The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight

by James Redfield

  Yin seemed to relax for a moment and smiled over at me.

  “The culture of Shambhala,” he said, “is built around setting such a field.”

  I couldn’t help smiling back. This journey was beginning to make sense in a way I couldn’t yet articulate.

  The next two days went smoothly, with no sign of the Chinese military. Still on the southern route heading northwest, we crossed another river near the top of Mayun-La, a high mountain pass. The scenery was spectacular with icy mountain peaks on each side of the road. We spent the first night at Hor Qu in an unmarked roadhouse that Yin knew about and proceeded the next morning toward Lake Manasarovar.

  As we approached the lake, Yin said, “Here we will have to be very careful again. The lake, and Mount Kailash farther on, are key destinations for people from all over the region: India, Nepal, China, as well as Tibet. It is a holy place like no other. There will be many pilgrims as well as Chinese checkpoints.”

  Several miles ahead Yin pulled off on an old track and we made our way around one of the checkpoints, then caught sight of the lake. I looked at Yin, who smiled. The sight was unbelievably beautiful: a huge turquoise pearl set against the rocky, brown-olive terrain, all framed against the snow-covered mountains in the background. One of the mountains, Yin pointed out, was Kailash.

  As we drove past the lake, we could see numerous groups of pilgrims standing around large poles strung with flags.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Prayer flags,” Yin replied. “Placing flags symbolizing our prayers has been a tradition in Tibet for centuries. The prayer flags are left to flap in the wind, and this sends the prayers they contain continually out to God. Prayer flags are also given to people.”

  “What kind of prayers do the flags contain?”

  “Prayers for love to prevail in all of humanity.”

  I was silent.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” Yin added. “The culture of Tibet is totally dedicated to the spiritual life. We are arguably the most religious anywhere. And we have been attacked by the most atheistic government on Earth—that of China. It is a perfect contrast for all the world to see. One vision or the other will prevail.”

  Without talking further, we drove through another small town and then into Darchen, the closest town to Mount Kailash, where Yin hired two mechanics he knew to check our Jeep for any potential problems. We made camp with the other locals as close to the mountain as we could get without arousing suspicion. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the icy peaks.

  “From here, Kailash looks like a pyramid,” I said.

  Yin nodded. “What does that tell you? It has power.”

  As the sun sank below the horizon, we observed an amazing sight. A magnificent sunset filled the western sky with layer upon layer of peach-colored clouds, and at the same time, the sun below the horizon still shone on the face of Mount Kailash, turning its snowy slopes into a dazzling spectacle of yellow and orange.

  “All through history,” Yin said, “great emperors have traveled thousands of miles on horseback or by carrier to witness these sights in Tibet. It was thought that the first light in the morning and the last in the evening had great rejuvenating and visionary powers.”

  I nodded as he talked, unable to look away from the majestic light around me. I did feel rejuvenated, and almost calm. In front of us, toward Kailash, the flat valleys and low foothills were bathed in alternate layers of shadow and light brown reflections, providing an eerie contrast to the sunlit higher ridges, which seemed to glow from within. The sight was surrealistic, and for the first time I realized why the Tibetans were so spiritual. The light of this land alone led them inexorably into a fuller awareness.

  Early the next morning, we were on our way again, and in five hours we had reached the outskirts of Ali. The sky was overcast and the temperature was falling rapidly. Yin made several turns on nearly impassable roads in order to miss the main part of town.

  “This is mainly a Chinese area now,” Yin said, “with bars and strip joints for the soldiers. We want to get through without anyone noticing us.”

  When we hit a decent road again, we were already north of town. At one point I caught sight of a newly built office building with several newer trucks parked outside. No one was moving anywhere on the grounds.

  Yin saw it at the same time and turned off the main road into an old driveway and stopped.

  “That’s a new Chinese facility,” he said. “I didn’t know it was here. Watch and see if anyone there observes us as we go by.”

  At that moment a wind came up and it began to snow heavily, helping to obscure our identity. As we drove on, I looked very closely at the grounds. Most of the windows of the building were draped.

  “What is that place?” I asked.

  “An oil exploration station, I think. But who knows?”

  “What’s with this weather?”

  “It looks like a storm is coming in. This could help us.”

  “You’re thinking they might be looking for us up here, aren’t you?” I asked.

  He looked at me with a profound sadness, which turned into a furious anger.

  “This is the town where my father was killed,” he said.

  I shook my head. “It’s terrible that you had to see that.”

  “It has happened to thousands of Tibetans,” he added, staring straight ahead.

  I could feel his hatred.

  He shook his head. “It is important not to think about that. We have to avoid such images. Especially you. As I told you before, I may not be able to control my anger. You must do better than me with this problem, so that you can go on alone if necessary.”

  “What?”

  “Listen to me closely,” he said. “You must understand exactly where you are. You have learned the first three extensions. You have been able to consistently raise your energy and create a strong field, but like me, you still fall into fear and anger. There are some other things I can tell you about anchoring your outflow of energy.”

  “What do you mean by anchor?” I asked.

  “You must stabilize your flow of energy better, so that it is coming out of you into the world strongly no matter what your situation is. When you do this, all three of the extensions that you have learned become a constant mind-set and way of life.”

  “Is this the Fourth Extension?” I asked.

  “It is the beginning of the Fourth. What I am about to tell you is the last information we have about the extensions. The rest of the Fourth Extension is known clearly only to those in Shambhala.

  “Ideally the extensions should work together like this: Your prayer-energy should come from your divine connection within and flow out in front of you, bringing forth the expected synchronicity and uplifting everyone it touches into his or her higher self. In this way it maximizes the mysterious evolution of our lives, and the awareness of and completion of our individual missions on this planet.

  “Unfortunately we hit bumps in the road, challenges that bring on a state of fear, which, as we have discussed, brings on doubt and thus collapses our fields. Worse, this fear can bring on negative images, bad expectations, which can help create what we fear in our lives. What you must learn now is a way of anchoring your higher energy so that you stay in the positive flow more often.

  “The problem with fear,” Yin went on, “is that it can be very subtle and sneak up on us quickly. You see, a fear image is always about some outcome we don’t want. We fear failing, embarrassing ourselves or our families, losing our freedom or someone we love, or our own lives. The difficult part is that when we begin to feel such fear, it often turns into anger, and we use this anger to martial our forces and fight back against whoever we feel is the threat.

  “Whether we are feeling fear or anger, we have to realize that these emotions come from one source: those aspects of our lives we want to hold on to.

  “The legends say that since fear and anger come from being concerned that we are going to lose something,
the way to avoid these emotions is to be detached from all outcomes.”

  We were well north of town now and the snow was falling even heavier. Yin was straining to see the road and glanced only briefly at me as he talked.

  “Take our case, for instance,” he said. “We are looking for Wil and the gateway to Shambhala. The legends would say that at the same time we set our fields to expect just the right intuitions and events to guide us, we should detach totally from any particular outcome. This is what I was getting at when I cautioned you about being too attached to whether Jacob stopped or not. The importance of detachment is the great message of the Buddha and the gift to humanity provided by all the Eastern religions.”

  I was familiar with the concept, but at the moment I was having trouble seeing its value.

  “Yin,” I protested, “how can we detach completely? This idea often sounds like an ivory tower theory to me. It may be a matter of life and death that we help Wil. How can we not care about that?”

  Yin pulled the Jeep off the road and stopped. Visibility was now near zero.

  “I didn’t say not to care,” he continued. “I said not to be attached to any particular outcome. What we get in life is always slightly different from what we want anyway. To be detached is to realize that there is always a higher purpose that can be found in any event, in any outcome. We can always find a silver lining, a positive meaning, that we can build on.”

  I nodded. This was a concept I knew from Peru.

  “I understand,” I said, “the value of looking at things that way generally, but doesn’t such an outlook have its limits? What if we are about to be killed or tortured? It’s hard to be detached about that or to see a silver lining.”

  Yin stared at me hard. “But what if being tortured is always the result of us not being detached enough during the events leading up to such a critical situation? Our legends say that when we learn detachment, our energy can remain high enough to avoid all these extremely negative occurrences. If we can stay strong, always expecting the positive, whether the outcome was exactly what we thought or not, then miracles begin to happen.”

  I couldn’t believe this. “Are you saying that everything bad that happens to us occurs because we missed some synchronistic opportunity to avoid it?”

  He looked at me with a smile. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “But that’s awful. Doesn’t that assign blame, say, to someone who has a terminal disease, thinking that it’s his own fault he’s sick because he missed the opportunity to find healing?”

  “No, there is no blame. We all do the best we can. But what I have told you is a truth we must accept if we are to reach the highest levels of prayer-energy. We must keep our fields as strong as possible, and to do this we must always believe, with a powerful faith, that we will be saved from such problems.

  “At times we will miss something,” he continued. “Human knowledge is incomplete, and we may die or be tortured because of a lack of information. But the truth is this: If we had all the knowledge that humans will eventually have, we would always be guided out of a perilous situation. We reach our greatest power when we assume this is the case already. This is the way we can stay detached and flexible and build a powerful field of expectation.”

  It was all beginning to make sense. Yin was telling me we had to assume that the synchronistic process would always take us out of harm’s way, that we would know ahead of time which moves to make, because that ability is our destiny. If we believe that, sooner or later it will become a reality for all humans.

  “All the great mystics,” Yin went on, “say that operating from total faith is important. The apostle John in your Western Bible describes the result of this kind of faith. They put him in a vat of boiling oil and he was unharmed. Others were placed with hungry lions, and they remained safe. Are these merely myths?”

  “But how high does our faith have to be to achieve this level of invulnerability?” I asked.

  “We have to reach a level approaching those in Shambhala,” Yin replied. “Don’t you see how it all fits together? If our ongoing prayer expectation is strong enough, we both expect synchronicity and send energy to others so that they can also expect synchronicity. The level of energy keeps going up. And in the meantime there is always the dakini…”

  He looked away quickly, apparently horrified that he had mentioned these beings again.

  “What about the dakini?” I asked.

  He was silent.

  “Yin,” I pressed, “you have to tell me what you mean. How do the dakini fit into all this?”

  Finally he took a breath and said. “I’m telling you only what I myself understand. The legends say the dakini are understood only by those in Shambhala, and that we must be very careful. I can’t tell you more.”

  I looked at him angrily. “Well, we’ll just have to find out later, won’t we, when we reach Shambhala?”

  He looked at me with great sadness. “I already told you I have had too much experience with the Chinese military. My hate and anger erode my energy. If at any time I see that I am holding you back, I will have to leave, and you will have to go on alone.”

  I stared at him, not wanting to contemplate that idea.

  “Just remember,” he continued, “what I said about being detached and about trusting that you will always be guided past any danger.”

  He paused a moment as he started the Jeep and drove on through the blowing snow.

  “You can bet,” he finally said, “that your faith will be tested.”

  6

  THE PASSAGE

  After traveling north for forty minutes, Yin turned onto a well-worn truck road and headed toward a high mountain chain twenty or thirty miles away. The snow continued to get heavier. Faintly at first and then steadily growing louder, a low drone rose above the engine noise and wind.

  Yin and I looked at each other as the sounds finally became recognizable.

  “Helicopters,” Yin yelled, pulling the Jeep off the track and through an opening in the rocks. The Jeep bounced wildly. “I knew it. They have some way of flying in this weather.”

  “What do you mean you knew it?”

  As the sounds rose above us, I thought I heard two craft. One was hovering directly over us.

  “This is my fault,” Yin screamed over the noise. “You must get out! Now!”

  “What?” I yelled. “Are you crazy? Where will I go?”

  He yelled into my ear. “Don’t forget to stay alert. Do you hear me? Keep going northwest to Dormar! You must get to the Kunlun Mountains!”

  With one deft move he opened my door and shoved me out.

  I landed on my feet, then tumbled several times into a snowbank. I sat up and struggled to catch sight of the Jeep, but it was already driving away and the blowing snow obscured my view. A wave a sheer panic filled me.

  At that moment a movement to the right caught my attention. Through the snow I could see the figure of a tall man about ten feet away, dressed in black yak leather pants and a sheepskin vest and hat. He was standing still, staring intensely at me, but his face was partially covered by a wool scarf. I recognized those eyes. From where? After a few more seconds he looked up toward the helicopter, which was making another pass, and dashed away.

  Without warning, three or four terrific explosions erupted in the direction the Jeep had gone, blowing rocks and snow all over me and filling the air with a choking smoke. I got up and staggered away as several more small explosions echoed around me. The blowing air was now completely filled with some kind of noxious gas. My head began to spin.

  I heard the music before I was completely conscious. It was a classic Chinese composer I had heard before. I jerked awake and realized I was in an elaborate, Chinese-style bedroom. I sat up in the ornate bed and pushed back the silk sheets. I was clothed only in a hospital gown and I had been bathed. The room was at least twenty by twenty feet, and each paneled wall had a different mural. A Chinese woman was peeking at me through
the crack in the door.

  The door opened, and in walked an erect Chinese military officer in full uniform. A chill went through me. It was the same official I had now seen several times. My heart pounded. I tried to extend my energy, but the sight of the officer completely deflated me.

  “Good morning,” the man said. “How do you feel?”

  “Considering I was gassed,” I replied, “pretty good.”

  He smiled. “It has no lasting effect, I assure you.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in Ali. The doctors have seen you and you are fine. But I must ask you some questions. Why were you traveling with Yin Doloe and where were you going?”

  “We wanted to visit some of the old monasteries.”

  “Why?”

  I decided not to tell him any more. “Because I’m a tourist. I have a visa. Why was I attacked? Does the American Embassy know I’m being held?”

  He smiled, and looked ominously into my eyes. “I am Colonel Chang. No one knows you are here, and if you have broken our laws, no one can help you. Mr. Doloe is a criminal, a member of an illegal religious organization which is perpetrating a fraud in Tibet.”

  My worst fears seemed to be happening.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “I would like to call someone.”

  “Why are Yin Doloe and the others looking for this Shambhala?”

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

  He took a step closer to me. “Who is Wilson James?”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” I said.

  “Is he in Tibet?”

  “I think so, but I haven’t seen him.”

  Chang looked at me with a hint of disgust and, without saying anything else, turned and walked out.

  This is bad, I thought, very bad. I was about to get out of bed when the nurse returned with half a dozen soldiers, one of them pushing what looked like a huge iron lung, only it was bigger and standing on tall, wide legs, apparently so that it could be rolled up over someone who was lying in a bed.