Peculiar overlaps continue to occur between Xoxonapo, the Death-Defier, and Padma Sambhava, the Born-of-a-Lotus Guru Rimpoche of Ancient Central Asia, North India and Tibet.  For instance, Merilyn Tunneshende reports in her book, Rainbow Serpent (Thorsons, 1999) that Juan Matus took her to do dreaming in a sacred cave in Baja California in the Sierra Guadalupe mountains.  One night there, in a state of lucid dreaming out of the body in the subtle realm, she was conducted to the subtle dream body of the Death Defier.  She reports:

“I spied a massive shadowy figure on the desert floor.  At first it appeared to be a gigantic cardon cactus, but on closer inspection the figure seemed to be moving.  I inched a little closer still and then I paused.  Suddenly, I heard the sound of far-off thunder and that stopped me dead in my tracks.”

 “I realized that I was not looking at a cactus.  What I saw was alive and yet it did not seem to be living as we know it.  The creature, whatever it was, turned and saw me standing outside the cave.  I could not run.  The being began to move closer.  One would have expected it to lumber along on account of its size, but it gracefully avoided bushes as it passed.  I was enthralled.  There was a ripple effect, like a wake or a flowing cape that followed and surrounded the being.  It seemed to be negotiating a large serpent-like tail, yet it moved upright on two legs.  The being was easily twice my size.”

 “The fire from the cave cast light upon it when it came close enough.  I drew in a deep breath.  I was gazing at a fully intelligent countenance.  The eyes were burning.  Its head was topped with three horns.  One was positioned at the crown of the forehead and the other two were at the sides of the head, above the ears.  The creature appeared to be red and black, like the gigantic figures painted on the inside walls of the cave and all around the entrance.  I thought perhaps I might be Seeing the guardian of the Powers of this place in Dreaming.”

 “Then the being looked me full in the face, lowering its head to observe my eyes in the night.  The features were beautiful, symmetrical and somehow classical!  I realized that this was a creature far more evolved and sophisticated than I.  It was easy to observe from the face, horns and body that this being maintained a balance between masculine and feminine, a perfect hermaphrodite, and that it was not of this world.  I began to wonder if I was observing a deity of some sort.  There were aspects of it that appeared almost human-like, the face, the arms and legs and graceful torso, yet it was beyond this.  The massiveness, the coloration and the horns were definitely representing something far outside our evolutionary uses of sexual and life-force energies.”

This being as described by Merilyn Tunneshende, as a form of the Death-Defier, bears an uncanny resemblance to a deity sometimes invoked in ceremonies by the Tibetans, namely, Yamatanka, which means in Sanskrit, “Death-Defier”, “Death-Defeater” or “Defeater of Yama, the Lord of Death.”  It is also known that Padma Sambhava would sometimes appear in this deity form to his disciples in Tibet.

For me it even gets better, for when I was a young child in Los Angeles in America, there was a giant cactus outside the living room window of the house where I lived.  Sometimes I would see the cactus come to life and take the form of the being described by Merilyn Tunneshende.  That being has been near me all my life.  As a child I found it rather scary and called it “The OO” as in the seed-syllable, HOOM.

Another factor about Padma Sambhava is that he was “Born of a Lotus” and Xoxonapo means “Eternal Spring” as in “Forever Blossoming”, which rather refers to the gigantic lotus from which He/She emerged.

For the Ancient Tibetans, Padma Sambhava was an avatar of a deity known by them in their meditations as Amitabha Buddha, the Red Buddha, with the seed-syllable sound of HREEH.  This same seed-syllable as HREEM is also that of the Hindu Goddess, Bhuvaneshwari, the Goddess of Space.

Chögyam Trungpa describes Padma Sambhava as a transcendental being who first manifested as a Dharmakaya Buddha or Enlightened Master of the Third Attention, then secondly manifested as a Sambhogakaya Buddha or Master of the Second Attention, and finally as a Nirmanakaya Buddha or Master of the First Attention.  With that final realization he became a genuine physical immortal, capable of full-blown physical shape-shifting, including into a human male or human female form, and therefore as a bisexual superhuman adept.

For Shree Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India, this was his great ideal of a “Supramental Descent” and a “Triple Transformation”.  He thought he was himself a Divine Being who was going to realize a superhuman immortal state like Padma Sambhava, but he was ignorant of Padma Sambhava and thought his intended realization would be a “world first”,  But, alas, he died.  Then, after that, his successor, “The Mother of Auroville” was going to do it, and all the disciples there eagerly awaited her transformation into the world’s first superhuman, fully physically transformed and physically immortal human being.  She nevertheless continued to age and was more and more ill in her latter days.  However, she was also able to enter into a trance-like condition without breath or heartbeat, a state of suspended animation, so she was working hard on her immortalization.  Unfortunately, her ignorant doctors and followers buried her alive, not knowing she was still alive!

After the live burial and passing away of Auro-Mother, her chief disciple, Satprem, a Frenchman, decided he would try to become the World First Superman Immortal as an example of a “New Species” of human being that would change the world for the better.  He, like Aurobindo and Auromother remained ignorant of the immortal presence of Padma Sambhava.  In a book by Satprem and Luc Venet, Life Without Death (Institute For Evolutionary Research, 1985) we hear the following strange dialogue of Satprem and Luc Venet:

“(Luc:)        And what about that “new being” that S. saw in her dream?

(Satprem:)  That’s the future, the supramental being, the being who in fact is no longer made of all that mortal fabric of falsehood.  It’s a being who is made…divinely.

(Luc:)          Could one say that the work you are doing is –

(Satprem:)  You know, I wouldn’t say “I” am doing, because you really have a feeling that the “I” is precisely what creates the obstruction – rather, you try not to stand in the way.

(Luc:)          I understand.  But is it conceivable that your endeavour brought that possibility faster, I mean, that child who seemed so close, so “concrete”?  Could one say that in a sense he is born of –

(Satprem:)  He is born of the supplications of some, and perhaps many, people who…   Well, supplications…..

                     So if this new being is …materialized, it’s a marvellous grace.  There’s no other word for it.  It’s the solution to everything – if he’s really materialized.  Personally, I have seen him, but in a subtler world.  Did he actually become material?  It looks like it.    I don’t know, but for the last month or two, I have had such a strong feeling that something had to happen…. It’s possible – it isn’t impossible.  If he is here, it brings such a tremendously positive energy into the atmosphere – it’s extraordinary!  People can’t understand, or else they understand through roundabout ways or masks….”

The challenge to all inheritors of the Nagual and Tibetan Vajrayana traditions of human development is that we must all ask ourselves what are we trying to become?  What are we aiming at and how do we intend to get there?  Is the aim merely to learn to materialize the double so as to simulate personal presence from the subtle world?  Is the aim to try to be an eternal baby Eagle in a detached causal body of the Third Attention that floats free of the ordinary cycle of death and reincarnation?  Is that a genuine “Final Freedom”?  And does it really last even if it goes on for thousands of years?

Padma Sambhava/Xoxonapo, the Death-Defeater/Death-Defier is perhaps transmitting his/her superhuman bisexual presence in a way that has not yet been fully understood or assimilated by any known persons, but there are possibilities of unknown persons outside all the usual social circles where people hopefully or dismissively chatter about all this.

There is also a possible cosmic reason why a being like Padma Sambhava would first have a prolonged manifestation publicly in the Eastern Hemisphere followed by a prolonged manifestation privately in the Western Hemisphere.  Perhaps I will talk about this in another article.