The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (11 page)

The road led up a steep rise, crested, and then settled into a long straight-away along a rocky plain. I drove for several
hours as the afternoon light began to fade. There were no cars or people to be seen anywhere and almost no houses. Half an
hour later it was completely dark, and I was thinking about finding a place to pull over for the night when I noticed a narrow
gravel drive heading off to my right. I slowed the Jeep and looked more closely. There was something just to the side of the
driveway. It looked like an item of clothing.

I stopped the Jeep and shined a flashlight out through the window. It was a parka. My parka. The one I had left in the restaurant
just before the Chinese had come.

Smiling, I switched off the light. Yin must have placed my jacket here. I got out of the Jeep, picked it up, and drove up
the narrow road with the headlights off.

The drive led about half a mile up a gradual incline to a small house and barn. I drove cautiously. Several goats looked at
me from across a fence. On the porch of the house, I noticed a man sitting on a stool. I stopped the Jeep and he stood up.
I knew that silhouette. It was Yin.

I got out of the Jeep and ran up to him. He met me in a stiff embrace, smiling.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said. “You see, I said you were being helped.”

“I was almost caught,” I replied. “How did you get away?”

A nervousness returned to his face. “The women at the restaurant are very cunning. They saw the Chinese officers and hid me
in the oven. No one ever looked in there.”

“What do you think will happen to the women?” I asked.

He met my eyes but said nothing for a long moment.

“I do not know,” he replied. “Many people are paying a high price for helping us.”

He looked away and pointed to the Jeep. “Help me bring in some food and we’ll make something to eat.”

As Yin made a fire, he explained that after the police had left, he had gone back to his friends’ house and they had suggested
this old house as a place for him to stay while they looked around for another vehicle.

“I knew that you might become overwhelmed by fear and try to get back to Lhasa,” Yin added. “But I also knew that if you decided
to continue on this journey, you would eventually try to head northwest again. This was the only road, so I placed your jacket
there hoping it would be you who saw it and not the soldiers.”

“That was quite a risk,” I said.

He nodded as he put the vegetables in a heavy boiler filled with several inches of water and hung it on the metal hook over
the fire to steam. Yak dung flames lapped at the bottom of the pan.

Seeing Yin again seemed to take much of my fear away, and as we sat down in old dusty chairs by the fire, I said, “I have
to admit that I did try to get away. I thought it was my only chance to survive.”

I went on to tell him everything that had happened—everything, that is, except the experience of the light around the house.
When I got to the part where I was in the mounds and the van came by, he sat up in his chair.

“You are sure it was the same van we saw at the roadblock?” he asked pointedly.

“Yes, it was them,” I replied.

He looked totally exasperated. “You saw the people we had seen before and you didn’t speak with them?” His face had an edge
of anger. “Don’t you remember me telling you about my dream, about us meeting someone who could help us find the gateway?”

“I didn’t want to take a chance that they would report me,” I protested.

“What?” He stared at me, then leaned over and held his face in his hands for a moment.

“I was petrified,” I said. “I can’t believe I’ve gotten myself in this situation. I wanted out. I wanted to survive.”

“Listen to me closely,” Yin said. “The chances of your getting out of Tibet now by fleeing are very slim. Your only chance
of surviving is to go forward, and to do that, you have to use the synchronicity.”

I looked away, knowing he was probably right.

“Tell me what happened when the van approached,” Yin said. “Every thought. Every detail.”

I told him the van had stopped, and when it did, I immediately grew afraid. I described how the woman acted as if she wanted
to get out, but changed her mind and they left.

He shook his head again. “You killed the synchronicity with a misuse of your prayer-field. You set your field with fearful
expectations and it stopped everything.”

I looked away.

“Think about what was happening,” Yin continued, “when you heard the van approaching. You had two choices: You could have
thought about that occurrence as a threat or as a potential aid. Certainly you have to consider both. But once you recognized
the van, that should have told you something. The fact that it was the same van that we had seen earlier at the crossroads
is meaningful, especially since these same people created the diversion that allowed us to go by without being seen. From
that point of view, they had already helped you and now were there to possibly help you again.”

I nodded. He was right. Clearly I had blown it.

Yin looked away, distracted by his own thoughts, then said, “You completely lost your energy and positive expectation. Remember
what I told you at the restaurant? Setting a field for synchronicity is a matter of putting yourself in a particular state
of mind. It is easy to think about synchronicity intellectually, but unless you enter the state of mind where your prayer-field
will help, all you will do is glimpse the coincidences every once in a while. In some situations that is enough and you will
be led forward for a time, but eventually you will lose your direction. The only way to establish a constant flow of synchronicity
is to stay in a state where your prayer field keeps this flow moving toward you—a state of conscious alertness.”

“I’m still not sure how to get into this state of mind.”

“One must stop and remind oneself to assume an attitude of alertness every moment. One must visualize that one’s energy is
going out and bringing just the right hunches to you, the right events. You have to expect them to occur at any moment. We
set our fields to bring us synchronicity by being ever vigilant, always expecting the next encounter. Every time you forget
to keep yourself in this state of expectation, you must catch yourself and remember.

“The more you stay in this state of mind, the more the synchronicity will increase. And, eventually, if you keep your energy
high, this posture of conscious alertness will become your prevailing attitude toward life. The legends say the prayer extensions
will eventually be second nature to us. We will set them in the morning as routinely as getting dressed. That is the place
you must reach, the state of mind where you have this expectation constantly.”

He paused and looked at me for a moment.

“When you heard the vehicle coming toward you, you immediately went into fear. From the sounds of it, they were intuiting
that they should stop at the mounds, although they probably had no idea why. But when you went into fear, thinking that they
were possibly the bad guys, your field actually went out and had an effect on them, entering their fields and probably making
them feel something was amiss, that they were doing something wrong, so they took off.”

What he was telling me was fantastic, but it felt true to me.

“Tell me more about how our fields affect people,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. The effect of our fields on other people is the Third Extension. For
now just concentrate on setting a field for synchronicity, and not going into fearful thoughts. You have a tendency to expect
the worst. Remember when we were on our way to Lama Rigden’s and I left you alone, you saw a group of refugees and they would
have led you right to the Lama’s monastery if you had only talked to them. But instead you figured they were going to turn
you in and you missed the synchronicity. This negative thinking is a pattern with you.”

I just looked at him, feeling tired. He smiled and didn’t mention any of my mistakes again. We talked casually about Tibet
for most of the evening, going outside at one point to look up at the stars. The sky was clear and the temperature barely
freezing. Above us were the brightest stars I had ever seen and I commented to Yin about it.

“Of course they look big,” he said. “You are standing on the rooftop of the world.”

T
he next morning I slept late and went through a series of tai chi movements with Yin. We waited for as long as we could for
Yin’s friends, but they never showed up. We realized we’d have to risk going with only one vehicle, after all, and loaded
up the Jeep, pulling out right at noon.

“Something must have happened,” Yin said, looking over at me. He was trying to be strong, but I could tell he was worried.

We were heading up the main road again through a thick, sand-blown haze that had covered most of the landscape and obscured
our view of the mountains.

“It will be hard for the Chinese to see us in this,” Yin remarked.

“That’s good,” I said.

I had been wondering how the Chinese knew we had been at the restaurant in Zhongba, so I asked Yin what he thought.

“I’m sure it was my fault,” he said. “I told you how much anger and fear I felt toward them. I’m sure my prayer-field was
bringing me what I was asking for.”

I looked hard at him. This was too much.

“Are you telling me,” I asked, “that because you were fearful, your energy went out and somehow brought the Chinese to us?”

“No, not merely the fear. We all get a general kind of fear. That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about letting my mind go
into fearful visions of what might happen, what the Chinese might do. I’ve seen them operate in Tibet for so long, I know
their methods. I know how they oppress individuals through intimidation. I allowed myself to see them coming for us in my
mind, as a little vision, and I wasn’t doing anything to counteract that image.

“I should have caught myself and envisioned in my mind that they would no longer be so antagonistic toward us, and then held
that expectation. My fear in general was not what brought them. I went unconscious and held a specific image, a specific expectation
that they would come in on us. That was the problem. If you hold a negative image too long, it can eventually come true.”

I was still awed by the whole idea. Could this be correct? For a long time I had observed that people who feared a particular
event—a burglary at their house, for instance, or getting a particular disease or losing a lover—often experienced just that
occurrence in their lives. Was this the effect Yin was describing?

I remembered the fearful image I’d had earlier in Zhongba, when Yin had left to find someone to go with us. I had imagined
being alone in the Jeep, driving around lost, which is exactly what had ended up happening. A chill went through me. I had
been making the same mistake as Yin.

“Are you saying that everything that happens to us that’s negative is the result of our own thoughts?” I asked.

He frowned. “Of course not. Many things merely happen in the natural course of living with other human beings. Their expectations
and actions play a part too. But we do have some creative influence, whether we want to believe it or not. We have to wake
up and understand that in terms of our prayer-energy, an expectation is an expectation, whether it is based on fear or faith.
In this case, I wasn’t monitoring myself closely enough. I told you my hatred of the Chinese was a problem.”

He turned and our eyes met.

“Also, remember what I told you,” he added, “that at these higher levels of energy, the effect of our prayer-field is very
quick. Out there in the ordinary world, individuals still have a mix of fear images and success images, so they tend to cancel
each other out and keep the effect low. But at these levels, we can affect what happens very quickly, even though a fear image
will eventually collapse the strength of our field.

“The key is to make sure your mind is focused on the positive path of your life, not on some fearful expectation. That’s why
the Second Extension is so important. If we make sure we stay in a state of conscious alertness for the next synchronicity,
our minds stay on the positive and off our fear and doubt. Do you see what I mean?”

I nodded but said nothing.

Yin focused again on the road. “We have to use this power right now. Stay as alert as you can. We could pass the van very
easily in this haze and we don’t want to miss them. You’re sure they were heading in this direction?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then if they stopped to spend the night, the way we did, they couldn’t be that far ahead.”

All morning we traveled, still heading northwest. As much as I tried to keep it up, I couldn’t stay in the state of conscious
alertness Yin was describing. Something wasn’t right. Yin noticed and kept looking over at me.

Finally he turned and said, “Are you sure you’re expecting the full synchronistic process?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I think so.”

He frowned slightly and continued to glance over at me.

I knew what he was getting at. Both in Peru and later in the Appalachians with the Tenth Insight, I’d experienced a process
to synchronicity. Each of us at any one point has a primary question about our lives, something we are inquiring into, given
our particular life situation. In our case, the question was how we might find the Dutch van, and then Wil and the gateway.

Ideally, once we recognize the central question in our lives, we will have a guiding thought or an intuition about how to
answer it. We find ourselves with a mental image that would suggest going somewhere, taking some action, saying something
to a stranger. Again, ideally, if we follow that intuition, coincidences will occur to give us information pertaining to our
question. This synchronicity leads us further down our life path… and, in turn, to a new question.

“What do the legends say about this?” I asked.

“They say,” Yin replied, “that humans will eventually learn that their prayer power can greatly influence the flow of their
lives. By using the force of our expectations, we can bring forth the process of synchronicity more frequently. But we have
to stay alert for the whole process, beginning with the next intuition. Are you consciously expecting an intuition?”