The Twelfth Insight - James Redfield [13]
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 the 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,