BLUE CRYSTAL MOUNTAINS

Good Morning,
In celebration of the imminent release of Book IV in the White Bird Series, Blue Crystal Mountains, I am sharing with you the first three chapters, hoping to entice you into further reading. I've worked

very hard on this latest edition to Crystal's life and anticipating the release the first part of February.
And, for your reading enjoyment, you can download this PDF onto your computer, reading any time you choose. Follow the link below which will direct you to my website. Download option is provided there.

Blue Crystal Mountains.

Now I can breathe for a bit, catch up on some other writing...my blog for instance. I've poured my entire being into this latest book and am so proud of it. Anticipating hearing from readers their thoughts and opinions. In the meantime, while we wait for the release, I will direct you to the writers and explorers who I couldn't have written this book without.

• Robert Thurman and Tad Wise wrote a book together titled, Circling the Sacred Mountain: A Spiritual Adventure Through the Himalayas. 1999. In every sense of the word, this book inspired me to write my own. As readers who've followed Crystal through Books I, II, and III know, she is traveling the world, unveiling ancient secrets as she goes. Because I wanted Crystal to travel to Tibet, after reading this book, it was clear to me exactly where she would go. This book details a lively account of a pilgrim's circumambulation of Asia's holy mountain in Tibet, illuminated by Thurman's passionate teachings and Wise's colorful insights. I used dozens of resources as I researched the cities and plateaus of Tibet, but this book was overall my favorite source and I would encourage anyone to read it. In addition, if you sympathize with Tibet's struggle for independence or are interested in Buddhism, visit Thurman's website here. Tibet House. 
• Dr. Alberto Villoldo is the author of the book, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power, and Grace of the Earthkeepers. 2006. I discovered this book a few years ago when I began researching Peru as a possible destination for Crystal. Having heard of the Q'ero shamans living high in the Andes north of Cuzco, Peru, when I began reading this book, I discovered they were one in the same. I then knew this book was going to be extremely important. Villoldo continues writing and giving workshops in the U.S. and Europe. To find more information about his current schedule, go here. Alberto Villoldo.
• A few years ago, I watched a video of a group of travelers on the highlands of Peru who had discovered a doorway carved into the side of a cliff wall. These travelers, when placing their hands on the doorway, experienced a sense of 'time traveling' and some even announced their trip extremely dangerous. Now, I was intrigued because, well, frankly, time travel excites me, but they weren't convincing because their accounts were flimsy. Then I came upon a book called Andean Awakening: An Inca Guide to Mystical Peru, written by Jorge Luis Delgado. On the front cover of the book is an image of a man standing in a doorway carved into the side of a cliff wall. His arms are out to the side and he's leaning into the doorway. At once, I knew this was the same doorway I'd seen in the video. Delgado calls this Amaru Muru's doorway and has had many profound and mystical experiences here. But his book is a lot more than this. He takes the reader on his own journey of awakening. One of Peru's premier spiritual tour guides, he takes us on a trip of discovery through the most powerful places on earth. Readers of my new book, Blue Crystal Mountains, will come to see for themselves the mystical powerful energy of Peru and a lot of my information has come from this book. I would encourage anyone seeking to know more about the Children of the Sun, to buy a copy for themselves.
• Websites I visit often to keep current on earthly events, celestial events, evolving consciousness and things to come I will list below. The messages I glean from these sites are extremely important to my writing and Crystal's travels.
• Kryon.
• Awakenings: Intuitive Astrology for Heart and Soul
• Crimson Circle
• Lightworker

I hope each and every one of you has an exciting day filled with magic and possibilities.

I look forward to announcing the release of my new book and I'll talk with you all soon.

Namaste,

PB

THE JEWEL TREE OF TIBET

Happy Almost Spring!

After a winter which included three, maybe four visits from the Polar Vortex, bringing us 55-60 nights of below zero temps and a handful or two of below zero days, I am happy to report that winter is almost, but not quite, over. Whew. As I've stated before, I am a Minnesotan, hearty through and through, thick blood and all. For instance, I love to run in single digit weather, I am not afraid to go get the mail without a coat when the mercury has dipped below the 0 mark, I don't find it unusual when my garden flags are buried under 4' snow covers for months at a time, or I start looking for signs of daffodils before the ground thaws, as they say, hope springs eternal! And the fact that it's still light out at 7:00 sheds light..haha..that spring is right around the corner. It has been one helluva long winter and I'm glad to see the backside of it. And yes, Minnesotans love talking about the weather, so there.

So, the topic of conversation today stems from a webinar I attended last week given by Robert Thurman. The webinar's title was: The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism, a book written by Robert Thurman, an American Buddhist writer and academic who has written, edited or translated several books on Tibetan Buddhism. The Jewel Tree of Tibet is considered one of the most explicit teachings on the steps on the path of enlightenment available. He is the co-founder and president of Tibet House and a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, the first endowed chair of Buddhist studies in the United States. He is known as a talented popularizer of the Buddha's teachings and after learning Tibetan and studying Buddhism he decided to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk and was ordained by H.H. the Dalai Lama, the first Westerner to earn that distinction. However, as his biography says, "some years later, he gave up his robes when he discovered he could be more effective in the American equivalent of the monastery: the university". He returned toHarvard to finish his PhD. A very popular professor, students call his classes "life-changing". www.bobthurman.com

During the webinar, Thurman focused on The Jewel Tree of Tibet. Tibetans think of their cherished tradition of Buddhism as a "wish-fulfilling jewel tree" for its power to generate bliss and enlightenment within all who absorb its teachings. Being that the webinar was only 2 hours, it was impossible for Robert to convey the message of the book entirely, but our meditations throughout the webinar helped us discover an esoteric teacher, one you might imagine and visualize to be indivisible from the Buddha himself, someone who is a living example of enlightenment. This 'mentor devotion' is a practice of acknowledging or worshiping the Buddha in a figure of your choice and you strive to emulate that model until you are able to understand and embody the teaching entirely yourself. 

However shortlived the webinar was, I took a lot away and feel a more personal connection to Mr. Thurman who is passionate, knowledgeable and very sincere about his teachings.

For anyone seeking the path to peace and enlightenment, I would encourage you to get your own copy of this book. 

Below, I've included an interview from the DailyOm with Robert Thurman pertaining to the steps leading to and during while writing this book and ultimately what the reader might discover about themselves.

The Jewel Tree of Tibet From "The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism" by Robert Thurman Posted by: DailyOM This book began as an intensive retreat with a small group of students. It is a teaching on the steps on the path of enlightenment that is common to all the forms of Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetans have taken teachings from all kinds of Buddhism, especially those preserved and developed in India over fifteen hundred years before they traveled to Tibet. But there in Tibet, Buddhism was made into a systematic method for people to practice and perform in order to become perfectly enlightened in this life, or in a short number of lives, starting from wherever they started.  This is what we'll aim to practice on this retreat, on this quest for enlightenment in book form. You'll start wherever you are in your life, today. We'll retreat into one of the greatest sacred wisdom texts of Tibetan knowledge of the soul, called The Devotion to the Mentor, in which a glorious wish-fulfilling gem tree is used to focus our minds. We're on a quest to contemplate this great text line by line, so that we come to understand its full, rich meaning, the brilliant reflections of its many facets guiding us, lighting up our awareness. And we'll take this awareness with us, out into the world, into our lives. It is a powerful text, just the reading of which has the capacity to lift you out of your individual self and into a perspective of unity, refreshing your individuality immeasurably. It will help you cultivate the sensitivity and appreciation to love more fully, feel compassion more intensely, and become a fountain of cheerfulness for all you meet and know.  The steps on the path of enlightenment in this text are a distillation of the vast profusion of healing techniques dispensed by the Shakyamuni Buddha -- the historical Buddha -- to his many thousands of disciples, two thousand five hundred years ago. I first encountered The Devotion to the Mentor and the jewel tree, in this life, forty-two years ago, when I met the Very Venerable Geshe Wangyal at his monastery in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, which was in a little pink tract house on East Third Street in Freewood Acres. He read to me a version of this same enlightenment path, the way to a higher quality of being, that had been written by the great south Indian philosopher sage Nagarjuna in the second century c.e. Nagarjuna had written it as Letter from a Spiritual Friend to his friend and disciple the south Indian King Udayibhadra, whose name means "King Happily Good."  My teacher read this text aloud in a Tibetan translation, accompanying it with a commentary written by a great fourteenth-century Tibetan lama, and as he read he would translate and explain in English to me and my friend Chris. The three of us would sit together in the chapel room or out in the yard of the little pink house that served as a monastery in New Jersey, under the spell of the great wish-fulfilling jewel tree of Tibet. Then, in the evening and late into the night, I would memorize the Tibetan, learn the text's meaning, and meditate on the steps and themes -- incorporating it all into my mind and psyche and spirit.  The fresh and reasonable vision of life, the deep meaning of existence, the imminence of freedom, the vast horizon of my human potential -- all this leapt out at me from these words in the lovely Tibetan script, block-printed on beautiful, long, fibrous pages. I loved Nagarjuna and his friend the king. I loved the Tibetan alphabet, so logical and elegant. I felt totally at home in it.  At that time, I was in the middle of a long pilgrimage that had led me to drop out of college and had taken me across Europe on a motorcycle and across Asia on foot, all the way to India. There, I had met the Tibetans and begun to learn from them and work with them when the death of my father brought me back to New York City for a month of family sadness and mourning, as well as a reimmersion into the hypocrisy and anxiety of the world that I was eager to transcend. Yet there I also met my teacher and went to work with him in the Jersey Pine Barrens, in a Russian Mongolian refugee community. Through him, I met the path of enlightenment. I met a true mentor. I had come home -- to myself and my soul -- through this great teacher and the jewel tree text he revealed to me.  And it was not just the text and the teachings that affected me so deeply. It was the special context in which Tibetans meditate and use their teachings. I learned to look up with my inner eye, the third eye of imagination, which lies in the middle of our foreheads and opens a channel of vision into a subtle realm of reality. In this inner sky revealed by my third eye, I discovered mystical beings, buddhas, bodhisattvas (persons who strive for enlightenment in order to help others on their quest for their highest development), historical lama mentors, angels, deities mild and fierce, and all the saints and teachers and philosophers from all the world's spiritual traditions. I beheld the shining tree of jewels, decked with living jewel beings.  I recognized the jewel tree as the world tree, Yggdrasil, the great ash tree extending over the entire earth, growing from the well of wisdom, where Odin, the highest god, had to cast one eye as sacrifice in order to receive the eye of wisdom from the goddess of the tree. The jewel tree is the tree of life, the tree of wisdom, and it is also the giant fig tree under which the Buddha attained perfect enlightenment, the bodhi tree. It grows from earth to heaven and is filled with the wish-granting jewels that make up the family of living mentors who have reached immortal life and can share their bliss with you, protect you, bless you, and help you open up your own inner doorway to peace and fulfillment. The jewel tree opens its loving embrace to everyone and promotes happiness -- which is our natural state and birthright.  Since that time when I began to enjoy the luminous shelter of the jewel tree of Tibet, I have studied and meditated year after year. I went on to become a monk; I learned more and more advanced teachings, tried to put them into practice, and seemed to succeed with insight after insight. But then I began to realize that last week's insight was superseded by the next one. For a while, all I wanted was to stay in my Buddhist community of seekers of enlightenment, to be embraced as a monk. My inner life was rich, full of insights and delightful visions, with a sense of luck and privilege at having access to such great teachers and teachings and the time to study and try to realize them. Eventually, I realized that there was more I needed to learn from the world, from engagement with others, from developing compassion in my interactions rather than the solitary quest of wisdom. So I resigned as a monk and reentered the university, determined to find a way to continue to study while engaging more actively with others.  As I have grown older and become less sure about everything -- and even confused and discouraged when my inherited negative personality traits reemerge in the heat of relationships -- I have repeatedly turned back to the beginning of my studies of the jewel tree. I regularly rest under the jewel tree and reflect on the steps it provides us to enlightenment, freedom, and happiness. A golden ladder from earth to heaven, the great jewel tree is an inner space for a retreat, a spiritual vacation, a refreshment and recharging that comes from stepping back from our emotions and habitual perspectives -- even for a few moments. You can spend minutes under the jewel tree or you can spend entire days or weeks, depending on the time you can afford to take. Sometimes it helps to meditate with others on the jewel tree, since your thoughts will become amplified and intensified by the resonance of one living mind with another.  Whenever I conduct a retreat, I try to remember that the main person who needs the retreat is myself. The person who most needs to learn what I say, even though I may be saying it, is me. So, therefore, I'm very thankful that you're joining me in your reading of this text and on this quest. I don't pretend to be a great teacher, but I do claim that this, the wish-granting jewel tree of Tibet, is a great teaching.  We love and admire Tibet because Tibet is the guardian, custodian, preserver, developer, and utilizer of these great enlightenment teachings. Originally, all the teachings came from what the Tibetans call the Noble Country, Aryavarta, the country of the noble beings. These beings followed the Buddhist tradition and achieved nobility in the spiritual sense, they were selfless beings -- beings who did not live enclosed within their own personal, egocentric perspective but lived within a multiperspectival world. The perspectives of the others were to them as important as, or more important than, the perspective of the self. The noble beings realized the meaning and the reality of selflessness. A noble person is defined by the Buddha not in terms of social class or race or nationality or sex or religion but by whether you perceive things only from your own perspective or whether you perceive them simultaneously from all others' perspectives.  So, what we're going to try to do on this quest together is to go from the beginning of the Tibetan path of enlightenment to its end. And we're going to rehearse various short meditations that will help us get deeper along the path. And we're going to learn about what that path is so that we understand it, so that you can do this retreat yourself again and again, and I can do this retreat myself again and again, each time learning something new. We're aiming to develop a tolerance for cognitive dissonance, a greater subtlety of consciousness. You don't want to get all fascinated or obsessed or entranced with one particular thing that you experience as you go along, but keep moving and learning, seeing things freshly again and again.  Even if you are not a Tibetan Buddhist or any kind of Buddhist, I hope you will be able to follow along with this teaching and gain something from it. I follow His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He's my main teacher, my mentor. I follow his view that, in the world today, we don't want millions and millions and millions of new Buddhists. We're not competing with the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus. We're not competing for market share, for a population explosion. But we are looking to the quality of people's lives, hoping that people will become more enlightened, whatever their religious affiliation or secular humanist beliefs. Conversion is not the goal here. Therefore, in teaching a teaching like this, which we hope the public will use widely, we want to make it accessible to as many people as possible.  However, if we teach a spiritual practice in a completely bland, watered down way, then no one will really have much inspiration to use it. I love the Buddha, and I love the Dharma, which is the teaching of the Buddha, and I love the Tibetan versions of it. And I particularly love the version that was perfected by Tsong Khapa, who lived in the fifteenth century. It is the core teaching that the Dalai Lamas have practiced since then, including the current Dalai Lama, the Fourteenth, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso. So, I want to share my love for their vision and wisdom with you through the ancient text that inspires this retreat in book form.  In this book, I will draw from those teachings and focus on the particularly vivid teaching about the wish-fulfilling jewel tree by the Fourth Panchen Lama, called the Guru Puja, or the Devotion to the Mentor. A mentor is not considered merely a teacher but is seen rather as an exemplar of the teaching, a model to follow. So, in each lesson or subject or verse, I will veer away from my own narrow understanding and Tibetan images, and I will encourage you to meditate, whether you are Sufi, Christian, or another kind of Buddhist, and to draw in your own images and ideas to enhance your own understanding. This retreat is divided into six chapters that can serve as retreats in themselves, with different meditations and a regular review of the principles that form the steps on the path to enlightenment. I want you to figure out how to enter a kind of jewel space of awareness, to populate and retreat to that jewel space in your own way. There you will be energized to discover your own feeling of insight into your own soul -- and into the soul of the entire universe. The wish-fulfilling jewel tree will restore you to yourself and illuminate your path through life...and illuminate your spirit into the next life.  Copyright © 2005 by Bob Thurman, Inc. See Also: Book Excerpt, Philosophy, Spirituality, Buddhism Namaste, PB