INDIA

Himachal Pradesh - Odder - Demchog

The hunger and thirst, the perils of dashing streams and freezing blizzard, the pain of writhing under heavy burdens, the anxiety of wandering over trackless wilds, the exhaustion and the lacerations, all the troubles and sufferings I had just come through, seemed like dust which was washed away and purified by the spiritual waters of the lake; and thus I attained to the spiritual plane of Non-Ego, together with this scenery showing its Own-Reality.

Ekai Kawaguchi, circa 1900, in “A mountain in Tibet” by Charles Allen

From time to time God causes men to be born – and thou art one of them – who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news – today it may be of a far-off thing, tomorrow of some hidden mountain...

Rudyard Kipling in “Kim”

After the wind stops I see a flower falling. Because of the singing bird I found mountain calmness.

Zen Poem in “Zen Mind, Beginner´s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki

Night has never been so dark, rain so heavy on our shoulders and fear so strongly troubling. Thus darkness covers our lucidity, our footsteps loose astray, we may pray for our souls before nature´s omnipotence and God´s magnificence, we have never felt so weak in this black night. When daylight vanished demons could seen walking in the yard, staring at us, Buddhist demons coloured as in Tibetan paintings. Thousands of ghosts haunting our sight with their evil eye and sharp long teeth frightening our fragile racionality.

May us be strong as we await for the dawn´s rising sun.

I saw Demchog walking hand-in-hand with human madness.



Tenzin was impressed by this image and used to look at me with an astonished curious face, she also was getting scared.

The storm or more exactly the succession of storms lasted an entire week, with heavy showers and strong winds; the light was going off continuously, during endlessly long periods of time. During those times, we were completely surrendered to nature. I felt that not much could protect us against wilderness. I wonder about ship journeys in old times, about living in total darkness. The nuns had a stock of candles for such occasions that they distributed.

We could ear strange howlings at the end of the afternoon like human laughs, something that reminded me hienas or mad dogs. At the begining I was impressed by those weird screams, they sounded like human screams coming from the nearby fields but I could not picture exactly where from. They were so human that I was giving them a lot of attention. In fact I was told later of wild dogs or some sort of fox like the ones I saw in the yard scared at me, they eyes shinning, reflecting the spotlight giving the impression of a really bad picture.

One week of heavy shower rain and storms, the light was cut off a lot of times. One night, the night Demchog was seen in the dark, after one my class one of the youngest nuns fainted, fell on the floor and then into a deep coma shaken by some kind of unconscious epileptic or hysteric crises, possessed by her own demons. Inconscious for four days, she has been awake for only a few hours, her coma shaked by those strange convulsions, rising her trunk on the bed, screaming for her mother and grapping her stomach suffering terrible physical and spiritual pains.



At the Indian hospital in Dharamshala the Chomos were told that she was suffering from the heart, after a long examination. I think they hadn´t found any explanation for her trouble.

As she grapped her stomach or more exactly the space below the sternum were the rib cage goes down, that with both hands, I could think it was one of the chakras that was out of order. Something related with a past trauma. It came to be true, they told me later that she saw her mother dying as a child.

She was lying in bed surrounded by other nuns, they were recitating prayers while her most closed mates were holding her, trying to calm her when she was arising the upperbody. This continued for a while until it became "usual", I mean taking her to the hospital in her worse crises and bringing her back to the Institute when Medecine couldn´t find any remedy. They were thinking of bringing a high Lama to see her, one of those scholars in Tibetan science or magic as they all are after a certain age, but they did not, I know not the reason.

Thubten went to my classes today for the first time since her attacks. She looked pale and rather terrible, but she is recovering.