDF then. I was on duty 12 hours a day and off duty 12 on station. Since I was very remote(10 miles from the nearest human) I saw an amazing assortment of wildlife like herds of wild boars, many deer and bucks and babies Western Bluebirds and many amazing critters. Because of the remoteness I was often visited by Tibetan Dieties and one of them told me when to go to India, December 10th 1985.

I went home and told my wife who by then was used to me telling her things before they happened simply said, "Where will the money come from to do this?"(since we had three children ages 10 to 14). I said, "Well. If God wants this to happen we will be shown a way."

Sure enough a way was shown through a relative just as predicted. But then, we didn't see how we could afford to pay someone to run our business(the lookout job was seasonal so I had about 6 months off a year during late fall, winter and early spring).So, as long as we could make our car payments, rent payments and get someone to run our family business we could be gone up to 6 months.

1 week before we had been told we were going finally it all came into line. Through a airplane ticket discounter San Francisco that specialized in university student fares worldwide we were able to buy 5 open ended 6 month tickets with stops in Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Katmandu, Nepal as long as we were all the way to Bangkok within 1 week of the moment we bought them. In 1985 these round trip tickets were about 5 thousand for 5 people. We could afford to go now! So we did.

After snorkling at Koi Samed Island in Thailand for a week we went to meet our Lama friend, Geshe Lobsang Gyatso in Bodhgaya, India. The Dalai Lama and 500,000 other Tibetan Buddhists from all over the world in native dress were there too which was amazing. However, nothing prepares one for the culture shock of India in 1985. An american who had been coming back to India for 20 years then said it best. He said, "One moment you are watching someone levitate a boulder or healing someone and the next moment you are looking at a corpse of someone who just starved to death on the streets and no one is coming to pick that person up. It's like they are road kill or something." He said he had a love hate relationship with India. It was just so amazing, magical and yet the next moment someone was screaming and dying or dead. India was then, 24 hour a day sensory overload.

For me, the amazing thing about India in 1985 and 1986 when I was there was that I had no fear of being murdered because most people believed in Karma. But instead it seemed like everyone was trying to scam me and my family out of everything we had, and every penny. So one had to be on guard not to give people an opportunity to take everything you have. One of the ways we did it was to hire a young college student to bargain for us. This way we paid the going price for everything we bought from food to taxis to horse carts to camel carts to rickshaws to clothes and trinkets. We usually took a native college student with us to bargain and in this way we had a great trip without getting ripped off financially every day like some people do.

We stayed in Guest houses primarily and we never camped out because one will wake up with between hundreds and thousands of people staring at you in the morning. So besides being very shocking it is psychologically difficult to endure this every day. If you pay to stay inside somewhere the lodge owners will protect you from people who just want to stare at you because you are different that most people they see. Also, if you have passed the first grade in school you have more education than over 50% of the people in India in 1985. It could be much different now, though because it is now almost 25 years later.

After the Kalachakra Initiation by the Dalai Lama in Bodhgaya we traveled by train to Varanasi, the Taj Mahal, New Delhi and then after awhile in Varanasi(Benares), The Taj Mahal and New Delhi, my daughter got Delhi Belly (like Montezuma's revenge) so we felt she would get better faster in the mountains of Dharmsala where the Dalai Lama lives(and she did). Tropical diseases don't usually do well in the mountains(Dharmsala is about 6000 feet in elevation about like Lake Tahoe in California).

When we arrived in Dharmsala we went to a famous healer or Tibetan Doctor there and within a day or two my daughter was well. We stayed at the Kailash Hotel and then we stayed at the Green hotel because at that time the Kailash was set up mainly for singles and at most 2 in a room. So we soon moved to the green hotel and bought a kerosene cook stove because it was January and the nights could be very cold (15 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit).One morning it was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit out and I noticed a four year old being bathed in cold water outside like it was normal. I really realized just how sissified our western culture had become at this moment. So either this kid was a tulku learning tsumo(vital heat) so he could melt glaciers(or ice cubes) or he was just tough Tibetan style. He didn't act like he was cold or that anything was wrong or unusual at all. Pretty amazing.