The Place of the Female Cannibal. Sounds like the meeting point for a particularly weird kind of sexual fetish. But it isn't....
The Place of the Female Cannibal is Simoling, a small village tucked away in the Himalayan foothills of north-west India. Seventy years ago its inhabitants were treated on approach the same way that I am by ardent social distancers today. Fear and panic would be the overriding reaction, with the same temptation to jump into the nearest ditch or river (it was too arid for hedges to flee into around Simoling).
Unlike the panic-stricken dodgers out of my way, into the path of a passing car, the folk of the neighbouring villages to Simoling at least had good reason to steer clear. The residents of this poor little habitation had the unfortunate experience of waking up in the morning to find that bits of their fingers, toes, nose, and other body parts, had disappeared overnight. Everyone was losing bits of their body; it was hardly surprising that the village was undergoing severe depopulation, and that folk from elsewhere avoided visiting Simoling at any cost.
In modern times, we would talk of an outbreak of leprosy. Nobody knew who would be next; the village seemed doomed to extinction.
A young man from Simoling, one of its few inhabitants who had not yet experienced bits of his body falling off, determined, against all odds, to find help. Chokshi set off on a journey to find someone who could help, a trail which led him eventually to Tso Pema, a lake associated with Padmasambhava, and to Tulshuk Lingpa. Without hestitation, Tulshuk agreed to come.
"And then this lama did what no one else had dared: he actually came to our village. We knew we were grotesque..... fingers, hands, forearms, elbows, feet, knees, and legs, noses, ears and lips in various stages of decay and disappearance, slowly eaten by festering wounds...… he (Tulshuk Lingpa) showed not the slightest horror at our disfigurement, handling our wounds and trying to heal them with Tibetan medicine. He climbed the mountain behind the village to the monastery and moved in. We could hear the drum and human thighbone horn at all hours of the day and night" as Tulshuk conducted rituals to rid the village of the disease.
To cut a fairly long story short: At first the rituals didn't work, so Tulshuk Lingpa called on some other masters of ritual to join him. Then, one day, he announced to the village: "The disease has gone. You are safe now." And so it was: leprosy cursed the village of Simoling no more.
What a wonder, a miracle, it was for those villagers to be visited by someone of great compassion, full of courage and free from fear.
The root of the disease had been the greed of the villagers. They had cut down trees by the water spring to use for making houses. This had angered the local serpent spirits, who had brought down the disease as consequence. Tulshuk Lingpa succeeded in banishing the serpent spirits, and all was well. Not only that, the villagers offered him the local monastery in thanks, an offer that he accepted, moving permanently into the village which was once the haunt of leprosy.
And the relevance of the story to our 'current situation' needs no explaining....
Part Two
Put people into a state of panic/fear and they are putty in your hands. They'll do anything you say, without question. At the moment we see increasingly weird mask-wearing and social distancing dictates coming out all the time, many of which the panic-stricken accept without a murmur. This is 'harvesting consent' to all manner of nefarious activities. 'Bend me, shape me, any way you want me' as a song I grew up with in the 1960s tells.
With so much fear around, the appearance of fearlessness is like an emotional oasis in a dry and life-sapping desert. Tulshuk Lingpa was one such example. There is a Buddha associated with fearlessness. His name is Amoghasiddhi. I know a little about this Buddha figure, and am aware of one or two Buddhists who meditate upon him regularly.
While it is great to have a Buddha of fearlessness, the problem is that nobody really told me what fearlessness truly is, or how it might be developed. Merely visualising a Buddha figure apparently related to fearlessness just wouldn't cut the mustard. I only discovered more about fearlessness very recently, from the figure of David Icke.
I have watched and listened to hours of David over the past three months. It seems to me that he is a man without fear. Watch him enough, and this awe-inspiring quality begins to shine through, to rub off on you even, to transmit itself. Truly a beacon amidst the toxicity and nonsense that characterises most 'communication and information' at the moment.
What's more, the root of fearlessness is explained simply and lucidly by Icke. It is a matter of personal identity. While a person identifies with the physical body, the five senses, this life and this life alone, then that person will be plagued with fear. But if they realise and experience that they are more than that - that they are 'infinite awareness having an experience through this particular body', to paraphrase David's words - fear will not come into the equation. It cannot.
If a person's true nature is infinite awareness, there is nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to fear. Again to use David's words: it is a matter of perception, of who we perceive ourselves to be. Absolute Mind, Universal Mind, Mind Only, there are variations on the theme. But realise this dimension of being, and the freedom of fearlessness will seamlessly follow.
The story of Simoling can be found in 'A Step Away From Paradise' by Thomas K. Shor
