The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight
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Authors: James Redfield
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The Celestine Prophecy
The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision
The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness
By James Redfield and Carol Adrienne
The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide
The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision: An Experiential Guide
James Redfield’s Web site:
www.celestinevision.com
THE SECRET OF SHAMBHALA
. Copyright © 1999 by James Redfield. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Warner Books,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2290-9
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1999 by Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: April 2001
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
For Megan and Kelly,
whose generation must evolve consciously.
In the evolution of spiritual awareness, there are many heroes. A special thanks is in order to Larry Dossey, for his pioneering
popularization of the scientific research on prayer and intention; also to Marilyn Schlitz, who continues to push the development
of new studies on human intentionality for the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In nutrition, recognition must be given to the
acid/alkaline work of Theodore A. Baroody and Robert Young.
Personally, I must thank Albert Gaulden, John Winthrop Austin, John Diamond, and Claire Zion, who all continue to make special
contributions to this work. And most of all, a special thanks to Salle Merrill Redfield, whose intuition and faith-power serve
as a constant reminder of the mystery.
When I wrote
The Celestine Prophecy
and
The Tenth Insight,
I was firmly convinced that human culture was evolving through a series of insights into life and spirituality, insights
that could be described and documented. All that has occurred since has only deepened this belief.
We are becoming fully conscious of a higher spiritual process operating behind the scenes in life, and in doing so, we are
leaving behind a materialistic worldview that reduces life to survival, gives a pittance to Sunday religion, and uses toys
and distractions to push away the true awe of being alive.
What we want instead is a life filled with mysterious coincidences and sudden intuitions that allude to a special path for
ourselves in this existence, to a particular pursuit of information and expertise—as though some intended destiny is pushing
to emerge. This kind of life is like a detective story into ourselves, and the clues soon lead us forward through one insight
after another.
We discover that a real experience of the divine within awaits us, and if we can find this connection, our lives are infused
with even more clarity and intuition. We begin to catch visions of our destiny, of some mission that we can accomplish, provided
we work through our distracting habits, treat others with a certain ethic, and stay true to our heart.
In fact, with the Tenth Insight, this perspective expands even more to include the full scope of history and culture. At some
level, all of us know that we come from another heavenly place into this earthly dimension to participate in one overall goal:
to slowly, generation by generation, create a completely spiritual culture on this planet.
Yet even as we grasp this invigorating insight, a new one, the Eleventh, is arriving. Our thoughts and attitudes count in
making our dreams come true. In fact, I believe we are on the verge of understanding, finally, the way our mental intentions,
our prayers, even our secret opinions and assumptions influence not only our own success in life but the success of others
as well.
Based on my own experience, and on what is happening around us, this book is offered as an illustration of this next step
in awareness. It is my belief that this insight is already emerging out them, swirling among thousands of late-night spiritual
discussions, and hidden just below the hatred and fear that still mark our era. As before, our only responsibility is to live
up to what we know, and then to reach out… and spread the word.
James Redfield
Summer 1999
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 2 THE CALL OF SHAMBHALA
CHAPTER 5 THE CONTAGION OF AWARENESS
CHAPTER 10 ACKNOWLEDGING THE LIGHT
CHAPTER 11 THE SECRETOF SHAMBHALA
Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished,
and rose up in haste and spake…
Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?
… Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire,
and they have no hurt, and the form
of the fourth is like the
son of God…
Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
who hath sent his angel, and delivered his servants
that trusted in
him.
—Book of Daniel
FIELDS OF INTENTION
T
he phone rang and I just stared at it. The last thing I needed now was another distraction. I tried to push it from my mind,
gazing out the window at the trees and wildflowers, hoping to lose myself in the array of fall colors in the woods around
my house.
It rang again, and I got a vague but stirring image in my mind’s eye of a person needing to talk with me. Quickly I reached
over and answered it.
“Hello.”
“It’s Bill,” a familiar voice said. Bill was an agronomy expert who had been helping me with my garden. He lived down the
ridge only a few hundred yards.
“Listen, Bill, can I call you back later?” I said. “I’ve got this deadline.”
“You haven’t met my daughter, Natalie, yet, have you?”
“Excuse me?”
No reply.
“Bill?”
“Listen,” he finally answered, “my daughter wants to talk with you. I think it might be important. I’m not quite sure how
she knows, but she seems to be familiar with your work. She says she has some information about a place you’d be interested
in. Some location in the north of Tibet? She says the people there have some important information.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
Bill chuckled on the other end of the line. “She’s only fourteen, but she’s been saying some really interesting things lately.
She was hoping she could talk with you this afternoon, before her soccer game. Any chance?”
I started to put him off, but the earlier image expanded and started to become clear in my mind. It seemed to be of the young
girl and me talking somewhere near the big spring just up from her house.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “How about two p.m.?”
“That’s perfect,” Bill said.
On the walk over I caught sight of a new house across the valley on the north ridge. That makes almost forty, I thought. All
in the last two years. I knew the word was out about the beauty of this bowl-shaped valley, but I really wasn’t worried that
the place would become overcrowded or that the amazing natural vistas would be destroyed. Nestled right up next to a national
forest, we were ten miles from the closest town—too far away for most people. And the family who owned this land and was now
selling selected house sites on the outer ridges seemed determined to keep the serenity of the place unspoiled. Each house
had to be low-slung and hidden amid the pines and sweet gums that defined the skyline.
What bothered me more was the preference for isolation exhibited by my neighbors. From what I could tell, most were characters
of a sort, refugees from careers in various professions, who had carved out unique vocational niches that allowed them to
now operate on flextime or travel on their own schedules as consultants—a freedom that was necessary if one was to live this
far out in the wilderness.
The common bonds among all of us seemed to be a persistent idealism and the need to stretch our particular professions by
an infusion of spiritual vision, all in the best Tenth Insight tradition. Yet almost everyone in this valley stayed to themselves,
content to focus on their diverse fields without much attention to community or the need to build on our common vision. This
was especially true among those of different religious persuasions. For some reason, the valley had attracted people holding
a wide range of beliefs, including Buddhism, Judaism, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and Islam. And while there
was no hostility of any kind by one religious group toward another, there wasn’t a feeling of affinity either.
The lack of community concerned me because there were signs that a few of our kids were displaying some of the same problems
seen in suburbia: too much time alone, too much video, and too much regard for the slights and put-downs at school. I was
beginning to be concerned that there wasn’t enough family and community in their lives to push these peer problems into the
background and keep them in proper perspective.
Up ahead the path narrowed, and I had to make my way between two large boulders that edged right up to a sheer drop-off of
about two hundred feet. Once past, I could hear the first gurgles of Phillips’ Spring, named by the fur trappers that first
set up a camp here in the late seventeenth century. The water trickled down several tiers of rocks into a lazy pool ten feet
across that had originally been dug out by hand. Successive generations had added features, such as apple trees up near the
mouth and mortared stone to reinforce and deepen the pool. I walked up to the water and reached down to cup some in my hand,
brushing a stick out of the way as I leaned forward. The stick kept moving, slithering up the rock face and into a hole.
“Cottonmouth!” I said aloud, stepping back and feeling the sweat pop out on my brow. There are still perils involved in living
here in the wild, although not perhaps the ones that old man Phillips faced centuries ago, when you could turn a corner on
the path one day and come face-to-face with a big cougar guarding her young, or worse, a pack of wild boars with three-inch
tusks that would slit your leg wide open if you didn’t get up a tree fast enough. If the day was going especially bad, you
might even come upon an angry Cherokee or a displaced Seminole who was tired of finding some new settler on his favorite hunting
grounds… and was harboring the conviction that a large bite of your heart would stem the European tide forever. No, everyone
alive in that generation—Native Americans and Europeans alike—faced direct perils that tested one’s mettle and courage in
the moment.
Our generation seemed to be dealing with other problems, problems that are more related to our attitude toward life, and the
constant battle between optimism and despair. Everywhere are the voices of doom these days, showing us factual evidence that
the modern Western lifestyle can’t be sustained, that the air is warming, the terrorists’ arsenals growing, the forests dying,
and the technology running wild into a kind of virtual world that makes our kids crazy—and threatens to take us further and
further into distraction and aimless surrealism.
Countering this viewpoint, of course, are the optimists, who claim that history has been filled with doomsayers, that all
our problems can be handled by the same technology that produced these perils, and that the human world has only begun to
reach its potential.
I stopped and looked out at the valley again. I knew that the Celestine Vision lay somewhere in between these poles. It encompassed
a belief in sustainable growth and humane technology, but only if pursued by an intuitive move toward the sacred, and an optimism
based on a spiritual vision of where the world can go.
One thing was certain. If those who believe in the power of vision were to make a difference, it had to begin right now, when
we’re poised in the mystery of the new millennium. The fact of it still awed me. How did we get lucky enough to be the ones
alive when not only a century changed but a thousand-year period as well. Why us? Why this generation? I got the feeling that
larger answers were still ahead.
I looked around the spring for a moment, half expecting Natalie to be up here somewhere. I was sure this was the intuition
I’d had. She’d been here at the spring, only I seemed to be looking at her through a window of some kind. It was all very
confusing.