Travels in India while Seeking Enlightenment

Be the Master you Are

My daughter gave me a pep talk because I had been ill the last couple of weeks and sort of feeling overwhelmed by life which resulted in the above article "Be the Master you Are". I decided to name this "Travels in India while Seeking Enlightenment" but it was originally with "Be the Master that you are" but it seemed like they were two different topics but related so I decided to separate them into two blog articles and connect them with word buttons.

In 1985 I found myself and my family in Bodhgaya, India with the Dalai Lama giving the Kalachakra Initiation to 500,000 people there near the Bodhi Tree where Buddha became Enlightened.

After that, we traveled by train to Varanasi and the Burning Ghat next to the Ganges River and to Sarnath where Buddha first taught with our Tibetan Lama friend, Geshe Lobsang Gyatso from Kham, Tibet. He escaped Lhasa, Tibet as a young Lama alongside of the Dalai Lama as they walked out of Tibet then to India. When we got to Dharamshala, India in the Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh state in North Western India I was introduced to Lam Rim Geshe, one of the Lamas that Yoda was modeled after. He had just come out of a 17 year retreat in the dark walled away from everyone. He was almost 6 feet tall and a very robust kind of person full of natural and empowered siddhis. His home reminded me a lot of Yoda's home when Luke Skywalker flew there in his ship.

A couple of months later, we traveled by bus and train back to New Delhi where I took Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and his English Translator who was a Tibetan from Darjeeling, India to the Last Star Wars movie with the Ewoks in it. When the Lama and his translator started laughing at the Ewoks I asked them why. The Lama said that the Ewoks were speaking a very primitive form of Tibetan and were hysterically funny speaking this dialect to Geshela and his translator.

Also, while we were staying in Dharamshala I was invited to hear and see the Nechung Oracle go into a trance and predict the future. However, I realized that because I am very psychically sensitive that since sometimes Oracles create such a field that they levitate off the ground that I shouldn't go to this. Later, Geshela thought that I made the right decision. I said (naively at the time not understanding what a Tibetan Oracle was) "Geshela, Am I an Oracle?" He said to me that oracles are not usually spiritually gifted in the way I was. He said that Tibetan Oracles tended to be completely normal people that were capable of being possessed by Dieites without dying. He said this usually didn't work for gifted people because they might die when possessed by Dieties. He told me how when the Possessions start they put a 150 pound headdress on the Oracle to keep them from flying around the room but that they have to wait until the energy gets so intense that you feel like the windows are going to blow out of the room first. Then they put this 150 pound headress on which under other circumstances would break the neck of a human being. Then the Oracle dances around and predicts the future accurately. So, over time Geshela convinced me that I was not an Oracle (at least in the Tibetan definition of what an oracle is and was).

On another day one of Geshela's many Tibetan students was given permission to take us to see Ling Rinpoche who was the Senior Teacher of the Dalai Lama and who ruled Tibet until the Dalai Lama was 18 I believe and could become the leader of Tibet. When I was taken with my family into this stone hut a few miles walk up into the Himalayas from the upper city of Dharamshala we did not know what to expect other than that we were being blessed by this experience. So, as we all walked into the main living room of this stone building with a locally quarried slate roof that looked like many other normal mountain hut dwellings in the area, we walked into to see Ling Rinpoche sitting in the Maitreya Mudra pose in meditation on top of a table 3 feet off the ground. The energy in the room was unlike anything I have ever experienced before or since. I realized as a gifted person that he was projecting heaven back from the heaven realms where he was. I asked the monks there if he was coming back and they said "No. He had been meditating in this mudra meditation position for 2 years and wasn't expected to return. However, because he was a Saint his body wasn't decomposing either. So he was projecting back to all near him the Blessings from Heaven which we were blessed to experience too. Since my father had passed away 6 months before I was profoundly affected by this experience and went outside and cried in amazement. This was not death. This was something different than I ever expected to see ever. This changed me permanently in a way I cannot really explain. I have never been the same since. I learned later within the next year while I was reading a book while camping at Castle Lake across from Mt. Shasta that a High Rinpoche (rinpoche means precious like a jewel)(it also means a Living realized Buddha) is encased in colored wax to actually look like they did while alive and put into a Gompa (Tibetan Church) for several years as a relic much like bones of Saints are put into the altars of Catholic Churches around the world to empower the churches and the people who visit there.

It was an amazing experience. So, be the master that you are. There is no becoming there is only being.

Or as Yoda would say, "There is no try there is only do".