The Twelfth Insight - James Redfield [2]
The more I read of Wil’s fax, the more the pages began to carry a kind of numinous attraction. The style was upbeat and vaguely familiar in some way, and the authentic tone was confirmed when I saw a second notation from Wil on the last page. “This came from a friend,” he had scribbled. “It’s for real.”
I looked over at the very same fax pages lying on the passenger seat beside me. Light from the afternoon sun flickered over them. Wil’s written comment, I knew, meant that the original was, at least in his mind, well founded—and probably extended the message of what had always been his singular obsession: the old Celestine Prophecy that had been discovered in Peru.
The thought spawned a flood of memories as I recalled how quickly word of the First Nine Insights of this Prophecy had circulated around the planet. Why? Because they made sense in a world too shallow and materialistic. The message of this Prophecy was clear. Being spiritual is more than merely believing in some deity in the abstract. It entails the discovery of another, entirely different dimension of life, one that operates solely in a spiritual manner.
Once one makes this discovery, one realizes the universe is filled with all sorts of fortuitous encounters, intuitions, and mysterious coincidences, all pointing to a higher purpose behind our lives, and in fact, behind all of human history. The only question, then, for the seeker who wakes up to this reality is how does this mysterious world really operate, and how does one begin to engage its secrets.
In those days, I knew, something had popped in human consciousness and had led directly to two more Insights: a Tenth and Eleventh. The Tenth delved into the mystery of the Afterlife and chronicled a decadelong focus on Heaven and its inhabitants, forever dispelling, along the way, an age-old repression of death and what happens afterward. Once that block was lifted, an exploration of everything spiritual seemed to begin.
Quickly came the next Insight: the Eleventh, born of a collective knowing that we are all here to participate in some as yet undefined agenda—a Plan of some kind. It involved the discovery of how to manifest our deepest dreams and to lift the world to its ideal. In the years that followed, this intuition grew into all sorts of theories about Secrets and Prayer Power and Laws of Attraction, theories that seemed right but not quite complete.
Those theories, I knew, brought us up to recent times and lasted until the material bottom fell out from under all of us—in the form of a worldwide financial collapse. After that, we faced more immediate matters, such as personal solvency and not letting the doomsayers take us too far into fear. We were still awake, and we still wanted more spiritual answers. But from then on, those answers had to be practical as well. They had to work in the real world, no matter how mysterious that world turned out to be.
I felt a smile coming up …. How interesting that Wil had found these writings now. He had long predicted the emergence of another Insight, the Twelfth—which he felt would signal a final revelation for humanity, picking up where the Eleventh had left off. I wondered, would the Twelfth finally show us how to “live” this spiritual knowledge at a greater level? Would this change begin to usher in this new, more ideal world we seemed to sense was coming?
I knew we would have to wait and see. Wil had said only to meet him at the airport and from there we would head to Cairo, if it worked out. If it worked out? What did he mean by that?
A deer dashing across the freeway broke my rumination, and I tapped the brakes to slow down. The big doe ran full speed across six lanes and jumped the fence on the other side. A deer was also a good sign, a symbol of attention and alertness.
As I looked out at the hills then, their fall colors now bathed in the light of an amber-tinted sunset, I realized I felt exactly that way: more alert and alive. All these thoughts had somehow induced a greater energy level in me, lifting me to a place where I was attending