The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (14 page)

“What was his message?”

“He confirmed what you and I saw with Maya; he said we could remember beyond our individual birth intentions to a broader
knowledge of human purpose and how we could complete this purpose. Apparently, remembering this knowledge brings in an expanded
energy that can end the Fear… and this experiment. He called it a World Vision.”

Wil was silent.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think all this is just more of the Tenth Insight knowledge. Please understand: I share your sense of urgency. But the only
way we can help is to continue exploring the Afterlife until we find out about this larger Vision that Williams was trying
to communicate. There must be an exact process for remembering what it is.”

In the distance a movement caught my eye. Eight or ten very distinct beings, only partially out of focus, moved to within
fifty feet. Behind them were dozens more, blended together in the usual amber-colored blur. All of them exuded a particular
feeling of sentiment and nostalgia that was distinctly familiar.

“Do you know who these souls are?” Wil asked, smiling broadly.

I looked out at the group, sensing kinship. I did know, but I didn’t. As I looked upon the soul group, the emotional connection
continued to grow more intense, beyond anything I could remember ever experiencing. Yet, at the same time, the closeness was
recognizable; I had been
here
before.

The group moved within twenty feet of me, increasing the euphoria and acceptance even more. I gladly let go, turning myself
over to the feeling, wishing only to bask in it—content— perhaps for the first time in my life. Waves of acknowledgment and
appreciation filled my mind.

“Have you figured it out?” Wil asked again.

I turned and looked at him. “This is my soul group, isn’t it?”

With that thought came a flood of memories. Thirteenth-century France, a monastery and courtyard. All around me a group of
monks, laughter, closeness, then walking alone on a wooded road. Two ragged men, ascetics, asking for help, something about
preserving some secret knowledge.

I shook off the vision and looked at Wil, gripped by a perverse fear. What was I about to see? I attempted to center, and
my soul group edged four feet closer.

“What is happening?” Wil asked. “I couldn’t quite understand.”

I described what I had observed.

“Probe further,” Wil suggested.

Immediately I saw the ascetics again, and somehow knew they were members of a secret order of Franciscan “Spirituals” who
had recently been excommunicated, after Pope Celestine V had resigned.

Pope Celestine? I glanced at Wil. “Did you get that? I never knew there were popes by that name.”

“Celestine V was late thirteenth century,” Wil confirmed.
“The ruins in Peru, where the Ninth Insight was ultimately found, were named after him when first discovered in the 1600s.”

“Who were the Spirituals?”

“They were a group of monks who believed that a higher awareness could be achieved by extracting themselves from human culture
and returning to a contemplative life in nature. Pope Celestine supported this idea and, in fact, lived in a cave himself
for a while. He was deposed, of course, and later, most sects of the Spirituals were condemned as Gnostics and excommunicated.”

More memories surfaced. The two ascetics had approached me asking for help, and I had reluctantly met with them deep in the
forest. I had had no choice, so entrancing were their eyes and the fearlessness of their demeanor. Old documents were in great
danger of being lost forever, they told me. Later I had smuggled them back to the abbey and had read them by candlelight in
my chambers, the doors closed and locked securely.

These documents were old Latin copies of the Nine Insights, and I had consented to copy them before it was too late, working
every moment of my spare time to painstakingly reproduce dozens of the manuscripts. At one point I was so enthralled by the
Insights that I sought to persuade the ascetics to make them public.

They adamantly refused, explaining that they had held the documents for many centuries, waiting for the correct understanding
to emerge within the church. When I questioned the meaning of this latter phrase, they explained that the Insights would not
be accepted until the church reconciled what they referred to as the
Gnostic dilemma.

The Gnostics, I somehow remembered, were early Christians
who believed that followers of the one God should not merely revere Christ but strive to emulate him in the spirit of Pentecost.
They sought to describe this emulation in philosophical terms, as a method of practice. As the early church formulated its
canons, the Gnostics were eventually considered willful heretics, opposed to turning their lives over to God as a matter of
faith. To become a true believer, the early church leaders concluded, one had to forgo understanding and analysis and be content
to live life through divine revelation, adhering to God’s will moment by moment, but content to remain ignorant of his overall
plan.

Accusing the church hierarchy of tyranny, the Gnostics argued that their understandings and methods were intended to actually
facilitate this act of “letting go to God’s will” that the church was requiring, rather than giving mere lip service to the/
idea, as the churchmen were doing.

In the end the Gnostics lost, and were banished from all church functions and texts, their beliefs disappearing underground
among the various secret sects and orders. Yet the dilemma was clear. As long as the church held out the vision of a transformative
spiritual connection with the divine, yet persecuted anyone who talked openly about the specifics of the experience—how one
might actually attain such an awareness, what it felt like—then the “kingdom within” would remain merely an intellectualized
concept within church doctrine, and the Insights would be crushed anytime they surfaced.

At the moment, I listened with concern to the ascetics and said nothing, but inwardly I disagreed. I was sure the Benedictine
Order of which I was a part would be interested in these writings, especially at the level of the individual monk. Later,
without telling the Spirituals, I shared a copy with a friend who was the closest adviser to Cardinal Nicholas in my district.
Reaction came
swiftly. Word arrived that the cardinal was out of the country, but I was asked to cease any discussion of the subject and
to depart at once for Naples to report my findings to the cardinal’s superiors. I panicked and immediately dispensed the manuscripts
as widely as possible throughout the order, hoping that I might garner support from other interested brothers.

In order to postpone my summons, I faked a severe ankle injury and wrote a series of letters explaining my disability, delaying
the trip for months while I copied as many manuscripts as I could in my isolation. Finally, on the night of a new moon, my
door was kicked down by soldiers and I was beaten severely and taken blindfolded to the castle of the local noble, where I
later languished at the stock for days before being decapitated.

The shock of remembering my death cast me into fear again and created a powerful tingling in my injured ankle. The soul group
continued to move several feet closer until I managed to center myself. Still, I was left with a degree of confusion. A nod
from Wil told me he had seen the entire story.

“This was the beginning of my ankle problem, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” Wil replied.

I caught his eye. “What about all the other memories? Did you understand the Gnostic dilemma?”

He nodded and squared up to face me directly.

“Why would the church create such a dilemma?” I asked.

“Because the early church was afraid to come out and say that Christ modeled a way of life that each of us could aspire to,
although that is what is clearly said in the Scriptures. They feared that this position would give too much power to individuals,
so they perpetrated the contradiction. On the one hand the churchmen urged the believer to seek the mystical kingdom of God
within, to intuit God’s will, and to be filled with the Holy Spirit. But on the other hand they condemned as blasphemous any
discussion of how one might go about achieving these states, often resorting to outright murder to protect their power.”

“So I was a fool for trying to circulate the Insights.”

“I wouldn’t say a fool,” Wil mused, “more like undiplomatic. You were killed because you tried to force an understanding into
culture before its time.”

I looked into Wil’s eyes for another moment, then drifted back into the knowledge of the group, finding myself at the scene
of the nineteenth-century wars again. I was back at the meeting of chiefs in the valley, holding the same packhorse, apparently
just before departing. A mountain man and trapper, I was friends with both the Native Americans and the settlers. Almost all
the Indians wanted to fight, but Maya had won the hearts of some with her search for peace. Remaining silent, I listened to
both sides, then watched as most of the chiefs had left.

At one point Maya walked up to me. “I suppose you’re leaving too.”

I nodded affirmatively, explaining that if these Native medicine chiefs didn’t understand what she was doing, I surely didn’t.

She looked at me as though I must be kidding, then, turning, she directed her attention to another person. Charlene! I suddenly
recalled that she had been there; she was an Indian woman of great power, but often ignored by the envious male chiefs because
of her gender. She seemed to know something important about the role of the ancestors, but her voice was falling on deaf ears.

I saw myself wanting to stay, wanting to support Maya, wanting to reveal my feelings for Charlene, yet in the end I walked
away; the unconscious memory of my mistake in the thirteenth
century was too close to the surface. I wanted only to run away, avoid any responsibility. My life pattern was set: I trapped
for furs, I got along, and I didn’t stick my neck out for anyone. Perhaps I would do better next time.

Next time? My mind raced forward, and I saw myself looking outward toward the Earth, contemplating my present incarnation.
I was watching my own Birth Vision, seeing the full possibility of resolving my reluctance to act or to take a stand. I envisioned
how I might utilize my early family to its greatest potential, learning spiritual sensitivity from my mother, integrity and
fun from my father. A grandfather would provide a connection with the wilderness, an uncle and aunt would provide a model
for tithing and discipline.

And being placed with such strong individuals would bring my tendency to be aloof quickly into consciousness. Because of their
ego and strong expectation, I would at first retreat from their messages, and try to hide, but then I would work through this
fear and see the positive preparation they were giving me, clearing this tendency so that I could fully follow my life path.

It would be a perfect preparation, and I would leave that upbringing looking for the details of spirituality I had seen in
the Insights centuries before. I would explore the psychological descriptions of the Human Potential Movement, the wisdom
of Eastern experience, the mystics of the West, and then eventually I would run into the actual Insights again, just at the
time they were surfacing to be brought finally into mass awareness. All this preparation and clearing would then allow me
to further explore how these Insights were changing human culture and to be a part of Williams’ group.

I pulled back and looked at Wil.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“It hasn’t exactly gone the ideal way for me either. I feel as if I’ve wasted the preparation. I haven’t even cleared myself
of the aloofness. There were so many books I didn’t read, so many people that could have given me messages that I ignored.
When I look back now, it seems as though I missed everything.”

Wil almost laughed. “None of us can follow our Birth Visions exactly.” He paused and stared. “Do you realize what you’re doing
at this moment? You just remembered the ideal way you wanted your life to go, the way that would have given you the most satisfaction,
and when you look at how you actually lived, you are filled with regrets, just the way Williams felt after he died and saw
all the opportunities he had missed. Instead of having to wait until after death, you’re experiencing a Life Review now.”

I couldn’t quite understand.

“Don’t you see? This has to be a key part of the Tenth. Not only are we discovering that our intuitions and our sense of destiny
in our lives are remembrances of our Birth Visions. As we understand the Sixth Insight more fully, we’re analyzing where we
have been off track or failed to take advantage of opportunities, so that we can immediately get back on a path more in line
with why we came. In other words, we’re bringing more of the process into consciousness on a day-to-day basis. In the past
we had to die to engage in a review of our lives, but now we can wake up earlier and eventually make death obsolete, as the
Ninth Insight predicts.”

I finally understood. “So this is what humans came to the Earth to do, to systematically remember, to gradually awaken.”

“That’s right. We’re finally becoming aware of a process that has been unconscious since human experience began. From the
start, humans have perceived a Birth Vision, and then after birth have gone unconscious, aware of only the vaguest of intuitions.
At first, in the early days of human history, the distance between what we intended and what we actually accomplished was
very great, and then, over time, the distance has closed. Now we’re on the verge of remembering everything.”

At that moment I was drawn back into the knowledge of the soul group. In an instant my awareness seemed to increase another
level, and all that Wil had said was confirmed. Now, finally, we could look at history not as the bloody struggle of the human
animal, who selfishly learned to dominate nature and to survive in greater style, pulling himself from life in the jungle
to create a vast and complex civilization. Rather, we could look at human history as a spiritual process, as the deeper, systematic
effort of souls, generation after generation, life after life, struggling through the millennia toward one solitary goal:
to remember what we already knew in the Afterlife and to make this knowledge conscious on Earth.