From The People’s Almanac #3 by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace [Bantam Books, Toronto, 1981] comes the story of Shambhala [Page 635 ff.], the Tibetan land that allegedly was the home of beings with superhuman powers.
Jannika Hurwitt, who provided the Almanac account, wrote that “… in the 1900s an article in an Indian newspaper, the Statesman, told of a British major who, camping in the Himalayas, saw a very tall, lightly clad man with long hair. Apparently noticing that he was being watched, the man leaped down the vertical slope and disappeared … the Tibetan with whom he was camping showed no surprise [calmly] explaining that he had seen one of the snowmen who guard [Shambhala].”
“A more detailed account of these “snowmen” guardians was given by Alexandra David-Neel, an explorer who spent 14 years in Tibet.”
She saw a man with extraordinary speed who had was gazing high up in space at some invisible distant object. “He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. [See previous post about Jumping Man] It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball, and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground.”
Ms. Hurwitt tells the story of Nicholas Roerich’s expedition, 1925-1926 [noted in my post about Wilhelm Reich].
Roerich and his colleagues saw a huge disk in the sky, which they watched with binoculars as it changed direction and disappeared behind Humboldt mountain.
“The Tibetan lamas [with] Roerich exclaimed ‘The sign of Shambhala!’”
“Two airships were also observed by British mountaineer Fran Smythe while on Everest in 1933. He recorded having seen two dark objects, one with squat wings and the other with a sort of beak, surrounded by a pulsating aura at an altitude of 26,000 ft. The most recent sighting was made near Shillong, Assam in India in 1967. A whirling disk hovered 650 ft. above the ground and then dived into a river, creating a huge vortex and a lot of noise. It then reappeared, ascended, and flew in a zigzag pattern over the jungle until it disappeared.”
Tibetan texts say the technology of Shambhala is highly advanced, its inhabitants using aircraft and cars that shuttle through a network of underground tunnels. Shambhalans have powers of clairvoyance, the ability to move at great speeds, and the ability to materialize and disappear at will.
The first stories of the mysterious place came from two Catholic missionaries who, around 1627 mentioned the “kingdom” in their letters sent home.
Madame Elena Petrovna Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society presented Shambhala to her acolytes in the late 1800s.
Ms. Hurwitt points to Western scholar Edwin Bernbaum, as the source of recent material about Shambhala, he having tried to locate its physical place, even conceding it “could exist on another planet or at the edge of our physical reality, but [believing] that the most likely explanation is that Shambhala was once a real kingdom which now has faded into the realm of myth.”
RR
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