My visit to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya in the Colorado mountains was, by design, an unresearched event. I wanted to experience the visit with no preconceived notions. So, on the way from Walden to Ft. Collins, I turned left at a little roadside community called Rustic and drove up a steep, windy washboard road for five miles until I reached the parking lot for the Shambhala Mountain Center.
A trail 7/8th of a mile long marked by yellow, orange, and pink ribbons guided guests to the stupa. Most of the trail was uphill, with a gorgeous meadow in the low ground and aspens lining a narrow walkway closer to the stupa. Most of the terrain between those two points was cluttered with tents and wooden buildings. The area felt like an unarmed encampment. A monk in a red robe guided a few people along a nearby path while taking a selfie of himself. Others milled around a big tented cafeteria area.
The whole thing seemed cultish, but I moved on and didn’t worry too much about it. Everyone was friendly enough. I donated $10 to a collection repository. There were several collection points along the way, as well as signs reminding guests to stay on the trail and be respectful of nature.
The hill steepened and the forest thickened as I approached the stupa. Then as I got close, the forest opened and the stupa sat before me on a high plateau, fronted by a series of beautiful steps. The stupa was intricately designed, colorful, and grand in scale.
The walk had been good exercise, but to intensify the memory, I sprinted the flight of steps. The moment I reached the stupa landing, I felt at home and comfortable, as if everything below had melted away to nothing. I walked clockwise around the stupa three times, stopping once to chat with a young woman who was pulling weeds between the stupa and circular path. She told me of how her family planted three Aspen trees in their yard and now there were fifty, and of how the Aspen is the largest organism in the world, and of how she loved Aspens and felt very connected to them.
The air was cool and slightly moist. Chipmunks and rabbits eyed me with lazy curiosity. A slender man with a pointed beard and watery deep blue eyes was pacing slowly around the stupa, staring attentively at the weeds, seemingly oblivious to everything around him. I finished my third lap, took off my shoes at the front door, and entered the stupa.
Immediately, a warm energy infused itself into every atom of my body, as if I was a permeable receptor adapting to an invisible dimension. The entire room vibrated at a different frequency. A man and woman knelt in deep meditation on soft rectangular pads. I sat on a pad in the center-back row, closed my eyes, and let the situation develop as it would.
I noticed very soon that most of my presence, for lack of a better word, was locked in my body. I felt my mind grinding away like a little machine. I studied the predictable intellectual and emotional patterns that have embedded themselves in my brain and run my life, like car engine parts that serve different functions.
Then, my sense of self dissolved. It just happened, effortlessly, unexpectedly. I was no longer trapped in my body, as if every bit of me was mingling with the people in the room, the air, the walls, everyone’s thoughts, extending endlessly into a great connection that has always existed but nearly everyone has forgotten. And all of this happened within five minutes from the time I entered the stupa.
I left with a sense of deep gratitude. Anyone can tap into a great sea of knowledge and do with it what seems right. We’ve all been there. In fact, we’re there now but just don’t see it most of the time. All too often, we live outside of the moment, wishing for a static eternity we’ll never have that doesn’t even exist. We’ve been conditioned to think this way.
By the time I got back to my car, the memory remained but the connection was fading. I wrote this to keep that connection alive. The written word can channel different frequencies from the past whenever necessary.
