AFTER, at various lamaseries, I had seen the embalming some haffdozen times, I was one day sent for by the Abbot in charge of Chakpori. "My friend," said he, "on the direct order of the Precious One you are to be initiated as an abbot. As you have requested, you can - like Mingyar Dondup - continue to be addressed as 'lama'. I merely give the message of the Precious One."

So as a Recognized Incarnation, I had again the status with which I left the Earth some six hundred years before. The Wheel of Life had revolved full circle.

Some time later an aged lama came to my room and told me that now I must undergo the Ceremony of the Little Death. "For, my son, until you have passed the Gateway of Death, and returned, you cannot truly know that there is no death. Your studies in astral travelling have taken you far. This will take you much farther, beyond the realms of life - and into the past of our country."

The preparatory training was hard and prolonged. For three months I led a strictly supervised life. Special courses of horrible tasting herbs added an unpleasant item to my daily menu. I was adjured to keep my thoughts "on that alone which is pure and holy". As if one had much choice in a lamasery! Even tsampa and tea had to be taken in less quantity. Rigid austerity, strict discipline, and long, long hours of meditation.

At last, after three months, the astrologers said that the time was now right, the portents were favourable. For twentyfour hours I fasted until I felt as empty as a temple drum. Then I was led down those hidden stairs and passages far below the Potala. Far down we went, flaring torches in the hands of the others, nothing in mine. Down through the corridors I had traversed before. At last we reached the end of the passage. Solid rock confronted us. But a whole boulder was swung aside at our approach. Another path confronted us - a dark and narrow path, with the odour of stale air, spices, and incense.

Several yards farther on we were stopped momentarily by a ponderous gold-sheathed door which was slowly opened to the accompaniment of protesting squeaks which echoed and re-echoed as if through a vast space. Here the torches were extinguished, and butterlamps lit. We moved ahead into a hidden temple carved from the solid rock by volcanic action in days long past. These corridors and passages once had led molten lava to the mouth of a belching volcano. Now puny humans trod the way and thought that they were gods. But now, I thought, we must concentrate on the task at hand, and here was the Temple of Secret Wisdom.

Three abbots led me in. The rest of the lamaistic retinue had melted away in the darkness, as the dissolving memories of a dream. Three abbots, aged, desiccated with years and gladly awaiting their recall to the Heavenly Fields: three old men, perhaps the greatest metaphysicians in the whole of the world, ready to give me my final ordeal of initiation. Each carried in the right hand a butterlamp, and in the left a thick stick of smouldering incense. Here the cold was intense, a strange cold seemingly not of this earth. The silence was profound: what faint sounds there were served merely to accentuate that silence.

Our felt boots made no footfalls: we might have been ghosts gliding along. From the saffron brocade robes of the abbots there came a faint rustle. To my horror I felt tingles and shocks all over me. My hands glowed as if a fresh aura had been added. The abbots, I saw, were also glowing. The very, very dry air and the friction of our robes, had generated a static electric charge. An abbot passed me a short gold rod and whispered, "Hold this in your left hand and draw it along the wall as you walk and the discomfort will cease." I did, and with the first release of stored electricity nearly jumped out of my boots. After that it was painless.

One by one, butterlamps flickered into life, lit by unseen hands. As the wavering yellow light increased, I saw gigantic figures, covered in gold, and some half-buried in uncut gems. A Buddha loomed out of the gloom, so huge that the light did not reach beyond the waist. Other forms were dimly seen; the images of devils, the representations of lust, and the forms of the trials which Man had to undergo before the realization of Self.

We approached a wall on which was painted a fifteenfoot Wheel of Life. In the flickering light it appeared to revolve and made the senses reel with it. On we went until I was sure we would crash into the rock. The leading abbot vanished: what I had imagined to be a dark shadow was a well-concealed door. This gave entrance to a path going down and down - a narrow, steep, winding path where the faint glow of the abbots' butterlamps merely seemed to intensify the dark.

We felt our way haltingly, stumbling, sometimes sliding. The air was heavy and oppressive and it felt as if the whole weight of the earth above was pressing down on us. I felt as if we were penetrating the heart of the world. A final bend in the tortuous passage, and a cavern opened to our view, a cavern of rock glittering with gold: veins of it-lumps of it. A layer of rock, a layer of gold, a layer of rock - so it went on. High, very high above us, gold glinted like stars in a dark night sky, as sharp specks of it caught and reflected back the faint light the lamps shed.

In the centre of the cavern was a shing black house - a house as if made of polished ebony. Strange symbols ran along its sides, and diagrams like those I had seen on the walls of the lake tunnel. We walked to the house and entered the wide, high door. Inside were three black stone coffins, curiously engraved and marked. There was no lid. I peered inside, and at the sight of the contents I caught my breath and felt suddenly faint.

"My son," exclaimed the leading abbot, "look upon these. They were gods in our land in the days before the mountains came. They walked our country when seas washed our shores, and when different stars were in the sky. Look, for none but Initiates have seen these."

I looked again, fascinated and awed. Three gold figures, nude, lay before us. Two male and one female. Every line, every mark was faithfully reproduced by the gold. But the size! The female was quite ten feet long as she lay, and the larger of the two males was not under fifteen feet. Their heads were large and somewhat conical at the top. The jaws were narrow, with a small, thin-lipped mouth. The nose was long and thin, while the eyes were straight and deeply recessed. No dead figures, these-they looked asleep. We moved quietly and spoke softly as if afraid they would awaken. I saw a coffin-lid to one side: on it was engraved a map of the heavens-but how very strange the stars appeared. My studies in astrology had made me quite familiar with the heavens at night: but this was very, very different.

The senior abbot turned to me and said: "You are about to become an Initiate, to see the Past and to know the Future. The strain will be very great. Many die of it, and many fail, but none leave here alive unless they pass. Are you prepared, and willing?"

I replied that I was. They led me to a stone slab lying between two coffins. Here at their instruction I sat in the lotus attitude, with my legs folded, my spine erect, and the palms of my hands facing up.

Four sticks of incense were lighted, one for each coffin and one for my slab. The abbots each took a butterlamp and filed out. With the heavy black door shut I was alone with the bodies of the age-old dead. Time passed as I meditated upon my stone slab. The butterlamp which I had carried spluttered and went out. For a few moments its wick smouldered red and there was the odour of burning cloth, then even that faded and was gone.

I lay back on my slab and did the special breathing which I had been taught throughout the years. The silence and the dark were oppressive. Truly it was the silence of the grave.

Quite suddenly my body became rigid, cataleptic. My limbs became numb and icy cold. I had the sensation that I was dying, dying in that ancient tomb more than four hundred feet below the sunshine. A violent shuddering jerk within me, and the inaudible impression of a strange rustling and creaking as of old leather being unfolded. Gradually the tomb became suffused by a pale blue light, like moonlight on a high mountain-pass.

I felt a swaying, a rising and falling. For a moment I could imagine that I was once more in a kite, tossing and jouncing at the end of the rope. Awareness dawned that I was floating above my flesh body. With aware-ness came movement. Like a puff of smoke I drifted as if on an unfelt wind. Above my head I saw a radiance, like a golden bowl. From my middle depended a cord of silver-blue. It pulsed with life and glowed with vitality.

I looked down at my supine body, now resting like a corpse amid corpses. Little differences between my body and those of the giant figures slowly became apparent. The study was absorbing. I thought of the petty conceit of present-day mankind and wondered how the materialists would explain the presence of these immense figures. I thought... but then I became aware that something was disturbing my thoughts. I seemed that I was no longer alone. Snatches of conversation reached me, fragments of unspoken thoughts.

Scattered pictures began to flash across my mental vision. From far away someone seemed to be tolling a great, deep-toned bell. Quickly it came nearer and nearer until at last it appeared to explode in my head, and I saw droplets of coloured light and flashes of unknown hues. My astral body was tossed and driven like a leaf upon a winter gale. Scurrying flecks of red-hot pain lashed across my consciousness. I felt alone, deserted, a waif in a tottering universe. Black fog descended upon me, and with it a calmness not of this world.

Slowly the utter blackness enfolding me rolled away. From somewhere came the booming of the sea, and the hissing rattle of shingle under the drive of the waves. I could smell the salt-laden air, and the tang of the seaweed. This was a familiar scene: I lazily turned on my back, in the sun-warmed sand, and gazed up at the palm trees. But, part of me said, I had never seen the sea, never even heard of palm trees I From a nearby grove came the sound of laughing voices, voices that grew louder as a happy group of sun-bronzed people came into sight. Giants! All of them. I looked down, and saw that I, too, was a "giant". To my astral perceptions came the impressions: countless ages ago. Earth revolved nearer the sun, in the opposite direction.

The days were shorter and warmer. Vast civilizations arose, and men knew more than they do now. From outer space came a wandering planet and struck the Earth a glancing blow. The Earth was sent reeling, out of its orbit, and turning in the opposite direction. Winds arose and battered the waters, which, under different gravitational pulls, heaped upon the land, and there were floods, universal floods. Earthquakes shook the world. Lands sank beneath the seas, and others arose. The warm and pleasant land, which was Tibet, ceased to be a seaside resort and shot some twelve thousand feet above the sea. Around the land mighty mountains appeared, belching out fuming lava. Far away in the highlands rifts were torn in the surface, and vegetation and fauna of a bygone age continued to flourish. But there is too much to write in a book, and some of my "astral initiation" is far too sacred and private to put into print.

Some time later I felt the visions fading and becoming dark. Gradually my consciousness, astral and physical, left me. Later I became uncomfortably aware that I was cold - cold with lying on a stone slab in the freezing darkness of a vault. Probing fingers of thought in my brain, "Yes, he has returned to us. We are coming!" Minutes passed, and a faint glow approached. Butter-lamps. The three old abbots.

"You have done well, my son. For three days you have lain here. Now you have seen. Died. And lived."

Stiffly I climbed to my feet, swaying with weakness and hunger. Out from that never to-be forgotten chamber and up to the cold, cold air of the other passages. I was faint with hunger, and overcome with all that I had seen and experienced. I ate and drank my fill, and that night, as I lay down to sleep, I knew that soon I would have to leave Tibet, and go to the strange foreign countries, as foretold. But now I can say that they were and are stranger than I would have imagined possible!