Buddha's Lions:
The Lives of the
Eighty-Four Siddhas

It's kind of strange to spend your life in pursuit of something that can't be defined, but serious Buddhists do that. Although we're told it can't be known or logically understood, or even intentionally pursued, we've heard stories of enlightenment and either go after it tenaciously or stop believing in it and turn what we do into religion instead.

I don't look at enlightenment in the way most Buddhists see it or conceive it. To me the old meditations led to something which fits the descriptions of enlightenment, but did leave me unable to explain what it might be. It wasn't what I expected, and it wasn't exactly as scholastic Buddhists describe it.

To find examples of what I mean I have to go back in history fairly far, because in the beginnings of Buddhism the experience seems to have been different, with fewer rules and simpler approaches to the problem. In Buddha's Lions: The Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas, 84 examples of enlightened people show us this older side of things. Most would think the stories exaggerated or symbolic, but if you consider them literal descriptions of what happened you do get that older view of what enlightenment actually means.

One of my favorite stories from this book is the story of Manibhadra. This young girl came from a wealthy family and at 13 was already entrenched in ordinary life and engaged to be married. One day a guru stopped to ask for food and after a conversation with him, she asked to learn how to obtain liberation. They spent several days in the local cemetery as he taught her the different stages of the path, and then she went back to her family.

Her parents were very upset with her, thinking she was rebelling against the arranged marriage that was still pending, but even though they beat her she was calm about all of it. She explained that she'd been around so long that every living being had been her mother and father at some time, and she'd just accept the beatings as part of her path. Her parents thought her remarks were silly, and she continued her ordinary existence as before but practiced her meditations faithfully. She married, had children, and was a good wife to her husband.

Twelve years later while carrying a pot of water back to her house, she dropped the pot and stopped where she was, just staring at the broken vessel for the rest of the day. When people spoke to her she didn't respond, just kept staring at the pot.

At the end of the day she seemed to come out of her trance, but looked around her at the people who had gathered there and couldn't understand what they said, accusing them of being possessed.

At sundown she flew up into the air and hovered there for 21 days before heading out into the Outer Heavens to visit the Dakas. While hanging around, she gave instructions in the path to any who cared to listen.

Part of her speech:

"Living beings without beginning,
break the pot of the body.
Why should I return home?
My pot is now broken.
I will not return to my home in samsara;
now I will go to the great bliss.
Behold, O guru, a great wonder:
desiring great bliss, I have recourse to you."

Today not many believe such things actually happened, but this book records 84 unique examples in detail, with some hints about how and why it was done. There are stories of monks who ate pigeons, hunters who gained control of life and death, scholars who fell in love with young prostitutes, and beggars who lived on fish guts. They all succeeded in finding that undefinable miracle. Every rule modern Buddhists consider essential is at some point in one of these stories broken, and the outcome is something few people today even imagine might be true.

Illustration taken from Buddha's Lions, translated by James B. Robinson.

This photo of a silver disc over Hungary comes close to what we saw
from the ground at Shakamak, although the silhouette showed
no detail or perspective. Photo by Entity of Life under CC 2.0.

Over the years I've probably seen only a couple of dozen things that really qualified as Unidentified Flying Objects, and most of them were in a known testing range for the Air Force. So there's a good possibility that many of these unusual objects were ours -- either piloted aircraft or experimental drones. I don't know that what I saw a few days ago at Shakamak Park here in Indiana was anything from another planet but it certainly looked like unusual technology.

While walking through the park with a friend we were watching several planes in the area which seemed to be flying a grid pattern. That's probably coincidental but it is the kind of thing which brings up thoughts of weather control and that huge mess of worms. On this particular day the grid of exhaust didn't last very long but for about an hour filled the sky with that unusual checkerboard contrail pattern. All the planes in the area looked like planes, moved like planes, and showed clear silhouettes of plane shapes.

Then we saw something unusual off in the distance. This flying object appeared to be at about the same altitude as the jets, but didn't leave a contrail. It was moving faster than the planes had and following a slightly curved path. The color was bright silver and didn't change as the angle between the object and the sun changed. The shape was oblong and symmetrical and showed no visible wings or features. We heard no engine noise but of the several aircraft we saw only one was actually close enough for audible engine sound to reach us.

With no other information than this it's hard to be sure this wasn't an aircraft seen at an odd angle, but since the sihouette was so clear and the shape was so constant it does seem unusual to me. It certainly could be explained away as an ordinary aircraft, and probably would be if I reported it to MUFON and anyone cared enough to ask questions. But it's the sort of thing that leaves a person unconvinced. Enough about it was strange that it immediately drew our attention and our active criticism. Neither of us was convinced this was just a plane.

Possibly it could have been a flying disc seen on edge, but we didn't have the right angle to see more than an oblong with rounded ends. Possibly it was oblong in all dimensions. Whatever it was, it was the first aircraft I've seen up here that I've thought was odd enough to report.

Most photographic orbs depict dust motes close
to the camera lens, as has been demonstrated
by stereoscopic photographs (one shows the
orb, the other does not). This photo still
accurately represents some of the other types
of orbs I've seen. Photo by snowflakespice;
License CC 2.0

On an early summer afternoon in 1989 I happened to be sitting in my living room in the Ozarks looking out through the front door when something unusual happened. A silver orb of light moved through the clear sky in a descending curve towards the west. This globe glinted with metallic light but didn't appear to be solid. It moved faster than any airplane or balloon could move and seemed headed for an impact with the ground a few miles away. I jumped up and ran out, expecting to see a plume of smoke and a fireball over the west ridge, but I saw nothing. Throughout the afternoon and evening I scanned the local radio stations for news of what I thought must have been a large meteor, but no one ever reported anything at least that matched what I had seen. The few people I mentioned the sighting to thought that I was making it up or hallucinating.

That one sighting set me on an interesting personal journey which eventually put me in touch with many people in that area who were seeing similar events. Many sightings involved globes of light which moved in unusual ways, and most people thought of these objects or orbs as UFO's.

I didn't see just the one. Over the next few years I witnessed at least a dozen, and if I took the time to sort through my memories properly I'm sure I could come up with more. In the local newspaper occasional accounts of globes witnessed by dozens of local people surfaced. One large red globe was seen floating just over the treetops in a remote area, shortly before dawn, and appeared to move into the ground.

Brown Mountain, one of my favorite places to camp.

I became accustomed to these strange events, which at least where I lived were not rare. I saw them outside, or in the house, in daytime and at night, alone or in the company of other people. The orbs seemed real enough, but behaved as physical objects should not. The orbs emerged from walls, crossed rooms and passed out through solid objects. Sometimes the orbs stopped in midair and simply vanished. Outside I sometimes saw these odd lights hovering high in the sky, then abruptly moving away at impossibly high speeds or diving into the ground in an arcing or spiraling path.

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Last night this strange object reportedly overflew western Canada, creating a strange spiral wake and a massive explosion in the sky. Several different photos have surfaced along with a few eyewitness reports. Two videos also show the event from start to finish.

There are some immediate problems with these reports. I'd love to believe in this footage, but even though I see a few things here which do connect to my own experience with strange phenomena, I see way too much which doesn't harmonize well with mundane skills I also have, like photography.

The explanation for the position and steadiness of the camera in the first video is that Stephen Murray, the source of the footage, films meteors with four stationary cameras set up outside his home. This is edited footage of the entire event, and only one of the cameras caught it. By the time he got outside the event was over except for the arrival of the shock wave.

That's plausible, but there's something going on here which doesn't look right. The multiple spirals in the contrail before the explosion do look computer generated.

This second video, sent to Weatherspace.com hours later, shows the same event through the window of a plane. Background sounds include engine noise and voices of some very calm and mildly surprised people who apparently were filming this precise spot for some reason, right at the critical moment. In the foreground the sharp silhouette of a plane's wing appears, and the window through which the film was taken is directly over the wing. No other plane structure is in view and again the camera is rock steady. The plane's course is about as smooth as things ever get, the wing doesn't even quiver in relation to the horizon. Again all that's suspicious, and some of the unusual details from the first film are absent in this one.

A photo published at Weatherspace claims to show the same event from the ground, but portrays a complex spiral path that doesn't show up in the two videos. This sort of image could be computer generated or created physically by image overlay. The videos don't back it up.

Witnesses commenting on the two videos and also claiming to have seen the event mention that the lights in the sky did not illuminate any ground objects. While I've noticed something similar to that in encounters I do consider real, in this case it's a too convenient explanation of why no one noticed what was happening and why you don't see that in the videos. Unless you were looking directly at it, you wouldn't know it was up there. The likeliest explanation is that the event is fake and this is mentioned just to cover up faults in the footage. In the plane video, the object does light up the tip of the wing and part of the cloud layer, but only within the sphere of the expanding object. That either places the object about thirty feet from the plane or means the image is superimposed.

We'll have to wait and see how many people come forward with substantiating evidence and stories. Anything visible over a major city, as this event was, should have caught the attention of hundreds, if not thousands, who happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time. If we learned anything from the Norway Spiral it's that lots of us are watching, all the time.

Did early NASA photographs reveal
evidence of ancient alien
artifacts on the lunar surface?

I listen quite often to late night AM radio -- Coast to Coast AM usually -- and every now and then a guest shows up who really seems to make sense. It's amazing how sensible people can sound when in reality they probably don't even remember to wear pants. When Richard C. Hoagland talks about the ruins of Cydonia on Mars, for example, you can almost see the old skyline of crumbling pyramids as you walk down the dusty rubble-strewn reddish boulevard towards The Face.

Then later you go look at the photos and with a little imagination you can see what people were excited about, but it's just not convincing. Maybe it's the key to hyperdimensional physics, written in the dust of Mars for future Earth-bound descendants to decipher, or maybe it's just terrain. It's hard to tell from grainy photos.

Another interesting topic, one in which I have a personal interest, is the possibility of ancient artifacts on the Moon. I remember quite a few of those pictures making the rounds of science fiction magazines and checkout-counter newspapers in the early 70's.

Some were said to show the skeletons of old skyscrapers on the distant horizon of the lunarscape, and computer enhancements even pulled out details such as broken windows. Not that this made any sense on the Moon, where window panes might be a terrible architectural concept -- it was just interesting, and like the Face on Mars story, people were tempted to take it seriously. One photo which did strike me as very unusual showed a perfectly symmetrical white pyramid in the center of a lunar crater. The photo had been taken from orbit by one of the mapping missions which preceded Apollo.

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