On Sep 3, 2010, at 12:42 PM, emptybill wrote: > Orgyen Kusum Lingpa, my first Tibetan teacher, lived in Golok, Tibet (now > part of China). He believed in Shambhala quite literally. In fact when he > first came to the West (1994) and saw blond haired people he thought they > were from Shambhala. He was a terton and saw many such people in the > Shambhala mandala. He got a good laugh at his own assumptions when he found > out "it weren't necessarily so". He also had advice for people who considered > the subtle Shambhala mandala a place to be reborn. "Don't be reborn there, > because there will be fierce warfare involving Shambhala". His advice was > rather to choose Sukhavati since it was a direct route to Bodhi. > > Exactly how Shambhala is positioned in Bhu-mandala/Chakravada, I'm not sure. > Going upwards goes to a series of subtle mountain ranges. Descend downward > into the closest "valley" and into the dark black center and the perceiver > pops out into the empty space of our solar system. > > I believe that this type of perception (which is quite simple) is how/why the > Indian yogins described the cosmology of Sumeru in the way they did. Although > it is confounding to Westerners practitioners, particularly new Buddhists, it > is an attempt to overlap Geo-sensory perception with an elementary form of > yogi-pratyaksha. > I don't know that I'd say that Pure Vision (dag sNan) is "quite simple" even though it is perfectly natural. Astral imaginings, mediumistic abilities and "astral projection" a la western esotericism is quite simple, but should not be confused with Pure Vision. One should also not assume that models of reality or geographical maps of reality hold any intrinsic value IMO. They merely represent the particular realization of a yogin(i) and what he passed onto his or her body of students to help those close to him or her awaken quickly and completely. Most tantras start out as rather simplified affairs and only later become large collections of writings and teachings.
For example many tantras vary considerably in their descriptions of the chakras. There is no "right or wrong" here, each one is relatively true unto itself. Yet some people actually believe here are "7 chakras" as some absolute subtle body, as if 7 were some magic number of chakras. Not so. Since the number of sentient beings are effectively infinite, so are the numbers of pure mandalas that can be expressed, along with their own geographies and bioenergetic "bodies".
