A Geshe degree is akin to a doctorate of Buddhism. Khen Rinpoche, as he is known to westerners, introduced Lama Christie to the higher secret teachings of Buddhism. In ad dition to very deep and difficult teachings on emptiness, these two Lamas also furthered her study in the higher teachings. After all of this, Lama Christie took these teachings into isolation, and completed a deep silent retreat of three years, three months, and three days in the Arizona desert.
When she and her teacher emerged from this retreat, they founded Diamond Mountain Buddhist University and Retreat Center, a place dedicated to advanced teachings in Buddhist philosophy and training in deep retreat, located in the foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains in southern Arizona.
At Diamond Mountain, Lama Christie developed and taught a series of 18 courses directed towards the study and actual practice of seeing emptiness directly. How to practice shamelessness, though—that I think he would be good on. Thank you for subscribing to Tricycle! As a nonprofit, we depend on readers like you to keep Buddhist teachings and practices widely available. Subscribe now to read this article and get immediate access to everything else.
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Please try again. Explore timeless teachings through modern methods. Long story short, he started moving away from me and pushing me toward Ian. I n the spring of , McNally and Roach officially split up. McNally says Roach announced their separation without consulting her. Thorson was smart and well-educated — having majored in comparative literature at Stanford — and had been a charismatic young man who morphed into an introspective, withdrawn spiritual seeker after encountering Roach.
I watched my son change until he became unrecognizable to family and friends. Thorson moved to Berlin, where he found a girlfriend, with whom he had a child, and reportedly worked as a language tutor. But he brought anger-management issues with him. Thorson returned to the U. There, according to Ekan Thomason, he was clearly in thrall to McNally. But as devoted as he was to his new girlfriend, he still had trouble keeping his temper in check.
Sometimes those of us who spent time around him would see him get overwhelmed by this sensitivity and fly into windmills of unintended physical outbursts, which at times caused potentially serious physical harm to those close by. He showed up at Jivamukti and other venues and made the pages of the New York Post , reportedly hitting on a pretty, young yoga teacher and going to a club in an Armani suit. Roach denies the incident and says he never owned an Armani suit or drank alcohol.
One student was kicked off the premises for attacking his girlfriend and rupturing her eardrum. Another broke down a door when his girlfriend switched partners. Roach himself ordered one couple to split up because of violence. Couples who arrived together broke up and connected with different partners.
One acolyte hit on single girls, according to a former student. After they have been praying all day imagining themselves as Vajrayogini, they come out wide open, and he goes in for the kill. General assholeness. One says she saw them walk through the temple wall together. One student says he found Ecstasy in the temple bathroom. Besides the metaphysical auras and experimental relationships, the teaching itself was increasingly DIY and unconventional.
In , McNally encouraged the students to participate in another three-year silent retreat, like the one she and Roach had undertaken nearly a decade earlier.
But this one would be somewhat different. For one thing, there would be many more students taking the enlightenment challenge — nearly 40 people would sign up.
But McNally had also begun worshipping the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, Kali, despite the fact that Kali is not a feature of Tibetan Buddhism. Students were led in at night, one by one, and sat down in candlelight before McNally, who said Kali required their blood, and handed devotees a lancet with which to prick their fingers and spill a drop on a piece of paper.
Some of the students cried. McNally stepped into the void, as the chief leader of the upcoming retreat. She and Thorson looked forward to the retreat as a kind of three-year honeymoon. They began furnishing their cottage with a cast-iron bathtub and wall tiles.
The board consisted of five people, some from the nonprofit world, who would make executive decisions for the silent followers with Roach still at the helm. She seemed to have succumbed to magical thinking, claiming the property was protected by an invisible diamond wall and that she could wake up the sun with her mind. I n December , 37 students, plus McNally and Thorson, said goodbye to the world and went into cottages scattered on the mountainside, while the board of directors and a cast of unpaid volunteers worked out of view on the periphery to support them.
Almost nothing would be heard from them until February , when McNally emerged to give a series of teachings. What normally would have been a routine appearance shook Diamond Mountain to its core.
McNally sat before the board and spectators, blindfolded so as not to break her vow and see the gathering of outsiders — and for three or four days, she talked about what she was learning. On the final day, to the astonishment of her audience, she began describing what sounded like episodes of domestic violence, including having stabbed Thorson with a knife sometime during the previous year. And she talked about a troubling incident with Roach during their teacher-pupil days in the first retreat.
Over the next few days, the Diamond Mountain board of directors called the sheriff and lawyers, and they began taking written statements from the silent followers. Former student Brannan wrote a letter to the board urging it to seek psychiatric evaluations for McNally, Thorson and the rest of the followers. The board did not do so. I went to the sheriff myself. We also asked for more information from the parties involved.
But she refused to converse with us about it. The board then wrote McNally and Thorson a letter, asking them to leave the property within an hour.
They were offered several thousand dollars, a rental car, flights and prepaid cellphones. One influential follower was able to persuade the board to give them five days to leave.
Then, she and Thorson simply disappeared. McNally says the reaction to the stabbing was overblown and blames Roach. It was a very frightening accident that happened when we were playing around with a kitchen knife. Frightening to me, at least.
Ian thought the whole thing was funny. He also thought it was a divine message. GM began campaigning for our abrupt excommunication. GM told another group of people that I was the dangerous one. Dangerous for him, perhaps. McNally and Thorson left Diamond Mountain, but instead of returning to speech and civilization, they continued their retreat on their own. But McNally and especially Thorson were adamant, so the assistants agreed to buy them camping gear and stay in contact with them by phone.
Akasha who asked that we not use his real name says that other followers were aware the couple had remained nearby, but that nobody knew exactly where they were camping. Two months passed, and the couple subsisted on canned food and water collected in a tarp. McNally says they imagined they would stay there for a year. A few days before she activated the SPOT emergency call, McNally — through one of the assistants — released a rambling treatise.
She says that no sooner had they handed the message to their assistant than she got ill. We had water but not so much, and we were rationing — a couple of bowls a day. Ian could have gone and gotten more, but he did not want to leave me.
And, as I discovered, even if you described the place, it was still almost impossible to find. She woke up to find him unconscious and called her assistant, who told her he would bring help.
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