The Twelfth Insight - James Redfield [41]
I looked at him. “You feel the Protection, too, don’t you?”
At this moment, I suddenly thought to look down the hill. Wil was already moving past me to do the same thing, climbing higher on the outcropping to get a good view. I was right behind him. When we got in place, we could see movement. A small group of men were heading up toward us, weapons in hand.
“I knew it,” he said, rushing back to the ledge.
So did I, I thought, trying to keep up with him.
As we moved through the opening, something else came to mind. When I was out on the ledge the night before, it was dark. Maybe there was a way off the ledge and down the hill in that direction after all. When we arrived, Rachel was already looking over the ledge with Coleman, searching for that exact thing: an escape route. All of our minds seemed to be working together in some kind of super Connection.
Coleman was now totally in sync.
“What is happening to us?” he asked, smiling. “I knew the Fifth was about having a Breakthrough, but I never expected—”
“Just concentrate on the sense of Protection,” I said instinctively.
His face told me he understood.
“There’s the way,” Hira said abruptly. She was looking over the right side of the ledge. “We can drop down to the next rock and move along the slope to the right.”
I moved over and looked. “That’s a fifteen-foot drop!”
“You can do it,” she said.
Turning around, I could see everyone getting their gear ready. Wil gave me a “let’s go” look.
Hira was first, dropping her pack and then jumping beside it like it was nothing. Coleman dropped his belongings to Hira and then crept out to the end of the ledge and hung momentarily by his arms before dropping. Wil did the same thing. Then Rachel walked over to me and I took her by the arms and held her over the ledge. As I did so, our eyes locked into the deepest Connection I’d ever experienced, as though our souls touched.
I held her there for a long moment and then dropped her easily to the others, before jumping down as well. As I dropped, I thought of something I’d long forgotten. All my life, since I was very small, I’d fallen periodically, sometimes from great heights. Once, when only three, I thought I could fly and, with an apron tied around my neck like a Superman cape, had swan dived off an eight-foot retaining wall, landing unhurt.
Later, as a youth, I had climbed a twenty-five-foot extension ladder over a concrete floor to help put up a light. The foot of the ladder suddenly kicked out and I fell the entire distance to the floor, landing on the ladder precisely, with my hip and shoulder each hitting a rung in the ladder so as to break my fall—the only way possible to have kept from being seriously injured. I walked away unharmed.
And finally, I’d fallen in college. While working as an electrician, I fell from the attic of a shopping center through the ceiling of a jewelry shop below, landing squarely on top of an eight-foot glass display case and shattering my way through four glass shelves until I bounced to the floor. When I landed, I carefully removed dozens of swordlike glass shards lying all across my body and got up—again, without a scratch.
During every one of these falls, time had slowed down and a sense of certainty had swept over me that everything would be all right, the same feeling I was having now as my feet landed on the rock below. I wondered if I had tuned in back then, somehow unconsciously, to this same sense of Protection.
Hira led the way and we found a route that took us around a large ravine and back down the eastern side of Secret Mountain. As Hira kept up a good pace ahead of us, I noticed she was rock hard and muscular, like a gymnast, and now bursting with enthusiasm.
“Don’t fall behind,” she said at one point, but even before she spoke, every one of us had instinctively begun to pick up the pace.
After about a