Iron Feather HQ : NOCH : CRUEL WYNDZ

The post below from a distraught Casimir on Tenpel’s forum relates directly to this whole Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche (DKR) affair. It shows from an insider’s observation the disfunction, manipulation, exploitation and deception that have become features of many Lamist groups in the West and elswhere. Casimir appears to be the brother of the woman who was having an affair with DKR while still married to Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel. A pretty sordid account all round. These are the “precious ones” that people in the West are seeking spiritual “guidance” from. It’s a worry…

casimir niedzwiedz says:
January 26, 2013 at 8:58 pm
Dear Anon and Tenpel, and anyone else. I write to Anon, because you wrote in the comments for the “a former Rigpa student’s thoughts on cultivating discernment, that teachers like Mingyur, Dzigar Kongtrul, Ringu Tulku, khandro were teachers that you found to be great teachers. I write to Tenpel because you have this website and i really need some help in understanding the past 15 years of my life under a tibetan guru. I have been contemplating writing here or on dialogue ireland about my experience within my own sangha, not Rigpa. I guess i should start at the beginning. My mom was a student of Trungpa, and was at one point a consort of his. i grew up in the shambhala community, living my life as a young buddhist, wanting to devote my whole life to the dharma, reading the tales of Gesar, Milarepa, the buddha, were always places of extreme inspiration. I practiced since about the age of ten, trying to meditate or what i thought at the time was meditation, going to sun camp up at RMDC while my mom was in Seminary. We moved and followed Trungpa from Boulder up to Halifax, and to my young eyes everything was good. At the age of 16 i felt i had experienced my basic goodness, though fleeting. It was at this point that i started to look into finding a teacher for myself. My sister who is 10 years older than me left our home at 16 to follow a career in fashion modeling. sometime in there because of her boyfriend and later husband, she became a student of a new young teacher that was a receiving much praise. their teacher-student relationship had been ongoing for a few years until, when i was 13 my older brother died and this is when things started to go down hill. The same summer my brother died, my sister got married to her husband and this Guru, let’s call him Jamyang Guru, presided the whole thing. this lasted about a year before my sister, under the guidance of this teacher, decided to go into retreat for three years. I began to look up to my sister, someone that is intelligent and was truly striving for the dharma. I wanted nothing else but to go into retreat. After sometime within retreat, my sister decided to leave her husband to focus on the path that Jamyang Guru was setting out for her. It is the Longchin Nyingtik tradition, with emphasis on guru yoga, retreat, and service. This lead to her moving up in the sangha as a role model for the other students, a theme that will carry on. Now i should say that Jamyan Guru, was raised in India, his father was revered as a great teacher, i know his name but will leave it out. All of Jamyang Guru’s brothers are all high lamas and gurus. while studying in Nepal with his teachers, Jamyang guru met a western girl, she became his first student and were married in thailand, had a son and moved to america. So my sister has been in retreat now with her teacher for a good amount of time, i should also mention that Jamyang guru’s wife was also in this retreat setting, everyone having their own cabins. at this time my sister began her sexual relationship, all in secret, with this guru. my sister hadn’t even left her husband yet, but through meeting with Jamyang guru, my sister’s husband came to find out that she was leaving her, not to be with this teacher, but to practice dharma, as though your hair is on fire, which can be found in Words of My Perfect Teacher, by Patrul Rinpoche, this Text became the sanghas ngondro practice. I very fundamentalist text f you ask me now, so my sister is now with this teacher, but he is still with his wife, and they go about acting like they are together, but really not. Now this is just what was going on within this small circle. Within the sangha, there was much mental/ psychological abuse going on, not just with the woman, but anyone who questioned or deviated from the lineage and path, plainly not seeing the Guru as how they explain it in all the texts and a lot of what you guys have gotten out of these webpost. Double binds, extreme co-dependant relationships. The system became a close circuit, this went on. i had my doubts start coming in. but i was asked to go to india and set up a school there for students to come and study the tibetan language and texts. My family had money, not a lot, but more than most, and my sister donated over a $100,000 to our teacher, it was told that one should give 10% of their yearly earning to the sangha. The sangha is non-profit, but you could never tell. the money went into building this school in a small tibetan refugee colony in India, about 2 to 3 hours from Dharmasala. i went over there. I was there for the most part by myself for a couple years, meeting teachers and being an attendant. i was put into a marriage set up by my teacher and his brother, who was the uncle of my wife. My ex-wife’s father was actually King of a provence in Tibet known as Drongpa, in the Nangchen region. Her other uncle is Tenga Rinpoche, who helped Dilgo Khyentse establish Nepal. so with my ex-wife’s status i was able to see a lot more teachers and how they live on a day to day basis. My third year in India, my teacher Jamyang guru came, with my sister and about 10 more students. the following five years were torture. It is hard to put into words all of the horrible things i saw committed by these enlightened masters. all of them friends and get along great together. while the rest of the people in this refugee colony lived in poverty, these gurus, were building huge houses for themselves and families, all of these Men gurus had girlfriends on the side, except maybe Tai Situ, who was only 30 mins away. I saw a system set up by the “Rinpoches” that was really only there for power and of course telling people the dharma that they are suppose to live by, Many Tibetan people themselves were uneducated and referred to the Buddha as God, they had a much more relaxed look on buddhism in the form of practice, they really only do the mani, spin the prayer wheel, and give money to the monasteries for prayer. they are extremely superstitious in every way, Rigpa students can attest, by looking at the calendar that Riga puts out every year. I learned Tibetan and translated other texts, Politics were in every aspect. Just look at the video put out by the Yangsi Kalu recently. It was basically just politics with gold covering it. I was verbally abused, neglected, called names by my sangha and sister which all came from our teacher. I was called out many times in class, about how i hadn’t donated as much money as my sister even though i had donated, (my sister didn’t say anything even though she new it was untrue, but to go against the teacher was not allowed(i give you this example not so much as physical abuse but how everything became screwy and allowed for further abuse to be perpetrated. Everything had to be taken to the extreme. It became fundamentalistic in every way, and i would say that it was always based in that fundamentalist interpretation of the dharma, in Tibet. The relationship between my sister and Rinpoche was kept secret, This teacher was still with his wife, now his wife was becoming a teacher in her own right, somehow, writing books and giving teaching, Their son was also being groomed to take over the sangha. This dharma heir lived with us, but was treated like a tulku in every way, even though he was not. My teacher kept telling us that this was not nepotism because he had a letter from Dilgo Khyentse saying his son will become a dharma heir, this boy never studied while in school in India, he spent his time either playing World of warcraft or reading comic books while the rest of us built walls, landscaped, help build an addition to his house which was already huge but needed to be bigger. people started to question my teacher’s relationship with my sister, but was never openly talked about, my sister was seen as a model of the perfect teacher, giving all of her money away, not relating to her family at all, treating our teacher’s family as her own. (Two young beautiful girls became students and then were encouraged to come to India and be apart of the school, they have since become the attendants that my sister once was to this teacher and are being groomed to follow in my sister’s footsteps.) i was no longer her brother, Our Guru’s son was and needed to be treated with the upmost respect and care, while i was dying from my depression. Everything is and was still backwards and i can give you many more examples. My ex teacher, now has 6 houses in Colorado, one of which he is moving into with my sister shortly, one in Vermont, he ha multiple houses in India, along with his three other brothers, who have equally if not larger houses than most people. They go to Taiwan every year to get million dollar donations from their Taiwanese students, while charging an arm and a leg for teaching here in the west. They do not charge students over there. It is sad, it has left my family pennyless. My mom latched onto this Jamyang Guru early on, but giving him lots of money because my sister said it would be more benefit with him, all in an attempt to purify the karma of my families past. My mom, who has been to so many teachers, has not received any help at all and is really in a lot of suffering. I finally left the sangha two years ago, i do not speak to my mom or sister, because anything negative i have to say about this teacher, is seen as me being crazy. As the sangha knew i was leaving , they began their attack, calling me troubled and possessed by some negative being, that could only be remedied by sending money to the monastery for prayers. my family is destroyed, my family penyless, i do not trust these “Rinpoches”, I know i am throwing out the baby with the bath tub, but i see the tulku and guru yoga as something that came about in medieval Tibet, I was a religious studies major, i did not want to take the academic approach to buddhism, seeing how all the schools arose in Tibet and China, and the causes behind such schools arising being anthropologically clear to establish.But i do see it as a Buddhocracy. I think the Lamas/Rinpoches though they do and might care about the dharma, they are in a double bind themselves. they can bring the dharma to the west or they can preserve their culture, now both can be done together, but i think i have seen that the majority if not all rinpoches, care more about preserving their culture, which has pretty much only benefitted the tulkus and kings of Tibet, rather than the dharma. The tulku system itself was self realized by the person who came up with it, the first Karmapa, we give so much to these teachers and for what. all of teachers are friends, they all have taught together at Rigpa, i am not saying there is a conspiracy, not at all. more the system that was set up came about through its own causes and conditions, and those causes and conditions do not apply now. The buddhas teachings are like medicine, no? so how can you say there is one teaching greater than the other or one medicine better than the other, it depends on your sickness, like Ati yoga, or all the subtleties that these Rinpoches use to seduce young girls. Everyone doesn’t know what is going on in this world any better than anyone else, that goes for these teachers, i feel. they take on the role of teacher, and we give them that power, i like your notes on reform, but i think the problem is more systematic than reform will take care of. I think we are our own buddhas and this thought that someone else knows how to relate to that better than ourselves has nothing to do with buddhsim, in my simple opinion.

I have so much more to say, i know this is a lot and i really only come from a place of needing help, i come asking for the people on this website for their thoughts and opinions on what i have written, i hope to add more, for i have been thinking about this for a long time, i know that it is not clear at all, but hopefully talking to you guys will help clear some things up. please tell me how crazy i am or when i lost you, feed back is key. i want to relate and see how things are grey, and i will try to do so and at the same time, question these roles. i see where BellaB, Mary, Dialogue Ireland, Tenpel, Anon, etc. are all coming from for i have been in all of those places, i get that, and that is my task to work on, but there is a imbalance going on, people are getting hurt, people’s lives are being destroyed, families torn apart, abuse in every way, double binds, group think, pure dysfunction, and it needs to be addressed in any way possible, even if it might not be to nice to hear.

There a several more posts after this one from Casimir, you can read here: http://thedorjeshugdengroup.wordpress.c ... -to-think/

Chris Chandler, on July 4, 2013 at 2:21 am said:

Thank you Casimir, , It is heartbreaking what you’re expressing, I know who you are talking about , the lama, the players, I have seen this terrible pain and repressive sangha that this lama created around him, how his students, good people , became less and less confident about themselves and their basic goodness, and become his slaves, running here and there , uprooting themselves, whenever he told them too. sending them on long retreats, the promiscuity of these lamas, which is one of the main reasons they protect Sogyal, because they would belike ” the kettle calling the frying pan , ‘black” , if they called him out, He has the secrets on them as well. ,

How they live in luxury, while treating us like they treated their serfs and slaves in Tibet, They only pretend to ‘adapt to the west” while recreating their lamaist world from old Tibet, that is their plan, and that is their goal, to colonize the west with the most repressive system imaginable, living off others labor and monies , while they live in luxury and opulence , just like in old Tibet. . You are not crazy, you are starting to really follow the buddha’s teachings, only each person, knows what the buddha’s teachings are from within themselves. As Gautama said to Ananda, ‘be a light unto yourself Ananda”. You may not believe this now, but you are finally really ‘waking up.” and coming out from under this terrible, lama oppression that kept their own people enslaved for centuries. WE know how it could happen, and we are watching them try and recreate it again. They are not the most enlightened amongst us, they are the most stuck, stuck in the past, stuck in their selfish attachments, , the most incapable of change, the most incapable of dealing with ‘impermanence” and the teachings of the Buddha, that’s the irony , that we look to these stuck , dysfunctional little boys, who have never grown up, and who have a big hole in their beings, that can never be filled, not even if they have millions of students adoring them, and thousands of consorts, they have grown up in a dysfunctional terrible system of abuse themselves, now the third generation, like this lama’s son, without even a trace of the dharmic teachings, will be the next lineage holder of this lama, another spoiled , rotten lama, who has been treated liek a God himself, with the projections of all the westerners and the asians, believing he too is a deity, or some special suprahuman being, just because he is this lamas son. This is a formula for creating another monster, that will abuse people as well. At least in old Tibet they all had ‘tutors’ that would box their ears, and beat them if they acted like spoiled brats.

He is a Nyingma so of course they recognize their own family members, so their labrangs (family trust funds continue). There are many groups of brother lamas that now have empires, while playing the humble roles of ‘just here to teach the dharma.” to westerners. .

Most of them are also in Taiwan building monasteries ,( some are in China building monasteries, while Tibetan monks and nuns are burning themselves to death , for the anti-China politics of these lamas ( they always hedge their bets) , i.e. for NOTHING, Their western students in the U.S. and Britain, and Europe have no idea of this, i.e. , the millions the Tawainese give to these lamas, huge donations to get these so-called ‘blessings”. Then they come back here, eat their sushi, get their western massages, teach to their western devotees, publish their books that their translators have written for them, live in their million dollar houses here for a few weeks a year.

Here they have to pretend to care about their students, when they don’t even know their names, unless they are a source of a ‘big donation”.or a potential , young , serial consort. I consider them actually sociopathic, NOT compassionate, since they have grown up in a male dominated , sick system, where pedophilia was rampant in the monasteries, and we wonder why they are so dysfunctional in their own families , behind the curtain ?

No more do I hesitate to call out their abuse. It needs to be called out, we should be like town criers over this corruption of the dharma and the buddha’s teachings..

After 30 years, I am convinced that Tulku-ism has to go, it is an atavistic, master slave paradigm that is fooling the world, with a ‘compassionate ‘ humble monk pretense” when in reality , these lamas are worse than fundamentalist Imams, they kept their own people in slavery, and they are repeating the same paradigm in the west. They are spoiled tyrants, with a big hole that can never be filled even if they had a million consorts, and a million slave devotees, they are never able to fill the hole that is within them. . They need to be called out,( and forget the exceptions, they are no use to dealing with this, they have proven that they will keep the wall of silence, so they are just as bad) they need to be seen as the danger they are, by those that have known them ‘intimately.”

There hell-realm fairy tales, are just that, fairy tales to scare us into submission. We don’t have to believe in ‘fairy tales’ anymore. We are not illiterate peasant Tibetans in Old Tibet , as much as they wish we were, and are doing everything in their power to create Old Tibet again, that they lost , from their own selfishness, greed and indifference to their own people, for centuries . These were perhaps the most ‘uncompassionate leaders of a country” the world has ever seen. That’s why they lost their country, it wasn’t the Chinese.

. We can ‘snap out” just as we ‘snapped in.” We can help others to ‘snap out.” Even if one person reads these posts and ‘wakes up from the mental slavery they have been put in by these lamas, it was worth it..

That would be a bodhisattva act on our parts. That would be real compassion, to save another generation of westerners from falling into the terrible, abusive grip of Tibetan. lamaism, that has destroyed the adult lives of so many westerners,