I sat down on one of the benches alone and ate. The vegetables and beans were unsalted but spiced with herbs. When lunch was over and the priests were stacking their plates on the table, another priest walked out of the church and hastily prepared a plate. When he finished, he looked around for a place to sit and our eyes met. He smiled and I recognized him as the priest who had looked at me from the sitting area earlier. I returned his smile and he walked over and spoke to me in broken English.
“May I sit on bench with you?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” I replied.
He sat down and began to eat very slowly, overchewing his food and smiling up at me occasionally. He was short and small with a wiry build and coal black hair. His eyes were a lighter brown.
“You like the food?” he asked.
I was holding my plate in my lap. Several bites of corn remained.
“Oh, yes,” I said, and took a bite. I noticed again how slowly and deliberately he chewed and tried to do the same, and then it struck me that all of the priests had been eating that way.
“Are the vegetables grown here at the mission?” I asked. He hesitated before answering, swallowing slowly.
“Yes, food is very important.”
“Do you meditate with the plants?” I asked.
He looked at me with obvious surprise. “You have read Manuscript?” he asked.
“Yes, the first four insights.”
“Have you grown food?” he asked.
“Oh no. I’m just learning about all this.”
“Do you see energy fields?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes while he carefully ate several more bites.
“Food is the first way of gaining energy,” he said.
I nodded.
“But in order to totally absorb energy in food, the food must be appreciated, eh…”
He seemed to be struggling for the right English word. “Savored,” he finally said. “Taste is the doorway. You must appreciate taste. This is the reason for prayer before eating. It is not just about being thankful, it is to make eating a holy experience, so the energy from the food can enter your body.”
He looked closely at me, as though to see whether I understood.
I nodded without comment. He looked thoughtful.
What he was telling me, I reasoned, was that this kind of deliberate appreciation of food was the real purpose behind the normal religious custom of being thankful, with the result being a higher energy absorption of the food.
“But taking in food is only first step,” he said. “After personal energy is increased in this way, you become more sensitive to energy in all things…and then you learn to take this energy into yourself without eating.”
I nodded affirmatively.
“Everything around us,” he continued, “has energy. But each has its own special kind. That is why some places increase energy more than others. It depends on how your shape fits with the energy there.”
“Is that what you were doing up there earlier?” I asked. “Increasing your energy?”
He looked pleased. “Yes.”
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“You have to be open, to connect, to use your sense of appreciation, as in seeing fields. But you take this one step further so that you get the sensation of being filled up.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
He frowned at my denseness. “Would you like to walk back to the sitting place? I can show you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”
I followed as he led the way across the courtyard and back to the sitting area. As we arrived, he stopped and looked around, as if surveying the area for something.
“Over there,” he said, pointing to a spot that bordered the dense forest.
We followed the path as it wound through the trees and bushes. He picked a spot in front of a large tree that grew out of a mound of boulders so that its huge trunk seemed to be perched on the rocks. Its roots wrapped around and through the boulders before finally reaching the soil. Flowering shrubs of some type grew in semicircles in front of the tree and I could detect a strange sweet fragrance from the shrub’s yellow blossoms. The dense forest provided a solid sheet of green in the background.
The priest directed me to sit down in a clear spot amid the bushes, facing the gnarled tree. He sat beside me.
“Do you think the tree is beautiful?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then, uh…feel it…uh…”
He seemed to be struggling again to find the word. He thought for a moment and then asked, “Father Sanchez told me that you had an experience on the ridge; can you remember how you felt?”
“I felt light and secure and connected.”
“How connected?”
“That’s hard to describe,” I said. “Like the whole landscape was part of me.”
“But what was the feeling?”
I thought for a minute. What was the feeling? Then it came to me.
“Love,” I said. “I guess I felt a love for everything.”
“Yes,” he said. “That is it. Feel that for the tree.”
“But wait a minute,” I protested. “Love is something that just happens. I can’t make myself love anything.”
“You do not make yourself love,” he said. “You allow love to enter you. But to do this you must position your mind by remembering what it felt like and try to feel it again.”
I looked at the tree and tried to remember the emotion on the ridge. Gradually, I began to admire its shape and presence. My appreciation grew until I actually felt an emotion of love. The feeling was exactly the one I remember as a child for my mother and as a youth for the special little girl that was the object of my “puppy love.” Yet even though I had been looking at the tree, this particular love existed as a general background feeling. I was in love with everything.
The priest slid away several feet and looked back at me intensely. “Good,” he said. “You are accepting the energy.”
I noticed his eyes were slightly out of focus.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I can see your energy field getting larger.”
I closed my eyes and tried to reach the intense feelings I had acquired on the ridge top but I couldn’t duplicate the experience. What I was feeling was on the same continuum but to a lesser degree than before. The failure made me frustrated.
“What happened?” he asked. “Your energy fell.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just couldn’t do it as strongly as before.”
He just looked at me, amused at first, then with impatience.
“What you experienced on the ridge was a gift, a breakthrough, a look at a new way. Now you must learn to get that experience by yourself, a little at a time.”
He slid back a foot farther and looked at me again. “Now try more.”
I closed my eyes and tried to feel deeply. Eventually the emotion swept over me again. I stayed with it, attempting to increase the feeling by small increments. I focused my regard on the tree.
“That is very good,” he suddenly said. “You are receiving energy and giving it to the tree.”
I looked at him squarely. “I’m giving it back to the tree?”
“When you appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of things,” he explained, “you receive energy. When you get to a level where you feel love, then you can send the energy back just by willing it so.” For a long time I sat there with the tree. The more I focused attention on the tree and admired its shape and color, the more love I seemed to acquire generally, an unusual experience. I imagined my energy flowing over and filling up the tree, but I couldn’t see it. Without changing my focus, I noticed the priest get up and begin to walk away.
“What does it look like when I’m giving energy to the tree?” I asked.
He described the perception in detail and I recognized it as the same phenomenon I had witnessed when Sa
rah projected energy onto the philodendron at Viciente. Though Sarah was successful, she apparently wasn’t aware that a state of love was necessary for the projection to take place. She must have been acquiring a love state naturally, without realizing it.
The priest walked down toward the courtyard and out of my range of vision. I remained in the sitting area until dusk.
The two priests nodded politely as I entered the house. A roaring fire fended off the evening chill and several oil lamps illuminated the front room. The air was filled with the smell of vegetable, or perhaps potato, soup. On the table was a ceramic bowl, several spoons, and a plate holding four slices of bread.
One of the priests turned and left without looking at me and the other kept his eyes lowered and nodded at a large cast iron pot sitting on the hearth by the fire. A handle protruded from under its lid. As soon as I saw the pot, the second priest asked, “Is there anything else you need?”
“I think not,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded and left the house as well, leaving me alone. I lifted the lid from the pot—potato soup. It smelled rich and delicious. I poured several ladles full into a bowl and sat down at the table, then pulled the part of the Manuscript Sanchez had given me from my pocket and placed it beside my plate, intending to read. But the soup tasted so good that I focused entirely on eating. After I finished, I placed the dishes in a large pan and stared at the fire, hypnotized, until the flames burned low. Then I turned down the lamps and went to bed.
The next morning, I awakened at dawn feeling totally refreshed. Outside a morning mist rolled through the courtyard. I stoked up the fire and put several pieces of kindling on the coals and fanned it until it caught up. I was about to look through the kitchen for food when I heard Sanchez’s truck approaching.
I walked outside as he emerged from behind the church, a backpack in one arm and several packages in the other.
“I have some news,” he said, motioning me to follow him back inside the house.
Several other priests appeared with hot corn cakes and grits and more dried fruit. Sanchez greeted the men, then sat with me at the table as the priests scurried away.
“I attended a meeting of some of the priests of the Southern Council,” he said. “We were there to talk about the Manuscript. At issue was the government’s aggressive actions. This was the first time any group of priests has met publicly in support of this document, and we were just beginning our discussion when a government representative knocked on the door and asked to be admitted.”
He paused as he served his plate and took several bites, chewing them thoroughly. “The representative,” he continued, “assured us that the government’s sole purpose was to protect the Manuscript from outside exploitation. He informed us that all copies being held by Peruvian citizens must be licensed. He said he understood our concern but asked us to comply with this law and turn in our copies. He promised that government duplicates would be issued back to us at once.”
“Did you turn them in?” I asked.
“Of course not.”
We both ate for a few minutes. I tried to overchew, to appreciate the taste.
“We asked about the violence in Cula,” he went on, “and he told us that this was a necessary reaction against a man called Jensen, that several of his men were armed agents from another country. He said they planned to find and steal the undiscovered part of the Manuscript and remove it from Peru, so the government had no choice but to arrest them. There was no mention of you or your friends.”
“Did you believe the government man?”
“No, we didn’t. After he left we continued the meeting. We agreed that our policy would be one of quiet resistance. We will continue to make copies and distribute them carefully.”
“Will your church leaders allow you to do that?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” Sanchez said. “The church elders have disapproved of the Manuscript but so far have not seriously investigated who is involved with it. Our main concern is a Cardinal who resides farther north, Cardinal Sebastian. He is the most vocal in opposition to the Manuscript and is very influential. If he convinces the leadership to issue strong proclamations, then we will have a very interesting decision to make.”
“Why is he so opposed to the Manuscript?”
“He is afraid.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t spoken with him in a long time, and we always avoid the subject of the Manuscript. But I believe he thinks man’s role is to participate in the cosmos ignorant of spiritual knowledge—by faith alone. He thinks the Manuscript will undermine the status quo, the lines of authority in the world.”
“How would it do that?”
He smiled and tilted his head back slightly. “The truth shall set you free.”
I was looking at him, trying to understand what he meant, eating the last of the bread and fruit on my plate. He ate several more tiny bites and pushed his chair back.
“You seem much stronger,” he said. “Did you talk with anyone here?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I learned a method of connecting with the energy from one of the priests. I…didn’t catch his name. He was in the sitting area while we were talking in the courtyard yesterday morning, remember? When I spoke with him later, he showed me how to absorb energy and then to project it back.”
“His name is John,” Sanchez said, then nodded for me to go on.
“It was an amazing experience,” I said. “By remembering the love I felt I was able to open up. I sat up there all day simmering in it. I didn’t reach the state I experienced on the ridge but I got close.”
Sanchez looked more serious. “The role of love has been misunderstood for a long time. Love is not something we should do to be good or to make the world a better place out of some abstract moral responsibility, or because we should give up our hedonism. Connecting with energy feels like excitement, then euphoria, and then love. Finding enough energy to maintain that state of love certainly helps the world, but it most directly helps us. It is the most hedonistic thing we can do.”
I agreed, then noticed he had moved his chair back several more feet and was looking at me intensely, his eyes unfocused.
“So what does my field look like,” I asked.
“It is much larger,” he said. “I think you feel very good.”
“I do.”
“Good. That is what we do here.”
“Tell me about that,” I said.
“We train priests to go farther into the mountains and work with the Indians. It is a lonely job and the priests must have great strength. All of the men here have been screened thoroughly and all have one thing in common: each has had one experience he calls mystical.
“I have been studying this kind of experience for many years,” he continued, “even before the Manuscript was found, and I believe that when one has already encountered a mystical experience, getting back into this state and raising one’s personal energy level comes much easier. Others can also connect but it takes longer. A strong memory of the experience, as I think you learned, facilitates its re-creation. After that, one slowly builds back.”
“What does a person’s energy field look like when this is happening?”
“It grows outward and changes color slightly.”
“What color?”
“Normally from a dull white toward green and blue. But the most important thing is that it expands. For instance, during your mystical encounter on the ridge top, your energy flashed outward into the whole universe. Essentially you connected and drew energy from the entire cosmos and in turn your energy swelled to encompass everything, everywhere. Can you remember how that felt?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I felt as though the entire universe was my body and I was just the head, or perhaps more accurately, the eyes.”
“Yes,” he said, “and at that moment, your energy field and that of the universe were the same. The universe was your body.”
“I had a strange memory during t
hat time,” I said. “I seemed to remember how this larger body, this universe of mine, evolved. I was there. I saw the first stars formed from simple hydrogen and then saw more complex matter evolve in successive generations of these suns. Only I didn’t see matter. I saw matter as simple vibrations of energy that were evolving systematically into ever more complex higher states. Then…life began and evolved to a point where humans appeared…”
I stopped suddenly and he noticed my changed mood.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“That’s where the memory of evolution stopped,” I explained, “with humans. I felt as if the story continued, but I couldn’t quite grasp it.”
“The story does go on,” he said. “Humans are carrying forth the universe’s evolution toward higher and higher vibrational complexity.”
“How?” I asked.
He smiled but didn’t answer. “Let’s talk about this later. I really must check on a few things. I’ll see you in an hour or so.”
I nodded. He picked up an apple and walked out. I wandered outside behind him, then remembered the copy of the Fifth Insight in the bedroom and retrieved it. Earlier I had been thinking of the forest where Sanchez had been sitting when I had first met him. Even in my fatigue and panic I had noticed that the place was extraordinarily beautiful, so I walked down the road toward the west until I came to the exact spot, then sat down there myself.
Leaning back against a tree, I cleared my mind and spent several minutes looking around. The morning was bright and breezy and I watched the wind as it whipped the branches above my head. The air felt refreshing as I took in several deep breaths. During a lull in the wind, I took out the Manuscript and looked for the page where I had stopped reading. Before I could locate it, however, I heard the sound of a truck engine.
I lay flat beside the tree and attempted to determine its direction. The sound was coming from the mission. As it grew closer, I could see it was Sanchez’s old truck, with him driving.