Buddhists call it the only Pure Land on earth. Andrew Tomas called it an “Oasis of Peace” – a beacon shining in the darkness of the planet. In most Western countries Shambhala is known as a mythical or esoteric curiosity, but hardly at all as a real place. The idea of a paradise hidden somewhere…
Victoria LePage
I was born in 1919 in Melbourne, Australia, at that time still a colonial, Anglo- Saxon, conservative country of only about 12 million people with a simple colonial culture. Raised in a fundamentalist Protestant sect, my first twenty-one years were unhappy. Although religious, I felt a spiritual alienation from the world of my peers and became agnostic. However at that time I had a spiritual experience that changed my outlook and the course of my life. During this period I was shown my future spiritual Teacher. He was Indonesian and came to the West twenty years later to establish an esoteric school that taught a new type of syncretic spiritual practice. In 1961 I was able to join this Teacher and remained with him for many years. The training he gave was primarily Sufic and centred on an awakening of spiritual energy in the heart chakra. From 1964 onward I visited Indonesia several times for fairly long periods, living in various villages in Java and becoming acquainted with some of its many occult sects and the religious beliefs its people have evolved from a creative synthesis of animism, Hindu-Buddhism, Sufism, Taoism, Christianity and Theosophy. (At that time, orthodox Islam was only just beginning to impose its fundamentalist regime on the population, which was then mostly mystical and pan-religious.) For the past twenty years I have moved among a number of other spiritual paths and begun late in life what has developed into a literary career.
Website URL: http://vlepage.newteam.org