The Iron Bird Lands Loaded With Lamas, by Christine Chandler

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

The Iron Bird Lands Loaded With Lamas, by Christine Chandler

Postby admin » Sat Jul 27, 2019 5:12 am

The Iron Bird Lands Loaded With Lamas [EXCERPT from Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism]
by Christine A. Chandler, M.A., C.A.G.S.
© 2017 Christine A. Chandler, M.A., C.A.G.S.

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NINE: THE IRON BIRD260 LANDS LOADED WITH LAMAS

After graduating from Northeastern University and Kantor's affiliated program, I was still very new to Trungpa's Shambhala path. I had also started taking Trungpa's Tibetan Buddhist classes, as we were all fervently encouraged to do, despite saying his Shambhala "secular" path was enough.

That Trungpa's Shambhala path was the apex of the Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Vajrayana path became very clear, once the two paths, inextricably, came together, later on. It was just a ruse, this 'secular talk,' created by Trungpa and his followers, to get us involved in their religiously fanatic Tantric cult, by stealth.

By the fall of 1985, with my family systems therapy degree in hand, I had started a family therapy counseling practice with three other women, all graduates from Kantor's program. We decided to specialize in sexual abuse trauma of both women and men. Since I had previously been working as a licensed certified social worker, specializing in sexual abuse for many years, it was a natural transition for this to become the focus of my therapy practice.

Besides seeing individual clients and families, our group practice gave training to educators, local police forces, and firefighters, in the subtleties of sexual abuse and how to spot the symptoms in children, and the behavior patterns in families. The sadistic kind of abuse and the religiously justified abuse were considered the worst.

I had no idea these same dynamics were present but hidden inside my newfound, spiritual path with Trungpa, or that these Tibetan lamas were using the worst form of sexual abuse justification -- the religious justification of Buddhism -- that was disguising their exploitative Tantra.

The institutionalized sexual abuse of students by these Tibetan lamas is never apparent to the new recruits of Tibetan Buddhism. It is always kept a well-guarded secret, for years. The Vajrayana Tantric teachings were always purposely cloaked in twilight language; held out as something very mysterious and special, that one had to practice diligently and with total commitment, to receive.

With more indoctrination techniques of meditation, mantra chanting, and increasingly ritualized behaviors, along with the later purification practices of ngondro,261 we believed we were aspiring to the highest of the Buddha's teachings and were now the rare beings, ourselves, so special to have found these treasure teachings and these precious 'living Buddhas,' the lamas. Instead, we were being led into the Tibetan lamas' Tantric trap, to eventually come to accept the unacceptable by our own western standards.

By the summer of 1986, I had completed a "weekthun," -- a week long Shambhala mindfulness meditation retreat in Vermont at Karme Choling -- as we were encouraged to do; all part of the Shambhala programming. After this six-day, seven-hours of meditation a day, group retreat, I inevitably bonded to the people around me, and inextricably became more intertwined with the larger Trungpa group. We were kept together, side by side, silently meditating, for hours at a time; silently eating together; silently working our rotas together; with new chants to learn; chanting praises and offerings to lamas like Trungpa; our only speech, day and into the night, for a week. After all, this was about Trungpa and his group creating Big Mind, Guru Mind, on the sly.

Nevertheless, despite the forced bonding, I was still very resistant to the oddly elitist group vibe of Trungpa's inner circle. I was never a group-oriented type of person, anyway. But, if you sit with a group of strangers, meditating six to eight hours a day and into the night, for a week, being encoded in the Lamaist doctrine, albeit in a secular disguise, you become swayed by the groupthink of the group; more than you know.

By the following winter, when it was clear that Trungpa was very sick and it couldn't be hidden any longer, I went faithfully every evening after work to his meditation hall outside of Boston, a ninety-minute round trip from my home, to do massive amounts of scheduled chanting, that was happening in every Vajradhatu center, all over the United States and Canada; chanting and prayers for the "long life of Trungpa," who was probably already in a coma, or even dead. Rumor reached my ears later that he had been kept on life-support for as long as his inner circle could do so, because they just couldn't let him go.

Besides, accumulating millions of mantras and prayers, through hours of group chanting, was the Tibetan lamas' prescription for every calamitous event that occurred. It always kept us from thinking about anything with our reasoning minds. Any scandal or potentially disastrous event, that caused disruption in the group, or might expose the truth about their 'Buddhism,' would be the excuse for massive amounts of more group time together, engaged in group practices, for more group bonding, to prevent us from judging these events, objectively. All events had to be mystified quickly and sealed over in the Guru Mind of Tantra.

By April of 1987, Trungpa was officially declared dead, and it was a huge, big deal to this group. They had lost their master, their 'living Buddha,' who could do no wrong and the cremation was a perfect opportunity for all the Tibetan lamas to come together, to catch Trungpa's students in their larger mumbo-jumbo Tantric net, before they fell to earth, and woke up.

After this increased group mingling and group think around his dying and death, I naturally slid right into becoming a big part of getting Karme Choling ready for its "big deal" Trungpa cremation taking place in Vermont, the first of its kind in the West. With only six weeks to prepare, many high lamas from India, Nepal and Bhutan were coming to oversee Trungpa's students in getting it right.

Even my soon-to-be ex-husband joined in on the preparations; painting and prepping one of the Karme Choling buildings, Ashoka Bhavan, for the high Tibetan lamas' arrival as our 'precious' guests. Suspecting that I was in a cult, he had come to see what this Trungpa group was all about, after watching it absorb so much of my time. But even he got sucked into the powerful energy at this pre-cremation of Trungpa, becoming part of the free labor the lamas always expect since their days of corvee in old Tibet.

Mostly, I would make the two-hour ride from Northern Massachusetts by myself, bringing my pup tent and setting it up on the Karme Choling land. I then got to work with the other hundreds of fanatics, occupying the buildings and land on its 700-acre spread.

Tremendous energy is released in a cult of god king worship. It's how the pyramids were built, after all. I was cutting tree branches by myself, in the big upper fields at Karme Choling, with a chainsaw I had only just learned to use, to clear the ground around the purkhang. This was a specially-built and painted cremation mound, in which Trungpa's body would be burnt. A small group of us would hurl these cut limbs into a big shredder, to create a pine-chip covered, circular pathway around this traditional housing; housing that was sacred, since it was where our Dharmakaya King Trungpa's salt-soaked and shrunken body would be incinerated, and where thousands of guests were expected to arrive, to gather and circle this purkhang, in devoted awe; paying their last respects.

But, clearly the most zealous of Trungpa's students, already enthralled and working like slaves, were here and surrounding me, as I predictably and inescapably joined in; becoming further indoctrinated into their groupmind.

I was impressed by Trungpa's vajra guards; his kasung, in their British-style military uniforms. I didn't know their ability to seem able to move mountains was because they saw Trungpa as a warrior god-king, or that they had vowed to "perpetuate" his world and had merged their minds with his BIG MIND. This was behind their one-pointed energy: a blind fanaticism for their guru.

I didn't know any of this, at the time. Yet, by the time Trungpa's six-week cremation had ended, and had soaked me in Tantric memes, with dozens of Tibetan lamas and their hocus-pocus encircling me, day and night, I would be in three cult streams of Trungpa's organization -- Trungpa's Shambhala and Tantric Buddhist cult streams, and his Vajradhatu-Shambhala "armed forces," his military cult stream; his vajra guards.262

As Trungpa's vajra guard sang its resounding Shambhala anthem, I was unaware, as most were, that it was to the tune of "Let Erin Remember" -- an Irish marching song -- one of the many western memes that Trungpa had appropriated, and cleverly wove into his Shambhala path, as we all slipped unconsciously into an emotional fusion of our own cultural heritage being paired with Trungpa's feudal Asian dictatorship.

Appropriating aspects of our own western culture was a particular skill Trungpa had developed, to fool us that nothing would be lost, only something amazing gained on this multicultural, ecumenical Shambhala path; a path that led straight into the larger Kagyu and Nyingmapa Lamaist hierarchy that had come to enfold us into their Tantric net.263

The only vajra guard member I got to know a little at this cremation was my future second husband. He was very funny and broke up the sacrosanct atmosphere with his being at the scorn-and-ridicule phase about the organization and the group. He was still idealizing the now-dead Trungpa as his guru, however, and he and I shared that in common: a distrust of groups and an idealization of Trungpa. This cremation was not only to fetishize Trungpa, but to place all the Tibetan lamas on a level of 'living Buddhas' in all our minds.

More than two thousand people joined the four hundred of us who had been preparing for this day. This would include all the crazy devotees of Trungpa -- both the ordinary "fringe" and the hubris-filled, celebrity devotees, like Ginsberg -- as well as the bedazzled reporters from major newspapers, as a military helicopter buzzed around and above our heads. Asian and Western neurosis had merged, under a big Tantric Lamaist tent, and spread itself over the little town of Barnet Vermont; population six hundred; considered just a 'very good start.'

Thousands of western devotees -- the absence of ordinary, ethnic Tibetans was always remarkable at these first lama events -- now joined the dozens of high-ranking Tibetan tulkus who had already swept in, with their own groups of sycophant-monks in tow. Many had been streaming in for weeks. These tulkus and their servant-monks turned Karme Choling into a medieval, bustling Lamasery hubbub and a traveling Tibetan lama show.

Tibetan lamas and their servant-monks had been experts in moving around in the vast spaces of Tibet with their big tents and religious theatre, to create major events like this cremation in Vermont. They had to keep their own semi-starving, Tibetan devotees happy, enthralled, and under their thumbs, by using long-lasting, ritual ceremonies, like this one. Now, they were bringing this show to us, to keep us -- their new western conquests -- happy, enthralled, and under their thumbs.

It seemed the whole Tibetan Buddhist Lamaist hierarchy in-exile had come to cast its spell on us and in the same way they had once done with their Tibetan peasants for hundreds of years; with the same ceremonies in Tibet.264 It was powerful and persuasive, this seamless, weeks-long campaign and groupthink, that was surrounding and saturating us with their religious propaganda, performed by the masters at creating medieval Tantric theatre. So powerful and persuasive, that it convinced many of us, there and then, that these Tibetan lamas, indeed, were amazing and special beings.

Not hard to do, when you create a cult milieu of almost three thousand western guru-worshipers, dozens of Tibetan lamas, and dozens more of their servant monks, bringing out all the bells and whistles, hand-drums, and long horns of Tibetan Tantric indoctrination, lasting for weeks, day and night.

These Tantric lamas had brought all their priestly head honchos and their spellbinding presence, and their thousand-year honed skills in working massive crowds. And these were the highest of Tibetan lamas; masters who taught all the other tulkus how to create their own theatre. This seamless, Tibetan Tantric milieu created a medieval world, in the middle of twentieth-century Vermont, and cast it net over the whole area.

I had been trained to respect these Tibetan teachers by default, by looking at their pictures always on the main shrines, and later on my own shrine. Every day I was now reciting chants to their magnificent and precious beinghood, captured in slick photos taken by professional, western photographers who happened to also be Tantric devotees of Tibetan lamas. All this had already formed a very positive image in my mind. Now all these Tibetan, lamas, whom I had only seen in photographs, were here in the flesh, creating a giant vibration of medieval incantations that went on for many days, non-stop.

None of us had a chance to escape this Tantric net of Lamaism, spun out and around us, at this full-on cremation for Chogyam Trungpa, who had fulfilled his role in planting his flag in North America. By the end, we were all seeing rainbows appearing in the sky.265 The power of a nearly three-thousand-strong, cult crowd of true-believers cannot be overestimated. The Dalai Lama has always relied on that phenomenon during his large Kalachakra events as do the Karma Kagyus who have thousands of devotees attend their annual Monlam events in India for the same reason: to keep the masses under their thumbs and into guru-worship of them.266 267

I was also surrounded in Vermont by all the Trungpa students, from all corners of the United States, Canada and Europe, engaged in their open display of guru worship; not only of the now-dead Trungpa, but of all these other high lama tulkus; giving them a 'living Buddha' patina. The high lamas didn't pack up and go home after the cremation was over, but stayed, when the highest lama of them all, Dilgo Khyentse, spent two more weeks giving teachings, and refuge and bodhisattva vow ceremonies at Karme Choling. He then did this, twice again, traveling to Vajradhatu centers in Nova Scotia and Boulder, Colorado, to cast his spell on the whole North American continent, over the course of another four weeks. This was, in fact, a two-month campaign to bring Tantra to the United States, and Canada, in a really big way.

It was also a heavy-duty campaign to keep all of Trungpa's students enthralled in the Tibetan Lamaist cabal and part of their Tantric jihad continuing, after Trungpa died, by recruiting that many more of us into helping them expand their Adi-Buddha world. This cremation, exponentially, added to their benefactor list,268 and increased their unpaid western workforce; their western corvee.

Look at what western students had already accomplished for Trungpa, with their devotion and free labor, and in such a short time. Trungpa now had three major centers, and several retreat centers: Dorje Dzong in Boulder, Colorado; the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado; 269 Karme Choling in Barnet, Vermont; and another in Halifax, Nova Scotia; a Tantric private college, Naropa Institute, and dozens of smaller centers all over the North American continent. He even had a Tantric monastic center at Gampo Abbey at Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Gampo Abbey provided a cover for his group being really a Tantric cult, whose western monastics' 'advanced practices' consisted of imagining themselves as deities engaged in imaginary sex with imaginary consorts, while their lama gurus and vajra masters were engaged in real sex with real consorts. Trungpa's Tantra was also making more inroads by integrating itself into established academia and the psychology field, thanks to Naropa Institute and its 'contemplative' degrees; his greatest vehicle for his medieval cult's influence to spread.

Yes, Trungpa had already accomplished a lot, in a dozen years in America, to establish what he called his "enlightened dictatorship." He had planted his Tantra, deep and wide, all over the North American continent. It is why he is called the 'father of Tibetan Buddhism' in the West, by the other Tibetan lamas.

Since Trungpa had managed to get his devoted students to build out their Lamaist empire, the other lamas, who followed in Trungpa's footsteps, needed those students to stay in the Tantric net, to help them recruit and expand; infusing more western institutions with Tantric influences, disguised as 'Buddhism.' This cremation was the Kagyu tulkus' biggest campaign, maybe the first religio-political campaign that the Kagyu and Nyingmapa lamas participated in together, on western soil and on such a grand scale, to mesmerize and create more western change agents to help fulfill these Lord Chakravartins' -- disguised as humble monks -- agenda of conquering the world. The Dalai Lama's Kalachakra ceremonies, that attracted thousands, would continue after he got the Nobel Prize, in 1989. This was always and has been a coordinated effort by these lamas, 'greater than kings.'

Doubts were dissipated all around at this cremation; newer students were impressed; older students were re-programmed. "This must be a legitimate Buddhism," I thought. The real thing. Tibetan and Bhutanese tulkus had flown in, from Nepal, India, and Bhutan, after all, to educated us on how to prepare for the funeral ceremony of what must be an extraordinarily high lama, like Trungpa. The weeks of preparation, surrounded by these lamas, was not just to educate us in how to soak Trungpa's dead body in salts, until it dried and shriveled up to the size of a baby; or how to crush his bones that were left. It was to entrap the Trungpa students deeper into their Tantric cult; making sure we never slipped through the lamas' net and got away.

The highest Nyingmapa lama that came, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, considered the most esteemed of the god kings and Lord Chakravartins, was revered as a deity by all the lamas, of every other Tibetan Buddhist sect. Most of these high tulkus had all taken empowerments and abhishekas with this Khyentse, including Trungpa, at some time in their lives; either in Tibet, or later in India, Bhutan or in France, where Dilgo Khyentse had his own centers in exile. Many of these Tibetan tulkus had been on a long retreat with him when young, to completely indoctrinate them in the most occult and medieval of their teachings, including Trungpa's son.270 271

These lamas also made a point of honoring Thomas Rich, Trungpa's Regent, at this cremation. Rich was expected to take over the Vajradhatu organization, even though the inner circle of Vajradhatu knew he had the HIV virus, yet was still letting him have unprotected sex with students. These symbolic, public endorsements of the Regent, by these high Tibetan lamas, including Dilgo Khyentse, surely contributed further to their own and everyone else's confusion, and their inability to stop his continuing dangerous, promiscuous behaviors. When the Regent's AIDS was finally exposed, Dilgo Khyentse suggested such helpful remedies as menstrual blood being thrown over him as a cure, before he finally suggested Thomas Rich withdraw, and go on retreat. But, only after his cover was blown when The New York Times exposed the truth272 about what had been going on inside Vajradhatu, with Trungpa's 'dharma heir.' Not one of these Tibetan lamas ever criticized his behavior, however. They later helped to reinstate and honor him and his spin-off lineage, started by his former lover, to help it grow. 273 274

At this cremation, we also witnessed the Tibetan lamas' obsession with the biological fluids of a high lama's body; including their piss and shit. I later learned why the monk-servants were slinking off with the commode of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, whose offal they rolled with herbs and made into "blessing pills." Only when I was leaving the cult, did I realize what those blessing pills were composed of: the waste material of high lamas that their devotees, throughout the centuries, believe is blessed and divine and can cure disease.

We all accepted little glass bottles, tied with red ribbon, containing the left-over salt Trungpa's body had been soaked in, and we placed these little reliquaries reverently on our home shrines, also as "blessings." I had a piece of Trungpa's hair and parts of his ceremonial robe. I carried these items with me in a locket and carved little box for the next twenty-five years, whenever I travelled. It became a talisman I never left home without. All the pomp and circumstance of this cremation was accompanied by the bellowing of Tibetan thirty-foot-long horns, that boomed out over the rolling hills of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, along with the sounds of endless, mesmerizing mantra chanting, ringing of bells, and other loud drumming and chanting, to protector wrathful demons and to their God King, Padmasambhava; the Indian sadhu and magician who had originally "tamed" Tibet. The lamas had turned Barnet into a medieval theocracy and now they were 'taming' Vermont, with the lineage holder, Dilgo Khentse, considered an incarnation of Padmasambhava, the medieval occult Indian sorcerer, more important to the lamas than any Buddha. The Buddha was just for show.

Tibetan Lamas not only needed to spin out their Tantric net so the Trungpa students didn't get away but, by occupying this little town of Barnet, it helped somewhat allay the town's suspicions that this was a cult. The Vermont dairy farmers had no idea who these Lamas were, or what they were doing in our nation, let alone in secret inside their sanghas; or knew that their "no good-no bad" Tantra flew in the face of the Presbyterian Scots ancestor's beliefs, values, and ethics; those who had first settled in Barnet, Vermont. They still do not. But the cremation had to have impressed them and affected them as well. Especially when the Dalai Lama got his Nobel Prize, two years later.

Vermont has now let another dozen Tibetan Lamaist Tantric groups build their own centers, throughout their State.275 Like Barnet, these struggling towns would become dependent on the revenues the lamas' adherents brought to their villages and towns by patronizing their stores, their gas stations, and their services, even starting their own small businesses. The little town of Barnet would eventually approve more additions and shrine halls at Karme Choling, and even consider plans for a forty-five-foot stupa that violated all town zoning codes.276 The Town of Barnet didn't know that building stupas for these Tibetan lamas was planting a flag to say: "I own this territory now."277

By the time of this cremation, Tibetan Buddhist Tantra was already in full swing to become a worldwide "religion" at an accelerated pace. These Kagyu lamas were also building centers in China, while collected donations for a "Free Tibet." After the Dalai Lama received his Nobel Prize of Peace, in 1989, there would be more recognized tulkus, with followings of their own; more than there had been in all of Tibet.

After this massive propaganda program of the cremation event, I fully believed that Tibetan "Buddhism" was a major religion, like the Catholic Church, that also continues with medieval rituals. But the Catholic Church does not expect anyone to worship their priests as gods themselves. That was the big difference I was going to discover. Nor does it pretend to be a nontheistic, secular path, "closer to a philosophy than a religion" while doing so.

I was also surrounded by fanatic guru-worshipers attending this cremation who were not only eating their lamas' piss and shit as "blessings" in rolled up "pills,"278 as I later discovered, but were following Tibetan Tantric lamas who were known to eat part of each other, when dead, to prove to each other that they had reached a state of non-duality and that the world was just an illusion, with nothing to "accept or reject."279

I was left with the desire to tell everyone about this wonderful spiritual path I had found, with these amazing Tibetan lamas, when they asked me "what's that red string you are wearing around your neck?"280 After the six-week, slow-boil, at Trungpa's cremation -- its preparation, event, and aftermath -- I was now completely enthralled with this Tantric cult.

My family thought I was in a cult. I thought they were sadly misinformed, although I would soon be keeping four sets of vows to these lamas: my refuge vow; my bodhisattva vow; my Shambhala vow; and my military kasung vow, to always protect the gurus and their teachings. And all these vows were to prepare me to take the next vow; the fifth vow in this secret cult; the only vow that mattered to these lamas: the Vajrayana Tantric vow of obeying the lamas, in all things; and never revealing their secrets.

Even though, after taking my Vajrayana vows, I would still not yet know what their secrets were.

After this cremation, surrounded by Tibetan lamas, and hundreds, then thousands of thoroughly indoctrinated Trungpa devotees, I left my career, my position as a family therapist, and my first "heretic" husband. I had a new family of vajra brothers and sisters now, and a new family patriarchy of God Kings, with Guru God King, Trungpa, front and center, as our Lord Chakravartin. I was now in the deeper part of the net of indoctrination; so deep now, I had no perspective, separate from my enthrallment. My whole life was to be consumed by this three-armed entanglement with Trungpa's Tantric world, for the next twenty-five years, after this six-week, total cult immersion during Trungpa's cremation.

_______________

Notes:

260 "When the iron bird flies / And horses run on wheels / The Dharma will come / To the land of the red faces. / This is widely and uncritically assumed to mean that at the time of aeroplanes  and motorized transport, Buddhism will make its triumphal entry to the West." Quote  from "Tibet, Tibet" essay by Stephen Batchelor, https://www.stephenbatchelor.org/index. ... ibet-tibet
 
261 Ngondro practices refer to what comes before, in other words preliminary practices that are considered 'purification practices' to allow you to enter the more esoteric practices of the vajrayana Tantra. Five main ngondro practices: taking refuge, prostrations, mantra and mandala  practice, each done a hundred thousand times, and then guru yoga, with a million recitations.  Each practice has rituals and visualizations that accompany these practices. It takes several years to complete ngondro before one is accepted as a vajrayana student.
 
262 Trungpa created an infantry, an air force, a navy, and a military ranking system of vajra  guards that became known as his kasung; his gatekeeper and protectors. His life-time servants were called the kusung branch. These latter positions were for those who wanted to be extra close to their gurus and didn't mind ironing underwear, dressing the lamas, and emptying their chamber pots, to do so. The motivation was to have much more face-time with Trungpa, and later the Regent, no matter how demeaning or servile the tasks. In the earlier days, he had a main butler, a westerner who started his own Celtic lineage of Tantric guru-worship based  on Trungpa's teachings. Fortunately, his group remains small. See: Celtic Buddhism Website:  Accessed August 6, 2016 http://www.celticbuddhism.org/knights.html
 
263 This Shambhala Anthem proved very effective in the Maritime Provinces of Canada where Trungpa later took his Shambhala and Tibetan Buddhist operation since this was where so many Scots-Irish had settled, like my own relatives, who would become fooled by these western props and a song still performed by bag-pipers, making us believe these Shambhala  teachings were also part of our Western Celtic heritage, when nothing could be further from the truth. In our Judeo-Christian, Scots-Irish families, men may have been tribal and worn kilts but they didn't keep harems of women, and fought against God Kings and their rule.
 
264 The Kagyu Tibetan lamas, now under the Chinese Communist Party auspices, are performing  Monlams in the United States and Canada; their annual ceremonies they have performed in Old Tibet and India. They plan to have one, every year, to further influence this North American region, with their Tantric memes, on a much wider scale and with China's blessing. See: http://kagyumonlamny.org
 
265 Conveniently, rainbows were common in these rural parts, where Trungpa had his Vermont and Colorado retreat centers. After rain showers, when the sun comes out, they are a sight that is not considered a miracle but ordinary; beautiful but with a scientific explanation when we as westerners were able to operate from both sides of our brain. Now, they were always to be attributed to the power of the guru over the phenomenal world, as our reasoning minds atrophied and our emotional side took over.
 
266 See: http://www.benchen.org.pllen/dharma-tea ... gyu-monlam
 
267 Mingyur Rinpoche, Thrangu Rinpoche, and other Kagyu lamas, now under the auspices of the Communist party of the Chinese Workers Front, are promoting these mass Tantric indoctrination Monlams in the United States and Canada: see: http://kagyumonlamnorthamerica.org  

268 Aran, Lydia, "Inventing Tibet," Commentary, January 2009, 127, 1, 38-41
 
269 Renamed Shambhala Mountain Center and now a new-age yoga and meditation retreat spa to attract yoga students into the cult of Tantra, under Trungpa's son. https://www.shambhalamountain.org
 
270 Rumor had it that the Sakyong was asked to leave his retreat cabin, under Dilgo Khyentse's  supervision, because he spent his time riding his motorcycle, and just goofing off instead of doing the practices required on retreat.
 
271 Mathieu Ricard, the adored 'scientific' monk of the Globalist elite and the Dalai Lama, was first the devotee of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the most occult of the high lamas from the ancient Bon-influenced, Nyingmapa lineage. Ricard accompanied and attended Dilgo Khyentse, during every aspect of this lama's Tantric, mystical ceremonies throughout this cremation for Trungpa Rinpoche.

272 Zaslowsky, Dyan, "Buddhists in the U.S. Agonize on the AIDS Issue," The New York Times, February 21, 1989, last accessed April 25, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/211us-bu ... issue.html
 
273 http://www.satdharma.org/retreat.phpThi ... .inOjai.CA. "blessed" by Thrangu  Rinpoche, whose approval legitimizes this organization, despite the Regent's history, that has been now buried. Thrangu helped the Regent's wealthy benefactors build a stupa in Ojai, to honor the vajra regent.
 
274 "Dzogchen Meditation Center" Dzogchen Meditation Website, accessed April 26, 2016,  http://www.dzogchenmeditation.com/retreat-calendar/upcoming-retreats/retreats/sangngagtenzin-rinpoche-9-9-18-2016.html
 
275 Every State, in the United States, or in certain districts of a State, such as Madison, Wisconsin, that has large numbers of Tibetan Tantric centers and institutions, have far more young people becoming left-wing ideologues, clamoring for a socialist state, without understanding even an iota of what that means. Think California (90 plus Tantric Lama centers); Vermont (12 centers for a population of 600,000) and a communist-leaning Senator; New York City and upper State New York, where the Dalai Lama, and the Karma Kagyus have their headquarters-West, respectively. Tantra is part of helping to confuse young people, so a globalist, left-wing agenda can more easily take over.
 
276 "Stupa Volunteer Weekend: Making Tsa Tsas with Julia Persch," Karme Choling Website,  Accessed August.7, 2016, https://www.karmecholing.org/program/?id=5471
 
277 Apparently, the Town of Barnet and its citizens have finally refused to let the zoning  codes be violated and the forty-five-foot Stupa is on hold, as of now. Karme Choling and Trungpa's son are still fund-raising for this stupa on the Karme Choling website. They never care about western laws and statutes. See: https://www.karmecholing.org/about-us/t ... directions
 
278 Dutsi it was called. For twenty-five years, I didn't know that this is what these lamas were presenting to us as gifts; the offal from their high lamas, whom they believed was so holy that a high lamas' excrement and urine could cure illness and prevent bad karma. These are the "scientific" lamas the West has embraced, uncritically.
 
279 Steinbeck, Nancy, The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck, (New York: Prometheus  Books, 2001) 198.
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Re: The Iron Bird Lands Loaded With Lamas, by Christine Chan

Postby admin » Tue Aug 13, 2019 10:24 pm

Chris Chandler’s Expose of Shambhala as a Mind Control Cult is Required Reading
by Tara Carreon
August 13, 2019

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The Shambhala organization is in crisis, and Chris Chandler is perhaps the most fearless and best-informed of its critics. Shambhala's spiritual leader, the "Sakyong Mipham," has been outed as a sexual assaulter and heavy drinker with a bad habit of assaulting his female followers, and even the internal investigators hired to sanitize the problem ended up by confirming his bad behavior. Revenues from new students and book sales have fallen off the charts, and local centers have stopped sending the required 25% of revenues to the mothership. Numerous old students have left the fold, and compromising pages on the Shambhala.org website are regularly being scrubbed. Two senior Shambhala teachers have been arrested for child sex abuse, and the organization has issued denials of corporate knowledge eerily reminiscent of the Catholic Church's approach to its own pedophile crisis.

Chris Chandler's qualifications to write an expose of Shambhala are unmatched. She devoted the better part of her adult life to serving the group, became a member of the "Kasung" corps of uniformed disciplinary officers who patrol the premises when teachings occur, and ultimately was so trusted by the Mukpo Family that she became the full time caretaker for Taggie Mukpo, the autistic son of bad-boy lama Chogyam Trungpa, whose own proclivity for alcohol and cocaine drove him to an early grave and may have cursed Taggie with fetal alcohol syndrome. Chris reveals how the Mukpo Family failed to provide for Taggie's care, and entirely abandoned him to the care of the State of Vermont, even as his mother indulged a familial taste for the finer things in life, including international travel, multiple homes, dressage horses, lavish parties, fine food, drink, and apparel.

Chris and her husband were both part of the group, and due to their insider status, were able to attend all manner of secret ceremonies and initiations that were altogether inaccessible to the public, and available to insiders only after meeting study prerequisites and shelling out lots of cash. Chris explains how the Shambhala system of "mindfulness meditation" forms the basis for cult indoctrination, fostering a blank, uncritical mind-state and an attitude of childlike dependency among followers, even as they boast that they are developing "warrior confidence," and an ability to confront the challenges in life with the "energy of basic goodness."

Perhaps most important for those who are dabbling in "Shambhala training," Chris reveals that this veneer of "secular spiritual" that supposedly does not endorse any faith-based beliefs, is actually the entryway to a supernatural view of life that focuses on weird practices like visualizing oneself as a Mongolian warlord astride his white charger, hacking down legions of heretics in order to establish an "Enlightened Society." Once Chris's book opened the door to this revelation for me, I was able to find other Shambhala apostates posting online about this "bait and switch" approach. Shambhala Training, it turns out, gradually pushes the trainees towards the doorway of cultic fetishism, and when the student gets to "Level 5," they are given a very persuasive shove through the portal, whereupon they find themselves in a place they never intended to go -- the "Kalapa KIngdom."

What is this Kalapa Kingdom? It is the pure, fanciful invention of Chogyam Trungpa, the inventor of the entire Shambhala system, that he constructed out of a hodgepodge of belief systems, relying especially heavily on the Japanese cultural traditions of calligraphy, flower arranging, and martial philosophy. Trungpa, it turns out, was fascinated with militarism, and in a master stroke of "reconciling the opposites," conjoined the sanctimonious mystagoguery of Tibetan Buddhism with the toxic heirarchicalism of Japanese Imperial Buddhism to create a bizarre hybrid that, surprisingly enough, held considerable appeal for a core group of believers.

Having come to the land of democracy, Trungpa found himself free to set up a monarchy, and surrounded himself with a "Court" of sycophants who fostered ever-grander delusions in his alcohol and cocaine-charged brain. His word was absolute law, all of his relatives were deified, and his servants catered to his every wish, believing that they were thereby paving their own path to enlightenment. Within this "Enlightened Society of Shambhala Warriors," no one could draw an independent breath, and everything went according to Trungpa's wishes. When he died at the age of 48, his body destroyed from drug and alcohol abuse, and his son took the "Kalapa Throne," the party continued unabated. But in his attempt to fill his father's shoes, the Sakyong Mipham laid down a trail of drunken misconduct that now, in the era of #MeToo, has become the bane of this imaginary monarchy.

You will, inevitably, be hearing more about the collapse of the Shambhala Empire, because its rotten foundations have begun to give way, and the entire superstructure is tilting. If you want to understand the faulty architecture of this cult, that gives itself the name of Buddhism, but deserves to be shelved next to Hubbard's Scientology and Moon's Unification Church, you can find no better guide than Chandler's compelling tome. While at times she repeats thematic conclusions that have already been well-expressed, I did not find that it impeded readability, although I occasionally skimmed over some paragraphs that presented ideas with which I had already become familiar. Those who think that she draws too many unwarranted inferences of worldwide conspiracy from the evidence would do well to research the various actors whom she implicates in the plot to take down American independent thinking -- the Dalai Lama's publicity army exists for a reason, and that reason is entirely political.
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