Making Heads Fall Off (with apologies to Gus di Zerega)

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the 80's, when I was living in northern California and teaching the western esoteric tradition, a friend had a student named Gus.  Gus kept saying that he wanted to "learn to make heads fall off."  My friend, Don Frew, had many wonderous stories about things he had seen or been party to, and Gus was hell-bent on learning to see and do the same.  I was always jealous, because I'd never seen or otherwise witnessed anything that I could not rationally explain.

These occasions seem, from my reading, to be fairly common in Tibetan Buddhism.  Here's a typical description, from Portraits of Tibetan Buddhist Masters by Don Farber:

"That same year in Los Angeles I had a profound experience during an empowerment called the 'Black Crown Ceremony' given by His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa.  As I stood in the crowd inside the Shrine Auditorium, I watched the Karmapa as he sat on a throne, a black hat on his head and his hand on top of the hat.  To the sound of Tibetan horns and gongs, he slowly lifted the hat up above his head.  Suddenly, he appeared to become transparent, while his clothes and the hat remained opaque.  He appeared this way for nearly a minute, until he placed the hat back on his head" (p. 1).

I'm still waiting to witness the unexplainable, but just today I had an AHA! experience about why in all my spiritual wanderings this has never occurred.  It is from something written by Lama Thubten Yeshe, the guru of my guru, in his book Becoming Vajrasattva.  He is speaking in the context of initiations and empowerments, but I think the idea can be generalized to other circumstances in which some witnesses have experiences of mystery and others do not:

"Receiving initiations has more to do with your own level of development than with the qualities of the guru.  You don't receive an initiation just because the guru is special -- in fact, it's the other way around.  You receive initiation because of your own qualities.  Due to your mind's capacity to attain higher states, during an initiation it can somehow meet, or merge with, the guru's mind, such that you both experience the same thing.  That sort of experience can really be called receiving an initiation" (p. 187).

(This also explains why, during my many years of involvement in Western esotericism, I seemed to be able to bestow experiences I had never had myself.)

If anything, I am now more a scientist than I was twenty-five years ago.  Because of my naive embarrassments of the past, as an extremely credulous youth, I am deeply fearful of being deceived by appearances.  (Whether that's good or bad can be debated.)  With the many tales of wonder that surround the practices of Tibetan Buddhism, the future could get very interesting.