This is an abridged version of a dialogue held between director Laurence Brahm and Tom Polin after a screening of Searching for the Lotus Born Master: Eight Manifestations of Quantum Energy at Asia Society Hong Kong, on 4 July 2024.
Tom Polin (TP): Let me start things off by asking you: what was it that actually prompted or inspired you to go on this very arduous journey across the Himalayan region and everything that we’ve seen there? It must have involved a lot of persistence and determination.
Now what was it that actually prompted you and inspired you to undertake this project? Was it just Guru Rinpoche telling you in your dreams that that you should understand the eight manifestations and go forth and tell the world, or was it something more complex?
Laurence Brahm (LB): Thanks Tom. It was actually that simple! At the time I had an NGO called Himalayan Consensus and our vision was to work with NGOs and government and entrepreneurs and try and work on environmental solutions between China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, all the countries that share the mountains of the Himalayas. And I was commuting at the time almost every month between Beijing and Kathmandu, where we had our other office.
One day we got into a storm and the plane got hit by lightning. The whole plane was all electrified and I turned to the stewardess and I said, “Look,” I said, “you’re not going to be able to land in this. Flying to Lhasa is impossible at night, you’ve got to turn around go to Dhaka.” And sure enough, she talked to the pilot and the next thing I knew the plane went almost like a rocket and we went out from the clouds, and suddenly we’re in blue sky and it turned and I knew we were heading toward Bangladesh, Dhaka where we had landed and we stayed that night.
And from that night on, Guru Rinpoche kept appearing in my dreams, and it was every single night, until one night he appeared and said to me, “My eight manifestations are eight quant energy fields. Now go tell the world.” And I awoke and so what would you do if he told you that?
And so shortly thereafter I was actually on a fundraising trip for the NGO in Shanghai and I called up an old friend of mine who was a Hong Kong Shanghainese, William Lo, and he’s very devoted to Guru Padmasambhava the Lotus Born Master; his family was always very devoted. He said “I’ll come over for lunch,” and he said “What are you doing?”
I said, “Well I had this dream, what do you think I should do?”
And he goes, “Well, you used to make documentaries. Why don’t you go out and make a documentary and tell the world?”
And I said, “I need funding, investment.”
He goes, “Wait. Tomorrow you stop everything you’re doing. You quit and I will invest all the funds and support it. I’m your producer as long as you’re the director.”
And from that moment, everything changed. Honestly, I knew the eight manifestations, but most people don’t know what they are. So it took about a year of research to try and track down the eight manifestations, the different lineages of slightly different stories. And finally with this movie, what we do is actually try to follow the historical route of his eight manifestations. And then quantum physics. . . I mean, that’s science and you know I’m actually a lawyer by background. So, we don’t deal in science. We as lawyers deal with fiction! And so, I had to bring all these science people together. That was really the beginning of the journey and then we just took off after a year of research and the journey’s never ended.
So, we’ve made now three documentaries on the Lotus Born Master. This is the first, the Eight Manifestations of Quantum Energy. The second is Return of the Lotus Born Master: Decrypting the Dakini Code which looks at the termas and tertons, the treasure revealers, and the dakini who helped them, the feminine energy spirits. And then people asked, “What’s a dakini?” So we did The Dakini Code and the subtitle of that is Lotus Born Master and the Event Horizon asking if he’s the father of quantum physics, could he also be the father of astrophysics? And then we’ve done three science fiction films taking his prophecies and projecting them into the future and now. We just finished our third science fiction film.
TP: How did quantum physics get into it? Because surely Guru Rinpoche didn’t mention that in his dream, right?
LB: He did. He said my eight manifestations are eight quantum energy fields and again, what is quantum physics? We’re so used to the classical Newtonian physics and the need to prove something and we can prove what’s observable. We can give rats many injections to see whether they live or die and then we can come up with an empirical conclusion that this works, or this doesn’t work, or this is scientific. But there’s so much out there all of us experience every day which is unprovable, that we can’t yet explain, and so we look at the fields, we look at frequencies: so many of these radio waves were only discovered maybe over just a hundred years ago and we began the whole process of recently Higgs Boson and dark matter. . . .
So we’re still discovering things that are affecting us in our daily life which we don’t know are out there. And so I think that discovery process continues. But in ancient times, these masters had a complete wiring of these systems using mental processes and ability to work with nature and to work with natural phenomena that we have in many ways forgotten and are only beginning to rediscover today.
And in those days, it wasn’t called quantum physics, but these systems of training that are in Tantrayana are systems that are empirical, because they’ve been proved over the centuries, and if you do those things, certain outcomes occur. Just like when I send you a text message, I don’t think about how it’s being decrypted and decoded and going on what frequency and what light wave and how it goes to another satellite and how it’s decrypted again in your phone, what kind of keys . . . I don’t think about that. I know you’re going to receive it. Just like when they’re able to use the purbha or the ritual dagger and send out a frequency, an intention, that intention will log on to the quantum energy fields and end up where it’s intended to go. And I think they had that wired. We’re just discovering the things that humanity has somehow forgotten.
TP: And it’s struck me for quite a while already that scientists are only in the modern age, let’s say the past 100 years, what they’ve been doing is among the things they’ve been doing is to basically verify things. They’ve been able to verify finally things that the Buddha told us about 2500 years ago.
Take for example quantum physics, quantum energy, the whole idea that in its ultimate form, everything can be boiled down to energy. That all is one is a very well-known Buddhist teaching from the Avatamsaka Sutra. And another is the idea of multiple universes and multiverses. In the Buddhist sutras, for example, you have Buddhas and bodhisattvas zipping throughout the cosmos all the time, calling on, making offerings to other Buddhas, and very advanced beings; and without regard to time or space which really doesn’t exist. That’s the picture that you can get from just reading any number of Buddhist sutras. It’s stated as a matter of fact.
But it’s only within recent decades, I suppose, that science has become to talk seriously about the absence, when you take it to the bottom line, the absence of time and space, and therefore the possible of existence of multiverses, parallel universes, all at the same time. So in many ways your film seems to have touched on these themes.
LB: Tom, it’s really interesting because you just reminded me by talking about parallel universes. How many years ago was it? It was quite a few years ago, when you and I sat in a coffee shop that was down below by a fountain in Hong Kong Park. And you were the first person to say to me, because we were having a discussion about Buddhism, you were doing a lot of research and you said, “Do you realize we may be in a parallel universe? There might be something happening right here where we are right now.”
And you explained to me how this was very much understood in Buddhism. And you were actually the first person to connect in my mind Buddhism with quantum physics. And that occurred right here. How many years ago?
TP: It must have been 20 years ago.
LB: 20 years ago, and here we are, back premiering Searching for the Lotus Master at Asia Society! So, I want to thank you for your insight. . .
TP: Scientists are quite slow, but they are the people that the world tends to believe so. . . we are all slow.
I have another question which came up as I was watching. As I said, it’s obviously a very arduous journey or many journeys that you guys made in making this film. I don’t think anybody here or very few people here would have been on that kind of track or journey. What were some of the more interesting or memorable challenges or difficulties that you encountered during these trips to these very remote and physically arduous places? Can you share some of the troublesome times or difficulties?
LB: This is what’s really weird. There were really no troubles and we went to places that might be restricted. We went to places where we were told we couldn’t film, and somehow, we’d go there and things just opened up. The person who was supposed to be the gatekeeper wasn’t there, or a lama would bring us in.
We went right into Samye Monastery and filmed inside, and nobody stopped us. We kept saying, you know, oh, this is the Lotus Born Master here. He’s taking care of all this. But there was this very unique kind of green light that was always there. And we have, if you notice on the cover of my book, there’s a very large raven in the background that the ravens kept always appearing. And there’s a you know the Mahakala (da hei tian), the great protector is often appearing, as they say, as a raven in the form of Kakamukha; that’s his raven manifestation. So we’d always say we’re protected, something’s happening.
But a really interesting event happened which has triggered the next sort of set of films that we have in planning last summer. So, we were in Kham region north of Yushu. There’s a cave network and we’ve passed through that network many times and I’ve always been very curious about it. So, last summer we went up there with one of the Rinpoche’s sons, who actually that day, was showing me a painting of the tseringma, the five protectress dakinis that he had done. And we went up there and the five protectresses are representing the elements of wind, fire, water, earth and emptiness.
And we climbed up and we found out that this was actually the place where the Lotus Born Master stayed; where he actually asked the tseringma, the five protectresses, to become his Dharma protectors. . . particularly to protect the Barché Lamsel and Sampa Lhundrup teachings that were hidden and later revealed there.
And when we began to film, suddenly in a second, this wind gusts up and immediately the wind is followed by lightning, thunder, snow, and ice. There was an ice storm. There was then a sandstorm, and then pouring rain. And we got ourselves back to the jeeps and we sat back and said, “Okay, the guru has spoken, the tseringma protectresses are protecting us.
We then took the Sampa Lhundrup, which addresses 13 crises that are taking place today: climate, natural disaster, war, one power rises and tries to create a kind of repression of other countries. . . All of this stuff is happening and this is going to actually be the next science fiction film we’re working on, where 13 emanations of the guru come back and deal with the problems of today. We’re going to call that film Lotus Born Master: Punksters and Magicians. So that’s all triggered by that incident.
TP: The film showed us many opinions and analyses from a very wide range of experts, practitioners, Rinpoches. . . my feeling as a professional editor is that you were basically taking a reporter’s approach. In other words, letting the subjects speak for themselves, giving all kinds of different opinions. And what doesn’t seem to be very clear is your own summary and opinion of what all this means.
I’d like to ask you here to give us your own take. You’ve encountered many of these things under very unusual circumstances. What were the ultimate keys or takes or summations that you would give as to what it all means, say, to you personally and then what you think for others in the world.
LB: Thank you, Tom. I’ll answer that in two parts. The reporter’s approach: I learned from you because I was a stringer as a law student. I was a stringer at Asiaweek and you were my editor. That was a long time ago. In summary, Searching for the Lotus born Master: we went out, we were searching, we didn’t want to give an answer. We wanted to search for the answer and let the audience come up with your own answer.
But if you want my answer from the search, and now it’s been quite a few years of searching, is if you think of the eight manifestations, these are actually eight historical events of Guru Padmasambhava, the Lotus Born master’s own personal journey, his own practices. The eight stages of his own realization also represent eight individual practices or eight entry points into the mandala of your own mind.
And then we can also understand it as eight quantum energy fields. Because from my own experience, the practices are connected to subtle energies, to working with these frequencies that are always around us, that most of the time we are not aware of because we’re not tapped into those frequencies. And in turn, the power of being able to convert negative energy to positive, knowing that actually there’s neither negative nor positive. Or if you wanted to think in purely science terms, you always have photons and electrons or neutrons and photons working together to create electromagnetic fields and energy. And of course, all of us are energy and all of us are interconnected and everything is a wave. And so something that happens here will have a butterfly effect on the other side of the world.
So, I come down and say, “Look: this is science.” And science, as you just said, has a long way to go. The first quote we open with is not a quote from the Buddha or a quote from Padmasambhava or from any other master. It’s a quote from Nikola Tesla, who himself said the day we start to take the spiritual and combine it with our science is the day science actually will make a huge leap forward. And of course, Tesla was the master of electromagnetic fields.
TP: Just a quick interruption: it’s quite typical that almost all the greatest scientists or so many of them, once they reach the highest levels of science, they realize how little they actually know about what’s out there.
It’s the lesser scientists who are hubristic enough to think that only science matters. What can’t be proven by science doesn’t exist, etc. But the greater scientists knew how little they knew. And it’s just one of these things that strikes one. Tesla of course, Einstein and many of the others
LB: Yeah. Which he himself, at the end of his life, embarked on a deep spiritual kind of quest and I think that’s exactly what you said is, at some point you have to go beyond what is observable to understand all that we are affected by that is unobservable.
TP: Now a message has been transmitted through the airwaves which I’ve decrypted; that’s telling us it’s almost time to wind this up. So let me ask one last question of you, Laurence. Okay, so go forth and spread the message, says Guru. What are your thoughts on how to do that?
LB: Well, first of all I want to thank Buddhistdoor for hosting this event, Tom, yourself, for hosting, and Asia Society. Alice, I want to thank you especially for all of your support. Asia Society has been great to host this film and I hope we can continue to show the sequel films and continue to have all of you on the journey with us.
But one of the things that came up is, how do we reach a broader audience? So, why we started do science fiction films is, we figured, let’s get beyond Asia beyond an audience that’s informed about Buddhism or about Asian philosophy. Let’s go way out there. And the science fiction films bring his prophecies to today and our objective is to reach a larger audience. And then also how we reach a younger audience? And we’ve begun to do music videos.
And so, what happened about a year and a half ago, the Rinpoches, lamas in Bhutan called me and said, “We need to spread a prayer called Wangdu Soldep, which was written by Mipham Rinpoche in the 19th century.” And this is a prayer that energizes and magnetizes the earth. They said “the earth is depleted and all these things are happening. We need to remagnetize it. So, you have to spread this everywhere.”
I said, “This is not going to this is not going to go fast enough.” So, I called another meeting at the lamas. I said, “I want to show you something. If you haven’t heard of this guy, his name is Michael Jackson. And many, many years ago, he did something called We Are the World. Let’s watch this video.” And they looked at it. I said, “Okay, I’m going to do Wangdu this way, but I’m not going to do it to pop music. I’m going to do it to rap. Do I have your permission?”
So, we started to put this thing together; it took about a year and a half to do, and we got my son got involved (he’s in LA); he’s also got his own rap group. And we got rappers in LA in London, in the Tibetan regions, in Bhutan, in New York, and we put this thing together.
If you like, I’ll share it with you, because I think this is a way of reaching many people very quickly in a way that is not heavy. It’s just cool. So, maybe we watch Wangdu Soldep!
