Observations placeholder
MacLaine, Shirley - The lama with a premonition of impending trouble
Identifier
026432
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Out on a Limb – Shirley MacLaine
….. I was interested in mind over matter, in metaphysical phenomena in meditational isolation, and certainly in expanded consciousness. But how could I find it for myself? Or was I already aware without recognizing it?
For instance, I met a lama in the Himalayas who had been meditating in near isolation for twenty years. I climbed 14,000 feet to his mountainside cave and when I arrived, he gave me some tea and a piece of saffron scarf that he had blessed to protect me, which he said would be necessary because I was soon going to run into trouble.
He was right.
On the way down the mountain, a man-eating leopard stalked me and my Sherpa guide. And one day later I found myself caught in a bizarre Himalayan coup d'etat; I was arrested and held at bayonet point for two days while my captors tried to take away my guide and throw him in the dzong (a Himalayan dungeon where people usually died).
The experience was like a bad grade-B movie-unbelievable to anyone who hadn’t been there. To me, it was real and the meditating lama had been right. About the danger anyway. Even if the scarf only provided moral support.
But was his premonition or foreknowledge spiritual? I hadn't ever really thought in those terms. I was more of a pragmatist. I had respect for things I didn’t understand, but I was more comfortable relating to those things on an intellectual or scientific level, which seemed more real to me.