Re: Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mu
Posted: Sun Jul 28, 2019 6:44 am
SEVEN
When Rinpoche arrived in Colorado in the fall, his students rented a small cabin for him in the mountains above Boulder, near an old mining town called Gold Hill. It was quite spartan, almost what you would call a stone hut. There was no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse. Rinpoche hadn't lived in a place like this since he'd left Tibet more than ten years ago. People may have thought a Tibetan lama would be more comfortable in a simple mountain setting. This might have been more a reflection of his students' hippie aspirations than an accurate reading of who he was at this point. On the other hand, it was by no. means a hovel, and he told me that he enjoyed himself there. The house was on a beautiful piece of property, with a view of the Continental Divide in the distance. It was owned by a family that had spent years in the foreign service in Asia. This was their summerhouse, which they named Gunung Mas, which is Burmese, I believe.
Before I joined Rinpoche, he moved into a larger house much closer to town. It was still a little ways into the mountains, about a ten-minute drive out of Boulder, in Four Mile Canyon. With the baby coming, he felt that we needed a better house for the family.
Rinpoche was quite proud that he was providing a home for us. Before I got there, John Baker and Marvin Casper took the train from Vermont to Boulder with all our belongings. Everything we owned fit in the allowed baggage on the train. In a phone call with John, I insisted that he take my pet goldfish on the train with him. In some areas, I behaved just like a spoiled teenager in those days. After all, I was barely seventeen. John always swore that he took the fish with him and that it died on the train, but I had my doubts.
When I arrived in Denver, Karl Usow picked me up at the airport in a Volkswagen bus. Karl was a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado; he, along with another professor, John Visvader, had sent the postcard to Scotland inviting Rinpoche to teach at the university. He had a big moustache, and his hair was over his ears, which was actually short for those days.
Colorado was in the heart of the West, with its rough and rugged frontier feeling. I saw people with cowboy hats and boots in the airport while I was waiting to get my luggage. It was certainly a different atmosphere from either the East or the West Coast. Coming to Colorado was the beginning of another whole adventure -- one that would leave a huge mark on our lives.
I was excited to be in Boulder and to have my own house. The new house was a large, two-story, fairly modern structure, what is called a "raised ranch." It was set slightly below the road that wound up the canyon, and Four Mile Creek ran in front of the house. There were poplar trees and evergreens growing around the property. Rinpoche and I had a sitting room and bedroom on the first floor, while John and Marvin lived upstairs. The living room, which was also upstairs, had been transformed into a shrine room where the community gathered to practice meditation.
Rinpoche had designed raised platforms for people to sit on. Several students built the wooden frames to hold single-bed mattresses. The frames were painted orange with gold leafing on them and were raised a few inches off the ground. Then Tibetan carpets were placed on top of the mattresses, and people sat on those. This was before Rinpoche adopted the use of meditation cushions, zafus and zabutons, from the Japanese Zen tradition. Rinpoche often sat and meditated with people in the evening.
By the time I arrived, a substantial scene had developed around Rinpoche in Boulder. Most of these people were not from Colorado. They were arriving from the East and West coasts, as well as from the Midwest. Some people flew in, but in those days, it was more than likely that someone would arrive in an old car with· belongings strapped to the roof. Some people hitchhiked into town. Some took the bus. All of them seemed to converge on our house. There were people there morning, noon, and night.
People would often crash in our sitting, room, which was all right with me if it was just for a night or two. Then one of Rinpoche's students brought his sleeping bag and stayed for a couple of weeks, and then his wife and children arrived and they were all camping out there. Finally I told him that they had to move out and get their own place. This wasn't the only time I felt the need for more privacy and kicked people out. When this happened, people often had very little sympathy for me. They related to me like I was this terrible woman that the guru just happened to be married to. It didn't seem to occur to people that this house was also our home and that there might be boundaries to how much we -- or at least I -- wanted to share the space with people.
In this instance, Rinpoche's student had a complete freak-out. He told me that I had no understanding of Buddhism, that the guru's house was his house too, and that he was always welcome in the guru's house. I told him, "Well, you can think what you want about your religion, but I'm calling the police if you're not out in twenty-four hours." The whole family left, obviously.
Even our bedroom was not always off-limits to people. There was a woman who liked to meditate in the room when we were sleeping. She would sneak in during the night, and when we woke up, she would be there on a cushion meditating in the corner. Rinpoche would lean over in bed and whisper to me, "She's in here again. Get her out of here."
God, those were really the days. It was a wonderful era, though. Anything seemed possible. It was around this time that it dawned on me that Rinpoche was going to create something magnificent. All of us, I think, began to realize that his influence was going to be enormous, on a grand scale. It seemed unstoppable. He was so much vaster than anybody else I have ever met. I began to see Rinpoche as a mahasiddha, someone who outwardly may live an ordinary, secular life but whose every action is an expression of ultimate sanity, or wakefulness, and compassion. I don't even think it had to do with him choosing to live his life this way. The essence of his being was on a different plane than most other human beings, including most of the other Tibetan teachers. There were absolutely no boundaries to his compassion and his desire to present the teachings. His passion and his role in this lifetime were to present Buddhism in the West, and he put up no barriers between himself and others. He didn't keep any little dim corner for himself at all. Many people give of themselves, but almost all of us reserve a pocket of privacy, some part of our personal life that we don't want to share. Rinpoche kept nothing for himself.
People freely flowed through the house. Even though the scene was sometimes crazy and intense, I enjoyed it most of the time, especially in the two months before our child was born. In the evenings, the house would· fill up with people, and I would sometimes cook dinner for everyone. There might be twenty or thirty people for dinner. I would make a big roast or a pot of stew, and we would all sit around and eat together in the kitchen.
During this time, Rinpoche's relationships with people were so immediate and informal that his students had the sense that they· could hang out with him all the time. To some extent that was true. Just before our son was born, one student who was at the house a lot asked to speak privately with Rinpoche, and she was really concerned. She said to him, "Now you're going to have a child, and you're not going to love us anymore." He reassured her that this was not the case.
A group of people who called themselves the Pygmies discovered Rinpoche and started to hang out at the house. They had a commune east of Boulder, and their motto was, "We're bodhisattvas, and we live on East Arapahoe." They were long-haired and unkempt, and they lived in tents most of the year, which wasn't all that unusual for those times. There were a lot of people living pseudo-tribal lifestyles in those days. I don't know how the Pygmies lived in the winter, but they seemed quite cheerful in all kinds of weather. Some of them pitched their tents around the house for a while, as I remember. I became good friends with a number of them.
People indulged in some interesting eccentricities in those days. Marvin Casper, who was living in the house, went through a phase where he didn't like to shower. Marvin had a theory that Westerners bathed too much. Marvin was a bit odd but very lovable. He liked to eat Wheatena and peas with mayonnaise on them. He often didn't wash the bowls he ate out of, putting them back in the cupboard dirty. When I inquired about this, he said that there was no reason to wash his dishes because he was just going to use them again. From this time onward, there were always people living with us who helped Rinpoche with his work. In that era, it was Marvin and John, but it was a lot of different people over the years.
Rinpoche did business at the house, as he had no outside office in those early days. He was making plans to write books, make movies, open meditation. centers. He was writing poetry, writing plays, taking photographs, giving a talk every other night of the week: He was planning to go back and forth from Boulder to Vermont several times a year, and there were requests from people all over the country for him to come and teach. There was endless activity, and he involved his students in every aspect of making and carrying out these plans.
When you think about the raw material that he had, it's quite amazing that he trusted these people -- all of us -- to help him spread the buddhadharma in America. In fact, this was a very important way that he worked with people and trained them. I say that from my own experience. I learned so much from him, from everything he did and. everything we did together. He gave me such confidence about who I was and what I could do. At the same time that he would build you up, he would also call forth the most genuine part of yourself, and he wore down the problematic parts. But he never did this by belittling you. He was very skillful that way. The only problem was that sometimes people lost track of the fact that they still had a lot of work to do on themselves. Living in his world, you sometimes felt that you had accomplished the whole thing on the spot.
From some point of view, you had, but then there's always the path. We all have that to work on.
Rinpoche would give private meditation interviews in a little room on the top floor of the house. Later, it became my son's bedroom. There were two chairs and a side table in the room. Although there were many informal scenes and a lot of hanging out around the house, Rinpoche always stressed the importance of these formal meetings with students, to discuss their meditation practice and their lives. I think that all of his students had private interviews with him during the first few years he taught in America. In the interview situation, at least in terms of my own experience, Rinpoche completely connected with the other person in a way that was frighteningly direct. Anyone who expected the interview to be an extension of the informal space around the house was in for a big surprise. One felt absolutely on the spot. His ability to connect with the deepest part of a person was uncanny.
Rinpoche had several people who helped him schedule his meetings and interviews. I had done a lot of this in Scotland, but in general I was no longer involved once we arrived in the United States. Kesang, Fran, Marvin, and John all helped out, and as more and more people came, Rinpoche asked other students -- new faces in Boulder -- to participate in this way.
Many people who came for interviews were members of the Buddhist community that was forming in Boulder. Others were spiritual seekers passing through town or students of other teachers who had heard about the Tibetan in the mountains outside of Boulder. Two long-haired American Hindu guys, Krishna and Narayana, came for interviews during this period. They were close students of Swami Satchidananda in Los Angeles, although originally they were from the East Coast. After Narayana's initial interview, he wrote to Rinpoche,
You never knew in those days who someone might become. Years later, in 1976, Rinpoche would appoint Narayana (also known as Thomas Rich) as his Vajra Regent, his dharma heir. Long-haired Hindus might transform into Buddhist businessmen; hippie girls might become university professors.
For many of those meeting Rinpoche for the first time, their initial interview brought a shocking realization, not unlike what Narayana described. Many, many people felt drawn to him in a way they could not explain. During these early years, he was gathering many heart disciples, people with a deep karmic connection who would remain with him throughout his life. They somehow found their way to him and he to them. It was an amazing process, an amazing time.
It was not, however, an overly solemn period. Rinpoche remained impish and always ready for a good joke. Bhagwan Dass, an American who fashioned himself as a Hindu yogi or sadhu, showed up at the house one day. He had spent a long time in India with Ram Dass, also known as Richard Alpert, the Harvard professor who was converted by psychedelic experiences to the life of a Hindu sannyasin and who wrote the classic Be Here Now. (At this time, we had not yet met Ram Dass.) I was sitting in the kitchen at Four Mile Canyon, and in walked Bhagwan Dass, this tall person with unbelievably long matted hair, dressed entirely in white. He said to me, "Where's the guru? I want to meet the guru. I have an interview with the guru."
I said, "Well, he's upstairs."
He responded, "I was just up there, and that fellow sent me back down here."
I asked him, "Did he, by any chance, have suspenders and a shirt on?"
"Yes," he said. I suggested that he go back up there. Apparently he had wandered upstairs and asked Rinpoche "Where's. the guru?" and Rinpoche had replied, "I don't know."
In addition to all the other activities at the house, we sometimes had parties, some of which got pretty wild. I think that Rinpoche found it interesting to. socialize with people in this way. During this period, Rinpoche was on a steep learning curve. It was often a wild ride for him and everyone else. He liked to get right out on the edge with people and see what would happen. It was a very creative space for him. I think he regarded it as a kind of research. Although the whole scene may sometimes have seemed merely chaotic and totally unplanned, Rinpoche was not just hanging out with people in a random fashion. As he said later,
Rinpoche also saw himself as part of the experiment, as part of what was being worked on. Throughout this whole period, what I think drove much of the activity was a kind of electric passion or connection between Rinpoche and his students.
Soon after I arrived in Boulder, in February of 1971, there was a party to celebrate Rinpoche's birthday. Rinpoche wore his black high-necked chuba, which had gold piping on the collar and Tibetan buttons. He looked quite handsome in it. There was a snowstorm that night, and people came in and left their jackets and boots on the floor just outside the kitchen. At some point in the evening, Rinpoche was in the kitchen showing off all the gadgets we had. He was very proud of the sprayer th-at was attached to the sink. It was on a long flexible black pipe that pulled out of the sink, and we used it to spray the dishes and clean the sink. He said, "Look, I have all these modern conveniences for my family now."
I was a few weeks away from giving birth, so I went to bed quite early. Apparently, a while later, Rinpoche turned on the water in the sink and starting experimenting with the sprayer. He started with cups and glasses on the counter; then he moved on to the people around him in the kitchen. First, it was just a playful burst of water that caught someone on the shoulder, then someone else in the face. Then, he turned the water on full force and began directing the. sprayer at everything within his reach. By the end, everybody's coats and boots were soaked from all the water, which spread out across the kitchen floor into the entryway. Finally, Rinpoche himself became a victim of his own prank. As the floor became slippery, he fell down in a puddle at his feet, which delighted him as much as anything else.
Although I missed most of the action that evening, I was certainly privy to similar occasions throughout the years. Sometimes these situations would remind me of the scenes in movies that turn into food fights or brawls. There's something both repulsive and attractive about those scenes. I remember a movie where a man and woman start feeding each other food out of the refrigerator, and they end up on the floor in front of the icebox, with their clothes off smearing food on one another's bodies. Most of us are willing voyeurs for such an outrageous scene in a film, but we are less ready to pursue such activities in real life. Yet there's a kind of longing for that freedom. Rinpoche had an amazing ability to take an individual or an entire group of people into those spaces, and not just as an opportunity to indulge in some fantasy. There was a way in which he invited you to unleash who you really are -- and then to see the utter transparency and ordinariness of that. It didn't have to be as literal or crude as a water fight -- although it could be. But it might also be inviting you to compose poetry with him, or cooking dinner for him, or just what you felt from a touch of his hand on your shoulder. It could be funny or very sad. It was like going through a mirror into your own mind.
When I arrived in Boulder, Rinpoche was lecturing several nights a week at the Wesley Foundation, a church on Twenty-Eighth Street and Folsom. His evening talks were in addition to classes that he was teaching once or twice a week at the University of Colorado. About a hundred people would usually attend the evening talks, although the crowd grew as the weeks went on. Around this time, some students rented a house, where. a number of them lived. It had a little shrine hall in the garage, and many people started practicing there, instead of in our living room. Rinpoche did a shrine blessing there and named the house Anitya Bhavan, "house of impermanence." I think he knew the scene was going to quickly outgrow that space.
Indeed, the scene was growing exponentially, new people arriving every week from all parts of the United States. Before and after his talks, there would be people milling around outside the hall where the lectures took place. On the one hand, Rinpoche wanted people to meditate before his talks began, but on the other hand, he and his students were building a Buddhist culture. I think he knew that this social scene was an important part of building that world. Also, he did not want to always be at the center of the scene. He talked about the importance of a teacher being slightly eccentric, in the sense of off center, saying that an overly centralized situation would not encourage the students to develop their own strength and understanding.
After some period of hanging out, people would slowly filter into the room and find a place to sit on the floor. Finally, Rinpoche would arrive and slowly make his way along the. edge of the audience to the stage. The Wesley Foundation was a modern building, and it had two walls of stained glass, which met at an angle in the middle. From the outside, this looked something like a bird's open beak. Inside, Rinpoche sat in front of the walls of stained glass.
Many of these talks were incorporated into his first genuinely American book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which was published in 1973. I was so impressed by how spacious yet charged the atmosphere was at these talks and how delighted and relaxed Rinpoche seemed to be. There was a sense that he had really arrived. He was home. After the main part of the talk, there was always a long question-and-answer period, and many of the exchanges were both brilliant and intimate. There was still the occasional off-the-wall question, usually from a newcomer, about whether the Tibetans were related to the people who built Stonehenge, or something like that. By and large, however, students were sharpening and focusing their minds, and the discussions that took place were part of that process of developing intellect. People may have looked a bit ragged at that time, but you could tell that they were jewels in the rough. All of this was going on during the last two months of my pregnancy. In fact, Rinpoche gave a talk the night before I gave birth, and he gave another in this series just a few days after our son was born.
To prepare for the birth of our child, just like any other young couple, Rinpoche and I went to Denver together to take birthing classes. Rinpoche was very supportive and involved. He came to almost all the classes. We had decided that we wanted to use natural childbirth, which was a relatively new, progressive trend in those days. Dr. Robert Bradley, who founded the Bradley method of natural childbirth, was in Denver, so we signed up for his course. Dr. Bradley preached that childbirth should be painless. He said that if you had the proper training, you wouldn't have any pain at all. Rinpoche and I were convinced that this must be true.
My son was due at the end of February, but he came almost two weeks late. On the night of March 8, Rinpoche returned after giving a lecture at the Wesley Foundation, and we both went to bed. I was awakened by pain, and after lying in bed awake for some time, I woke Rinpoche up and I said, "There's something wrong with me. I'm having a lot of pains. Do you think I'm in labor?" He responded, "Oh no, Dr. Bradley said that childbirth isn't painful. I'm sure it will pass." I sat up for a while waiting for the pains to subside, but in fact they were growing more and more intense. For some reason, we were convinced that I wasn't in labor. We were both so naive about this, Rinpoche with his monastic background and me with my alienated English upbringing. Finally, I got into a hot bath, which I thought might alleviate the pain. I never drank at this point in my life, but I had a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker that night, hoping it might help.
Very early in the morning, around six o'clock, I went upstairs to John Baker's room and knocked on his door. I said, "John, I think there's something wrong with me. I think something's terribly the matter." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well I'm getting these pains, and they're coming every five minutes." Within three minutes, I would say, he was up and had his clothes on and the car keys in his hand, and he told me, "Okay, we're going to the hospital." He drove me as fast as he could to Dr. Bradley's office in Denver. I was already six centimeters dilated at that point. They took me over to Porter Memorial Hospital, which was a Seventh-day Adventist hospital, and put me in the labor room there. After John got me checked in, he phoned the house and asked someone to bring Rinpoche down right away.
While I was lying there alone, I remember feeling quite afraid. During the latter phases of my pregnancy, it had been haunting me that I had no idea what to do with a baby. There was a forty-year-old woman in one of my childbirth classes who was having her fifth child. I asked her, "What do you do with a baby?" She answered, "Oh, you just change them when they're dirty, feed them when they're hungry, and hold them when they cry."
I was somewhat overwhelmed by the prospect of motherhood. I was so young and I had no helpful reference points from my past to prepare me for motherhood. I had never been around infants, and the only sort of mothering I'd known was my own mother's. I knew that I didn't want to repeat what she'd done. I was afraid that I would be an inadequate parent. There were very few women who had children in the Buddhist sangha at that time, so I didn't know who to turn to. All those anxieties came up as I was lying there alone in labor.
When Rinpoche arrived, I was well into transition. Dr. Bradley soon came into the room. When I was ten centimeters dilated, I wanted to push the baby out, and I felt that the best way. to do this was to put my feet up on the end of the bed and push. Dr. Bradley told me that this was not the proper thing to do. He said that I should squat down and grab my knees and push the baby out in that position. He had been studying how some aboriginal tribes gave birth, I think. I tried to do this, but I felt that I couldn't get any leverage. He stood there in the room and wouldn't let me do what I wanted. This must have gone on for an hour and 'a half. Finally, he stepped out, at which point, I immediately climbed back onto the bed, put my feet up against the end of the bed and pushed. The baby crowned, I was taken to the delivery room, and my son was born shortly thereafter.
Rinpoche was surprised that our first child was a son. There's a rather chauvinistic Tibetan tradition that if a lama marries and the first child is a daughter, this proves that he made a mistake in disrobing. If the first child is a son, it was the right decision. Rinpoche was convinced we were having a daughter. He didn't think our marriage was a mistake, but he didn't expect to get any breaks, as far as these beliefs were concerned. We hadn't even picked out a name for a boy. We were going to call our daughter Dechen, which means "Great Bliss." However, Rinpoche quickly came up with a name for our son. At Rinpoche's suggestion, we named him Tagtrug, which means "tiger cub." The next week, Rinpoche wrote to the Dalai Lama and asked His Holiness for a name for our son. The Dalai Lama named him Tendzin Lhawang, which means "holder of the teachings, divine Lord." So his legal name was Tendzin Lhawang Tagtrug David Mukpo. We called him simply Taggie.
Taggie was born around seven in the evening. He was quite gray when he came out, and I wondered if that was because it took so long to push him out. After the birth, Dr. Bradley -- who was very interested in Rinpoche because he was a Tibetan lama -- wanted to talk to him about reincarnation, but Rinpoche wouldn't engage in the conversation. He felt that the doctor had mistreated me, and he was not enchanted with his personality.
A while later, the nurses took Taggie to the nursery. At that time, they didn't let the baby stay in the room with the mother that much. Then, at some point, Rinpoche went home so that I could get some rest. In the middle of the night, they brought Taggie to me, to nurse. I remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of this child. I picked up the telephone to call Rinpoche to tell him how wonderful our child was. Rinpoche told me that he too was very excited about the birth of our son, and he read me a poem he'd written that night:
While we were on the phone, the nurse came running in and took Taggie away from me. She said that I couldn't be on the phone when the baby was in the room. She said he could pick up bacteria from the telephone. This was ridiculous, but I didn't know enough at the time to argue with her. I went to sleep missing my child. The next morning I got up and went to look at Taggie in the nursery. I felt such a maternal instinct that I decided I wanted to take him home immediately. I phoned Rinpoche and John and asked them to pick me up. When they arrived, I discharged myself from the hospital, and we took Taggie home.
Back at Four Mile Canyon, the situation was chaotic. Sam Bercholz was there visiting from California, and Kesang and other people were in the kitchen. They popped open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the birth of the baby. Unfortunately, the cork almost hit him in the head. After a little while, I decided to retire with Taggie to the bedroom.
Rinpoche was having more and more intense sessions with his students in the evenings. While earlier I would have joined him in these sessions, as my pregnancy advanced, my interest in the group scene decreased, especially late at night. Now, with my newborn son, I had less than no interest. This particularly didn't seem like the night for it, as far as I was concerned. I would have liked to have time alone with Rinpoche and the baby, and I felt incredibly invaded with all the people in the house. These scenes continued almost every night after Taggie and I came home. I found that I couldn't get enough sleep because there was so much noise. The baby was being woken up many extra times a night.
A few nights after Taggie was born, Rinpoche was sitting around the kitchen table with some students listening to reel-to-reel tapes of his talks, which they were discussing. At this time Sam Bercholz had already been talking with Rinpoche about editing his talks into a book, and Rinpoche and some of his close students were starting to go through the talks to determine what material might work in a book. The volume on the tape recorder was turned up quite loud, and they weren't being very quiet themselves. I couldn't sleep and I kept going in and saying, "Please try to be a little bit quieter. Please try to be quieter." It would quiet down a little bit, but then it would start up again. Finally, I marched into the room and snapped the tape reel in two with my bare hands. That put an end to it, at least for that night.
There were many times that I would complain to Rinpoche that I wanted more time alone with him. He would say to me, "Don't you like people?" And I would answer him, "Well, yes, I like people, but not as much as you do." When I complained to him that we didn't have enough time together, he would say to me, "Do you want to have a suburb-ian marriage? That would be terrible!" Well, there was no chance of that.
Sometimes during this era I would take drastic measures to get time with him. On Easter Sunday, I announced to everyone at the house that I had prepared an egg-hunt in the yard, and they all went outside to look for the eggs. Then I locked the doors and the windows, so that no one could get back in. Rinpoche asked me what was going on, and I just said, "Now you're mine!"
To me, one particular occasion marks the change in my life that came with the birth of my first child. When Taggie was only two weeks old, Rinpoche left for several days to investigate buying a piece of land in the mountains above Fort Collins. Before this, I almost always accompanied him when he traveled, and it was quite a shock when I realized that I was going to stay behind. Rinpoche would have welcomed my company, but tramping around in the snow in the Rocky Mountains in March with an infant made no sense. So I decided to stay home with Taggie. However, I felt abandoned and somewhat afraid of being home alone with the baby. When Rinpoche left, I was crying, sobbing actually. The house had been full of people ever since I'd arrived in Boulder. Now, for the first time, it was empty. A few people came by to visit and help out, but I was alone most of the time.
When Rinpoche came back, he said, "We're going to buy some land," and he was really happy about it. I was really happy to see him. I had no idea how significant it was that Rinpoche had located this land. The land he had discovered became the future home of the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, now renamed Shambhala Mountain Center. In his mind, establishing a rural practice center in Colorado was a crucial step. He wanted a place in the western United States, similar to Tail of the Tiger in the east, where he could teach intensive seminars outside of the speed and confusion of the city. He also wanted a center with a lot of land where his students could do intensive group practice as well as solitary retreats. Later, he talked about the establishment of Rocky Mountain Dharma Center as the key to making meditation the foundation of his students' experience.
Rinpoche had great faith in the students from those early days. He always saw their workability. He invited the Pygmies to move to RMDC and help settle the land, because he could see their strength and their resilience. They were used to difficult living situations without many amenities, so they took to the land quite easily. They built a number of houses there, some of them quite strange, idiosyncratic constructions that are still there. They weren't great meditators at that time, but many of them have become so. In part, this is because he believed in them. He saw so much potential in everyone.
Finding the land for RMDC in my mind marks the end of our first year in North America, the first of seventeen years we spent together on this continent. In 1969, while still in England, Rinpoche wrote a poem, "In the North of the Sky," that expresses what coming to America was all about for him. As he said about himself there, "Here comes Chogyam disguised as a hailstorm."
Indeed, our first year in America was a whirlwind; a kind of spiritual storm that was gathering energy as it moved across the country. Like so many things I experienced in my life with him, it was a time that was both magnificent and sometimes lonely. I felt part of his world, absolutely, but I also had to begin to come to terms with my life separate from him. It was not always easy to be the guru's wife. But I must say, it was rarely boring.
When Rinpoche arrived in Colorado in the fall, his students rented a small cabin for him in the mountains above Boulder, near an old mining town called Gold Hill. It was quite spartan, almost what you would call a stone hut. There was no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse. Rinpoche hadn't lived in a place like this since he'd left Tibet more than ten years ago. People may have thought a Tibetan lama would be more comfortable in a simple mountain setting. This might have been more a reflection of his students' hippie aspirations than an accurate reading of who he was at this point. On the other hand, it was by no. means a hovel, and he told me that he enjoyed himself there. The house was on a beautiful piece of property, with a view of the Continental Divide in the distance. It was owned by a family that had spent years in the foreign service in Asia. This was their summerhouse, which they named Gunung Mas, which is Burmese, I believe.
Before I joined Rinpoche, he moved into a larger house much closer to town. It was still a little ways into the mountains, about a ten-minute drive out of Boulder, in Four Mile Canyon. With the baby coming, he felt that we needed a better house for the family.
Rinpoche was quite proud that he was providing a home for us. Before I got there, John Baker and Marvin Casper took the train from Vermont to Boulder with all our belongings. Everything we owned fit in the allowed baggage on the train. In a phone call with John, I insisted that he take my pet goldfish on the train with him. In some areas, I behaved just like a spoiled teenager in those days. After all, I was barely seventeen. John always swore that he took the fish with him and that it died on the train, but I had my doubts.
When I arrived in Denver, Karl Usow picked me up at the airport in a Volkswagen bus. Karl was a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado; he, along with another professor, John Visvader, had sent the postcard to Scotland inviting Rinpoche to teach at the university. He had a big moustache, and his hair was over his ears, which was actually short for those days.
Colorado was in the heart of the West, with its rough and rugged frontier feeling. I saw people with cowboy hats and boots in the airport while I was waiting to get my luggage. It was certainly a different atmosphere from either the East or the West Coast. Coming to Colorado was the beginning of another whole adventure -- one that would leave a huge mark on our lives.
I was excited to be in Boulder and to have my own house. The new house was a large, two-story, fairly modern structure, what is called a "raised ranch." It was set slightly below the road that wound up the canyon, and Four Mile Creek ran in front of the house. There were poplar trees and evergreens growing around the property. Rinpoche and I had a sitting room and bedroom on the first floor, while John and Marvin lived upstairs. The living room, which was also upstairs, had been transformed into a shrine room where the community gathered to practice meditation.
Rinpoche had designed raised platforms for people to sit on. Several students built the wooden frames to hold single-bed mattresses. The frames were painted orange with gold leafing on them and were raised a few inches off the ground. Then Tibetan carpets were placed on top of the mattresses, and people sat on those. This was before Rinpoche adopted the use of meditation cushions, zafus and zabutons, from the Japanese Zen tradition. Rinpoche often sat and meditated with people in the evening.
By the time I arrived, a substantial scene had developed around Rinpoche in Boulder. Most of these people were not from Colorado. They were arriving from the East and West coasts, as well as from the Midwest. Some people flew in, but in those days, it was more than likely that someone would arrive in an old car with· belongings strapped to the roof. Some people hitchhiked into town. Some took the bus. All of them seemed to converge on our house. There were people there morning, noon, and night.
People would often crash in our sitting, room, which was all right with me if it was just for a night or two. Then one of Rinpoche's students brought his sleeping bag and stayed for a couple of weeks, and then his wife and children arrived and they were all camping out there. Finally I told him that they had to move out and get their own place. This wasn't the only time I felt the need for more privacy and kicked people out. When this happened, people often had very little sympathy for me. They related to me like I was this terrible woman that the guru just happened to be married to. It didn't seem to occur to people that this house was also our home and that there might be boundaries to how much we -- or at least I -- wanted to share the space with people.
In this instance, Rinpoche's student had a complete freak-out. He told me that I had no understanding of Buddhism, that the guru's house was his house too, and that he was always welcome in the guru's house. I told him, "Well, you can think what you want about your religion, but I'm calling the police if you're not out in twenty-four hours." The whole family left, obviously.
Even our bedroom was not always off-limits to people. There was a woman who liked to meditate in the room when we were sleeping. She would sneak in during the night, and when we woke up, she would be there on a cushion meditating in the corner. Rinpoche would lean over in bed and whisper to me, "She's in here again. Get her out of here."
God, those were really the days. It was a wonderful era, though. Anything seemed possible. It was around this time that it dawned on me that Rinpoche was going to create something magnificent. All of us, I think, began to realize that his influence was going to be enormous, on a grand scale. It seemed unstoppable. He was so much vaster than anybody else I have ever met. I began to see Rinpoche as a mahasiddha, someone who outwardly may live an ordinary, secular life but whose every action is an expression of ultimate sanity, or wakefulness, and compassion. I don't even think it had to do with him choosing to live his life this way. The essence of his being was on a different plane than most other human beings, including most of the other Tibetan teachers. There were absolutely no boundaries to his compassion and his desire to present the teachings. His passion and his role in this lifetime were to present Buddhism in the West, and he put up no barriers between himself and others. He didn't keep any little dim corner for himself at all. Many people give of themselves, but almost all of us reserve a pocket of privacy, some part of our personal life that we don't want to share. Rinpoche kept nothing for himself.
People freely flowed through the house. Even though the scene was sometimes crazy and intense, I enjoyed it most of the time, especially in the two months before our child was born. In the evenings, the house would· fill up with people, and I would sometimes cook dinner for everyone. There might be twenty or thirty people for dinner. I would make a big roast or a pot of stew, and we would all sit around and eat together in the kitchen.
During this time, Rinpoche's relationships with people were so immediate and informal that his students had the sense that they· could hang out with him all the time. To some extent that was true. Just before our son was born, one student who was at the house a lot asked to speak privately with Rinpoche, and she was really concerned. She said to him, "Now you're going to have a child, and you're not going to love us anymore." He reassured her that this was not the case.
A group of people who called themselves the Pygmies discovered Rinpoche and started to hang out at the house. They had a commune east of Boulder, and their motto was, "We're bodhisattvas, and we live on East Arapahoe." They were long-haired and unkempt, and they lived in tents most of the year, which wasn't all that unusual for those times. There were a lot of people living pseudo-tribal lifestyles in those days. I don't know how the Pygmies lived in the winter, but they seemed quite cheerful in all kinds of weather. Some of them pitched their tents around the house for a while, as I remember. I became good friends with a number of them.
People indulged in some interesting eccentricities in those days. Marvin Casper, who was living in the house, went through a phase where he didn't like to shower. Marvin had a theory that Westerners bathed too much. Marvin was a bit odd but very lovable. He liked to eat Wheatena and peas with mayonnaise on them. He often didn't wash the bowls he ate out of, putting them back in the cupboard dirty. When I inquired about this, he said that there was no reason to wash his dishes because he was just going to use them again. From this time onward, there were always people living with us who helped Rinpoche with his work. In that era, it was Marvin and John, but it was a lot of different people over the years.
Rinpoche did business at the house, as he had no outside office in those early days. He was making plans to write books, make movies, open meditation. centers. He was writing poetry, writing plays, taking photographs, giving a talk every other night of the week: He was planning to go back and forth from Boulder to Vermont several times a year, and there were requests from people all over the country for him to come and teach. There was endless activity, and he involved his students in every aspect of making and carrying out these plans.
When you think about the raw material that he had, it's quite amazing that he trusted these people -- all of us -- to help him spread the buddhadharma in America. In fact, this was a very important way that he worked with people and trained them. I say that from my own experience. I learned so much from him, from everything he did and. everything we did together. He gave me such confidence about who I was and what I could do. At the same time that he would build you up, he would also call forth the most genuine part of yourself, and he wore down the problematic parts. But he never did this by belittling you. He was very skillful that way. The only problem was that sometimes people lost track of the fact that they still had a lot of work to do on themselves. Living in his world, you sometimes felt that you had accomplished the whole thing on the spot.
If you mean impromptu drama then that means to make it up on the spot. (https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_makin ... ama_called)
He doesn't know what he is going to say and is trying to make it up on the spot. (https://books.google.com/books?id=QtmGS ... 22&f=false)
Was the meaning there all along or did they make it up on the spot? (https://books.google.com/books?id=vPI7x ... 22&f=false)
When you find yourself in that situation, you will make it up on the spot (https://books.google.com/books?id=TFXm2 ... 22&f=false)
Mammon was a god before Jesus' sermon in which he didn't make it up on the spot. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMammon)
Do you really just make it up on the spot? (https://www.activemelody.com/improvisin ... -its-done/)
Movement can also be improvised, meaning that the dancers make it up "on the spot" (https://www.elementsofdance.org/action.html)
If you don't know an answer, a fact, a statistic, then … make it up on the spot. (https://www.activistfacts.com/person/3370-paul-watson/)
From some point of view, you had, but then there's always the path. We all have that to work on.
Rinpoche would give private meditation interviews in a little room on the top floor of the house. Later, it became my son's bedroom. There were two chairs and a side table in the room. Although there were many informal scenes and a lot of hanging out around the house, Rinpoche always stressed the importance of these formal meetings with students, to discuss their meditation practice and their lives. I think that all of his students had private interviews with him during the first few years he taught in America. In the interview situation, at least in terms of my own experience, Rinpoche completely connected with the other person in a way that was frighteningly direct. Anyone who expected the interview to be an extension of the informal space around the house was in for a big surprise. One felt absolutely on the spot. His ability to connect with the deepest part of a person was uncanny.
Rinpoche had several people who helped him schedule his meetings and interviews. I had done a lot of this in Scotland, but in general I was no longer involved once we arrived in the United States. Kesang, Fran, Marvin, and John all helped out, and as more and more people came, Rinpoche asked other students -- new faces in Boulder -- to participate in this way.
Many people who came for interviews were members of the Buddhist community that was forming in Boulder. Others were spiritual seekers passing through town or students of other teachers who had heard about the Tibetan in the mountains outside of Boulder. Two long-haired American Hindu guys, Krishna and Narayana, came for interviews during this period. They were close students of Swami Satchidananda in Los Angeles, although originally they were from the East Coast. After Narayana's initial interview, he wrote to Rinpoche,
I have met many saints and teachers, but only one had the ability to change my state· to a noticeable degree just through darshan [being in the teacher's presence]. Swami Satchidananda was the one, but now you are the other. I am telling you this because I realize that it was a significant encounter and one that may have bearing on how I approach life and spirituality.1
You never knew in those days who someone might become. Years later, in 1976, Rinpoche would appoint Narayana (also known as Thomas Rich) as his Vajra Regent, his dharma heir. Long-haired Hindus might transform into Buddhist businessmen; hippie girls might become university professors.
For many of those meeting Rinpoche for the first time, their initial interview brought a shocking realization, not unlike what Narayana described. Many, many people felt drawn to him in a way they could not explain. During these early years, he was gathering many heart disciples, people with a deep karmic connection who would remain with him throughout his life. They somehow found their way to him and he to them. It was an amazing process, an amazing time.
It was not, however, an overly solemn period. Rinpoche remained impish and always ready for a good joke. Bhagwan Dass, an American who fashioned himself as a Hindu yogi or sadhu, showed up at the house one day. He had spent a long time in India with Ram Dass, also known as Richard Alpert, the Harvard professor who was converted by psychedelic experiences to the life of a Hindu sannyasin and who wrote the classic Be Here Now. (At this time, we had not yet met Ram Dass.) I was sitting in the kitchen at Four Mile Canyon, and in walked Bhagwan Dass, this tall person with unbelievably long matted hair, dressed entirely in white. He said to me, "Where's the guru? I want to meet the guru. I have an interview with the guru."
I said, "Well, he's upstairs."
He responded, "I was just up there, and that fellow sent me back down here."
I asked him, "Did he, by any chance, have suspenders and a shirt on?"
"Yes," he said. I suggested that he go back up there. Apparently he had wandered upstairs and asked Rinpoche "Where's. the guru?" and Rinpoche had replied, "I don't know."
In addition to all the other activities at the house, we sometimes had parties, some of which got pretty wild. I think that Rinpoche found it interesting to. socialize with people in this way. During this period, Rinpoche was on a steep learning curve. It was often a wild ride for him and everyone else. He liked to get right out on the edge with people and see what would happen. It was a very creative space for him. I think he regarded it as a kind of research. Although the whole scene may sometimes have seemed merely chaotic and totally unplanned, Rinpoche was not just hanging out with people in a random fashion. As he said later,
On my arrival in the United States of America, I was met by lots of psychologists and students of psychology; ex-Hindus, ex-Christians and ex-Americans of all kinds .... At the beginning, when I first arrived in the U.S.A., I was trying to find students' so-called trips and trying to push a little bit of salt and pepper into their lives and see how they handled that. They handled that little dash of salt and pepper okay. They understood it, but they would still maintain their particular trips. So then I put more of a dash of salt and pepper into their lives and further. spice ... experimenting with how to bring up so-called American students. It's quite interesting, almost scientific. You bring up your rat in your cage and you feed it with corn or rice or oats and you give it a little bit of drugs and maybe occasionally you inject it and see how it reacts, how it works with it. I'm sorry, maybe this is not the best way of describing this -- but it was some kind of experimentation as to how those particular animals called Americans and this particular animal called a Tibetan Buddhist can actually work together. And it worked fine; it worked beautifully.2
Rinpoche also saw himself as part of the experiment, as part of what was being worked on. Throughout this whole period, what I think drove much of the activity was a kind of electric passion or connection between Rinpoche and his students.
Soon after I arrived in Boulder, in February of 1971, there was a party to celebrate Rinpoche's birthday. Rinpoche wore his black high-necked chuba, which had gold piping on the collar and Tibetan buttons. He looked quite handsome in it. There was a snowstorm that night, and people came in and left their jackets and boots on the floor just outside the kitchen. At some point in the evening, Rinpoche was in the kitchen showing off all the gadgets we had. He was very proud of the sprayer th-at was attached to the sink. It was on a long flexible black pipe that pulled out of the sink, and we used it to spray the dishes and clean the sink. He said, "Look, I have all these modern conveniences for my family now."
I was a few weeks away from giving birth, so I went to bed quite early. Apparently, a while later, Rinpoche turned on the water in the sink and starting experimenting with the sprayer. He started with cups and glasses on the counter; then he moved on to the people around him in the kitchen. First, it was just a playful burst of water that caught someone on the shoulder, then someone else in the face. Then, he turned the water on full force and began directing the. sprayer at everything within his reach. By the end, everybody's coats and boots were soaked from all the water, which spread out across the kitchen floor into the entryway. Finally, Rinpoche himself became a victim of his own prank. As the floor became slippery, he fell down in a puddle at his feet, which delighted him as much as anything else.
Although I missed most of the action that evening, I was certainly privy to similar occasions throughout the years. Sometimes these situations would remind me of the scenes in movies that turn into food fights or brawls. There's something both repulsive and attractive about those scenes. I remember a movie where a man and woman start feeding each other food out of the refrigerator, and they end up on the floor in front of the icebox, with their clothes off smearing food on one another's bodies. Most of us are willing voyeurs for such an outrageous scene in a film, but we are less ready to pursue such activities in real life. Yet there's a kind of longing for that freedom. Rinpoche had an amazing ability to take an individual or an entire group of people into those spaces, and not just as an opportunity to indulge in some fantasy. There was a way in which he invited you to unleash who you really are -- and then to see the utter transparency and ordinariness of that. It didn't have to be as literal or crude as a water fight -- although it could be. But it might also be inviting you to compose poetry with him, or cooking dinner for him, or just what you felt from a touch of his hand on your shoulder. It could be funny or very sad. It was like going through a mirror into your own mind.
When I arrived in Boulder, Rinpoche was lecturing several nights a week at the Wesley Foundation, a church on Twenty-Eighth Street and Folsom. His evening talks were in addition to classes that he was teaching once or twice a week at the University of Colorado. About a hundred people would usually attend the evening talks, although the crowd grew as the weeks went on. Around this time, some students rented a house, where. a number of them lived. It had a little shrine hall in the garage, and many people started practicing there, instead of in our living room. Rinpoche did a shrine blessing there and named the house Anitya Bhavan, "house of impermanence." I think he knew the scene was going to quickly outgrow that space.
Indeed, the scene was growing exponentially, new people arriving every week from all parts of the United States. Before and after his talks, there would be people milling around outside the hall where the lectures took place. On the one hand, Rinpoche wanted people to meditate before his talks began, but on the other hand, he and his students were building a Buddhist culture. I think he knew that this social scene was an important part of building that world. Also, he did not want to always be at the center of the scene. He talked about the importance of a teacher being slightly eccentric, in the sense of off center, saying that an overly centralized situation would not encourage the students to develop their own strength and understanding.
After some period of hanging out, people would slowly filter into the room and find a place to sit on the floor. Finally, Rinpoche would arrive and slowly make his way along the. edge of the audience to the stage. The Wesley Foundation was a modern building, and it had two walls of stained glass, which met at an angle in the middle. From the outside, this looked something like a bird's open beak. Inside, Rinpoche sat in front of the walls of stained glass.
Many of these talks were incorporated into his first genuinely American book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which was published in 1973. I was so impressed by how spacious yet charged the atmosphere was at these talks and how delighted and relaxed Rinpoche seemed to be. There was a sense that he had really arrived. He was home. After the main part of the talk, there was always a long question-and-answer period, and many of the exchanges were both brilliant and intimate. There was still the occasional off-the-wall question, usually from a newcomer, about whether the Tibetans were related to the people who built Stonehenge, or something like that. By and large, however, students were sharpening and focusing their minds, and the discussions that took place were part of that process of developing intellect. People may have looked a bit ragged at that time, but you could tell that they were jewels in the rough. All of this was going on during the last two months of my pregnancy. In fact, Rinpoche gave a talk the night before I gave birth, and he gave another in this series just a few days after our son was born.
To prepare for the birth of our child, just like any other young couple, Rinpoche and I went to Denver together to take birthing classes. Rinpoche was very supportive and involved. He came to almost all the classes. We had decided that we wanted to use natural childbirth, which was a relatively new, progressive trend in those days. Dr. Robert Bradley, who founded the Bradley method of natural childbirth, was in Denver, so we signed up for his course. Dr. Bradley preached that childbirth should be painless. He said that if you had the proper training, you wouldn't have any pain at all. Rinpoche and I were convinced that this must be true.
My son was due at the end of February, but he came almost two weeks late. On the night of March 8, Rinpoche returned after giving a lecture at the Wesley Foundation, and we both went to bed. I was awakened by pain, and after lying in bed awake for some time, I woke Rinpoche up and I said, "There's something wrong with me. I'm having a lot of pains. Do you think I'm in labor?" He responded, "Oh no, Dr. Bradley said that childbirth isn't painful. I'm sure it will pass." I sat up for a while waiting for the pains to subside, but in fact they were growing more and more intense. For some reason, we were convinced that I wasn't in labor. We were both so naive about this, Rinpoche with his monastic background and me with my alienated English upbringing. Finally, I got into a hot bath, which I thought might alleviate the pain. I never drank at this point in my life, but I had a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker that night, hoping it might help.
Very early in the morning, around six o'clock, I went upstairs to John Baker's room and knocked on his door. I said, "John, I think there's something wrong with me. I think something's terribly the matter." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well I'm getting these pains, and they're coming every five minutes." Within three minutes, I would say, he was up and had his clothes on and the car keys in his hand, and he told me, "Okay, we're going to the hospital." He drove me as fast as he could to Dr. Bradley's office in Denver. I was already six centimeters dilated at that point. They took me over to Porter Memorial Hospital, which was a Seventh-day Adventist hospital, and put me in the labor room there. After John got me checked in, he phoned the house and asked someone to bring Rinpoche down right away.
Stephen Butterfield, a former student, recounted in a memoir:Tenzin offered to explain his behavior at a meeting which I attended. Like all of his talks, this was considered a teaching of dharma, and donations were solicited and expected. So I paid him $35.00 to hear his explanation. In response to close questioning by students, he first swore us to secrecy (family secrets again), and then said that Trungpa had requested him to be tested for HIV in the early 1980s and told him to keep quiet about the positive result. Tendzin had asked Trungpa what he should do if students wanted to have sex with him, and Trungpa's reply was that as long as he did his Vajrayana purification practices, it did not matter, because they would not get the disease. Tendzin's answer, in short, was that he had obeyed the guru.[21]
-- Osel Tendzin [Thomas Rich], by Wikipedia
For about half a year in 1980, I went to live in Rajpur, across the street from Sakya Trinzin. I asked him for teachings on my meditation practice and he convinced me he had a vision of him and me yab yum and that it was important for him to act on it with me. Not only was it the most pathetic sex act of my entire life, it was such a total farce. It was about as enlightening as a mosquito bite, less even, if that's possible. And when it seemed impossible that he could get beyond his Ganesh sized belly to have sex, I offered him oral gratification. He was worried that would get me pregnant.
-- Randy Sogyal Rinpoche, Best-Selling Lecher, The Writings of Am Learning
While I was lying there alone, I remember feeling quite afraid. During the latter phases of my pregnancy, it had been haunting me that I had no idea what to do with a baby. There was a forty-year-old woman in one of my childbirth classes who was having her fifth child. I asked her, "What do you do with a baby?" She answered, "Oh, you just change them when they're dirty, feed them when they're hungry, and hold them when they cry."
I was somewhat overwhelmed by the prospect of motherhood. I was so young and I had no helpful reference points from my past to prepare me for motherhood. I had never been around infants, and the only sort of mothering I'd known was my own mother's. I knew that I didn't want to repeat what she'd done. I was afraid that I would be an inadequate parent. There were very few women who had children in the Buddhist sangha at that time, so I didn't know who to turn to. All those anxieties came up as I was lying there alone in labor.
When Rinpoche arrived, I was well into transition. Dr. Bradley soon came into the room. When I was ten centimeters dilated, I wanted to push the baby out, and I felt that the best way. to do this was to put my feet up on the end of the bed and push. Dr. Bradley told me that this was not the proper thing to do. He said that I should squat down and grab my knees and push the baby out in that position. He had been studying how some aboriginal tribes gave birth, I think. I tried to do this, but I felt that I couldn't get any leverage. He stood there in the room and wouldn't let me do what I wanted. This must have gone on for an hour and 'a half. Finally, he stepped out, at which point, I immediately climbed back onto the bed, put my feet up against the end of the bed and pushed. The baby crowned, I was taken to the delivery room, and my son was born shortly thereafter.
Rinpoche was surprised that our first child was a son. There's a rather chauvinistic Tibetan tradition that if a lama marries and the first child is a daughter, this proves that he made a mistake in disrobing. If the first child is a son, it was the right decision. Rinpoche was convinced we were having a daughter. He didn't think our marriage was a mistake, but he didn't expect to get any breaks, as far as these beliefs were concerned. We hadn't even picked out a name for a boy. We were going to call our daughter Dechen, which means "Great Bliss." However, Rinpoche quickly came up with a name for our son. At Rinpoche's suggestion, we named him Tagtrug, which means "tiger cub." The next week, Rinpoche wrote to the Dalai Lama and asked His Holiness for a name for our son. The Dalai Lama named him Tendzin Lhawang, which means "holder of the teachings, divine Lord." So his legal name was Tendzin Lhawang Tagtrug David Mukpo. We called him simply Taggie.
Taggie was born around seven in the evening. He was quite gray when he came out, and I wondered if that was because it took so long to push him out. After the birth, Dr. Bradley -- who was very interested in Rinpoche because he was a Tibetan lama -- wanted to talk to him about reincarnation, but Rinpoche wouldn't engage in the conversation. He felt that the doctor had mistreated me, and he was not enchanted with his personality.
A while later, the nurses took Taggie to the nursery. At that time, they didn't let the baby stay in the room with the mother that much. Then, at some point, Rinpoche went home so that I could get some rest. In the middle of the night, they brought Taggie to me, to nurse. I remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of this child. I picked up the telephone to call Rinpoche to tell him how wonderful our child was. Rinpoche told me that he too was very excited about the birth of our son, and he read me a poem he'd written that night:
There was a crescendo of energy at the birth of Tagtrug.
Vajrapani flies in the space --
The action of tiger's leap bridges the valley.3
While we were on the phone, the nurse came running in and took Taggie away from me. She said that I couldn't be on the phone when the baby was in the room. She said he could pick up bacteria from the telephone. This was ridiculous, but I didn't know enough at the time to argue with her. I went to sleep missing my child. The next morning I got up and went to look at Taggie in the nursery. I felt such a maternal instinct that I decided I wanted to take him home immediately. I phoned Rinpoche and John and asked them to pick me up. When they arrived, I discharged myself from the hospital, and we took Taggie home.
Back at Four Mile Canyon, the situation was chaotic. Sam Bercholz was there visiting from California, and Kesang and other people were in the kitchen. They popped open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the birth of the baby. Unfortunately, the cork almost hit him in the head. After a little while, I decided to retire with Taggie to the bedroom.
Rinpoche was having more and more intense sessions with his students in the evenings. While earlier I would have joined him in these sessions, as my pregnancy advanced, my interest in the group scene decreased, especially late at night. Now, with my newborn son, I had less than no interest. This particularly didn't seem like the night for it, as far as I was concerned. I would have liked to have time alone with Rinpoche and the baby, and I felt incredibly invaded with all the people in the house. These scenes continued almost every night after Taggie and I came home. I found that I couldn't get enough sleep because there was so much noise. The baby was being woken up many extra times a night.
A few nights after Taggie was born, Rinpoche was sitting around the kitchen table with some students listening to reel-to-reel tapes of his talks, which they were discussing. At this time Sam Bercholz had already been talking with Rinpoche about editing his talks into a book, and Rinpoche and some of his close students were starting to go through the talks to determine what material might work in a book. The volume on the tape recorder was turned up quite loud, and they weren't being very quiet themselves. I couldn't sleep and I kept going in and saying, "Please try to be a little bit quieter. Please try to be quieter." It would quiet down a little bit, but then it would start up again. Finally, I marched into the room and snapped the tape reel in two with my bare hands. That put an end to it, at least for that night.
There were many times that I would complain to Rinpoche that I wanted more time alone with him. He would say to me, "Don't you like people?" And I would answer him, "Well, yes, I like people, but not as much as you do." When I complained to him that we didn't have enough time together, he would say to me, "Do you want to have a suburb-ian marriage? That would be terrible!" Well, there was no chance of that.
Sometimes during this era I would take drastic measures to get time with him. On Easter Sunday, I announced to everyone at the house that I had prepared an egg-hunt in the yard, and they all went outside to look for the eggs. Then I locked the doors and the windows, so that no one could get back in. Rinpoche asked me what was going on, and I just said, "Now you're mine!"
To me, one particular occasion marks the change in my life that came with the birth of my first child. When Taggie was only two weeks old, Rinpoche left for several days to investigate buying a piece of land in the mountains above Fort Collins. Before this, I almost always accompanied him when he traveled, and it was quite a shock when I realized that I was going to stay behind. Rinpoche would have welcomed my company, but tramping around in the snow in the Rocky Mountains in March with an infant made no sense. So I decided to stay home with Taggie. However, I felt abandoned and somewhat afraid of being home alone with the baby. When Rinpoche left, I was crying, sobbing actually. The house had been full of people ever since I'd arrived in Boulder. Now, for the first time, it was empty. A few people came by to visit and help out, but I was alone most of the time.
When Rinpoche came back, he said, "We're going to buy some land," and he was really happy about it. I was really happy to see him. I had no idea how significant it was that Rinpoche had located this land. The land he had discovered became the future home of the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, now renamed Shambhala Mountain Center. In his mind, establishing a rural practice center in Colorado was a crucial step. He wanted a place in the western United States, similar to Tail of the Tiger in the east, where he could teach intensive seminars outside of the speed and confusion of the city. He also wanted a center with a lot of land where his students could do intensive group practice as well as solitary retreats. Later, he talked about the establishment of Rocky Mountain Dharma Center as the key to making meditation the foundation of his students' experience.
Rinpoche had great faith in the students from those early days. He always saw their workability. He invited the Pygmies to move to RMDC and help settle the land, because he could see their strength and their resilience. They were used to difficult living situations without many amenities, so they took to the land quite easily. They built a number of houses there, some of them quite strange, idiosyncratic constructions that are still there. They weren't great meditators at that time, but many of them have become so. In part, this is because he believed in them. He saw so much potential in everyone.
Finding the land for RMDC in my mind marks the end of our first year in North America, the first of seventeen years we spent together on this continent. In 1969, while still in England, Rinpoche wrote a poem, "In the North of the Sky," that expresses what coming to America was all about for him. As he said about himself there, "Here comes Chogyam disguised as a hailstorm."
I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable—a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.... I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced "holy." You will understand why I publish this book beforehand—it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. And I am notwithstanding, or rather not notwithstanding, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more blown-out with falsehood has ever existed, than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hitherto lies have been called truth. The Transvaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its senses—a step which in me became flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being, and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehood—that is to say, I smelt it as such. My genius resides in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted hitherto, and am nevertheless the reverse of a negative spirit. I am the harbinger of joy, the like of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such lofty greatness that, until my time, no one had any idea of such things. Mankind can begin to have fresh hopes, only now that I have lived. Thus, I am necessarily a man of Fate. For when Truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes, followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept "politics" then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on earth.
-- Ecce Homo (Nietzsche's Autobiography), by Friedrich Nietzsche
Indeed, our first year in America was a whirlwind; a kind of spiritual storm that was gathering energy as it moved across the country. Like so many things I experienced in my life with him, it was a time that was both magnificent and sometimes lonely. I felt part of his world, absolutely, but I also had to begin to come to terms with my life separate from him. It was not always easy to be the guru's wife. But I must say, it was rarely boring.