The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision

by James Redfield

  When I finished, I didn’t wait for him to comment. I asked him about the surveillance.

  “I don’t know who they are,” he said. “I started to have the feeling I was being observed a few days ago. Then yesterday, I saw one or two of them at a distance. They’re very good.”

  I nodded, feeling nervous. I lifted the pages of translation by my leg and asked, “Who sent this to you?”

  “A friend who lives in Egypt,” Wil replied, “one of the foremost experts in ancient texts. I’ve known him a long time, and when we talked by phone he said it’s unquestionably authentic and probably dates back to the fourth or fifth century. He was sent only the first part of the Document, already translated, but he thinks it refers to our current time period, just like the old Prophecy did.”

  We exchanged glances.

  “There’s more,” Wil continued. “The Document says we’re in some kind of a race here. My friend said these fragments are popping up all over the world. Apparently, whoever is releasing this Document is sending selected parts to various people with some end in mind. That’s all I know. My friend and I were disconnected in the middle of the call. I haven’t been able to reach him since.”

  My mind was abuzz. The woman I saw at the Pub had a part of the Document and was going to Arizona. But where in Arizona? Was she in danger? Were we?

  The reality of the situation was sinking in. The Document was fascinating, but we had just seen that someone official also had an interest as well. Were they trying to restrict access to it? How far would they go? A pang of fear rushed through me.

  “Well, I guess our trip to Egypt is off,” I said, looking for humor.

  Wil grinned for a moment. “I had a feeling we might be going somewhere else.”

  Suddenly, he looked hard into the rearview mirror. Behind us was another SUV, a long way back.

  “I think this one’s following us,” he said.

  At this point Wil began a series of strategic moves. First, he asked to borrow my smart phone and pulled up the map of the local area, turned the phone off, and pulled out the battery. Then he slowed down, which made the SUV slow down as well in order to keep its distance behind us. After a minute, Will quickly sped up, a move that opened a lot more space between us and the SUV and allowed Wil to take the next exit unseen.

  He took an immediate right onto a small paved road, then a left onto a gravel road that I knew wouldn’t have been on the map.

  “How did you know about this road?” I asked.

  He shot me a look but said nothing. The old road was full of potholes and ruts, but it eventually led to another paved road that in turn took us back to the freeway again, about five miles farther north. When we hit the ramp it became clear that the freeway behind us was completely backed up. We could see blue lights and a fire truck parked at the point of congestion.

  Wil sped down the ramp and onto what was an almost empty road. Everyone else behind us, including those in the SUV, was completely blocked.

  I was staring at Wil. In the past I had seen him do many things, but nothing this rapid.

  “How did you know to make all those turns?” I asked.

  He looked at me and asked in return, “How did you know to stop at the Pub so that we could connect with each other later?”

  “Okay,” I acknowledged. “Intuition. But what you did seemed so fast. I’ve never done anything like that.”

  Light from the oncoming cars swept over his face. “I’ve been talking to people who have seen different parts of this Document. It describes many abilities humans haven’t developed yet. That’s what this Document seems to be all about. Each part is devoted to what it calls the ‘Integration’ of spiritual knowledge, and it refers directly to the insights of the old Prophecy.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That would mean the author of this Document, whoever it was, had to have known about the Prophecy, way back then.”

  “Yeah.” I think it’s some kind of companion piece, like a guide. My friend said there are eleven parts of this Document floating around out there, each devoted to a particular Integration of knowledge. And it talks about a Twelfth….”

  “It reveals what the Twelfth Insight is?” I asked.

  “Apparently, but no one seems to have that part yet, or at least no one is talking about it. The Document says that each Integration must be actualizd in order, one after the other, beginning with the First: learning to sustain Synchronicity.”

  He paused and looked at me, adding, “That has always been a problem.”

  I knew what he was getting at. Everyone glimpses Synchronicity. The challenge, just as in my case, was to sustain the experience and keep the flow going. Of all the difficulties with Synchronicity, this was the one most people voiced. Synchronistic experience seemed to come into our lives almost as a tease, stay a while, and then end.

  Turning around, I gazed behind us again to check the road, finding it still clear. I remained nervous.

  “I’m not sure I want to get involved with this Document, Wil. It may be too dangerous.”

  He nodded. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to go to a police station and get these people off of us. Maybe I can help get the word out after the contents are known.”

  “What if that doesn’t happen? And the Twelfth is never found?”

  I looked at him and smiled. We’d been though a lot in the past, and Wil had never steered me wrong. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

  “Look,” he continued. “All that we’ve discovered, the whole search for the truth about spiritual experience, it may be coming down to this moment. You decide, but at least let me tell you what’s at stake.”

  Wil slowed the car and exited the freeway, saying he wanted to concentrate. He noticed a little side road just off the ramp and backed in and turned the lights off.

  “The Document speaks very directly,” he began. “It says that during the current period of history, the easy material life will get harder, with widespread financial and social disruption. Yet it proclaims that all the challenges are evoking an even greater spiritual awakening in us, where we can realize many new abilities and perceptions.

  “But each of us has to make a decision. Will we embrace this deeper spirituality, or go into fear and foreboding? It is a challenge of courage, but also of practicality. In some sense, events are forcing us to put our beliefs into action. The only way to survive the level of turmoil we are facing in the world is to pursue life in a different way.

  “It says the first ability that will manifest is our being able to sustain Synchronistic Flow. When the mysterious coincidences come more frequently, we’ll eventually learn that we are guided, even protected, from the dangers of this historical period.”

  He paused and caught my eye in the dim light. “There’s more. The Document says that those of us, early on, who discover how to sustain this flow and integrate this knowledge will make it easier for others to open up to it later, just because of the influence we have.

  “But on the other hand, if too many of us fail to move forward in this regard, the knowledge might not be actualized at all and could be lost to history.”

  “It says that?”

  “Yes, exactly that.”

  He smiled at me in a sympathetic way.

  “That’s how important it is,” he continued. “Yet we all have to make our own individual choices.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “The Document focuses on the Synchronistic experience first,” Wil continued, “because it is the phenomenon that leads each of us forward. If we make this experience more consistent, then we realize our lives are trying to take off in a destined direction. We feel more alive.”

  Exactly, I thought. More alive. I’d used that exact expression earlier to describe my own experience. And because I had just been thinking of the release of the Document, I knew the meeting was beyond chance when I saw the women and heard their conversation. I was meant to be there somehow. Then, of course, the sk
eptic appeared and the experience was lost. I could feel my energy drop even now, just thinking about it.

  Wil seemed to notice. “When we enter a flow of Synchronicity, clarity and aliveness is what we get. When we fall out of the flow, it is what we lose.

  “The point is, we have the opportunity now to finally reach a higher clarity about not just the phenomenon of Synchronicity, but also about our entire spiritual nature. And if we don’t, then all our futures, and the futures of our children, could go in an entirely different direction.”

  He paused as a car moved along the road in front of us. It passed us and seemed to be of no concern.

  “So the idea is this: we find the pieces of this Document, one at a time. Each part builds upon the previous one, so they integrate seamlessly together, yielding both a greater understanding and a higher consciousness, and all these new abilities.

  “The Document says when we integrate all eleven, we get the final download: the Twelfth. After that, we’ll understand not just the full picture of spirituality in this life, but we’ll be able live it most of the time.”

  Another car went by.

  “But again,” Wil continued, “the First Integration gets the whole thing going, because it involves learning how to stay in the flow of Synchronicity that will lead us forward.”

  “What does it say about staying in Synchronistic Flow?” I asked.

  “It says all we have to do is learn to remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “That this flow is possible! That it exists! In the past, when you first read the Insights of the Prophecy, and we were all thinking and talking about Synchronicity, didn’t it seem to happen a lot? Well, that was literally because we had the expectation of it in mind. That’s all it takes. All you have to do is remember to remember.”

  I had to think about this for a moment. Was it that simple? Earlier, as I was driving to the Pub, I certainly let go and began thinking about the reality of Synchronicity. And yes, I suddenly fell right into it.

  “In practice,” Wil clarified, “it boils down to consciously expecting the next Synchronicity to come, which means we should go into a posture of ‘expectant alertness,’ a mood that’s not that easy right now, because we always think we’re behind, with too much to do. But staying in this state of alertness helps us immediately, because it has the effect of ‘slowing down’ time.”

  I knew that was exactly true. Anytime you are expecting something and want it to hurry up and happen, it takes forever to arrive. Time does seem to slow down.

  “Slowing down time is a good thing right now,” he added, “because so many of us feel overwhelmed by problems coming at us at light speed. The more we can slow everything down—and wait on a Synchronistic event to show us the way—the easier life is to handle.

  “So, to begin, we have to put a sticky note on the bathroom mirror, or tell a friend to call us first thing in the morning, anything to remind ourselves to set up an expectation for Synchronicity first thing each day. Eventually, it becomes a habit. And once all the mysterious coincidences are happening and our destiny seems to be unfolding, all that is left is to stay in that flow.”

  He paused dramatically.

  “And to do that,” he went on, “we have to learn to communicate what’s going on with us to others.”

  “What?”

  “Think about what happens when we lose the Flow,” he explained. “Doesn’t it occur because we hit some situation where we have to interact with others who aren’t in a flow, and who can’t readily see the meanings we are seeing? The effect is to knock us out of it altogether.”

  I thought about what happened to me with the skeptic. It was certainly true in that case.

  “When I’m in the flow,” I said, “I usually try to get away from most people, so they can’t knock me out of it.”

  “I know,” Wil said in a mock accusatory tone.

  “Are you saying,” I asked, “that I should have taken the time to talk with that skeptic, even though that’s not what I wanted to do?”

  “No, I’m suggesting that you should have been open and truthful with him, maybe asking him to wait a minute while you talked to the people at the table. He was needling you, but you didn’t lose your flow because of him. You lost it because you didn’t find a way to honestly communicate who you were and what you were doing.”

  “I don’t think he was interested in hearing anything from me.”

  “You’re missing the point. I’m not telling you to defend yourself or to convince him of anything. You just have to give him the truth of the situation as you see it, with the main purpose being to keep yourself centered in the flow. If he’d walked away or thought you were rude, so be it, but you would have held your flow.”

  Again he paused dramatically, then said, “And by handling it that way, you would have also stayed open to whether he had some information for you! You know from the old Prophecy in Peru that you must treat his perceived interruption not as a threat but as a potential Synchronicity itself—in the long run, perhaps being of equal importance to what you were learning from the woman.”

  The reminder both jolted and invigorated me at the same time. If I was getting all this right, then telling the truth of one’s situation, whatever it happened to be, kept the flow going—and primarily because it kept one centered in the clarity of one’s own deeper life experience. Again, I had to question whether it could be this simple.

  When I voiced the question to Wil, he chuckled and said, “It’s as simple and as hard as that. And if you want to follow through with finding the Integrations, you have to start by concentrating on telling the absolute truth, to yourself and others, about what is happening to you—no matter how esoteric it gets.”

  As I continued to think, Wil started the car and pulled onto the freeway again. After a short distance, he moved into the left lane to avoid a car parked on the right shoulder. Inside was the silhouette of a lone driver. Light flickered across his face.

  “That’s him!” I stammered, not quite believing it. “The skeptic at the Pub. That’s him.”

  Wil looked back. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  As we watched, the man pulled onto the freeway and took the first exit he came to. Wil glanced questioningly at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You look like you’re more in the flow now. Perhaps you’re being given another chance.”

  “You mean to talk with him?”

  “Well,” Wil said, looking at the dash, “you wanted to know where the woman you saw was going. And you said he was talking to her in the parking lot. We need gas, so we could go back and find him.”

  I looked at Wil and nodded, not exactly liking it. “Okay, I’m in. But I’m not sure I’ll know what to say to this guy.”

  “Just tell him the truth,” Wil said, “that you believe meaningful coincidences are real, and occur for a reason… and this is the second time you’ve crossed paths with him.”

  CONSCIOUS CONVERSATION

  We turned around and took the same exit and pulled up to a huge, well-lit truck stop. A dozen trucks were lined up behind a main building that housed a restaurant, showers, and store. Only a few cars were at the gasoline pumps. The skeptic’s brown rental was one of them.

  “Remember,” Wil offered, “carry the attitude of expecting Synchronicity all the way into the conversation. I like the movie analogy. Synchronistic Flow feels as though you are slowing down and increasing your feeling that you are the center, or star, of your own unfolding movie. Keep this centered clarity and you’ll know what to say.”

  Wil smiled and pulled the Cruiser up to a pump directly across from the skeptic, then made one more comment.

  “The Document says,” he added, “that if you commit to holding your truth, it includes all the ideas that come up intuitively to say to him, even if you’ve never thought of the ideas before.”

  I nodded and got out and began putting gas in the Cruiser, feeling that numinou
s sensation again, as though this was going to be an immensely important conversation for everything that was going to happen later.

  The skeptic was directly across from me, busy fueling his own vehicle. Finally, he spotted me and laughed out loud.

  “Well, it’s the lover of coincidences,” he said. “What a Synchronicity this is!”

  “Maybe,” I said. “We passed you back on the freeway, and we turned around to talk to you.”

  I couldn’t quite believe that I had started off that directly, but it did seem to help me stay centered.

  “And what do you think we have to talk about?” he asked.

  His tone was sarcastic, yet semifriendly, and I suddenly realized he was speaking in the jousting style favored by scientists, a mode of talking that is more like a friendly debate. The key element of this style is to take great care not to inadvertently confirm some idea or theory held by the other party. In the world of Science, to affirm a colleague’s position is never something to be taken lightly. It has to be earned. So the idea is to be very skeptical at first and to check out whether the person is carrying the proper scientific attitude.

  If the other party crosses the line and takes a position that is poorly thought out or too speculative, then the conversation is over immediately. On the other hand, if the other person is being logical and tentative with his pronouncements, then the debate can go on. I had always thought communicating in this manner was boring and time consuming, but I knew I could do it.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, “whether we have anything to talk about or not. I guess we’ll have to see. I’m trying to make contact with the woman we saw back at the Pub. She was talking about an old Document, and I noticed you speaking with her outside, later. Did she tell you where in Arizona she was going?”

  “What’s your interest in this document?” he asked guardedly.

  “I’m interested in what it says about spirituality.”