The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision

by James Redfield

  Over thousands of years the multitude of farming communities coalesced further into large civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Crete, and northern China, each inventing its own version of the nature and animal gods. But such deities could not long forestall the anxiety. I watched generations of souls come into the Earthly dimension intending to bring a message that humanity was destined to progress by sharing and comparing knowledge. Yet, once here, these individuals succumbed to the Fear and distorted this intuition into an unconscious need to conquer and dominate and impose their way of life on others by force.

  So began the great era of the empires and tyrants, as one great leader rose up after another, uniting the strength of his people, conquering as much land as possible, convinced that the views of his culture should be adopted by all. Yet, throughout this era, these many tyrants were always, in turn, conquered themselves and pressed under the yoke of a larger, stronger cultural view. For thousands of years different empires bubbled up to the top of humanity’s consciousness, disseminating their ideas, rising for a time with a more effective reality, economic plan, and war technology, only to be later deposed by a stronger and more organized vision. Ever so slowly, through this method old, outdated ideas were replaced.

  I could see that, as slow and bloody as this process was, key truths were gradually making their way from the Afterlife into the physical dimension. One of the most important of these truths—a new ethic of interaction—began to surface in various places around the globe, but ultimately found clear expression in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. Instantly I could see the Birth Visions of hundreds of individuals born into the Greek culture, each hoping to remember this timely insight.

  For generations they had seen the waste and injustice of mankind’s unending violence upon itself, and knew that humans could transcend the habit of fighting and conquering others and implement a new system for the exchange and comparison of ideas, a system that protected the sovereign right of every individual to hold his unique view, regardless of physical strength—a system that was already known and followed in the Afterlife. As I watched, this new way of interaction began to emerge and take form on Earth, finally becoming known as democracy.

  In this method of exchanging ideas, communication between humans still often degenerated into an insecure power struggle, but at least now, for the first time ever, the process was in place to pursue the evolution of human reality at the verbal rather than the physical level.

  At the same time, another watershed idea, one destined to completely transform the human understanding of spiritual reality, was surfacing in the written histories of a small tribe in the Middle East. Similarly I could also see the Birth Visions of many of the proponents of this idea as well. These individuals, born into the Judaic culture, knew before birth that while we were correct to intuit a divine source, our description of this source was flawed and distorted. Our concept of many gods was merely a fragmented picture of a larger whole. In truth, they realized, there was only one God, a God, in their view, that was still demanding and threatening and patriarchal—and still existing outside of ourselves—but for the first time, personal and responsive, and the sole creator of all humans.

  As I continued to watch, I saw this intuition of one divine source emerging and being clarified in cultures all over the world. In China and India, long the leaders in technology, trade, and social development, Hinduism and Buddhism, along with other Eastern religions, moved the East toward a more contemplative focus.

  Those who created these religions intuited that God was more than a personage. God was a force, a consciousness, that could only be completely found by attaining what they described as an enlightenment experience. Rather than just pleasing God by obeying certain laws or rituals, the Eastern religions sought connection with God on the inside, as a shift in awareness, an opening up of one’s consciousness to a harmony and security that was constantly available.

  Quickly my view shifted to the Sea of Galilee, and I could see that the idea of one God that would ultimately transform Western cultures was evolving from the notion of a deity outside, of us, patriarchical and judging, toward the position held in the East, toward the idea of an inner God, a God whose kingdom lay within. I watched as one person came into the Earth dimension remembering almost all of his Birth Vision.

  He knew he was here to bring a new energy into the world, a new culture based on love. His message was this: the one God was a holy spirit, a divine energy, whose existence could be felt and proven experientially. Coming into spiritual awareness meant more than rituals and sacrifices and public prayer. It involved a repentance of a deeper kind; a repentance that was an inner psychological shift based on the suspension of the ego’s addictions, and a transcendent “letting go,” which would ensure the true fruits of the spiritual life.

  As this message began to spread, I watched as one of the most influential of all empires, the Roman, embraced the new religion and spread the idea of the one, inner God throughout much of Europe. Later, when the barbarians struck from the north, dismembering the empire, the idea survived in the feudal organization of Christendom that followed.

  At this point I saw again the appeals of the Gnostics, urging the church to focus more fully on the inner, transformative experience, using Christ’s life as an example of what each of us might achieve. I saw the church lapse into the Fear, its leaders sensing a loss of control, building doctrine around the powerful hierarchy of the churchmen, who made themselves mediators, dispensers of the spirit to the populace. Eventually all texts related to Gnosticism were deemed blasphemous and excluded from the Bible.

  Even though many individuals came from the Afterlife dimension intending to broaden and democratize the new religion, it was a time of great fear, and efforts to reach out to other cultures were distorted again into the need to dominate and control.

  Here I saw the secret sects of the Franciscans again, who sought to include a reverence for nature and a return to the inner experience of the divine. These individuals had come into the Earth dimension intuiting that the Gnostic contradiction would eventually be resolved, and were determined to preserve the old texts and manuscripts until that time. Again I saw my ill-fated attempt to make the information public too soon, and my untimely departure.

  Yet I could see clearly that a new era was unfolding in the West. The power of the church was being challenged by another social unit: the nation-state. As more of the Earth’s peoples were becoming conscious of each other, the era of the great empires was coming to a close. New generations arrived able to intuit our destiny of unification, working to promote a consciousness of national origin based on common languages and tied more closely to one sovereign area of land. These states were still dominated by autocratic leaders, often thought of as ruling by divine right, but a new human civilization was unfolding, one with recognized borders and established currencies and trade routes.

  Finally, in Europe, as wealth and literacy spread, a wide renaissance began. As I watched, the Birth Visions of many of the participants came into my view. They knew that human destiny was to develop an empowered democracy, and they came hoping to bring it into being. The writings of the Greeks and Romans were discovered, stimulating their memories. The first democratic parliaments were established, and calls were issued for an end to the divine right of kings and the bloody reign of the church over spiritual and social reality. Soon came the Protestant Reformation, which held the promise that individuals could go directly to important Scriptures and conceive a direct connection to the divine.

  At the same time, individuals seeking greater empowerment and freedom were exploring the American continent, a landmass symbolically lying between the cultures of the East and the West. As I watched the Birth Visions of the Europeans most inspired to enter this new world, I could see that they came knowing that this land was already inhabited, aware that communication and immigration should be undertaken only by invitation. Deep inside, they knew that the Amer
icans were to be the grounding, the road back, for a Europe quickly losing its sense of sacred intimacy with the natural environment and moving toward a dangerous secularism. The Native American cultures, while not perfect, provided a model from which the European mentality could regain its roots.

  Yet, again because of the Fear, these individuals were able to intuit only the drive to move to this land, sensing a new freedom and liberty of spirit, but bringing with them the need to dominate and conquer, and to pursue their own security. The important truths of the Native cultures were lost in the rush to exploit the region’s vast natural resources.

  Meanwhile, in Europe, the Renaissance continued, and I began to see the full scope of the Second Insight. The power of the church to define reality was diminishing, and Europeans were feeling as though they were awakening to look at life anew. Through the courage of countless individuals, all inspired by their intuitive memories, the scientific method was embraced as a democratic process of exploring and coming to understand the world in which humans found themselves. This method—exploring some aspect of the natural world, drawing conclusions, then offering this view to others—was thought of as the consensus-building process through which we would be able, finally, to understand mankind’s real situation on this planet, including our spiritual nature.

  But those in the church, entrenched in Fear, sought to squelch this new science. As political forces lined up on both sides, a compromise was reached. Science would be free to explore the outer, material world, but must leave spiritual phenomena to the dictates of the still-influential churchmen. The entire inner world of experience—our higher perceptual states of beauty and love, intuitions, coincidences, interpersonal phenomena, even dreams—all were, at first, off limits to the new science.

  Despite these restrictions, science began to map out and describe the operation of the physical world, providing information rich in ways to increase trade and utilize natural resources. Human economic security increased, and slowly we began to lose our sense of mystery and our heartfelt questions about the purpose of life. We decided it was purposeful enough just to survive and build a better, more secure world for ourselves and our children. Gradually we entered the consensus trance that denied the reality of death and created the illusion that the world was explained and ordinary and devoid of mystery.

  In spite of our rhetoric, our once-strong intuition of a spiritual source was being pushed farther into the background. In this growing materialism, God could only be viewed as a distant Deist’s God, a God who merely pushed the universe into being and then stood back to let it run in a mechanical sense, like a predictable machine, with every effect having a cause, and unconnected events happening only at random, by chance alone.

  Yet here I could see the birth intent of many of the individuals of this time period. They came knowing that the development of technology and production was important because it could eventually be made nonpolluting and sustainable and could liberate humankind beyond all imagination. But in the beginning, born into the milieu of the time, all they could remember was the general intuition to build and produce and work, holding tightly to the democratic ideal.

  The vision shifted, and I could see that nowhere was this intuition stronger than in the creation of the United States, with its democratic Constitution and its system of checks and balances. As a grand experiment, America was set up for the rapid exchange of ideas that was to characterize the future. Yet below the surface, the messages of the Native Americans, and the Native Africans, and other peoples on whose back the American experiment was initiated, all cried out to be heard, to be integrated into the European mentality.

  By the nineteenth century we were on the verge of a second great transformation of human culture, a transformation that would be built on the new energy sources of oil and steam and finally electricity. The human economy had developed into a vast and complicated field of endeavor that supplied more products than ever before through an explosion of new techniques. In great numbers people were moving from rural communities to great urban centers of production, shifting from life on the farm to involvement in the new, specialized industrial revolution.

  At the time, most believed that a democratically founded capitalism, unfettered by government regulation, was the desired method of human commerce. Yet, again, as I picked up on individual Birth Visions, I could see that most people born into this period had come hoping to evolve capitalism toward a more perfect form. Unfortunately the level of Fear was such that all they managed to intuit was a desire to build individual security, to exploit other workers, and to maximize profits at every turn, often entering into collusive agreements with competitors and with governments. This was the great era of the robber barons and of secret banking and industrial cartels.

  However, by the early twentieth century, because of the abuses of this freewheeling capitalism, two other economic systems were set to be offered as alternatives. Earlier, in England, two men had posed an alternative “manifesto” which called for a new system, run by workers, that would eventually create an economic utopia, where the resources of the whole of humanity would be made available to each person according to his needs, without greed or competition.

  In the horrible working conditions of the day, the idea attracted many supporters. But I quickly saw that this materialistic workers’ “manifesto” had been a corruption of the original intention. When the Birth Visions of the two men came into view, I realized that what they were intuiting was that human destiny was eventually to achieve such a utopia. Unfortunately they failed to remember that this utopia could only be accomplished through democratic participation, born of free will and slowly evolved.

  Consequently the initiators of this communist system, from the first revolution in Russia, erroneously thought that this system could be created through force and dictatorship, an approach that failed miserably and cost millions of lives. In their impatience the individuals involved had envisioned a utopia but had created communism and decades of tragedy.

  The scene shifted to the other alternative to a democratic capitalism: the evil of fascism. This system was designed to enhance the profits and control of a ruling elite, who thought of themselves as privileged leaders of human society. They believed that only through the abandonment of democracy, and the union of government with the new industrial leadership, could a nation reach its greatest potential and position in the world.

  I saw clearly that in creating such a system, the participants were almost totally unconscious of their Birth Visions. They had come here wishing only to promote the idea that civilization was evolving toward perfectibility and that a nation of people, totally unified in purpose and will, striving to attain their fullest potential, could reach great heights of energy and effectiveness. What was created was a fearful, self-serving vision wrongly claiming the superiority of certain races and nations, and the possibility of developing a supernation whose destiny was to rule the world. Again the intuition that all humans were evolving toward perfection was distorted by weak, fearful men into the murderous reign of the Third Reich.

  I watched as others—who had likewise envisioned the perfectibility of mankind, but who were in greater touch with the importance of an empowered democracy—intuited that they must stand up against both alternatives to a freely expressed economy. The first stand resulted in a bloody world war against the fascist distortion, won finally at extreme cost. The second resulted in a long and bitter cold war against the communist bloc.

  I suddenly found myself focusing on the United States during the early years of this cold war, the decade of the fifties. At this time, America stood successfully at the apex of what had been a four-hundred-year preoccupation with secular materialism. Affluence and security had spread to include a large and growing middle class, and into this material success was born an enormous new generation, a generation whose intuitions would help lead humanity toward a third great transformation.

  This generation grew up constantly reminde
d that they lived in the greatest country in the world, the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all its citizens. Yet, as they matured, members of this generation found a disturbing disparity between this popular American self-image and actual reality. They found that many people in this land—women and certain racial minorities—were, by law and custom, definitely not free. By the sixties the new generation was inspecting closely, and many were finding other disturbing aspects of the United States’ self-image—for instance, a blind patriotism that expected young people to go into a foreign land to fight a political war that had no clearly expressed purpose and no prospect of victory.

  Just as disturbing was the culture’s spiritual practice. The materialism of the previous four hundred years had pushed the mystery of life, and death, far into the background. Many found the churches and synagogues full of pompous and meaningless ritual. Attendance seemed more social than spiritual, and the members too restricted by a sense of how they might be perceived and judged by their onlooking peers.

  As the vision progressed, I could tell that the new generation’s tendency to analyze and judge arose from a deep-seated intuition that there was more to life than the old material reality took into account. The new generation sensed new spiritual meaning just beyond the horizon, and they began to explore other, lesser known religions and spiritual points of view. For the first time the Eastern religions were understood in great numbers, serving to validate the mass intuition that spiritual perception was an inner experience, a shift in awareness that changed forever one’s sense of identity and purpose. Similarly the Jewish Cabalist writings and the Western Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckehart and Teilhard de Chardin, provided other intriguing descriptions of a deeper spirituality.