The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision

by James Redfield

  He looked at me sharply. “You think it’s going to confirm your ideas about Synchronicity?”

  “The part we have has already done that.”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t give this kind of writing too much weight. The best it could do is add to our knowledge of some ancient people’s mythology and superstition.”

  “Yeah, but you can compare what it says to your own experience and go from there.”

  “In order to do what?”

  “To identify phenomena to be investigated that may have been missed before.”

  He gazed at me questioningly.

  “Look,” I said, “I believe that there’s more to the Universe than a strictly skeptical attitude allows into experience. Sometimes you have to bracket your skepticism long enough to fully experience a new phenomenon. Don’t you ever wonder if there is something real and universal behind people’s spiritual experiences?”

  He gave me a hint of a smile. I wasn’t convincing him, but I could tell he liked my tact.

  “We need Science,” I added. “But we need it to look at everything.”

  “What do you know of Science?” he asked, giving me a superior look. “Science is a very precise process where individuals explore and draw conclusions about the nature of the world around them. And its activity is very precise: one scientist suggests that something in nature works a certain way, and other scientists try to refute that hypothesis with other facts they think are true. Slowly, consensus is reached about the issue. In turn, this conclusion about reality is replaced with something that is even more true, and so on. That’s how scientific fact, and the resulting social reality that flows from it, is established. It’s a precise, orderly process.”

  He looked away and added, “At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, lately a lot of corruption has happened: moneyed interests such as big pharmaceutical companies and food processors have taken over the medical schools and university departments with big grants, and now they get the results they want from studies. Other industries do the same thing, but health and food are the worst. It’s pitiful.”

  I thought of the writings of Dr. Russell Blaylock, who talks about why dangerous additives still remain in our food, then realized something in a flash: this skeptic I’m talking to is an idealist.

  Something else came into my mind to say, and I recalled Wil stressing that such ideas had to be voiced.

  “Look,” I stated, “maybe the key is heightening public awareness of the scientific process, and then applying it to every part of our world. What if this document is right about Synchronicity being a part of the natural order of things? Shouldn’t it be investigated with the same vigor as a star or bacteria?”

  Something about what I said irritated him, and he took the gas nozzle out of his car and slammed it back in its place at the pump.

  “W-w-what I’m saying,” he stammered, “is that something like this document can’t be trusted. Synchronicity is too subjective. The problem with Science now is that the emphasis on basic truth is being lost. Once we start allowing too much speculation or corruption, the culture can slip into fantasy thinking and even delusionary movements.”

  He was looking at me hard. “Don’t you see that civilization is hanging by a thread? It only takes so many people losing a grip on the basic laws of nature to undermine logical thinking and scientifically established reality altogether. And if that happens we fall back into superstition and a new dark age.”

  I nodded and said, “But what if a science of spirituality could be logical and orderly?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he shook his head and walked into the building to pay. Wil was still seated behind the wheel and smiling at me. He had heard the entire conversation through the open car window.

  “Aren’t you going to get into this?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “I think it’s yours to finish.”

  When the scientist came out of the building, I approached him again.

  “Look,” I said, “you’re right. No one wants a new dark age. But let me pose the issue in another way: what would it take for scientists like you to be able to study spiritual phenomena in a way that is orderly and logical?”

  For a long moment he seemed to be genuinely considering my question. “I don’t know…. We would have to discover something like the natural laws of spirituality—”

  He stopped and shook his head, then waved me off.

  “Listen,” he said. “I really don’t have time for any more speculation. Believe me, none of this is going to happen.”

  I nodded and then introduced myself. He shook my hand and said his name was Dr. John Coleman.

  “Enjoyed the conversation,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you another time.”

  He chuckled at that and then said, “The woman you were asking about… her name is Rachel Banks. She was going to a town north of Phoenix, a little place called Sedona.”

  I sat up straight in the passenger seat, struggling to wake up. As we drove along, sunlight from behind us was just beginning to fill the car, and the sweet smell of Oklahoma farmland filled my nostrils. Wil nodded when he saw me stirring, then immediately looked back at the road, appearing to be deep in thought.

  Which was fine with me; I was talked out. Because we both knew Sedona well, Wil and I had conversed late into the night as we traveled west. For years, the town had been a hotbed of spiritual thought, as it was situated in the famous red rock hills of Native American lore. Because the energy was so strong there, it was claimed by some that the town had more houses of worship, new age centers, and artists per square mile than any place in America.

  The question that had most intrigued us last night concerned Rachel’s motivations. Why were her intuitions pointing to Sedona? Was it because one would likely find more people talking about such writings there? Or was it because one could understand esoteric information in general at a deeper level just by being in those hills—the famous “Sedona effect”?

  I shook off the thoughts. All I wanted to do at this point was look out at the landscape. We had traveled from the mountains of Georgia and Tennessee to the flatlands of Oklahoma, and now the sky was big and blue in the morning light. Munching on nuts and apples that Wil had packed for breakfast, I watched the scenery go by for a while.

  When I awakened fully, I noticed two neat stacks of pages on top of the dashboard in front of me. I looked over at Wil, figuring he had placed the stacks in front of me for a reason. He kept his eyes on the road but lifted one eyebrow, which made me chuckle. I reached over, grabbed the stack on the left, and began to read.

  The pages described the First Integration almost exactly as Wil had relayed it earlier, and then reiterated that once Synchronicity was being sustained, one should be on high alert—for it was that mysterious flow that would reveal the other Integrations.

  Reading on, the Document divided the twelve total Integrations into two groups. It called the first five Integrations the “Foundation” of spiritual consciousness, and the remainder it called the “Rise to Sacred Influence.”

  Rise to Influence? I had no idea what that meant, but I remembered that Wil had said those of us pursuing the Integrations now would make it easier for others to do so later because of some kind of mysterious influence.

  Coming to the end of the first stack, I picked up the other stack of text, which began to address the Second Integration. This step up in consciousness begins, it said, when we realize that human conversation, regardless of the subject, is always an exchange of outlook, or worldview—and thus is the basic mechanism of human evolution, taking us from one historical level of knowledge to the next.

  When human interaction is done while in centered, Synchronistic truth, this process of exchanging worldviews is lifted into full consciousness. It called this more aware interaction Conscious Conversation.

  I looked over at Wil again and said, “Conscious Con
versation. Do you know what this means exactly?”

  He looked at me as though I was kidding. “It’s what you were engaging in when you talked with Coleman—only there was one part missing.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  He nodded for me to read on, and in the very next passage, the Document said the level of conversation, and the consciousness of the participants, are elevated when both people are aware of the “historical context” surrounding the interchange.

  I looked back at Wil. “So it’s referring to the second Insight of the old Celestine Prophecy?”

  “That’s right,” he replied. “Do you remember what the Second Insight is?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I think so.”

  I looked away, my mind drifting into an intense contemplation of the question. The Second Insight was essentially an understanding of the longer history of Western society, in particular the psychological shift that happened at the beginning of the Modern, secular age. In essence, it marked an awakening in consciousness—one we’ve been having trouble holding on to ever since.

  The old Prophecy had predicted we would one day be able to keep this longer history fully in mind as a surrounding context for our daily activities. And when we could, this historical understanding, in itself, would completely change our individual lives. It would keep us fully awake to the spiritual side of existence.

  The Modern worldview, I knew, had begun just after the fall of the dark Medieval period of history. In those times, there was no science in the West, no independent thought to speak of, and very little knowledge of natural causes. The men of the powerful Catholic Church ruled people’s minds and decreed that all the events we now call natural operated solely through the hand of God—including birth, all the challenges of life and illnesses, death, and what came after, Heaven or Hell. The churchmen declared themselves the only interpreters of God’s will. And they fought hard for centuries to disallow any challenge to this authority.

  But then the Renaissance began, motivated by an increasing distrust of the churchmen and a growing awareness that our real knowledge of the world around us was woefully incomplete. Other influences quickly followed: the invention of the printing press, a greater awareness of the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, and the discoveries of the early astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo, which contradicted the astronomy espoused by the churchmen.

  When the Protestant Reformation occurred—a direct rejection of Papal authority—the structures of the Medieval world began to completely break down, and with them, the established reality of the people.

  Precisely here, I knew, was where the Modern age began. For centuries, the churchmen had dictated a strictly theological purpose for existence and for natural events. And then that picture of life had systematically eroded, leaving humans in a state of deep existential uncertainty, especially concerning their spirituality. If the churchmen, who had always dictated the facts of spiritual reality, were wrong, then what was right?

  The optimistic thinkers of that day had a solution. We would follow the model of the ancient Greeks, they said. We would commission Science to go out and investigate this suddenly new world we found ourselves in. And in the enthusiasm of the day, everything was on the table, including our deepest spiritual questions, such as Why are we here? What happens after death? And is there a plan and destiny for humankind?

  With this new mandate, Science was sent to look at the world objectively and to report back. Over the centuries it wonderfully mapped the physical realities of nature, from the movement of galaxies and planets to the biology of our bodies, the dynamics of weather systems, and the secrets of food production. But it did not quickly return with an objective analysis of our spiritual situation.

  At this crucial point, we made a critical psychological decision. In the absence of existential answers, we decided to turn our attention to something else in the meantime. While we were waiting, we would focus on settling into this new world of ours, devoting ourselves to the betterment of humankind. We abated our uncertainty by striving to make our secular world more abundant and secure.

  And that’s what we did, creating in the following centuries the greatest surge in material abundance the world had ever seen. But even as we put our energies to bettering our physical circumstances, waiting as we were for the higher questions to be answered, Science itself was pushing that higher mandate further into the distance.

  In fact, as the centuries proceeded, Science began to ponder such questions less and less. In a sense, these inquiries had become a victim of Science’s success in the physical realm. The more it succeeded in explaining the outer world—and created new technologies that increased the population’s level of security—the less important spiritual questions became. Let the religions fight it out over the larger issues, scientists began to think. We’ll stick to the physical world.

  By the time the theories of Isaac Newton were filtering through Science, the dismissal was almost complete. Newton established the mathematics that defined the universe as operating strictly on its own, following basic mechanical laws, in a completely predictable manner—like a giant machine. Now, the Universe could be regarded from a completely secular perspective. God didn’t move the stars in the sky. Gravity did.

  The Modern, secular, materialistic worldview had been born and, pushed by Science, was exported around the planet. The idea of God, or of a deeper spiritual experience for that matter, now seemed not only unnecessary but unlikely as well. And as for the inner evidence for a spiritual reality—higher states of consciousness, Synchronicity, premonitions and intuitive guidance, Afterlife experiences—these could all be written off as pathological hallucination or religious delusion and removed from the debate completely. Even many religious institutions, suffering from diminished attendance, became ever more oriented toward secular, social activities rather than toward any discussion of real spiritual experience.

  And as science and other institutions went, so did the individual. The world seemed so normal and manageable and certain that such higher questioning no longer seemed valid and it began to be pushed out of everyday consciousness as well.

  Just work hard, we told ourselves, and focus on bettering your life. Enjoy all the frills and goodies of modern existence. Forget about whether knowing the purpose of life might give you higher guidance along the way, or bring more enlightened relationships with others. Just stay focused on the everyday stuff and you’ll feel fine, right up to the end. If ever the prospect of death raises its ugly head, or questions squeeze into your mind about what happens after, just get busy with the secular action again until the thoughts are lost in the din.

  Precisely here, I knew, we could see the real psychological truth of our longer history. We had launched Science to go out and discover the truth of our spiritual existence, and when it didn’t return, we dedicated ourselves to improving our earthly conditions. And then, gradually, everyone forgot what we were waiting for. Slowly, our preoccupation with the secular world became a full-fledged, psychological obsession.

  And like any obsessive behavior designed to repress something—in our case, the missing answers about the true purpose of life—it takes ever more frenzied activity to keep from remembering what haunts us.

  By the time the Modern worldview peaked, sometime in the later twentieth century, such obsessive behavior had made the careers of dozens of existential psychologists, who mapped out the vast variety of ways we kept ourselves from waking up: compulsive working, shopping, decorating, arranging, eating, gambling, drugging, sexing, smoking, running, exercising, gossiping, celebrity and sports watching, and the endless search for personal recognition from others—our fifteen minutes of fame.

  These obsessions could be found everywhere. And they included, especially in recent years, the most ironic compulsion of all: religious fanaticism, where people kept themselves asleep to real spiritual experience by concentrating only on the doctrines and trappings of a particular religion—even to th
e point of violently attempting to force these assumptions on everyone else.

  Then, thankfully, as the years progressed, we slowly began to wake up. Over the past few decades, something, indeed, had popped in the collective human psyche. Why? Perhaps it was the inherent inability of repression to endure, or maybe it was the steady influence of the human potential theorists of the seventies and eighties. Another reason could have been the sheer weight of numbers of the baby boom generation, coming to peak influence in the nineties—and questioning, as they did, all aspects of human culture. Certainly, the old Prophecy found in Peru had some level of influence as well.

  In any case, our preoccupation with the material life began to collapse. Like drowning men reaching the surface, we began to gasp for the air of higher meaning. Since then, in fits and starts, more people have glimpsed a new world of wonder around them. As a larger culture, we began, finally, to discover the experience of Synchronicity.

  This reawakening, I knew, was the real historical context surrounding our current lives. We are waking up from our secular obsession and taking up where we left off. We want to know our true spiritual situation on this planet. And while those still obsessed with the secular might declare such a quest impossible, intuition says otherwise.

  Suddenly, I realized Wil was staring at me. He had been driving along, waiting patiently for my reverie to be over. When I met his eyes, he humorously looked at his watch, making me laugh out loud.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s the way my mind works.”

  He nodded. “So I presume you remembered the Second Insight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did it say about a more truthful historical context surrounding our interaction?”

  “It says we’re waking up from a five-hundred-year-long preoccupation with the material and secular world, wanting to know what life is really about.”

  Wil beamed. “That’s right. And the Document says anyone who sustains Synchronicity, and remembers the context of awakening, will be guided into a flow of Conscious Conversation. And hence will become part of a worldwide consensus-building process to discover the truth of our spiritual nature.”