Most people live their lives as if they were living in a room with all the lights turned off. Bumping into things they learn nothing about. An epiphany is when a light get turned on in that room. The Tambolian Map is a map you mind with all the lights turned on.
From the Tambolian Book of Deeds
The Tambolian Map Story
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| The Hidden part of the Map |
The information uncovered and the extraordinary range of the Tambolian Map is developed in the four books of the Bodhicariyan Paradox, or will be as soon as I can finish the manuscripts. How the Tambolian Map was actually discovered and became a reality is quite another story. I suspect it all started with me pilfering the Longchen Nyingtik Refuge Tree Visualization which is one of the stories I included in the Buddhist Humor book.
I moved into Padma Ling Monastery in the summer of 1971, with Tarthang Tolku Rimpoche, and began formal practices. It was a frenzied time in a frenzied year in the heart of the hippy revolution at Berkeley, California. The Padma Ling Monastery is a converted fraternity house five blocks east of Telegraph Avenue, arguably the most berserk place on the planet. Within a few weeks of living in the basement, in a closet under the stairs leading to the meditation and ceremony room, I decided to acquire the Longchen Nyingtik Refuge Tree Visualization.
I noticed other students had this enigmatic pictograph on their alters. Not familiar with the normal Tibetan protocols in such matters I snuck into the ceremony room when no one was around, rummaged under the alter until I found the stack of visualizations and snatched one as clean as the Artful Dodger in any Dickens novel. I shortly discovered that this was a serious breach of meditational and spiritual integrity, but I kept the visualization anyway.
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| The Longchen Nyingtik |
A few weeks later Tarthang Tolku Rimpoche visited me in my little closet- room. This was not as easy as it might seem. I lived in a basement in a large fraternity house converted into a meditation center. To get to my room you had to know the right hallways, go through the correct doorways, and move around some basement storage things, all of which made about half the journey in complete darkness, even in the day time. We, as students, were supposed to be up at 6:00 am to do the morning practices in the ceremony room at 6:30 am. Tarthang arrived at my room at 5:45 am and caught me sitting in the half lotus, with my alter properly set up, with a candle burning in a proper dish and incense in the proper sand holder, chanting away like a mad mendicant. I’m not sure what he was expecting to find as the door banged open and Tarthang, being a large man, filled up the closet and then some. He took a quick look around saw the Refuge Tree visualization among other things and said a “Harrumphed” kind of sound implying, I suppose, no justifiable reason for yelling at me and banged out again.
I was never sure why no one at Padma ling or anywhere else seemed interested in this remarkable pictograph. I actually loved it from the very beginning; I was completely fascinated by, what eventually evolved into a sophisticated arrangement of symbol-strings-algorithms of abstract decision making protocols and outcome management strategies.
Initially the Longchen Nyingtik Refuge Tree pictograph appears to be an organization of the historical lineage of the Dzogchen Masters in the form of a refuge tree. This Tree, a possible depiction of the Bodhi Tree at Bodhi-Gaya India, is the primary structure and is typical of all Mahayana Buddhist linage visualizations. There are branches leading to Monks and Bodhisattvas, Yoga Masters, mediators, billowy clouds, banners of victory, an upside down rainbow and other peaceful/wrathful deities floating independently here and there. At the outset the pictograph seemed artfully stylized, historically complicated and conceptually tedious. Until I thought about it for a while - then it became infinitely fascinating. An esoteric plan representing my spiritual journey that morphed into a mapping algorithm of my conceptual mind, then into a convincing argument for enlightened awareness, then finally into a panoramic vista of the human condition.
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| My translation of the Refuge Tree |
“Yes,” he said, then emphasized “But you did it to fast!”
Figuring out the Refuge Tree visualization was easier than figuring out Gyaltrul Rimpoche answer. To this day I haven’t the foggiest clue about what figuring out something to fast might mean. That I was able to unravel this Refuge Tree visualization enabled me to pass the Insight Test given to me by the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand a few years later, which of course led me to the Forest Monks in northern Thailand and eventually a sunny cave in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona
There is an anecdote that establishes another unusual connection with this particular Refuge Tree linage visualization pictograph. Gyaltrul Rimpoche came to Berkeley, California via Belleville, Canada. He came as the official Lama for fifty Tibetan families sponsored by the graciousness of the Canadian Government. Occasionally I had to take him back there for a visit to his traditional parishioners. We normally stayed at the hectic home of Nurup Rongue, who is the son-in-law of the King and Queen of Kam, Tibet, (The King and Queen of Kam, Tibet look exactly like the King and Queen on a deck of cards).
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| The Tibetan style of the Wheel of Life |
The next part of the Tambolian Map discovery was the unraveling of the Bavachakra (the Wheel of Life), the most obvious symbol of the Buddhist Dharma. There are several renditions of this pictographic visualization the Tibetan Mahayana being the most elaborate. When I first saw this Wheel of Life mandala I was surprised, or possibly intrigued, by the wrathful deity holding the Wheel of Life glaring over the edge with a less than an encouraging expression. I suspect then that going over the edge of this visualization process was going to be a challenge. I spent several years just having a Tanka of Wheel of life around before I decided that what I had read about the stories and symbolism did not make very much sense and that was not the original objective of the symbolism. I suspected that the early Buddhist wanted the symbolism to be useful and helpful and that that criterion got lost over the years. So I decided to apply a mapping strategy I was working on, as a Physics project, and is very fundamental science which simply states – what does an answer look like?
The Bavachakra didn’t look like an answer any more but I suspected the real answer was still hidden in all the visual noise. This is also not an unusual problem in Physics. Once I whittled down the information into simple bites I took it to the local Buddhist scholar, which there was one. He looked at my translation and announced that it was not scholarly. I pointed out that the academic translations were incomprehensible and he agreed that they were but still contended that my work was not scholarly. I then asked him if my translation was understandable and possibly helpful. He said that it was but it was not scholarly. He abandoned his robs a short time later and married one of his students which I thought was astoundingly and wonderfully non scholarly.
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| My interpertation of the Wheel of Life |
The entire process unraveled when I was invited to come to Seattle. I was sponsored there by Dr. Eye, a heart surgeon at Swedish Hospital, and his family who invited me into their home and treated me as family for almost three years. Early on they asked me to do a weekend seminar and explain to them how I had helped their daughter over some complicated emotional problems, she could not manage, and their very professional collogues who could not figure it out either. I told them about remote viewing, visualization pictographs, mantra, trust postures and exercises and several Lama Tales about the funny things that happen to people who have made the life style choices I have made. To me everyone seemed delighted to get this information but the feedback from Mrs. Eyer, who was also the undisputed leader of the clan said, “We didn’t understand a word you said.”
These people were reading A Course in Miracles, out loud, had gone through the book three times in their house over least five years. Had the Nurancha Book, very esoteric, and all of Madam Bolvaski works on their book shelves along with most of the contemporary spiritual material available at the time. They even had the author of the Runes Book as a guest, he was an idiot. I was astounded that they didn’t understand me. Sally, Mrs. Eyer, asked me to choose the simplest topic and make a single seminar out of that topic, which I did – which turned out to be the Tambolian Map visualization.
I spent the next almost sleepless three months figuring out how to do it. It was a wonderful time of creativity, imagination and undisciplined fantasy that any hopeless romantic could have fallen into. The most interesting part was that I hadn’t the remotest clue of what I had figured out. The understanding of what I had done took another fifteen years. First of all I was reluctant to put everything that I knew about the visualization into the pictograph. Actually the next rendering of the Map will have everything I know about it. First off, I figured that I had an interesting Board Game. After playing it for a couple of years I decided I had a reasonably close approximation of the human mind. Then, after a couple more years, I decided that I had figured out not only the conditions of the human mind but an accurate interpretation of the human condition. This was unbelievable insight. Eventually, I decided that the Tambolian Map was actually a map of an enlightened mind and wondered who's mind I had stumbled across.
To be continued.
Note - If you click on the pictures they expand
