A friend of mine was told by his Tibetan Buddhist teachers that he either needed to go do his practices near Mt. Kailash or come to the U.S. to California and do his practices at the foot of Mt. Shasta. Since he was a world traveler he chose Mt. Shasta as it would be easier to financially and physically survive there. This was in the 1980s.
I, also found out how profound it was to do Tibetan Buddhist practices in Mt. Shasta after being empowered by Tibetan Lamas to do this as well. After I received the Kalachakra Tantra from the Dalai Lama with about 500,000 other Tibetan Buddhists from around the world in Bodhgaya, India around Christmas 1986 with my family, I returned to Mt. Shasta after living on Maui, Hawaii in 1990 and lived there again doing my practices until 1992 when I returned a 2nd time to the SF Bay area and bought another business.
I have always wanted to visit Mt. Kailash but it hasn't happened yet because of the remoteness and because I'm now 68. I would have liked to have gone in 1966 in January or February but the only way there would have been over a 20,000 foot pass in a bus from Katmandu at the time and a friend of mine had come across a whole busload of dead people at the top of the pass when their bus died and so did they all including the driver at that altitude. So, I decided not to do that to my family at the time. I think it was a wise decision then. Also, Lhasa is at 12,000 feet and many people cannot survive that either. A lady I knew from my church flew there and died within 15 minutes of walking off the plane from the altitude. So, unless you take enough time to adjust to the altitude somewhere like Colorado Springs or Santa Fe or Flagstaff at 7000 feet or more, (maybe 2 weeks to a month) flying into Lhasa not adjusted to 12,000 feet might kill you.
In the 1980s when I went to India, Nepal and up to around 10,000 feet trekking in the Himalayas 25 to 50 miles beyond any dirt roads that cars or vehicles could drive on, it was an amazing experience sort of like going to another planet. Most of what I experienced in India and Nepal was not like being still on earth. So, I just had to start thinking in another way where technology is less important and spirituality and spiritual technology was how things actually operated there.
So, this was hard at first to get used to but over time I realized I was in a completely different world with completely different rules on every single level. I could see how coming to the U.S. for people here would be very confusing unless they had watched enough U.S. TV programs.
My biggest surprise at all was that my biggest cultural shock was not going to India or Nepal which is what I would have thought. Instead coming home to the U.S. after after almost 5 months away was the hardest cultural shock of all. Though at that time arguing and fisticuffs wasn't unusual anywhere I went, people generally, took care of each other more than here in many ways. Though you might find people starving and dying on the streets and no one helping them, people still were incredibly helpful everywhere I went there, whereas when I returned to the U.S. everyone was scared and hiding in their cars and apartments and not even walking the streets for the most part. So, socially the world was much more engaged in India and Nepal than here and I was shocked when I returned and saw this and felt the U.S. was very cold and removed from direct touch and experience of people talking with an arguing and sometimes fighting with each other but usually not shooting each other everywhere I visited in India and Nepal.
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Mount Kailash - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kailash (also Mount Kailas; Tibetan: གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ Kangrinboqê or Gang Rinpoche; simplified Chinese: 冈仁波齐峰, Gāngrénbōqí fēng, Sanskrit: कैलास Kailāsa) is a peak in the Kailas Range (Gangdisê Mountains), which forms part of the Transhimalaya in Tibet. It lies near the source of some of the longestrivers in Asia: the Indus River, the Sutlej River (a major tributary of the Indus River), the Brahmaputra River, and the Karnali River (a tributary of the River Ganga). It is considered a sacred place in fourreligions: Bön, Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. The mountain lies near Lake Manasarovar and Lake Rakshastal in Tibet.
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[hide]Nomenclature, orthography and etymology[edit]
The mountain is known as Kailāsa (कैलास) in Sanskrit.[1][2] The word may be derived from the word kēlāsa (केलास) which means "crystal".[3] In his Tibetan-English dictionary, Chandra (1902: p. 32) identifies the entry for 'kai la sha' (Tibetan: ཀཻ་ལ་ཤ, Wylie: kai la sha) which is a loan word from Sanskrit 'kailāsa' (Devanagari: कैलास).[4]
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