Sensei of Shambala - Anastasia Novykh (english novels for students .txt) 📗

future, and was born in our time, and so forth. In other words, there are certain laws there, so don’t be surprised too much. Alright?”
“Of course!” Nikolai Andreevich uttered with admiration.
Suddenly Stas, who had kept silent before, thoughtfully asked, “Concerning reincarnation, do people in Shambala also undergo it, or do they exist eternally?”
“If you mean the life of the Bodhisattvas in Shambala, they exist under completely different laws. And they don’t have such bodily, rough matter as people. Shambala is a completely different side of reality. Well, for you to understand it better, their bodies are subtle matter, which exists under its own laws in time and space. And if in the human world the mind serves the body, at home - I mean in Shambala” the Teacher quickly corrected himself, “the body serves the mind. Why can’t Shambala be found? Because it exists at a completely different frequency level of perception.”
“So, a human cannot get there in his body?” Andrew asked with surprise.
“Why? He can if he knows and is able to transform his body to that frequency of the perception of reality.”
“It sounds like a fantasy,” Kostya sniffed quietly.
“For today’s human perception, maybe. But it’s a fact. If people believe that this is fantasy, let them... But a human cannot make up anything on his own because all this knowledge was, is, and will be in spite of his desires. His capabilities of perception are limited only by his egocentrism. In general, fantasy is only an unrealized reality.”
“How do higher creatures come into this world? You said that they, if needed, can get into contact with people.”
“Simply, through reincarnation. Their soul enters the body of an infant on the eighth day, in other words, just like all people are born.”
“I wonder,” remarked Nikolai Andreevich, “What made you think that the soul enters a human on the eighth day of life? In the Christian religion, for example, it is believed that the soul enters him while still in his mother’s womb.”
“It’s a wrong opinion. Evidently, someone understood something incorrectly and another one incorrectly translated it. A third one added his own thoughts coming from his logic; in this way, the real knowledge was lost. In reality, the soul enters the human body on the eighth day. It can even be materially traced. A soul, though being an energy substance, enters the body, acquires a quality of subtle matter. That’s why the weight of a newborn baby sharply increases on the eighth day from three to twenty grams, and sometimes, in exceptional cases, up to fifty grams. This can be traced if one exactly measures the weight of an infant starting from the seventh day, taking into account the nutrients he ingests and expels. In other words, on the eighth day, there occurs a sharp increase in the weight of a newborn baby. Moreover, exactly on the eighth day, the gaze of a child becomes alive, luminous. It is impossible not to notice that.”
“How do Bodhisattvas differ then from ordinary people?” Kostya asked with interest.
“They don’t. They are consciously reborn into the matter of the human in order to experience all the severities, hardships, and also the temptations of the world. During their human lives they make their contribution, which they should do. Sometimes they come to Earth with a certain goal, to realize a decision made in Shambala, but most often as observers. Bodhisattvas live as common people, quietly and modestly performing their work, though inside, the human is quite aware that he is a Bodhisattva. But he will never yell this and drum on his chest. As a rule, no one around knows this. This could be anybody: your close friend, your acquaintance, relative, and so forth.”
“Why do they come as observers?” asked Victor.
“Yes, why?” I thought. “Our world probably seems like a dirty and egoistic place to these higher creatures.”
“Well, they have such a rule or, to be more precise, a responsibility. Each one of the Bodhisattvas of Shambala should, at least once in a thousand years, reincarnate into this world. What for? In order to live a human life, to see how and what mankind thinks about, at what level people should be given knowledge. In other words, to know the human nature because in Shambala the animal nature is absent in individuals. In Shambala, there is a completely different reality. So, for a Bodhisattva who lives there, to understand what is going on here, he is thrown out into this world so that he won’t forget, so to say, won’t relax too much. Even Rigden Jappo cannot avoid this rule, this fate. However, he comes, as a rule, to this world before the beginning of global changes in the course of human civilization, approximately once every ten or twelve thousand years, not as a Messiah, but as a judge. He checks the work of his forerunners, assessing the level of human perception, the degree of their spirituality or absorption by matter. Depending on that, Shambala then returns a verdict, to be or not to be, for mankind.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if mankind in its majority is evaluated as a spiritually progressing society, then it is preserved. While if more of the beast, in other words, the material nature, predominates in it, then the same story of global cataclysms that affected previous civilizations is repeated. Less than one-tenth of the total people are left for the breeding of matter for the souls of the next civilizations. Mankind chooses the path for itself, while the actions of Shambala are just the consequences of that choice.”
“As I understood it,” Victor joined the conversation, “their main predestination is the spiritual development of humankind.”
“Almost right,” answered Sensei. “Their main predestination given from Heaven, in other words, from the Cosmic Hierarchy or God, call it as you wish, is the cultivation of the human soul during all cycles of its reincarnation. They actively help develop it when the spiritual nature awakens in a human.”
“I bet this egoistic world seems horrible, from the point of view of their spirituality,” I spoke my thoughts aloud.
Sensei grinned and continued, “Right, it’s not quite a gift. This reincarnation is similar to if a butterfly were stuffed into a caterpillar - that is inconvenient for both the butterfly and the caterpillar. But these are the rules. Each Bodhisattva should serve his time here, live an entire life. Any Bodhisattva is free to go to Nirvana any minute, though; it is a big temptation for them.”
“You once said that a Bodhisattva is a human who left Nirvana for the sake of humankind.”
“Certainly. That’s why this is a double temptation for him, because he felt this state of peak of unearthly happiness. You simply can’t imagine yourselves, what kind of a… feat it is to leave Nirvana and to come here. Metaphorically speaking, Bodhisattvas can be compared with those who are the best of the best volunteers that were sent to do the most crucial work. Bodhisattvas stay here for the sake of people, for the sake of the cultivation of human souls so that these souls can develop and become free, really free. Because our internal nature, our soul, strives for this every moment of life.”
Sensei glanced at his watch and said, “Alright guys, it’s time to start a meditation. Otherwise, we could continue debating until morning.”
I also looked at my watch. Time flew by in this conversation as if it were just one second. There was a strange feeling too, as if time were completely absent, as if it were the moment of eternity, slightly opening the curtain of its mysteries.
We performed the same meditation as last time, cleansing our intentions. I already started to feel more clearly the water streaming over edge of the jug, with some kind of wavy movement. After the training, the Teacher reminded us that we should permanently learn to control our thoughts and fish out negative parasites of consciousness. He also emphasized that we shouldn’t give in to our aggression, if it appears. And the most important thing, we should constantly cultivate in ourselves divine love by performing the Lotus Flower. Nikolai Andreevich remained in the glade while we said good-bye and went home.

31

I was so amazed by this knowledge that Sensei was so simply and lucidly telling us that I wrote down this whole conversation into my diary, marking out for myself the most important moments: “The sense of human existence is the perfection of the soul!!!” I felt this but wasn’t sure. Now, once again I thought that this was changing everything that I had known up to now and that I considered so valuable and important in life. I looked around and thought: “We really live life entirely for the body. Even at home, whatever you look at, everything exists for the service and satisfaction of the needs of the body. Books are probably the only exception. Of course, Sensei said once that all these attributes of civilization are necessary for us to have more time for the perfection of our souls. But how much among all this unnecessary stuff is completely redundant! And still for us it isn’t enough. We still want more. What for? Why? After all, tomorrow we could die and in that other world they will value what we have cultivated inside us and not how much dust we’ve gathered by the tireless work of our shell, half rotten in the earth.”
I went on to revalue everything, even at school. The girls, as usual, showed off what fashionable rags were bought for them and with evident envy told about what they saw on others. Listening to them, I was surprised with myself, because before I was just the same. I was chasing some kind of illusive fashion that didn’t completely suit me. But my megalomania was increasing, ,as at that time I had an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. In reality, though, fashions are only those things that nicely suit a person. Once fashionable clothes, after a momentary presentation, are now hanging as dead weight in my closet. Why does one human need so much stuff? What do I need it for? Maybe somewhere people don’t have anything to wear. In my own class, for example, there are three girls from poor families. Two of them didn’t have fathers because they had died in the mines. And the third one’s father was a drunkard, which is even worse. Why can’t I share all this stuff with them? They need it more than me.
I asked the advice of my mother, although I lied to her a bit, telling her that our school had organized a charity action. But my mother wasn’t against it. We even found shoes for the girls. I gathered all this and then had to solve another problem: how can it be given to them? Putting myself in their place, I considered that the best variant would be to ask my class teacher to pass the clothes to them as if from some charitable organization. I suppose that she liked this idea, because in a week the whole school, under the initiative of our teacher, announced a charitable action to benefit children from the city orphanage. Having heard this news, I recalled once again Sensei’s words that one kind thought and one kind deed give birth to a chain reaction of kind thoughts and kind deeds. I thought that if everyone could understand this and did whatever good deeds he could, then perhaps poverty and hunger would disappear in the world. Otherwise, it’s somehow shameful to be called civilized when nearby somebody is starving or extremely needy.
With such thoughts of universal love, brotherhood, and mutual aid, my body was embraced by some kind of