FreakingNews.com

What is it about this time of year that melts even the hardest disinfonaut scepticism? Sure, Santa Claus might be the old shamanic magic mushroom cult incarnate repackaged to dupe us all into developing a Pavlovian response to the Baron Samedi of consumerism that he has now become, but I’ve always suspected the rabbit hole went down deeper.

And then I came across this blog post by  paranormal researcher Jeff Belanger:

My friend Al told me he was struggling with telling his four-year-old daughter about Santa Claus. “It’s the only lie I’ve ever told her,” he said. I too have a four-year-old daughter and am currently in the thick of Santa Fever at my house, where we’ve been lauding Père Noël for the last three Christmases. He’s a legend I’m honored to propagate.

I study legends for a living. Monsters, ghosts, extraterrestrials, and ancient mysteries swirl around me like smoke from a smoldering campfire. If there’s one thing that’s certain: it’s that all legends have a solid foundation in someone’s reality. From there the story grows and evolves; it becomes part of a collective human experience. Legends are real. The point can’t be argued.

His bio page proclaims him to be “the founder of the new legend tripping movement” (www.legendtripping.com), so at first glance he might know something whereof he speaks. The post is full of high and cheerful Christmas strangeness – especially his theory that Old St Nick is a benevolent dybbuk, normally a malevalent type of spirit possession from Jewish folklore – so I recommend you read it in full.

For my part, I’m haunted by the slightly different possibility that Father Christmas might be what is known in the Himalayan shamanic and Buddhist traditions as a tulpa - a being or object created through willpower, visualisation, concerted intentionality and ritual; a materialized thought that has taken physical form.

This may seem even more far fetched, but I’d be in good company. Alvin Schwartz, the man synonymous with the creation of Superman comic strips in the 1940s and ‘50s, wrote in his 1997 autobiography An Unlikely Prophet (a book that according to Neil Gaiman, who no stranger to gods old, new and American, is “one of the great Odd Books of our time”, and again he should know) that Superman had become a tulpa and that a Hawaiian kahuna told him Superman once traveled 2,000 years back in time to keep the island chain from being destroyed by volcanic activity. Schwartz went on to tell of his own encounter with Superman in a New York taxi.

I’ll leave you with Belanger’s final thoughts on the subject:

Believe in Santa … His legend is real. He’s real. He’s you. He’s me. He’s a bit of all of us. And next year he’ll be back, because we’ll never stop needing him.

If that doesn’t sound like a job for a Superman, I’ll eat my mistletoe.

14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatzo

After years of heading the exiled Tibetan movement, the Dalai Lama will resign his political role. After years of leading his people both spiritually and politically he believes it is time for an elected official, but will remain involved with the movement. The Bangkok Post reports:

The Dalai Lama announced Thursday his plan to retire as political head of the exiled Tibetan movement, saying the time had come for his replacement by a “freely elected” leader.

The Dalai Lama, whose more significant role is as the movement’s spiritual leader, said he would seek an amendment allowing him to resign his political office when the exiled Tibetan parliament meets next week.

“My desire to devolve authority has nothing to do with a wish to shirk responsibility,” he said in an address in Dharamshala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile in northern India.

“It is to benefit Tibetans in the long run. It is not because I feel disheartened,” he added.

[Continues at Bangkok Post]

A team of linguists announced Tuesday that they have discovered a new and unique language, called Koro, in northeastern India, but immediately warned that it was highly endangered.

Only around 800 people are believed to speak the Tibeto-Burman language, and few of them are under the age of 20, according to the researchers who discovered Koro during an expedition as part of National Geographic’s “Enduring Voices” project.

The language, they said, has never been written down.

Continues at Discovery News …

From National Geographic:

NOT FOR SENSITIVE SOULS!

Click through to mbvtravel to see the full set of photos. You have been warned.

For the first time in 18 years, the Dalai Lama is visiting Washington this week without stopping by to see the U.S. president.

Tibet’s exiled religious leader — brushed aside by U.S. President Barack Obama in favor of communist China — was saluted at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday for his work for human rights. The presentation ceremony underscored Obama’s dilemma in dealing with China, a growing power and the biggest holder of U.S. debt.

The decision not to meet the Tibetan leader was made amid efforts to improve U.S.-Chinese relations on issues from stemming global warming to reigning in North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

In a statement, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, accused Obama of “kowtowing to Beijing” by refusing to meet with the 74-year-old monk.