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The Himalayas: Wanderers from the West
BY W. K. JACKSON
(continued)
Jan Michiels got high on LSD and was subsequently moved by his psychedelic visions.
Thus began a search, as one of the driven, for answers to the meaning of life.
Raised more by the streets than his fish-selling parents during the week, and more by his grandparents on the weekends, Jan grew up a member of a strong Catholic family in cities across Belgium, the Flemish son of simple, uneducated stock.
“At some age you start doubting,” he said of his mid-teen years when he began to feel distanced from his parents (“when you are a teenager you start hating your parents for everything they do,” he says) and when he questioned Catholicism most vehemently. “At about age fourteen, fifteen, I became very skeptical. I didn’t believe anymore.”
The boy’s spiritual leanings – or lack thereof – set him apart from his sister and only sibling, a girl he describes as “normal,” meaning she “doesn’t question all these things.” To this day, tension exists between brother and sister. Said Jan: “I think she envies me because she married young and is stuck and I am doing all these things.”
It was during these teenage years of change that Jan fell in love with experimental poetry. Fascinated by the freedom it allowed, the 15-year old knew that his destiny was to be a poet.
“Something like hit me in the face and I started writing poetry then,” he said.
But poetry wasn’t the only medium through which the young Flemish experimented. Art of all kinds also found a place in his life, not to mention drugs. At 17, a high dose of LSD led to his leaving his body and “seeing things” in a sort of bliss. Soon afterwards, another high dose left him chained by paranoia, scared, like a child.
“My salvation was very dualistic,” he tried to explain of these two events. “First I experienced a huge bliss, then it was like a hell.”
Feeling isolated, finding no solace with friends, struggling with “serious mental problems” as he puts it, it wasn’t until the age of 21 – after graduating with a degree in the arts - that he walked out of the library with a book in his hands: a book by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama. Poring over its pages, the young man read exactly what he himself had experienced during the drug-induced hallucinations of his past. This is it, he thought, I will become a Buddhist.
Initially attracted to Zen Buddhism over the Tibetan version’s myriad deities and wrathful gods and multitudinous prayers, Jan visited a Tibetan Buddhist center in Belgium some months later – a visit that would not conclude until he had finished ten days of meditation. “It was wonderful,” he said, and it was later, during a retreat in an old Chinese restaurant in Austria, that he met his guru and his “career of being a Buddhist” gained direction.
“My teacher was a wild yogi,” Jan said, “not like the smiling, gentle Buddhism that Westerners think of.” As contradictory as it may initially ring, the unruly lama taught through confusion. “That was his way of practicing,” Jan said. “My guru was,” he explained, “the crazy-wisdom emanation of Padmasambhava.”
Despite the guru’s unorthodox ways, or perhaps because of them, Jan felt he had found the path leading to truth.
And so, as is proper for one of the driven, he went to the mountains.
Studying Tibetan, the Belgian hopes not only to better understand religious texts but also translate them as an extension of his anthropological interests.
“So many great traditions in Tibet are absolutely unknown in the West,” he said. “These books are just laying there by the tens of thousands, probably never touched by any Westerner.”
After six months in Darjeeling, he plans to live with a Tibetan family in Nepal, learning the language and practicing Buddhism as “a way to give back to my teacher, who has given me so much.” After that, his plans are far less concrete. “I absolutely don’t want a family or any fixed relationship,” he said. “I have all these things I want to do – long retreats – and if you have a serious relationship or a child then you can’t do that.”
Inwardly, he explains, his pursuit is to develop complete detachment.
“I don’t have the feeling I will ever have a real life,” he admitted. “Maybe I’ll live in India the rest of my life. That’s the decision I took, I mean, I made this connection with my guru, and that’s part of being a yogi. It’s like signing a contract. But still, sometimes I really wonder, what am I doing?”
Thus, despite all of his findings, the Belgian is still searching (“the goal is the path,” he says), and as such he finds himself in the hills, like the much-loved Tibetan saint Padmasambhava, who Jan admires with an almost worshipful devotion. To Nyingmapas, Jan explains, Padmasambhava occupies a higher place than even Siddartha Gautama. He it was who left India and came to the mountains, to Tibet, taking Buddhism there in the 8th century and establishing it for good. Later the Nyingma sect, along with Tibetan Buddhism in general, went through a period of degeneration, followed by regeneration, but despite the new, more popular sects springing up all over the Land of Snows, the Nyingmapas could always claim to be the oldest, the first, the school of Padmasambhava. Like numerous Indian saints after him, Padmasambhava left the plains to teach and meditate in the mountains.
And that, it seems, is an example being followed by a young student from Belgium, one thousand three hundred years later.
* * *
My path has led me from the sweltering plains of Delhi to the ancient kingdom of Ladakh, from Nelson Mandela’s election in South Africa to the desolation of the Ethio-Eritrean war. I’ve visited Buddhist centers in Singapore, interviewed almost one hundred refugees between Dharamsala and Salt Lake City, organized charity dinners at Marriott hotels, put together symposiums at major universities, and once I even ran one thousand five hundred miles (59 days) from San Francisco to Colby, Kansas carrying the Tibetan flag in my weary hand. I’ve debated with the Chinese ambassador to the United States, given speeches on Burmese national television, and seen my newborn son receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama’s niece. I’ve been a missionary in Poland, for two years speaking nothing but Polish and wearing a suit and tie and nametag and sharing my deepest spiritual beliefs with anyone who would listen on the street. I’ve founded an NGO and taken it apart again, I’ve built houses for the poor in the Philippines, and I’ve organized pen-pal relationships between rich Utah schoolchildren and destitute orphans – all AIDS victims - in Zimbabwe. I’ve directed crowds of hundreds in rural Ethiopian villages, volunteered at refugee camps in South Africa, addressed a packed auditorium in the Singapore National Museum, and once, on the friendship highway between Nepal and Tibet, I yelled “Free Tibet” to the border guard on the China side.
Through all of this, experiences the world over, working with thousands of people in calamitous conditions from Africa to Asia to Eastern Europe to the United States, I have always been driven. And no matter where I was involved, or with what, I have always been driven here, to the hills: the mountains of India and Tibet. I’ve never been able to explain it, though I’ve been asked to try hundreds of times. At first, perhaps, the exotic nature of it all, the mountains themselves, were the magnets that sucked me in. But that is no longer the case. My obsession with Tibet isn’t about the Great Game, or Shangri-la, or levitating monks in a peace-loving land; I have studied Tibetan history vigorously and I know better. Then why am I learning Tibetan? Because I am a student of Tibetan history, because I must do my part in preserving a culture that has been scheduled for extermination, because I wish to expand my horizons, because I want to free Tibet... In all honesty, I don’t know. I’m driven to. There. That’s my answer.
I’m searching, too – not necessarily for the great spiritual answers but for a greater understanding of the world and what I can do to make it better - or, in the words of Costanzo Allione, “to benefit sentient beings.”
And here, facing down Kanchenjunga – a part of the same range where Milarepa reached Enlightenment, where Khenpo Rinpoche spent twelve years in meditation, where Yeshe Tsogyal became Tibetan Buddhism’s most famed female, where Jigme Lingpa “realized the nature of his mind,” and where Padmasambhava went to bring dharma to a benighted land - I just might stumble upon something.
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