The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (20 page)

“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.

“You yourself have to overcome this tendency and stay focused on the process of what is happening to you. You have reached
Shambhala at a time when it is going into transition. Tashi’s father is here to talk to Tashi about his future and the situation
at the temples. Yet Tashi doesn’t feel intuitively led to go to the temples. Instead he’s interested in going to your world.
And you show up right in the middle of this. It all means something.”

As though to punctuate what Ani had just said, we both heard a faint roaring sound in the distance, which quickly disappeared.

She looked confused. “That’s nothing I’ve ever heard before.”

A chill went through me. “I think it might be a helicopter,” I said.

Again I thought about telling her about my dream, but before I could she began talking again.

“We have to hurry,” she said. “You have to know who we are, the culture we’ve created. We were talking about the importance
of young people understanding the sequence of generations that came before them. This history is something that all individuals
in the outer rings become aware of at an early age—as they wake up to their own spirituality and sense of what they came here
to do.”

She raised her finger. “Everyone here is clear that the human world evolves through the succession of generations. One generation
establishes a way of life and meets certain challenges, and the next generation comes along and extends that worldview. Unfortunately
in the outer cultures this evolution is just beginning to be taken seriously. More frequently what occurs is that parents
want children to be just like them, to take the same view of everything. This desire is natural in a way because we all want
our children to reinforce the choices we have made.

“But often the process becomes antagonistic. The parents criticize the interests of the children, and the children criticize
the old-fashioned ways of the parents. To some degree it is part of the process: Children look at the lives of the parents
and think, I like most of how they live, but I would have done certain things differently. All children have a sense of what
is incomplete in their parents’ way of life. After all, that’s the system: We chose our parents in part to be awakened to
what is missing, to what needs to be added to human understanding, and we begin that process by being dissatisfied with what
we find in our lives with them.

“Yet all of this doesn’t have to be antagonistic. Once we know the life process, we can participate consciously. Parents can
be open to the criticisms of their children, and be supportive of their dreams. Of course, doing this causes the parents to
have to stretch their own ways of thinking and evolve along with their children, which can be difficult.”

I had heard that before. She was going out of her way to make the process of evolution very clear to me. I asked a few more
questions, and she spent another ten minutes giving me the details of life in the outer rings of Shambhala. She explained
that once children gained an understanding of history and family, the next step for them was to learn to extend their creative
prayer field, just as I had. They then went on to find a way to advance the culture, either teaching in the outer rings or
using their prayer-field at the temples.

“This will eventually be the lifestyle in the outer cultures as well,” she added. “Some will be devoted to the teaching of
children, and others will enter the many institutions of human culture and help move them toward the spiritual ideal.”

I was about to ask more about what they did at the temples when the door to Tashi’s room swung open. Tashi came out, followed
by his father.

“Father wants to see you,” Tashi said, looking at me. The older man bowed slightly and Tashi introduced us, then both sat
down at the table. Tashi’s father was dressed in the traditional sheepskin pants and vest of a Tibetan herdsman, except that
his clothing was immaculately clean and a light tan color. He was short and stocky and looked at me with kind eyes and an
expression of boyish enthusiasm.

“You know that Shambhala is about to go into transition?” he asked.

I looked at Ani and then back at him. “Only what some of the legends say.”

“The legends say,” the older man replied, “that at a precise time in the evolution of Shambhala and the outer cultures, a
great shift will occur. This shift can only happen when the level of awareness in the outer cultures has reached a particular
point. But when it does, Shambhala will move.”

“Move where?” I asked. “Do you know?”

He smiled. “No one knows exactly.”

His statement filled me with a wave of anxiety for some reason, and a slight dizziness. For a moment I had a hard time focusing
my eyes.

“He’s still not that strong yet.” Ani said.

Tashi’s father looked at me. “I’m here because of my intuition that it is important that Tashi join us at the temples during
this transition. The legends say it will be a time of great opportunity but also of dire peril. For a time what we have been
doing here in the temples will be disrupted. We will not be able to help as much.”

He looked over at his son. “This will happen just as the situation in the outer cultures becomes critical. Many times during
the hidden history of mankind, humans have developed spiritually to this point and then have lost their way and fallen back
into ignorance. They began to misuse their technology, disrupting the natural course of evolution.

“For instance, right now in the outer cultures, some people are taking the natural process of food and distorting it by genetically
manipulating seeds to have unnatural characteristics. This is primarily done in order to patent these seeds and control them
in the marketplace.

“The same thing is occurring in the pharmaceutical industries, where a known herbal remedy, free to all, is genetically altered
in order to sell it. In the precise energy system of the body, these manipulations can have terrible consequences on health.
The same is true of irradiated foods, chlorine and other additives to the water supply, not to mention so-called designer
drugs.

“At the same time, the technology of the media has reached a point where it can have dramatic influence. If it responds only
to the needs of corporations and corrupt politicians, it can create realities for humans that are distorted and unnatural.
As corporations merge, so that they control more and more of the technology and want to use more advertising to create false
needs, this problem will grow.

“Most imperative is the situation of government power and surveillance, even in the democratic countries. Citing a need to
combat drug dealers or terrorists, the government has infringed more and more on the privacy of the common man. Already, cash
transactions are being restricted and the Internet fully monitored. The next step will be forcing the move to a cashless society
controlled by a central authority.

“This growth toward a central, spiritless governmental authority, in a high-tech virtual world divorced from natural processes,
where food, water, and the routines of living have been trivialized and distorted, leads to disaster. When health is subverted
into just one more commercial cycle of worsening food, new diseases, and more drugs, Armageddon is the result, and it has
occurred several times in prehistory. It could happen again, only this time on a much larger scale.”

He smiled over at Ani. “But it need not happen. In fact, we are one small step in awareness from turning the corner. If we
could just move fully into the idea that we are spiritual beings in a spiritual world, then food, health, technology, media,
and government would all move into their proper roles in the evolution and perfection of this world. But for this to happen,
the prayer extensions must be completely understood in the outer cultures. They must understand what we do at the temples.
The transition of Shambhala is part of this process, but the opportunity has to be seized.”

He looked deeply at Tashi. “For this to happen your generation must merge with the last two into an integrated prayer-field—one
that includes a final unity of all the religions.”

Tashi looked confused, and his father moved closer to him.

“All over the world, the generation born in the first decades of the twentieth century, what our friend from the West would
call the World War II generation, used courage and technology to save democracy and freedom from the threat of dictators seeking
empire. They won, using technological might, and continued to expand this technology into a worldwide economy. Then the next
generation—what Americans call baby boomers—arrived on the Earth, and their intuitions told them that the focus on materialism,
on technology alone, was not quite correct. That there was too much pollution, too much corporate influence on government,
too much surveillance by the intelligence organizations.

“This criticism was the normal way that a new generation expands and intuitively leads us forward. They grew up in a hard-won
materialism, or in some countries, the desire for the material, and began to react, to voice the idea that there was more
to life. There was a spiritual purpose behind human history that could be grasped in more detail.

“That’s what was behind all that happened in the sixties and seventies in the West: the rejection of a material-based system
of status, the exploration of other religions, the popularity of philosophy, the explosion in thought of the Human Potential
Movement. It was all the result of a series of insights that there was more to life than our material worldview knew.”

He regarded me with a twinkle, as though he knew everything about my experiences with the Insights.

“The intuitions of the baby boomers were very important,” he went on, “because they began to put technology and material abundance
into perspective, and to grasp the deep intuition that technology is being developed on this planet to support a culture where
we can focus not just on surviving, but on our spiritual development as well.”

He paused for a moment. “And now, since the late seventies and into the eighties, a new generation has been arriving to push
human culture even further.” He looked at Tashi. “You and your age group are the final members of this generation. Do you
see what emphasis you are bringing into the world?”

As Tashi pondered the inquiry, I thought about the question myself. The sons and daughters of the boomers have been characterized
as reacting to the boomers’ idealism and ambivalence toward technology by becoming more practical and, in fact, developing
a love for technology beyond anything seen before.

Everyone looked at me as though they had heard my thoughts. Tashi was nodding in agreement.