The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (24 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

He looked confused, but I remained focused on the part of his expression that was listening.

“We are free,” I said. “But we also belong to a design that comes from a greater part of ourselves that we can connect with.
Our true self is much larger than we thought.”

He just stared. Somewhere deep in his consciousness, he seemed to be understanding.

We were interrupted when the guards outside banged on the entrance flap. As they did, I realized that the wind had erupted
into a gale. We could hear things being blown and turned over all through the compound.

A guard had opened the flap and was shouting loudly in Chinese. The colonel ran toward him. As he did, we could see tents
blowing over everywhere. He turned and looked at Yin and me, and in that moment a tremendous gust of wind blew the left side
of our tent up from its foundation and ripped it apart, covering the colonel and guards with canvas, knocking them to the
ground.

Yin and I were hit with the wind and snow blowing in through the gaping hole.

“Yin,” I shouted. “The dakini.”

Yin struggled to his feet. “This is your chance!” he said. “Run.”

“Come on,” I said, grabbing his arm. “We can go together.”

He pushed me away. “I can’t. I’ll just slow you down.”

“We can make it,” I pleaded.

He shouted against the howling wind. “I’ve done what I was here to do. Now you must do the same. We still don’t know the rest
of the Fourth Extension.”

I nodded and embraced him quickly, then grabbed the colonel’s heavy coat and ran through the hole in the tent into the storm.

I
ran to the north for about a hundred feet and stopped to look back toward the camp. I could still hear the sounds of debris
blowing through the compound, and the din of shouting.

Out ahead of me was a solid sheet of white, and I was trudging back toward the mountains when I heard the colonel yelling.

“I’ll find you,” he shouted angrily above the wind. “You won’t make it.”

I walked on, hurrying as much as possible in the deep snow. It took me fifteen minutes to walk a hundred yards. Fortunately
the wind was still fierce, and I knew it would be some time before the Chinese could get their helicopters into the air.

I heard a faint sound. At first I thought it was the wind, but it gradually became louder. I hunkered down. Someone was calling
my name. Finally I could see someone moving in the blowing snow. It was Wil.

I embraced him. “God, am I glad to see you. How did you find me?”

“I watched the direction the chopper flew in,” he said, “and just kept walking until I saw the camp. I’ve been out here all
night. If I hadn’t had my camp stove with me, I would have frozen to death. I was trying to figure out how to get you out
of there. But the blizzard solved that problem. Come on, we have to try again to get to the temples.”

I hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” Wil asked.

“Yin’s in there,” I replied. “He’s hurt.”

Wil thought for a moment as we looked back toward the compound. “They will be organizing a search party,” he said. “We can’t
go back. We’ll have to try to help him later. If we don’t get out of here and find the temples before the colonel does, everything
could be lost.”

“What happened to Tashi?” I asked.

“We were separated when the avalanche started,” Wil replied, “but I saw him later going on up the mountain alone.”

We walked for more than two hours, and strangely, once we got out of the area around the Chinese encampment, the wind began
to die down, although it was still snowing heavily. During our trek, I told Wil about everything that Yin had said in the
tent, and what had happened with the colonel.

Finally we reached the area on the mountain where the avalanche had occurred. We hiked well past it and to the west, farther
up the slope.

Without talking any more, Wil led the way upward for another two hours. Finally he stopped and sat down to rest behind a huge
bank of snow.

We looked at each other for a long moment, both of us breathing hard. Wil smiled and asked, “Do you now understand what Yin
was telling you?”

I was silent. Even though I had seen it all play out with the colonel, it still seemed hard to believe.

“I was engaging in negative prayer,” I said finally. “That’s how the colonel was able to follow me.”

“We can go no farther until we both can avoid this,” Wil said. “Our energy must stay consistently high before we can progress
through the rest of the Fourth Extension. We must be very careful not to visualize the evilness of those who are in fear.
We have to look at them realistically and take precautions, but if we dwell on their behavior or hold images that they are
about to harm us, it sends energy to their paranoia and can actually give them the idea to do whatever it is that we expect.
That’s why it is so important not to let our minds visualize the bad things that could possibly happen to us. It is a prayer
that acts to create that very event.”

I shook my head, knowing I was still resisting this idea. If it was true, it seemed to put a high burden on each of us to
watch every thought. I voiced my concern to Wil.

He almost laughed. “Of course we must monitor every thought. We have to do that in order not to miss an important intuition
anyway. Besides, all that is necessary is to go back to a conscious alertness and always to visualize everyone’s awareness
being increased. The legends are very clear. To keep our prayer-energy extended most powerfully, we must never allow ourselves
to use it negatively. We can go no farther until we can avoid this problem completely.”

“How many of the legends were described to you?” I asked.

In answering my question, Wil began to talk about his experiences during this adventure in greater detail than he’d been able
to before.

“When I came to your house,” he began, “I was bewildered as to why my energy had fallen from where it was when we were exploring
the Tenth Insight. Then I began to have thoughts of Tibet and found myself at the monastery of Lama Rigden, where I met Yin
and heard of the dreams. I didn’t understand it all, but I had similar dreams myself. I knew that you were involved somehow
and had something to do here. That’s when I began to study the legends in detail and to learn the prayer extensions. I was
all set to meet you in Kathmandu, but I caught the Chinese following me, so I asked Yin to go instead. I had to trust that
we would eventually find each other.”

Wil paused a moment and dug out a white undershirt and began to put a new dressing on his knee. I looked out at the infinite
expanse of white mountains behind us. The clouds parted for an instant and the morning sun created a rippling effect of light
ridge tops and darker, shadowed valleys. The sight filled me with awe, and in a strange way I began to feel at home here,
as though some part of me finally understood this land.

When I looked back at Wil, he was staring at me.

“Perhaps,” Wil said, “we should go over all that the legends say about the prayer-field. We must understand how all this connects
together.”

I nodded.

“It all begins,” he went on, “with the realization that our prayer-energy is real, that it flows out from us and affects the
world.

“Once we have that realization, we can grasp that this field, this effect we have on the world, can be expanded, but we have
to begin with the First Extension. We have to first improve the quality of energy we take in physically. Heavy and processed
foods build up acid solids in our molecular structures, lowering our vibration and eventually causing disease. Alive foods
have an alkaline effect and enhance our vibration.

“The purer we vibrate, the easier it is to then connect with the more subtle energies available within us. The legends say
we will learn to consistently breathe in this higher level of energy using our increased perception of beauty as a measure.
The higher our level of energy, the more beauty we see. We can learn to visualize this higher level of energy flowing out
from us into the world, likewise using the emotional state of love as a measure that this is occurring.

“Thus we are connected within like we learned in Peru. Only now we’ve learned that by visualizing that energy is a field that
goes out ahead of us wherever we go, we can stay consistently stronger.

“The Second Extension begins when we set this extended prayer-field to enhance the synchronistic flow of our lives. We do
this by staying in a state of conscious alertness and expectation for the next intuition or coincidence that moves our lives
further along. This expectation sends our energy out even farther and makes it stronger, because we are now aligning our intentions
with the intended process of growth and evolution structured into the universe itself.

“The Third Extension involves another expectation: that our prayer-field go out and boost the level of energy in others, lifting
them into their own connection with the divine within and into their own higher-self intuition. This, of course, increases
the likelihood of them giving us intuitive information that can further enhance our own level of synchronicity. It is the
interpersonal ethic we learned in Peru, only now we know how to use the prayer-field to make it stronger.

“The Fourth Extension begins when we learn the importance of anchoring and maintaining the outflow of our energy, in spite
of fearful or angry situations. We do this by always maintaining a particular posture of detachment toward events as they
occur, even as we expect the process itself to carry on. We must always seek a positive meaning, and always, always expect
the process to save us, no matter what is happening. Such a mental posture helps us to stay focused on the flow and keeps
us from dwelling on negative images of what might occur if we fail.

“In general, if we find a negative image coming to mind, we must consider whether it is an intuitive warning, and, if so,
we need to take appropriate actions, but we must always return to the expectation that a higher synchronicity will guide us
past this problem. This anchors our field, our outflow of energy, with a powerful expectation that has always been called
faith.

“In sum, the first part of the Fourth Extension is about keeping our energy strong at all times. Once we master that, we can
move forward and extend our energy even farther.

“The next step in the Fourth Extension begins when we fully expect that the human world can move toward the ideal expressed
in the Tenth Insight and modeled by Shambhala. Moving your energy out farther and stronger in this way takes true belief.
That’s why understanding Shambhala is so important. Knowing that Shambhala has done it extends our expectation that the rest
of human culture can do it too. We can readily see how humans everywhere can master our technology and use it in the service
of our spiritual development, and then begin to focus on the life process itself, on the real reason we are here on this planet:
to create a culture on Earth that is conscious of our role in spiritual evolution and to teach that understanding to our children.”

He stopped and looked at me for a moment.

“Now comes the most difficult part,” he said. “To expand even farther, we must do more than just remain positive in general,
and avoid images of negative events occurring. We must also keep all negative thoughts out of our heads concerning other people.
As you have just seen, if our fear ever turns to anger and we lapse into thinking the worst of others, a negative prayer goes
out that tends to create in them exactly the behavior we expect. That’s why teachers who expect great things from their students
usually get it, and when they expect the negative, they get that too.

“Most people believe it is a bad thing to say something negative about others, but that it’s okay to think it. We now know
it’s not okay; thoughts matter.”

As Wil said this, I thought about the recent spate of school shootings by students in the United States, and mentioned what
I was thinking to Wil.

“Kids everywhere,” he said, “are more powerful than ever, and the typical cliques and put-downs that have always occurred
in schools can’t be ignored by teachers any longer. When certain kids are looked down on and made fun of and scapegoated,
they are affected by this negative prayer more than ever before. They now sometimes strike back explosively.

“And this is not just happening with kids; it’s happening throughout human culture. Only by understanding the effect of prayer-fields
can we grasp what is happening. We all are gradually growing more powerful, and if we don’t become completely mindful of our
expectations, we can inadvertently cause great harm to others.”

Wil stopped talking and raised his eyebrow. “That brings us up to where we are now, I believe.”

I nodded, realizing how much I had missed him.

“Where do the legends say we go from here?” I asked.

“To the subject I have been most interested in,” he replied. “The legends say that we can’t expand our fields farther until
we fully acknowledge the dakini.”

I quickly told him about my many experiences with the strange figures and lighted areas since coming to Tibet.

“You had those experiences before Tibet,” Wil said.

He was right. There were times when we were looking for the Tenth Insight that I seemed to be helped by strange wisps of light.

“That’s right,” I said, “when we were together in the Appalachians.”

“In Peru too,” he added.

I tried to remember but nothing came to mind.

“You told me about the time you faced a crossroads and didn’t know which way to go,” he said. “And one road appeared more
lit up, more luminous, and you chose that direction.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the occurrence clearly. “You think that was a dakini?”

Wil was standing on his feet, putting on his pack.

“Yes,” he said. “They are the luminosities we see that guide our way.”