When I started reading about Tibetan Buddhism I began to read about Enlightenment's nectar and wondered what that was all about. The first thing I read on Tibet was Ding Le May because my father became interested his his book called "My Life in Tibet". So, this peaked my interest. My father and I since we were then building a retirement home for my father on weekends near Joshua Tree, California where the "Institute of Mentalphysics" is that also Carrie Fisher did retreats then in the 1970s and 1980s as well then. So, it has been visited by many famous people over the years. So, reading this book with my father was my first real experience with people describing their experiences in Tibet.
Around this time also my friend who was a student who eventually got a bachelor's degree in History of religion from UCLA and later a master's degree as well in the same subject specializing in Buddhism and Sanskrit. So, my friend is fluent in Sanskrit as a result which helps him understand languages related like Hindi and Newari (Nepalese) and even Russian which is also related to Sanskrit interestingly enough.
It's sort of the way Latin relates to Italian, French and Spanish and maybe other languages as well.
In My Life in Tibet Ding le May "J. Edwin Dingle" who was a cartographer (map maker) spoke about how he saw someone take an orange seed and grow an orange tree in their hand and then pick an orange off it as well as he watched.
Now, whether you believe this or not is up to you. I never saw anything like this while I was in India or Nepal but I saw enough to know that reality is very different than the U.S. in India and Nepal and things often happen there that don't happen ordinarily other places too.
What I realized while traveling for 4 months in India and Nepal was that another reality exists there than we ordinarily see here in the United States or in Europe.
Why is this true?
I think the way I could put this is that it is mostly because so many uneducated people live there and so there is this feeling of "anything can happen" or a belief in miracles that is much more prevalent in Asian cultures than you have in the U.S. because people tend to be more "materialistic" and into mechanical things like Trains and cars and planes more. Also, the time I went there was 1985 and 1986 when there were still steam trains taking people everywhere then too. So, it was maybe a more magical time then than now in some ways too then. I'm not sure because I haven't returned to India or Nepal since then. So, in my mind it is set in my memories the way it was then in the 1980s.
Also, because 4 out of 5 of us getting giardia and it taking about 6 months to not look like skeletons and various other problems of sloughing giardia off like our U.S. foreign disease specialist recommended doesn't make me want to rush over there again now at 73 and maybe die from something this time either.
Because 4 months there took us all 6 months to recover from as the giardia sloughed off out of our bodies as the specialist recommended at the time.
But, my Ayurvedic American Nurse practitioner said that one of the problems of getting giardia in Asia is that it sometimes can give people thyroid problems later in life which is what happened to me even though I wasn't aware of this at the time. But, I wasn't diagnosed with thyroid problems until 2006 which is good because I might have died partly caused by this undiagnosed problem within 10 years if it hadn't finally been diagnosed then.
Being hypothyroid isn't usually a death sentence as long as it is eventually diagnosed. Some of the symptoms is feeling cold a lot and cold hands and getting things like bronchitis a lot during the winters and stuff like this. If you suspect you have a hypothyroid condition (low thyroid) then you should get two blood tests (a T3 and a T4) blood test to see if you are deficient in thyroid production in your thyroid glands.
So, though going to Asia and studying with Tibetan Lamas is wonderful you might get some types of diseases and since Giardia is endemic to most parts of Asia this is likely one of the things you will eventually get if you stay over there long enough (4 months time for my family) in Nepal and India mostly with a couple of weeks in Thailand going and coming from San Francisco through Narito Airport in Japan. We wound up not staying long in Japan mostly because it was just too expensive for us because at the time it was 40 bhats to the dollar then in Thailand which made staying there in a Guest house very reasonable. For example, staying in a nice guest house in Bangkok was only about 10 dollars a day then including breakfast and dinner for 5 people if I remember correctly. India was about 10 rupees to the dollar then so India was the most expensive place to stay and I think it was 20 Nepali Rupees to the dollar so Nepal was about 1/2 way between Thailand and India expense wise. Of course all these things have changed now to something else.
So, like right now a baht is worth 3.1 cents. So, it comes out right now to around 32.25 bahts to the dollar still in Thailand. So, not as good an exchange as when I was there but still pretty good today.
Here's the exact rate of exchange but 32.25 makes more sense than: 32.2580645161 which is what it actually is right now.
However, there is a story that I believe from what I did
see regarding how things really are in India and Nepal
and Tibet.
It is a story about a High Tibetan lama who was fully
realized and when the Chinese came they took his kata
"White blessing cloth" which is used to bless others or
to receive blessings from other high Lamas like the
Dalai Lama and others. The Chinese soldiers stuffed his kata
Blessing cloth down his throat and so as he died from
suffocation he turned a cup inside out with his mind to
show them that they were killing an amazing being but
that his dedication to compassion and non-violence
was absolute enough that he wouldn't take revenge on them.
This story I believe from my experiences in Asia with
Highly evolved realized beings there.
By God's Grace
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