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My teacher liked to dress up in a variety of different costumes, some of them seemingly quite comical, but which he took very seriously. For instance, the kilts he liked to walk around in, as he had begun his career as a guru-fraudster (as many people saw him) in the first Buddhist monastery in Europe, in, you guessed it, Scotland. But this costume, the one in my story, was a uniform. A military outfit, with a full set of rather fake-looking medals plastered across his chest. And with epaulets, those ornamental fringed shoulder pads worn as an insignia of rank. Only these epaulets were different. They were… enormous, and stuck out past the end of Rinpoche’s shoulders, jutting out into space, as it were.

But of course, no one dared to ask him about it. Until one day, at the end of one of his “dharma talks,” when Rinpoche did as he always did, and opened the floor for questions and discussion, a guy at the back raised his hand. “Yes, sir,” Rinpoche asked, “what is it?” And the guy said, “Ummm, your uniform.” “Yes, what about my uniform?” “Can you tell us why those… epaulets are so… big?” “Epaulets?” “Yes, your shoulder pads.” “Those are not epaulets.” . . . . “Then, sir, what are they?”

“They are landing pads.” “Landing pads?” “Yes, for the dralas. And I would like you very much to meet them.”

But Rinpoche is no longer here, at least not on this plane, and as there doesn’t appear to be anyone else around who seems willing to step forward to do the honors, I’ll try and introduce you to them as best I can.

Dralas are spirits. Well, maybe not quite. Let’s just say they are… entities. Of some kind or another. And in fact, there are a bunch of kinds. You have your basic garden-variety drala, a sort of protector spirit, a guardian, who lives in an area in the middle of your chest, like an invisible breastplate or shield.

But dralas are everywhere, in trees and rivers, and even the dumbest of rocks.

And you can tune into them any time you want, and experience things with an open heart, with curiosity and receptiveness, which is why they often reveal themselves in female form, as dakinis, like this leggy damsel, dancing in the sky.

They provide a gateway into another world, but it’s the same one everyone and every creature inhabits, only in this world, everything looks different. How? One day, Rinpoche was sitting on the grass with one of his teachers, and leaned over and pointed up at a tree, and whispered something in his ear. And they both broke up in hysterical laughter. And someone came over and asked a monk what he had said. And the monk replied, Rinpoche said, “They call that a tree.”

And then there are the mahakalas, the Wrathful Ones,

though I’m not quite sure if they qualify strictly as a class of drala, but in any case, they come from the same place, wherever that is. The one you see here is stomping his right foot, in a typical stance, and under it is a guy with an elephant-size ego.

And they are indeed Wrathful, but not angry. Anger is an expression of frustration and a refusal to accept things as they are (or things as it is, as Suzuki Roshi always liked to say). The Wrath of a mahakala is of a different kind — they don’t take BS from anyone, you, me, or especially A-holes like… [He Who Must Not Be Named or else]. And you better watch out, if you’re naughty and not nice, and violate the Dharma, and let your ego run rampant and act without compassion, they will stomp on you and make you cry. I know, from experience.

But if you think dralas or mahakalas are somehow floating around somewhere in outer space, you’d be making a big mistake. As Rinpoche was very careful to make clear, over and over again, dralas are none other than a part of your own mind. Projections, if you will, but not in the same sense they are commonly understood in Western psychology, as projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, and blaming them.

Treat a drala in the right way, with proper respect, and even devotion, and maybe one of them will land on your shoulder, and whisper something in your inner ear, and if you pay attention to the message they bring, and take the hint, and act accordingly, in accord with things as it is, and not as you might want them to be, then they might just be willing to become… an ally. Your daimon perhaps, as the ancient Greeks understood it, for dralas are only the name that Tibetan Buddhists give them. Every culture has a different name for them, or many different ones.

It seems that the only culture that doesn’t have its own name for them is, alas, our own. Our gurus, the witch doctors who sit at the feet of Big Pharma doling out candy to pacify those who can’t follow the rules of order, simply don’t believe they exist. But of course they do, and I’m writing about them here to acknowledge the debt I owe them, and which I will never be able to repay. Without their kindness and fierce wisdom, I’d never have taken the risk and tried to write about any of this.