How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [160]
Now holding the honorific title of Jetsunma Ahkön Norbu Lhamo, or just Jetsunma, Zeoli/Burroughs (name changes are common in this story) founded a Tibetan Buddhist center in Maryland in 1986 and quickly developed a cast of loyal followers, which we meet one by one in detail through the sensitive and searching eyes of Sherrill, who is herself seeking spiritual balance. The history of how Burroughs turned to the mystical in response to her tragic upbringing (including cigarette burns on her body and beatings with a radiator brush), however, is not where the power of this story is to be found. The downtrodden bootstrapping themselves into happiness is vintage Americana and not especially interesting outside of the particulars of how it was done.
Where Sherrill’s insight is most valuable is in introducing us not only to the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, but in exploring the fascinating ways it has been modernized for the 1990s. Imagine a Buddha who wears makeup, paints her nails red, and shops at mall stores while also believing that we will all reincarnate “countless times, as bugs and animals, even descend into the ghost realms and hell realms, before you achieved liberation from the endless hamster wheel of death and rebirth.” One of the reasons the characters in this story continue reinventing themselves is that in Tibetan Buddhism “the student progresses toward enlightenment by practicing intense introspection and retraining the mind, learning to see the world differently. The student is taught, sometimes rather painfully, to abandon the notion of self (it is a delusion anyway) and to go in search of his or her own Buddha nature.”
Tibetan Buddhism, however, is not just focused inwardly; in fact, true enlightenment comes through “being of benefit to all sentient beings,” as Sherrill explains. “Everything in Tibetan Buddhism is about sentient beings—and ending the suffering of sentient beings. You say sentient beings instead of ‘human beings’ because you don’t want to exclude anybody, and sentient is a way of describing all lifeforms that are conscious, sensate—all people, all animals, all bugs and fish, including the invisible realms, the ghost realms and the hell realms.” This is not a religion for the spiritually faint of heart. “There are eighteen different hells in Tibetan Buddhism, and there are countless beings there, too, all hoping to be released.”
Are people released from their private hells in this religion? This is the subtext of Sherrill’s narrative as she explores the many ways people deal with the slings and arrows of modern life, and the answer is a highly qualified one. Some do, some don’t. Some leave too early, some stay too long. Some are undercommitted, some are overcommitted. The story of Betsy Elgin (aka Elizabeth, aka Alana) is an especially troubling one. Attractive, mid-thirties, happily married with children (but with the usual doubts about the meaning of it all), Elgin first encountered Zeoli (or should it be Alana met Jetsunma?) when the latter was doing psychic readings for twenty bucks a pop. Occasional meetings became regular rituals, time with the Buddha took precedence over time with the family, and before long, she recalls, “I remember laying in bed thinking, Here I am in my perfect town house with my perfect little kids and my perfect little husband and everything … but why do I feel so empty?”
To find out she consulted a channeled entity named Santu, who told her to divorce her husband, which she promptly did, moving into an apartment with her two daughters. In the sociological study of cults this is what is known as detachment—the individual is removed from her traditional