Our species is predominantly a clan animal. Geographically, this has led to cultural identities and identifiable clans, which has historically led to conflict and continues to do so today. More recently, this dynamic has sparked difficult conversations around cultural appropriation. There can be both personal and societal confusion and anxiety when people feel inextricably drawn to another culture—to other places around the world that feel like home, when we feel a kinship with people we’ve never met, or when we fall in love with art forms we’ve never tried.
This tension is central to a series of interviews I’ve begun: conversations with artists who feel that calling and are pursuing creative practices outside of their own cultural norms.
What if there were a simple explanation for these feelings; one that has nothing to do with the skin we’re born in or the geography we come from? What if we simply had to stop thinking the way we’ve been taught to think? This is when we’re invited to think bigger, beyond the minutiae of one lifetime. And perhaps what one person calls appropriation, another might call a step toward human unity.
Welcome to my interview with someone who offers a system to help us see reality differently. An American-born international speaker, teacher, artist, astrologer, architect, and prolific author, he once backpacked to India, where he became close with figures such as the 12th Tai Situ Rinpoche, became involved in a Kalachakra documentary with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and spent decades as a committed Buddhist. From 1972–2000, he lived across Europe, in England, Denmark, Spain, and Italy.
A. T. Mann—known to many as Tad—thinks differently, and thank goodness he does. His life has taken him to places—physically, socially, spiritually, and conceptually—that many of us are only now beginning to explore. This short piece barely scratches the surface.
Tad was born after his father had already passed away in a German POW hospital during World War Two. His mother died when he was a teenager, leaving him alone in the world. “I come from generations of ministers, but I never really believed in Christianity,” he said. “Although I later realized that the undercurrent of Christianity is connected to other Eastern religions, and that made me more comfortable.” Tad went on to have multiple near-death experiences through psychedelics. Christianity offered no framework for what he was encountering, but he recognized those experiences as something akin to the Tibetan bardo (an intermediate state between life and death), sparking a fascination with The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Even as a child, Tad was drawn to Eastern esotericism and Buddhism. But his early 30s would take that interest to a whole new level.
Tad and I had a wide-ranging conversation that slid between interview, philosophical musing, and unfiltered laughter. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to this brilliant creative—a mind and artist whose work blends time and space, shifting how we perceive our lives.
Tad graduated from Cornell’s College of Architecture in 1966 and launched an award-winning career in New York, where he helped to design the police headquarters. By 1968, he was working in Rome. All of this before age 30—when he walked away from it all.
In 1970, he flew to Paris, dropped down into Morocco, and, on a whim, hitchhiked his way to India. He passed through countries and met people in ways that feel almost impossible today. Once in India, he settled in Dharamsala, where he fell in love with art. He formed a close friendship with Tai Situ Rinpoche—a connection that resumed when he returned in the early 2000s. Rinpoche’s own work in sacred architecture, mandala painting, and astrology mirrored Tad’s growing passions.
Their conversations, especially around the astrological timing of death and the discovery of reincarnated lamas, helped Tad to formulate his own astrological system, deeply influenced by Tibetan Buddhist astrology, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the idea that time is not experientially fixed.
Tad’s final psychedelic experience was in India in 1972. After that, he moved to a houseboat in London, raising his daughter as a single father. He traveled with her often, and this was also when his prolific writing career began.
“I basically winged it,” he said. “I just began writing, and everything else followed. My life has gone in these stages where I don’t know what I’m doing when I start, but I realize I’m supposed to be doing it.”
Many of us feel pressure to have a clear path—to manifest a fixed reality. But Tad reminds us that approaching life with a beginner’s mind opens up a different kind of magic.
“I did a lot of work with the Rubin Museum in New York,” he noted. “In 2018, I did a series of interviews called Astrology, Prophecy and Divination. I interviewed a Mayan priest, an Aztec, shamans, someone who interprets terma called Khenpo Serang Dangwell. I asked: ‘Where does terma come from, and how do you know?’”
In 2009, he edited and narrated a seven-hour version of the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra Tantra teachings. He also helped to produce America’s First Guru, a documentary about Swami Vivekananda: “And Also, I helped a friend of mine make a documentary called America’s first Guru about Vivekananda. He was born in 1895, and came to America for the first time from India for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As a result he was swept away by a group of rich ladies from New York and Boston who loved what he was talking about. He was the one who brought yoga to America and founded the Vedanta Societies all over America and our documentary was bought recently by PBS and it’s going to be shown this year.”
After years in Copenhagen, Tad returned to the US and, in 2001, took refuge with Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, who gave him the name Pema Rangjung (Lotus Wisdom—terma from the mind of a terton). By then, he had meditated for over 25 years, but under Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, his practice deepened.
Even during his years in the UK, Tad was penning books: on the sacred feminine, sacred trees, and more; and developing an astrological modality to explain why we’re often drawn to things far outside our “birth bubble.” Simply put: perhaps we’ve lived (or are living) other lives. This is worth considering when we get anxious about cultural appropriation—especially if our DNA is the primary metric we’re using.
All that said, I first fell for Tad’s artwork.
Over the years, he found that creating very geometric mandalas became a form of meditation—one that brought peace to his soul and, in turn, to his collectors. With his background in sacred architecture, his geometric precision evolved into works that blend Egyptian symbolism, astrology, Buddhism, Kabbalah, Daoism, and more. His tools for healing include oracle decks, like those found on tarot.com. His love for artistic structure was born in the Buddhist temples of India.
“I loved the iconography [of Buddhist art] more than I understood the religion itself. I just understood what it meant because it’s all about dying, Bardo and incarnation.” A process shared by all sentient beings.
Like many of us, his art is guided more by intuition than by formal scholarship. And sometimes, we need that broader intuitive lens that helps us transcend the arbitrary lines we draw on maps that seperate clans and delineate cultures. The language of symbols can speak to the soul and make the world feel like a shared home. We’re only here for a few short years each time—so why not work to bring the world together, instead of dividing it with suffering?
There’s so much more I could say: the life Tad has lived, the art, the astrology, the books . . . but we have to end somewhere. Thankfully, his work is easy to find online if you’d like to explore further.
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New Paradigms in the Ancient Wisdom of Thangka Art: The World of Dr. Sarika Singh
Augmented Wisdom or Virtual Insanity?
Imagining the Omnipresent, Liminal OM, Part 1
