The Ocean of Wisdom
According to Richard Rudd, the author of The Gene Keys, there are always five living masters on Earth at any one time. I am certain one of these five is The 14th Dalai Lama, who was born 85 years ago on the 6th July. I also know that we are each under the care of a living master, and in The Nine Gems we examine our life experiences to discover who our teachers, helpers, guides and allies, both incarnate and in spirit, are. They are always present, and in times of need they are very close. As Carl Jung said, “Called or not called, God is here.”
I had repeated it over and over again. In the six months since my mother died, people had asked me how I was. The answer was always the same. “I’m fine.” By all accounts I seemed to be, but the pressure inside me that did not even have a name had made unspoken grief molten. I hadn’t only lost my mother. My body still carried the pain of each parent lost, and each child gone. Three generations of grief, exiled and waiting to erupt. Soon I could not function at work. I couldn’t write. Deadlines were missed. I was anxious and distracted. And then a dear friend lost his wife suddenly, and I was gone. All the unshed tears, from all those lives lost, flooded the circuits in my brain. I couldn’t sleep for fear of death. Only decades later did I begin to understand that fear was not my own. I was gone into the dark of an ancestral and collective wound.
A year earlier I had found the writings of the great 20th Century Mythologer Joseph Campbell. On page 194 of his Reflections on the Art of Living I came across a word I hadn’t heard. Bodhisattva. It drew me to it as if with open arms. My mother’s cancer had returned, and this word offered both solace and refuge. Bodhisattva, Campbell explained, means “one whose being (sattva) is enlightenment (bodhi). A “future Buddha”, who “voluntarily comes back into the world knowing that it’s a mess.” He/She is a “a beacon, guide and compassionate saviour of all beings.” I fell in love with Campbell’s retelling of the Tibetan Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara - He who looks down on the world with Mercy. And I learned that the Dalai Lama, whose title means Ocean of Wisdom, is the living embodiment of this Divine Being. The One who refuses to leave the world until all beings achieve enlightenment. Six months after my mother died I couldn’t see the pattern forming. That through a book passed into my hands and a grief that had crossed oceans, a living master had come to save me from drowning.
Just before I left for London on my O.E. three months later, the Dalai Lama came to New Zealand. I bought tickets to hear him speak, and his bubbling laughter and the stillness of mountains between his words soothed the depression that had by then taken hold. I remember looking down at my engagement ring - the diamond’s facets, touched by the venue’s lights, illuminating rainbows in my eyes.
In London, not knowing whether I could hold down a job, a temp assignment became a saving grace. The depression had by this time sapped all colour from midsummer, as if I lived under a thick blanket that blocked all light. The winter came, and just before Christmas, he found me again. Passing a newsagent after work, huddled against the cold, I looked up. The cover of a French Vogue held his face, and those eyes that know, that behold and hold, that are wise and compassionate and ancient met mine. His face had been superimposed upon the Himalayas, and a rainbow spanned an arc of love from there and from him direct to my heart. I bought the magazine, and it is something I still count as a very great gift - his words, as guest editor, again carrying a timbre of pure love.
The depression started to lift. Slowly at first. Like cloud thinning around a mountain top. The sensation of weight lightened. Colours came back. It was as if the blanket had begun to wear thin, and holes appeared to let in the light and the air. I began to feel joy as late winter’s first brave leaf buds appeared on the Holm Oaks of Russell Square. The sun’s warmth penetrated the ancestral tomb, and with Spring, I came back to life.
The hypomanic episode and the depression had taken its toll. In fact, looking back I now understand that another grief had also resided in the same confined space. In our tiny bedsit, my husband and I moved farther and farther apart. Again it was something I could not see, but felt in the bone. As we crossed the ocean again, coming back to New Zealand, I had the first intimations that our marriage would not survive. Another Christmas passed and by January we sat in the car after arriving home from an evening out. A space so confined, his words pressed in to suck all the air out, as he said he did not think he could be married to me anymore.
And soon after, the Dalai Lama came to New Zealand again. And I saw him again, his words forgotten now, but the energy of joy imprinted itself as a touchstone to hold in my hand. “He doesn’t come back ‘only if it’s sweet for me’. The Bodhisattva participates joyfully in the sorrows of the world,” wrote Joseph Campbell.
And I went on. Too quickly into another relationship, and the birth of my firstborn son. Six weeks later, hospitalised with post-natal psychosis. Two months’ separation from him, and then release. Learning how to be a mother while barely having the strength to carry my son in my arms. And again the Dalai Lama came. I still did not see the sacred synchronicity. I was simply grateful to be blessed by the Presence of Light.
Many years later, through the birth of my daughter where no trauma visited, I was invited to create a strategic vision and purpose, and brand communications for a New Zealand company. When I first met the founder, she smiled as if she knew me. Over the course of the time I worked with her she revealed that she had had, many years before, a dream of a pregnant woman who was standing in a war zone. As we shook hands, she recognised that woman was me. I thought of my grandmother in Poland just as the Russians invaded.
The founder’s husband is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist and, after emigrating to New Zealand, he had studied with a beloved monk who had been the young Dalai Lama’s senior teacher in Tibet before the Chinese invasion. Again, through only two physical degrees of separation, I could feel a peace and a knowing that surpassed all my understanding. I shared my experiences of seeing the Dalai Lama throughout my life, finding him arrive at times when I was most lonely or in darkness. She leaned close, and simply said, “Stefania, he was checking on family.” The miracle’s Grace alighted on me. This living master, the reincarnation of Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, had found me with his Boundless Love. His mercy vast enough to enfold all living beings.
It is said that every morning the Dalai Lama recites the Bodhisattva Prayer, written by Shantideva, a Buddhist monk of the Mahayana Tradition, who lived around 700CE.
May I be a guard for those who need protection
A guide for those on the path
A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood.
May I be a lamp in the darkness
A resting place for the weary
A healing medicine for all who are sick
A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles.
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.
And so I would counsel, look to your life. There are clues. Those living masters who guide you have a way of showing up in the stories of your life. They don’t have to be from the culture or traditions in which you were born. And they are closer than you may know. When we look deeply at the synchronicities your Soul has curated through your life’s experiences, we will find these living masters, and thank them and honour them. They have vowed to stay close until the day we, too, awake to understand our destiny is to become such a One as They.
This I know. We are never alone. We are always afloat in an Ocean of Wisdom, held in the strong and loving arms of Compassion.