“The dakini are showing us where to go,” Wil said, still pulling me along.
We ducked through the opening and followed the descending pathway. On both sides, a sheer rock face rose upward twenty or thirty feet and blocked out most of the light. For more than an hour we walked down the steps, steadily descending until at last the cliffs widened above our heads.
Several yards farther the ground leveled off and the steps ended. We found ourselves looking out on a flat precipice that wrapped around the rock face to the left.
“Over there,” Wil said, pointing.
Two hundred yards ahead of us appeared to be an old monastery, totally in ruin, as if it were thousands of years old. As we walked toward it, the temperature warmed even more and a misty ground fog rose from the rocks. In front of the monastery, the precipice widened into a wide shelf that cut into the side of the mountain. When we reached the ruins, we carefully made our way through the collapsed walls and large stones until we emerged on the other side.
There, we were stopped in our tracks. The rocky surface we were walking on had turned to a floor of smooth flat stones, light amber in color, that were evenly placed onto the ground beneath our feet. I glanced at Wil, who was looking straight ahead. In front of us was an intact temple, standing fifty feet high and twice that wide. It was rusty brown with streaks of gray along the joints of the fitted stone walls. On the front were two mammoth doors, fifteen or twenty feet high.
Something moved in the misty fog near the temple. I looked at Wil and he nodded, motioning me to follow him. We walked to within twenty yards of the structure.
“What was that movement?” I asked Wil.
He gestured with his head toward the area in front of us. Less than ten feet away was a form of some kind.
I strained to focus and finally was able to detect the barest outline of a human figure.
“It must be one of the adepts who inhabit the temples,” Wil said. “The person is vibrating higher than us. That’s why we can only see a hazy shape.”
As we watched, the shape moved toward the door of the temple and disappeared. Wil led the way up to the door. It appeared to be made of some kind of stone, yet when Wil pulled it by the carved stone knob, it glided open as though it weighed nothing.
Inside was a large circular room, sloping downward in a series of terraced steps toward a center, stagelike area. As I surveyed the structure, I caught sight of another figure halfway to the stage, only this person was clear to our perception. He turned so we could see his face. It was Tashi. Wil was already moving toward him.
Before we reached Tashi, a spatial window appeared in the space just above the center of the room. The image slowly came into focus, captivating our attention, and growing so bright we could no longer see Tashi. It was a view of the Earth, seen from space.
The scene shifted in quick succession to a view of a city, somewhere in Europe, and then to a metropolitan area in the United States, and finally to one in Asia. In each case we could see people walking on busy streets, as well as some in offices or other work environments. As the scene again shifted through different cities in different areas of the planet, we could see that the individuals, as they worked and interacted, were slowly raising their energy levels.
We began to see and hear individuals involved in moving from one type of occupation to another, following their intuitions, and growing more inspired and creative as they did so, inventing new and faster technologies and more efficient services. At the same time we also began to see scenes of people who were still in fear, resisting the changes and trying to gain control.
Next we focused on a research facility, inside a conference room. A group of men and women was engaged in a heated exchange. As we watched and listened, the content of the conversation became clear. Most of the people were in favor of a new coalition between the larger communications and computer companies and an international group of intelligence services. The representatives of the intelligence services argued that the fight against terrorism necessitated having access to every telephone line, including Internet communications, and secret identification devices in all computers so that authorities could go in and monitor anyone’s files.
But that wasn’t all. They wanted more surveillance systems. Several of the people were even speculating that if the problem of computer viruses continued, the Internet might have to be taken over completely, along with all linked computers in commerce everywhere. Access could be controlled by a special ID number that would be required in order to do any electronically based business.
One hypothesized that new identification systems might have to be implemented for this use, such as iris or palm scans or perhaps even something based on brain wave patterns themselves.
Two other people, a man and a woman, started arguing vehemently against these measures. One mentioned the book of Revelation and the mark of the beast. As we continued to watch and listen, I realized I could see through the window of the conference room. A car was passing along a road outside the building. In the background I could see cactus and miles of desert.
I looked at Wil.
“This discussion is happening right now,” he said, “in present time somewhere. It looks like the southwestern United States.”
Directly behind the table where the group was gathered, I noticed something else. The space around them was becoming larger. No, it was becoming lighter.
“The dakini!” I said to Wil.
We continued to watch as the conversation began to change. The two people who were arguing against the extreme surveillance seemed to be gaining more attention from the group. The proponents seemed to be reconsidering.
Without warning, our attention was pulled away from the image in front of us by a sharp vibration that shook the floor and walls of the temple. We ran for another door at the end of the building, fighting to see though the dust. We could hear stones crumbling and falling outside. When we were thirty feet from the door, it opened and a figure we couldn’t make out quickly moved through it.
“That must have been Tashi,” Wil said as he rushed to the door and pulled it open.
As we ran through the opening, another booming crash filled the air behind us. The old ruin we had first seen was collapsing in an implosion of rocks and dust. Behind it somewhere we could hear the roar of helicopters.
“The colonel seems to be following us again,” I said. “But I’m holding only positive images in my mind, so how is he doing that?”
Wil looked at me questioningly, and I remembered Colonel Chang’s remark about how he now had the technology so that I could never get away. He had my brain scan.
I quickly told Wil what had happened, then said, “Maybe I should go in another direction, lead the soldiers out of the temples.”
“No,” Wil said. “You have to be here. You’re going to be needed. We’ll have to stay ahead of them until we find Tashi.”
We followed a stone pathway past several other temples, and I found my eyes lingering on a doorway to our left.
Wil turned, noticing.
“Why were you looking at that door?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It caught my eye.”
He gave me an incredulous look.
“Oh yeah, right,” I said quickly. “Let’s check it out.”
We ran inside and I found another circular room, this one much larger, perhaps several hundred feet in diameter. Another spatial window was hovering over the center. As we entered, I saw Tashi to our right a few yards away, and nudged Wil.
“I see him,” Wil said, leading the way in the near darkness to join the boy.
Tashi turned around and saw us, then smiled in relief, before focusing again on the scene visible through the window. This time we were seeing a room filled with the things of youth: pictures, balls, various games, piles of clothes. A bed was in disarray in the corner, and a carry-out pizza box littered one end of a table. At the other end of the table, a teenager of about fifteen worked on s
omething, some kind of wired apparatus. He was dressed in shorts without a shirt, and his face seemed angry and determined.
As we continued to watch, the scene though the window shifted to another room, where another teenager, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, sat on a bed staring at a phone. He got up and paced across the room several times and then sat down again. I got the impression that he was struggling with a decision. Finally he picked up the phone and dialed a number.
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.”
11
THE SECRETOF SHAMBHALA
For 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 t
he 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.
The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight Page 20
