9/11 and The Kalachakra Prophecies THE PERSISTENCE OF PROPHECY, THE REBIRTH OF ORACLES: A CELEBRATION OF THE END OF TIME  by Lama Michael Lewis (used with permission) In 1976, together with 40,000 Tibetan, Indian and Western pilgrims, I received initiation into the Kalacakra, or “Wheel of Time”, Tantra from His Holiness the Dalai Lama on the plains of Choklamsar, on the banks of the Indus River in Ladakh, which is politically a part of India, but spiritually is Western Tibet. I camped for a week in a tiny tent with a small party of fellow Western monks. For two days prior to the initiation I noticed the famous “weather yogi”, Ngakpa Yeshe Dorje, walking in a wide circle around the precincts of initiation, blowing his human thighbone trumpet at the sky and reciting mantras. I knew he was famous for having the ability to stop rain or hailstorms, but I was surprised to see him working as it almost never rains in Ladakh. On the morning of the opening ceremonies it rained steadily, exactly and only in the area that Ngakpa Rinpoche had patrolled, and all of us were thoroughly soaked, as there was no shelter. At the close of the ceremonies that day I approached Ngakpa Yeshe Dorje and asked him what had gone wrong. I said, “I thought you were supposed to keep rain away; what happened? Did you recite something backwards?” He laughed, winked at me, then informed me that His Holiness the Dalai Lama had requested him to bring rain to test the resolve of all those who were attending the initiation. I was later to spend considerable time with Ngakpa Rinpoche. He became one of my main instructors in the Chod practice of the Wrathful Black Mother, Khrodi Kali, according to the lineage of the New Treasures of Dudjom. Rinpoche lived in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s headquarters in the state of Himachal Pradesh, India. He was a married lama, had many children and was very poor. Especially in the days when he was fond of drinking chang, Tibetan rice beer, small accidents and near disasters were frequent in his life. Once I asked him, “Rinpoche, are you sure that you’re doing your practices correctly?” He was usually jovial, always smiling and laughing and quite fond of jokes. Now, however, he became stern and asked me, in a challenging tone of voice, “What are you talking about?” I mentioned his sprained ankle, the fact that the roof of his small hut had recently caved in, his several sick children, and reiterated, “Are you sure you’ve got everything right?” Smiling again, Rinpoche said to me, “Listen, Speedy, YOU try living in a reality populated almost exclusively by ghosts and demons and see how well YOU do!” After the Kalacakra initiation I accompanied another patriarch, His Holiness Sakya Trizin Rinpoche, the head of the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism, to an 800-year-old monastery known as Mato Gonpa. There I received further initiations, oral transmissions and instructions, and was able to question His Holiness, known to be a great scholar and practitioner of Tantra, about the teachings of the Wheel of Time Tantra and its attendant prophecies. Each evening I would spend an hour or two alone with the lama. He would tell me what the next day’s initiations and teachings were to be, and would then question me about Western culture. He was curious about everything, from how to make various cocktails to the history of Eastern Europe. At the end of the evening, he would inquire if I had any questions, and I invariably did. Once I asked, “What is the essential teaching of the Kalacakra Tantra; what does it really mean?” His holiness replied, “The essential message of the Kalacakra cycle is that time as such does not exist.” I did not understand, but I pondered his words deeply that night in meditation. The next morning I looked around the temple as the ceremonies unfolded and realized that, with the exception of a few wristwatches and myself, there was nothing there that could not have been there 800 years ago. That afternoon a Roman film crew from Cinecitta arrived, and suddenly the entire scene approached the cusp of the 21st Century: cutting edge film equipment, beautiful women in hotpants, technology, elegance and flash! Eight hundred years and more in the space of a few hours: time, as such, did not exist. Briefly, here is what I was told about the prophecies. Keep in mind the general Buddhist context for this topic: that we live in a Dark Age, the time of the dregs, of the five great degenerations. In common with most traditional Wisdom cultures, the Tibetans believe, not that we have progressed for millennia following an emergence from barbarism, but rather that we have devolved from a state of comparative grace to our current situation, the truly barbarous modern world. According to the Kalacakra prophecies, this decline will continue until the end of the Kali Yuga. Increasingly the forces of darkness will spread and consolidate their controlling power in all nations. They will marginalize and attempt to eliminate those who remain true to the remnants of spiritual culture, and will use all their resources - governments, media, military institutions, law enforcement, so-called education, international finance – to bring about the defeat of the practitioners of the Old Ways. At least initially, such steady decline may not be accompanied by overtly dramatic events. Or it may simply be that such events will not be too difficult to hide, minimize or dismiss, since the overwhelming majority of the world population will be in the condition described by T.S. Eliot with the words, “…we had the experience, but missed the meaning.” As Robert Bly once put it to me, the beginning of the end may not arrive as Armageddon, but rather as people forgetting how to teach a class, write a poem, cook nourishing food, or be polite to one another. I would add: it may come with fragmented education, externally imposed standards of taste and conduct, the control mechanisms of organized religion, the rapacious greed and insensitivity of consumerism, the passionless inanities of political correctness, and the sincere but muddle-headed subjective experiences of a self-styled “New Age”. As for organized religion, the Kalacakra prophecies are explicit that it is from this direction that the greatest danger will come. As “the end of civilization as we know it” nears, most of the population of the world will be, more or less forcibly, converted to fundamentalist Islam; most of the former Soviet Union, as well as China, will be Muslim nations. This needs to be stated unambiguously: the forces of darkness are specified in the authoritative teachings of the Kalacakra to be “the followers of Mahmoud”, that is, Mohammed, led in the end by a charismatic green-turbaned fanatic who will have become the ruler of the world. Only isolated pockets of pre-World -War- III culture and civilization will remain, floating like tiny peaceful islands in a vast and turbulent sea. Toward the final years of the Dark Age, the hidden Kingdom of Shambhala will become visible again. The Haji world-tyrant will throw his forces against it and this will rouse the King of Shambhala, the Rigden, to ride forth with his Bodhisattva army. Each soldier who serves him will be an Awakening Warrior and will have the capacity to liberate the spirits, or consciousness-principles, of the Muslim hordes whose bodies they slay. In the last battle, the green-turbaned Dark Lord will be defeated, and a rebirth of spiritual civilization, a Renaissance, will begin, eventually leading to a new Golden Age. The main purpose of initiation into the Kalacakra Mandala, I was told, is to ensure the rebirth of those who receive it as the Awakening Warriors in the Shambhala Rigden’s armies of the Light. At this point I would like to invoke the psychologist James Hillman’s three rules for dealing meaningfully with archetypal material of any kind. Rule number one says, “Never literalize”; rule number two is, “Never literalize”, and rule number three is, “Never literalize”. The point is not that the Kalacakra Tantra’s prophetic scenario is not literally true; it may well be, as recent events would seem to indicate. The point is that metaphor is a more profound and significant carrier of meaning than mere fact. The point is, as His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche recently said to me in Los Angeles, “…at least now the forces of light and darkness are separating out clearly for everyone to see.” Or are they? After receiving a number of quite detailed and explicit explanations of the Kalacakra prophecies, from Sakya Trizin Rinpoche and several other lamas, I was told not to speak of these teachings. When I asked why not, I was given two reasons. Firstly, that it would not do for Indo-Tibetan Buddhism to be considered anti-Muslim. And secondly, that most people would probably consider me cracked, not because I am an obvious flake, but because of the depth of resistance and denial which such prophecies can provoke. Both reasons were, and are, compelling to me. But after the World Trade Center attack, I strongly feel the time to speak of these matters openly has come. Before dealing with the inevitable objections – I am tempted to say “reaction formations” – I will once more invoke context. Two years prior to the events I have been describing, I traveled the pilgrimage route in India, visiting the foremost sacred “power-spots” associated with the life of Sakyamuni Buddha. In many places, but most especially in Nalanda, I was struck by the viciousness of the destruction visited upon Buddhist and Hindu spiritual centers by the fundamentalist Muslim invasions of the past. Please note that I consistently say “fundamentalist Muslim”. I am well aware of the Sufi, Ishmaili and other mystical schools of Islam, and I personally revere any number of Islamic saints and sages, most especially Jalaluddin al-Rumi and Sheikh al-Akbar (the Greatest Master) Muhyidin Ibn al-Arabi (may his secret be sanctified). But as I told the munshi in Dharamsala with whom I studied Urdu and read through the Quran, the fundamentalist Imams would burn the Sufis as gladly as they would any Jew. And they have, the most obvious example being Mansur al-Hallaj, who was killed for applying one of the Names of God to himself in his fatal utterance, “Ana al’Haqq, I am the Truth”. As the Sufi master Junaid remarked, “What should he have said? ‘I am Falsehood?’” There are those, it should be noted, who interpret the Kalacakra prophecies as referring precisely to the Turkish invasions that destroyed Buddhism in its Indian homeland. The Tantra is vague, to say the least, on dates. But let us remember: Never literalize. The details, and the language, of prophecy may be no more linear than time itself. At the time I received teachings on the prophecies, I assumed that what was being spoken of would happen hundreds of years from now. Since returning to the United States in 1981, I have frequently felt that I was increasingly witnessing the prophecies coming true all about me, those parts of them, at any rate, that speak of a steady decline in intelligence, moral action, all positive character traits and, in general, spiritual understanding and practice. On September 11, 2001, I was in Woodstock, translating for the Treasure-Discoverer of Lhodrak, the Lord of Refuge Kunzang Detchen Lingpa Rinpoche, a Dzogchen master who lives in the jungles of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. We had been teaching in the City for weeks, and Rinpoche would often look up at the Twin Towers and other skyscrapers and say, “These amazing buildings that reach to the sky and that you think are so solid and reliable are as impermanent and as flimsy as dust. There will come a time when even the name ‘New York City’ will not be remembered.” He also said that there might come a time when half the planet will be blown away. As we watched on television the hijacked plane hit the second Tower, Rinpoche said, “This is the beginning of the Final Battle, World War III.” His nun attendants immediately objected, saying, “Don’t say that, Rinpoche, your words have power, what you say comes true.” So he desisted, but said to me, “Since this is the prophesied ripening of collective karma, there is very little that can be done, even by Padmasambhava.” These days it is politically correct to assert that Islam is a religion of peace. That is a position I find difficult to justify on the record. I feel that fundamentalist Islam is not only itself obviously violent, but that it provokes violence in others. One need only remember the horrible slaughter of Sikhs and other Punjabis by Muslims, and of Muslims by reacting Sikhs, during the 1947 riots attending the partitioning of India. Again, the Sufis and other mystics of Islam are tolerant and inclusive, Ibn al-Arabi (may his secret be sanctified) writing in the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, “My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, / And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran./ I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.” But, then again, the Seal of the Saints himself was frequently attacked as a heretic. He was also accused by the small-minded of being arrogant for “stating his credentials”, and insisting on the more inclusive nature of his own spiritual view. As for the objection that all this is some sort of New Age lunacy, please keep in mind that I am speaking of the Kalacakra Tantra, universally regarded by the sages of India and Tibet to be the “highest” of all the tantric teachings. The Kalacakra cycle was transmitted, according to the oral tradition and all written commentaries, by the Enlightened Being, Sakyamuni Buddha himself. Furthermore, the prophecies contained in the Tantra are confirmed, at least in general, by numerous prophecies of other Wisdom cultures, including, to my personal knowledge, those of the Hopi, Maya, Nahua, Mexica, and Cherokee nations. They are also corroborated to some extent by the contemporary alchemist Fulcanelli’s decoding of the symbols embedded in the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, and in the Cyclic Cross at Hendaye in the French Pyranees. There is also, and increasingly, at least some data from the contemporary sciences of cosmology and astrophysics, ecology, and what is sometimes styled “Forbidden Archeology”, that would seem to indicate that perhaps a bit of literalizing would not entirely miss the mark. And at the other end of the sliding scale of verifiability, there are the increasingly numerous worldwide instances of visions, spontaneous oracular utterances, and “warnings”. These are embedded, like what I call “diamonds in a dunghill”, in the welter of “channeled” material that continues to be transmitted, whether from God, the Archangel Michael and any number of other entities, or the collective unconscious. I will not speak here of Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, Christian and other apocalyptic scenarios, and so forth, since these are areas in which I have comparatively little exact or experiential knowledge. My training and practice has been in Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan, Native-American and Meso-American shamanism, and Western Kabbalistic and Rosicrucian ceremonial magic. But I have said enough to convey an idea of the relevant prophecies, and of the relevance of the prophecies. (...) |
