INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 694 Amsterdam, December 26th, 2017 IS SHAMBHALA A CULT? - An Integrative Experiential Perspective - ELLIOT BENJAMIN As I traverse through my late 60's, to my utter surprise I have found myself involved with a spiritual community, the Shambahala organization, which has its lineage in Buddhist ancestry, but was initiated in the West by Chögyam Trungpa in the 1970's. Now Shambhala and Trungpa is not in my Modern Religions book only because I had never experienced this religion and my book is an experiential account of my experiences in modern religious movements. However, it was common knowledge for anyone familiar with religious cults that Trungpa was a controversial guru with a reputation for being both an alcoholic and engaging in numerous sexual encounters with his devotees. But Trungpa died in 1987, and his son Sakyong Mipham, who has been the Shambhala guru since 1990, is apparently a bona fide ethical and upstanding human being in his personal life. To backtrack a bit, my wife Dorothy had done a week-long Shambhala retreat in Nova Scotia a few years ago, and she completed her final Shambhala basic training level (Level 5) in November, 2016, which happened to be a few days after the U.S. presidential election. And I must say that I was struck by how “transformed” Dorothy was when she returned home, as we were initially both so devastated with the outcome of the election and our new U.S. President Trump. She came home conveying to me all about the vision of basic goodness in the world that she received from her weekend, symbolized as The Great Eastern Sun, and this had a rejuvenating effect upon me as well. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/benjamin91.html