“Jamyang Tsering Namgyal (born 4 August 1985) is an Indian politician and Member of Parliament from Ladakh, India’s largest parliamentary seat geographically. Namgyal was elected, on 9 November 2018, to be the youngest and 8th Chief Executive Councillor (CEC) of Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh. He belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).”
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Me old bones need a bit of a rest. The chores in the garden will be there tomorrow.
About ten years ago I took part in empowerments given by Choje Akong Tulku Rinpoche at the Kagyu Samye Dzong in London. These were for White Tara and Guru Rinpoche. In 2009 I had found that I could do something approaching Tibetan Deep Voice Chanting, which was a bit of a turn up for the books.
The “scholar” monk who introduced them said that they work on a number of levels and if you are susceptible / ready you might get the full lineage empowerment.
I have chanted the mantra for Guru Rinpoche the purpose of which is to develop tantric abilities.
I have read quite a bit on him.
I have also chanted the mantra for Heart Sutra, Avalokitesvara, Manjushri, Vajrapani and Tara. I did these either alone or in combinations over a period of at least five years, every day. These were accompanied by rāja yoga visualisation and mudra hand positions.
I recognised from my shamanics training that the empowerments were in a similar vein. Because I am / was a researcher I looked into many aspects of Vajrayana both in its Tibetan and Japanese varieties. It is complex and I could never get my head around some of the Tibetan symbolic Thangkas.
This whole “Buddhist” aspect of this life began in earnest after my night on Mt Sinai. Because not long after that I began having visuals of myself dressed in Buddhist monks’ robes and with om mane padme hum, tattooed on my arms in Sanskrit. I developed a bit of a thing for lotuses {padme} and now we have a pond / étang which grows lotuses every spring.
I was “told” {2009} that I had had two Buddhist lifetimes and in the first one I was a close disciple of Siddhartha. According to the Tibetan text posted yesterday evening, there is a train of thought that as a close disciple, I would have received Vajrayana directly and 2500 years ago. A dream pointed me towards one of the sixteen arhats, Bakula. He was a scholar and came to the path late in life.
From RigpaWiki:
“Sixteen Arhats or Sthaviras (Skt. Ṣoḍaśa Sthavirāḥ; Tib. གནས་བརྟན་བཅུ་དྲུག, Neten Chudruk, Wyl. gnas brtan bcu drug) — Buddha Shakyamuni personally selected the Sixteen Arhats from amongst his disciples and requested them to remain in the world, protecting the Dharma for as long as beings are capable of benefitting from the teachings. They vowed at the time of the parinirvana to remain in the world and maintain the Dharma until the time of the future Buddha Maitreya. To visualize the Buddha Shakyamuni surrounded by the Sixteen Arhats and an assembly of bodhisattvas generates great merit and quickly develops insight into the teachings of the Buddha.”
Hagiography is not always accurate.
Speculating slightly the empowerment from Akong Rinpoche might have stimulated a latency.
The one thing I knew for sure, is that it is unwise to piss about with tantra so I was always very careful with the mantra for Guru Rinpoche and Vajrapani. The energetics of the latter are very powerful. I can easily visualize a full blown Vajrapani and feel comfortable with a vajra in my hand. It is like a wand in function.
I have dreams with many Buddhist themes including ones with vajra.
For me personally there is no problem. But I could imagine that those who knew me as a science academic might find the notion of me doing tantric practice a bit odd.
How could he believe in Tibetan ritual magic? It is mumbo jumbo.
So, if what RigpaWiki says is correct I would have kept a causal vehicle and not blown it off, nirvana. Thus, using this train of thought I would have continued to incarnate from time to time. Last time it was in Cardiff.
I have also been told that this is my last life on this planet and that I am therefore a non-returner. There is no “hasta la vista” for me, no “au revoir”.
I am not glamoured by this. For me it is more of a question as to what if anything do I do with these snippets of information.
The weird thing for me is that I incarnated in such a way, that I found myself in the heart {wrong word}, the middle of UK science such that I studied at UCL and The Royal Institution of Great Britain. I subsequently worked and taught at Imperial College. I met heads of learned societies and a few science Nobel Prize winners. I once drunk quite a bit of gin with the wife of one of these at a party in the RI.
Not too bad for the grandson of a Bevan boy and a Cardiff docker. Coal and steel have been a part of my heritage, as has North Wales slate and copper.
It was whilst giving a course on Toltec Teachings and Toltec dreaming in particular, that I met a young nagal’s courier who had me speak briefly on dreams at a Kagyu Dzong. This subsequently led to me attending the empowerments and deeper into my exploration of Buddhism.
Blavatsky mentions the occult use of sound and colour. I have done many experiments using tantra and rāja yoga. Now, today, I am sitting here typing and Bowie the stray cat is watching me very carefully only one metre away. It is catching some rays right next to the French window doors. The inside of the window is at ~16 ˚C. The temperature outside is 4 ˚C.
Life is weird, shit happens and then you die.
It is not inconsistent with certain schools of thought that I have indeed had two Buddhist lifetimes. I think I have a good understanding of the written part of Buddhism. It was a bit like a duck to water for me. The Toltec Teachings are not at odds with Buddhism to my eye, it simply depends where one puts the emphasis.
I have a view that for religions in general the cores are very similar; the interpretations and human enactments vary considerably. There is a lot of personal power dynamics including “power over”.
Prior to my Buddhist lives I had one Zoroastrian and two Egyptian lives. The recall of these is weak / poor, aside from a familiarity with hieroglyphs. The life I “remember” {put back together} the best is the one as a soldier/priest here in France at the time of one of the crusades. The one immediately previous to this was also European and I was born in Sicily for that one.
Tomorrow I will get out the leaf blower and collect leaves. After that I will probably mow the lawn in front of the kitchen window and prune the crab apple tree so that area is done. Then a couple more mows and it is back to the wood collecting.
Time for lunch…
I am in Africa with Théun. We are dressed in khaki shorts, with boots and khaki hunting vests. We are walking in a river and he is showing me some aspect of hunting (stalking). As we walk along, we catch various fish with our hands which we then discard and let go. We near a rockpool which is where we are going to fish. The river goes between a rock formation and he wants to show me what is past that. So, we go through and right up to the lip of a waterfall which is there. The water cascades over into a massive plunge pool it is totally beautiful. I am a little nervous about the height but cope OK. As we pull back from the edge, I lift up the riverbed as if looking under a carpet. I can see stars and a beautiful night sky under the “carpet”. I replace the riverbed and we move back to our fishing spot.
Later we are inside a room. In front of us on a table lies a giant human heart which is pulsing. I start to run a grater / mandolin over the surface of the heart. This removes the aged and vitrified muscle so that the heart can function better. Théun looks on and there is a sense of us working on this together.
Dream ends
On the 5th of September a Le Creuset casserole split into two halves in our kitchen, for no apparent reason.
I subsequently found out that he is said to have died on that date.
My Bakula dream followed on the 12th of August.
On the 22nd of October I had another dream in which Théun is old and frail and in which he dies. I provide him comfort at time of death. I was “there” at the end in that dream.
In early 2009 I was accustomed to walk entirely sober and soon after dawn at the Ashridge Estate near Tring.
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I would get there before most of the normal folk and as I was leaving, I would start to encounter the odd dog walker or two or some sweaty dude out running.
I perhaps imagined telepathic dialogues with inter alia the Tibetan, Djwhal Kuhl. Or maybe it was real? Maybe I am a paranoid delusional schizophrenic? Place your bets…
He “told” me of my five previous incarnations and said that I was a close disciple of Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, my brother. My dreams have pointed at a named person, Bakula. He is considered as one of the arhats of the Buddha in some texts, roughly equivalent of being one of the apostles of Jesus.
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This suggests that I pertained to the ashram of a Master 2500 years ago. Or that I need to be locked up at the Friern Barnet Asylum.
There is discursive Buddhist intellectualism as to what an arhat is or may be. The general consensus is that is really bad karma to be nasty and disrespectful to a being who is closer to enlightenment than you. If you have been a manipulative bastard to an arhat, that is not a good thing to have on your karmic CV.
If a high degree initiate incarnates into a nation and feels the need to change country because of how he is treated, that is not karmically good for the nation. For the new host, it is a good thing.
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If an alcoholic “burn out” runs away to die a lonely sad and isolated death, that has no karmic impact on the nation he runs away from.
The strange thing is that the people who imagine that they know best are unaware as to the limitations and the accuracy of their all-encompassing imagination. It is impossible to teach, help or advise, those who have already self-diagnosed their own universal and cosmic omniscience.
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Still flowers on the Clematis
Lichen on the silver birch
It is often damp here, one tonne of propane…
We have loads of these pink flowers which we rescued and replanted..
small puddle in the arms of the beech
Don’t you just want to pop them like bubblewrap?
look at my wings…we are ready for our annual daddy long legs invasion
This shiny chap is about 1 cm across.
Maple leaf on bitumen…there will be loads of these!!
Spiders in the wood store…
Print of Bakula Rinpoche thangka on my current gardening shirt…I am getting the last few wears out of my tatty old t-shirts before binning them.
I am in a roof top garden, there is some sort of party going on with loads of people sat around and at tables. There are people of many ethnicities from all over the world. They are dressed in brightly coloured “hippie” style clothes. As the party carries on they draw a curtain around one part of the garden and gather around some Buddhist icons. A south American man there starts to do some chanting. I butt in with Tibetan deep voice chanting. They do not recognise me and are annoyed at my interruption. I point out to them that it is my garden which they are in. I strike up again and do White Tara. I need a drink of water before I can find my voice. After several cups I strike the right note and do some White Tara. Everyone joins in and after a while the party resumes happily.
The wife and I are in one segment of the garden when Anna L and a friend turn up. They have been travelling in India. She has remained pale but her friend has gone brown. She talks of her travels and I say that we will in time need to have a proper talk. She has something for me. At which point she shoots straight up into the air and then lands. She has brought many “ethnic”, clothes and trinkets.
Next I am on a mountain train. I arrive at a terminus in a hillside town way up in the mountains. It is very much like Nepal / Tibet / Bhutan. I get out of the train and wander along the high street. Turning instinctively to the right I go up a hill to “my” palace. Again there is a vibrant garden with peacocks. It is “my” garden.
Later I make another journey on the mountain train and end up at another terminus. Here the streets are filled with market traders selling saffron and magenta clothes, together with gold trinkets and jewellery. I have time to explore. Everyone is trying to barter with the merchants trying to buy goods in various currencies. The merchants will not trade unless the currency matches the passport of the person trying to buy.
I am not interested in bartering and look on watching. Somehow I am “in tune” with the locals. I wander back to the main street and notice various pins sticking in my back. Somehow I am now in an off the shoulder robe. One by one I pull the pins out of my back. They are made of a very fine gold pin topped with a tiny ivory chess figure. There is a castle, a knight, a king and a queen. I have also been adorned with much golden jewellery.
I go into an emporium as I am pulling out these pins and sit down. I ask the shopkeeper about what has been happening. She says that they have done this to me so as to make me unattractive to the locals so that they won’t fall for me and want to have sex with me.
Anna L comes into the shop and sits next to me. We start talking about my palace. An old Indian man with very short hair suddenly starts to talk in a very proper English accent. He says that she holds for me a key and that we must find it. It relates back to 1773. He says that I must get back to Bakula.
We leave the shops and seek out the train station. “All trains go through Bakula”, says the station announcer. We look at the map and it is configured like this.
I am in a roof top garden, there is some sort of party going on with loads of people sat around and at tables. There are people of many ethnicities from all over the world. They are dressed in brightly coloured “hippie” style clothes. As the party carries on they draw a curtain around one part of the garden and gather around some Buddhist icons. A south American man there starts to do some chanting. I butt in with Tibetan deep voice chanting. They do not recognise me and are annoyed at my interruption. I point out to them that it is my garden which they are in. I strike up again and do White Tara. I need a drink of water before I can find my voice. After several cups I strike the right note and do some White Tara. Everyone joins in and after a while the party resumes happily.
The wife and I are in one segment of the garden when Anna L and a friend turn up. They have been travelling in India. She has remained pale but her friend has gone brown. She talks of her travels and I say that we will in time need to have a proper talk. She has something for me. At which point she shoots straight up into the air and then lands. She has brought many “ethnic”, clothes and trinkets.
Next I am on a mountain train. I arrive at a terminus in a hillside town way up in the mountains. It is very much like Nepal / Tibet / Bhutan. I get out of the train and wander along the high street. Turning instinctively to the right I go up a hill to “my” palace. Again there is a vibrant garden with peacocks. It is “my” garden.
Later I make another journey on the mountain train and end up at another terminus. Here the streets are filled with market traders selling saffron and magenta clothes, together with gold trinkets and jewellery. I have time to explore. Everyone is trying to barter with the merchants trying to buy goods in various currencies. The merchants will not trade unless the currency matches the passport of the person trying to buy.
I am not interested in bartering and look on watching. Somehow I am “in tune” with the locals. I wander back to the main street and notice various pins sticking in my back. Somehow I am now in an off the shoulder robe. One by one I pull the pins out of my back. They are made of a very fine gold pin topped with a tiny ivory chess figure. There is a castle, a knight, a king and a queen. I have also been adorned with much golden jewellery.
I go into an emporium as I am pulling out these pins and sit down. I ask the shopkeeper about what has been happening. She says that they have done this to me so as to make me unattractive to the locals so that they won’t fall for me and want to have sex with me.
Anna L comes into the shop and sits next to me. We start talking about my palace. An old Indian man with very short hair suddenly starts to talk in a very proper English accent. He says that she holds for me a key and that we must find it. It relates back to 1773. He says that I must get back to Bakula.
We leave the shops and seek out the train station. “All trains go through Bakula”, says the station announcer. We look at the map and it is configured like this.
To the left are Kushok Bakula Rinpoche Airport and Spituk Monastery. This is Leh in Ladakh
Spot the chess board….
This is spookily like the emporium in the dream….
Spituk Monastery, also known as Spituk Gompa or Pethup Gompa, is a Buddhist monastery in Spituk, Leh district, Ladakh, northern India. 8 kilometres from Leh. The site of Spituk was blessed by the Arhat Nyimagung. It was founded by Od-de, the elder brother of Lha Lama Changchub Od when he came to Maryul in the 11th Century. He introduced the monastic community. When Lotsewa Rinchen Zangpo (Translator) came to that place he said that an exemplary religious community would arise there and so the monastery was called spituk (exemplary). During the time of Dharma raja Gragspa Bum-Ide the monastery was restored by Lama Lhawang Lodos and the stainless order of Tsonkhapa was introduced and it has remained intact as such till present. Founded as a Red Hat institution, the monastery was taken over by the Yellow Hat sect in the 15th century.
The monastery contains 100 monks and a giant statue of Kali (unveiled during the annual festival).
Every year the Gustor Festival is held at Spituk from the 27th to 29th day in the eleventh month of the Tibetan calendar.
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“Bakula Rinpoche, who has passed away aged 86, was a unique Lama of great talent and exceptional gifts. He was highly revered for his erudition, his dedication to the education of a new generation of young monks and nuns and his gentle humility. His wisdom and compassion put him in the front rank of influential Tibetan Buddhist masters, yet he was always modest.
Born into a noble family of Ladakh, India, he was recognized by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of Bakula Arhat – one of the Sixteen Arhats (direct disciples of the Shakyamuni Buddha).
As a Buddhist leader, he guided his followers through his personal example of a humble life as a celibate monk. He dedicated his life to the core principles of Buddhist teaching by caring for others, especially for those who were less fortunate and in great need.”
“Today, the teachings of the Buddha have once again come back to Russia and Mongolia and Bakula Rinpoche has played an important mentoring role in the process.
Over a period of ten years, he helped re-open ancient monasteries and organize Buddhist peace conferences. Under his guidance, Pethub Monastery and Dechen Ling Nunnery in Ulaanbaatar developed into important centres of learning for the Mongolian Buddhists. In 2001 the President of Mongolia awarded Rinpoche one of the highest honour of the country, “The Polar Star”.
He travelled internationally promoting the importance of inter-faith understanding, inter-communal harmony and peaceful reconciliation of conflicts in the world. His last visit to London was in November 2002 when he was a guest of Her Majesty the Queen. During that visit Tibet Foundation had the privilege to host a reception in his honour and receive his blessing. Tireless in his work, he travelled on to the 3rd World Buddhist Conference hosted by His Majesty King Norodom Sihanouk in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.”
I got a shiver of recognition when I saw this one … even more spooky…
Traou an Dour 
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