The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision

by James Redfield

  I looked at Wil. “Won’t that take forever?”

  Instead of responding, he nodded toward the rest of the Document in my hand. When I began reading, I realized I had only one page left, which was torn off at the bottom and contained only one paragraph. It said that each person who holds the truth of his Synchronistic journey, while listening for the truth in another’s journey, helps to build a new, more truthful worldview. And because of this honoring of evolving truth, that person exudes a special influence on the world. All we had to do was keep our energy up.

  I perked up, thinking again of the Document’s reference to the last group of Integrations we would discover as a Rise to Influence.

  I looked back over at Wil. “It’s the centering of ourselves in truth that creates the Influence, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “We’ll find out once we discover the rest of this Integration.”

  Indeed. I had no doubt. We were only on the Second Integration, yet everything was occurring just as the Document had said it would. The First Integration showed us that expecting Synchronicity and telling the absolute truth to others kept these mysterious coincidences coming. And now the Second Integration seemed to be saying that if everyone was doing that, and thus staying awake, we would discover what we needed to know. The only things mentioned that weren’t fully clarified yet were the idea of influence and the cryptic remark about “keeping our energy up.”

  Suddenly, Wil was pulling the Cruiser over to the side of the road.

  “It’s your turn to drive,” he said.

  All morning, I drove west. The big sky had stayed blue, and the sunshine vivid, over hundreds of miles of wheat fields and pastureland. For hours I just gazed out on the flat horizon until, at one point, I felt myself get slightly bored and hungry.

  Just before noon, I stopped at a roadside gas station and filled up the Cruiser with gas. Unable to resist, I bought a packaged apple pie from the counter and ate it slowly as I drove. It tasted really good, maybe too good. Within twenty minutes my head began to hurt and I felt a sudden drop in energy. The funk lasted for several hours. When Wil finally woke up, I told him what I’d done.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You, the disciple of Blaylock, ate a mass-processed pie right off the shelf. You know better than that.”

  I knew he was talking about the problem with glutamates that Blaylock railed against. Glutamates, MSG-type substances resulting from the processing of various proteins and oils, are often added to processed foods, mainly because they, like MSG itself, are taste enhancers. They don’t have a taste themselves, but the first bite sends immediate signals to the brain that you are eating the tastiest thing in the world, despite what are probably very bad ingredients.

  The food industry says they’re not harmful, but according to some experts, glutamates have been proved to inflame the brain and disrupt other organs, contributing to a myriad of modern diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and especially obesity.

  “Let me guess the symptoms,” Wil said. “Maybe a little nagging headache, tired eyes, low energy, absolutely no inspiration to do anything. All for a small initial hit of taste euphoria.”

  He shook his head. “Eating is one of the most obsessive things we do in the Modern world. If your particular feel-good distraction is food, it by definition has to taste really good, because otherwise it won’t give you that pacified and satisfied feeling that comes when glutamate receptors in the brain are activated. The food makers find a way to artificially do that for you with glutamates.

  “The big problem,” he went on, “is not just the health impact. It’s how it affects your consciousness. You can’t keep your energy up and stay alert spiritually if you are drugged.”

  He stopped and looked at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The Document states that keeping our energy up is important to developing influence.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  He glanced over and caught my eye. “Food is the first level of energy we allow into our consciousness, so it’s basic to integrating a higher mastery over life. And the ironic thing is that real food, the kind that’s organic and pure, and freshly picked, stimulates those same receptors in the brain, and gives us just as much natural euphoria—without bringing us down later. Did you know that most people have never tasted a fresh-picked organic vegetable? Most of what we buy in regular stores is weeks old and stone dead.”

  At just this moment, Wil abruptly stopped talking and was staring at the top of an exit ramp we were passing. He shook his head.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “There was an SUV parked at that last exit. It happened last night as well.”

  “You think they’re still following us?”

  “Not following us, just observing. They must be tracking us with a satellite or something.”

  “What? That would mean these people are highly connected with the government.”

  “That’s right. But at least they don’t seem to want to detain us. They could have done that anytime after daylight. They just want to know where we are going for some reason.”

  I looked Wil in the eyes. “You think it’s the Document they’re interested in?”

  He nodded. “Looks that way.”

  For the rest of the day, we didn’t talk much. I periodically felt anxious about our safety, but each time I managed to shrug it off and recover my waiting-for-Synchronicity attitude. At this point, I felt there was no alternative to pursuing this Document, at least for a while longer. The only effect I saw on Wil was that he became hypervigilant about finding clean food.

  “You getting poisoned,” he said to me, “was a reminder.”

  Every time we stopped for gas, he’d ask for the location of organic food stores and farmer’s markets, and we were able to shop at several. At each mealtime, we’d exit at a truck stop and fire up the lightweight propane cooker Wil carried in his pack. In fifteen minutes we’d have enough steamed vegetables for a great, nutritious meal. After twenty-four hours of this, I felt incredibly energized and clear thinking. I could even see with greater acuity.

  By nightfall we were in Albuquerque, where we eased into an enclosed garage owned by a friend of Wil’s and had the vehicle and all our belongings scanned for surveillance devices. Everything was clean. Afterward, we spent the night at a small hotel nearby, which we paid for in cash, and rose early the next morning to drive to Arizona.

  At midday, we began to notice the vehicles again, and by midafternoon, we took the exit to Sedona, driving right by one of the SUVs sitting in plain sight.

  “They want us to see them,” Wil commented.

  “Who are these people?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But you can bet that sooner or later they’re going to tell us.”

  I just shook my head and tried to focus on the red rock hills we were driving through. Entering the Sedona area was always a reminder that some places are pure power spots. If you’re clear enough to sense it, driving through the little town of Oak Creek, and then up into Sedona proper, is a journey into a higher world.

  It feels like pure aliveness and clarity, and as you gaze out at the spectacular hills and formations surrounding the small town, you immediately feel a change in your perception. Everything around you stands out more, and the Synchronicity literally explodes in frequency, just by virtue of being in this place.

  We drove slowly along the main street leading uptown, looking around at the people on the sidewalks. There seemed to be a lot of tourists and locals, and judging from their dress and demeanor, people from out of town who weren’t tourists. They looked like serious trekkers who, like us, were looking for something. For a while we cruised around uptown seeing what might happen, and for a moment, I felt as though I was about to run into someone of importance. Yet nothing occurred.

  Since our food had run out, I suggested we drive west toward the sinking sun and stop at the New Frontier Grocery for a salad. When we arrived, instead of
parking, Wil just let me out, telling me he wanted to go look for some Hopi friends of his who lived in the area. I went in and ordered my salad and one for Wil to go, then sat down at a table in the corner to eat.

  I had almost finished when someone caught my eye at the door—it was Coleman. He hadn’t indicated he was coming to Sedona when we talked at the truck stop. But here he was, walking straight over to me, like a man on a mission.

  “I saw you come in,” he said, pulling some loose papers out of his briefcase. “Have you seen this? It’s part of the Document you’ve been talking about.”

  I quickly looked it over, and indeed it was the same passages about the Second Integration I’d read earlier, but it included ten more pages I hadn’t seen before.

  “Where did you get this?”

  He shook his head and smiled in amazement. “I hadn’t been here ten minutes last night when I ran into your lady, Rachel.”

  “She’s not my lady,” I protested.

  “It was just a manner of speaking. Anyway, we’re staying at the same hotel. Then later, I came down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee and overheard two people talking. When I got closer, I realized they were talking about this Document.

  “I walked up and introduced myself, and it turns out they are scientists. Do you believe that? And they were discussing the very question you posed earlier: how real scientists could study the topic of spirituality. And that’s not all. They had the first and second parts of the Document with them and were relating it to an old Prophecy that became known years ago.”

  He laughed out loud. “You think my mind was blown or what? The more I talked to these guys, the more we found we had in common. We all took to one another immediately and wound up talking half the night. And guess what? Early this morning, we hiked out into the desert, and I got it! I understand that Synchronicity is real, and how to sustain it, and that we’re waking up to systematically explore our spiritual nature again. They gave me a copy of the Second Integration. I wasn’t surprised when I saw you again.”

  He was full of energy, talking ninety miles an hour about having all this Synchronicity. I chuckled. This was the typical Sedona effect that everyone talks about.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Read it.”

  I started where I had left off with Wil’s copy, finding that it continued on the same point, emphasizing the importance of Conscious Conversation for bringing in a new consensus about spiritual experience.

  “Do you see what this is saying?” he interrupted. “It’s not using the precise words, but my new scientist friends and I agree. It calls for applying the scientific method to our individual search for spiritual truth. Everything it says to do is what good scientists do already.

  “This process has yielded all the basic laws of physical reality, from Thales to Newton to Einstein, and I see now how it can be applied to the inner experience of spirituality. For instance, consider the phenomenon of Synchronicity. Because it feels the same for everyone, we can discuss it and compare notes and reach consensus about how it works.”

  I was just listening, not believing I was talking to the same person. Even the basic expressions on his face were different. Instead of continuing to frown and debunk spirituality, he had experienced something he couldn’t explain from his old point of view, and had snapped awake, just that quickly.

  “Listen,” he said. “I owe my interest in all this to you. If I hadn’t said something to you at the Pub, or if you hadn’t asked how Science might investigate Synchronicity and spirituality, I might never have seen the truth of it. I wasn’t even intending to come to Sedona until I talked to you at the gas station.”

  He smiled at me, then continued. “You know, I haven’t been very successful as a scientist. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I was fired from MIT because of my opposition to commercial interests buying particular outcomes of studies. But the idea of engaging in a method of inquiry that’s honest and dedicated to truth, that’s what I’ve always been about. You’ve really had an influence on me.”

  Influence, I thought, that word again.

  He nodded toward the pages I was still holding. “And this last part, it fits exactly with something I’ve been fascinated with for a long time, as though that part of my life was preparing me for all this.”

  I gave him a puzzled look.

  “The Document speaks,” he said, “of something Immanuel Kant advocated centuries ago with his idea of a categorical imperative.”

  I nodded. I knew a little bit about Kant. He was the father of a philosophy called phenomenology, which essentially called for thinkers to suspend their ordinary way of looking at a given phenomenon in nature in order to see it in a fresh way. In fact, I’d used his term bracketing assumptions with Coleman earlier. I’d even heard of the imperative idea—living and conducting yourself as if other people would be compelled to live and believe the exact same way as you—because, said Kant, that is the exact influence we actually have on them.

  “Does the Document talk about all this?” I asked.

  “No, not in Kant’s terms,” he replied. “But it’s saying the same thing. Everyone has to not only be honest but tentative in their beliefs before making great proclamations, otherwise we can be pulling others in the wrong direction, just by this mysterious influence we have on them. The Document says that we have to come to grips with the fact that our personal reality is contagious.”

  He paused and looked at me. “It says each of us must first and foremost ‘prove to ourselves’ that our conclusions about spirituality actually work before we pass them along as truth. And because we are adding spiritual knowledge to our secular reality, we should use ‘logic first’ as we proceed.”

  He leaned closer to me and hushed his voice. “You know there are a lot of screwball ideas floating around here in Sedona.”

  I laughed. He was right, of course, and some of these crazy ideas were being pushed by outright charlatans, out just to make money. But, as Coleman was learning, the effect of the place itself, the hills and streams and overall beauty, was as genuine as the light of day.

  “It also says,” Coleman continued, “that when we feel convinced inside that our spiritual experiences are real, then we must live them fully and openly and tell everyone about them, because if there really is an influence—and I believe there is—then it helps everyone get to a higher level of experience faster.”

  He was suddenly on his feet. “Keep this translation,” he said. “I made copies.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “How do you think this conscious way of consensus making is going to unfold?”

  “It will come together like any other scientific consensus. First, there will be ever-larger areas of agreement, as common experiences are discussed and found to be the same for everyone. Then these will coalesce into still larger principles, as with Newton’s and Einstein’s theories about the secular world. Eventually, we’ll arrive at certain laws governing the whole thing: the basic, natural laws of spirituality.”

  Without saying anything else, he scribbled his cell phone number on the top page of the Document, gave me a wink, and bounded out the door.

  When Wil picked me up, I was stretched out on a bench near a grove of fragrant junipers, enjoying the first pink streaks of sunset. As I climbed into the Cruiser, the sun sank below some thin clouds near the horizon line, turning into a red blaze that now colored the clouds with streaks of orange and dark amber.

  The beauty of the moment was striking. Everything around us—the sculptured peaks of the surrounding hills, the small businesses across the street, and every cloud in the sky—was cast in a pleasant golden aura. People were stopping on the sidewalks and pulling their cars to the side of the road just to watch.

  Another magical Sedona sunset, I thought as I looked over at Wil in the driver’s seat. He grinned back at me, and I suggested we drive over to the Airport Vortex to watch the dramatic finale there. Wil nodded in agreement and in ten minutes we were climbing a rock formation near the v
ortex that was shaped like a circular pyramid. At the top, it flattened out into one crowning area of rock about forty feet in diameter.

  For a long time we just watched and soaked up the energy of the light. I couldn’t help thinking more about the mythology of Sedona. All around the area, many believe, are special locations that have a particular uplifting effect on people. Some are large vortexes like the one here. Half a dozen or so of these have been marked and identified.

  But legend has it that not only do these major vortexes dot the Sedona landscape, but other, smaller places of power are hidden about in the surrounding ravines and mesas as well, waiting for the casual hiker who chances to sit down nearby. As the mythology goes, there is a personal vortex waiting for everyone who journeys to Sedona, a spot of our own where each of us can be lifted up into consciousness and into a greater destiny. All you have to do is hike around until you find it.

  I wondered, given the life clarity Coleman was suddenly displaying, if he had already stumbled upon his.

  I smiled and looked out at the horizon again. Here at the Airport Vortex the feeling is about letting go of all one’s concerns and soaking up what can only be described as a supportive, healing energy, a sense of being totally content and safe. I leaned back on the rocks, feeling myself letting go to it—wanting to be nowhere else besides here, in this moment, basking in the glow.

  We watched the sun sink beneath the horizon and disappear, sending out a more yellowish light, and then a pale gray. I looked over at Wil. He nodded and got up, and we started down the hill. As we walked, I told Will about seeing Coleman and reading the rest of the Second Integration.

  “I met with my Hopi friends,” he replied. “They showed me the rest of the Second as well.”

  “What do you think about this idea of building a new consensus about spirituality? Coleman said it was what he was meant to do.”

  Wil stopped and pulled me to the edge of the trail as a group of people heading up the slope walked past us. Several of them looked us over, as if wondering whether seeing us here was a Synchronicity. We smiled back and nodded, and they walked on.