The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (16 page)

Yet, again because of the Fear, these individuals were able to intuit only the drive to move to this land, sensing a new freedom
and liberty of spirit, but bringing with them the need to dominate and conquer, and to pursue their own security. The important
truths of the Native cultures were lost in the rush to exploit the region’s vast natural resources.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Renaissance continued, and I began to see the full scope of the Second Insight. The power of the
church to define reality was diminishing, and Europeans were feeling as though they were awakening to look at life anew. Through
the courage of countless individuals, all inspired by their intuitive memories, the scientific method was embraced as a democratic
process of exploring and coming to understand the world in which humans found themselves. This method—exploring some aspect
of the natural world, drawing conclusions, then offering this view to others—was thought of as the
consensus-building process through which we would be able, finally, to understand mankind’s real situation on this planet,
including our spiritual nature.

But those in the church, entrenched in Fear, sought to squelch this new science. As political forces lined up on both sides,
a compromise was reached. Science would be free to explore the outer, material world, but must leave spiritual phenomena to
the dictates of the still-influential churchmen. The entire inner world of experience—our higher perceptual states of beauty
and love, intuitions, coincidences, interpersonal phenomena, even dreams—all were, at first, off limits to the new science.

Despite these restrictions, science began to map out and describe the operation of the physical world, providing information
rich in ways to increase trade and utilize natural resources. Human economic security increased, and slowly we began to lose
our sense of mystery and our heartfelt questions about the purpose of life. We decided it was purposeful enough just to survive
and build a better, more secure world for ourselves and our children. Gradually we entered the consensus trance that denied
the reality of death and created the illusion that the world was explained and ordinary and devoid of mystery.

In spite of our rhetoric, our once-strong intuition of a spiritual source was being pushed farther into the background. In
this growing materialism, God could only be viewed as a distant Deist’s God, a God who merely pushed the universe into being
and then stood back to let it run in a mechanical sense, like a predictable machine, with every effect having a cause, and
unconnected events happening only at random, by chance alone.

Yet here I could see the birth intent of many of the individuals of this time period. They came knowing that the development
of technology and production was important because it could
eventually be made nonpolluting and sustainable and could liberate humankind beyond all imagination. But in the beginning,
born into the milieu of the time, all they could remember was the general intuition to build and produce and work, holding
tightly to the democratic ideal.

The vision shifted, and I could see that nowhere was this intuition stronger than in the creation of the United States, with
its democratic Constitution and its system of checks and balances. As a grand experiment, America was set up for the rapid
exchange of ideas that was to characterize the future. Yet below the surface, the messages of the Native Americans, and the
Native Africans, and other peoples on whose back the American experiment was initiated, all cried out to be heard, to be integrated
into the European mentality.

By the nineteenth century we were on the verge of a second great transformation of human culture, a transformation that would
be built on the new energy sources of oil and steam and finally electricity. The human economy had developed into a vast and
complicated field of endeavor that supplied more products than ever before through an explosion of new techniques. In great
numbers people were moving from rural communities to great urban centers of production, shifting from life on the farm to
involvement in the new, specialized
industrial revolution.

At the time, most believed that a democratically founded capitalism, unfettered by government regulation, was the desired
method of human commerce. Yet, again, as I picked up on individual Birth Visions, I could see that most people born into this
period had come hoping to evolve capitalism toward a more perfect form. Unfortunately the level of Fear was such that all
they managed to intuit was a desire to build individual security, to exploit other workers, and to maximize profits at every
turn,
often entering into collusive agreements with competitors and with governments. This was the great era of the robber barons
and of secret banking and industrial cartels.

However, by the early twentieth century, because of the abuses of this freewheeling capitalism, two other economic systems
were set to be offered as alternatives. Earlier, in England, two men had posed an alternative “manifesto” which called for
a new system, run by workers, that would eventually create an economic utopia, where the resources of the whole of humanity
would be made available to each person according to his needs, without greed or competition.

In the horrible working conditions of the day, the idea attracted many supporters. But I quickly saw that this materialistic
workers’ “manifesto” had been a corruption of the original intention. When the Birth Visions of the two men came into view,
I realized that what they were intuiting was that human destiny was eventually to achieve such a utopia. Unfortunately they
failed to remember that this utopia could only be accomplished through democratic participation, born of free will and slowly
evolved.

Consequently the initiators of this communist system, from the first revolution in Russia, erroneously thought that this system
could be created through force and dictatorship, an approach that failed miserably and cost millions of lives. In their impatience
the individuals involved had envisioned a utopia but had created communism and decades of tragedy.

The scene shifted to the other alternative to a democratic capitalism: the evil of fascism. This system was designed to enhance
the profits and control of a ruling elite, who thought of themselves as privileged leaders of human society. They believed
that only through the abandonment of democracy, and the union of
government with the new industrial leadership, could a nation reach its greatest potential and position in the world.

I saw clearly that in creating such a system, the participants were almost totally unconscious of their Birth Visions. They
had come here wishing only to promote the idea that civilization was evolving toward perfectibility and that a nation of people,
totally unified in purpose and will, striving to attain their fullest potential, could reach great heights of energy and effectiveness.
What was created was a fearful, self-serving vision wrongly claiming the superiority of certain races and nations, and the
possibility of developing a supernation whose destiny was to rule the world. Again the intuition that all humans were evolving
toward perfection was distorted by weak, fearful men into the murderous reign of the Third Reich.

I watched as others—who had likewise envisioned the perfectibility of mankind, but who were in greater touch with the importance
of an empowered democracy—intuited that they must stand up against both alternatives to a freely expressed economy. The first
stand resulted in a bloody world war against the fascist distortion, won finally at extreme cost. The second resulted in a
long and bitter cold war against the communist bloc.

I suddenly found myself focusing on the United States during the early years of this cold war, the decade of the fifties.
At this time, America stood successfully at the apex of what had been a four-hundred-year preoccupation with secular materialism.
Affluence and security had spread to include a large and growing middle class, and into this material success was born an
enormous new generation, a generation whose intuitions would help lead humanity toward a third great transformation.

This generation grew up constantly reminded that they lived
in the greatest country in the world, the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all its citizens. Yet, as they matured,
members of this generation found a disturbing disparity between this popular American self-image and actual reality. They
found that many people in this land—women and certain racial minorities—were, by law and custom, definitely
not free.
By the sixties the new generation was inspecting closely, and many were finding other disturbing aspects of the United States’
self-image—for instance, a blind patriotism that expected young people to go into a foreign land to fight a political war
that had no clearly expressed purpose and no prospect of victory.

Just as disturbing was the culture’s spiritual practice. The materialism of the previous four hundred years had pushed the
mystery of life, and death, far into the background. Many found the churches and synagogues full of pompous and meaningless
ritual. Attendance seemed more social than spiritual, and the members too restricted by a sense of how they might be perceived
and judged by their onlooking peers.

As the vision progressed, I could tell that the new generation’s tendency to analyze and judge arose from a deep-seated intuition
that there was more to life than the old material reality took into account. The new generation sensed new spiritual meaning
just beyond the horizon, and they began to explore other, lesser known religions and spiritual points of view. For the first
time the Eastern religions were understood in great numbers, serving to validate the mass intuition that spiritual perception
was an inner experience, a shift in awareness that changed forever one’s sense of identity and purpose. Similarly the Jewish
Cabalist writings and the Western Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckehart and Teilhard de Chardin, provided other intriguing
descriptions of a deeper spirituality.

At the same time, information was surfacing from the human sciences—sociology, psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology—as
well as from modern physics, that cast new light on the nature of human consciousness and creativity. This cumulation of thought,
together with the perspective provided by the East, gradually began to crystallize into what was later called the
Human Potential Movement,
the emerging belief that human beings were presently actualizing only a small portion of their vast physical, psychological,
and spiritual potential

I watched as, over the course of several decades, this information and the spiritual experience it spawned grew into a
critical mass
of awareness, a leap in consciousness from which we began to formulate a new view of what living a human life was all about,
including, ultimately, an actual remembrance of the Nine Insights.

Yet, even as this new view was crystallizing, surging through the human world as a contagion of consciousness, many others
in the new generation began to pull back, suddenly alarmed at the growing instability in culture which seemed to correspond
to the arrival of the new paradigm. For hundreds of years the solid agreements of the old worldview had maintained a well-defined,
even rigid, order for human life. All roles were clearly defined, and everyone knew his place: for instance, men at work,
women and children at home, nuclear and genetic families intact, a ubiquitous work ethic. Citizens were expected to discover
a place in the economy, to find meaning in family and children, and to know that the purpose of life was to live well and
create a more materially secure world for the succeeding generation.

Then came the sixties wave of questioning and analysis and criticism, and the unwavering rules began to crumble. No longer
was behavior effectively governed by powerful agreements.
Everyone now seemed empowered, liberated, free to chart his or her own course in life, to reach out for this nebulous idea
of potential. In this climate what others thought ceased to be the real determinant of our action and conduct; increasingly
our behavior was being determined by how we felt inside, by our own inner ethics.

For those who had truly adopted a more lived, spiritual point of view, characterized by honesty and love toward others, ethical
behavior was not a problem. But of concern were those who had lost the outer guidelines for living, without yet forming a
strong inner code. They seemed to be falling into a cultural no-man’s-land, where now anything seemed to be permissible: crime
and drugs and addictive impulses of all kinds, not to mention a loss of the work ethic. To make matters worse, many seemed
to be using the new findings of the Human Potential Movement to imply that criminals and deviates weren’t really even responsible
for their own actions, but were, instead, victims of an oppressive culture that shamelessly allowed the social conditions
that shaped this behavior.

As I continued to watch, I understood what I was seeing: a polarization of viewpoint was quickly forming around the planet,
as those who were undecided now reacted against a cultural viewpoint they saw leading to runaway chaos and uncertainty, perhaps
even to the total disintegration of their way of life. In the United States especially, a growing number of people were becoming
convinced they were now facing what amounted to a life-and-death struggle against the permissiveness and liberalism of the
past twenty-five years—a culture war, as they called it—with nothing short of the survival of Western civilization at stake.
I could see that many of them even considered the cause already near lost, and thus advocated extreme action.

In the face of this backlash, I could see the advocates of Human Potential moving into fear and defensiveness themselves,
sensing that many hard-earned victories for individual rights and social compassion were now in danger of being swept away
by a tide of conservatism. Many considered this reaction against liberation an attack by the embattled forces of greed and
exploitation, who were pushing forth in one last attempt to dominate the weaker members of society.