Author's Note

This book is a creative synthesis of two of my loves, therapeutic counselling and Tibetan Bön Buddhist philosophy and practice. It was initiated when I asked my Bön teacher, Geshe YongDong Losar of the Sherab Chamma Ling Sangha in Courtenay B.C. Canada a question about my inability to visualize the presence of a feminine goddess in the space in front of me.

“Geshele, I don’t see anything when I try to do that”. His response was simple yet full of intrigue. “Imagine it and eventually you will experience it”. That was all he said.

At the moment of hearing that, I did an internal referential search for what he could possibly mean by “imagine it”. I came up with all the conditioning and cultural antagonisms that arise with the use of the word imagine. Childlike, silly, unimportant, not measurable, not real and therefore not useful.

It took a while to process the inner paradox of his instruction and my reaction to it. Eventually something opened when I recognized a specific distinction. I had been raised and educated in a typical western mode of viewing the Imaginal as day dreaming and antithetical to the requirements of the “real” world for reliable and trained workers. The Imaginal was dismissed by authority figures, classified negatively as day dreaming. The child's mind was refocussed on the external and taught to grip the pencil properly and not going over the lines.  

Geshele, on the other hand, at the age of thirteen entered the Nangzhig Monastery, the largest Bön monastery in Tibet and was trained to visualize the presence of a feminine goddess in the space in front of him. I recognized that there was a whole field of inquiry that had been suppressed by western culture and began to research Bön principles and cosmology as well as engage my conditioned western mind in its meditative and visualization practices.

There are a few of the original Bön monastic training manuals now available in English publication and I invested time in the study and practice of the information available in these manuals, imagining myself tapping into the experience of a thirteen year old goat shepherd in a Tibetan monastery learning from master teachers of an ancient wisdom tradition.

The more I studied and embodied the practices, the more evident it became that the majority of the technology I was utilizing in my therapy practice was sourced from models of consciousness and transformative possibility embedded in these ancient Bön training manuscripts. Even the processes and protocols that I greedily viewed as “my own creations” had their roots in Bön psychology. Humbling but intriguing.

So what you are about to be presented with in this book is the culmination and hopefully, cohesive expression of that process. It is not meant to be a work of scientific standing. It is simply an exposition of one person’s engagement into the Imaginal territory. I invite you to enjoy the journey, participating in your own intellectual and emotional struggle of how to dismantle conditioning and integrate the wonders of the Imaginal into your own life.

Art Pouchet