The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (2 page)

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.

B
ack 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.

* * *

T
he 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.