I moved into Padma Ling Monastery in the summer of 1971 with Tarthang Tolku Rinpoche and began formal practices. It was a frenzied time in a frenzied year in the heart of the hippy revolution at Berkeley, California. The Padma Ling Monastery is a converted fraternity house five blocks east of Telegraph Avenue, arguably the most berserk place on the planet. Within a few weeks of living in the basement, in a closet under the stairs leading to the meditation and ceremony room, I decided to acquire the Longchen Nyingtik Refuge Tree Visualization.

    I noticed that other students had this enigmatic pictograph on their altars and were unfamiliar with the standard Tibetan protocols in such matters. I snuck into the ceremony room when no one was around, rummaged under the altar until I found the stack of visualizations, and snatched one as clean as the Artful Dodger in any Dickens novel. I shortly discovered that this was a serious breach of meditational and spiritual integrity, but I kept the Visualization anyway.

    A few weeks later, Tarthang Tolku Rinpoche visited me in my little closet room. This was not as easy as it might seem. I lived in the basement of a large fraternity house that had been converted into a meditation center. To get to my room, you had to know the right hallways, go through the correct doorways, and navigate around some basement storage areas, all of which made about half the journey in complete darkness, even during the daytime. We, as students, were supposed to be up at 6:00 am to attend the morning practices in the ceremony room at 6:30 am. Tarthang arrived at my room at 5:45 am and caught me sitting in the half lotus, with my altar correctly set up, with a candle burning in a proper dish and incense in the appropriate sand holder, chanting away like a mad mendicant. I'm not sure what he was expecting to find as the door banged open, and Tarthang, being a large man, filled up the closet and then some. He took a quick look around, saw the Refuge Tree visualization, among other things, and said a "Harrumph" kind of sound, implying, I suppose, no justifiable reason for yelling at me, and banged out again.

    For the next few years, I mostly stayed at Padma Ling Monastery between trips to the desert. Gyaltrul Rinpoche was also living in Padma Ling at that time. We seemed to get along quite well, and he ultimately tested me on the symbolism of the Longchen Nyingtik Refuge Tree visualization.

    I was never sure why no one at Padma Ling or anywhere else seemed interested in this remarkable pictograph. I loved it from the beginning; I was utterly fascinated by what eventually evolved into a sophisticated arrangement of symbol strings, algorithms, and abstract decision-making protocols and outcome management strategies.

    Initially, the Longchen Nyingtik Refuge Tree pictograph appears to be an organization of the historical lineage of the Dzogchen Masters in the form of a refuge tree. This Tree, a possible depiction of the Bodhi Tree at Bodhi-Gaya, India, is the primary structure typical of all Mahayana Buddhist lineage visualizations. Branches lead to Monks and Bodhisattvas, Yoga Masters, mediators, billowy clouds, banners of victory, an upside-down rainbow, and other peaceful/wrathful deities floating independently here and there. At the outset, the pictograph seemed artfully stylized, historically complicated, and conceptually tedious. Until I thought about it for a while, it was just interesting. Then it became infinitely fascinating. An esoteric plan represented my spiritual journey, morphing into a mapping algorithm of my conceptual mind, then into a convincing argument for enlightened awareness, and finally into a panoramic vista of the human condition.

    For me, this was a thoroughly compelling realization process, utterly fascinating, addictive, and persuasive. I asked Gyaltrul Rinpoche to test me on this process sometime in 1975. We were in Oakland, California, at the time, and after my explanation, he said that I had passed the test, but I figured it out too fast. I asked him again to try to understand what he meant, "Had I actually figured out the symbolism of the Refuge Tree visualization?"

    "Yes," he said, then emphasized, "But you did it too fast!"

Figuring out the Refuge Tree visualization was easier than figuring out Gyaltrul Rinpoche's answer. To this day, I haven't the foggiest clue about what figuring out something too fast might mean. That I was able to unravel this Refuge Tree visualization enabled me to pass the Insight Test given to me by the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand a few years later, which, of course, led me to the Forest Monks in northern Thailand and eventually a sunny cave in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.

    An anecdote reveals another unusual connection between this particular Refuge Tree lineage visualization pictograph and Gyaltrul Rinpoche, who traveled to Berkeley, California, via Belleville, Canada. He came as the official Lama for fifty Tibetan families, sponsored by the Canadian Government's graciousness. Occasionally, I had to take him back there to visit his traditional parishioners. We usually stayed at the hectic home of Nurup Rongue, the son-in-law of the King and Queen of Kam, Tibet (The King and Queen of Kam, Tibet, look exactly like the King and Queen on a deck of cards).

    One afternoon, I was asked to take a blanket outside to Nurup's father, Tenzin, who had recently moved into the house. He was sitting under a tree in the backyard. I remember giving him the blanket, then lying beside him and falling fast asleep, an odd behavior for me.

    Tenzin came into my room a few days later and noticed the Refuge Tree visualization. He became quite agitated; he left and brought back his son to translate his concerns. Tenzin said he was the original artist of this particular Refuge Tree visualization, which he had drawn in Kam Tibet twenty years or so earlier, and asked how I had come to possess it. I said that I got it from Tarthang Tolku Rinpoche. He immediately said that Tarthang had stolen it from him in Damansara, India. I told them both how I had stolen it from Tarthang. Tenzin's eyes glistened with the most conspiratorial laughter I had heard, maybe ever.

    We all laughed for a while, then went out for some tea.