This World

Chapter Eleven.

Isolation

“Dennis Corbin, I’d like you to meet Mr. Conway, the man in charge here. This is Mrs. Bolton. [”Sunnie,“ she interjected pleasantly.] Mr. Barnard, our only fellow American.“

Procedures at Shangri‑la are nothing if not flexible. Mr. Conway, on hearing my fast sketch of Corbin’s background, attitude, and mission, had swiftly decided that the five of us should have lunch together—presumably on the theory that no surroundings are quite so disarming as an informal meal. So it was that, within half an hour of our receiving Mr. Meister’s seal of approval on Corbin’s health, I was escorting him to one of the library alcoves that doubled, according to the occasion, as den, living room tea‑room or—as now—dining room. And so he was introduced, with no greater ceremony, to three people who would be at the center of his life for the foreseeable future.

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Chapter Ten.

Interrogation

I awoke early that afternoon. That is, Mr. Barnard woke me up, touching my shoulder with one hand while holding a cup of hot tea near my nose with the other. Most unusual. Then I remembered the day before, and our long night. “Did they get the engines up okay?”

“No, they didn’t. Too blamed big and heavy. But they piled three feet of rock and dirt on ’em. Think that’s enough?”

“These days, God knows, but I suppose it’ll have to be. Just so they’re out of sight, we ought to be all right.” I remembered something from sleep, and sat up abruptly. “Say, Mr. Barnard, you know what we forgot? We ought to comb the rocks near where the wing tip hit first; there were fragments all over the place. Not so big a clue, but all it would take would be for the sun to reflect off just one piece. . . .”

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P A R T   T H R E E

Messenger

August, 1979

 

Chapter Nine.

Corbin

We were chanting.

Years ago, chanting used to irritate me. It had seemed a needless relic of the Middle Ages. But I’d long since changed my mind about that, as about so many things. I’d discovered its virtues.

Partly we chant for the joy of the sound; partly, for the spiritual side effects to be had by losing ourselves in a chorus. The Latin chants in particular—which I once would have found highly irritating—I now found soothing, those ancient Latin words, sung of the beauty of God and God’s world. And blended in with the sounds were the smell of the incense, the rich colors of the tapestries, and the weight of the hymnal I myself had helped to manufacture the paper for, 11 years earlier.

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Chapter Eight.

The Monkey

Mr. Conway’s hand on my shoulder brought me awake, and I got out of bed, shivering in the mid‑night cold. One advantage to wearing robes: it wasn’t hard to get dressed. Seeing his face by the flickering oil lamp, I got a sense of the experience—not to use the embarrassing word “wisdom”—concealed behind that youthful face. Our silence reinforced the impression.

He worked with me to find a comfortable position for the meditation exercise, telling me (to my surprise) that I would not have to torture myself into the cross‑legged lotus position favored by yogis. “Without years of preparation, you would be unable to sit for long with legs crossed. The pain would be intolerable.”

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There is so little we know, and so much we misunderstand because of our assumptions: that everything is separate rather than connected, that most things are dead instead of everything being alive, that consciousness is accidental or incidental, rather than fundamental….

http://www.schwartzreport.net/study-reveals-plants-listen-find-sources-water/?utm_source=Stephan+Schwartz%27s+Email+List&utm_campaign=af117e4bc1-SR_Daily_Digest_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0eb25d4404-af117e4bc1-221392153

When you change your assumptions, what seemed unlikely now seems obvious. Hint, guys: The world is alive, and the world is made of consciousness!

This from SchwartzReport.

P A R T   T W O

Another World

August, 1979

 

 

 

Chapter Seven.

Experience

My room — my cell — has one window, facing south. In daytime I see the mountain, but at night the mountain is only a finger pointing to the moon. And it is the moon that I see in my imagination, by day as well as night: The moon, full silver, giving itself a halo of deep blue against the black sky, sailing clear and calm, unmoved by the tragedy and farce below.

At this great height, air is thin. Nights obscured by snowstorms are rare; cloud cover so thick as to block out the moon is scarcely less so. In the many years I have been here, I cannot recall a night whose moon was lost to cloud cover. At most, I have seen layers of cloud illumined from behind, great uneven porous blankets of grey, shining into one halo of light. But mostly the nights are clear with the light of the moon in its phases.

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Chapter Six.

Escape

By the end of April I’d spent about three months learning a few Tibetan phrases that might or might not prove useful in the event—long enough to realize that to go beyond these phrases to fluency could require not months but years.

I’d carefully adopted the wearing of a monk’s robe, not merely for the sake of fitting in visually but also to save wear on my flight suit.

Oxygen was going to be a problem, obviously, since I had no way to refill my mask. The monastery puts some sort of drug into newcomers’ food, to lessen the effect of high altitude on bodies born in lower places. My careful, inconspicuous searches never turned up the drug’s storage place. Not so surprising, perhaps, since I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I’d have to do without it, and hope the residual effect of whatever was still in my system when I left would carry me past the worst.

Continue reading Messenger Chapter Six