Blavatsky's Tibet: Sacred Power Places and their Spiritual Mysteries | Theosophical Classic 2006

ah yeah [Applause] well we tried to set up the slideshow earlier but buddhism bodhisattvas for them to appear they're everywhere nagarjuna said every atom has a hundred buddhas dancing and laughing throughout the universe and that's the entire universe is filled with enlightened beings nonetheless they wouldn't appear on our slideshow till we gathered a great deal of merit so we had to spend about two hours but i think chris has perhaps got it set out here although i think he's put it somewhere towards the middle or towards the end i'm not sure but we'll leave that up to him very great honor for me to be here on founders weekend actually this year 2006 my first visit to the ts and when i first started here was in 1986 20 years ago and i've come at least once a year every time since then often twice a year so it's been very wonderful for me to have that connection and i have many friends here and the other ts lodges around the country i think uh for my own my own experience or my own training although i've studied and read largely from all the different fields starting with sufism and hinduism taoism or probably my very strong reading focuses in my teen years and whatnot after i actually started practicing more i went more towards the tibet side not because i found it superior to the others but simply because of the wonderful abundance of great tibetan masters largely thanks to the murderous chairman mao and the communist chinese you know this wonderful book right now called mao chairman mao the unknown story it starts out with he was born in a village in western china educated to be a civil servant went on to murder 70 million people in peace time more than the total number murdered by all wars of the 20th century but the book starts like that but uh goes on to tell his life and how he came to murder the 70 million and of course this terrible thing to murder 70 million but from my side every cloud has a silver lining and that silver lining was of course the tibetans were pushed out of their country and the great llamas thrown across the the the modern world and so they first came to nepal in india sikkim bhutan and so forth and from there as refugees moved elsewhere of course that was uh excesses of a violent time when we think back of it we think it's uh something very terrible and of course it is terrible but the 20th century was a very rough century world war one world war ii i mean just the bird flew after world war one wiped out three million more than the entirety of world war one 21 million i think it wiped out so it was a somewhat of an intense century all told and i was had the good fortune to see the last half of it which was not quite so tough as the first half but because of what happened in china then china taking tibet and the tibetan llamas fled and because of them fleeing then of course those of us in the west with some sort of karmic connection had the auspicious opportunity to meet many of those great masters and to study with them i once discussed this kind of slant on the situation with the dalai lama and he replied to me uh he said sometimes for the purity of a spiritual tradition you build temples and sometimes for the purity of a spiritual tradition you have to tear temples down i think probably our world or towards the last half of the middle of the last century and as we went deeper into the last century became ever increasingly sensitive of sort of politically certainly militarily with nuclear power financially more delicate environmentally more delicate and as a result i think tibet perhaps played the role of being the safety valve and a bit of steam blew out from there and hopefully that will have the effect of turning things around according to buddhist prophecy and madame blavatsky was very much into prophecy and the kalachakra tantra she was very attracted to those aspects of tibetan tibetan mysticism according to that prophecy in the not near not too distant future we will come to a crossroads and at that crossroads we will either enter into a thousand years of darkness or a thousand years of golden age and it is possible that the last two or three generations could have resulted in the thousand years of darkness it only took someone hitting the little red button on either side or any of another any of a number of other factors could have created that disaster but it said that if we all work hard and collect lots of good karma become bigger better wiser and smarter all the humans on the planet then we will get the thousand years of the golden age so myself i'm honored to have met with those great llamas and i hope that in some way things i've done with my own life will be able to contribute in some small way to things going in that positive direction i think madame blavatsky was very much a great being pushing things in that golden era direction but of course some other forces are pushing the other way the dalai lama on another occasion sid our world is in a very precarious state and it's up to each individual to do his or her best we can't talk about world peace we can talk about individual peace we can't talk about a world solutions we can talk about individual solutions when we get enough individual peace and enough individual solution we get we move towards world peace world solutions and i think madame blavatsky made a great contribution to that we often forget that when she came into the world we in the west were very condescending towards all other traditions we use names for them like savages pagans barbarians and so on and so forth wherever we went we essentially did our best to undermine their cultures it was an imperialistic age not just for us but elsewhere around the world but amanda blavatsky really was very much a breakthrough thinker when she not only pronounced that all traditions of the world have a great deal of truth to share and are founded in truth and encourage beings to evolve towards truth and it sounds very commonplace to us today but that at that time it was a very radical thing to say but not only did she say it wherever she went she got thousands and often tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people to listen to her she became one of the most highly respected and regarded um spiritual peoples of her age um of course a lot of people also there was also a lot of uh negative uh response because obviously not everyone wanted to hear a message of that nature not everyone wanted the world to move in that direction there were the cultural and spiritual imperialists who felt that they should have the dominating position we who have those of us who have learned much from asian traditions all of us have a lot uh great debt to her we owe her a great debt and the tibetans in particular her work when she started working nobody knew much about tibet hall and she was really the first person to speak about tibet with with with praise with beautiful language with exaltation and to speak well of the tibetans before her everyone else basically in the west either we didn't know anything about her or if we did we just basically thought of them as provincial peoples located somewhere to the north of india who didn't really have much going for them and she brought out the mystical side of tibet and the spiritual side of tibet popularized it and created something of a tibetan enamorment movement and that tibetan enamelment movement led to people studying tibetan and learning the language and then coming to see what tibet did and did not have uh for cultural spiritual assets those who came after her many of the great translators people like evans wentz uh and so forth who did a lot of the early work always mention her and give credit to her back in the 1920s that they they owed much of what they themselves learned to the the direction she had pointed and the pace she had set so for me it's uh when i was here last year betty and i discussed the idea of taking a ts trip to tibet next year to blavatsky's tibet someone said to me today did blavatsky ever go to tibet and it is an open question officially she did not she was a russian traveling in british india and that was a time of the great war and all uh white peoples were banned from tibet from the year 1802 basically because the british from the south had chopped away at tibet's borders taking ladakh lahu spiti kanor you know darjeeling we say in india actually was door jailing in tibet all of these parts of south tibet fell to the british colonialists and on the north the russian tsar was pushing east at the rate of several miles a day and swallowed up all of the tibetan buddhist areas among all regions of the north throughout siberia tuvo baryat and so forth and the final result was in the early 1800's that tibetans said these white fellas are a little dangerous they come in and ask to trade and before you know it they map out all of the trade routes and then later they send in their armies using those maps and they conquest and they colonize so they made their tibetan government made the rule in 1802 that white peoples wanting to come to tibet had to get a personal letter directly from the lhasa government they couldn't come in without that and through the 1800s that built up and became ever stronger as the russian empire continued to expand and the british colonies continued to become more and more forceful and in india of course india became a full-fledged colony and actually became part of the empire it was actually victoria was first declared an empress when her son edward traveling in india declared her from india the empress of india so the the tibetans became very concerned and very nervous naturally around foreign intents and uh both russia uh in all of its eastern sections had tibetan buddhist areas and india in the south ruled by britain all of its north himalayas all the himalayan regions were all tibetan buddhist areas so both of them agreed neither should take over tibet because it would give the t and both were enemies in the conquest of central asia so we should say combatants in in the conquest of central asia and so both agreed neither should take tibet and it should remain something of a buffer zone if someone took it it would give them too much of a spying capability in those other regions in particular lhasa for instance the three great monasteries and we'll see some of them in the slideshow today whole areas of eastern russia the peoples born there being tibetan buddhist mongolians by birth had hereditary right to just show up and demand free education and all of eastern russia therefore was uh largely inhabited by peoples who went to tibet to train similarly people from ladakh lahu spiti when they con when they completed or at least got fairly developed in their own monasteries completed much of the training they could switch to lhasa for the higher uh monastic universities in the higher trainings so both british and russians were very concerned that neither should take tibet similarly china started taking a real interest because of course in those days tibet was independent country but western china was largely buddhist and in fact the manchus who are a mongol tribe and who conquered china in about 1844 i believe were very concerned because if anyone took tibet then of course they were tibetan buddhist and the dalai lama was the spiritual head of all of manchu china of all of the manchu mongols and as a result they too pressed that no one should take tibet so all three were very concerned and therefore the ability of white peoples to europeans or americans to travel into tibet was very very limited it used to be said that nobody went there and if they did thereafter they wrote a dozen books about their adventures and about their travels it is possible that madame blavatsky did secretly go in because she spent a lot of time in shimla and shimla was in the old days the far southwest of tibet not so far really from mount kailash i've taken several trips there and in our slideshow we'll see one of the a few shots from one of the places one of the passes we go over the 18 600 foot pass which does demand a bit for your average kind of morning jogger but uh shimla used to be part of old tibet in the southwest and had been taken over by british india i believe in 1821 or 1822 something like those years similarly and kunu used to be part of tibet and had been part of actually the old tibetan kingdom of guge and today in india some of the best monks in draepon los ling are from kugai and there's actually one of the twenty four departments in draepon los ling monastery has a department called guge kamsan all all the monks from those areas taken over at that time still go down legally they're indian but uh ethnically and spiritually they're tibetan so madame blavatsky's great introduction to the tibetans began with her time there with colonel olcott whether or not she went into tibet or whether she spent all of that time in shimla and just exchanged spiritual ideas with those beings who came through there now in those times shimla was an important pilgrimage place and the tibetans coming out coming down to essentially uh sopema is a tibetan name for it but it's a raw waltz are they come down too similar and head up uh pull or right and go for a few days and you come to the bottom of the manali valley and head up into the mountains and you come to the lotus lake where the great padmasambhava achieved enlightenment with his female student manda rava still there today that's a great tibetan temple center and if you travel through the himalayas a wonderful wonderful temple town to visit a beautiful hill station and above it all the caves were padmasambhava meditated and tibetans since that time since about 7 20 or so have continued to meditate and so that's where madame blavatsky essentially got her introduction to tibet and learned about it met many great tibetan masters and where she she in all caught us well i shouldn't say took an interest they had spent a lot of time before that elsewhere in india and possibly had other direct connections certainly they had been to sri lanka and various buddhist other buddhist regions but it was the closest she got to the tibetan border and actually it was inside what would have been pre-19 1820s tibet and did she or did she not go in well there is no word from her that she did but there's a there is a school of thought that thinks yes she indeed did because uh a number of peoples in those days did disguise themselves and did travel around tibet on pilgrimage usually like alexander david neal for instance instance disguise guy who disguised herself as kind of a mad old woman and made herself all dirty and rough and made herself look like a provincial country bumpkin and slightly mad and pretended she couldn't talk and would just go from pilgrimage place to pilgrimage place being very careful not to let her identity known so it's thought that blavatsky may have done something like that in her time though it would have been very dangerous had she said yes she did because she never again would have been allowed to go back to india not only that everyone she met in tibet would have gotten in in serious trouble the tibetans took their closed-door policy very close and not even though tibetans are rather compassionate peoples and a buddhist people they did regard any infringement on the part of their own local governors and uh road controllers and so forth as an act of treason and not that much earlier in about eighteen seventy five or eighteen eighty sharat sandra das had gone in and he had traveled under a document issued by the pension llama again a person of whom madame blavatsky speaks in depth and and speaks very enamoringly and he he had gone in with a document from the pension llama traveled through out central tibet and throughout lhasa and all the regions and then returned to darjeeling later it was learned that in fact he was in the pay of the british government and so even though he is an academic and a scholar like so many american academics and canadian scholars studying abroad they are it will take a little task from the government to do a little um look uh look at what's going on in places uh stipends and that's what he did unfortunately it did backfire and the pension llama's guru actually the pension alum at the time was very young man was arrested for treason and so it had a disastrous effect and the treason was the only sentence in most buddhist buddhist countries in the east that carried the death sentence so he was actually put to death for issuing that visa for endangering state security and madame blavatsky came along not long after that so even had she gone in there's very little chance she ever would have publicly announced it or written about it or let people know directly nonetheless until today there is the legend that from that time she did did in fact go in did travel around and that's how she got to know so much about tibet i think people think it kind of logically where there's smoke there's fire and because she knew so much about tibet people felt that must have been how she got it because otherwise shimla was having been at that time under british rule for about 50 years or so 60 years had become less tibetanized and more indian and britainized um i think one of the main books in the early days and i brought a copy along with me just in people's don't know it hpb vlavotsky tibetan tuku by jeffrey barbourka which is one of the very important early books on tibetan culture and is one of the ones that really tells a lot about what was going on with that whole part of the world and what was going on in tibet spiritually and very carefully drawing from blavatsky's writings kind of hints of what she knew and then elucidating that and showing how the whole tibetan tradition works spiritually but going she basically calls all of blavatsky's secret doctrines writings and other sources interviews with her letters with her and so forth and drawing on those sources creates the picture and really the first in-depth picture of the tibetan spiritual world of course today it's a lot later we can look at it and say well that doesn't really all come up to modern linguistic and philosophical ways of looking at things but when we translate anything from a foreign language into our own we put it into a cultural setting which is uh accessible to our readers and i think a lot of the distance is created by that i remember with david riegel a very dear friend who's a theosophist and when i had him doing the sanskrit on my color chakra book he was working on some of the early blavatsky writings and a lot of the early academics pupad blavatsky for a word called dodea and gude and books called dodea and gude from which she had gotten much of her learning and they commented that no such book exists in the tibetan world in fact dodei means the the uh compendium of sutras sutras means public discourses jude means compendium of tantras are secretly taught buddhist discourses so the fact that she had spelled those two words in something of an antiquated old-fashioned way and hadn't written it the way we're used to seeing it in modern wiley system transliteration and so forth had sort of thrown everyone for a loop and made the academics come up with the idea that no such books existed in the tibetan world actually i'd never heard the debate myself until david pointed it out to me and pulled out some paragraphs on it and then pulled out those two words and showed what they were and asked if i knew what they were in tibetan and of course because i knew what they were in tibetan and just the way he pronounced them and said them without looking at the spelling then that immediately clarified why that whole situation had come about um the theosophical society has helped a lot with a lot of the things happen to tibetans after they came into exile in india of course their the key to the middle way which was the dalai lama's first book published in english was published by quest books herron wheaton on the dalai lama's first trip in america he came by chicago and met with the ts leaders and the next year actually came and stayed here and visited and so the link has been strong in india the ts helped with a lot of fundraising from eddier and helped with the world organization uh raise because we suddenly had 150 refugees just pouring across the borders and into india a third world country ten years after their independence from uh twelve years after the independence from england so a kind of a very impoverished third world country and very little resources so the ts worldwide did large fundraisings for them i think the argentina ts society in particular was very strong but from england very strong and also here in america so undoubtedly many tibetan lives were saved by that effort when they came out most tibetans made their life making earning 20 cents a day um working on the roads and just having basically an umbrella to sit under when it rained or got sun and uh putting their kids just tying them on a little tether to a stick with an umbrella over their head for the 12 hours a day they'd work for this 15 or 20 cents so at that time everyone was dying from a lot of tuberculosis which didn't exist in tibet and was very contagious in the indian climate and it's very common with all indians actually it's almost all indians test positive for tb because everyone's contacted it and has the antibody to it and so tibetans of course had no resistance so many many of them died probably as many as 20 or 30 percent of them but the ts was very instrumental in coming in with some some help and clothes and money and food and so on and so forth so save many many lives they also help spiritually through helping to preserve their books and helping with publishing and other such activities helping to re-establish the monasteries and in little ways and sponsor monks and sponsor the whole re-education and stable uh settling and re-establishing of destroyed traditions back in tibet and the cultural revolution this is in 59 cultural revolution in china erupted in 1966 so then full scale destruction took place throughout china and therefore throughout tibet in tibet i think of 6500 monasteries all but 13 were destroyed their inhabitants either killed or imprisoned even those 13 were closed and the inhabitants killed her in prison uh but then those 13 were turned into either warehouses or military barracks and this continued until 1980 when deng xiaoping came in and said this anti-intellectualism has to go it's not a good thing and actually it's quite interesting in china throughout china during that whole period there was very little education anywhere other than the little red book i once heard the president of china who went to prison in 1966 his daughter i think was nine years old and her school had finished and so thereafter she just had underground education and later after not until deng xiaoping came in did she have any more education for that whole 14 or 15 year period and she she once heard her speak in an interview and she said this is really a great lost period of chinese history and until today chinese still do not like to talk about it it's something that i think all chinese are ashamed of and they feel terrible about and it's i think a little bit like the holocaust with the jews it was very difficult for them for many years after after the end of world war ii for them to talk openly or honestly about it it was something that was an object of terrible shame and pain for them and same for china and in tibet the destruction went on but then deng xiaoping brought it to an end and in the 80s tibet started to be rebuilt and uh so now we have about 500 of those monasteries are rebuilt and although none of them are anywhere as big or as glorious as they were in the olden days nonetheless they are up an active and tibetan culture anywhere except the cities is doing pretty well the cities of course have suffered a lot from uh mass immigration because tibet only had about six million people now tibet and chinese did discuss this in various ways because in 1967 a year after cultural revolution they changed began they changed the border of eastern tibet and moved it westward by several hundred miles so now the population of tibet autonomous region is about 2 million but above 4 million tibetans live in the other eastern parts which are now either sichuan province or uh ching hai province hunan province these other provinces but in central tibet in particular immigration has been very strong with i think now maybe two or three million four million chinese living in only two million tibetans lasa in particular you know it's a little disappointing i think there's 1.2 million chinese and only 300 000 tibetans so the old city is pretty well disappeared nonetheless it is still very much a sacred country and when you go uh 200 yards off the road you get back to old tibet so when we travel in tibet next year on the theosophical tour those of you come we will mostly go to those areas or those places which are still very quite pure in terms of tibetan spiritual culture and where a lot of practice study practice and study meditation and so forth is done now i thought yeah we'll watch to do something with a slideshow here i have to find chris and find out we have to get to the first slide there we are beautiful yeah i was recently speaking in dallas and in dallas i was at the crow museum and they've got the old photographs that newark museum in new jersey collected and those photographs were mostly taken between about 1890 and 1920 but one of them is of larson as this grand picture of the potola from uh 1916 i think and at that time there were only about 10 000 tibetans living in the valley and then city of lhasa but this great site which is mentioned many times in madame blavatsky's writings was one of her kind of great places of mind i think a kind of great inspiration you know the dalai lama always lived there he's got those five little rooms on the top under the little uh those little golden roofs off to the left that's his personal apartment and if you come down one level it's uh mostly temples and chapels for study and practice and whatnot and the monks of namgul would do prayers and rituals come down another and that's the residence of the hundred and twenty monks of dalai lama's private monastery nam gil trasen come down another level and that's the mostly national archives sort of like the american library of congress except tibetan equivalent so all of the books in historical records and whatnot were all kept in there down further are the big meeting rooms where the tibetan government would meet to make important decisions and before in the older days have you come out front was a little city of lhasa with about 10 000 people behind was the village of shoal and the sixth dalai lama who wasn't a monk but was the famous lover of tibet used to sneak down those depths behind every night and go back and sing and dance in the taverns and make love to the young maidens of the lhasa valley and write love poetry until today i think every tibetan knows his love poetry by heart is perhaps the most popular of all the dalai lamas in terms of poetry some of the others are appreciated more there for their philosophy but his songs are known to all and probably when we go in tibet uh you know on the ts trip we can request some of the when we stop to have some tibetans mostly drink alcohol made for a kind of a beer a little bit like bear a little bit like wine made from barley flour so when we drink barley barley wine we can have them sing some of their love songs for us written by the sixth dalai lama they don't sound great in english but they all have some kind of tantric meaning to them that uh vast commentaries are like things like uh you know when we i've heard about guru yoga i try to practice it i work and work to get the mind of get the image of my guru visualized in my mind's eye but it slips away but amazingly so easily the face of my lover comes back now of course uh tibetans give that a llamas give that a he probably just meant it as a simple love song or he may have meant it as a tantric song but if it were to be given a meant uh tantric meaning then it would be that the teacher is an important you know is an important vessel or carriage leading us to enlightenment but once we get to enlightenment we have to look to the to the true lover the real guru which is the experience of enlightenment itself so some say oh no the dollar the six dollars just proclaiming his own enlightenment and no need to look so much more for the guru for the words of the great master and the face of the great master now it's his own enlightenment state is his guru so we can click over the steps going up are rather wonderful there's uh hundreds and hundreds of them and you get to the top and then you enter the building then you go up a whole series of tiny little ladders with uh very slippery wooden steps in the olden days uh when dalai lama would sit on the top on a throne with these monks and uh 20 30 40 50 000 a tribe would come in those kind of numbers for blessings on pilgrimage very often get 10 or 20 or 30 000 then the whole bunch of them would all go up in single file like that and he'd sit there on a throne like this we can do it at the end i'll show you he'd reach down and rather give everyone a hand blessing if uh if they were you know if they were like old people and they'd like to be touched on the head otherwise with other people he'd use kind of a stick with a little blessing tassel on the end and the blessing tassel had like little snippets of robes from all the previous dela llamas and here little snippets of hair from the great gurus of the past and a ding like that and the whole 20 30 000 of them would go through and undoubtedly when blavatsky was in india that kind of mass blessing thing was something she would have witnessed with the great llamas on pilgrimage because even today when any llama comes anywhere just tibetans are not in the central asians so they're not so enthusiastic for hearing long philosophical talks they more want to get blessing and they also want to get a blessing pill something you can take home and eat and share with your uh relatives and friends recently in august was in mongolia and the wrestling association was his host organization and so they are they're kind of intellectual types wrestlers as you know and so they are requested large you know long kind of public teaching things and i was sitting there in this little mongolian lady sitting here what's he talking about she says do they like oh it's the other ladies oh i think it's like something about philosophy so when's he going to finish and get on to giving us the blessing and the pills because tibetans are smarter they're more accustomed to these blessing ceremonies and mongolians because mongolians were under soviets for 75 years so for them they're just getting back into the swing of it tibetans always bring along a bottle of wine or a bottle of whiskey so if the talk goes on too long they kind of have something to help the hours slip by can you go to the next one inside of the pothole it's said to be a mass palace of a thousand rooms but all the upper chambers are all temples so this is my personal favorite it's the chapel of the seventh dalai lama who is also my own personal favorite his book of poetry was one of the first books i translated songs of spiritual change and later it was republished as meditations to transform the mind which is taken from another part of its title uh snowline often republishes books with a different title thinking if the first one you know went and the second one you can always improve it and go even better but he was my favorite he wrote wonderful spiritual poems things like uh image of a sun shining high in the heavens we're all living beings to shine radiant love equally upon all other living beings how excellent image of an eagle flying high in space where we all to fly free in the space of vast infinity without grasping or holding how excellent the image of a rainbow clear dazzling where we all to shine in our meditation like the rainbow in the sky how excellent and so on he goes on with this very wonderful poem but he wrote something like 5 000 poems in his life but all more overtly spiritual less kind of lover this and love her that kind of poem like his predecessor had done perhaps because you know the sixth dalai lama having been a little bit of a rascal brought the ire of the mongols who said oh he's not the real dalai lama so they invaded arrested him and put a puppet on the throne which of course led to a civil war because no tibetan likes a foreign country interfering with their dalai lama institution so then that led to a civil war and then the seventh dalai lama came back so i think he thought well the last guy's poetry was good but it did create a civil war it did lead to an invasion and a civil war but that's one of my that chapel has three statues of him plus the mummy that was made of him after he died tibetans make mummies of their dela llamas panchen llamas and genon tripa head of galoopa and so all of the dalai lama mummies from the fifth on still exist and they're in the potela first a fourth they didn't make mummies they just started with a fifth and the first two present pension lama were always mummified uh by modern count and tibet iv because later the chinese wanted to elevate the pension lama status so they called the first one the fourth by giving them three previous lives and saying uh calling without his previous life i was noticing in the ts library up in milwaukee last night that the four previous lives of annie well that's what they did with pension lama and so the first became the fourth but they mummified from the first or fourth pension llama up until the one who died in 1989. of course after he died they all got joined the cultural revolution they got very angry and destroyed all of the pension llama mummies because they thought they had the pension llama working for him because they caught him as a young kid and held him very closely and made him sort of act read speeches for them and stuff as a teenager and he didn't really have any uh choice but in 1964 he read he was supposed to read a speech sort of supporting the chinese invasion and he said just the opposite that things had gone terribly and were going worse and there was no hope and so unless tibetans looked to the dalai lama then and just held their breath for a while things would be going much much worse for the next couple of decades and they said you shouldn't expect to see me again i'll certainly be arrested tonight and probably killed and so that was the last that was seen of him for 15 years everyone presumed him dead and the chinese got very angry and destroyed all the mummies of these predators so way of getting back you'd be good or will destroy your mummies of your previous lives anyway the dalai lamas they still kept them for some reason i i think chairman mao personally made the made the order during the uh during the cultural revolution that the potala couldn't be harmed so next one so there's three statues of them one at eight years old i think one at 21 or 22 and one the year before he died so that's the one of them as a little boy there below and that's the one above as i'm older and the one over in the corner is one of them as a young man so next the other uh great thing in lhasa of course the jokong also was not destroyed quite uh by accident the had been built in about 630 that king sang sengampo the emperor who had created unified all of tibet in those days and made an empire that went all the way from western china to afghanistan down deep into india and all up covering the silk road large parts of mongolia were invaded the largest continuous land empire ever seen in our western world out even larger than the roman empire but anyway he married uh two foreign women both buddhists one from nepal and one from china so in the cultural revolution china they were supposed to destroy anything non-chinese directly non-chinese linked in tibet anything with a direct link to china should not be destroyed so the generals thought that this had been built for the china of the two foreign princes buddhist princesses one for the first was from nepal and the second was from china and so they got the temples confused and they destroyed the chinese temple and preserved nepali temple so this was one built for the nepali temple i think i've always tell tibetans you know your big hope is your your occupiers are chinese communists [Laughter] it is it does give them an advantage they're always doing the wrong thing but anyway it's a very beautiful temple and we will be going to there on the trip now again blavatsky mentions that many times in her writings because it was the center of all buddhist asia and undoubtedly many of the buddhist pilgrims she met while they were living in shimla would have been from if they came from eastern tibet they would certainly go through there there are very set kind of pilgrimage routes standard pilgrims pilgrimages that the central asians love and every year once in their life they like to make the mount kailash one which actually next year i'm taking one there in uh in august but that's a tough one a real tough one so if you go to kailash you go down there past there particularly if you're old school or ningma down to shimla then over to rawaltzar to guru padmasambhava's caves up there then you come up the other way north of kailash and come back so they would have gone through the temple on the way out but building about 6 30 and it's considered one of the great marvels of ancient architecture and by the way the portala is marked by unesco as one of the seven man-made wonders of the world because this enormous thing built at that time with absolutely no mechanical equipment and according to tibetan sayings you know the they used uh llamas with telekinesis to levitate the large rocks into place at the top because there was no way other way to get them up they tried you're not supposed to use magical powers unnecessarily because it's like showing off but if all else fails then you can so according to legend that's how they did so next one who came to tibet 100 years later of course and we'll be going to many of his places again blavatsky mentions him many times as a source of great inspiration but what he actually wrote and taught we don't really know because it was so long ago and much of what has been preserved has been through treasure text either through dreams or meditation visions and so on but nonetheless these are all in credited to him or inspired by him so they're very great being we can actually click that there's a way you can no maybe you can't see and no can't see on the screen okay otherwise you could blow it up a little bit but uh a very great master again and considered to be emanation of shenro ze as is the dalai lama the prayer to him begins dharmakaya is amitabha somboga kaya ishendra zee namanakaya is padma sambhava and i notice in toku in tibet there's a passage where they quote madame blavatsky is discussing those three kayas and the doctrine of three kayas the infinity of being where mind becomes vastness how mind manifests on the etheric plane or the higher plane which can only be perceived by aryas or saints and finally manifests in the ordinary world in ways that can be perceived for the training of ordinary living beings so it means on the infinite plane amitabha on the etheric plane genres a on the human plane guru padmasambhava but all tibetan schools regard him as the greatest master of ancient times and he took everything sangsan gampo and the four generations following sangsan gumbo had done and put all of that together in a format and um finished and re re re refreshed re-edited all of the translations and brought in revived all the lineages and put them together as packages that continued and come down to us today and until today we still have many lineages as i say what comes directly from him and what are ins inspired by dreams and meditation visions by later masters because many of those term attacks uh treasure texts are seven eight hundred years later a thousand years later but nonetheless they are held as equally true of his legacy as though he had spoken them himself next time of course where blavatsky was in india was uh just uh miles few miles from where he achieved enlightenment the lake where he achieved enlightenment the cave where he did that meditation and so forth there's right near where she lived and did a lot of her uh work up there they have these wonderful kind of prayer wheels and again blavatsky mentioned those repeatedly in her doctrine and she even writes poems called prayer wheels inspired by the idea she would have seen them in the temples in the area and she would have also seen them as hand-held little instruments that the old people often carry when they go on pilgrimage so a prayer will you fill it with prayers and good thoughts and sort of twirl it as you before coming into a temple and the mantras make your prayer or your wish a hundred thousand times stronger but she of course likes to use it allegorically or metaphorically i should say metaphorically for some of her poems prayer wields as auspicious thoughts to guide the future and inspire the future next tibetans begin every morning with this smoke ceremony right in front of the jokong a little bit of strong in the air pollution anyone who doesn't like secondhand smoke stay home [Laughter] but they take juniper juniper bushes and sage they love sage for the smell of sage and they just especially at sacred times of the year they just fill those urns so filled with smoke and if they sow in smoke and barley flour and then alcohol because of course it's uh it's for the spirits of the mountains and of the lakes and of the air so the nature spirits and everyone knows they love barley they love incense and they love whiskey so everyone takes along their bottle of whiskey and their barley flour and they love butter so you also throw in some butter if you have a mountain near you please do one of those every morning and you'll live a happy life but it's very uh wonderful atmosphere at the time particularly if you know in sagadawa the sacred month it's very busy and people begin and do walk-arounds of all the sacred places of lhasa and especially strong at around the barcore morning and evening a shoulder to shoulder you cannot hardly move for the pilgrimage pilgrims pushing there so it's very very magical next and uh even though tibet's very high it's a lot its valleys are very lush we'll be going in may so it'll still be um before growing season so it'll look a little moonscapey um but once the rains of mid-june come then it turns totally lush and green and this i think was taken mid-june yeah this is one of ed ormont outside of milwaukee came on one of my trips to the oracle lake and so everything's just starting to turn green but nonetheless all the valleys have glacial rivers like this this is a brahmaputra starts almost a thousand miles west at mount kailash and winds its way all through the high plains and high deserts and comes right down through the heart of lhasa goes east for another few hundred miles and then pulls a right and drops down to india comes out at calcutta beautiful river brahma putra brahmaputra the son of brahma putra next brahma is the creator god and on the southern shores of that uh river is samye the first monastery built in tibet again blavatsky mentions that many times and we'll be going there that's of the very first monastery built in tibet a month there were sangsan gumbo 100 years earlier had built 108 temples including the jokong the difference between a monastery and a temple is that a monastery must be three airshots from the nearest human habitation by old definition it's not like that anymore now the definition is it just has to have five or more monks living in it so almost any you could call put five monks here and you could call the tias a monastery legally and if there were grants for monasteries you could apply but in those days you could not there had to be three air shots from the nearest non-monk human habitation but a very beautiful place and it was of course was destroyed during the cultural revolution but this is all rebuilt since 1980. next to get there from lhasa you have to take a boat across that beautiful river so uh everyone bring your water wings actually now you can take a bridge and go behind and around it you don't have to take the boat but the boat is a wonderful uh experience it's about a two-hour boat ride i guess to get from one side to the other even though it's not very far but the river is depends on the time of year and the river has a lot of con channels in it so they have to go up and down and up and down and up and down following the channels to get there this was a group i took about three years ago to the oracle lake and just by that fellow right there the former husband of joan halifax great zen female zen teacher here in america an anthropologist but he now has lived in england for many years maybe 15 or so and he's a british filmmaker and he made a documentary film for british television of our oracle lake quest that was released in england i guess two three months ago it'll be released in america i think mid-december something like that it's called sacred sites of the dalai lamas pilgrimage to the oracle lake so next again prayer wheels every temple we go to every site sacred site we visit always has the prayer wheels i just wanted to show this one just because it's uh one near samyang it just it kind of just shows the simplicity of the spiritual life often you know temples with the statues and whatnot but the prayer wheel meditation the morning and evening walk i think for tibetans is their favorite time of day in an article i once wrote actually for a quest magazine i pointed out that i mentioned that i once asked a tibetan friend living in america what he missed most over here and he said the morning and evening korra which means walkabout or pilgrimage every tibetan villager has a there's a kind of the sacred sites of the valley where the local like you know water sprite lives and where a tree spirit lives and then saint you know some place where a great saint once sat and temples built by this are visited by that great being of the past and they'll make a circular walk about which usually will take about an hour to walk slowly or 45 minutes to walk quickly and every tibetan loves every morning and evening to get up and do that quick sort of walkabout for them it's more fun than sitting in meditation or chanting mantras or prayers and they walk around they spring the prayer wheels and in front of the most sacred places they'll make their little wishes and sacred prayers and send their good thoughts next um blavatsky was most into the new school or the yellow school of tibetan buddhism and he's two great students of being here i think this this is probably uh i think that that's from the jokong so from that's from central tibet but of course uh she was most inspired by the dalai and punch and llamas and by beings connected with them and they both of those toku lineages trace their first incarnations to direct students of la masankapa who is pictured here often called the galukpa school or the yellow hat school or in the far east with mongolia and simply the golden school next i guess a big uh difference with uh sun kapa's bob thurman uh the professor father who's a president of tibet house and he's the father of uma thurman the actress refers to it as the gandan renaissance sankapa brought in gandan tushita maitriya buddha and the whole kind of artistry of maitreya the buddha of the future kind of futuristic buddhist art symbolized by maitreya so every time you go to a yellow temple that's what you see maitreya and again blavatsky mentions that connection many times meaning she was well aware of that tradition next the great monasteries near uh tibet ganda and serra uh and tashi lumpo and plebsky mentions all of those draping was the biggest and uh in the old days alosing held about ten thousand monks and gomong held about three thousand so and then they had six other trasongs just with a few hundred each so maybe twelve to fifteen thousand was their average uh population they're about i guess seven eight miles from lhasa so they actually equal the total population of all of lhasa but uh from the second to fifth dalai lamas they always lived in here they always lived in in drepong monastery next if you look out over the buildings and beside the great temples you have all the residences and down below there's a beautiful apple orchard next and in the old days of course that was all just a farmland down below now even though it's 10 miles i guess east of the city no 10 miles west of the city you've saw the chinese immigration has spread all the way urban sprawl urban sprawl it's not just the bane of chicago [Laughter] next was that that shot is from draepong monastery oh behind samye is is the great mountain complex cave complex of chimpu if you look closely you can see temples up along it but there's a nunnery there with 250 nuns and a lot of those nuns live in the caves up there meditating that's where the first 25 tibetans achieved enlightenment under padmasambhava and were also where two the first two tibetans who learned how to fly learned how to fly and so there's a cave there that they used to practice their flying from i mentioned that because my most recent book is called the flying mystics of tibetan buddhism and i suggested to quest books that they try and get sir india to give them paperback rights to it because i think it would be a lot of fun i dedicate it to madame blavatsky and alexander david neal because they sort of saw the fun in tibetan buddhism and i think in the last couple of decades most of our tibetan buddhism in the west has come through academics doing phds and their doctorates and then becoming profs and so it's kind of hasn't been it's not really so much fun anymore you know it's like arguing over whether this term really means that or is it a muslim or mishi with that and you know self-emptiness other emptiness and all these kind of is this a really a prominent or is it not and is this a num talk or is it just a toppa and it goes on and on and on and like who cares [Laughter] but anyway so it's kind of gone in that very dry somewhat boring direction so i want to do an art show called the flying mystics of tibetan buddhism and i do a reader together with it so i did it i did it as an art show down in atlanta about three years ago i guess and the art show is now in new york so if any of you happen to visit new york it's in the reuben museum on 17th street and 7th avenue pretty well about that location beautiful museum owned by a very wealthy jewish man who's the biggest american collector of central asian art buddhist dark from central asia but anyway so he sponsored the publication but it was published by surindia here in chicago but behind is this uh chimbu where in the old days everyone went to meditate and do the three-year retreats and if you're going to do a 12-year retreat when you get to the top you pull over a left on the pass and you come down another little valley and you go to the top of that and that's where they would do the 12-year retreats so just this was for the guys doing the short retreats of just three years but the first two people learning to fly learned there and i have a great picture from a painting of course not uh not from a camera we haven't got time travel to go back and shoot them yet but of uh the first one the very first one uh nam kanyengpah was his name who learned to fly and so there's a picture of him jumping out of his cave and actually flying for the first time so they always love to hang those prayer flags and again madame blavatsky mentions that in many of her mentions prayer flags and again often uses it as a metaphor uh for something sort of sort of a beautiful thought sent on the power of the wind to fill the whole universe next my personal favorite place in uh near where the early kadampa masters padmasambhava meditated for three months yes you saw gal for i think six years and but then uh atisha and lamadrumdumpa the great kadampa masters of the 11th century met here meditated here for about five years and it became a spot where a lot of the kadampa's meditated and therefore all the early panchon lamas would go here to meditate for three or six months and so one of my favorites but on the left the little temple complex it's just a little temple that's been put up in front of the caves of batisha and lamadampa the founders of the kadampa school atisha of course was india indian coming from bengal in about 1042 he came entered tibetan lived there and taught until his death teleloma often says of course to call one thing lama ism he said we tibetans don't much like that word because that makes it sound like ism is different than buddhism he says it's just buddhism but if there's one element that's very strong in tibetan buddhism that's special it's the lineages from him and they go to all schools of tibetan buddhism next just looking from one of the retreat huts i think this is the temple in front of the guru rinpoche cave so padma sambhava lived in this cave for three months and i think yeshua saw gel at a later date for six months but looking up that ridge that's again a lot of great caves or other masters achieved enlightenment and again lots of prayer flags everywhere so next and looking down the valley from any of those caves it just kind of drops from about 16 000 feet down to a mere 13 000 or so in next to no time but the beautiful little mountains going straight down and of course one of the tributaries that goes into the brahmaputra in the far distance next and again that's that's all tibetan's favorite little valley because up above there is where the seventh dalai lama achieved enlightenment so that's the valley where he achieved enlightenment and as a result everyone hangs their prayer flags there and to get up to his cave is extremely difficult you've got those hundreds of thousands of prayer flags and you're not allowed to step over them that would be inauspicious you have to lift all those ropes like this thick of prayer flags and lift them up and go under all the way up and of course you know pulls off all your buttons and you know when i went up i took three or four very beautiful ladies with me so it wouldn't be complete suffering [Laughter] next actually when we go this is the first place we're going to go we're not going to go to lhasa this is the yarlung valley and that's said to be the first castle built in tibet or the first palace about 400 bc the first uh perhaps the time of buddha and the civil wars that followed in central india after buddha's passing it's legend that a group of indians escaped into tibet uh one of the armies running away from the fight that particular prince was very ugly so the father always put him in like the most difficult battles hoping to kill him off but nothing would ever work so eventually he just got fed up with it and joining those civil wars left and went to tibet and settled in this valley and tibetans asked him where he came from and he didn't understand what they meant because he didn't speak tibetan and the tibetan way indians if you say something they don't know they go like this like what do you like what do you mean like like that so they thought he was pointing to the heavens meaning he was a god who had fallen down from heaven so they lift him up lift them up on put them on a plank one and carried them on their shoulders to this mountain and declared them their king they thought you know if god's going to drop in also like me he was a very handsome fellow by tibetan way of thinking by the indian standards he was very ugly because apparently like webbed fingers and web feeds and stuff like that which actually in buddhism is a sign of a very high incarnation but therefore he's called king nyatri sampo the king carried on a palanquin and he became the first king of the yarlung valley this little valley and slowly that valley that dynasty became more important and eventually became the main dynasty of central tibet all the other kings eventually developed an allegiance to him to that reigning monarch but the 33rd song sengampo is the one who moved to tibet started the building of the potala and so forth and he turned this from a castle and made it into a little monastery with now i think six or eight or maybe 10 monks live in it and meditate there but very beautiful and you have to go up that walkway but if you're not up to it there are horses and a camel and a yak down below you can take your choice of the kind of conveyance you would like i think my hair work on a yak folks right so we'll we'll go for the ax next but it is a very beautiful uh beautiful little monastery of temple again it was completely destroyed in the cultural revolution by china but uh has been rebuilt since next next and next up behind the temple all the way to the peak of course you get this wonderful array of prayer flags and such so next then the next few shots are just kind of when you travel for tibet is essentially 400 kingdoms that uh in ancient times were a loose federation each with its own king and with the dalai lamas as kind of the spiritual peacemakers and the tibetan government in lhasa as a kind of a central switching office keeping uh everything in working well you know famines hair or problems they're trying to kind of keep it all working harmoniously but each one was pretty independent each of those valleys had its own king its own reincarnate llama kind of like a dalai lama and its own great you know a lot of them had a little bit of their own way of speaking you know like milwaukee accent compared to chicago compared to bronx compared to brooklyn kind of thing sometimes even a little more different than that but as you drive from one to another you go up these wonderful mountain passes with beautiful vistas because this is in uh june so you know the crops are up and it's green when we're there i'm not sure if it will or will not yet be green but the advantage of when we're going the reason why we're going earlier is because that's the sacred month because it's not green people haven't done much farming yet the pilgrimages are out in full force and it's the it's the holy month for the tibetan so everyone is all the temples are full and the monks are banging drums and chanting and you've got a lot of you know temple dances the mask dances and all of those kind of things in the month of may so we're trying to time it for that rather than for the flowers of the greenery summer those of you who like you can come back in the summer next so these again they're just like beautiful mountain passes this is potala i think the the pota pass and i think it's about 18 000 feet or something like that it's fairly intense and when you get up you're looking down like a very little muddy road and if it's raining it's totally muddy and slippery and it's like one lane and if you meet someone coming the other way someone has to back up to you find a place that's almost two lanes and you kind of inch by one another like that so it's very dramatic but we're not going to those passes oh the next but we're going over many beautiful mountain passes and now the ones like we're we're going from uh down by the turquoise lake and down to gyansa that's we get two very beautiful glacial passes that way but the road there is a better finish is actually paved road all the way they just finished it this year 2008 being olympic year china has tried to pave every road from an airport to every main place and to clear both sides of the street and make it look beautiful and civilized on both sides of the street anywhere in china you go 100 yards off of that of course it's quite different so next next next so just kind of beautiful vistas you get as you drive this is one of the passes they do this kind of thing on the mountain passes next next the oracle lake which is the subject of the film we made but you come up to the next you sit on this kind of natural man-made ridge about a quarter of a mile above and look down into the water and you get your vision from there but they go there to looking for the reincarnations of all dilemmas and pension llamas so next and far west kailash that's traveling from lhasa out to where blavatsky spent her time so had she gone to tibet this is how she would have gone this is a road she would have taken next next i don't know who that handsome fellow is anyway that river that the reason one of the reasons why that is so sacred shiva achieved enlightenment there in the hindu tradition but also the ganges the brahmaputra the indus and the sulci river is all fine all are sourced on that mountain they flow from there in four directions so india and pakistan their two main rivers come from that mountain but it's been a great meditation spot not only for hindus and buddhists but also for eastern persians zoroastrians for the bunpos are pre-buddhists of ancient tibet the shamans of ancient tibet the taoists of western china and the shamans of mongolia for many many millenniums actually so very sacred so next uh the lake where uh shiva's paravati sat in a cold lake meditating trying to win his heart of course we men were very cool distant even though she was beautiful he didn't move his meditation at all but she sat in there for two years he was impressed they got married and had some kids [Laughter] one of whom is of course ganesh of the famous ganesh fame and uh that became the source of the hindu tantras that's about 500 years after the buddhist tantras so in buddhism we say buddhist gave the tantras to the hindus we gave it to the hindus giving to ganesh it was the first to get the shiva paranas next and when we came down everyone were like walking and coming over past 18 600 feet we're feeling a little tired but these uh grandmas did a prostrating full body length all the way you take a stone and stretch out and put it down take two steps bow down bend down pick up your stone take a another prostration put it down stand back up take another two steps bend down they went all the way up that 18 600 foot pass and all the way down the other side and here they're going across a river that's uh the ice is slightly melting here so it's very wet like your feet your your shoes get totally wet from the water but didn't disturb them they just kept going so next and next here's some of the other great old monasteries in the sakya tradition so just llama dances happening at them and again blabassi discusses those sacred dances so would have been must have experienced them somewhere next next this one monastery we're at this young lama had just his reincarnation had just been discovered that was very very wonderful and he was actually the guru of the seventh dalai lama so i feel a very strong connection to him and like you know his predecessor his first reincarnation was a guru of the seventh dalai lama and his previous to previous reincarnation was a fellow who identified the present dalai lama so i felt very honored to meet him just by chance and uh well i had a camera with me and the police came up and said there's no cameras allowed and i said yes yes but when i got in front of him i said rinpoche would uh um i'm a big fan of the seven-dollar alumni of your first incarnation and also of the wretting who discovered the present-day llama do you mind if i take your picture and he says not at all so then he i took his picture and of course the police grabbed me and took me in the back and said this is very bad where's your passport you're going to be arrested i said oh i'm sorry i didn't bring my passport with me well anyway you're going to be arrested who doesn't bring their passport and says i don't because there's a lot of thieves in these places it says you police you don't do such a good job there's not enough police here you should be looking for thieves so they scolded me for about an hour and i said no no i'm very sorry but you said no but he said yes so who am i supposed to believe who are you he said we'll confiscate your camera and i said no you will not the thing is with uh those those are the communist authorities in all the communist places is to be firm fair humorful and not at all insulting you can't be insulting but anyway he let me keep my camera and my photograph and this is the one in rimpac just came out beautiful in it i think he's just seven years old and this was he's coming out this was his first public event since his enthronement since he was recognized about six or eight months ago so next yes so uh this is a a good friend of uh ruth ann fowler here i put it in purposely thinking ruth ann would be a hair but a friend of hers her car had had a problem with her car about an hour ago like half an hour before the talk so she comes running and says oh glenn i'm so sorry i have to run but i put this in for her but also to show you guys you see if you don't want to walk we can put you on a camel off some of those mountain passes or a horse or a yak and for those of you who are used to driving like volkswagens and toyotas they even rent donkeys next oh yeah this uh these are the last two pictures i always when i travel i always meet people who say oh yes can you find a sponsor for my child so this little girl here it's a single mom she's a waitress in a restaurant in lhasa and anyway she's a single mom and the next pitcher this is a very sweet little girl anyway if anyone likes to have a foster sponsor a little girl in lhasa you can phone up and chit chat and say hello once a month or whatever because they actually have phones in lhasa unfortunately in tibet uh if you're not a member of the in most of china if you're not a member of the communist party there's no free schooling so if you have kids they don't get to go to school for free you have to spend like 30 dollars a month for your school fee and uh which is kind of amazing in a communist country you think that education and medicine would be free but neither is free in communist china and so you know she probably as the mom probably makes uh 60 70 a month as a as a waitress in a restaurant and a very beautiful young and intelligent young girl so i thought wherever i go i'll put a picture at the end if anyone says hey i like that kid i'll sponsor her for 20 30 40 a month then i'll give you the mom's address and you can phone up and do it and if you don't then you at least you get to see a pretty uh very delightful young lady so thank you so much and uh i hope that was a little bit of an introduction to levatsky's tibet it's certainly the tibet i love and fine i think blavatsky made references to all those places and all those traditions in her own writings and so i wanted to show some of it we won't be going to all those places on our tour like i don't think we're going to have mount kailash or mount everest or those kind of places but nonetheless we will be going too many of the the central ones we will be staying in hotels everywhere rather than tenting so people who don't like tenting don't have to worry about rocks under your mattress and things like that thank you so much if anyone has anything questions or points you want to bring up okay also at the back there's some of my books and anyone buys any i'll happily sign and as for the bric-a-brac that's for sale there it's for the american mongolia friendship society these days i keep an apartment in mongolia and i try to help with the rebuilding under 75 years under soviets there was great destruction of mongolia and so now everything's being rebuilt and a lot of a lot of difficulties of course challenges in that rebuilding so i had the good the great honor to bring over a mongolian art exhibit for atlanta last year parts of it now are actually up in new york at the reuben museum and uh anyway so i did that basically to try to get more attention to mongolia and to the need to rebuild that central part of the world in the past i think mongolia was one of the great civilizations of asia still is like chingas khan for instance brought us the zero we did not have zero before genghis khan in our western mathematics so we were rather challenged before ching is gone no zero we also didn't have carrots and if you like carrots thanks thanks to jengaskhan for opening the silk road we also didn't have he was his often thought as as the first emperor to proclaim both religious freedom and there was no no religious bias he himself had teachers from all schools although he considered himself primarily a shaman and a buddhist but he always kept christian teachers in his court taoist teachers and even a hindu teacher from india if any of his ruled places they had religious fights or feuds he'd go in and cut off heads on both sides just to show that he wasn't showing preference so he was a firm but fair guy and he of course brought the end to the dark ages in europe you know for 800 years we had been languishing under the dark ages like if our woman so much as showed a slight mystical sign she was either drowned or burned at the stake and if she was thrown in the water if she drowned then it meant she was innocent but if she came to the top it meant she was a witch and was very often killed we had a terrible we call it the dark ages because it was so rough rough but uh opening the silk road and bringing in those uh a kind of a court democracy that he introduced where um for instance when he conquered the land only the he always sent negotiators before invading that was kind of a new idea for people uh very few seldom did people negotiate first because that meant you had hostile intentions it's always better to have a sneak attack he never relied upon the sneak attack he'd always send negotiators and try and make peace before anything before the conflict went the other way then he also always went to his mountain and did three days of meditation and prayer to look for an alternate path to violence so then when he conquered he didn't harm the people only those the only those responsible for the decision of not making the trade treaty so wherever it did go the other way was because they murdered his uh ambassadors and that then then he got a little tough so he's a little tough in kiev he's a little tough in herat and also in damascus because they murdered his ambassadors when i told that story when i gave a talk in the american embassy in mongolia before my art exhibit was coming over to get the ambassador and the cultural office there to help i said you know he never liked anyone to murder his ambassadors and pamela the american ambassador at the time stood up and said we also don't like that when people murder the ambassadors so anyway whatever people get from there you make the check out to the american mongolia friendship society it's on the piece of paper and it helps some mongolia projects thank you so much thank you very much glenn um and we appreciate all the work you do for the mongolian project and the tibetan people um so saturday i would remind you that we are that glenn will be teaching esoteric buddhist techniques from tibet and mongolia and this will be a practical guide to self-illumination through 84 000 ways to enlightenment i don't think you'll cover quite all of those but i think it should be a very uh inspiring day of instruction meditation mantra and power yoga also based on the seventh dalai lama who is oral tradition who is your favorite um and the brochures are downstairs on the the tour that glenn is leading and i look forward to it myself very much thank you we do not have time for more questions but we appreciate all the information and the lovely pictures thank you so much [Applause] you

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 9,616

Keywords: theosophical society, theosophy, Glenn Mullin, Blavatsky's Tibet: Sacred Power Places and their Spiritual Mysteries, Sacred Power Places, Blavatsky, Tibet, Power, place, spiritual, spirituality, mystery, mystery tradition, theosophical society in america

Id: 8gUsKL7nxW4

Length: 82min 20sec (4940 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021