Déjà vu

Five years ago, I climbed the beautiful Kanchenjunga Mountain, situated in south central Asia, in the Himalaya, on the frontier between Nepal and Sikkim, India.
I lived with a Tibetan family (who catered to the tourists) and became very close to them. It was here that I experienced the sense of de ja vu. This place has a magnetic pull where one involuntarily becomes alert and full of awareness. My hosts were deeply religious, they performed rituals everyday, burnt incense sticks and their home had a mystic resonance which I have never been able to explain nor understand completely. It was here that I learnt about the variations in Buddhism.I was a eager student.
(The head of the family was an elderly woman, and she had prophesized that I would meet the Dalai Lama. At that time, I thought, there was no way that I would meet the great leader who lived in exile, at Dharmashala India. But you can imagine my astonishment, when, after exactly 2 years, I was invited for a conference of inter-faith dialogue at the cultural center of the college where I work. And I was able to meet with the Dalai Lama, who was one of the speakers and had come to inaugurate the centre for Buddhist studies. This incident has strengthened my belief in consciousness and the power of the self……)
Tibet is traditionally the stronghold of Lamaism, a unique and highly developed form of esoteric Buddhism, not very different from Tantric Buddhism.
Tantra (Sanskrit, “web” or “warp”), is a body of esoteric Hindu and Buddhist religious texts and rituals. The Hindu Tantra were written after the Puranas, in the medieval period, and are usually set in the form of a dialogue between the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, in which he explains to her the philosophy and myths underlying the Tantric ritual. This ritual involves reversals of normal Hindu social practices (for instance, incestuous sexual acts) and reversals of normal physiological processes (for instance, the drawing up of the semen out of the woman and into the body of the man). It also reverses the orthodox Hindu “five products of the cow”, or panchagavya (milk, butter, curds, urine, and faeces) used for purification; in Tantra, these become the “five m's”: maithuna (“intercourse”), matsya (“fish”), mansa (“flesh”), mudra (“parched grain”), and mada (“wine”). Tantric adepts learn, from a guru, how to raise their psychosexual energy—the curled serpent power (Kundalini) that lies at the base of the spine—through successive focal points (chakras), until it reaches the highest chakra, at the top of the skull, and the adept experiences, within, the union of the god and the goddess. This process (sadhana) begins with a systematic visualization of the deity, limb by limb, who materializes through the use of visual diagrams (yantras) and through the use of magic incantations (mantras).

Buddhist Tantra is an aspect of the third stage of Buddhism, the Thunderbolt Vehicle or Diamond Vehicle (Vajrayana) that developed out of Mahayana Buddhism; it was perfected in Tibet. Vijnanavada (Consciousness Vehicle), school of Mahayana Buddhism, is sometimes known as Yogacara, or Faxiang in China and Hosso in Japan. It developed in India, in the 4th century. Its doctrines were derived from the Lankavatara Sutra and related works, holding that only consciousness (vijnana) is real; the outside world is an illusion. Experience of an external world is the consequence of seeds stored in a store-consciousness and engendered by karma. As part of the karmic process, a false split develops between the mind and the objects which its imagination creates. By purging karmic residues through meditation, the devotee can return to the state of pure consciousness which is Buddha hood.
The threefold structure of reality as imaginary fictions, provisionally true things and perfect consciousness were held to correspond to Mahayana doctrine regarding the transformation-body, enjoyment-body, and essence-body of the Buddha.
Its most influential formulation, however, was that there is an eternal, mutually sustaining dialectic though things are false and void in absolute terms; they are true and real in relative terms. “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form”.

My question to fellow bloggers;
I’ve never felt the sense of de ja vu ever again. I have often wondered if the reason for feeling like that on the Kanchenjunga Mountain was because of the strong ritualistic, compelling, mystic atmosphere. What do you think?