Edwin Dingle

Edwin John Dingle (6 April 1881, Cornwall – 27 January 1972) was an English journalist, author and founder of the Institute of Mentalphysics in California, US. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain.

Dingle claimed to have learned advanced spiritual disciplines from a Tibetan mystic, and styled himself as a spiritual teacher with the name Ding Le Mei . As the President and Preceptor Emeritus of the Institute of Mentalphysics, he described himself as a "psychologist, author and philosopher".

Biography

Edwin J. Dingle was born in Cornwall, England and became an orphan at nine. As a journalist, Dingle moved to Singapore (Straits Settlements) in 1900 to cover the affairs of the Far East. He was one of the first Caucasians to go into China and to actually stay for a substantial period of time in a Tibetan Monastery. There, he learnt meditation and yoga from a teacher.

In 1910, he travelled to Tibet and stayed there for nine months. He claimed to have learned closely guarded advanced spiritual methods from the Tibetan Lamas. These techniques included the "Eight Key Breaths", a form of pranayama. He spent nearly 21 years in the Asia, in China, India, Tibet and Burma. During the 1911 Revolution, he was in Wuhan and then Shanghai. He witnessed the brutal civil wars in Hankou and Hanyang. He later wrote a book to tell his personal experience during the revolution. He spoke highly of Li Yuanhong, Yuan Shikai and Sun Yatsen. In many ways, he sympathised with the revolution but believed that Yuan could be able to be a unifier of the country.

In 1917, the North China Daily News & Herald of Shanghai published his The New Atlas and Commercial Gazetteer of China, which was devoted to China's "geography & resources and economic & commercial development". The book served as a standard reference for years, and was described by the Millard's Review of the Far East as "The biggest and best book on the resources of China". After his return to England, Dingle also wrote about his experiences in the East which were eventually published as the book Across China on Foot by Earnshaw Books.

Institute of Mentalphysics In 1921, Dingle settled in Oakland, California and lived in retreat till 1927. In 1927, he began preaching on what he called the science of mentalphysics – a "universalist spiritual development" technique based on vegetarian diet, pranayama and development of extrasensory perception. This technique was purported as the ancient wisdom preserved by the Tibetan mystics.

Dingle's Institute of Mentalphysics was incorporated in 1933-34, and a retreat centre was established in Joshua Tree (then Yucca Valley), California, in 1941. The Institute of Mentalphysics sits on 385 acres, and most of its buildings were designed by Lloyd Wright. It is now known as the Joshua Tree Retreat Center.

Dingle also established a centre at the International Church of the Holy Trinity in Los Angeles, where he taught classes and also conducted correspondence courses on Mentalphysics across North America. As a spiritual teacher, he adopted the Chinese name "Ding Le Mei", the name given to him in the monastery of Tibet.

Following Dingle's death Donald L. Waldrop succeeded as the head of the centre

Personal life On 16 July 1912, Dingle married Lilian Mary Grandin, a British–Jèrriais physician and Methodist medical missionary. The marriage was unhappy, and in 1923 Grandin returned to missionary work in Zhaotong but died 16 months later from typhus.

Dingle died on 27 January 1972.