Wayback in the 1960s

Final episode of Season One!

Groping towards the dharma in the midlands of England in the 1960s.

Bookworm paradise: Birmingham Central Library as it was then:

Words or phrases you might want to look up (in no particular order, and some best forgotten!):

Man, Myth and Magic (magazine)

Gurdjieff

PD Ouspensky

Paul Brunton

Anagarika Govinda

Edward Conze

Alexandra David-Neel

Evans-Wentz

Christmas Humphreys

Marco Pallis

Waddel’s “Lamaism: Buddhism of Tibet”

Lobsang Rampa

H P Blavatsky

 

#Buddhism #Vajrayana #DoubleDorje #Dzogchen #Nyingma

Episode Transcript

(00:12):
Well, hello again, dear listeners, and it's almost goodbye again, at least for a bit.
Welcome to the Double Dorje podcast. I'm Alex W1lding and in this episode I look back, not at earlier episodes or even recent decades, but what it was like trying to get into this path 50 or more years ago.

(00:35):
I begin as always, by asking you to please like, better still subscribe, and even better than that to tell your friends about this podcast. You might wonder why I ask that, seeing as how there will not be an episode next week, but Series 2 is already in planning.
Now, when this podcast first started, I didn't really know how long it would run.

(00:59):
Topics have varied, but mostly my hope has been that listeners would say something like, “Well, I wish somebody had told me that when I first started.
But there are only so many times that I can again spell out what the four revolting thoughts are, what the three refuges are, how important compassion is, and so on. And I feel that I have at least touched, not deeply or finally, to be sure, but at least touched on many of those early questions.

(01:31):
If you think there are topics of that kind that I've ignored, or maybe just forgotten about, then do please let me know. I'm not hard to find on the net!
A lot of what I have said has been very general and I do expect Season 2 to focus on some issues maybe a little bit more specifically.

(01:53):
These thoughts drew my mind back to the days when I, a spotty but rather clever young boy - I suppose these days would call someone like that a nerd -
was first searching for a path.
I recall how different things were in those days and how limited our access was to any possibilities for learning, so I thought I'd indulge in a little walk down memory lane in the hope that some of today's newcomers

(02:23):
may better appreciate
the options that we have now, how lucky we are now, and what a terrible shame it would be to let it all slip by.
If a wimp like I was then could do it at that time, then I do believe that you can do it now!
I’m thinking mostly about the days before I made real contact with a genuine tradition, days as a schoolboy in Birmingham, then a university student, and entering the world of work.

(02:54):
Even though – obviously - I was there at the time, it's not totally easy to bring to mind again how narrow the options were for thinking about the real nature of things, or really how narrow the options were for thinking about what sort of life
we were going to live. How blinkered we were!

(03:15):
Of course, there were people in the world with all sorts of interesting ideas, but did we, middle-class, middle-England, fodder for the world of industry ever have a sight of those people? Not a lot.
I am talking here about popular everyday culture, and not making any attempt to describe the thinking and even experimentation going on in artistic and intellectual circles far from the regular crowds of ordinary people like my own dear family.

(03:49):
Strangely, on an intellectual level, it was as if we were ruled by two entirely incompatible world views, and somehow we were expected to accept both.
On the one hand, there was the church.
Babies were baptised. When you were asked what your religion was, you said Church of England without thinking about it.

(04:12):
In due course, you might or might not have sex before marriage, but you would get married and it would be in a church.
When anyone died, they had a funeral at church.
My school wasn't a church school as such, but the good old C of E, the Church of England, saturated the culture. The school even had its own chapel. Not that I ever went in. I think I peeked through the front door once.

(04:39):
A few of the kids got keen on religion and started taking communion there, but we looked on them as oddballs.
On the other hand, the explanation for the actual world and what happened in it was entirely mechanical. There was gravity, so the moon and the stars followed their paths. There was electricity and magnetism. There were atoms and other particles.

(05:04):
Those particles and their behaviours, according to rigid rules, were what underlay chemistry and when chemistry got complicated, that was what underlay life.
If your auntie was a spiritualist medium, you weren't allowed to meet her and she was written off as a nut case headed for the asylum. I think she did end up there, to be honest.

(05:28):
This dead weight of conventional thinking was, of course, not watertight. At that time, and being a little bit more precise I’m talking here about the early 1960s, we might not have realised it, but a shift was taking place in the whole of Western culture.
Rock'n'roll had started! So, at least in terms of popular music, the hegemony of classical music for the highbrows and light entertainment music for the lowbrows - that was out of the window.

(06:10):
Hudson's University Bookshop was the place where I first saw a narrow window through which
light of a strange and different colour could filter. In fact, that bookshop was two places. My school was located directly across the road from Birmingham University, where the main incarnation of this bookshop was located.

(06:33):
This was the place where most of the books were above our heads, but occasionally some specialist text that you might be interested in could be found.
If you won a prize to be presented on the school prize day, this was where you came to make your choice. I'll touch on this again later.
More interestingly, the same bookshop had an emanation in the city centre, close to New Street Station, and since it wasn't unknown to - how shall I put this? - to not attend school during certain period of time

(07:07):
that I was supposed to, and that I shall not explain in detail, this bookshop was included in the regular round of coffee shops, music shops and other places of diversion.
The special attraction for me was a basement room where books of less than obvious or even obscure interest were available to be looked at and bought.

(07:31):
Standing there, reading and occasionally buying, gave me my first introduction to:
mysticism, spiritualism. theosophy, astrology, yoga, the occult, witchcraft, clairvoyance, past lives, the mysteries of the pyramids, the fiction (I have to admit that I did read this) of Lobsang Rampa and travell by Bactrian camel across the Gobi Desert.

(07:54):
All of these were mind-opening.
University, unsurprisingly, provided many, many more possible diversions. There was amateur music to make; there was skirt to chase.
But the weird and wonderful still drew me.

(08:15):
I started what later grew into an almost complete collection of Man, Myth and Magic, one of those magazines designed to build into a reference work.
During vacations, I was a regular at Birmingham Reference Library, which was still in its probably impractical but nevertheless wonderful 19th century body. Later it was reincarnated in an ugly brutalist lump, a building that lasted for about 40 years.

(08:41):
Luckily, it never achieved listed status, and now has a third incarnation in something much more modern. I've never been inside that new building and it probably works well, but I tend to doubt whether it has quite the magic that was provided by the
Light in that 19th century building
gently falling from the high windows onto the polished wood reading tables, or the broad entrance staircase with its polished bannister and brass fittings gleaming in the greenish light.

(09:20):
But enough nostalgia.
The point was that in that library, although sometimes I was there for the official reason of studying what I was supposed to be studying, it was also a source for even more obscure books of the type that I just mentioned, books that had perhaps been out of print for many decades.
I think it's fair to say that as the 60s turned into the 70s, interest in this whole range of topics became rather more accessible, if not actually mainstream. We used to call this interest “things”, saying, “Oh, are you interested in things too?”, with a heavy emphasis in the voice and a meaningful nod to indicate that a

(10:01):
clear definition was unlikely, but we did know more or less what was meant. And of course it wasn't just books. The Hare Krishna movement was seen on the streets, while George Harrison and the other Beatles brought Transcendental Meditation to British shores.
The Divine Light Mission had a place near where I used to live in a house shared with followers of Krishnamurti and followers of a Sufi movement whose name I've forgotten, but which was making inroads into the new age spiritual circles of the time.

(10:34):
I did attend a couple of meetings with the Divine Light people, but not more.
The books, I suppose, did lead the way. I had acquired a heavy tome that looked impressive, but that I never understood. Authored by PD Ouspenski, who had studied under Gurdjieff, it came from one of the darker shelves of Hudson's University Bookshop, and I chose it as a school prize.

(10:58):
It stood on my bookshelf for years, next to several publications from the extremely wordy Paul Brunton, not to mention a couple of other books from the Theosophical movement.
Talking of which, I did meet Madame Blavatsky herself in a dream only a couple of years ago.
I had been walking up a path through some tall trees and came to the base of an enormous stone staircase, which I took to be the way up to Guru Rinpoche’s palace on the Copper Coloured Mountain.

(11:29):
Some other pilgrims were taking a rest at the bottom of the steps there before tackling the stairs, and we made use of a little tea shop to the side of the staircase entrance. Who should be serving but HP Blavatsky herself!
I asked what she was doing there and she told me that because she'd written such a lot of nonsense, she wasn't yet allowed to start climbing the steps. But for her sins she was working this off in the tea shop. In the meantime, she was enjoying the work because she met such a lot of interesting people.

(12:02):
“Well, it's true, isn't it? You did write a lot of tosh, didn't you?” I said. “Yes, of course”, she laughed. But I did get you all going as well, didn't I?
So there was a lot of rubbish in what I was taking in, but I forgive myself as I had no mentor to guide my studies, If I may give them such a grand word.

(12:24):
I learnt to be sceptical of some things without necessarily ruling them out altogether and slowly, slowly, I began to focus on Buddhism.
There weren't so very many books available at that time, but I'll mention a few. There were the works of Anagarika Govinda, Edward Conze, Alexandra David-Neel. There were the publications from Evans Wentz, which he did not translate, but did edit in such a way as to almost entirely obscure the source text.

(12:56):
Nevertheless, they piqued interest.
There were a couple of books claiming to summarise the whole of Buddhism, one by Edward Conze, one by Christmas Humphreys, and I later learned that there was just a single chapter in Peaks and Lamas, which was a travel and mountaineering book by Marco Pallis that was short
and to the point, as far as Tibetan Buddhism was concerned.

And somewhere along the line, probably in the reference library, I did dip into Waddel’s rather narrow-minded and dismissive “Lamaism (13:21):
Buddhism of Tibet”.
I do sincerely hope that some of you, dear listeners, are quite a lot younger than I am, and I ask you to imagine that this short list I have just suggested, which might be expanded if I went into detail to 30 or 40 titles,

(13:47):
was a very large slice of the literature that was easily accessible to ordinary people in those days.
Today, if you browse through some of the astonishing array of material available from various Dharma stores, you will find literally thousands. Some of them of course, are of dubious quality, been knocked off by somebody with not enough experience or knowledge.

(14:11):
But many of them are of an extremely high standard. Some of them each represent years of work on the part of serious and highly qualified translators.
A similar thing has happened to Dharma centres. Back then, if you were to have put a lot of effort into looking,
you might have found a tiny handful of centres across the whole Anglophone world.

(14:35):
Within a decade or so, there were dozens, and nowadays hundreds, quite literally hundreds.
And then, amongst all the digging, I had subscribed to a quarterly (I think it was) publication, The Middle Way, from the Buddhist Society in London, and somewhere in one of those I saw an advertisement

(14:59):
for what was then called Kham Tibetan House.
I booked in for a weekend, and that's where the rest of the story started. So be glad! Opportunities to carve out a path of study and practice are vastly more open than they were 50 years ago.
And all of us from that time onwards have far more access to opportunities for real study and practice, as well as opportunities to choose their own path, compared to what many a Tibetan would have had in the days of old Tibet. 80 00:15:32,000 --> hung, orgyen yul gyi nubjang tsam,000 A recording of the late Ato Rinpoche, chanting the Seven Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche (See Episode 33) before I close out... 81 hung, orgyen yul gyi nubjang tsam,000 --> 00:15:40,000 Hung. In the north-west of the land of Orgyan 82 00:15:40,000 --> In the heart of a lotus flower,,000 pema gesar dongpo la 83 In the heart of a lotus flower,,000 --> yatsen chok gi ngödrub nyé,000 00:15:49 84 yatsen chok gi ngödrub nyé,000 --> 00:16:04,000 Endowed with the most marvellous attainments, 85 00:16:04,000 --> You are renowned as the ‘Lotus-born’,,000 pema jungné zhé su drak 86 You are renowned as the ‘Lotus-born’,,000 --> khor du khandro mangpö kor,000 00:16:12 87 khor du khandro mangpö kor,000 --> 00:16:29,000 Surrounded by many hosts of ḍākinīs. 88 00:16:29,000 --> Following in your footsteps,,000 khyé kyi jesu dak drub kyi 89 Following in your footsteps,,000 --> jingyi lab chir shek su sol,000 00:16:38 90 jingyi lab chir shek su sol,000 --> 00:16:55,000 I pray to you: Come, inspire me with your blessing!

(16:55):
guru pema siddhi hung
Om Ah Hung Vajra Guru Pema Siddhi Hung

(17:16):
So once more, please remember to like and subscribe! Watch out for Season 2, and remember that the opportunities are there. You can seize them - or you can let them slip away.
Bye!