The Twelfth Insight - James Redfield [38]
I was running through the darkness now, jumping from boulder to boulder. At one point, to my horror, I found I had no way forward without moving back down the slope in a direction closer to the bobbing lights. Worst of all, up ahead, the slope ended in a sheer rock face. I would have to climb virtually straight up the rocks to get away.
Another gunshot rang out, which threw me completely into panic. It all seemed meaningless now. Now there was only fear, and the desperate desire to get away.
When I reached the rock face, I chose the best way I could see and climbed for my life. At each ledge of rock reached, the lights flickered erratically over me, telling me the men were climbing as well. Were they already sighting in on me with their weapons? The thought sent me into ever larger waves of panic until the level was simply unbearable. At that moment, I began to feel the resignation of imminent death descending on me like a wet blanket, sapping my remaining energy. My legs began to feel like lead.
Then suddenly, I was buoyed by a memory. This exact circumstance had happened to me before, years ago, during the search for the Prophecy in Peru. I was in the exact same situation, giving in to death as a respite from terror. Back then, I had opened up to a consciousness I hadn’t experienced before or since.
With that thought in mind, I regained some of my balance and climbed to the top of the rock face. Then I squeezed through a narrow opening between two large outcroppings, attempting to find a way up to my right. To my shock, I found myself totally blocked off and stymied by a sheer drop-off ahead of me. Again, just as in Peru.
Rocks sliding down the slope behind me told me the extremists were close. My rubbery legs began to fail again, and I slumped to the rocks. Again the blanket of surrender began to cover me—only this time I didn’t fully let go. A part of me, the part that remembered the experience in Peru, didn’t give in. I moved into a zone where I was the pure observer, the detached witness, there only to watch the unfolding drama that would determine my fate.
Taking a breath, I looked out at my surroundings, waiting, and then, just as in Peru, something began to change. Without investment, I watched as my consciousness suddenly enlarged and reached out to everything around me, giving me an odd feeling of familiarity, as though I was recapturing a natural part of myself that had been lost.
Instantly, my perception was filled with everything I hadn’t noticed before: Small moths and flying insects circled around my head. Crickets, or perhaps grasshoppers, sang their song from the trees and rocks. I became aware of a large bird, perhaps a hawk or owl, awakened by my rude intrusion, which cried out and flew away. I could hear each thump of the wings, as if it was flying off in slow motion.
Above me, the sliver of moon that had guided my way was now hanging lower in the sky. As I looked at it, I felt another expansion of my being, one I also remembered from before. No longer was it merely an artifact in the sky, two-dimensional in its appearance, like something seen on television.
This sliver was now perceived by the observing part of myself in a larger way, so that I knew in my perception that the phases of the moon are really a change in the way the sun’s light reflects off the moon’s round, three-dimensional shape, hanging there in space.
The perception stretched my awareness even more to include not just the moon but the sun as well, hanging, as it was, underneath Earth’s western horizon and shining upon the moon. The effect was to extend my sense of space past the local area around the ledge I was sitting on, out to the larger cosmos in all directions—and not just over my head and to each side. I felt it under my feet on the other side of Earth as well.
With that, everything was suddenly