The Tinleys and the small key of David

This afternoon I was in my study, which is full of bookcases, and one of the books caught my eye: The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma by Thinley Norbu. (One can only hope that the book is as well-written as the title!)

As mentioned in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I bought this book on February 3 because of recent syncs about pairs of keys -- particularly a gold key and a silver one. The fact that the key is specified as small hadn't meant anything in February, but it caught my eye today in the context of my April 25 post "Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting," which included this quote from the movie Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Johnny emphasizes the smallness of the key and compares it to the stone with which David killed Goliath. In the post, I connect this to the "key of David," which "shutteth and no man openeth" (Rev. 3:7). Earlier in the post I had included a picture of a lion and a red door, captioned "Aslan closed the door," and said it had caught my eye "because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors."

Taking down The Small Golden Key now and opening it up to one of the first pages (p. 4), I found this:

Later, at Vulture's Peak in Rajgir, the Buddha taught the "Perfection of Wisdom" . . . which is the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma . . . .

This got my attention because I had just posted a dream about a vulture, in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask."

In writing this post, I revisited the "What's the second key?" post so that I could include a link to it. The post begins with this sentence:

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is.

"The Green Door finally closes." As mentioned above, my recent post about a small key featured a red door closing and gave the sync context as "red doors and green doors." Later in the February post, the Key of David also puts in an appearance:

I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David!

My reference was not directly to Revelation and the idea of a door closing, but to Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which influenced the development of the Tarot -- specifically of the Wheel of Fortune card, which features an eight-spoked wheel. The post goes on to mention several syncs related to eight-spoked wheels.

The Wheel of Dharma, of which the second turning was apparently preached on Vulture's Peak, also has eight spokes.

So that's a lot of connections: Small keys. Vultures. Eight-spoked wheels. Red and green doors closing. The Key of David. 

Then there's the name Thinley Norbu. I don't know much about Tibetan, but I assume from the fact that Tibet used to be spelled Thibet that Thinley could also be transliterated as Tinley.

When I was a child, I wrote an unfinished story called The Tinleys, about two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small. These were a giant and a midget, respectively, and their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly. I don't know if the story has survived, and I don't remember much about it, but I believe the two Tinleys became friends after Small bested Big in a fight, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood and Little John. A very small person defeating a very big person -- what does that remind me of?

Update (7:40 p.m. the same day): I found a copy of The Tinleys. It's really awful, so I'm not going to quote much from it, but I thought it was interesting that the Tinleys' first quest together is to kill a griffin that lives at the top of a peak:

"Knights," said the king, "there's a gryphon around here somewhere that's stealing cattle."

"He lives at the top of Donchatryan Peak," said the cattle-herder.

"Donchatryan Peak?" cried the king. "Why, that's the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around!"

I just posted above about Vulture's Peak and how it was a sync with a dream about a vulture that became a Russian woman named Odessa Grigorievna. I identified the vulture in the dream as white-backed vulture, which is a member of the griffon vulture genus. Russian uses the same word, гриф, to mean both "vulture" and "griffin."