The
Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight
by James Redfield
Chapter 1
FIELDS
OF INTENTION
The phone rang and I just stared at it. The
last thing I needed now was another distraction. I tried to push it from
my mind, gazing out the window at the trees and wildflowers, hoping to
lose myself in the array of fall colors in the woods around my house. It
rang again, and I got a vague but stirring image in my mind's eye of a
person needing to talk with me. Quickly I reached over and answered it.
"Hello."
"It's Bill," a familiar voice
said. Bill was an agronomy expert who had been helping me with my garden.
He lived down the ridge only a few hundred yards.
"Listen, Bill, can I call you back
later?" I said. "I've got this deadline."
"You haven't met my daughter, Natalie,
yet, have you?"
"Excuse me?"
No reply.
"Bill?"
"Listen," he finally answered,
"my daughter wants to talk with you. I think it might be important.
I'm not quite sure how she knows, but she seems to be familiar with your
work. She says she has some information about a place you'd be interested
in. Some location in the north of Tibet? She says the people there have
some important information."
"How old is she?" I asked.
Bill chuckled on the other end of the line.
"She's only fourteen, but she's been saying some really interesting
things lately. She was hoping she could talk with you this afternoon,
before her soccer game. Any chance?"
I started to put him off, but the earlier
image expanded and started to become clear in my mind. It seemed to be of
the young girl and me talking somewhere near the big spring just up from
her house.
"Yeah, okay," I said. "How
about two p.m.?"
"That's perfect," Bill said.
On the walk over I caught sight of a new
house across the valley on the north ridge. That makes almost forty, I
thought. All in the last two years. I knew the word was out about the
beauty of this bowl-shaped valley, but I really wasn't worried that the
place would become overcrowded or that the amazing natural vistas would be
destroyed. Nestled right up next to a national forest, we were ten miles
from the closest town--too far away for most people. And the family who
owned this land and was now selling selected house sites on the outer
ridges seemed determined to keep the serenity of the place unspoiled. Each
house had to be low-slung and hidden amid the pines and sweet gums that
defined the skyline.
What bothered me more was the preference
for isolation exhibited by my neighbors. From what I could tell, most were
characters of a sort, refugees from careers in various professions, who
had carved out unique vocational niches that allowed them to now operate
on flextime or travel on their own schedules as consultants--a freedom
that was necessary if one was to live this far out in the wilderness.
The common bonds among all of us seemed to
be a persistent idealism and the need to stretch our particular
professions by an infusion of spiritual vision, all in the best Tenth
Insight tradition. Yet almost everyone in this valley stayed to
themselves, content to focus on their diverse fields without much
attention to community or the need to build on our common vision. This was
especially true among those of different religious persuasions. For some
reason, the valley had attracted people holding a wide range of beliefs,
including Buddhism, Judaism, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity,
and Islam. And while there was no hostility of any kind by one religious
group toward another, there wasn't a feeling of affinity either.
The lack of community concerned me because
there were signs that a few of our kids were displaying some of the same
problems seen in suburbia: too much time alone, too much video, and too
much regard for the slights and put-downs at school. I was beginning to be
concerned that there wasn't enough family and community in their lives to
push these peer problems into the background and keep them in proper
perspective.
Up ahead the path narrowed, and I had to
make my way between two large boulders that edged right up to a sheer
drop-off of about two hundred feet. Once past, I could hear the first
gurgles of Phillips' Spring, named by the fur trappers that first set up a
camp here in the late seventeenth century. The water trickled down several
tiers of rocks into a lazy pool ten feet across that had originally been
dug out by hand. Successive generations had added features, such as apple
trees up near the mouth and mortared stone to reinforce and deepen the
pool. I walked up to the water and reached down to cup some in my hand,
brushing a stick out of the way as I leaned forward. The stick kept
moving, slithering up the rock face and into a hole.
"Cottonmouth!" I said aloud,
stepping back and feeling the sweat pop out on my brow. There are still
perils involved in living here in the wild, although not perhaps the ones
that old man Phillips faced centuries ago, when you could turn a corner on
the path one day and come face-to-face with a big cougar guarding her
young, or worse, a pack of wild boars with three-inch tusks that would
slit your leg wide open if you didn't get up a tree fast enough. If the
day was going especially bad, you might even come upon an angry Cherokee
or a displaced Seminole who was tired of finding some new settler on his
favorite hunting grounds . . . and was harboring the conviction that a
large bite of your heart would stem the European tide forever. No,
everyone alive in that generation--Native Americans and Europeans
alike--faced direct perils that tested one's mettle and courage in the
moment.
Our generation seemed to be dealing with
other problems, problems that are more related to our attitude toward
life, and the constant battle between optimism and despair. Everywhere are
the voices of doom these days, showing us factual evidence that the modern
Western lifestyle can't be sustained, that the air is warming, the
terrorists' arsenals growing, the forests dying, and the technology
running wild into a kind of virtual world that makes our kids crazy--and
threatens to take us further and further into distraction and aimless
surrealism. Countering this viewpoint, of course, are the optimists, who
claim that history has been filled with doomsayers, that all our problems
can be handled by the same technology that produced these perils, and that
the human world has only begun to reach its potential.
I stopped and looked out at the valley
again. I knew that the Celestine Vision lay somewhere in between these
poles. It encompassed a belief in sustainable growth and humane
technology, but only if pursued by an intuitive move toward the sacred,
and an optimism based on a spiritual vision of where the world can go.
One thing was certain. If those who believe
in the power of vision were to make a difference, it had to begin right
now, when we're poised in the mystery of the new millennium. The fact of
it still awed me. How did we get lucky enough to be the ones alive when
not only a century changed but a thousand-year period as well. Why us? Why
this generation? I got the feeling that larger answers were still ahead.
I looked around the spring for a moment,
half expecting Natalie to be up here somewhere. I was sure this was the
intuition I'd had. She'd been here at the spring, only I seemed to be
looking at her through a window of some kind. It was all very confusing.
When I arrived at her house, there seemed
to be no one home. I walked onto the deck of the dark brown A-frame and
knocked on the door loudly. No answer. Then, as I glanced around the left
side of the house, something grabbed my attention. I was looking down a
rock pathway that led past Bill's huge vegetable garden and up to a small
grassy meadow on the very top of the ridge. Had the light changed?
I looked up at the sky, trying to figure
out what had occurred. I had seen a shift in the light in the meadow as
though the sun had been behind a cloud and then had suddenly peaked out,
illuminating that specific area. But there were no clouds. I strolled up
to the meadow and found the young girl sitting at the edge of the grass.
She was tall and dark-haired, wearing a blue soccer uniform, and as I
approached, she jerked around, startled.
"Didn't mean to scare you," I
said.
She looked away for a moment in the shy way
a teenager might, so I squatted down to be at her eye level and introduced
myself.
She looked back at me with eyes much older
than I expected.
"We aren't living the Insights
here," she said.
I was taken aback. "What?"
"The Insights. We aren't living
them."
"What do you mean?"
She looked at me sternly. "I mean, we
haven't figured it out completely. There's more that we have to
know."
"Well, it's not that easy . . ."
I stopped. I couldn't believe I was being
confronted by a fourteen-year-old like this. For an instant a flash of
anger swept across me. But then Natalie smiled--not a large smile, just an
expression at the edges of her mouth that made her endearing. I relaxed
and sat down on the ground.
"I believe the Insights are
real," I said. "But they aren't easy. It takes time."
She wasn't letting up. "But there are
people who are living them now."
I looked at her for a moment.
"Where?"
"In central Asia. The Kunlun
Mountains. I've seen it on the map." She sounded excited. "You
have to go there. It's important. There's something changing. You have to
go there now. You have to see it."
As she said this, the expression on her
face looked mature, authoritative, like that of a forty-year-old. I
blinked hard, not believing what I was seeing.
"You have to go there," she
repeated.
"Natalie," I said, "I'm not
sure where you mean. What kind of place is it?"
She looked away.
"You said you saw it on the map. Can
you show it to me?"
She ignored my question, looking
distracted. "What . . . what time is it?" she asked slowly,
stuttering.
"Two-fifteen."
"I gotta go."
"Wait, Natalie, this place you were
talking about. I--"
"I gotta meet the team," she
said. "I'm going to be late."
She was walking fast now, and I struggled
to reach her. "What about this place in Asia, can you remember
exactly where it is?"
As she glanced back at me over her
shoulder, I saw only the expression of a fourteen-year-old girl with her
mind on soccer.
Back at home I found myself totally
distracted. What was that all about? I stared at my desk, unable to
concentrate.
Later I took a long walk and a swim in the
creek, finally deciding to call Bill in the morning and get to the bottom
of the mystery. I retired early.
At about 3:00 A.M. something woke me. The
room was dark. The only light was seeping in around the base of the window
blinds. I listened intently, hearing nothing but the usual sounds of the
night: an intermittent chorus of crickets, the occasional drone of
bullfrogs down by the creek, and far away, the low bark of a dog.
I thought about getting up and locking the
doors of the house, something I seldom ever did. But I shrugged off the
idea, content to let myself ease back into sleep. I would have faded away
altogether, except that in my last sleepy glance about the room, I noticed
something different at the window. There was more light outside than
before. I sat up and looked again. There was definitely more light coming
in around the blinds. I pulled on some pants and walked over to the window
and parted the wooden slats. Everything appeared normal. Where had that
light come from?
Suddenly I heard a light knocking behind
me. Someone was in the house.
"Who's there?" I asked without
thinking.
No answer.
I walked out of the bedroom and into the
hall that led to the living room, thinking about going to the closet and
getting out my snake rifle. But I realized the key to the closet was back
in the dresser drawer by the bed. Instead I carefully walked on.
Without warning, a hand touched my
shoulder.
"Shhhhh, it's Wil."
I recognized the voice and nodded. When I
reached for the light on the wall, he stopped me, then walked across the
room and looked out through the window. As he moved, I realized that
something about him was different from the last time I had seen him. He
was somehow less graceful, and his features seemed completely ordinary,
not slightly luminous as before.
"What are you looking for?" I
asked. "What's going on? You scared me half to death."
He walked back toward me. "I had to
see you. Everything has changed. I'm back where I was."
"What do you mean?"
He smiled at me. "I think all this is
supposed to be happening, but I can no longer enter the other dimensions
mentally, the way I could. I can still raise my energy to some degree, but
I'm now firmly here in this world." He looked away for an instant.
"It's almost as though what we did in understanding the Tenth Insight
was just a taste, a preview, a glimpse of the future like in a near-death
experience, and now it's over. Whatever we're to do now, we have to do
right here on this Earth."
"I never could do it again
anyway," I said.
Wil looked me in the eye. "You know,
we've received a lot of information about human evolution, about paying
attention, about being guided forward by intuition and the coincidences.
We've been given a mandate to hold a new vision, all of us. Only we aren't
making it happen at the level we can. Something in our knowledge is still
missing."
He paused for a minute and then said,
"I'm not sure why yet, but we have to go to Asia . . . somewhere near
Tibet. Something is happening there. Something we have to know."
I was startled. Young Natalie had said the
same thing.
Wil walked back to the window again,
peering out.
"Why do you keep looking out the
window?" I asked. "And why did you slip into the house? Why
didn't you just knock? What's going on?"
"Probably nothing," he replied.
"I just thought I was being followed earlier today. I couldn't be
sure."
He walked back toward me. "I can't
explain everything now. I'm not even sure myself of what is happening. But
there is a place in Asia we must find. Can you meet me at the Hotel
Himalaya in Kathmandu on the sixteenth?"
"Wait a minute! Wil, I have things to
do here. I'm committed to . . ."
Wil looked at me with an expression I've
never seen on anyone's face but his, a pure mixture of adventure and total
intent. "It's okay," he said. "If you're not there on the
sixteenth, you're not there. Just be sure if you come that you stay
perfectly alert. Something will occur."
He was serious about giving me the choice,
but he was smiling broadly.
I looked away, unamused. I didn't want to
do this.
The next morning I decided I would tell no
one where I was going except Charlene. The only problem was that she was
on an assignment out of the country and it was impossible to reach her
directly. All I could do was leave her an E-mail.
I walked over to my computer and sent it,
wondering, as I always did, about the security of the Internet. Hackers
can get into the most secure corporate and government computers. How hard
would it be to intercept E-mail messages . . . especially when one
remembers that the Internet was originally set up by the Defense
Department as a link to their research confidants at major universities?
Is the whole Internet monitored? I shook off the concern, concluding that
I was being silly. Mine was one message among tens of millions. Who would
care?
While I was on the computer, I made travel
arrangements to arrive in Kathmandu, Nepal, on the sixteenth and stay at
the Himalaya. I would have to leave in two days, I thought, barely enough
time to make preparations.
I shook my head. Part of me was fascinated
with the idea of going to Tibet. I knew that its geography was one of the
most beautiful and mysterious in the world. But it was also a country
under the repressive control of the Chinese government, and I knew it
could be a dangerous place. My plan was to go only as far with this
adventure as felt safe. No more getting in over my head and letting myself
be pulled into something I couldn't control.
Wil had left my home as quickly as he had
arrived, without telling me anything more, and my mind was full of
questions. What did he know of this place near Tibet? And why was an
adolescent girl telling me to go there? Wil was being very cautious. Why?
I wasn't going a step beyond Kathmandu until I found out.
When the day came, I tried to stay very
alert through the long flights to Frankfurt, New Delhi, and then Kathmandu,
but nothing of note occurred. At the Himalaya, I checked in under my own
name and put my things in the room, then began to look around, ending up
at the lobby restaurant. Sitting there, I expected Wil to walk in any
moment, but nothing happened. After an hour the idea of going to the pool
came to mind, so I hailed a bellman and found out it was outside. It would
be slightly chilly, but the sun was bright, and I knew the fresh air would
help me adjust to the altitude. I walked out the exit and found the pool
in between the L-shaped wings of the building. There were more people
there than I would have imagined, although few were talking. As I took a
chair at one of the tables, I noticed that the people sitting around
me--Asians mostly, with a few Europeans scattered about--seemed to be
either stressed-out or very homesick. They frowned at each other and
snapped at the hotel attendants for drinks and papers, avoiding eye
contact at all cost.
Gradually my mood began to decline as well.
Here I was, I thought, cooped up in one more hotel halfway around the
world, without a friendly face anywhere. I took a breath and again
remembered Wil's admonition to stay alert, reminding myself that he was
talking about watching for the subtle twists and turns of synchronicity,
those mysterious coincidences that could pop up in a second to push one's
life in a new direction.
Perceiving this mysterious flow, I knew,
remained the central experience of real spirituality, direct evidence that
something deeper was operating behind the scenes of the human drama. The
problem has always been the sporadic nature of this perception; it comes
along for a while to entice us and then, just as quickly, disappears.
As I looked around the area, my eyes fell
on a tall man with black hair who was walking out of the hotel door
heading straight for me. He was dressed in tan slacks and a stylish white
sweater and carried a folded newspaper under his arm. He walked along the
path through the loungers and sat at a table directly to my right. As he
took out his newspaper, he looked around and nodded to me, smiling
radiantly. Then he called an attendant over and ordered some water. He was
Asian in appearance, but he spoke in fluent English with no detectable
accent.
When his water arrived, he signed the
ticket and began to read. There was something immediately attractive about
this man, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. He just radiated a
pleasant demeanor and energy, and periodically he would stop reading and
look around with a wide smile. At one point he made eye contact with one
of the crabby gentlemen directly in front of me.
I was half expecting the sullen man to look
away quickly, but instead he smiled back at the dark-haired man and they
began to engage in light conversation in what sounded like Nepalese. At
one point they even burst out laughing. Attracted by the conversation,
several other people at nearby tables became amused, and one said
something that created another round of laughter.
I looked out on the scene with interest.
Something was happening here, I thought. The mood around me was changing.
"My God," the dark-haired man
stammered, looking in my direction. "Have you seen this?"
I looked around. Everybody else seemed to
have returned to their reading, and he was pointing to something in the
paper and moving his chair around to get closer to me.
"They've released another prayer
study," he added. "It's fascinating."
"What did they find?" I asked.
"They were studying the effect of
praying for people who have medical problems, and found that patients who
received regular prayers from others had fewer complications and got well
faster, even when they weren't aware that prayers were being said. It's
undeniable proof that the force of prayer is real. But they also found
something else. They found that the most effective prayer of all was
structured not as a request, but as an affirmation."
"I'm not sure what you mean," I
said.
He was staring at me with crystal-blue
eyes. "They set up the study to test two types of prayer. The first
was just asking God, or the divine, to intervene, to help a sick person.
The other was to simply affirm, with faith, that God will help the person.
Do you see the difference?"
"I'm still not sure."
"A prayer that asks God to intervene
assumes that God can intervene but only if he decides to honor our
request. It assumes that we have no role except to ask. The other form of
prayer assumes that God is ready and willing but has set up the laws of
human existence so that whether the request is fulfilled depends in some
part on the certainty of our belief that it will be done. So our prayer
must be an affirmation that voices this faith. In the study, this kind of
prayer proved to be most effective."
I nodded. I was beginning to get it.
The man looked away as though thinking to
himself and then continued. "All the great prayers in the Bible are
not requests, they are affirmations. Think of the Lord's Prayer. It goes,
'Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily
bread, and forgive us our trespasses.' It doesn't say please can we have
some food, and it doesn't say please can we be forgiven. It merely affirms
that these things are ready to happen already, and by faithfully assuming
that they will, we make it so."
He paused again, as though expecting a
question, still smiling.
I had to chuckle. His good mood was so
contagious.
"Some scientists are theorizing,"
he went on, "that these findings also imply something else, something
that has a profound significance for every person alive. They maintain
that if our expectations, our faithful assumptions, are what makes prayer
work, then each of us is beaming a force of prayer-energy out into the
world all the time, whether we realize it or not. Do you see how this is
true?"
He continued without waiting for me to
answer. "If prayer is an affirmation based on our expectations, our
faith, then all our expectations have a prayer effect. We are, in fact,
praying all the time for some kind of future for ourselves and others, we
just aren't fully aware of it."
He looked at me as though he had just
dropped a bombshell.
"Can you imagine?" he continued.
"Science is now confirming the assertions of the most esoteric
mystics of every religion. They all say we have a mental and spiritual
influence on what happens to us in life. Remember the scriptures about how
faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. What if this ability
is the secret of true success in life, of creating true community."
His eyes twinkled as though he knew more than he was saying. "We all
have to figure out how this works. It's time."
I was smiling back at this man, intrigued
by what he was saying, still amazed at the transformation in the mood
around the pool, when I instinctively glanced around to the left in the
way we do when we feel someone looking at us. I caught one of the pool
attendants staring at me from the entrance door. When our eyes met, he
quickly looked away and began to walk back along the sidewalk that led to
an elevator.
"Excuse me, sir," came a voice
from behind me.
When I looked around, I realized it was
another attendant.
"May I serve you a drink?" he
asked.
"No . . . thank you," I replied.
"I'll wait awhile.
When I looked back toward the man on the
sidewalk, he was gone. For a moment I surveyed the area, looking for him.
When I finally looked over to my right where the dark-haired man had been
sitting, he was gone too.
I got up and asked the man at the table in
front of me if he had seen which way the man with the paper had walked. He
shook his head and looked away curtly.
For the rest of the afternoon I stayed in
my room. The events at the pool were disconcerting. Who was the man
telling me about prayer? Was there a synchronicity involved with this
information? And why was the attendant staring at me? And where was Wil?
Around dusk, after a long nap, I ventured
out again, deciding to walk down the street a few blocks to an outdoor
restaurant I heard one of the guests mention.
"Very close. Perfectly safe," the
bespectacled concierge told me when I asked him how to get there. "No
problem." I walked out of the lobby into the fading light, keeping an
eye out for Wil. The street was crowded with people and I pushed my way
through. When I arrived at the restaurant, I was given a small corner
table next to a four-foot-high wrought-iron fence that separated the
dining area from the street. I ate a leisurely dinner and read an English
newspaper, keeping the table for more than an hour.
At one point I grew uncomfortable. I felt
as though I was being watched again, only I couldn't see anyone looking. I
gazed around at the other tables, but no one seemed to be paying me the
slightest attention. Standing up, I peered over the fence at the people on
the street. Nothing. Struggling to shake the feeling, I paid the check and
walked back toward the hotel.
As I neared the entrance, I caught sight of
a man at the edge of a row of bushes about twenty feet away to my left.
Our eyes met and he took a step toward me. I looked away and was walking
past when I realized it was the attendant I had caught looking at me at
the pool, only he was now dressed in sneakers and jeans with a plain blue
shirt. He appeared to be about thirty, with very serious eyes. I hurried
on by.
"Excuse me, sir," he called out.
I continued to walk.
"Please," he said. "I must
speak with you."
I moved a few yards farther so that I would
be in sight of the doorman and bell staff, then asked, "What is
it?"
He moved closer, half bowing. "You are
someone I believe I am here to meet. You know Mr. Wilson James?"
"Wil? Yes. Where is he?"
"He is unable to come. He asked me to
meet you instead." He offered his hand and I took it reluctantly,
telling him my name.
"I am Yin Doloe," he replied.
"Are you an employee here at the
hotel?" I asked.
"No, I'm sorry. A friend works here. I
borrowed a jacket from him so I could look around. I wanted to see if you
were here."
I looked at him closely. My instincts told
me he was telling the truth. But why the secrecy? Why didn't he just walk
up to me at the pool and ask who I was?
"Why has Wil been delayed?" I
asked.
"I am not sure. He asked me to meet
you and take you on to Lhasa. His plan, I believe, is to meet us
there." I looked away. Things were beginning to feel ominous. I
looked him over again, then said, "I'm not sure I want to do that.
Why hasn't Wil called me himself?"
"I'm sure there is an important
reason," Yin replied, taking a step toward me. "Wil was very
insistent that I bring you to him. He needs you."
Yin's eyes were pleading. "Could we
leave tomorrow?"
"Let's do this," I said.
"Why don't you come inside and we'll have a cup of coffee and talk
about the situation?"
He was looking around as though afraid of
something. "Please, I'll come back at eight tomorrow morning. Wil has
already arranged a flight and visa for you." He smiled, then scurried
away before I could protest.
At 7:55 I walked out the door of the main
lobby with only one satchel. The hotel had agreed to store everything
else. My plan was to be back within the week--unless, of course, something
strange happened once I left with Yin. In that case, I would be back
immediately.
Exactly on time, Yin drove up in an old
Toyota and we headed toward the airport. On the way over, he was cordial,
but he continued to plead ignorance as to what was going on with Wil. I
considered telling him what Natalie had said about the mysterious place in
central Asia and what Wil had told me that night in my bedroom, just to
see Yin's reaction. But I decided against it. Better to just watch Yin
closely, I thought, and see how things felt at the airport.
At the ticket desk, I found that a seat had
indeed been purchased in my name for a flight to Lhasa. I looked around
and tried to feel out the situation. Everything seemed normal. Yin was
smiling, obviously in a good mood. Unfortunately the ticket clerk was not.
She could speak only a little English and was very demanding. When she
asked for my passport, I became ever more irritated and snapped back at
her. At one point she stopped and glared at me, as though she was going to
refuse to issue the tickets altogether.
Yin quickly stepped in and talked to her in
a calm voice in her native Nepalese. After a few minutes her demeanor
began to change. She never looked at me again, but she spoke pleasantly to
Yin, actually laughing at something he said. A few minutes later we had
our tickets and boarding passes and were sitting at a small table in a
coffee shop near our gate. There was the strong smell of cigarettes
everywhere.
"You have much anger," Yin said.
"And you don't use your energy very well."
I was taken aback. "What are you
talking about?"
He looked at me with kindness. "I
mean, you did nothing to help the woman at the counter with her
mood."
I immediately knew what he was getting at.
In Peru the Eighth Insight had described a method of uplifting others by
focusing on their faces in a particular way.
"You know the Insights?" I asked.
Yin nodded, still looking at me.
"Yes," he said. "But there is more."
"Remembering to send energy is not
that easy," I added defensively.
In a very deliberate tone, Yin said,
"But you must realize that you were already influencing her with your
energy anyway, whether you know it or not. The important thing is how you
set your . . . field of . . . of . . ." Yin was struggling to find
the English word. "Field of intention," he said finally.
"Your prayer-field."
I looked at him hard. Yin seemed to be
describing prayer in the same way the dark-haired man had earlier.
"What are you talking about
exactly?" I asked.
"Have you ever been in a room of
people where the energy and mood were low, and then someone comes in who
lifts everyone's energy immediately, just by entering the room? This
person's energy field goes out ahead of him or her and touches everyone
else."
"Yeah," I said. "I know what
you mean."
His look penetrated me. "If you are
going to find Shambhala, you must learn how to do this consciously."
"Shambhala? What are you talking
about?"
Yin's face grew pale, exuding an expression
of embarrassment. He shook his head, apparently feeling as though he had
overstepped himself and let something out of the bag.
"Never mind," he said lowly.
"It is not my place. Wil must explain this." The line was
forming to enter the plane, and Yin turned away and moved toward the
ticket steward.
I was wracking my brain, trying to place
the word "Shambhala." Finally it came to me. Shambhala was the
mythical community of Tibetan Buddhist lore, the one that the stories
about Shangri-La had been based on.
I caught Yin's eye. "That place is a
myth . . . right?"
Yin just handed the steward his ticket and
walked down the aisle.
On the flight to Lhasa, Yin and I sat in
different sections of the plane, giving me time to think. All I knew was
that Shambhala was of great significance to Tibetan Buddhists, whose
ancient writings described it as a holy city of diamonds and gold, filled
with adepts and lamas--and hidden somewhere in the vast uninhabitable
regions of northern Tibet or China. More recently, though, most Buddhists
seemed to speak of Shambhala merely in symbolic terms, as representing a
spiritual state of mind, not a real location.
I reached over and pulled a travel brochure
of Tibet from the pouch on the seat back, hoping to get a renewed sense of
its geography. Lying between China to the north and India and Nepal to the
south, Tibet is basically a large plateau with few areas lower than six
thousand feet. At its southern border are the towering Himalayas,
including Mount Everest, and on the northern border just inside China are
the vast Kunlun Mountains. In between are deep gorges, wild rivers, and
hundreds of square miles of rocky tundra. From the map, eastern Tibet
seemed to be the most fertile and populated, while the north and west
looked sparse and mountainous, with few roads, all of them gravel.
Apparently there are only two major routes
into western Tibet--the northern road, used mostly by truckers, and the
southern road, which skirts the Himalayas and is used by pilgrims from all
over the region to reach the sacred sites of Everest, Lake Manasarovar,
and Mount Kailash, and farther on to the mysterious Kunluns.
I looked up from my reading. As we flew
along at thirty-five thousand feet, I began to sense a distinct shift in
temperature and energy outside. Below me, the Himalayas rose in frozen,
rocky spires, framed by a clear blue sky. We practically flew right over
the top of Mount Everest as we passed into the airspace of Tibet--the land
of snows, the rooftop of the world. It was a nation of seekers, inward
travelers, and as I looked down at the green valleys and rocky plains
surrounded by mountains, I couldn't help being awed by its mystery. Too
bad it was now being brutally administered by a totalitarian government.
What, I wondered, was I doing here?
I looked back at Yin seated four rows
behind me. It bothered me that he was being so secretive. I made up my
mind, again, to be very cautious. I would not go any farther than Lhasa
without a full explanation.
When we arrived at the airport, Yin
resisted all my inquiries about Shambhala, repeating his assertion that
soon we would be met by Wil, at which point I would learn everything. We
caught a taxi and headed toward a small hotel near the center of town,
where Wil would be waiting.
I caught Yin staring at me.
"What?" I asked.
"I was just checking to see how you
are adjusting to the altitude," Yin said. "Lhasa is twelve
thousand feet above sea level. You must take it easy for a while."
I nodded, appreciating his concern, but in
the past I had always adapted easily to high altitudes. I was about to
mention this to Yin when I caught sight of a huge, fortress-like structure
in the distance.
"This is the Potala Palace," Yin
said. "I wanted you to see it. It was the Dalai Lama's winter home
before he was exiled. It now symbolizes the struggle of the Tibetan people
against the Chinese occupation."
He looked away and remained silent until
the car stopped not in front of the hotel, but down the street a hundred
feet.
"Wil should be here already," Yin
said as he opened the door. "Wait in the taxi. I'll go in and
check."
But instead of getting out, he stopped and
stared at the entrance. I saw his look and gazed in that direction myself.
The street was busy with Tibetan pedestrians and a few tourists, but all
seemed normal. Then my eyes fell on a short, Chinese man near the corner
of the building. He held a paper of some kind, but his eyes were carefully
surveying the area.
Yin looked toward the cars parked on the
curb across the street from the man. His eyes stopped on an old brown
sedan containing several men in suits.
Yin said something to the taxi driver, who
looked nervously at us in the rearview mirror and drove toward the next
intersection. As we drove on, Yin bent over so as not to be seen by the
men in the car.
"What's going on?" I asked.
Yin ignored me, telling the driver to turn
left and head farther into the center of the city.
I grabbed his arm. "Yin, tell me
what's going on. Who were those men?"
"I don't know," he said.
"But Wil would not be there. There is one other place I think he
would go. Watch and see if we are being followed."
I looked behind us as Yin gave the taxi
driver more instructions. Several cars came up behind us but then turned
off. There was no sign of the brown sedan.
"Do you see anyone back there?"
Yin asked, turning to look for himself.
"I don't think so," I replied.
I was about to question Yin again about
what was happening when I noticed that his hands were shaking. I took a
good look at his face. It was pale and covered with sweat. I realized that
he was terrified. The sight sent a chill of fear through my own body.
Before I could speak, Yin pointed out a
parking place for the taxi driver and pushed me out of the car with my
satchel, leading me down a side street and then into a narrow alley. After
walking a hundred feet or so, we leaned against the wall of a building and
waited for several minutes, our eyes glued to the entrance of the street
we had just left. Neither of us spoke a word.
When it appeared as though we were not
being followed, Yin proceeded down the alley to the next building and
knocked several times. There was no answer, but the lock on the door
mysteriously opened from the inside. "Wait here," Yin said,
opening the door. "I'll be back."
He moved silently into the building and
shut the door. When I heard it lock, a wave of panic filled me. Now what?
I thought. Yin was scared. Was he abandoning me out here? I looked back
down the alley toward the crowded street. This was exactly what I had
feared most. Someone seemed to be looking for Yin, and maybe Wil too. I
had no idea what I might be getting involved in.
Perhaps it would be best if Yin did vanish,
I thought. That way I could run back to the street and hide among the
crowds until I found my way back to the airport. What else could I do then
but go back home? I would be absolved of all responsibility to look for
Wil or do anything else on this misadventure.
The door suddenly opened, Yin slid out, and
the door was quickly locked.
"Wil left a message," Yin said.
"Come on."
We walked a bit farther down the alley and
hid between two large trash bins as Yin opened an envelope and pulled out
a note. I watched him as he read. His face seemed to grow even whiter.
When he finished, he held the note out toward me.
"What does it say?" I demanded,
grabbing the paper. I recognized Wil's handwriting as I read:
