I looked away.
“Think about what was happening,” Yin continued, “when you heard the van approaching. You had two choices: You could have thought about that occurrence as a threat or as a potential aid. Certainly you have to consider both. But once you recognized the van, that should have told you something. The fact that it was the same van that we had seen earlier at the crossroads is meaningful, especially since these same people created the diversion that allowed us to go by without being seen. From that point of view, they had already helped you and now were there to possibly help you again.”
I nodded. He was right. Clearly I had blown it.
Yin looked away, distracted by his own thoughts, then said, “You completely lost your energy and positive expectation. Remember what I told you at the restaurant? Setting a field for synchronicity is a matter of putting yourself in a particular state of mind. It is easy to think about synchronicity intellectually, but unless you enter the state of mind where your prayer-field will help, all you will do is glimpse the coincidences every once in a while. In some situations that is enough and you will be led forward for a time, but eventually you will lose your direction. The only way to establish a constant flow of synchronicity is to stay in a state where your prayer field keeps this flow moving toward you—a state of conscious alertness.”
“I’m still not sure how to get into this state of mind.”
“One must stop and remind oneself to assume an attitude of alertness every moment. One must visualize that one’s energy is going out and bringing just the right hunches to you, the right events. You have to expect them to occur at any moment. We set our fields to bring us synchronicity by being ever vigilant, always expecting the next encounter. Every time you forget to keep yourself in this state of expectation, you must catch yourself and remember.
“The more you stay in this state of mind, the more the synchronicity will increase. And, eventually, if you keep your energy high, this posture of conscious alertness will become your prevailing attitude toward life. The legends say the prayer extensions will eventually be second nature to us. We will set them in the morning as routinely as getting dressed. That is the place you must reach, the state of mind where you have this expectation constantly.”
He paused and looked at me for a moment.
“When you heard the vehicle coming toward you, you immediately went into fear. From the sounds of it, they were intuiting that they should stop at the mounds, although they probably had no idea why. But when you went into fear, thinking that they were possibly the bad guys, your field actually went out and had an effect on them, entering their fields and probably making them feel something was amiss, that they were doing something wrong, so they took off.”
What he was telling me was fantastic, but it felt true to me.
“Tell me more about how our fields affect people,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. The effect of our fields on other people is the Third Extension. For now just concentrate on setting a field for synchronicity, and not going into fearful thoughts. You have a tendency to expect the worst. Remember when we were on our way to Lama Rigden’s and I left you alone, you saw a group of refugees and they would have led you right to the Lama’s monastery if you had only talked to them. But instead you figured they were going to turn you in and you missed the synchronicity. This negative thinking is a pattern with you.”
I just looked at him, feeling tired. He smiled and didn’t mention any of my mistakes again. We talked casually about Tibet for most of the evening, going outside at one point to look up at the stars. The sky was clear and the temperature barely freezing. Above us were the brightest stars I had ever seen and I commented to Yin about it.
“Of course they look big,” he said. “You are standing on the rooftop of the world.”
The next morning I slept late and went through a series of tai chi movements with Yin. We waited for as long as we could for Yin’s friends, but they never showed up. We realized we’d have to risk going with only one vehicle, after all, and loaded up the Jeep, pulling out right at noon.
“Something must have happened,” Yin said, looking over at me. He was trying to be strong, but I could tell he was worried.
We were heading up the main road again through a thick, sand-blown haze that had covered most of the landscape and obscured our view of the mountains.
“It will be hard for the Chinese to see us in this,” Yin remarked.
“That’s good,” I said.
I had been wondering how the Chinese knew we had been at the restaurant in Zhongba, so I asked Yin what he thought.
“I’m sure it was my fault,” he said. “I told you how much anger and fear I felt toward them. I’m sure my prayer-field was bringing me what I was asking for.”
I looked hard at him. This was too much.
“Are you telling me,” I asked, “that because you were fearful, your energy went out and somehow brought the Chinese to us?”
“No, not merely the fear. We all get a general kind of fear. That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about letting my mind go into fearful visions of what might happen, what the Chinese might do. I’ve seen them operate in Tibet for so long, I know their methods. I know how they oppress individuals through intimidation. I allowed myself to see them coming for us in my mind, as a little vision, and I wasn’t doing anything to counteract that image.
“I should have caught myself and envisioned in my mind that they would no longer be so antagonistic toward us, and then held that expectation. My fear in general was not what brought them. I went unconscious and held a specific image, a specific expectation that they would come in on us. That was the problem. If you hold a negative image too long, it can eventually come true.”
I was still awed by the whole idea. Could this be correct? For a long time I had observed that people who feared a particular event—a burglary at their house, for instance, or getting a particular disease or losing a lover—often experienced just that occurrence in their lives. Was this the effect Yin was describing?
I remembered the fearful image I’d had earlier in Zhongba, when Yin had left to find someone to go with us. I had imagined being alone in the Jeep, driving around lost, which is exactly what had ended up happening. A chill went through me. I had been making the same mistake as Yin.
“Are you saying that everything that happens to us that’s negative is the result of our own thoughts?” I asked.
He frowned. “Of course not. Many things merely happen in the natural course of living with other human beings. Their expectations and actions play a part too. But we do have some creative influence, whether we want to believe it or not. We have to wake up and understand that in terms of our prayer-energy, an expectation is an expectation, whether it is based on fear or faith. In this case, I wasn’t monitoring myself closely enough. I told you my hatred of the Chinese was a problem.”
He turned and our eyes met.
“Also, remember what I told you,” he added, “that at these higher levels of energy, the effect of our prayer-field is very quick. Out there in the ordinary world, individuals still have a mix of fear images and success images, so they tend to cancel each other out and keep the effect low. But at these levels, we can affect what happens very quickly, even though a fear image will eventually collapse the strength of our field.
“The key is to make sure your mind is focused on the positive path of your life, not on some fearful expectation. That’s why the Second Extension is so important. If we make sure we stay in a state of conscious alertness for the next synchronicity, our minds stay on the positive and off our fear and doubt. Do you see what I mean?”
I nodded but said nothing.
Yin focused again on the road. “We have to use this power right now. Stay as alert as you can. We could pass the van very easily in this haze and we don’t want to miss them. You’re sure they were heading in this direction?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then if they stopped to spend the night, the way we did, they couldn’t be that far ahead.”
All morning we traveled, still heading northwest. As much as I tried to keep it up, I couldn’t stay in the state of conscious alertness Yin was describing. Something wasn’t right. Yin noticed and kept looking over at me.
Finally he turned and said, “Are you sure you’re expecting the full synchronistic process?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I think so.”
He frowned slightly and continued to glance over at me.
I knew what he was getting at. Both in Peru and later in the Appalachians with the Tenth Insight, I’d experienced a process to synchronicity. Each of us at any one point has a primary question about our lives, something we are inquiring into, given our particular life situation. In our case, the question was how we might find the Dutch van, and then Wil and the gateway.
Ideally, once we recognize the central question in our lives, we will have a guiding thought or an intuition about how to answer it. We find ourselves with a mental image that would suggest going somewhere, taking some action, saying something to a stranger. Again, ideally, if we follow that intuition, coincidences will occur to give us information pertaining to our question. This synchronicity leads us further down our life path… and, in turn, to a new question.
“What do the legends say about this?” I asked.
“They say,” Yin replied, “that humans will eventually learn that their prayer power can greatly influence the flow of their lives. By using the force of our expectations, we can bring forth the process of synchronicity more frequently. But we have to stay alert for the whole process, beginning with the next intuition. Are you consciously expecting an intuition?”
“I haven’t gotten anything yet,” I said.
“But are you expecting one?” he pressed.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about intuitions.”
He nodded. “You must remember that this is part of setting your field of prayer for synchronicity. You must stay alert and expect the whole process to come forth: the question, getting an intuition and following it, and looking for the coincidences. Remind yourself to expect it all, be alert for it all, and if you do, your energy will go out ahead of you and help bring the flow.”
He shot me a smile meant to uplift my spirits.
I took in a few breaths, feeling my energy begin to return. Yin’s mood was contagious. My alertness sharpened.
I smiled back at him. I was for the first time appreciative of who Yin was. At times he was as fearful as me, and often he was too blunt, but his heart was into this journey and he wanted more than anything to succeed. As I thought about this, I slipped into a daydream of Yin and me walking through rocky sand dunes at night, somewhere near a river. There was a glow in the distance, a campfire, that we wanted to reach. Yin was leading and I was glad to follow.
I looked over at him again. He was staring hard at me.
I realized what had happened.
“I think I just got something,” I said. “I had the thought of us walking toward a campfire. Do you think that means anything?”
“Only you would know,” he said.
“But I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”
“If your thought was a guiding intuition, it would have something to do with us looking for the van. Who was at the campfire? What was the feeling?”
“I don’t know who was there. But we wanted to reach the campfire very badly. Is there a sandy area nearby?”
Yin pulled the Jeep off the road and stopped. The haze was beginning to lift.
“This landscape is all rocky sand for another hundred miles,” Yin said.
I shrugged my shoulders. “What about a river? Is there a river somewhere close?”
Yin’s eyes lit up. “Yes, just past the next town, Paryang, about a hundred and fifty miles up ahead.”
He paused for a moment, smiling broadly. “We must stay very alert,” he said. “It is our only lead.”
We made good time, reaching Paryang by sunset. We drove straight through town and then on for another fifteen miles, where Yin turned off to the right on a track road. It was almost completely dark, but we could see the river half a mile ahead.
“There is a checkpoint up ahead,” he explained. “We have to go around it.”
As we approached the river, the road narrowed and became extremely rutted.
“What’s that?” Yin asked, stopping the Jeep and backing up.
Off in a rocky clearing to our right, barely visible, was a vehicle. I rolled down the side window so we could see more clearly.
“It’s not a van,” Yin said. “It’s a blue Land Cruiser.”
I strained to see.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s the vehicle I saw at the roadblock when we were separated.”
Yin shut off our headlights, and the darkness seemed to engulf us.
“Let’s go on a little farther,” he said, pulling the Jeep forward through the deep ruts for several hundred more feet.
“Look!” I said, pointing. To our left was the van, parked between large rocks. No one was around.
I was about to get out when Yin lurched the Jeep forward and parked it out of sight several hundred yards to the east.
“Better to hide our vehicle,” he commented, locking it up as we got out.
We returned to the van and looked around.
“The footprints go in this direction,” Yin said, gesturing toward the south. “Come on.”
I walked behind him as we made our way through the large rocks and sand. A three-quarter moon lit our way. After about ten minutes he looked at me and sniffed. I could smell it too: the smoke of a fire.
We walked another fifty yards in the darkness until we saw a campfire. A man and a woman were huddled around it. It was the Dutch couple I had seen in the van. The river was just beyond.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
“We’ll have to announce ourselves,” he said. “You had better do it so they will be less afraid.”
“We don’t know who they are,” I said, resisting.
“Go ahead, tell them we are here.”
I looked at them more closely. They were dressed in fatigues and thick cotton shirts. They looked like mere tourists, trekking in Tibet.
“Hello,” I said in a loud voice. “We’re glad to see you.”
Yin looked at me askance.
The two people jumped up and stared closely as I emerged from the darkness. Smiling broadly, I said, “We need your help.”
Yin followed, bowing slightly, and said, “We’re sorry to disturb you, but we’re looking for our friend Wilson James. We were hoping you could help us.”
They were both in shock, not believing we had walked into their camp this way. But slowly the woman seemed to realize we were harmless and offered us a place to sit beside the fire.
“We do not know Wilson James,” she said. “But the man we are here to meet tonight does know him. I’ve heard him mention the name.”
Her companion nodded, looking very nervous. “I hope Jacob can find us. He is hours late.”
I was about to tell them that we had seen the Land Cruiser parked not too far away when the expression on the man’s face changed. He looked petrified. His eyes were glued to something behind me. I jerked around. Back in the direction of the vehicles, the terrain had come alive with other vehicles and headlights and dozens of voices speaking in Chinese, all moving in our direction.
The man leaped to his feet and extinguished the fire. He grabbed several packs and ran out of the camp with the woman.
“Come on,” Yin said, trying to catch up to them. Within several minutes they had disappeared in the darkness. Finally Yin gave up. Behind us, the lights were getting closer, and we huddled by the river.
“I think I can make my way around to our Jeep,” Yin said. “If we are lucky they haven’t found it yet. You head north, upstream, for about a mile, and try to outdistance
them. You’ll find another road there that comes down to the river’s edge. Listen for me and I’ll pick you up.”
“Why can’t I go with you?” I asked.
“Because it is too dangerous. One man might get through, but two would be seen.”
Reluctantly I agreed, and began to make my way through the rocks and gravel mounds in the moonlight, using my flashlight only when absolutely necessary. I knew Yin’s plan was crazy, but it seemed to be our only chance. I wondered what would have been learned if we had talked longer to the Dutch couple or met the other man. After about ten minutes I stopped to rest. I was cold and tired.
I heard a rustling ahead of me. I strained to hear. Someone was definitely walking. It must be the Dutch couple, I thought. Slowly I made my way forward until I caught up with the sound. Twenty feet away, I could see the silhouette of only one person, a man. I knew I had to say something or risk losing him.
“Are you Dutch?” I stammered, thinking that this might be the man the couple was waiting to meet.
He froze and said nothing, so I repeated the question. It sounded silly, but I thought perhaps I would get some kind of response.
“Who is it?” came a reply.
“I’m an American,” I said. “I’ve seen your friends.”
He turned and looked at me as I struggled through the rocks to reach him. He was young, perhaps twenty-five, and looked terrified.
“Where did you see my friends?” he asked, his voice shaking.
As he focused on me, I could feel how afraid he was. A wave of fear swept through my body, too, and I struggled to keep up my energy.
“Back downstream,” I replied. “They told us they were waiting for you.”
“Were the Chinese there?” he asked.
“Yes, but I think your friends got away.”
He looked even more panicked.
“They told us,” I said quickly, “that you know a man I’m looking for, Wilson James.”
He was backing up. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said, turning to leave.