My writing as Amlearning January 5, 2004

THE WRITINGS OF AMLEARNING - 1/5/04
Site Map		Dear Tara, The last few days, (since having discovered your site quite by accident - I was looking up Buddhist links for a person who is interested in the combination of Buddhism and psychoanalytical thought) have been profoundly healing for me. I had long given up the hope, that I could work on healing these old and painful wounds of spiritual betrayal by discussing it with anybody who had experience in the Tibetan Buddhist scene. What a deep relief it is to relate what happened to me to somebody who knows what I'm talking about. So much unresolved pain surfaced from my memory these last few days. I read with increasing interest your posts about how Tibetan Buddhism made you feel, the PTSD that you experienced. The images of torture, of pain, affected me deeply. Yes, I really related to that PTSD you described and had felt that myself. How courageous of you to express your feelings here! It was comforting to me, validating and reassuring that I wasn't alone in this. What has been a tremendous help to me in understanding the Tibetan lama cult has been the discovery of the term pathological narcissist. I'd heard the word narcissist before and thought it basically meant self-centered in a vain, conceitedly self-loving way. Now, after 4 years of studying about personality disorders, I am confident in saying that I think a number of Tibetan lamas suffer from this disorder of pathological narcissism. It's no wonder, in my opinion, since they were yanked away from their families at a very young age and literally put on thrones. I think this did severe harm to them psychologically. Though their intellects may be intact, and they may mimic a silkily 'compassionate' demeanor on the surface, I think almost all of the so-called rinpoches who survived this bizarre child abuse are deeply damaged emotionally and act out their pain on Western women, expressing covert rage for the abandonment they endured as children. I think those Westerners, who survived narcissistic parents, would be more likely to enter into a long term enmeshment with a Tibetan lama and be used as Secondary Narcissistic Supply, while new devotees would be culled as Primary Narcissistic Supply. I'm sorry that this jargon may sound academic, the info on pathological narcissism is freely available on the web if you put it into Google. The mumbo jumbo surrounding the Tibetan lamas, the rituals, the chanting, the obsession with feeling important about secrets, lineages, entitlement, initiations, Bon wierdness, lengthy visualisations ... all are bedazzling, obscuring the basic tenets and views of Buddhism, putting them into some kind of wood-chipper of medieval pagan belief systems. It's, in my opinion, utterly crazy-making, and I have not met a Tibetan Buddhist, Western or Tibetan, who I thought had any basic integrity or was, in fact altogether sane believing this bizarro malarcky. The belief that mumbling so-called tantric practices at high speed while doing dishes had any 'merit', or paying lip service to 'virtue' while ROUTINELY lying, being racist, bigoted, contemptuous, aiding petty or not so petty criminal or immoral behavior, twisting reality in labrynthine distortions is insanity producing. It's brainwashing and it's sickening. It sickens people, and I don't think it is spiritually awake or even Buddhist. This is not to say that I think ANY Buddhist 'scene' is especially healthy either, not the Zen scene, not the Theravada scene. I think the whole devotee-guru dynamic has been and is a sick one. Almost no lama I ever met and asked about how to meditate knew how to meditate or taught meditation. Not that I think meditation is so important now, but I did think at one time that meditation was the core practice of Buddhism. Lamas did, however, teach elaborate cultic visualisations with bizarre rituals. But basic Buddhist meditation, no way. In my experience that was extremely rare and I only learned to meditate by going to a non-rinpoche, unpretentious monk, called Gegen Khentse in Manali. Frankly, he was the only teacher I met who didn't sit on a throne, and was not sexually abusive to my knowledge. But he was surrounded by people who were sexual predators, in particular an "amche", a so-called doctor from Lahaul, who put the make on every female student who came to Gegen for instruction. And Gegen did nothing to get rid of this scum, who negatively influenced the young rinpoches at the gompa there with his misogyny. Gegen endorsed abuse by doing nothing about it in his presence. Shandor and Gaea to me sound like they have Anti-Social Personality Disorder and they were/are used by various lamas to bully others, as part of an abuse support system to manipulate and exploit Westerners, to intimidate, coerce and FORCE students into being obedient. Shandor's and Gaea's bully tactics may be camouflaged by being called protective but what exactly are the lamas being protected FROM? The Westerners who visit the lamas are basically PROSTRATING themselves, handing over their money, their houses, airfare, hundreds of acres of prime real estate all over the world. I was told by a friend that Tibetans received 5 times more money as refugees than any other group in official contemporary charity. Tibetans get so much when the Indians, who have suffered so much for so long, gave Tibetans thousands of acres of the best land in India. I think Shandor and Gaea are an expression of the lamas' own aggression and covert bullying-by-proxy through these puppets. What's pathetic, in my opinion, is that the Westerners who are being bullied by these creeps are PAYING to be bullied.  It's being put up with and defended by the people who are being bullied. Like with the whole corrupt, sexaholic insanity of the Kalapa Court. Without the Westerners, these people would have to GET A JOB and earn their living, like any sane, ordinary adult in society. Or they would have to go back to India or Tibet and pull their bullying sadism on defenseless little Tibetan boys, who have been sacrificed to the monasteries by their ignorant, brainwashed parents. So Shandor and Gaea invited Sogyal Rinpoche. That makes sense. It takes a sociopath to want another sociopath around to manipulate and abuse the devotees. It's no wonder to me that Sogyal Rinpoche told the same joke twice. He has a routine patter, the same ole same ole con he grinds out. He's stupid in my opinion, incapable of introspection, a classic malignant narcissist exploiter. I've seen him in a vicious rage about how inferior all the other Tibetan sects are, how inferior everybody is who isn't giving him adulation or his main drug of choice, whether negative or positive, attention. He has to have attention of some kind all the time and will do anything to get it. You said Sogyal Rinpoche went to Eugene and seduced Tsering Everest, Chakdud Tulku's translator. No surprise there. Anybody who would be Chagdug's servant, would be an easy target. I agree with your speculation that Chakdud Tulku slept with many of his students, since I heard about this literally decades ago from women who had slept with him and men who knew that Western women students slept with him. I think that sleeping with the disciples is a routine with cult leaders of any kind or any gender. There may well be people who will talk about this in the years to come, as the disillusionment with Tibetans and their cult scene starts to percolate to the surface. Sexual exploitation by priests of their emotionally/spiritually vulnerable devotees is corrupt and causes psychological damage in the devotees. This is true in the Catholic Church, in a therapist's or lawyer's office, and it's true when the abuse/exploitation is done by a Tibetan lama.  I don't know a single Western student of Tibetan Buddhism who isn't in some way a mess after surviving their long term cultic involvement with Tibetan lamas. Marilee was living with Joel in a nice house in Berkeley in summer 1976, when they housed Sogyal as translator for Dudjom Rinpoche. Lena Shefflin, who I thought was pleasant, visited often. She was a raw-foodtarian at that time if I remember. I thought Marilee was nice and flaky in a way I thought was just part of being an American at that time. She was, I think I remember, teaching natural birth control methods then, the rhythm method by testing one's temperature etc. I met her a year later in Boudha at the initiations given for 6 weeks by Dudjom there. When I fell in a drainage ditch badly injuring my kneecap, Marilee did what I thought was pure hocus pocus, polarity therapy. But it fixed my knee almost instantly. That was unexpected and much appreciated. I think she was a loving person who was looking for answers, as I think all of us were. I hope she is well these days. I was so thankful for her kind hospitality in Berkeley but looking back, I see how she tolerated all of Sogyal's arrogance, his raging about everybody, his being a lousy person, by being very passive. As I also was passive for a while. Nobody stood up for what they knew was right. It was abject passivity, letting Sogyal and the whole corrupt, materialistic, ugly Tibetan scene unfurl without a peep, kowtowing to the bullshit all the way. I think there was a lot of focus in the West on food issues when people needed to look at their emotional and deeper psychological issues. But there wasn't really a language that was readily available then in the seventies, and what was available was being conscripted by psychological cults, like EST and is still used in other cults today, like The Forum. I left Sogyal after staying with Marilee and Joel, utterly disgusted, and returned to India wiser for the abuse I survived, but still deluded into thinking it would be so much better with monks as teachers. Not. No, I don't think I know Linda Wellings, Neal King or Lisbeth Duncan. I may have met them at the Dudjom scene in Berkeley in summer 1976 and just don't remember. I felt like an outsider there because my first Tibetan teacher was a Gelug geshe and the Nyingma scene was grossly judgmental about any other (read inferior) lama who wasn't in THEIR (read superior) lineage. Looking back, it was all so kindergarten petty, tedious and pathetic. Oh, it's so sad Linda Wellings had sex with a monk at Khamtrul Rinpoche's monastery at Tashijong and ended up with her son Jigmae, while being accused of corrupting a monk just like Dechen was at Jetsunma's. Having been overtly groped by monks in the company of other monks who ALSO groped me, and survived an attempted rape by a monk behind the Chinese gompa in Bodhgaya, I have serious doubts that any Westerner ever "corrupted" a Tibetan monk. If anything, I think it was the other way around. How could most Tibetan monks actually be monks of their own volition anyway? They were packed into filthy, frightening brainwashing factories as little boys, dressed in a skirt, told to memorise thousands of pages of paicha that meant NOTHING to them, that they didn't understand and never understood. They raped each other in the monasteries, often hearing other little boys like them being raped. How could these men, who survived this child torture, actually be monks???!!! They were forced into this insanity involuntarily, socially, ashamed to opt out of this role that was forced on them as little boys, when they had no voice or way of saying what they wanted. The role of monk was idealised as THE right thing for a Tibetan family to do. Then after these brainwashed psuedo-monk men arrived in India, along came Western women and men, not feeling the same "ngotsa" (shame) of the Tibetans, but who were/are seeking spiritual awakening, a truth path that they thought was an authentic, Buddhist one, and it must have been staggeringly confusing/distressing for these pseudo-monks. Does that mean they had a RIGHT to sexually harass or molest Western women? No way. It's understandable, in the way criminal or immoral behavior is understandable when committed by those who've lived lives of terrible deprivation. But it is not acceptable and the abuse needs, in my opinion, to stop. The whole Tibetan scene is sick, wall to wall. And the Dalai lama and others who are highly educated ALL know this! Nothing is being done to change this insanity, this MASS ABUSE of little Tibetan boys by forcing them into monasteries at 4/5/6/7 years of age. It's making a lot of sick parasites who then act out their illness. You said "Jigmae has always had trouble with his peers because he's so dark skinned. Everyone thinks half-Tibetan kids are black". That's so sad because Tibetans have so many shame, "ngotsa" issues. So much to them is about appearances. There is obsession in the East, as everywhere, about skin color and being as white as possible. But Tibetans themselves foster such prejudice routinely. Most Tibetans do not know words for any other colors except white, black and red. Tolerance, in my opinion, is absolutely NOT a national Tibetan characteristic. You said "My favorite waiter at the Stupa View Restaurant in Kathmandu told me he'd seen many a Western girl crying her eyes out to her mother in the restaurant, because her Tibetan lama-lover treated her like shit and slept with other women." Yup, that sounds par for the course. Get any bunch of Western Tibetan Buddhist women in a room and out will come the sexual abuse stories. But almost always no feelings come up with these stories except gossip-giggling. It's like their reasoning and recognition have disappeared and they don't see what's actually happened, how they have been so used/abused. There is all this excusing the sexual abuse, it's so unhealthy, and because of the shame attached to the negative feelings, the ANGER about it isn't shared. So the abuse has gone on and on and on and on. You said "When Sangye Khandro left Gyatrul Rinpoche she told me, "Tara, you have no idea how badly Tibetan men treat women." She ought to know -- she slept with enough of them." Wow, that was news to me. When I knew Sangye at Gangchen Kyishong, she told me she had taken some sort of lay vows. But now I read that as vows to lay. I always assumed she slept with Gyaltrul but that it was never actually thought of as sex. How I compartmentalised that insanity in my thinking is typical of cultic brainwashing. Sangye was, in my opinion, deeply enmeshed with Gyaltrul Rinpoche. Her beauty was something I was somewhat in awe of and envied a bit. I also envied somewhat her calm exterior, her living in Hawaii, and even when she said she had been, if I remember correctly, something of a biker chick before she became a cult devotee of Gyaltrul's. In Clement Town at Dilgo Khentse's Rinchen Terdzo intitiations in 1980, she said that she was actually quite plump (she wasn't) for her size because her bones were tiny. Thinking about her enmeshment with Gyaltrul and what she said to you, while having for many years put on this deceitful front of euphoric composure, I feel really badly for her, how much she must have suffered and been a party to get other women to be used by the lamas who also used her. I wonder if she wasn't an adult who had been badly abused as a child and locked into some reenacting her past with these older men, who drained her dry while proclaiming their holiness, receiving prostrations. Do you know what happened to her after all those years of cultic devotion? Is she in therapy? You said "Lama Sonam thought he might come on to me once until I asked him how his wife was doing". Good for you!!! I regret not saying that to Sakya Trinzin. But since he endorsed adultery by not saying anything about the adultery around him in his disciples, I think he, like most other Tibetan men, think that adultery or sexual immorality of all kinds, including sexually abusing little novice monks, is something that is fine as long as one isn't caught. A Western student, who wanted very much to reconcile the lack of morality among the Tibetan teachers told me there was "lower morality" and HIGHER morality". She thought that committing adultery, lying, conniving, manipulating, exploiting, when it was done by a Tibetan lama or disciple of a Tibetan lama, was of the HIGHER kind of morality. It astonishes me the levels of reality warping that was done around Tibetan lamas and is STILL being done. Millions of dollars are being pumped into this insanity-making machine all over the world. This insanity needs to exposed and talked about. Thank you very much for talking honestly and courageously about what you experienced Tara. I deeply appreciate sharing here what I experienced myself and get it out into the open with the intention to heal and offer it as a reality to any others who may be coming out of the cultic fog or thinking of getting enmeshed with any Tibetan lama for any reason.