Journey To Shamballa Land

It is written that for him who is on the threshold of divinity no law can be framed, no guide can exist. Yet to enlighten the disciple, the final struggle may be thus expressed: Hold fast to that which has neither substance nor existence. Listen only to the voice which is soundless. Look only on that which is invisible alike to the inner and the outer sense. Peace Be With You

Light on The Path – Mabel Collins

This is the story of a journey to Shamballa Land in the Gobi desert of Mongolia undertaken by my wife Sharon and I in August 2007.

Sacred pilgrimage is a simultaneous journey through both the inner and the outer world in the attempt to reveal that which lies behind and is the source of both landscapes. At times the outer journey opens, through resonance, unexplored inner territories. At times the inner journey ensouls and gives meaning to the outer terrain. But always through both, the ear of the heart is being tuned to respond to the voice of the silence; to the presence of emptiness; to the one non-dual reality; to the sound of Shamballa.

Along with the inner and outer aspects of the journey itself there is also the wider context in which it occurs. Shamballa is a symbol for the supreme planetary centre – a symbol that has developed and embedded itself in the collective consciousness and the mythology of many cultures. In the individual sense Shamballa represents the monad - the divine essence - that is source of the experience of both the soul and personality selves.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to outline the development of the concept of Shamballa in both the eastern and western traditions and this has been adequately done by a variety of authors. There are themes in common however – what we might call the Shamballa motif – that recur wherever this symbol of the supreme centre is found.

SHAMBALLA MOTIF

Firstly there is a centering symbol. It can be a mountain or a cave. It can be a sacred island like White Island. It can be a sacred tree or a fountain. The journey to the sacred centre is normally associated with a search for a talismanic object - a stone, a lost word or a grail. There are normally guardians ( dragons, scorpions, archers etc ) that protect a treasure ( jewel, fruit, draught of immortality etc ).
The dualities of day/night masculine/feminine etc must also be overcome in order to pass through the guardians and gain access to the treasure or soma. Finally there is the story of the entry of the energy of the centre into the world with both vitalizing and destructive results.

The association of Shamballa with the Gobi desert follows a number of authors including H.P. Blavatsky, Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. The decision to journey there in 2007 arose out of a number of inner and outer experiences which I will briefly mention to the extent that they are relevant here. Over a twelve year period between 1987 and 1999, on the same date in October every three years I received a series of symbols in meditation that were developmental and associated with Shamballa and the emerging new schools. The first symbol in the series was a pyramid and the last an octahedron, surrounded by a blue sphere with eight rays of light emanating from the centre and passing through each of the facets.

In 1999 the entire symbol burst into fire coinciding with an inner call to make the journey to Mt Kailas and the Wesak Valley for the Shamballa impact of 2000. On return Shamballa School was set up, the esoteric school established for a time at Highden and the same process of working with the archetype of the octahedron took place in group formation. The group initiatory experience was guided by the mercury transmissions which eventually led to a triangle of groups working together focused on the central diamond or the life aspect. This process might be represented visually as follows.

Individual

Group

Group of Groups

The process is symbolic of the opening of the causal body. The revelation of the jewel and then identification with the life aspect that allows for the transfer of identity into the triad and reorientation to the monad, or in the group sense to Shamballa.

In the emerging esoteric schools the focus will be on connecting monad to personality while in the last dispensation the focus was on contact with the soul.

The pyramid in Egypt is a fitting geometrical symbol for the last dispensation of the mysteries indicating the building of the four-square personality and orientation to the soul as the quintessence or fifth principle.

The personality, once formed must be fused with its opposite which can be represented by the downward pointing pyramid. When the fusion takes place the symbol of the diamond soul is created.

The threefold monad/soul/personality may be represented as follows:

And the two phases of the anchoring of the mysteries can be represented symbolically in this way:

Phase 1 Phase 2

The Anchoring of the mysteries

The seven pairs of the new schools all have their root in the one fundamental school in Shamballa which is to say that each of the schools has, as its symbolic centre the archetype or ‘signature’ of Shamballa.

In Letters on Occult Meditation the Master DK outlines the pattern for the advanced schools as follows.

If we take this as a cross section of a three dimensional geometric figure we have the following.

In effect the spheres represent areas of inclusivity or ring-pass-nots while the geometric figures represent the nested platonic solids which give the energetic ‘structure’ .

The central point is the doorway in and out of the system. It is the eye with in the triangle within the square within the sphere. Or three dimensionally it is the point within the double tetrahedron within the octahedron within the cube.

Let the group together move the fire within the Jewel in the Lotus into the Triad and let them find the Word which will carry out that task. RI Rule XI p 23

The three levels of personality, soul and monad are represented by the outer universal ‘centers’ of planet, sun and black hole. These three levels also have their correspondence in each centre so, for example the earth as a physical planet has a crust, a mantle and a core corresponding to the three levels. The causal body has three layers of petals and so on.

A major context for the journey to the Gobi is that it coincided with the seventh year of the Shamballa impact cycle beginning in the year 2000 and also with the alignment between the galactic centre, the sun and the earth ( as well as other significant planets ).

The potential exists therefore for the anchoring of a ‘seed’ or core pattern from the galactic centre corresponding to the sun’s monad or cosmic Shamballa and also for a corresponding activation of planetary kundalini. This energetic impact, passing through Shamballa should have an effect on the etheric physical plane ( seventh year in the cycle ).

So now let us switch from the inner archetype to the outer journey. In 2006 a temple called Shamballa Land in the Gobi desert officially opened.

A good background on the history of this centre can be found here http://www.tibetan-museum-society.org/java/arts-culture-Shambhala-Rising.jsp

But briefly it is designed as a ‘portal’ to the Shamballa energy. In 1853, the fifth lord of the Gobi, a lama named Danzan Ravjaa put on a tsam ( a 3 day dramatic dance ) called The Way to Shamballa ( developed by the Third Panchen Lama ) in this location and designated it as a place for a future temple that would serve as a gateway to this energy.

Sixty-four trunks of various treasures were buried in the desert during the communist occupation and begun to be dug up again by the sixth generation custodian ( takhitch ) in 1989 ( when Uranus was conjoined the galactic centre ).

On arrival in Ulan Bataar ( the capital city of Mongolia ) we arranged to meet with Altangerel the man who is the current custodian of the centre in the Gobi and the driving force behind the construction of the temple. His story is a strange one. He was selected for his role as a child because of a moon shaped birth mark on his back that had served as a sign for each of the custodians. His grandfather, the previous custodian took charge of his upbringing and education which was conducted in secret. Part of that education was to be taken regularly to the seventeen places in the desert where the trunks were buried and to learn by rote the history and function of each item in them. He was also taught to locate them using the light from the full moon on the 15^th day of the middle month of the lunar year.

Through a translator we presented him with a large piece of river worn greenstone from New Zealand. This was the piece that had travelled all over the three islands of NZ when we were looking for the location for the school in 1999. Many thousands of people had held this stone with the intent for right spiritual emergence in mind. Intuitively we took it as a symbol of spiritual connection between an emerging seventh ray centre in the southern hemisphere and the crown centre of the planet.

It was a moving exchange. Altangerel spoke of a stone that was kept hidden away which his elders had told him was connected to other stones in other parts of the world. He saw the arrival of the greenstone as an outer confirmation of the work he had been patiently engaged in for most of his life ( a man building a temple in the desert in one of the most isolated places on earth gets little outer confirmation ). He planned to place what he called the ‘travelling stone’ with the hidden stone and saw in the future a stone mandala at the temple site composed of stones from different parts of the world that might be drawn there for that purpose.

We also carried a donation gathered to support their work in the Gobi and he spoke of the stipulation that his teachers had given him that the temple could only be constructed with what he called ‘pure money’ by which we took to mean money given with pure intent. He said that in some ways this had made the construction harder and took longer but he understood through the process how important this piece of guidance was.

After a quick visit to see Roerich’s King of Shamballa painting in the Zanazabar museum it was onward to Sainshand where many of the artifacts that had been dug up ( some are at the temple site and 15 boxes remain buried ) are on display in the Danzan Ravjaa museum. Our guide was Altangerel’s daughter, Intiktik and each piece was carefully explained.

Danzaan was a poet, a teacher, a physician, a dramatist and musician. He was the first teacher to allow women in his school and families from all over Mongolia and Tibet sent their daughters to learn along side the monks. In fact his honouring of the feminine principle was one of the things that set this lama apart from others and was also to cause him trouble with the spiritual hierarchy of his time. He built temples to honour both the red hat and the yellow hat lineage. He was both an ascetic, walling himself up for long periods, and a libertine known for embracing strong drink as well as women. Indeed his tantric approach to all dualities was another defining characteristic. Here is an example from his poetry:

White and black are inseparable

Good and bad are inseparable

Yes and no are inseparable..

Everything has an opposite but no reality

Just names

Emptiness is the miracle

Which has no shape

No direction to come and go

No colour to identify

No space to exist

Emptiness is the miracle of being

From….Sutandaa Tukh Khairyai

There is a woodcutting of the stamp that he used to graduate students in his school – the bottom half of which could be removed indicating a mastery of the higher chakras only. He wrote music the way it sounds in long looping strokes of the quill and his music, poetry and plays are still performed throughout the country.

Of course there are many stories that weave the borderline between mythology and history – the inner and outer realities but one which I particularly liked and saw the evidence of was a peace making mission that Danzan Ravjaa embarked upon. A man had been knifed to death at the monastery and so the lama asked for all knives that could be used as weapons from the surrounding area to be brought to him.

In the morning there was a pile of knives on his doorstep which he arranged to be melted down and then cast in to ‘the statue of 10,000 knives’( now on display in the monastery ). In looking at this beautiful work I couldn’t help but wonder what global sculpture could be made for the UN if each country was asked to give just one of its weapons ( tank, plane, missile etc ) to be melted down and cast into a symbol for global peace.

On the afternoon of August 12 we headed for the Gobi sunrise ger camp and promptly lost our way in the desert, arriving at the edge of Shamballa Land itself before a large black bird hovered over the bonnet of the car for long enough to attract our attention and call a stop. We backtracked, found the ger camp and spent a restless night’s sleep full of strange dreams. In the morning I wrote this poem.

Last Confession The final destination is an anathema to the seeking soul Shamballa a firing squad For the surendered rebel leader Eating his last ego meal On the edge of annihilation reading his will and last confession In the winds’ calligraphy On the desert sands There is no original sin Its all derivative Arising from the illusion Of existence I confess I have never really existed In spite of this persistent illusion Never having existed nothing I ever did thought or felt has left its mark on the stainless void When they come for me Tell them I have already slipped Back behind the curtain Of eternal innocence This is not poison on my soul’s lips but the cure

I no longer want to be a boddhisattva Or serve the greater good These worthy goals seem pretentious now The pre dawn dreams of a waking soul A rock pool’s brief kingdom In the twelve hours between tides I would only be that which I cannot not be My only purpose to have no purpose Of my own Let this individual life be A small and simple thing A grain of sand Shaped by 51000 tides glinting in the Gobi Nothing more and nothing less Than the living face of the universe Let there be nothing left of me Capable of trying to achieve anything However holy Let me rest In emptiness To go forth no more And by remaining Permeate it all Forever

The temple itself is constructed of 108 stupas blazing white in the open desert about an hour’s drive south east of Sainshand. Two great stone breasts mark a doorway that leads to two monastery temples which have been rebuilt in honour of the two Buddhist lineages. Then from the monastery one walks past petrified wood and dinosaur bones to the Shamballa site itself. This desert was once a great swamp and this area that has the monastery and temple is remarkable for the deep red colour that arise from the local geology.

The temple is laid out in the familiar Shamballa square pattern with openings in the four sides. The southern gate is where one enters and leaves and the north gate has the ‘brain ovoo’ or the symbolic crown chakra where vodka is transmuted into soma. Procedures in this great open air temple are followed according to protocol ( outlined adequately in the webpage referred to above )

A particular point of interest to the theme is three old stone circles in the centre of the site which a remnants of the original temple. They line with a mountain through the west gate called black mountain and one of the ritual is to stand facing this mountain and throw a cup of vodka in that direction.

There are three sacred mountains in Mongolia. The first is Mother mountain in the north, the second golden mountain and the third black mountain. Here we have the threefold archetype of planet, sun, black hole which is further reinforced once the mythology of black mountain is taken into account.

The mountain is said to be inhabited by the spirit of the third Lord of the Gobi. He left his body halfway up and travelled to the summit in spirit to speak with the lord of the underworld about his father. When he returned his followers, thinking him dead had burned his body The third Lord corresponds to Saturn and the atmic plane while the fifth Lord, Danzaan Ravjaa corresponds to Venus and the mental plane. The antahkarana between the personality and the monad is constructed via the triad and completed at the third degree when Venus and Saturn are united. This motif is further reinforced by Formula Five given by the Master Dk. This is the formula associated with Shamballa and consists of three words in a triangular relationship. SUN..BLACK.. ANTAHKARANA. The Shamballa temple is positioned between the sunrise in the east and Bl;ack mountain in the west and is thus a living symbol for the construction of the higher antahkarana between soul and monad.

Part of the beauty of the desert is its starkness. There is nothing to draw the attention outward. Our bodies have journeyed far across the globe, bumped along non existent tracks, slept fitfully under starlight, eaten strange foods and squatted for relief in the open desert. Now it is time for the consciousness to fall towards its source. I closed my eyes on the image of a falcon flying far above that triggered two poems interweaving in my mind.

The first from Rilke

I am circling around God, the ancient tower

And I have been circling for a thousand years

And I still don’t know If I am a falcon

Or a storm or a great song.

And the second from Blake’s Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A vivid period of inner teaching followed the essence of which was the immanent emergence of the spiritual centre we call Shamballa under whatever name within the consciousness of humanity. I was shown that – just as uprising kundalini energy can cause earthquakes and eruptions as the pressure from the core activates fault lines in the earth’s crust – so the descending Shamballa fire also places pressure on the fault lines of consciousness that exist in the mental field - religion, philosophy, politics and racial thoughtforms. The same energy that is designed to produce liberation can also be destructive which is why it is ‘held’ in reserve until the demand from humanity for the revelation of synthesis is strong enough. When the soul is freed from the mind and returns to its monadic source it immediately recognises its universal nature and an energetic quality becomes active in the soul itself via the jewel.. This quality simply because it is universal and simultaneously present in all souls recognises itself everywhere and more specifically recognises through resonance when it is consciously active. Put another way, souls that have been home or are in conscious touch with the monad automatically through spiritual resonance recognise this same quality in others. Historically these souls, while in touch with each other in an ashramic sense have remained isolated as points of centralising influence in their different groups and centres of consciousness around the world. Now, as the Shamballic centre is emerging and under the Law of Assembly these souls are being drawn together into more conscious contact and forming a centre within humanity able to stand and withstand the Shamballic force. They come from all spiritual traditions and disciplines and their consciously recognised work is to collectively hold this energy as a reservoir and a seed of the Will. As Pluto moves through Capricorn and the power structures of the planet come under irresistable pressure to transform, this seed will flower within the human centre as an expression of spiritual governance based on the revelation of universal principles.

After the ‘teaching’ we entered a period of profound silence and energetic recharging that gave a new meaning to the term ‘rest in peace’. In that peace was sound however – a sound that I had recognised in 2000 at the start of my transmission work and written about in this way:

The core assertion was an energetic ‘sound’ , a fiat of freedom, which would gradually clothe itself in ideas and these ideas would be written down in books and studied. The ideas and the books were not the Teaching however, the Teaching was the reality of the affirmation of inherent freedom ‘sounded’ by Being with intent to liberate those held within the illusion of mind. Any thoughts or ideas that clothe that ‘sound’ will have at their core that purposeful reality.

The Teaching contains then the great Shamballic ‘sound’ stepped down by Hierarchy in such a way that it liberates human consciousness from illusion and then makes of it a sheath for anchoring that ‘sound’ in the depths of matter.

Notes on receiving the Mercury Transmissions

It was therefore a natural progression from the Temple to find a path to an enormous bell standing alone on a desert ridge and this bell is the perfect symbol for the sound of Shamballa and a complement to the invisible dorje or lightning bolt that the Temple itself is designed to receive. We had permission to ring the bell which is done with a large wooden post and the tone was so deep that you could feel the vibrations directly through the body.

Returning from the bell I found Sharon in deep conversation with three women who were escorting us. They had exchanged gifts and were speaking about the importance of Danzan Ravjaa’s role in empowering the feminine principle when they sprang up and motioned for us to follow. They led us by jeep a little way into the desert and suddenly there was a well.

An old car tire surrounded a hole in the sand and a goatskin on a rope served as a bucket when lowered into the cool depths. Intiktik raised the first full load and without warning I received about a gallon of sweet cold water directly into my face and chest. The women roared with laughter and then one by one each was subjected to the same beautiful indignity until we stood in a dripping circle beaming at each other.

A herd of goats arrived at full trot over the nearest dune having heard and smelled the water which was promptly shared with them as well.

Many mystical stories surround the locating of the well and the curative properties of its water but standing there I was struck most by the simple everyday miracle of any well in the middle of any desert.

Suddenly in the very heart of this seared land there was life and all living things were glad and refreshed by it. And here were three young women released from the solemn and reverent affairs of museum and temple bursting with a natural and irrepressibly sensual and sensible spirit which was waiting to bubble up and renew us.

Our next stop was black mountain, a rather ominous mound of dark volcanic sand and rock that reminded me a little of Mt Doom in the Lord of the Rings. This is the mountain that we threw vodka towards at the Shamballa temple and is said to house the spirit of the third gobi Lord. The Lord of death asked him to the summit to testify concerning his own father’s sins. He truthfully reported them but by the time he got back to his body his followers had burned it thinking he too was dead. Now he must listen to the prayers of others as they come to climb and intercede on their behalf with Death. Halfway up the mountain I paused at a small shrine said to mark the spot where his body was burned, lit a candle for my own father and contemplated the mystery of death, truth and sacrifice. It is local tradition that women only climb to this point so I left Sharon listening to the exquisite music of a lone flutist performing one of Danzan Ravjaa’s songs and trudged up the last few hundred metres.

On the peak, with the desert all around and the sun dropping into the west in Leo, I was meditatively aware of the black hole at the galactic centre overhead.

Looking back the symbology is obvious. In the triad it is venus or the feminine principle of the soul that builds the causal body on the higher mental plane which allows for the soul’s full expression in the three worlds and is the base camp for the soul’s ascent to the monad. Mercury or the masculine principle of the soul must climb the mountain ( atma ruled by Saturn ) and receive the dark fire of the monad which upon return ignites the causal body. After the burning nothing remains but fire - spirit and matter are atoned -which is represented by the spirit ensouling the mountain.

This theme of the relationship between soul and spirit continued as we sought a place to camp for the night and experience the stillness of the desert. Years before Sharon and I had both separately discovered two pictures and bought them for each other only to find they were almost identical images of a naked woman wrapped by a dark figure in the desert. That night, laying down to sleep it felt as if we were that naked and vulnerable figure surrendering into the velvet darkness of the Gobi. We had camped on a small promontory where we found the bones of a mountain goat or sheep and a small cave that might have once housed a meditating ascetic.

During the night we woke to a distant rumbling like thunder which built slowly into an almost impossibly loud growling as if a gigantic lion was roaring right outside the tent. And then the sand storm hit with prolonged gusts fallowed by eerie silence and then the same build up to another crescendo. Several times I had to stumble out into the dark stinging sand to re-secure the tent and by morning the storm was almost passed. Looking out at dawn the gusts were made visible across the face of the desert as they lifted before them sails of sand like enormous yachts following each other in tacking duels across what was once a great sea.

We traveled south towards a canyon in the desert that is deep enough that a frozen glacier can be found even in summer and we stopped at an oasis of another sort - the three camels ger camp which must be said is the finest accommodation we found in Mongolia.

Journal extract

 3 Camels Ger Camp, Gobi Desert 16 August 2007

 I had spent the day writing an esoteric treatise on the stone/wine mysteries that basically trace the symbolic ascent of the soul from a stone buried in the earth at the base chakra to bread at the heart to the wine of soma experienced at the crown chakra. Little did I know how quickly an experiential component of my studies was approaching. Dusk was near and my shoulders were cramped from being hunched over the computer so I decided to take a walk around the hill where we were camped and watch the sun set behind the Altai mountains.

 Sitting amongst the rocks I was approached by four children from a nomadic horse herding family. I assumed they were hatching some clever scheme to obtain something from a foreigner. Three girls and a boy ranging in age from 4 -10, they sat down about six feet away from me and conferred with each other. One by one they approached, held out their hands and introduced themselves in Mongolian.  I returned their greeting and stated my name four times and then there was more conferring.

The youngest – a girl- then approached and held out her hand as if to lead me. “Ok” , was my first  thought, “here comes the scam.”  But she was so innocent and vulnerable in her reaching towards me that  my own child self ignored my cynic, took her hand and followed. 

They led me a fair way through the rocks to a small mound where they had created a circle of stones in the outline of a small ger ( nomadic tent home ). They entered solemnly through the ‘door’  and sat in a cross leaving the north and south open.  I was then invited to enter and sit to the left of the door and then the young girl again took the lead by producing from under a dirty piece of cloth  a rock which had two depressions in the centre of it which each held a  stone.  One was  elongated and the other round rather like a small baseball bat and ball.

 Like a sacred sacrament she lifted the long stone and ‘poured’ as if from a bottle a lo