ma ’das sprul sku and Taking Dreams Literally

I have found that if you start looking into things Tibetan that complexity soon arrives.

Today I came upon ma ’das sprul sku for the first time.

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Abstract: A ma ’das sprul sku is a non-hereditary reincarnate lama (sprul sku) who assumes his or her predecessor’s status, but who takes birth before his or her predecessor’s death. This paper presents ten oral histories of ma ’das sprul skus and examines what they and their narrators reveal about the logic of transference in establishing the personhood of a ma ’das sprul sku, how ma ’das sprul sku personhood may challenge conventional understandings of sprul sku personhood and temporality, ma ’das sprul sku and their creators as reflective agents, and what the dearth of ma ’das sprul sku hagiographies may imply.

Marcia Calkowski in The Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies.

https://www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/#!jiats=/07/calkowski/b1/

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The notion that a being can have a second incarnation whilst still alive, kind of messes with the idea that one needs to leave the meat before getting some more. She mentions the idea of mandé trülku.

Taken to the limit that could mean that an emanation, similar to that which gave rise to the Dalai Lama, could already be incarnate whilst he lives.

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Literary Sources for Tulku Lines

Successive systems of reincarnation or tulku (sprul sku) are fascinating sources for the study of the social history of Tibet. The tulku, predicated on Buddhist metaphysics of rebirth, is a phenomena in which a person is recognized as embodying a previous person, in their own current body. This is technically referred to in Tibetan as one who is “recognized as having returned to existence” (yang srid ngos ‘dzin or sprul sku ngos ‘dzin).

There are hundreds of multigenerational tulku lines in Tibet. By looking at when such tulku lines were declared, within which contexts, patterns of interpersonal relations, institutional alliances, and regional practices emerge. We are given new visions of these trans-generational social networks and the weblike worlds in which tulkus function.

From The Buddhist Digital Resource Center.

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This suggests that there are so many tulkus that some could be considered common or garden as opposed to the big three.

The naming and interweave is not easily tractable. If I was to start with my recent Tibetan dream, trying to find out who I might have been, there are many pitfalls.

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This dream, if taken literally, suggests that I was being escorted out of Tibet in and around the early sixties / late fifties. Clearly that is a big if. It suggests an importance sufficient to warrant an escort and a rank above common or garden

I could search for a person, lama or tulku, who died in and around that time but the list of tulku lines is not easily searchable by date. The dream suggests that I was not going to make it.

https://legacy.tbrc.org/?locale=en#!persons/tulkus

But I may have made it. Which might make me a co-incarnation of a living person. We share an emanatory source. That co-incarnation could have passed on since and could in principle have been born biologically before me, say ~1940s in order to be old enough to march to freedom.

The feeling from the dream was that I was a youth / young man. Which puts a window ~1935 – 1945. My hands in the dream were soft inconsistent with extended heavy manual labour.

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My eight Tibetan Houses Dream

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Points at Southeastern Tibet / Shigatse/ Shigatze which might geo-locate an incarnation but does not take me much closer to a named individual in the twentieth century.

My Tibetan Buddhist Search Committee Dream suggests that I might recognise a magically inscribed cabinet. It suggests that I might recognise Tibetan martial arts weapons.

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“The carpet on the floor of the hall has been rolled back to reveal a parquet dance floor of some considerable sheen. Amongst the entourage I can hear gossiping. “It cannot be him; he is too coarse thickset and muscular.”

I hear this and whip off my shirt to reveal my muscular bare chest. I say that I will cooperate with whatever it is they must do. Take a look if you must. I am now wearing saffron yellow trousers, training pants, that are “elasticated” at the ankles. I start to do a forward splits on the floor to warm up. I say that given I am nearly sixty I am surprised that being that old I can still do that.

One of the woman in the entourage says to me that I am much older than that both in this lifetime and stretching way back. I am nearly 73 she says. I do the mental calculation that I must have been “born” in the early 1950s. She says, “we tried to wake you five years ago”. You have been “asleep” and we have been waiting.”

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So, the dreams suggest an inconsistency of age or timing.

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The monastery airport dream points at Leh in Ladakh.

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There are a number of dreams with Kālacakra or wheel of time mandala.

In another dream “Tibetan soil dream” I am given my piece of Tibet.

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There are other dreams with H.H. Karmapa and H.H. Dalai lama in.

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If dreams are “evidence” then there is quite a bit suggesting some Tibetan connection. If I were a Tibetan having these dreams then the Tibetans would take them more seriously. A hairy arsed sixty-year old Welsh ex-academic spendthrift is not as attractive as perhaps a younger person linked to the sangha.

It is difficult to explain these dreams cropping up from a Freudian or Jungian perspective.

There is circumstantial evidence. It is pretty unlikely that any conscious imaginations / research makes its way fully into dreams. I did not make any of them up. They were recorded as is the morning after.

I have not tried to visualise this putative life as that is more likely to be prone to prejudice / confirmation bias.

It is possible that having looked at this theme there may be more passive dreams on the way….

Maybe I Was an Alpaca?

This morning’s dream points {again} to some kind of Tibetan incarnation, perhaps some lama-dude. I have long held this possibility at arm’s length because I have had no waking memory of such a thing. The dream indicates a time stamp roughly of 1960 when things were bad in Tibet and a number of lamas left. We hear about the ones who made it. We don’t hear about the ones who did not.

They may have been vulture food.

I did once go to a dzong in London and had an “empowerment” by Tulku Akong Rinpoche. A lama who along with Chögyam Trungpa escaped from Tibet during the Chinese excess.

I have often wondered why no waking recall. The only answer I came up with is that life as a monk is so very boring that there is little to remember, no outstanding dramatic events. Tedium, day after day routine.

If the dream points at a very recent incarnation, then that hints at something like a tulku incarnation, where one life follows quickly.

That does not really impinge on the current health problems and search for a nanna-flat. In a sense it is little more than a phenomenological possibility when viewed from life circumstance. I do not see nor feel that there is much / anything left for me to do.

I have hypothesised that there have been many failures, way more than “successes”. We only hear of the latter because it is they who have ongoing wider significance. In a way quiet failure fertilizes the ground for success.

I am at something of an impasse on the health front and cannot currently see any further steps. There is nothing urgent and I can tolerate the pain and lack of sleep. We need to move house before even thinking about any operation. It is not a complicated equation, for now.

I am currently where I am not seeing medical intervention as something positive and healing. It seems like a necessary thing and to be endured even. It does not fill me with hope for an easier existence.

Do I have to? Well maybe it is sensible.

Who knows what if any dreams will follow tonight…

Tibetan Plateau, Gold, Lama Dream 1-11-2011

Prompted by this morning’s dream I found this one in the vaults, so to speak.

Dream Diary 1-11

I am outside with Charlie. He and I are loading bricks into the trunk / boot of a car. The bricks have curly writing on them, it is not Sanskrit or Tibetan. They are golden and more like large ingots of gold.

He and I are now on a long journey across the mountains on a plateau which is in Tibet. With us is a smiling lama who is our guide, guard and escort. He is showing us the way. The landscape is very sparse and rocky with scree falls. I look at the lama’s physique and it is very similar to mine only that he is shorter and obviously Tibetan. I say that I didn’t know that they built Tibetans like that…

As we continue on our journey. Charlie and I are now wearing saffron and magenta monk’s robes. This journey is to be extensive. As we move forward Charlie is often out in front exploring the different routes. At one stage we need to pick up speed. The Tibetan monk picks up his companion, also a monk, and carries him piggy-back. I do the same with Charlie. I am not sure that I can walk and climb at this altitude like this. After a few steps I realise that I can and easily so.

A little later the trail becomes tortuous and Charlie is way ahead up the hill. He comes down back to me via a slippery and windy route. I find a more direct route. This is a part of a long journey together.  

Back now in London, we are at a Tibetan Dzong as guests of honour. Sat waiting are Charlie , the wife and I. We are offered some western food. I turn to her and say that she had better tuck in before they come out with the yak’s butter….

Dream ends

Tibetan Food Tibetan Caravan Aberfan – Reincarnation – Dream 24-04-2025

Here is this morning’s dream

The dream starts in an airy metropolitan indoor market. The roofs are high and glass. There is a hubbub and the mood is light. There are many trendy food pop-ups. The area is opulent. I am outside a Tibetan food pop-up stall with some upper middle class English people. They are going on about how wonderful the stall is and that it is good to support the exiles, the diaspora. We order some food and sit at a “pub” table. It comprises a semi-leavened bread a bit smaller than a naan, some sausages tied with string and a spicey vegetable side relish with dark green overtones. The sausage is served on a wooden board with a very sharp wooden handled knife to share amongst us. They, in their safe luxury, do not understand hardship.

The scene changes to a harsh barren mountainous landscape. It is cold and we are navigating the sides of a valley. From time to time scree has fallen which makes the path difficult to navigate. We are fleeing, escaping. I am wearing a heavy fleece lined animal skin jacket and pointy hat with ear flaps. My skin is darker and dry. I am Tibetan. I feel windblown and hungry. There are around twenty of us in the caravan which is mostly on foot with some donkey like animals carrying supplies. We have been traveling for days. We cannot light a fire until night fall, because the smoke will be seen. I am armed with a pistol in a holster on my waist. Others in the party are more heavily armed with old-style rifles.

A couple of men who have gone ahead join us. They have found a spot to camp for the night. We round a bend into a flattish area in the valley wall next to a small stream. The men start to make camp, it is heavy work. As has become the custom they set me down on a rock and give me a bag of flour and some bowls. There are some other powders. Before it gets dark, I start making several batches of dough. They joke my soft hands make the best bread. I set the dough aside covered with cloths.

I prepare some wood for a fire and as soon as it is dark, set it alight. When it is hot enough, I get out a wok-like pan and start to cook the breads having greased the pan first. The smell is great and I make batch after batch. The other men are similarly dressed but have a military bearing. They are protecting me. We all gather round and someone gets out some relish which he adds to a bowl. He then gives each of us a length of string-tied sausage which we cut with our own knives, kept in a hip scabbard. There is water to drink from the steam. All of us a weary. There is a sense in the dream that I will die soon and not make it.

The scene changes to black and white. It is a newsreel of early 1960s London. With buses at Picadilly circus and people in suits. It talks of fashion and life in the city.

Next, I am sat with my sister. We are very young less than three years old. We are in my nan’s house in the Rhondda valley. I can hear a vast rumbling from the mountainside. Instinctively I know that it is the coal tip sliding down the mountain. I grab my sister and we go to sit crouched outside close against the wall by the back door. The landslide continues and the house is knocked down but by the door frame remains intact. Coal waste pours past us and we get covered in dust. The slide stops and the coal starts to burn glowing red in the heat. I know that we must sit tight and that it will be fine. I can lift us both up out of the area to fly to a nearby grassy part. In the dream I hear the words Aberfan and sense that it has not yet happened.

I know beyond doubt that this dream is about reincarnation.

The dream ends

Notes

I was born in Cardiff in 1964. My sister was born March 1966.

The Aberfan disaster (Welsh: Trychineb Aberfan) was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip on 21 October 1966. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, and overlaid a natural spring. Heavy rain led to a build-up of water within the tip which caused it to suddenly slide downhill as a slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed Pantglas Junior School and a row of houses.

Das Glasperlenspiel – Reincarnation – Missing Pieces

It was not until I read Das Glasperlenspiel – The Glass Bead Game – that I gave much thought to past lives. Somehow the scope of the book and the Three Lives of Knecht appended caught my attention. Hesse was the first person whose mind was so comprehensive. At last. Somebody who thought a bit like me….

Based on the circumstantial evidence inter alia of dreams I can draw up a rough chronology of putative previous lives.

The more recent graph starts ~2500 years ago as a disciple of Siddartha, possibly with a named individual. In principle I may have heard the esoteric Kālacakra first hand. It then proceeds with two further Buddhist lives, one Theravada Thai/Burmese and one Vajrayana Japanese. This is followed by a Christian priest-soldier in France and a seeker / occultist in Sicily Italy. Finally, I incarnated as a proto-scientist in Wales.

Inspection of the chart shows two “gaps”. One of a thousand years and one of ~ six hundred. It does not mean that I did not incarnate then. One can conclude that no memory / data has yet come through for these periods. A thousand years is a big gap. Looks a bit iffy.

Being cynical there is little history written for the -500 to + 600 time period. Therefore, it is more difficult for me to fabricate an internally consistent story / legend / delusion for that period.

I can cobble together a satisfactory rough explanation for this graph. What I cannot explain, what perhaps is the missing piece, is the occurrence of all the Tibetan “stuff” in my dreams.

Speculating the most likely time for any “Tibetan” incarnation would be in the ~1200-1750 window.

No western “scientist” could publish a definitive claim for proof of reincarnation and expect a career of longevity, peer kudos and substantial research funding. A country {Tibet} can choose its leaders entirely on the basis of the Tulku phenomenon and “circumstantial” evidence.

The practice in London/Oxford/Cambridge differs from that in Lhasa and Shigatze.

Only very recently have I had imagery consistent with a Tibetan “maroon” life. I could have snuck one in before Wales.

We shall see what the dreaming brings….

Gelugpa Wrasse – Dreams and Snippets 21-02-2025

The first thing to say here is that what follows is inordinately difficult to verbalize.

Leading up to the last few days and despite numerous appearances of Tibetan based themes in dreaming I have been fairly certain that I have never had a Tibetan-Bhutanese-Nepalese incarnation. In whatever visions or dreams I have had with a Buddhist flavour I have never been wearing the maroon robes of that locality and certainly never any groovy hats.

Nevertheless, the tulku {or nirmāṇakāya} phenomenon has been resident at the periphery. I have never had the Mahayana urge or thought form pertaining to a bodhisattva training journey of coming back for the benefit of all sentient beings, to teach and to aid. This idealised wish form projected onto would be bodhisattvas seems a human thing and potentially prevents beings from leaving when they ought to be exiting the wheel of rebirth. “Please don’t leave us”, is not an empowering or enabling sentiment.

A few days ago, in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness I had a few images of me dressed in maroon monks robes with a yellow hat characteristic of the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. I was surprised. It was a “turn up for the books” and does not fit with my hypothetical chronology. The only Tibetan stuff I have felt akin with are the tales of Chögyam Trungpa though I met at a distance Akong Rinpoche. Their relationship was complex if I understand it correctly. I have a hypothesis as to why Trungpa resonated.

What is safe to say is that the thought-forms associated with and to centuries old Buddhist traditions, studied and recited by thousands are firm, almost solid. The lineage has a “mind” all of its own, nurtured by devotees of and with a ruthless and tireless devotion. It exists in the mental and emotional space of humanity. People reciting and chanting for centuries make something almost tangible in a physical sense. The traditions and practice are kept vital and alive by regular enactment, quasi-archaic though they may be. They are alive.

Newtonian mechanics dominated the human psyche to be improved upon around a century ago for microscopic systems. Yet Newton is useful to this day in our everyday reality. These mechanics are a part of the mental space of humanity. They have merit. They work. There is a loose analogy.

This morning, I had a brief dreaming sequence in which I encountered a fish in a tank. The tank was large, beautiful and with coral. The fish was an ocean going wrasse. It introduced it self as a Gelugpa Wrasse. It told me that even if I had been previously associated with the Gelug, there was no place for me therein in this life. Such a thing would be way too disruptive. The wrasse was calm and relaxed. It was just conveying without colouration.

It said that way back in the 1990s in Switzerland there had been a possibility but life circumstances had scuppered that. “Not to worry”, it said. It showed me some images of Bern.

I struggled to hold more of the dream but the wrasse part remained clear. Fish is the dreaming symbol for awareness or the need to be wide awake. The wrasse was pretty enough though contained in a tank. It was not free.

I am not sure what to make of it.

Last night we watched the Netflix programme “Adolescence” in which life for a family changes dramatically overnight. It was very good and left one with a breathless reminder of how normality can be completely flipped in a matter of hours.

We have had a few flips over the years.

Freaky Friday, an equinox talking with fish again…

Padmasambhava – Blue manifestations

looking a little into this and from RigpaWiki

Guru Sengé Dradrok (Skt. Siṃhanāda; Tib. གུ་རུ་སེང་གེ་སྒྲ་སྒྲོག་, Wyl. gu ru seng ge sgra sgrogs; Eng. ‘The Lion’s Roar’) — one of the Eight Manifestations of Guru Rinpoche.

From A Great Treasure of Blessings, page 30: Guru Rinpoche challenged and defeated five hundred upholders of wrong views in debate at Bodhgaya. He reversed their magic with the aid of a wrathful mantra given him by the lion-faced dakini Marajita. He is known as Sengé Dradok, ‘The Lion’s Roar’.

and

Guru Orgyen Dorje Chang (Skt. Guru Oddiyāna Vajradhara; Tib. གུ་རུ་ཨོ་རྒྱན་རྡོ་རྗེ་འཆང་, Wyl. gu ru o rgyan rdo rje ‘chang) is one of the Eight Manifestations of Guru Rinpoche. This aspect of Guru Rinpoche is sometimes visualized at the centre of the field of merit in the Nyingma tradition. Orgyen Dorje Chang is in sambhogakaya form, with its specific ornaments; holding vajra and bell and his legs in full vajra posture, he embraces white Vajravarahi.

More on the roaring lion Senge Dradog

Senge Dradog Thank

and more on the sambhogakaya Urgen Dorje Chang not necessarily counted in the normal eight.

Urgen Dorje Chang Thank

These are the two “blue” manifestations here is a thangka:

Padmasambhava – 8 Forms: Orgyen Dorje Chang

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Chemical Leak – Surgery – Padmasambhava – Floods – Drinks – Dream 18-03-2025

This dream comes after many days with very unsettled sleep due to intensely painful gout(?) in my right knee. I had 60mg of Codeine in co-codamol in order to get off to sleep.

The dream starts in a very modern building used for chemistry and science. The building is unknown to me. It is in London. On an upper floor where there are chemistry laboratories with fume hoods there has been a major incident. There are youngish people lying on the floor wearing white lab coats. Some of them have safety spectacles and purple nitryl plastic gloves on. They are not moving and are dead. There has been a leak of gas a chemical leak. The gas is an organometallic tin compound, a stanyl. It is volatile. Apart from being dead they look well. I am alone on the floor and immune to the leak. Slowly I drag the bodies out on to the landing and start to pile them into a heap ready for collection. From the landing I can see the entrance atrium which is rather grand. There is a glass banister topped with a hand rail. The bodies are both female and male. They are still warm to the touch yet floppy and lifeless. The work is easy and they do not feel heavy. There are well over a dozen bodies. I pile them up easily.

The scene changes and I am with G, R and T all of whom were / are academic chemists. We are waiting in turn to be operated on. We are to have sebaceus cysts removed from our faces. The man doing the operating is completely naked and devoid of any bodily hair. His genitals are visible. He is wearing blue plastic surgical gloves and nothing else. It is my turn to be operated on. I ask him why he is naked. He replies that it is a lot easier to clean up, the blood washes off. I understand the logic. He starts to cut out two cysts from my face. One of them is deeper than the other and he makes a slight mistake. He is worried that I am angry. I say that I am not in the slightest concerned with my appearance and that a scar of the right side of my face will match the one from the basal cell carcinoma removal on the left side. I suggest that he stitches away. This he does with a dark-black thread of a thicker than usual thickness. I get out of the operating chair and leave. The others are waiting nervously.

I am now walking around London with Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche. The atmosphere between us is fraternal as if we go way back. He is in a dark royal blue manifestation. We get into a right hand drive old Mk3 Ford Cortina in white. I drive us down to the embankment then we get out. Rinpoche puts his right arm around my right shoulder. He points with his left hand at the Thames water level. He says that in due course it will flood London. The water level rises and as it rises, we retreat uphill. Soon large tracts of land near the embankment are flooded. We work our way up towards Victoria and then Kensington. As we get to the north side of Kensington High Street, he shows me how much of London has been inundated by the sea level rise. He comments that much of this might have been stopped but it was not. There is a feeling of bond between us as we survey.

The scene changes and I am in what once was the Norfolk Arms but now is a hotel. It is very late well after closing time. I am in the bar with G, R and T. There is a young woman decked out as a waitress with a white apron and a black waistcoat. She is drying glasses with a towel. T orders a round of drinks from her and brings them over to us. There is some conversation about the chemical leak. The time comes and it is my turn to buy a round. For some reason I forget G. He feigns upset. I buy him a drink and the woman asks if I have any change, loose coins. She says that we always run out. I pull out coins from my trousers pocket to pay for the round. Her colleague, a male comes over and counts them out. He adds them to a small metallic coin-change box. He gives me back three coins. These coins I/we know are antique, they have a patina of age upon them. The others then go off to bed in the hotel and I sit at the bar with the waitress and her senior colleague. The night is our time, we are creatures of the night.

The dream ends.

Looking for Kuthumi or Koot Hoomi Lalsingh

In various texts Kuthumi is said to have been educated at one of the British Universities. In the mid nineteenth century that meant Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen or maybe Durham. Logic says that if he graduated, he would be on alumni lists, BUT in those days, many attended and never sat the qualifying exams. I have searched provisionally and found some Singhs at Cambridge, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Most of these were to the end of the century but none corresponded to him.

University could be a metaphor.  

It could also mean college or private school.

Some say he was a Rajput Prince though others confer this to Morya.

Leadbetter suggests that they together with Djwhal Kuhl lived in a ravine in Tibet.  They are placed not far from Shigatze and the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery the seat of the previous Panchen lamas

It is suggested that Kuhl, previously a follower of Kuthumi, became a master in his own right in 1875. He is said to be involved in the running of a certain lamasery.

Morya is anecdotally placed in London for the 1851 Great Expedition whilst Faraday was at The Royal Institution of Great Britain. I’ll speculate that anyone travelling from the sub-continent interested in science and knowledge might have swung by Albermarle Street.

In a piece of text, I cannot now find, Blavatsky suggested that she had been to some talks there. She speaks of Müller and other writers on eastern religions. Blavatsky is said to have visited the Masters in Tibet.

Minds were more like blotting paper, once. There was no Netflix so people had to find other things to keep the grey matter ticking over.

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There was a great melting pot of ideas back then. William Crookes was a member of the Society for Psychical Research

“The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) originated from a discussion between journalist Edmund Rogers and the physicist William F. Barrett in autumn 1881. This led to a conference on 5 and 6 January 1882 at the headquarters of the British National Association of Spiritualists, at which the foundation of the Society was proposed. The committee included Barrett, Rogers, Stainton Moses, Charles Massey, Edmund Gurney, Hensleigh Wedgwood and Frederic W. H. Myers. The SPR was formally constituted on 20 February 1882 with philosopher Henry Sidgwick as its first president.

The SPR was the first organisation of its kind in the world, its stated purpose being “to approach these varied problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.”

In 1882 Mary Everest Boole became the first female member of the SPR; however, she resigned after six months. Some other early members included the author Jane Barlow, the renowned chemist Sir William Crookes, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, Nobel laureate Charles Richet, artist Lewis Charles Powles and psychologist William James.”

Sir William Crookes (17 June 1832 – 4 April 1919) was an English chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube, which was made in 1875. This was a foundational discovery that eventually changed the whole of chemistry and physics.

He is credited with discovering the element thallium, announced in 1861, with the help of spectroscopy. He was also the first to describe the spectrum of terrestrial helium, in 1865. Crookes was the inventor of the Crookes radiometer but did not discern the true explanation of the phenomenon he detected. Crookes also invented a 100% ultraviolet blocking sunglass lens. For a time, he was interested in spiritualism and became president of the Society for Psychical Research.

From Wikipedia

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Do you think there is some PR in this wiki page trying to discount the whacko spiritualism?

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Crookes attended the Royal College of Chemistry

“The Royal College of Chemistry (RCC) was a college originally based on Oxford Street in central London, England. It operated between 1845 and 1872.

The original building was designed by the English architect James Lockyer in 1846 with the foundation stone being laid by Albert, Prince Consort on June 16, 1846.

The College was set up to teach practical chemistry. Many politicians donated funds to establish the college, including Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and Robert Peel. It was also supported by Prince Albert.

The first director was August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Frederick Augustus Abel studied under von Hofmann. Sir William Crookes, Edward Divers and J. A. R. Newlands also attended the college.

The young William Henry Perkin studied and worked at the college under von Hofmann but resigned his position after discovering the first synthetic dye, mauveine, in 1856. Perkin’s discovery was prompted by his work with von Hofmann on the substance aniline, derived from coal tar, and it was this breakthrough which sparked the synthetic dye industry, a boom which some historians have labelled ‘the second chemical revolution’.

The college was merged into the Royal School of Mines in 1853. It was the first constituent college of Imperial College London and eventually became the Imperial College Chemistry Department.”

From Wikipedia

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The description from Leadbetter (extended in the book) is entirely consistent with various images I have had in dreaming and which started with this dream about The Tibetan.

Logic suggests that things have changed in the last >125 years. The invasion of China is likely to have been more than a slight perturbation.

Where are they now?

Eight Tibetan Houses (seats) Dream 19-02-2025

This came after we watched a documentary on how China is changing Tibet, making it more Han Chinese.

The dream starts in South or Southeastern Tibet. There is a sense of Shigatze. I can see on a map eight Tibetan houses or seats. They have terracotta roofs and although they appear as houses, I know that they are seats, monasteries, in the sense of high lama thrones. They are linked to lineages and are the bricks and mortar, the physicality. I collect them in a sense. I coral them in my non-physical arms. I am wearing magenta and saffron Buddhist robes.

The scene changes and I can see the same eight locations but now I am seeing the spirit, the ethos, the essence of these “houses”. It is the near indelible mark of the spirit of these places, how they have energized the world.

I wake briefly.

I am back looking at the map of Tibet. Again, I can see these eight centres, only now I can see history, lineage stretching back over centuries. This is the past, the lineage which has been cultivated in time and through time.

I wake briefly.

I am back again looking at the map with these eight houses highlighted. Now I can see mind, mind-stream and even the awareness or consciousness associated with these centres. I sense in the dream that this represents future in that the centres live not necessarily physically but in the mind-stream, the Buddha field.

As I awake, I joke to myself that is must be weird Wednesday as opposed to freaky Friday.