The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision

by James Redfield

  Wil leaned over and whispered, “That isn’t a tourist helicopter. It’s military.”

  Some of the people who seemed like tourists began to walk casually up the trail again. But two groups held back: us and a group of about a dozen men, all of differing cultural backgrounds. Some were clearly Europeans and Americans, but judging from their speaking patterns, most of them seemed to be from out of the country, probably the Middle East. As they moved around, I saw two women with them as well.

  One of the women turned to face us, and I recognized her immediately. It was Rachel, the woman I’d seen at the Pub. She walked away then and began talking to the other woman in what sounded like Hebrew. As I watched, I suddenly felt a rush of emotion toward Rachel similar to the one I had felt before.

  I quickly looked away just as Wil grabbed my shoulder. Many of the men in Rachel’s group had spotted us looking at them and were staring hard in our direction.

  “Let’s walk on,” Wil whispered.

  We headed deeper into the canyon, wanting to put some distance between the men and us. Out of the corner of my eye I could see them glaring at us as we walked. Finally, when we were out of sight completely, Wil darted off the trail to the right.

  “I think we should get off this trail,” he said, and led us straight up the slope about a hundred yards, where we ducked behind a large rock outcropping. Once there, I felt more hidden, yet we could still see some of the main trail down below through the scrub pines and junipers. The eastern wall of the canyon towered behind us.

  I told Wil I’d seen Rachel.

  “Really,” he said. “That was her, huh? I wonder who those people are she’s with.”

  “They looked none too friendly,” I remarked.

  We waited there for a long time as more people came walking down the trail. There was no more noise from the helicopter, so I figured it must still be sitting where it landed. The question was, who was in it? And where are they now? Was it the same group that had been following us?

  Finally, Wil said, “Look, I think you have to understand what the Hopis told me about the Law of Connection.”

  “Okay.”

  “You said those two guys you asked for food earlier had started to back away from you even before you began talking.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you have any idea why?”

  “Not really.”

  “It was because of the Connection we have with one another. It’s built into our brains. The Document says that because we’re all connected, we sense what others are feeling and thinking. As we progress through the Integrations, it says we will develop this sense even more. But everyone already has this basic perception.”

  “Are you telling me they could tell I wasn’t going to give them the exact story? My intent wasn’t to harm them. I wanted to give them money for their food. I just left out some of the details.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that they knew what you were doing exactly. They could feel what you were feeling, and as the lie you were contemplating brought you down, they felt that drain themselves, and thus became more confused and unclear—which was an unconscious signal to them that something was wrong, and that you were probably up to no good. So they backed away.”

  He paused a moment as if to let his words sink in.

  “And this sensitivity,” Wil went on, “increases as our consciousness increases. Humanity is reaching the point where you’d better not lie, even a little bit, because if you do, there will be more people every day who will be able to sense it. Lying is just not going to work much longer.”

  We were interrupted again as we noticed other groups walking by on the main trail below us.

  “A lot of people are coming into the canyon,” Wil said, suddenly concerned. “And many of them are packed for long-term camping, probably all without permits. Eventually, they’re going to draw the attention of the park rangers. We’d better find out what we can before they show up. Time to move.”

  He gave me a serious look. “Keep your eyes open. Watch everything that happens.”

  We carefully walked down to the trail again. There was no sign of Rachel or the group she was with. As we walked slowly forward into the heart of the canyon, we began to notice people sitting around talking everywhere. We found a spot out of the way and stopped.

  “Listen,” Wil said. “I feel I should walk up ahead alone and see if anyone knows what that helicopter is about. If you’ll watch the packs, I’ll go do that, and be right back.”

  I nodded and sat down. Staying here was fine with me since I wanted to think more about the Law of Connection. If this was a true principle of our spirituality, it meant that it was the same for all of us. How far could we develop this Connection with each other, I wondered. Would we eventually become telepathic? For a long time, I pondered what that would be like.

  Suddenly, I heard someone walking up behind me and turned around to see an upbeat man of about thirty smiling and offering me his hand.

  “I’m Jeff,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  I shook hands with him and introduced myself. At first, I felt a slight downturn in my energy, but the more he talked enthusiastically about how beautiful everything was in the canyon, the more I began to think he was okay.

  At one point, I even asked him if he knew anything about the Document, but he said he wasn’t aware of it. After we talked a bit more about Sedona, he said, “I see you have a knife. I wonder if I could borrow it for a few minutes.” He was pointing toward my belt at my prized eight-inch hunting knife that I always carried in the woods.

  “We’re setting up camp over there,” he continued, “and I just need it for a few minutes to cut some rope.”

  I looked through some mesquite and saw two men and a woman in that direction putting up a tent. Figuring he would be close where I could observe him, I took off the knife and gave it to him in the scabbard—then watched as he walked back and began working with the two people.

  A fresh breeze was blowing up, and I took a breath. The morning rain had cleared and the sun was beaming down. Slowly, I felt myself recovering my lost energy and noticed how beautiful this particular area was. Small pine trees and junipers dotted the entire canyon floor.

  Just then Wil came back and sat down beside me.

  “No one seems to know what the chopper is doing,” he said. “I kept my distance from it, but I could see it was empty. And it’s definitely military.”

  He was sitting on his pack. “Let’s just wait here for a while.”

  I smiled. “You could tell me about the next spiritual law.”

  As Wil formulated a sentence, I again looked over toward the campsite where the man had been working, only to find that he was nowhere to be seen. I jumped up and ran to the campsite and asked the couple where he was. They told me they didn’t know, that he wasn’t really part of their party.

  “He just came up to talk,” the woman said. “He offered to go borrow a knife for us, to help us cut some rope. He seemed to be a little down on his luck.”

  I was about to go look for him when Wil came up, and I quickly filled him in.

  “He stole your knife?” Wil remarked, a look of wonder and amazement on his face, as if something important had happened. I brushed it off and proceeded to look all around the area. There was no sign of him anywhere. After about twenty minutes, I returned to where the packs were, finding Wil sitting patiently, waiting for me.

  “I’ve had that knife a long time,” I said, sitting down next to him.

  “Well,” Wil offered, trying not to grin, “you wanted to see how all this would play out.”

  I was in no mood for analysis. I just wanted my knife back, but Wil was persistent. “Right before you saw the guy was gone, didn’t you ask me what the next law was?”

  I remained silent, still sulking.

  “Well,” he continued, “it’s the Law of Karma.”

  It was past noon, and Wil had left again, telling me he was going to look for
food. For a long time I just sat around, wondering what kind of purification was going on here in this canyon. Then, about the time I was ready to go look for him, I saw Wil coming back. He sat down and looked over at me.

  “Find some food?” I asked.

  “Yeah, a little bit. I had lunch with some people I met. I wanted to bring you some but there wasn’t enough.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Why shouldn’t I find food?” he responded. “I have good Karma!” He was using an overly dramatic tone to his voice, then burst into laughter, barely able to control himself.

  As usual with Wil, his humor was so contagious I couldn’t help but laugh, too.

  “Okay,” I said. “What did the Hopi tell you about Karma?”

  Instantly, he was serious. “The Document says that it’s real, and in our time, it responds to our actions more quickly than ever before.”

  “So I’m the poster child for it.”

  “Well, take a look at what has happened. You tried to steal food from someone, and that created a karmic response from the Universe that resulted in some guy stealing your knife.”

  I began resisting again. “What about him? Maybe he’s just a serial thief.”

  “Maybe, or maybe he’s a nice guy and he decided to move up the trail somewhere or go back to town, and he just forgot to give back your knife. Either way, you have to ask why this happened to you right now, just when we’re talking about all this and right after you tried to steal from someone.”

  “Wait a minute. Stop saying that. I wasn’t trying to steal from anyone.”

  “No? Didn’t you tell a lie in order to try to manipulate someone out of his food? Trying to do it and doing it is the same thing karmically.”

  “The Document says that?”

  He nodded and then stared at me for a long time.

  “Look,” he finally added. “These laws seem hard to believe because we’ve all been trained to think the Universe only has physical laws. And the reason people are slow to put this together is that we all shade the truth at times, especially in business, or to save face, and we all have things happen to us that are bad. So there seems to be no relationship between the two. We think it doesn’t matter if we lie a little bit, because bad things happen to everyone anyway.”

  He looked at me hard. “But according to the Document, that isn’t true, and anyone can prove it to himself by just being observant. Because Karma is speeding up, the consequences from an untruthful manipulation come back very quickly.”

  “But why is it speeding up?”

  He stopped. “I don’t know. I asked the Hopis the same question, but they said the Document didn’t say. They only hinted it may be part of the energy that the Calendar is pointing to.”

  “You mean the Mayan Calendar? What do the Hopi know of that?”

  “The classical Maya were Native Americans, too, you know.”

  “Anyway,” Wil continued, “prove it to yourself. The Document says that when enough of us realize this is the way Karma works, it’s going to lead to a new era of Integrity to replace the corruption we have now.

  “And there’s more. It’s important to see that the Law of Karma is designed not for punishment, but to affect a positive correction. It apparently works this way: the Universe is set up spiritually to support and encourage our spiritual growth. If you center yourself in truth, then your Synchronicity will soar. If you participate in untruth, then you draw into your life a person who does the same thing to you, again not as punishment but to show you how it feels, so you can move back toward truth.

  “What happens,” I asked, “if we don’t get the message?”

  “The Document says the response of Karma gets more extreme in an effort to get our attention, something, again, that we can also prove to ourselves at this moment in history. All we have to do is pay attention to what happens in relation to our own behavior.”

  “Okay, what if one is randomly selected and murdered by a serial killer? Is that payback for something we did earlier?”

  “No. Remember, Karma has nothing to do with payback. It reflects back to you what you’re doing. If you are an armed robber, for instance, you are standing for the untruth that says that behavior is okay. It’s the same as a lie or deception to get the money, only worse. And you will have money taken from you to show you how it feels, so you can change. The problem is that some people just use the Karma as an excuse to keep the same behavior going, thinking everyone is doing it to me, why shouldn’t I do it to them as well? They’re missing the fact that they are being shown something so they can change.

  “When someone becomes the victim of a serial killer, unless the person is a serial killer himself, it’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s the result of chance, not Karma, and happens because of the current state of the world’s imperfection. We know psychologically and genetically what’s going on with serial killers, from studies of childhood trauma and genetics. In the ideal, someone would have noticed these factors and intervened with the person early, so he wouldn’t have been able to hurt anyone. Unfortunately, we just aren’t enlightened enough to institute those kinds of interventions yet. Hopefully, one day we will be.”

  “I guess, until then, we have to hope we’re lucky.”

  “Yeah, at least until we can move through the Integrations enough to realize we can be ‘protected.’ ”

  “What do you mean, protected?”

  Wil leaned toward me. “My Hopi friends told me that these kinds of random accidents and mishaps aren’t supposed to happen. The Document says that, as spiritual consciousness rises, we will learn how to detect the hunches and premonitions that allow us to avoid impending accidents and attacks. They said we’ll get to that level at the Fourth and Fifth Integrations.”

  Abruptly, we heard the raspy engines of several ATVs coming up the trail behind us. In the time it took to grab our packs and duck into the thicker brush, they were driving up.

  “Those are Park Service four-wheelers,” Wil shouted, leading us farther up the slope away from the noise. As we hurried away, we could see people scurrying for cover everywhere. Once near the canyon wall, we saw two men up ahead attempting to climb the steep face of a wall of rock.

  “They’re sport climbers,” Wil said, urging me along. “They probably have permits.”

  Suddenly, as we watched, one of their rope anchors ripped out of the rock, flipping one of the climbers upside down and threatening to drop him fifty feet to the jagged rocks below. Then another anchor broke free and dropped him another ten feet. He screamed in terror.

  Without thinking, I dashed toward the cliff. The second climber was pointing frantically toward something on the ground near their tent. I immediately saw a full length of extra rope. I picked it up, then quickly made my way up the rock and out on a ledge to within ten feet of the helpless climber.

  I threw his buddy the end of the rope and he knew exactly what to do. He put the end through a solidly hammered anchor near him, pulled it through, and lowered the end to his friend—who, despite his panic, was able to tie it around himself. After that, all I had to do was hold my end of the rope tightly to secure him from falling any farther. After a minute, he was able to cut himself loose from the other ropes. With the help of Wil, I lowered the man safely to the ground.

  As we gathered up our stuff, the traumatized climber was so upset he was unable even to talk. His friend gave him some water and spoke with him privately for a minute, then pulled us to the side. We could hear the four-wheelers all over the canyon floor below us, but the climber seemed not to notice.

  “If you hadn’t come by,” he said, “I don’t know what might have happened. I’ve got to get him back to Sedona. I wish there was some way to repay you.”

  Wil and I glanced at each other.

  Then I told them the truth of our situation, that we needed food.

  “Well,” the climber said, “we can sure help with that. We were going to stay here for four day
s, but my friend is too shaken. He wants to leave tomorrow. We have lots of food you can have.”

  After packing the food, we left hurriedly toward the northeast and found another place where we could hide in the rocks. From there we had an even better view of the canyon floor, where people were being detained or turned around by the rangers. I looked hard for the group Rachel was with but couldn’t see any of them.

  “We should stay here for a while,” Wil said, “until all this dies down.” He was still giving me that look of astonishment over what had occurred.

  “I know. I know. All this means something,” I replied.

  “Means something? It’s the most pointed run of Synchronicity I’ve ever seen. Remember when we were driving away from the Pub and I made all those moves to lose the car behind me, and you thought the speed of the Synchronicity was amazing? Well, you’re now operating at just that level of speed.

  “Think about it. You were shown the Law of Truth when you tried to manipulate for food. You were rejected by the tourists in a perfect illustration of the Law of Connection. Then, right after, you had something stolen from you, through similar false pretenses, illustrating the Law of Karma. And now you’ve just secured our food, which is what you were trying to do all along.”

  I looked at him, not quite getting the last one.

  “Don’t you see?” he pressed. “You aided those people by intuiting immediately how you could best help. It came to you how to help, and you did it, fast.”

  I knew he was right. I didn’t really even think much about the actions. Somehow, I just knew.

  “It’s called the Law of Service. And again, it’s built into the way the Universe operates and how our minds are designed. We somehow know what others around us need, and when we act in response, we fall into alignment with this law. All you have to do is think, ‘How can I be of service?’ And something will always come to you. All the resources you need will be provided in order to help, and you’ll feel like you’re always in the right place at the right time to make a difference.”

  He paused for a moment and then asked, “Do you see now what the Third Integration is, in total? It’s all about getting into Alignment. And again, you proved it to yourself. You played it out right here in this canyon. And anyone else who observes sincerely can see it just as clearly in his or her own life.