A 1973 song by the American rock band 'Three Dog Night' goes this way:
'Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain
With the rain in Shambala
Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame
With the rain in Shambala...'
And uplifts this lilting melody into a happy realm where the significance of a spiritual ablution couldn't possibly get any more direct. Often better known to occidental sensibilities as the "Shangri La", the famed utopian lamasery of the Orient was officially introduced to the western world by James Hilton's 1933 novel 'Lost Horizon.. It was a place that carried some hope of redemption in a world on the brink of disaster represented both literally and metaphorically through the world weary soul of Hugh Conway, a World War I veteran. It does paint a morbid picture of where we're headed and yet subtly manages to emit sparks of a certain deliverance where a silver lining could well penetrate the overlying garb of intended obfuscation that we keep ourselves in. If only we could rid ourselves of it and tread closer to what truly seems mythical in its completeness of all idealized bliss, it would not translate into a state of happy stupor where suffering is but a sordid reality that we'd not have to wake up but conversely to live and breathe every moment in such grace without ever harbouring the fears of having a bad dream. Is that the Shangri La, the Shambala? And if it is, does it in fact exist? And if it does exist, where exactly does it does so? Is it a physical reality or an allegorical delineation? Questions abound, and outnumber the answers.
One Man's Quest to Unravel The Shambala
Laurence J. Brahm was a man on a mission. In his book "Shambala: The Road Less Travelled in Western Tibet" he sets out to fathom what this fabled land is all about with the essential key in hand, the Shambala Sutra. In the prologue he talks about a recurring dream of canyons and deserts replete with convincing details of their physical terrain, flashes amidst his actual life woven around law firms, political congregations, cocktail parties and times that he wished he could spend with his dog. What seems like a dream to begin with, turns into what 'really' drives him, and putting all his apparently real commitments on the back burner, he talks about the very last time he awakened from that dream, with a resolve that it no longer had to remain what it had been for so long, a mere dream.
Brahm's Journey
A long-winded one by all means, it takes him from an antique store in Lhasa to the teahouse of a charismatic young woman, Renzhen Deki who eggs him on to unearth the scripture (Shambala Sutra) that he is now in possession of, after seeking to simply own a piece of genuine antique. His first stop is the Ngari Prefecture, Tibet's western-most stretch that is largely inaccessible and in every way, inhospitable save for the few nomads that waft in and out of it like the dry desert winds that accompany them for the most part. Rarefied oxygen, altitude sickness, sand and snow make for a weird cocktail that don't make the next leg of the journey to Poison Lake seem anything that the writer's body could imagine acclimatizing to. He travels to Mt. Kailash, that gets him to witness the queer traditions of a sky burial where corpses are neither burned nor buried, but fed to mountain eagles and then to the lost kingdom of Guge and the Tuolin Monastery. It gets unmistakably frustrating when after all these arduous trips, he is directed back to Tashilumbo Monastery in Shigatze, which was much closer to Lhasa in the first place! What in the world is this Sutra all about? Why does it seem like he is going about in circles? Is there any such thing or place as Shambala after all? Brahm's journey is an endless series of see saw events that etch themselves out on a continuum that stretches from plain pointless to proverbially revelatory.
The Kalachakra Construct
The Kalachakra or the 'Wheel of Time' is a core tenet of the Shambala philosophy and may help us better comprehend it. On a mandala it is usually depicted as a blue man and a yellow woman, locked in embrace. But before it can betoken any possible whiff of erotic emotion, it is to be interpreted on a more sublime footing as a fusion of the energies of compassion and wisdom. What these forces do is also evident in the image. The smaller figures that the deities are standing upon are not hapless victims being stamped over but miniature consorts of their own selves, in a symbolic representation of the demons within ourselves that we ought to annihilate. The Kalachakra is thus a bid to crush the forces of greed, ignorance and malice that are all too easily given the upper hand within ourselves and in the world around us. It is meant to help us realign our positive energies, beginning with ourselves and to spiral its effects on to life forces around us. It addresses the complex issues of space and time, how they make slaves of us and what we can do to free ourselves from these man made contraptions. Seemingly unrelated at the outset, the espousal of these ideas can lead us to a realm unknown to our ordinary minds and lives, riddled with the apparent weight of the world, but it can and does promise to dissolve all that into a happy vacuum which can then be filled up with the what now appears as ethereal and incredulously euphoric!
Is it then a place, a palace, a refuge or a rearing ground? A sacred space or space that can scarce be found? Is it real, surreal or unreal? It would help to direct our energies not at a pinpointed location but in its stead to identify and work on a process, so that the journey becomes more important than the destination, and leads us on to the realization that there is not one but many Shambalas, one within each of us. Sounds like a possibility? Perhaps.
Reference:
Brahm, Laurence J. Shambhala: The Road Less Travelled in Western Tibet, 2006, Marshall Cavendish.
Monica Bhattacharjee - Monica Bhattacharjee works as an educator currently based in Singapore. She holds a Masters degree in English Literature and a diversified ...
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