hey belgian tears those of us who like our spirituality with a twist in this episode the first of a four part series we have the unique pleasure of chatting with the inevitable profound jovial and enlightening glenn h mullen or lama glenn to his students lama glenn's bio okay this is a long one llama gun traveled from canada and lived in the indian himalayas between 1972 and 1984 where he first met the dalai lama and then stayed on and studied philosophy literature meditation yoga and the enlightenment culture under 35 of the greatest living masters of the four schools of tibetan buddhism drawing on those experiences he's the author of over 30 books on tibetan buddhism many of which have been translated into a dozen foreign languages his earlier titles focus on the lives and works of the dalai lamas others of his titles elucidate the practice traditions of buddhism especially the tantric tradition he has been an international teacher of tantric buddhist meditation for the past 25 years he is also an expert on buddhist art and has curated a number of important tibetan art exhibitions and is an advocate for artists of the east i personally bought several wonderful pieces of art with his help he is currently working on a book on nicholas roark the great russian painter spiritual figure and social activist and the multiple time nominee for the nobel prize but wait there's more in non-coveted times lamigan is an expert in travel to the sacred sites of the himalayas and beyond he not only leads tours to these places but also acts as a consultant and advisor to independent groups wanting to travel safely and meaningly through these sacred sites finally lamigland is an activist in allowing western folks to support and help make donations to the spiritual practices of those who need that support this is true of both artists and meditators i personally have sponsored retreats for those who need financial assistance and as they say in the buddhist world this is a very auspicious thing for both sides okay in this first episode we asked lama glenn about his roots in canada his journey to india to meet the dalai lama and what influenced him to pursue this path he tells stories of tibet and its relationship to the west of lives in between lives and the karma holding it all together and the challenges of being a mystic in the west enjoy [Music] welcome to jyn and tantra spirituality with a twist the podcast that takes tantrism buddhism taoism sufism cabalism shamanism chinese medicine and all of the other isms we've been influenced by and blends them into a tall crisp cool cocktail your spirit has been longing for you to get together now isn't that refreshing i want you to get together hey fellow g in tears those of us who like our spirituality with a twist as you already know from the intro today we have the unique and special pleasure of having on the great and wonderful not quite sure that's a word you use to describe a dude but still wonderful glenn h mullen or more simply lama glenn to all of his students thanks so much for coming on lama glenn my joy my pleasure my honor etc excellent uh okay so it occurred to me in settings up that you and i have had many conversations over the years uh thank god not recorded because they usually involved me and my own personal life and issues and questions but today is going to be about you uh and recorded to boot so thanks for coming on to uh to share with us uh the first thing we really wanted to get to um was just to ask you about your earlier life it's one of the fascinations of the show why people choose to not only live spiritual lives but also lives that are just sort of out of the box in general so we always like to ask people about what led them to make the decisions they made not just a curiosity but because daniel and i uh sort of think and believe it's good to hear the stories of people who have gone on uh their own way followed their own way and had the reward of wonderful interesting and important lives we think there's something really kind of important encouraging and inspiring about that so i think the first question would be could you tell us a little bit about your early life and what led you to kind of leave canada and head over to india and kind of what were the things going on in your mind that time that led you to do that those steps well as you know my real focus for the last 50 years in my study my training my practice and also my teachings has been tantric buddhism and usually when they discuss an issue they mention outer inner and secret a secret doesn't really mean secret it just means kind of non-obvious but from outer side i was born on the east coast of canada this little town of casper which was the first place in canada that europeans landed during the so-called pre-colonial era a frenchman called jacques cartier landed here in 1534 and come sort of claimed it for france and later the brits of course had already claimed some parts down in the states although just you know putting up a flag and some have claimed down further down south for france there's no real settlement done in those days but uh it's a casper is a mikmak indian word or first nations word as justin trudeau likes us to say meaning end of the earth because it's a peninsula with st lawrence to the north and it sort of skips straight out into the ocean the gulf of st lawrence as it's called but it's really salt water so the ocean and uh my parents my dad was irish canadian several generations three or four generations irish immigrant family to canada and my mom was a british war bride and i think a big influence in my life in terms of those two is that my dad being irish protestant the big issue is the work ethic work hard study hard be good be honest don't tell lies except for embellishing a story a little bit and my mom is british warbrite her father had been in india at the turn of the last century as part of the british effort to bring flesh toilets and toilet paper to india and uh though when the indians were when the brits were in india it was one of the countries they really fell in love with and developed a deep deep admiration for it and also he was there at the time of the british invasion of tibet in 1904.05 we didn't participate in that but it was a sort of a very emotional story for all of the soldiers in india british soldiers and also caught a lot of international press because it violated the treaty that england had with both russia and uh other parts of the world not to not to invade especially with russia because all of eastern russia's tibetan buddhist and himalayan india is tibetan buddhist so neither of them wanted neither russian or england wanted the other to have a foothold in tibet and be able to send spies throughout their their buddhist regions and so the invading officer into tibet took a walk into the mountains when he was in lhasa went into a trance so for instance lieutenant colonel sir prince's young husband was his name went into a trance and became a mystic and after coming back to england he became president of the mystical society of england and went on to write about 20 or so books on international mysticism so i think this made tibet the most loved to be loved and admired country because when the brits invaded they actually you know they had to basically after getting to lhasa they had to withdraw kind of quickly because of realizing it was a treaty violation and all of that but england and the brits became very good friends and so there's sort of a love affair i would say between england and tibet that developed so for instance when i traveled to india later in my early 20s and met the dalai lama my mom wrote to me even if you die tomorrow you could not bring a greater honor to this family oh really no yeah as you know in the buddhist world we say that our choice of parents is not random uh that basically after we die in one life if we're not enlightened being yet there were inches from in like still inches from enlightenment oops i'm in canada centimeters from enlightenment then we enter the bardo and we sort of swirl around digesting our previous experiences and looking for the graduation door to the next step up on the evolutionary ladder and when we do that we float around the world looking at places and situations and looking for what would be the ideal both in terms of what we deserve what we've earned i would say both in terms of reward and punishment perhaps and also in terms of what will provide our next avenue of spiritual growth our next window on spiritual growth or a spiritual evolution well i think i probably chose and so in the bar in that teaching of the buddha it's also embarrassed ultimate book of the dead and so forth it discusses how one wanders around when you're getting ready for rebirth and uh you sort of redigested completely everything from previous life and you're sort of on cruise control looking for a spaceship coming back to planet earth and you see a few dozen couples around the planet making love and you sort of check in on them and uh if you develop a strong attachment to the mother or passion for the mother you become jealous of the father and eventually this kills your bardo body or breaks your biobody into pieces and you take rebar and if you become female kind of the opposite so we choose our mother and father based on that i think i chose my mother because of her strong tibet situation in other words i didn't sit there in the bardo thinking oh yeah she's got a tibet link it's kind of an energy process you could say earlier in our pre-recorded session we're talking about energy that's right it's kind of an energetic and buddhism we call it karma right arma hair means whenever we do something we leave a kind of a seed or an energy energy button on our santana our stream of consciousness and that kind of has a natural yeah instinctual resonance with the pros and cons of all the other energy buttons floating around so many years later when i was with uh what they call a melangma a reader a mirror reader who sort of looks in mirrors and makes prophecies he said oh yeah glenn you were uh you were a cue to a monk in portala in your previous life close to the previous tele-lama i don't think that's true but i do think i was probably a yak on the end of a yak that was written by a dalai lama which would account for why i like dala llamas very much and have published 10 or 12 books on lives and writings of early television so from outer side looking around and floating in the bardo i chose that as my point of entry uh i suppose from inner inner side inner heron but usually refers to a kind of an emotional or an intellectual uh conceptual set and i think my both my mom and dad had the kind of attitude to the world which is at once respectful but at the other side also a bit hesitant in accepting things at their face value in other words a little bit suspicious and i think that's uh i admire that in people being at one time or somewhat respectful for your experience the way you experience things but at the other time being a little suspicious that the way they appear is actually the way they they function the way they exist as it goes but i think that side of it and they were both you know very honest uh kind compassionate gentle folk and like that so i think that was a kind of an inner connection now secretly i think it was a misorientation uh because in the nyangma tradition there's a um famous buddhist paradise called sangdo paleri the great copper-colored mountain it's sort of a a heaven for nyingma practitioners uh exclusive heaven for the old school practitioners you could say buddha field and so zander pellery literally means a glorious copper-colored mountain so right near where i was born there is a mountain called copper mountain so i think i was looking for the other one i just got the gps settings a little bit and ended up over here but anyway growing up i grew up in a small english-speaking community surrounded by you know 75 80 percent french people but we had our own english schools english churches english sports clubs like that and uh so although i grew up in french canada the french were really only peoples we encountered in this on the streets or in cafes and stuff like that it wasn't part of a young person's life because you go from home to school or home to sports home to church that sort of thing but it was very wonderful place to grow up it's very like a upper peninsula in michigan or something like that very similar kind of climate where it's rural beautiful foliage in the autumn flowers in bloom and spring and mosquitoes in the summer yeah we were just out there on a little bit of uh you know up to the upper peninsula because no one can travel so that's where we're spending our time so yeah we can kind of visualize that in chicago very very similar area like if you were to drive if you were to be just picked up blindfolded and dropped in a spaceship somewhere and then asked are you in up or in uh in gaspe quebec you would have to go hmm let me see um i'll toss a coin looking for the sound of french somewhere i guess right right yeah well of course if you hear people speaking you'd know yeah but anyway so i went to school and high school hair and then at 17 went off to college and then later after college went to england to meet my mom's side of the family because she was a british and from there sort of made some links to india it's very common for europeans to go back and forth to india and especially after high school or after first second year college many europeans give their kids a year off to travel and figure out what they want to do with their life kind of like the gap year idea right yeah yeah so usually they like them to finish first or second year university but some will do it after college and uh so there's a lot of meeting lots of people going to and from india and spending time in india and all of that then i met six americans who had were studying with tuxe rinpoche professor norbu delama's older brother in the university of indiana in bloomington and they were on their way to dharamsala to do an immersion program for three months credited in dharmsela just kind of go there stay there and get their tibetan together and stuff like that and they mentioned that the dalai lama was opening the school for western wow wow i'll save up my shekels and make it over there so i did that over the winter and the next spring set out for india and arrived there in july of 1972 met the dalai lama a few days later with a used to give public audiences to westerners on sometimes twice a week monday and friday just sort of informal things people would walk up and stand outside his veranda and he'd come out on the veranda and just chit chat for 20 minutes half an hour sometimes if it was uh too hot outside or raining outside then he'd bring people inside the little audience room that quite comfortably sits about 40 50 and would do inside so i met him was very very impressed i mean he was such a wonderful human being just really uh you know just very dazzling in his humility his simplicity but also you could say his splendor very very just very energetic but in a very familiar way almost like meeting uh you know if you had a really famous uncle or grandfather or something like that who was famous for being a genius and being good humored and being very very talented a real renaissance man kind of a thing and so i immediately was very very impressed and and i asked about the studies program and he said well it starts in september you got a couple of months off you can either hang around here and you know just get to know the lay of the land or come back in early september because uh it'll be starting in it gave me the you know they mentioned the date so i went down to the it was being run basically out of the tibetan library and so that's how i ended up there and i like to think it's a combination of previous life instincts towards towards the enlightenment tradition and and also in this life the blessings of my mother my mother and my maternal grandfather's connection with that part of the world and uh yeah and sort of a natural affinity spiritually that i have with the the indo-tibetan buddhism i should say would just like curiosity with that you know we never talked about this particular thing so this is some of this i had some familiarity with some of it not i imagine you like in your teenage years playing bass and you know and doing those things so uh you were kind of like then if i get it you were in uh england kind of on a gap year kind of an experience you were just traveling over there right well no no after college i worked for about six years with college totally yeah after college i worked about six months up north in canada where you basically are given room and board and all your money goes directly in the bank and so and they pay very well so i got a nice chunk of change and so after next spring i basically packed my packed my bags and made it over drove cross country from west coast canada to to east coast canada then said goodbye to my parents my family and from montreal flew over to uh england so let me ask you real quick um what was your i know it's kind of a random what was your major in college and and what about that too what what at that point you know going through college and after high school what what did you think you wanted to do for work because i'm sure people ask ask you during that time your family and whatnot like where was your mind before you went i had no idea of a career option at all education was just kind of a you know you find yourself on a boat on a little river and you go through kindergarten and then you go to primary and then secondary school you know i had the advantage that my mom growing up in london during that edwardian period and posted where he period it was kind of a very strong international spiritualism movement and so all of the educated brits had books on hinduism and buddhism and zan and sufis and so she had a very good library and she was connected you know theosophical society was quite strong in london in those days right and so she was connected with with the theosophical movement and so growing up i had a strong influence from the whole asia spiritual tradition from all different sides through her and very often that in the lunch or dinner if we had time she would if she was reading a particular book she would bring it out and say oh i think we should do a quotation from the rubiate of omar khayyam a very interesting statement from the tauti king and this is something we should contemplate don't you think i think that's an interesting thing to say can you imagine those silly chinese people thought this like 5 000 years ago well that's how well it's aged it still cares legs she wouldn't say silly chinese people [Laughter] that's all i'm kind of thought i you know fell in love with the asian things right from the beginning and that was very very moving in terms of going to college i got an engineering scholarship okay most english speakers but scholarships either for engineering or for finance the french all got their scholarships for like romantic 17th century a lot of them went into law you know for us englishers to go in anglophones we used to call ourself englishers but now we have to say anglophones to go into law that was considered like a dirty profession you rather working for criminals or you're trying to cheat someone out of yeah so our scholarships rather in one hard sciences usually meaning engineering one of the branches of engineering or into economics so because i like science a lot and i like physics and chemistry those things so it went in that way but anyway so that uh after that i worked up north and went to england and then in 72 made my way to india so when you're going to india you didn't have a big like plan in mind it just was one of those things that happened you heard that there were these uh students who had this program you thought oh i'll go and check that out were you already turning your mind that your life would go that way i'd already read quite a bit on tibetan stuff you know what's the tibetan book of the dead was out at the time signed up and edited by evans wentz and life of milarepa was out and uh secret tibetan yoga secret doctrines i read lamo govinda's foundations of tibetan buddhism which is a real mind stomper those germans really know how to make easy things sound very difficult yeah there's some chinese medical texts that are written by german people you're like what are they talking about even if you know the field yeah later when i would read translations by the german canadian herbert gunther i'd have to put the tibetan text beside it to have a clue what where it was coming from but anyway uh i mean i was very very interested in that whole side of things but i was very moved by you know ken kesey the american writer who wrote books like a once a great notion some flew over the cuckoo's nest and things like that i was very convinced that if there were any enlightened people in the west they would probably be in mental hospitals so as well as meeting my my and you know we see this said many many times in the literature right the idea of the mad yoga and the crazy wisdom and all that sort of stuff is commented upon in many many texts and so i thought yeah they would they would certainly be considered either schizophrenic or just totally out of touch or you know sort of any of a dozen different prognoses so i knew i'd not met people who had gone and worked in england and the easiest job for a foreigner arriving in london to get was working in a mental hospital because the brits are afraid of mental illness they're scared that it's contagious and also i think they're still traumatized for world war ii so they were afraid of violence and mental hospitals you suddenly often have sudden outbreaks of very irrational violent behavior and so one reason for my interest in that was this idea that enlightened people or mystical people or peoples with special talents in that direction would probably be locked up in our society i mean russia did it regularly and over here the government can't do it regularly but families can do it to their relatives quite easily and i never met anyone over here who was even slightly impressively mystical other than my mother perhaps because by inclination rather but not by experience so uh and then you know though came kisi's book one flew over the cuckoo's now sort of follows that theme that if someone is a very talented individual and free thinker and whatnot they just might end up in the loony bin and anyone cause i read that one in like seventh grade or something i remember reading it in the school bus and it like blew the top of my head open you know the cuckoo's nest it was like both of ken casey's books were absolutely fabulous i mean isn't it he was certainly the most talented writer of his decade just unfortunate he sort of blew his brain mind out in a car on lsd and other psychotropics uh through what would you say unsupervised use of them excessive and random so when you were going to india then did you feel like uh do you feel did you feel pangs for things that you were leaving behind or was that once you made the commitment was it like i'm okay with this this seems like the right thing or did you have originally i thought i would spend three years there and then i would be an enlightened being but once i started to do the training i noticed it's a little bit more in i suppose organic than that perhaps and i could have done it in three years with certain kinds of steroids which may might be developed in the future but we don't have them yet yeah and so after three years uh decided i've given another three and finally it became 12. after 12 i really did i mean every year i did feel a lot of benefit i did feel very very enthusiastic i would say you know not only dela lama but he chose two teachers to serve as our tutors of geshedar gig issue rabdon kesha rabdin had just completed i think a six-year retreat and geshigargi a three-year retreat and uh they were both very well educated as well very well practiced and both wonderful wonderful personalities and of course we could visit de la lumba's own gurus lingarama trijian rubijay from time to time and they gave initiations and teaching from time to time especially those early days the dalai lama didn't do many initiations the tibetan tradition is if your guru is around usually you don't do it unless he commands you to do it and so he didn't do much for initiation at those times he would do some um you know every spring do a two or three week public teaching for five six hours a day usually on lam rim or some indian text like chanti devo or um or yadava uh negrojuna that sort of thing but anyway every year i did learn a lot and i did feel a great benefit spiritually intellectually emotionally however who wants to put it and darmslow is very beautiful place to live you know it's in the foothills of the himalayas my window the sun came over a 17 000 peak mountain and fell across my bed in the morning which is a nice way to wake up and uh it's you know reasonable weather it's not hot like delhi and uh buckeye or varanasi in summer it's coolish winter gets a little chilly but in the winter usually the program would close down the dalai lama and most llamas and most of the tibetans would go down either to budgaya or varanasi for the winter so we would all go there so it was a wonderful place to live and definitely relate to this feeling of being in your 20s because i think i started doing zen back then and i thought well i'll spend a few years get this enlightenment thing done you know i'll have rat that wrapped up no a little bit more to it but yeah um yeah i think you know dalai lama often says a problem with western people is we have this idea of like it's like turning on a light switch a kind of instant noodles that sort of thing is an organic process and each person has their own i suppose you would say pace of unfoldment like different flowers bloom at different speeds and they stay in full bloom for longer various varying lengths of time and so on so yeah so it became 12 years