The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (26 page)

At that point the window widened so that we could see both scenes. The boy with no shirt answered the phone. The youth in
the sweatshirt seemed to be pleading, and the other boy grew ever more angry. Finally the shirtless boy slammed down the phone,
sat down, and began working at the table again.

The other teenager got up and put on a coat and hurried out the door. In a few minutes the boy at the table heard a knock
and got up and walked over to the door of his room and opened it. It was the youth he had been talking to on the phone. He
tried to shut the door, but the boy pushed his way in, continuing to talk to him in pleading gestures, pointing at the apparatus
on the table.

The other teenager pushed him back and pulled a gun from a drawer and pointed it at his visitor. This boy stepped back but
continued to plead. The youth with the gun exploded with anger and pushed his victim hard against a wall, placing the barrel
of the gun against his temple.

At this moment, in the area behind them both, we began to detect a change: The area was getting lighter.

I glanced at Tashi, who met my gaze for an instant and then focused again on the scene. We both knew we were again witnessing
the dakini at work.

As we watched, the one boy continued to plead and the other held him firm against the wall. But gradually the boy with the
gun began to relax. Finally he dropped the gun to his side and went over and sat on the edge of the bed. The other youth sat
down in a chair facing him.

Now we could hear the details of their conversation, and it became clear that the boy who had the gun wanted to be accepted
by others at his school, but had not been. Many of his peers were excelling at extracurricular activities, expanding their
talents, and he didn’t have the confidence to keep up. They had been kidding him, calling him a loser, and he felt as though
he was a nobody, that he was fading away. The situation filled him with anger and a false sense of strength, which had led
him to decide to fight back. The device he had been working on was a homemade bomb.

Just as before, we felt a jolt under our feet, and the whole building shook. We all ran for the door and had just made it
out when half the temple collapsed behind us.

Tashi motioned for us to follow him, and we ran several hundred yards and stopped beside a wall.

“Could you see the people in the temple,” he asked, “the ones who were sending prayer-energy to the boys?”

We both confessed we could not.

“There were hundreds in there,” he said, “working on the problem of youth anger.”

“What were they doing exactly?” I asked.

Tashi stepped toward me. “They were extending their prayer-energy, visualizing the boys in that scene lifted into a higher
vibration so they could move past their fear and anger and find their higher intuitions to resolve the situation. Their energy
helped the one youth find the best, most persuasive ideas. In the case of the other youth, the extra prayer-energy lifted
him into an identity above and beyond the social self his peers rejected. He no longer felt that in order to be someone, he
needed their approval. It eased his anger.”

“And that’s what they were doing in the other temple as well?” I asked. “Helping to counter those who want to control everything?”

Wil looked at me. “The people in the temple were sending out a prayer-field aimed at helping to raise the energy level of
everyone involved, which had the effect of easing the fear of those who were pressing for ever more surveillance, and helping
those who were resisting to find the courage to speak, even within those kinds of organizations.”

Tashi was nodding. “We are supposed to be seeing this. These are some of the key situations that must be won if spiritual
evolution is to continue, if we are to get past this critical point in history.”

“What about the dakini?” I asked. “What were they doing?”

“They were helping lift the energy level as well,” Tashi replied.

“Yeah,” I pressed, “but we still don’t know what makes them go there and take action. Those in the temples were doing something
else we don’t know yet.”

At that moment another loud noise filled the air as the other half of the temple behind us crashed to the ground.

Tashi jumped involuntarily, then hurried down the pathway.

“Come on,” he said. “We have to find my grandmother.”

F
or hours, we wandered through the temples, looking for Tashi’s grandmother, hurrying to stay ahead of the Chinese military,
and observing the work those in the temples were doing. In each temple, we found people viewing a situation in the outer cultures
that seemed critical.

One temple was focused on other problems related to youth alienation—the proliferation of violent experiences induced by movies
and killer video games, which created the delusion that violent acts could be performed in anger and then erased somehow without
being final, a false reality that was at the heart of the school shootings.

In these instances, we watched as the creators of these games were each sent energy that had the effect, as before, of lifting
them into a higher intuitive perspective with which they could rethink the effects of their creations on children. At the
same time, key parents were likewise being lifted into higher energy states, where they could investigate their hunches about
what their children were doing and find more time to model a different reality.

One temple focused on the current debate within the field of medicine over alternative, preventive approaches—approaches that
were being proved to be beneficial in the elimination of disease and in the increase of longevity. The gatekeepers of medicine—the
medical organizations of various countries, the heads of popular research clinics, the government institutes of health who
dispensed large financial grants, the pharmaceutical companies—all operated out of an eighteenth-century paradigm which fought
the symptoms of disease without much thought about prevention.

Their targets were various microbes, faulty genes, and runaway tumor cells—and most thought such problems were the inevitable
results of aging. Under this point of view, the huge majority of grant money was going to the large research facilities looking
for magic bullets: pharmaceuticals that could be patented and sold to kill the microbes, destroy the malignant cells, or somehow
reprogram the genes. Almost no money was going into research to discover ways to boost the immune system and prevent such
diseases.

In one scene we watched, a conference meeting involving representatives for many medical fields, some scientists were arguing
that the entire field of medicine had to change its point of view if we were ever going to solve the riddle of human disease,
including the arterial lesions of heart disease, the tumors of cancer, and the degenerative illnesses such as arthritis and
lupus and MS.

These scientists were arguing—as Hanh had earlier—that the true cause of disease of every type was the polluting of the body’s
basic environment by the foods we were eating and other toxins, shifting the body from the healthy, vibrant, alkaline state
of youth, to a dull, low-energy acid state, which created a climate in which microbes flourish and begin to systematically
decompose the body. Every ailment, they argued, is the result of this slow decomposition of our cells by microbes, but they
don’t attack us without cause. It is the foods we consume that set us up for these problems.

Others in the room had trouble accepting these findings. Something had to be wrong, they thought. How could human illness
be that simple? They were involved with health industries which saw consumers spending billions of dollars on complex drugs
and expensive surgeries. The health officials in the room had to believe all this was necessary. Some were dedicated to the
proposal, close to being accepted in many countries, that chips should be placed in every individual to store health and drug
information, a control and identification ability that the intelligence services also wanted. They were committed to this
program. Their positions of power depended on it. Their very livelihoods were at stake.

Besides, they personally loved the foods they ate. How could they recommend that people change their diets in ways they couldn’t
imagine doing themselves? No, they couldn’t accept this.

Still, the physicians with the new research continued to plead their case, knowing the climate was right to change the paradigm.
Look at how the rain forests were being cleared and destroyed to raise beef for the Western countries, they argued, a problem
ever more people were becoming aware of.

Also helpful was the fact that baby boomers in all countries were beginning to reach ages when diseases strike, and they had
already seen the medical establishment fail their parents. They were looking for new alternatives.

Slowly we saw the conflict begin to moderate in the conference we were watching. Those arguing for the alternative approaches
were being listened to.

In another temple, we witnessed the same kind of debate in the profession of law. A group of attorneys was urging the profession
to begin to police itself. For years, reputable attorneys had stood by and watched many of their colleagues engage in the
practice of manufacturing lawsuits, coaching witnesses to shade the truth, inventing imaginary defenses, and hypnotizing juries.
Now there was a movement to raise the standards. Certain attorneys were arguing that they must move to a higher vision of
what they do, that they must understand the true role of lawyers: to reduce conflict, not promote it.

Similarly, several of the temples we saw were looking at the situation of political corruption in various countries. We saw
scenes of elected officials in Washington, D.C., debating behind closed doors as to whether to support campaign finance reform.
At issue, most especially, was the ability of political parties to receive unlimited amounts of contributions from special
interests and spend it on general TV spots which distorted the truth in any manner they wished. This dependence on large corporations
for these funds obviously obligated the politicians of the party to certain favors. And everyone knew it.

These politicians resisted the arguments of reformers that democracy could never reach its ideal until it was based not on
distorted TV ads, but on public debates—where the citizens could more readily judge demeanor, facial expression, and truthfulness,
and thus use their intuition to choose the best candidate.

As we continued to move through the temples, it became clear that all of them were similarly focused on some particular area
of human life. We saw many fearful world leaders, including those in the Chinese government, being helped to join the global
community and to implement economic and social reforms.

And in every case, the area behind the people involved would lighten and then those most in fear, who were acting to control
or manipulate to ensure personal gain or power, would gradually begin to lessen the intractability of their positions.

As we continued to run through the maze of temples searching for Tashi’s grandmother, the same questions kept coming to me.
What, exactly, was happening here? What was the relationship between the dakini or the angels and the prayer extensions being
performed? What did those in the temples know that we didn’t?

A
t one point we stood facing literally miles of temples as far as we could see. The paths were going in every direction. In
the background we could still hear the helicopters. As we stood there, another large temple, five hundred feet behind us,
came crashing to the ground.

“What’s happening to the people inside those temples?” I asked Tashi.

He stared at the plume of dust rising from the rubble. “Don’t worry, they’re all right. They can move into another location
without being seen. The problem is that their role of sending energy is being disrupted.”

He looked at both of us. “If they aren’t able to help with these situations, who’s going to?”

Wil walked over to Tashi. “We have to decide where to go. We don’t have much time.”

“My grandmother is out there somewhere,” he said. “My father told me she is at one of the central temples.”

I looked out at the maze of stoned structures. “There is no physical center, not that I can see.”

“That’s not what my father meant,” Tashi said. “He meant that Grandmother is at a temple that is focused on the central, endpoint
issues of human evolution.” Tashi was surveying the temples in the distance as he spoke.

“You can see the people here better than us,” I said to him. “Could you talk to them and ask them where to go?”

“I tried to talk to them,” he replied, “but my energy isn’t strong enough. Possibly if I was able to stay here for a little
while.”

Tashi had no sooner finished his sentence than another temple crashed to the ground, this time much closer.

“We have to stay ahead of the soldiers’ energy,” Wil said.

“Wait a minute,” Tashi said. “I think I see something.”

He was looking out toward the maze of temples. I surveyed the scene as well, seeing nothing different. When I glanced at Wil,
he shrugged.

“Where?” I asked Tashi.

He was already walking down a pathway to the right, motioning for us to follow.

A
fter hurriedly walking for twenty minutes we stopped in front of a temple whose architecture was much the same as all the
others, except that it was larger and its dark brown rock carried a slightly bluer hue.

Tashi stood motionless, looking directly at the massive stone door.

“What is it, Tashi?” Wil asked.

Far behind us we heard a crash as yet another temple collapsed.

Tashi looked over at me. “The temple in your dream, the one where you said we found someone? Wasn’t it blue?”

I looked at the temple again. “Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

Wil walked toward the door and looked back at us.