The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision

by James Redfield

  The operative spoke briefly to the other three and they formed a perimeter encircling us at a distance of about thirty feet. “Sit down,” one of them said.

  We sat facing each other in the darkness. Our energy was almost totally deflated. There had been no sign of the soul groups since we left the cave.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked Charlene.

  “Nothing’s changed,” she whispered. “We’ve got to build our energy again.”

  The darkness was now almost total, broken only by the operatives’ lights sweeping back and forth across the group. I could barely make out the outlines of the others’ faces, even though we were sitting in a tight circle, eight feet apart.

  “We have to try to escape,” Curtis whispered. “I think they will kill us.”

  Then I remembered the image I’d seen in Feyman’s Birth Vision. He envisioned being with us in the woods, in the dark. I knew there was also another landmark in the scene, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

  “No,” I said. “I think we need to try again here.”

  At that moment the air was filled with a high-pitched sound, a sound similar to the hum but, again, more in harmony, almost pleasing to the ear. Again a perceptible shimmer swept through the ground under our bodies.

  “We have to increase our energy now!” Maya whispered.

  “I don’t know if I can do it here,” Curtis responded.

  “You have to!” I said.

  “Focus on each other the way we did before,” Maya added.

  I tried to screen out the ominous scene around us and return to an inner state of love. Ignoring the shadows and the flickering beams of light, I focused on the beauty of the faces in the circle. As I struggled to locate the others’ higher-self expression, I began to notice a shift in the light pattern around us. Gradually I could see every face and expression very clearly, as though I was looking through an infrared viewer.

  “What do we visualize?” Curtis asked in desperation.

  “We have to get back to our Birth Visions,” Maya said. “Remember why we came.”

  Suddenly the ground shook violently and the sound from the experiment again took on a dissonant, grating quality.

  We moved closer together and our collective thought seemed to project the image of fighting back. We knew that somehow we could marshal our forces and push back the negative and destructive attempts of the experiment. I even picked up a picture of Feyman being pushed backward, his equipment blowing up and burning, his men fleeing in terror.

  Another surge in the noise disrupted my focus; the experiment was continuing. Fifty feet away, a huge pine tree snapped in half and thundered to the ground. With a ripping sound and a cloud of dust, a fissure, five feet wide, opened up between us and the guard on the right. He reeled back in horror, the beam of his flashlight swinging wild in the night.

  “This isn’t working!” Maya screamed.

  Another tree crashed to the ground on our left as the earth slid four or five feet, knocking us flat.

  Maya looked horrified and jumped to her feet. “I’ve got to get away from here!” she yelled, then began to run north into the darkness. The guard on that side, lying where he had been thrown by the earth’s movement, rolled to his knees and caught her form in the beam of his flashlight, then raised his gun.

  “No! Wait!” I screamed.

  As she ran, Maya looked back, spotting the guard who was now aiming directly at her, preparing to fire. The scene seemed to shift into slow motion, and as the gun discharged, every line in her face revealed an awareness that she was about to die. But instead of the bullets ripping into her side and back, a wisp of white light darted in front of her and the bullets bore no effect. She hesitated momentarily, then disappeared into the darkness.

  At the same time, sensing the opportunity, Charlene leaped up from her position to my right and ran to the northeast, into the dust, her movement unnoticed by the guards.

  I started to run but the guard who had fired at Maya turned his weapon toward me. Quickly Curtis reached out and grabbed my legs, dragging me to the ground.

  Behind us, the bunker door swung open and Feyman ran to the dish antenna and furiously adjusted the keyboard. Gradually the noise began to diminish and the earth movements slowed to mere tremors.

  “For God sakes!” Curtis yelled toward him. “You’ve got to stop this!”

  Feyman’s face was covered with dust. “There’s nothing wrong that we can’t fix,” he said with eerie calm. The guards were on their feet, dusting themselves off and walking toward us. Feyman noticed that Maya and Charlene were missing, but before he could say anything, the noise returned with ear-shattering volume and the earth under us seemed to leap upward several feet, rolling everyone to the ground once more. The splintering limbs from a falling tree sent the guards scurrying toward the bunker.

  “Now!” Curtis said. “Let’s go!”

  I was frozen. He jerked me to my feet. “We’ve got to move!” he yelled in my ear.

  Finally my legs worked and we ran northeast in the same direction that Maya had fled.

  Several more tremors reverberated under our feet and then the movements and sounds ceased. After making our way through the dark woods for several miles, our path lighted only by the rays of the moon filtering through the foliage, we stopped and huddled in a grove of small pines.

  “Do you think they’ll follow us?” I asked Curtis.

  “Yes,” he said. “They can’t allow any of us to get back to town. I would guess that they still have people stationed along the paths back.”

  While he was talking, a clear picture of the falls entered my mind. It was still pristine, undisturbed. The falling water, I realized, was the landmark in Feyman’s vision that I had been trying to remember.

  “We have to go northwest to the falls,” I said.

  Curtis nodded toward the north, and as silently as possible we headed in that direction, crossing the stream and carefully making our way toward the canyon. Periodically Curtis would stop and cover our tracks. During a rest, we could hear the low rumbling of vehicles from the southeast.

  After another mile we began to see the moonlit canyon walls rising up into the distance. As we approached the rocky mouth, Curtis led the way across the creek. Suddenly he jumped backward in fright as someone walked around a tree from the left. The person screamed and recoiled, almost losing balance, teetering at the edge of the creek bank.

  “Maya!” I yelled, realizing who it was.

  Curtis recovered and lunged forward and pulled her back as rocks and gravel slid into the water.

  She hugged him intensely and then reached out to me. “I don’t know why I ran like that. I just panicked. I could only think to head toward the falls you told me about. I just prayed that some of you would get away too.”

  Leaning back against a larger tree, she took a deep breath, then asked, “What happened when the guard fired back there? How did those bullets miss me? I saw this strange streak of light.”

  Curtis and I looked at each other.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It seemed to calm me,” Maya continued, “… in a way I’ve never experienced before.”

  We looked at each other; no one spoke. Then, in silence, I heard the distinct sound of someone walking up ahead.

  “Wait,” I said to the others. “Someone’s up there.” We crouched down and waited. Ten minutes went by. Then, from the trees ahead, Charlene walked up and dropped to her knees.

  “Thank God I found you,” she said. “How did you get away?”

  “We were able to run when a tree fell,” I said.

  Charlene looked deep into my eyes. “I thought you might head toward the falls so I walked in this direction, although I don’t know if I could have found them in the dark.”

  Maya motioned for us, and we all moved out to a clearing where the creek went through the mouth of the canyon. Here the full light of the moon illuminated the grass and the rocks to each side.<
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  “Maybe we’re going to have another chance,” she said, urging us with her hands to sit down and face each other.

  “What are we going to do?” Curtis said. “We can’t stay here long. They’ll be coming.”

  I looked at Maya, thinking we should go on to the falls, but she seemed so energized that, instead, I asked, “What do you think went wrong before?”

  “I don’t know; maybe there are too few of us. You said there were supposed to be seven. Or perhaps there’s too much Fear.”

  Charlene leaned toward the group. “I think we have to remember the energy we achieved when we were in the cave. We have to connect at that level again.”

  For several long minutes we all worked on our inner connection. Finally Maya said, “We have to give each other energy, find the higher-self expression.”

  I took several deep breaths and watched the faces of the others again. Gradually they became more beautiful and luminescent, and I caught sight of their authentic soul expression. Around us, the surrounding plants and rocks lit up even more, as though the moon’s rays had suddenly doubled. A familiar wave of love and euphoria swept through my body and I turned to see the shimmering figures of my soul group behind me.

  As soon as I saw them, my awareness seemed to expand even more and I realized that the soul groups of the others were in similar positions, although they had not yet merged.

  Maya caught my eye. She was looking at me in a state of complete openness and honesty, and as I watched her, it seemed as though I could see her Birth Vision as a subtle expression on her face. She knew who she was and it beamed outward for everyone to observe. Her mission was clear; her background had prepared her perfectly.

  “Feel as if the atoms in your body are vibrating at a higher level,” she said.

  I glanced at Charlene; on her face was the same clarity. She represented the information bearers, identifying and communicating the vital truths expressed by each person or group.

  “Do you see what’s happening?” Charlene asked. “We’re seeing each other as we really are, at our highest level, without the emotional projections of old fears.”

  “I can see that,” Curtis said, his face again full of energy and certainty.

  No one spoke for several minutes. I closed my eyes as the energy continued to build.

  “Look at that!” Charlene suddenly said, pointing at the soul groups all around us.

  Each soul group was beginning to blend with the others, just as they had done at the cave. I glanced at Charlene and then at Curtis and Maya. I could now see on their faces an even fuller expression of who they were as participants in the long movement of human civilization.

  “This is it!” I said. “We’re reaching the next step; we’re seeing a more complete vision of human history.”

  Before us, in a huge hologram, appeared an image of history that seemed to stretch out from the very beginning to what appeared to be a distant end. As I strained to focus, I realized that this was an image very similar to the one I had observed earlier while with my soul group—except that in this instance the story was beginning much earlier, with the birth of the universe itself.

  We watched as the first matter exploded into being and gravitated into stars that lived and died and spewed forth the great diversity of elements that ultimately formed the Earth. These elements, in turn, combined in the early terrestrial environment into ever-more-complex substances until they finally leaped into organic life—life that then also moved forward, into greater organization and awareness, as if guided by an overall plan. Multicelled organisms became fishes, and fishes progressed into amphibians, and amphibians evolved into reptiles and birds and ultimately into mammals.

  As we watched, a clear picture of the Afterlife dimension opened up in front of us, and I understood that an aspect of each of the souls there—in fact, a part of all of humanity—had lived through this long, slow process of evolution. We had swum as fishes, boldly crawled upon the land as amphibians, and struggled to survive as reptiles, birds, and mammals, fighting every step of the way to finally move into human form—all with intention.

  We knew that through wave after wave of successive generations, we would be born into the physical plane, and no matter how long it took, we would strive to wake up, and unify, and evolve, and eventually implement on Earth the same spiritual culture that exists in the Afterlife. Certainly the journey would be difficult, even torturous. With the first intuition to awaken, we would sense the Fear of aloneness and separation. Yet we would not go back to sleep; we would fight through the Fear, relying on the dim intuition that we weren’t alone, that we were spiritual beings with a spiritual purpose on the planet.

  And, following the urge of evolution, we would gravitate together into larger, more complex social groupings, differentiating into more diverse occupations, overcoming a need to defeat and conquer each other, and eventually implement a democratic process through which new ideas could be shared and synthesized and evolved into ever-better truths. Gradually our security would come from inside us, as we progressed from an expression of the divine in terms of nature gods to the divine as one father God outside ourselves to a final expression as the Holy Spirit within.

  Sacred texts would be intuited and written, offering heartfelt symbolic expression of our relationship and future with this one deity. Visionaries from both East and West would clarify that this Holy Spirit was always there, always accessible, waiting only for our ability to repent, to open, to clear the blocks that prevent a full communion.

  Over time, we knew, our urge to unify and share would expand until we sensed a special community, a deeper association with others who shared a particular geographical location on the planet, and the human world would began to solidify into political nation-states, each holding a unique viewpoint. Soon after would come an explosion of trade and commerce. The scientific method would be instituted, and the resulting discoveries would initiate a period of economic preoccupation and the great secular expansion known as the Industrial Revolution.

  And once we developed a web of economic relationships around the globe, we would begin to further awaken and to remember our full spiritual nature. The Insights would gradually permeate human consciousness and we would evolve our economy into a form compatible with the Earth, and, finally, begin to move beyond the last fearful polarization of forces toward a new spiritual worldview on the planet.

  Here I momentarily glanced at the others. Their faces told me that they had shared this vision of Earth’s history. In one brief revelation we had grasped how human consciousness had progressed from the beginning of time right to the present moment.

  Suddenly the hologram focused on the polarization in great detail. All humans on the Earth were migrating into two conflicting positions: one pushing toward a vague but ever-clearer image of transformation, and the other resisting, sensing that important values contained in the old view were being lost forever.

  We could see that in the Afterlife dimension, it was known that this conflict would be our greatest challenge to the spiritualization of the physical dimension—particularly if the polarization grew extreme. In this case, both sides would entrench into an irrational projection of evil onto the other, or worse, might believe the literal interpreters of the end-times prophecies and begin to think the coming future was beyond their influence and therefore give up completely.

  To find the World Vision and resolve the polarization, we could see that our Afterlife intention was to discern the deeper truths of these prophecies. As with all the Scriptures, the visions in Daniel and Revelation were divine intuitions coming from the Afterlife into the physical plane, and so must be understood as draped in the symbolism of the seer’s mind, much like a dream. We would focus on the symbolic meaning. The prophecies envisioned an eventual end to the human story on Earth; but an “end” that, for believers, would be quite different from the one experienced by nonbelievers.

  Those in the latter group were seen to experience an end o
f history that would begin with great catastrophes and environmental disasters and collapsing economies. Then, at the height of the fear and chaos, a strong leader would emerge, the Antichrist, who would offer to restore order, but only if individuals would agree to give up their liberties and carry the “mark of the beast” upon their bodies in order to participate in the automated economy. Eventually this strong leader would declare himself a god and take by force any country that resisted his rule, at first making war on the forces of Islam, then on the Jews and Christians, ultimately casting the whole world into a fiery Armageddon.

  For believers, on the other hand, the scriptural prophets predicted a much more pleasant end to history. Remaining true to the spirit, these believers would be given spiritual bodies and be raptured into another dimension called the New Jerusalem, but would be able to go back and forth into the physical. Eventually, at a certain point in the war, God would fully return to end the fighting, restore the Earth, and implement a thousand years of peace where there would be no sickness or death, and everything would be transformed, even the animals of the world, who would no longer eat meat. Instead, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb… and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”

  Maya and Curtis caught my eye, and then Charlene looked up; we all seemed to sense, at once, the core meaning of the prophecies. What the end-times seers were receiving was an intuition that in our time, two distinctive futures would be opening before us. We could choose either to languish in the Fear, believing that the world is moving into a Big Brother style of automation and social decay and ultimate destruction… or we could follow the other path and consider ourselves the believers who can overcome this nihilism and open to the higher vibrations of love, where we are spared the apocalypse and can enter a new dimension in which we invite the spirit, through us, to create just the utopia the scriptural prophets envisioned.

  Now we could see why those in the Afterlife felt that our interpretation of these prophecies was key to resolving the polarization. If we decide that these Scriptures mean that the destruction of the world is inevitable, written unalterably into God’s plan, the effect of such a belief would be to create this very outcome.