Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

Conway: You know, when we were on that plane, I was fascinated by the way the shadow followed us. That silly shadow! Racing along over mountains and valleys, covering ten times the distance of the plane, and yet always there to greet us... with outstretched arms when we landed. And I've been thinking that, somehow, you're that plane, and I'm that silly shadow. That all my life I've been rushing up and down hills, leaping rivers, crashing over obstacles, never dreaming that one day that beautiful thing in flight would land on this earth and into my arms.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

[Comicopolis]

It's a log time since I've see it but I always liked Capra's version of Lost Horizon.

[Duffman_Comics]

Just catching up, but thanks again for a lovely stroll down Memory Lane with regard to Nepal and Tibet.

 

I spent a couple of months in both places in 1992, and your pics of Nepal, especially, dragged memories back to the forebrain.

 

I think it should be pointed out that it is illegal to climb Macchapucchre AT ALL.

 

It's forbidden, because it's sacred.

 

The "Fish Tail" peak is noticeable all over Nepal (not from Kathmandu - get on down to Pokhara) and truly beautiful.

 

Great thread. Keep it up (thumbs u <--- the good one

[Flex Mentallo]

Shambala

 

"It is very good to recite the mantra Om mani padme hum, but while you are doing it, you should be thinking on its meaning, for the meaning of the six syllables is great and vast... The first, Om symbolizes the practitioner's impure body, speech, and mind; it also symbolizes the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha. The path is indicated by the next four syllables. Mani, meaning jewel, symbolizes the factors of method: the altruistic intention to become enlightened, compassion, and love. The two syllables, padme, meaning lotus, symbolize wisdom. Purity must be achieved by an indivisible unity of method and wisdom, symbolized by the final syllable hum, which indicates indivisibility. Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that through the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha."

The Dalai Lama

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Tibet is the world’s largest and highest plateau. Chinese geologists have identified more than 130 minerals in Tibet with significant reserves of the world’s deposits of uranium, chromite, boron, lithium, borax, and iron. 10 major river systems originate from Tibet that sustain the life of about 47 per cent of the world’s total human population.

 

It is often referred to as the ‘world’s third pole’ because it contains the biggest ice fields outside of the Arctic and Antarctic. No other area in the world is a water repository of such size. The Tibetan plateau is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and the impact of melting glaciers could be catastrophic.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Until the twentieth century, Tibet and its ancient traditions were largely unknown to westerners. Rumors had persisted for four centuries that somewhere in Tibet there lay a fabled land whose inhabitants were the custodians of hidden wisdom. The legends said that they would emerge only when our greed has driven the world to the very brink of destruction.

 

“Every seventh year, these teachers are believed to assemble in SCHAM-CHA-LO, the “happy land.” According to the general belief it is situated in the north-west of Tibet. Some place it within the unexplored central regions, inaccessible even to the fearless nomadic tribes; others hem it in between the range of the Gangdisri Mountains and the northern edge of the Gobi Desert, South and North, and the more populated regions of Khoondooz and Kashmir, of the Gya-Pheling (British-India), and China, West and East, which affords to the curious mind a pretty large latitude to locate it in. Others still place it between Namur Nur and the Kuen-Lun Mountains – but one and all firmly believe in Scham-bha-la, and speak of it as a fertile, fairy-like land, once an island, now an oasis of incomparable beauty, the place of meeting of the inheritors of the esoteric wisdom of the god-like inhabitants of the legendary island.”

Madame Blavatsky, 1882

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Inspired by Theosophical lore and several visiting Mongol lamas, Gleb Bokii, the chief Bolshevik cryptographer and one of the bosses of the Soviet secret police, along with his writer friend Alexander Barchenko, embarked on a quest for Shambala, in an attempt to merge Kalachakra-tantra and ideas of Communism in the 1920s.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

They contemplated a special expedition to Inner Asia to retrieve the wisdom of Shambala - the project fell through as a result of intrigues within the Soviet intelligence service, as well as rival efforts of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat that sent its own expedition to Tibet in 1924.

 

Bokii and Barchenko also experimented with Buddhist spiritual techniques. In his Moscow laboratory Barchenko was carrying out experiments on behalf of the Bolsheviks on mind control at a distance, with the aim of inculcating revolutionary fervour in the masses by the excitation of their brain cells.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Russian artist Nicholas Roerich (whose paintings are mentioned by HP Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness) was heavily influenced by eastern mysticism.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In 1925 he took his entire family on a five year long expedition that, in Roerich's own words: "started from Sikkim through Punjab, Kashmir, Ladakh, the Karakoram Mountains, Khotan, Kashgar, Qara Shar, Urumchi, Irtysh, the Altai Mountains, the Oryot region of Mongolia, the Central Gobi, Kansu, Tsaidam, and Tibet"

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Prior to this expedition, Roerich had attempted to solicit the help of the Soviet government and Bolshevik secret police to assist him in his expedition, promising in return to monitor British activities in the area, but received only a lukewarm response. Between the summer of 1927 and June 1928 the expedition was thought to be lost, since communication with them ceased for a year. They had been attacked in Tibet and only the "superiority of our firearms prevented bloodshed... In spite of our having Tibet passports, the expedition was forcibly stopped by Tibetan authorities."

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The expedition was detained by the government for five months, and forced to live in tents in sub-zero conditions and to subsist on meagre rations. Five men of the expedition died during this time. During March 1928 they were allowed to leave Tibet, and trekked south to settle in India, where they initiated a research center, the Himalayan Research Institute.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Next:

 

‘To the German King, the sublime Herr Hitler from the Regent of Tibet, Reting Hutuku, on the 18th day of the first Tibetan month of the Earth-hare year. To the German King, Herr Hitler, who has achieved power throughout the whole wide world. It pleases me that you are in good health and that your good deeds are crowned with success. [...] I greatly hold the wish that the previous good relationship between our two residences will intensify. I believe that you, sublime King, Herr Hitler, agree with me on this issue and consider it important and are not indifferent to it. I wish for your good health and for news of your wishes.’

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Hollow Earth

 

In The Spear of Destiny (1973), Trevor Ravenscroft asserted that Nazi Germany sent annual expeditions to Tibet from 1926 to 1943. Their mission was first to find and then to maintain contact with the Aryan forefathers in Shambala and Agharti, hidden subterranean cities beneath the Himalayas. Adepts there were the guardians of secret occult powers, especially vril, and the missions sought their aid in harnessing those powers for creating an Aryan master race.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Many high-ranking members of the Nazi regime, including Hitler, but especially Himmler and Hess, held convoluted occult beliefs. Prompted by those beliefs, the Germans sent an official expedition to Tibet between 1938 and 1939.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The first element of Nazi occult beliefs was in the mythic land of Hyperborea-Thule. Just as Plato had cited the Egyptian legend of the sunken island of Atlantis, Herodotus mentioned the Egyptian legend of the continent of Hyperborea in the far north. When ice destroyed this ancient land, its people migrated south.

 

The second ingredient was the idea of a hollow earth. At the end of the seventeenth century, the British astronomer Sir Edmund Halley first suggested that the earth was hollow, consisting of four concentric spheres.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The hollow earth theory fired many people’s imaginations, especially with the publication in 1864 of French novelist Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In 1871, British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in The Coming Race, described a superior race, the Vril-ya, who lived beneath the earth and planned to conquer the world with vril, a psychokinetic energy.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The French author Louis Jacolliot linked vril with the subterranean people of Thule. The Thuleans will harness the power of vril to become supermen and rule the world.