The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight

by James Redfield

  “Oh yes,” she clarified. “Our legends are very old and come from many sources. All the myths of Atlantis and the Hindu legends of Meru stem from old civilizations that really existed in the past where the early evolution of Shambhala worked itself out. Developing our technology was the most difficult step, because to place technology fully in the service of our individual spiritual development, everyone must move to a point where spiritual understanding is more important than money and control.

  “That takes some time, because people who are locked up in fear—and think they personally need to manipulate the course of human evolution with their egos—often desire to use advances in technology in negative ways, to control others. In many early civilizations, a few controllers tried to subvert the use of the amplification machines by trying to use them to monitor and control other people’s thoughts. Many times these attempts ended in war and mass destruction, and humanity had to start all over again.

  “The outer cultures face this problem right now. There are people who want to control everyone else by using surveillance, embedded chips, and brain wave scans.”

  “What about the artifacts of these ancient cultures you’re speaking about? Why has almost nothing ever been found?”

  “Continental drift and ice have buried much of it, and then, once a culture progresses to a point where material goods are being created mentally, if anything goes wrong, and a wave of negativity brings the energy down, it simply all disappears.”

  I took a breath and shrugged. Everything she said made perfect sense, yet at the same time was utterly disconcerting. It was one thing to hypothesize human civilization evolving toward a spiritual future. It was quite another to find oneself immersed in a culture that had already reached it.

  Ani moved closer. “Just remember that what we have done is the natural course of human evolution. We are ahead of you, but because we have done what we’ve done, the way can be easier for you in the outer cultures.”

  She paused and I broke into a grin.

  “Your energy looks much better now,” she said.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this alert.”

  She nodded. “As I said before, it’s the level of energy the individuals here in Shambhala maintain. It’s contagious. There are so many people here who know how to bring energy into themselves and project it outward to others that it creates a multiplying effect, where everyone takes in the prayer-energy they have received from others and sends it out to everyone else again. Do you see how it grows? All the assumptions and expectations of everyone in a culture flow together and make one big cultural prayer-field.

  “The general level any culture achieves is determined almost solely by how conscious its members are about, first, the existence of their prayer-fields in general, and then second, how to extend them consciously. When the extensions are finally practiced, the energy level soars. If everyone in the outer cultures knew how to bring in energy and flow it out, making the prayer extensions a priority, they could achieve the level we have here at Shambhala just like that!” She snapped her fingers for emphasis, then added. “That’s what we are working on at the temples. We use our prayer extensions to help raise the awareness in the outer cultures. We’ve done this for thousands of years.”

  I considered her words, then asked, “Tell me everything you know about the Fourth Extension.”

  She was silent a moment longer, staring at me very seriously.

  “You know you must take it one step at a time,” she replied. “You were helped, but in order to get here you had to know the first three extensions and part of the Fourth. You must stop now and understand exactly how the extensions actually work.

  “When an extension is completed, one’s energy reaches out farther and becomes stronger. This occurs because when you send your energy out to bring in synchronistic experiences and uplift others, and when you anchor this energy with detachment and faith, you are promoting the divine plan, and the more you can act and think in harmony with the divine, the stronger your power gets. Do you see? There is a built-in safety device, as you’ve no doubt seen. God is not going to turn up the power in you unless you are on the same page with universal intention.”

  She touched my shoulder. “So what you have to do now is get clearer about where humanity is supposed to go, how overall human culture must evolve. It is time for this to happen. That is why you and others are finally seeing and understanding Shambhala. This is the next step in the Fourth Extension. You must really grasp the intended future of humanity.

  “Already you’ve grasped how we have mastered technology and placed it in the service of our inner spiritual evolution. Experiencing this extends your energy out farther because you can now set this expectation into your prayer-field.

  “It is important to understand how this works. You already know how to send a field out in front of you as you walk through this world, and you know how to set it to increase energy and synchronistic flow in yourself and others. You extend your field another step when you not only visualize your field uplifting the people around you into their higher intuitions but do it with a certainty of where everyone’s higher intuitions, yours and theirs, are leading: toward an ideal spiritual culture like the one you see here in Shambhala. When you do this, it helps them find their part to play in this evolution.”

  I nodded, anxious for more information.

  “Don’t go too fast,” she cautioned. “You have not yet seen all of how we live here. Not only have we mastered technology, we have also restructured our world to focus entirely on spiritual evolution… on the mysteries of existence… on the life process itself.”

  8

  THE LIFE PROCESS

  I took a left fork in the walking trail behind Ani and Tashi’s house and made my way up through the rocks and trees for almost a mile. Ani had ended our conversation abruptly, saying that she had to make some preparations that she would tell me about later, and I had decided to take a walk by myself.

  As I gazed out on the green foliage, questions filled my mind. Ani had said I needed to see how Shambhala modeled a culture focused on the life process. What did that mean?

  As I pondered the question, I noticed a man walking toward me on the path. He was older, appearing to be about fifty, walking at a brisk pace. When he reached me, his eyes lingered on mine for a moment and then he walked on by. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him turn once and look back at me.

  I walked a bit farther, irritated that I hadn’t stopped and started a conversation. I turned around and headed back in the direction the man had been walking, hoping I could catch up with him. He was just rounding a corner up ahead and moving out of sight. When I got to the corner myself, he had disappeared altogether. I was disappointed but walked back to Ani’s house without thinking any more about it.

  She greeted me at the door with some jeans and a shirt.

  “You’ll need these,” she said.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You used your field to create these.”

  She nodded. “You’re beginning to understand us.”

  I sat down in a chair and looked at her. I didn’t feel as though I understood at all.

  “Tashi’s father has arrived,” she said.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “In with Tashi.” She nodded toward a bedroom.

  “Where did he come from?”

  “He’s been at the temples for a while.”

  I perked up. “Did he just come in?”

  “Yes, just before you came back.”

  “I think I passed him just now on the path.”

  Ani paused, then said, “I think he is here to prepare us.”

  “For what?”

  “For the transition. He thinks we are nearing the time when Shambhala will move.”

  I was about to ask her more when I noticed she had looked away, appearing to be in deep thought.

  “You said you saw Tashi’s father on the path?” she asked.

  I nodded.


  “Then the message he is bringing must be important for you too. We have to be very conscious of the process here.”

  She looked at me expectantly.

  “You mentioned the life process,” I said. “Can you tell me exactly what those in Shambhala understand that to be?”

  She nodded. “Let’s look at the whole picture of how a society can evolve once it begins to raise its level of prayer-energy. The first thing that happens is that those who create the technology will begin to make it ever more efficient and automated, so that robots make more and more of the material goods in the society. This is already occurring in every industry in the outer cultures and is a positive development, despite the fact that it is especially dangerous. It can place too much power in the hands of a few individuals or corporations unless it is decentralized. It also creates job losses, and many people have to adjust how they make a living.

  “What mediates these problems, however, is the fact that, as material production is automated, the overall economy will begin to shift toward one of information and service—providing just the right information at just the right time for others—which will necessitate everyone becoming more intuitive and alert and focused on synchronistic perception as a way of life.

  “As spiritual knowledge increases, and people become aware of the creative power they can attain with their prayer-fields, technology is evolved another step. That’s when the thought wave amplifiers will be discovered so that individuals can create everything they need mentally.

  “When this happens, the culture will be free to focus completely on spiritual matters, or what we call the life process itself. This is where we are now in Shambhala and where the rest of human culture is destined to follow. Our whole society is educated to the wider reality of the spirit. At some point every culture must truly grasp that we are spiritual beings and that our bodies themselves are only atoms in a particular vibration, a vibration that can be raised as our connection and prayer power increase.

  “Here in Shambhala we understand that fact, and we also understand that we come down here from the purely spiritual plane to accomplish something. We come here on a mission to bring the whole world into full spiritual awareness, generation by generation, and to do it as consciously as possible. That’s why we participate fully in this life process from the very beginning—before birth itself, in fact.”

  She looked at me to see if I understood, then continued. “There is always an intuitive relationship between the mother and father and the unborn child before birth.”

  “What kind of relationship?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Everyone here knows that souls begin to contact parents before conception. They make their presence known, especially with the mother. It’s part of the process of deciding whether the prospective parent is actually the right one.”

  I looked at her with astonishment.

  “This already occurs in the outer cultures,” Ani explained. “It’s just that people are only now beginning to talk about it and to develop their perception. Ask any group of mothers and see what they say.

  “This same kind of intuition is involved in the marriage process as well, if you think about it. As humans learn to seek out a mate consciously, the main measure is passion, but that’s not the only factor. We also get intuitions of what life will look like with a particular person. We assess—whether we are fully conscious of it or not—if the style of life with that individual will represent an advance forward from the style and attitudes we ourselves grew up with.

  “Do you see what I’m getting at? Choosing the right mate is important from an evolutionary point of view. As we evolve spiritually, humans are destined to mate consciously in order to set up a home, or home attitude, that represents a more truthful way of life compared to the previous generation. Intuitively we know that we must build a life that adds to the wisdom we found in the world when we arrived. See the process?

  “Then, when intuitions come in about a child who wants to be born to us, they always bring up questions: Why would this child want to be born to our family? What would this child want to be when he or she grows up? How would this child stretch and expand the understanding he or she found with us?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t we have to be careful in assuming we know how our kids will turn out? What if we’re wrong and we try to fit our children into some pigeonhole that isn’t best for them? My mother thought I was going to be a country preacher, and that wasn’t accurate.”

  “Yes, of course, these are only intuitions; the reality will only be close to what we think. It will never be exact. Centuries were spent arranging marriages and forcing children to enter professions chosen by the parents. But don’t you see? This was the misuse of a real intuition. We can learn from what they did wrong. We don’t receive final knowledge about our children, nor should we exercise total control. We merely receive intuitions, broad images of what they are going to do with their lives—although I’d bet your mother wasn’t far wrong about you.”

  I laughed. She was right, of course.

  “So, you can see where all this is leading. We know that while the mother and father are intuiting how the child will use the wisdom the child will find with them, and then stretch it further, the unborn soul is doing the same thing in a pre-life vision of what it wants to accomplish. Next comes the conception process.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “Do you remember the couple we saw at the waterfall?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  “It seemed to be very deliberate.”

  “That’s right, it was. Once a couple decides to attempt conception to bring in a soul they intuit, the physical act is a kind of merging of energy fields that in a very real way orgasmically opens a gate into heaven and allows the soul in.”

  I thought about what I had seen at the waterfall. The couple’s energy merged and a new energy began to grow.

  “In the materialistic mind-set of science in the outer cultures,” she went on, “the sexual union has been reduced to mere biology, just a physical act. But here we know the spiritual energy of what is really going on. The two merged their energy fields into one and the child was a product of the merger.

  “Again, science prefers to think of conception as a random combining of genes, and certainly it looks like that when superficially studied in a test tube. In actuality, however, the genes of the mother and father combine to make a child whose characteristics are synchronistic with the best destinies of all three people. Do you see? The child has an intended destiny that he or she visualizes in a pre-life vision, and the genes combine in a precise way to give the child the tendencies and talents needed to fulfill this vision. Scientists in the outer cultures will eventually find a way to confirm this process.

  “That’s why the physical recombining of genes by scientists and doctors is so dangerous. Helping to combat disease is one thing, but recombining to increase intelligence or talent or just because of preference comes from the ego and can be disastrous. This practice alone led to the destruction of some early civilizations.

  “My point,” she concluded, “is that here in Shambhala we take the parenting process very seriously. In its ideal form, the parents’ intuition and the child’s intuition work together to give the child the best preparation for accomplishing his or her life purpose.”

  What she was saying made me think again of the missing conceptions occurring in Shambhala.

  “What do you think is happening to conceptions that have been disappearing here?” I asked.

  She shrugged, glancing at the closed door of Tashi’s room. “I don’t know, but perhaps we will find out from Tashi’s father.”

  Another question came to mind, so I asked, “I don’t understand who goes to the temples and who stays in the rings.”

  She laughed. “I suppose it is quite confusing. Our culture is divided into those who teach and those who are called to the temples. Many of those who are
at the temples, though, come back and forth every few days to maintain relationships, especially if they have children. The situation can change at any time, based on intuition. Those who work at the temples can come back to teach, and those who have been teaching will go to the temples. It is all very fluid and synchronistic.”

  She paused for a moment and I nodded for her to continue.

  “Next in the life process is helping a child to wake up. Remember, each of us forgets to some degree why we came, what we intended to do with our lives, so the child must be given the historical circumstances that surround the event of his birth.

  “What’s important is to give the child a context for life so that he knows what has occurred before he arrived and where he fits in. That includes the personal history of his family, back several generations. These we keep on a recorder similar to a videotape, except that it is stored electronically.

  “Tashi, for instance, was able to watch his relatives back seven generations telling him about their lives, what their dreams had been, what worked and didn’t work, and at the end of their lives, what they would have done differently. All this is immensely important information for a youngster to hear from relatives. It helps younger people chart the course of their own lives by learning from the mistakes and building on the wisdom of those who came before. Tashi has learned much from many of his ancestors, although his favorite relative is still his grandmother.”

  I was amazed. “Recording relatives is a great idea. I wonder why we don’t take the time to do this back home.”

  “You don’t take the time because you still postpone talking about death until the very last minute, and then often it’s too late. And life in the outer cultures is still focused too much on the material, not on the life process itself. This will become easier as time goes by and the outer cultures begin to sustain their vibrancy and learn the prayer extensions. Right now you still reduce life to the ordinary, to the mundane, when in fact it is a constantly mysterious, informative process.”

  She looked at me as though there was some deeper meaning behind her last statement.