MYSTERY IS A GREAT EMBARRASSMENT TO THE MODERN MIND.
-- FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Years ago, before Alana found her way to Poolesville, she was called Betsy Elgin. She had red hair, an aloof sort of pristine beauty, and when she was growing up in suburban Maryland she had the usual questions about life -- the ones everybody thinks are appropriate for teenagers and embarrassing later on. But Betsy was not as remote, or as unfeeling, as she appeared. She just had a way of hiding her feelings. When she got pregnant her senior year of high school, she hid that, too -- six months pregnant under her graduation robes and not even her parents knew. She and her boyfriend got married when they were seventeen. raised their daughter, and, four years later, they had another.
She had grown up in a Protestant household, but in her early twenties Betsy attended lectures on Buddhism. It was the sixties, and Eastern religion was in vogue. The lectures were dry, though -- just lists of books to read. words to memorize. Later on, following another burst of spiritual passion. Betsy had a born-again Christian experience. A bit later she was divorced and remarried.
As she grew older, Betsy's youthful questions, and sense of wonder about life, left her. The days became ordinary. She was working as an insurance secretary, raising her two daughters, feeding her two cats. vacuuming the carpets in her suburban town house, and trying, on the side, to start her own interior decorating business. The mystical did not present itself: The strange connections between things went unnoticed. Her husband -- an insurance agent, NFL football referee, bodybuilder -- was utterly grounded in materiality. And if Betsy ever raised doubts about the way they were living their lives, he'd say, "Why are you even asking that question? The universe? Why are you talking about the universe?"
When Betsy was thirty-five years old. a friend told her about a psychic who lived in Silver Spring. "You pay her twenty dollars and she goes into a trance and tells you about your past lives and other crazy stuff," her friend said. It was a hoot, really -- the kind of thing Betsy could have a good laugh with her girlfriends about later. "I went to see this channeler, and ... " But when Betsy called the number she was given for the psychic. her heart was pounding. A sweet voice answered -- not the old witch she had imagined -- and Betsy made an appointment to see Catharine Burroughs on a weekday afternoon in the fall of 1983.
Betsy arrived at a redbrick apartment building in Silver Spring and found the first-floor apartment where Catharine Burroughs lived. Betsy had come from work, and was wearing a camel suit with matching camel-beige pumps and handbag. Her hair was bright red and down to her shoulders. Her body, even under the boxy suit, was noticeably strong and curvaceous.
A heavyset woman with a pretty face answered the door and smiled very warmly. "Dh, you're so beautiful!" she said.
"You are too!" Betsy blurted back. She looked down at Catharine's African print skirt and perfectly manicured red nails. There was an awkward pause and a fumbling for words. Betsy suddenly felt a great intimacy with this woman, which made her a little queasy.
She was led to Catharine's small living room, which, to Betsy's eye, needed decorating. Clearly this psychic wasn't making much money. "There were crates instead of furniture," she recounted, "and a lamp sitting on the floor because there was no table to put it on." Some large quartz crystals were scattered about -- lending a New Age feeling.
Once she was settled, Catharine explained to Betsy what would be happening during the psychic reading. She would meditate, she said, examine Betsy's energy on various levels -- the physical plane, the emotional plane, and the spiritual plane -- and tell her what she saw. It was a little like a checkup, she said. Then Catharine sat back in a green velvet, overstuffed chair and closed her eyes.
"How is your marriage?" Catharine asked.
"Fine," Betsy said. "Really fine."
Catharine said nothing.
"Is your father dead?"
"No," Betsy said, getting nervous. "I mean ... I hope not. I don't think so."
"I can see your father in your energy field," Catharine said, "but it's like somebody has taken an eraser and erased his face."
When Betsy heard that, she started to cry. "It was such a perfect description of my relationship with my father." she said later. "He was there but not there."
By the time the session was over, she had cried many times. With Catharine she felt as though she was talking with an old, dear friend, someone who knew her better than anyone else did. She had a feeling of being deeply cared for in a way she'd never experienced. Catharine had also said some incredibly nice things that made her feel incredibly good. She told Betsy that she was a "great being," a great spiritual being. And she said that someday -- while it might seem hard to believe -- Betsy's life would be completely different from what it was now. It would turn over, like a pancake. Her whole world would become spiritual.
"Is your full name Elizabeth?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Why don't you call yourself that?" Catharine asked.
"I've always been Betsy."
"The names we use are very important -- and have great spiritual significance. Betsy's a cute and nice name, but ... Elizabeth has nobility. And it suits you."
At the end of the session Betsy was invited to attend a Tuesday night "teaching" Catharine was giving at her apartment -- every week, she explained, she gave lectures on various spiritual subjects. And when Tuesday night came Betsy returned -- and this time, the place was crowded. She quietly found a spot on the floor with a cluster of Catharine's other students -- and introduced herself as Elizabeth. Later, when Catharine caught sight of her, she smiled warmly, almost proudly, and invited Betsy -- Elizabeth -- to attend a Friday night lecture, which was reserved for the more advanced students.
On Friday, Catharine lectured about kindness and compassion. She used the phrase "developing one's Christ nature" along with other Christian language, which made Elizabeth feel comfortable with the Center for Discovery and New Life even though, as she would put it, "many of the people in my class were very strange. I mean, way out there .... I remember one night where two women were talking about this occult stuff they'd done, something involving putting candles around the room and ghosts and negative beings appearing. I was like, What am I doing here? What am I getting into? But Catharine always saved me. She was always very kind, and dealt with me on a level that I could understand."
Soon Elizabeth's weeks began to pivot around these evenings. And when Catharine moved her center to Kensington, Elizabeth continued to commute from Gaithersburg -- sometimes to her husband's dismay.
Eventually Catharine felt that Elizabeth was ready to attend a class where the lecture was channeled -- this took place every Thursday, with a group of ten or twelve students who had been with Catharine for a year already. "She was more nervous than I was," Alana said later. "She said, 'I'm warning you, it's really strange. I close my eyes and I twitch and I talk in a man's voice.' " But Elizabeth felt flattered to be invited -- and she trusted Catharine. In just a few months the women had become close friends. "When you first meet your teacher," Alana explained, "there's a big rush of merit and karma coming forward -- that she's helping to pull forward -- and a lot can happen very quickly." Elizabeth also felt a great love for Catharine, and a sense that she had found something she'd been searching for her whole life. Their bond, she said, was like a "deep spiritual marriage." In fact, they had formed a friendship that was intense enough to threaten both their husbands and become a source of stress at home.
By early 1984, Catharine was offering two weekly classes in Kensington, each lasting about two hours. She didn't want to charge fees for her teachings, so donations were suggested. The class for newcomers, the Tuesday Class, began as a series on attachment but evolved into an exploration of Eastern philosophy. The Thursday Class was reserved for Catharine's original group of students or by invitation -- because of the unusual nature of the evenings. It was on Thursdays that Catharine channeled an entity who claimed to be the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. Actually, the voice of Jeremiah played a kind of emcee role at these sessions, introducing the students to an assortment of other entities who were speaking through Catharine and sharing their wisdom. There was Enoch. There was Santu, a high-pitched voice who said she "came in love." And there was Andor, who claimed to be the head of the Intergalactic Council.
As time passed, the class became familiar with the various personalities. When Catharine's voice turned deep and masculine, the students greeted Jeremiah like an old friend. He addressed members of the group. encouraging them. advising them, joking with them -- while they sat stunned. "I remember pulling up in the car in front of the Kensington house," said Wib. "and looking over at Jane or Shelly and saying. 'How could this week be any more incredible than last week?' But it always was."
The basement of the Kensington house was stuffy and crowded with students the night Elizabeth first came to hear Catharine channel a lecture. Elizabeth carried her tape recorder and walked through yet another crowd of strangers -- Catharine's core students. like Wib and Jane, Shelly and Eleanor. She found a place on the floor in front, next to the green velvet chair where Catharine would sit, close her eyes, slump as though she'd fallen asleep, then awaken in a trance. But Elizabeth didn't get a chance to meet Jeremiah that night. Instead, Catharine channeled a new entity who called herself Ms. Buddha. She spoke about the nature of love and how ceaseless prayer could really change the world. "The whole thing was so sweet," Alana recalled. "When she came out of the channel, she was disoriented for a while. But then she looked over at me and said, are you okay? Was that too strange?'"
After her introduction to the Thursday Class, Elizabeth found herself even more involved with the Center for Discovery and New Life -- she spent her time after each evening in Kensington excited about the next one. She gained a reputation for being "spiritually evolved" and able to connect with Catharine in a profound way. She was also loyal. When the group began its twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer vigil, Elizabeth became the most loyal participant of all, arriving at 4:00 A.M. to take a two-hour shift before driving to work.
Elizabeth felt incredibly fortunate -- blessed -- to have found Catharine, or have had Catharine find her. She enjoyed the camaraderie of the group and relished her status as Catharine's confidante. The classes continued to become more dramatic. Catharine channeled yet another new entity -- White Moon, a Native American spirit -- and afterward nearly fainted from exhaustion. She also channeled information about herself, explaining that in a previous life she had been one of the female disciples of Christ responsible for passing down the Gnostic texts. And, in a private moment with Elizabeth, Catharine revealed that in a past life they had been romantically involved. In fact, Elizabeth had been her consort.
While Elizabeth's new spiritual life was crowded with extraordinary events and romance, her old life -- particularly her marriage -- seemed increasingly dead. People often talk about individuals changing in a marriage, but Elizabeth didn't feel she was changing as much as becoming more herself. Her husband had come to a few classes in the early days, but it was harder and harder to share the things she was learning with him and her young daughters. She felt pulled in two directions. A large part of her existed in the spiritual world with Catharine. A smaller part was with her family at home.
It was both sad and strange to feel so in touch with her heart, so much more compassionate about the world -- to be part of a ceaseless prayer vigil -- yet to have become an absentee mother.
"I was still in my tight little box," Alana recalled, "and I was not happy. I remember lying in bed thinking, Here 1am in my perfect town house with my perfect little kids and my perfect little husband and everything ... but why do I feel so empty?"
***
She wasn't exactly sure why she was joining Michael and Catharine at National Airport -- they were welcoming a Tibetan lama who was arriving from India -- except that Catharine had indicated that it was a good thing to do. And Elizabeth always paid attention to suggestions like this, even the smallest ones.
The center had sold rugs to raise money for some young Tibetan Buddhist monks, but Elizabeth wasn't sure what the connection was between the visiting lama and the rugs. Did he run the monastery where the monks were? Was he related to the Dalai Lama? Everything was pretty blurry. It seemed blurry to Catharine and Michael, too. If Kunzang Lama, the guy who'd gotten the students into selling the rugs, had ever mentioned that Penor Rinpoche was a big deal in India, it had been lost on all of them. Nobody seemed to know that he'd been recognized as a tulku when he was two or three, or that he'd performed a great number of miracles as a child, or that he'd fought the Chinese with guns and hand grenades to get out of Tibet in 1950.
Like the other students, Elizabeth was still reeling from recent developments in Kensington and not thinking about much of anything else. After initiating the round-the-clock prayer vigil, the group had decided to change its name. Rather than the Center for Discovery and New Life, which sounded flaky and self-centered -- and the new in New Life was a little too close to the new in New Age-they would be the World Prayer Center. This name matched their sense of purpose and the feeling that they weren't about self and self-improvement -- or self-work as the New Agers like to call it. The World Prayer Center was about praying and compassion. Selling the rugs had figured into their new focus, too. The group wasn't the Kensington Prayer Center. It was the World Prayer Center -- a global place, with an agenda to pray for world peace.
Alana would later remember the first meeting of Penor Rinpoche at National Airport as undramatic. There was a crowd of Chinese, which seemed to part for a short Gandhi-like figure. And rather than the romantic accounts that would be circulated years later -- in magazine profiles and newspaper articles -- about sobbing upon the sight of him, or running into his arms as in a shampoo commercial. Catharine said little at the airport as Penor Rinpoche appeared, according to Alana's account, but she did seem "very wide-eyed."
They went directly from the airport to a welcoming lunch at Mr. K's, an expensive Chinese restaurant in downtown D.C., and afterward, driving to Kensington, Catharine spoke up for the first time. "She said she couldn't believe how much the Tibetan lama was checking her out over lunch," Alana later said. Catharine seemed to feel that Penor Rinpoche had been waving a spiritual metal detector over her body. She felt a sense of invasion and, at the same time, the presence of great spiritual power. "She'd never met anybody who could do that," Alana said. "Her first instinct was to try to block it out, and then she decided, No, I'll just live with it."
Several days later Catharine called Elizabeth at work. Her name wasn't on the list of students who had signed up to meet privately with the Tibetan before he returned to India. Elizabeth said she had been busy and didn't think she had the time. "This is an opportunity," Catharine said, "and I don't think you want to pass it up." She told Elizabeth to arrive early and plan to spend a few minutes meditating before meeting with the lama. She suggested having a couple of questions ready for him.
"So I went over there, and I'm thinking, What am I going to ask him?" Alana recalled. She kept worrying about possible questions, but nothing was coming to her. "He was seeing people in the living room," she said, "and I waited downstairs to be called up. And something really bizarre happened while I was sitting there, meditating and waiting. I finally thought of a question to ask him, and then, suddenly, the answer came into my mind. When I thought of another question, it happened again. Three times .... It was so weird. That's when it started to dawn on me that something special was going on."
And when Elizabeth was called up to the living room, she was stunned by the appearance of Penor Rinpoche. He didn't look anything like she'd remembered. "At the airport, he looked short and fat -- a little guy. But sitting on that sofa, he suddenly looked immense."
She asked him a couple of questions about her life, which he answered quickly without much interest. "I was completely me-centered at the time," she said later, "all caught up in self." But when Elizabeth asked how she could be useful in the world, he said, "In this life, you need to learn to take refuge in nothing but the three precious jewels." Then he gave her a blessing, by putting his hands on her head and blowing on the top of her head. "I remember my body was shaking, vibrating, and when he blew on me it went right through me, like a strong clear feeling," she recalled.
When Elizabeth emerged from the living room, she saw Michael. "What are the three precious jewels?" she asked.
''I'm not sure," he said, "but there's a book in the office that might explain." Downstairs she found a book, The Door to Liberation, and she looked up the three precious jewels. She came across something called the Refuge vow. There were three sentences, one for each precious jewel:
I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma.
I take refuge in the Sangha.
Catharine and Michael were anxious to hear a report from Penor Rinpoche afterward -- a sense of how he felt the students were doing, and if they'd been taught properly. The rinpoche told them, unequivocally, that both Catharine and Michael had a strong connection to Mahayana Buddhism. He said that Michael had been a Buddhist scholar in prior lives. He told Catharine that she had been a Buddhist practitioner and teacher over many lifetimes. "Bodhisattvas come back again and again for the sake of sentient beings," Jetsunma remembered Penor Rinpoche saying, "and you are a great, great Bodhisattva."
"I remember hearing." Alana recalled, "that he said the very fabric of her mind was the Dharma."
Their students had "very good intention," the lama continued, but they needed to learn better technique. For one thing, they had to be taught to "dedicate their merit." This was very important. Immediately afterward Michael went down to the office and poked around in a few books trying to figure out what Penor Rinpoche was talking about. Eventually he found a Tibetan "dedication" prayer:
Throughout my many lives and until this moment,
Whatever virtue I have accomplished,
Including the merit generated by this practice,
And all that I will ever attain,
This I offer, for the welfare of sentient beings.
May sickness, war, famine, and suffering
Be decreased for every being,
While their wisdom and compassion increase
In this and every future life.
May I clearly perceive all experiences
To be as insubstantial as the dream-fabric of the night,
And instantly awaken to perceive the pure display
In the arising of every phenomenon.
May I quickly attain Enlightenment
In order to work ceaselessly
For the liberation of all sentient beings. [1]
The next evening Penor Rinpoche was scheduled to give another talk. About twenty-five students sat close together on chairs lined up in the Kensington living room and listened patiently. It was sometimes hard to follow the Tibetan -- things were left out in the translation. But at the end of the talk the students were very clearly asked to repeat a string of words. A few of them noticed that other Tibetans in the lama's entourage seemed to be crying. "We had no clue what he was saying," Alana recalled. "It was like gobble-dee-gook, gobble-dee-gook, gobble-dee-gook. And we just went gobble-dee-gook, gobble-dee-gook, gobble-dee-gook after him."
Then the translator spoke: "You are all Buddhists now. Congratulations."
On the last night of his visit, at the barbecue in his honor, Penor Rinpoche sat on the back porch eating hot dogs and potato chips. When Catharine noticed that he was alone she took Elizabeth aside and asked her to go sit with him. "Do 1have to?" Elizabeth asked, with a laugh. "I mean, what am I going to talk to him about?"
The next morning, as the lama's trunks were being loaded into the car, Catharine and Michael felt a vague sense of relief that their normal life would return -- but also a sense of sadness. They sat with him for a few minutes in the living room, hoping their warm smiles would communicate their intense feelings about him, and their appreciation for what he'd brought to their students. "Now we have a connection," Penor Rinpoche said, smiling back. "You can be a center here, my center, and let's see what happens."
Did His Holiness have any advice for them? Michael asked.
"To start," the lama answered, "you need to find a bigger place."
"We are already looking for a bigger place," Michael said. "But a bigger place costs money. We don't have much."
"Find a bigger place," Penor Rinpoche advised, "and the money will come."
_______________
Notes:
1. Translated by Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche.