Some people love dismissing online publications like HuffPost for being somewhat irrelevant, but I owe to HuffPost for publishing in 2016 their 1.5-minute video on Mingyur Rinpoche, which I first watched in July 2017. I watched the video and was instantly intrigued. It was my first introduction to the lovable monk from Nepal and monkey mind.
I felt an instant connection. Honestly, the 1.5-minute video is deep; it seems like nothing, but it contains work that can engage someone for their entire life. The Huffpost video contains a technique called Anapana, which Tibetans claim comes directly from Buddha Gotama or Buddha Shakyamuni, as they call him. It is hard work, and perhaps only very few spartan, hardy type beginners would be able to profit from instructions so pithy.
Nevertheless, Rinpoche followed the procedure while trying to give out meditation instructions- you have to hold the lineage of that meditation, you have to tell where it came from (2500 years ago from Buddha in this case), you have to give the instructions, and you have to make sure that the person receiving the instructions practices it at least once. I didn’t know it at that time, but it was all in the video. It was a profound video, but it was also funny, and it sparked memes.
The video made me feel enthusiastic enough to look him up on Youtube and I stumbled upon the Tergar YouTube channel where Rinpoche’s team has been meticulously putting up teachings since 2011. Soon, I was lost in the world of Mingyur Rinpoche and Tibetan Buddhism. This was July 2017, I had just had a somewhat painful breakup, I was smoking pot, and I was suffering- a lot.
I come from India, and India is the land of fake spiritual Gurus. Trust me, white people are very gullible when it comes to Indian spirituality and Indian holy men and have been so, according to me, for the entire 20th and 21st centuries. Many Gurus have a very large cult-like following but are very dubious. India being such a huge country, Gurus like these come dime a dozen. It is very hard to convince their followers to snap them out of their clever rhetoric. Indians get fooled too, but usually we are more sceptical of holy men because we have seen so many of them go to jail and usually on very serious accounts like raping and molesting young teenagers. Almost any slightly sensible Indian would be wary of Indian holy men even when they are charming, speak English flawlessly and court thousands, if not millions, of followers. Spirituality is a grand bazaar in India and remains the land of cults.
The problem is when people who are not really good at language encounter these pseudo-spiritual holy men. They are good at rhetoric and sophistry. They are almost artists in the way they use language and stories. Lay emphasis on words while speaking and do every shtick in the book to charm and deceive. As so many researchers have pointed out in recent times, most people are trusting engines and get fooled. This is the same lure as that of bad art and bad books being popular as hell. Something is popular as hell, but you know that it is not the measure of its being right. It is the measure of it being wrong. I would estimate that as many as 99% of spiritual practitioners in India are either deluded or deluding. That is 99% percent of Indian Gurus are fake. It is a thing. It is very hard to find a true Guru. And this is not new. This has been the case for centuries, and the number of fake Gurus is only rising. It is a lucrative option to be a fake Guru. A Hindi saying goes,
“Jab tak na mile Guru saacha, kar lijiye das-paancha”
(Change 5-10 Gurus, until you find thetrue Guru)
But it was different with Mingyur Rinpoche’s videos. There was no Mingyur Rinpoche in them. There was none of that assuming, that posturing that makes you realise, oh no, another spiritual conman! They were just teachings. And they were very refreshing. There was clarity. There was balance. I was slowly gaining wisdom, and this wisdom was like an antidote to my suffering at that point in my life. Largely because I was a stupid stoner who made a lot of mistakes in daily life. But all that was changing slowly, and I became the biggest Mingyur Rinpoche fan. I literally sent one of his videos to all my acquaintances because it was such a big revelation to me at that time. I was thinking how it can be turned on by this. It was a big, big revelation. At the same time, I discovered the world of cognitive behavioural therapy, and it began to fundamentally change the way I perceived the world. I realised I wasn’t so rational in the way I was thinking. I think I am still not totally out of it in the way that I assume or leave out things. But largely, the self-hurting bit of my personality has been demolished.
Compared to the fake Gurus Mingyur Rinpoche is relatively unknown on YouTube. At that time, the subscribers ran into a few ten thousands. Even right now, I believe he is vastly underrated at around 200k. All this while the fake Gurus have man,y many channels with millions of subscribers and a very strong IT team that dumps tons of videos every day from all the channels filled with the same bullshit, rhetoric and self-assuming braggadocio.
Then came another seminal moment in my life. My first acid trip, and literally shit hit the fan. I saw a giant hive-like Alex Grey-esque structure in the sky. And I also had an experience with a spiritual entity known as Shiva. I was baffled out of my wits. Reality as I had known it imploded. This can’t be. Was this real? How is this not common knowledge? I thought. The next day of the trip, I drew the mega-hive as I saw it in the sky. I didn’t have a name for it. I didn’t know it existed. No one told me about it. But here I am experiencing it. It was right out of a fantasy novel. My life as I had known it changed.
The mega structure that I had experienced. What was it? I searched at my wits’ end. My new girlfriend at the time told me that perhaps it was Indra’s net of jewels. I was really excited and curious as to what this thing was. The next day, I drew the mega-hive in my diary. The only other time I saw any human have any knowledge of it was Alex Grey when he came on Joe Rogan’s podcast and talked about such structures. I remember I was quite relieved. At least someone else had also experienced it. I remember being almost quite attached to this phenomenon I had experienced.
People are also dismissive of social media, particularly Facebook, which many of my friends see as a hellhole. Again, I am filled with gratitude because Facebook gave me the chance to meet Mingyur Rinpoche. One day, scrolling through Facebook, I see an advert for an event in New Delhi by Mingyur Rinpoche. At that time, all of Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings in India were conducted by Vikramashila Foundation India, run by C_____ P____. I was living in New Delhi at the time. Bingo! Opportunity of a lifetime. It is a two-day seminar/workshop on meditation called Joy of Living Level 1 and Level 2, which Rinpoche conducts around the world, and now it was in my hometown! What good luck!
So I went to the workshop, and it was free as well. The experience of learning meditation from him is awesome. It is like one of those experiences I wish I could experience for the first time again. I could finally meditate. I had no experience with meditation prior to this, and it was so easy. It seemed like the easiest, most natural thing in the world. The day was just perfect. I could meditate with ease. Rinpoche introduced me to my awareness. It was like being gifted wings.
I come again for day 2, and I realise that to get to meet him personally during break-time in the workshop, you just have to write down your name on a piece of paper. Whoa. It was so easy. I just had to write my full name on a piece of paper. I stood in a line, and there was this one girl who went before me and came out with her face entirely red. I guessed it was an intense experience.
I took the ceremonial khat, which is a white scarf that Tibetans use for greeting. I had never used it before, so inside I tried to use it the wrong way, offering to put it around his neck when it is to be the other way round. You offer it to the lama, and they put it on the nape of your neck.
Bam. I am face-to-face alone in a room with one of the greatest meditation masters on planet Earth. He has quite a funny persona while he teaches, so I was in a slightly frivolous mood, but when I encountered him, he was very sombre and was like a gigantic rock-solid wall of awareness. I sobered up. I offered him a teeny tiny origami bird no bigger than half a cm across that I had just folded. His face lit up like that of a child. He got super excited for some moments. I realised that he was still capable of child-like wonder. A capacity most of us have lost.
I showed him my sketch of the mega-hive I had seen in the sky. I didn’t tell him that I saw it on LSD. Would he know what LSD is? He had a look at it, and then he said, “It is Dharmadhatu, a structure which is as old as time.” Then he said, “You see it sometimes with your closed eyes when you look at light.” And he told me to look at a light that was there in front of us. I closed my eyes and turned my head to look at it, but then he dismissed it as the light being of a bad quality. But I think he was looking at the back of my neck. Many months later, I read that there are some advanced practices that, if a practitioner carries them out diligently, the back of the neck becomes supple.
I told him that he looked really cute and that there should be Mingyur Rinpoche action figures. He told me in his characteristic English that in Taiwan, they made some dolls. Then I told him the problems I was facing in my family with my father and our difficult relationship, and he gave me some advice. My five minutes were up. He looked up at his black plastic watch. The five minutes ensure everyone gets some time with him. There was a long line behind me.
Then I asked if I could take some pictures. He posed for me! Giving me a thumbs up on camera and even made a funny face for me. Coming out of the meeting room, I was thinking, “Whoa, this photo will get a lot of likes on Instagram.” Then I went up to the canteen. (The event was being organised in a school on the weekend) I was enthralled with what Mingyur Rinpoche had told me about Dharmadhatu, and I also got really excited about my experience with Shiva. I was getting really egoistic and with a lot of force. I have what the Tibetans call a delusional mind. And at that time, I was even more delusional than now. I started chanting Shiva’s mantra in my mind. Just earlier that day, I had learnt how to do mantra meditation from Rinpoche. Then suddenly I look up, and there’s a painting of Shiva in the canteen with his mantra written at the bottom. This was perhaps a meaningless coincidence, but to my delusional mind, this was a great omen. I started thinking with much gusto, “I was born to be a follower of Shiva. Shiva has sent me on this planet.” And so on. It was all pretty delusional thinking. I was strangely confident about my spiritual prowess.
Then the break ended, and part two of the workshop was to begin. I came down from the canteen, and everyone took their places in the hall. I was also sitting. Mingyur Rinpoche took the mic, and before I knew I was going red-faced. It was embarrassing. He was mimicking a person scrolling on the phone and saying people put photos on Facebook, and then they keep checking how many likes they got. I was thinking of doing the same sometime ago.
Then I was getting embarrassed even further. I didn’t know why. Mingyur Rinpoche was saying, “There would be a voice in your head. It would say you are the biggest follower of a God. You are sent to the planet by him. You are his son. Don’t believe that voice.” I became red-faced because I had been thinking the same things. Then there were more thinly wielded personal insults to me directly in front of all the people in the hall. I couldn’t comprehend how this was happening. At the same time, I was becoming really hot. I was developing a strong fever.
I became so sick that I had to leave before the official end of the event. Months later, while I was reading The Monk and the Philosopher by Matthieu Ricard, I realised what had happened: Mingyur Rinpoche had read my mind. Ricard recounts similar experiences with lamas in his book. And I was so embarrassed at that time because I saw his insults on the stage as a direct attack even when I didn’t realise how’d that happened. Later, I also realised that it is a tradition to attack the hidden faults of your spiritual friend or student.
“The best spiritual friend is one who attacks your hidden faults”
-Atisha
He directly attacked my ego, and it really helped me. I became less delusional and more balanced. For one, I stopped thinking that I was some special air-dropped agent of Shiva. I think I am really lucky that he accessed my mind-stream, as it is called in Buddhist texts. When there is a person who is unaware, then the mind-stream can be accessed easily. There are examples even in old Buddhist literature. It is one of the siddhis or powers that are a result of meditation practice. Also, I have seen many people getting a fever after meeting high lamas. I have a fledgling theory about the karma ripening.
I used to be a cynic and a positivist who would have laughed at this future version of me, but after this experience, I did not doubt in my mind. The texts say that people who have such powers have a hard time hiding them. Like an elephant trying to hide under a banana leaf. I know it is unbelievable, and for a long time, I had a hard time trying to process it, but then it happened again on a different occasion.
And what was this Dharmadhatu thing, which I had seen as old as time? I searched the internet a lot but in vain. It was propped up on the Stanford Buddhist philosophy website. Apparently, you see it when Buddha-nature is realised, and Dharmadhatu has a particular place in Buddhist descriptions. So I had cheated a bit by consuming a substance and getting to see it. Dharmadhatu also means the realm of all phenomena. It was something beautiful I saw, but at the same time, as Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche says, “ The important point to see is that there is nothing to see.” I regarded the event of seeing the Dharmadhatu as something special, but the Buddhists see all phenomena as impermanent and fleeting and something not to get attached to. This is where I had been wrong. But still, it showed me that there was much more to life than the corporations and governments were telling us. That I would have to look beyond what we humans have created and maybe look within.