“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.
As from a great height, a large holographic image opened up around me and I could somehow see, in one glance, the long saga of human history. Without warning I was drawn into the image, and I felt myself being swept forward into the story, reliving it somehow in fast-forward, as if I had really been there, experiencing it moment by moment.
Suddenly I was witnessing the dawn of consciousness. Before me was a long, windswept plain, somewhere in Africa. Movement caught my eye; a small group of humans, unclothed, was foraging on a field of berries. As I watched, I seemed to pick up on the consciousness of the period. Intimately connected to the rhythms and signals of the natural world, we humans lived and responded instinctively. The routines of daily life were oriented toward the challenges of the search for food and toward membership within our individual band. Levels of power flowed downward from one physically stronger, attuned individual, and within this hierarchy we accepted our place in the same way we accepted the constant tragedies and difficulties of existence: without reflection.
As I watched, thousands of years passed by and countless generations lived and perished. Then, slowly, certain individuals began to grow restless with the routines they saw before them. When a child died in their arms, their consciousness expanded and they began to ask why. And to wonder how it might be avoided in the future. These individuals were beginning to gain self-awareness—beginning to realize that they were here, now, alive. They were able to step back from their automatic responses and glimpse the full scope of existence. Life, they knew, endured through the cycles of the sun and moon and seasons, but as the dead around them attested, it also had an end. What was the purpose?
Looking closely at these reflective individuals, I realized I could perceive their Birth Visions; they had come into the Earthly dimension with the specific purpose of initiating humanity’s first existential awakening. And, even though I couldn’t see its full scope, I knew that in the back of their minds was held the larger inspiration of the World Vision. Before their birth, they were aware that humanity was embarking on a long journey that they could already see. But they also knew that progress along this journey would have to be earned, generation by generation—for as we awakened to pursue a higher destiny, we also lost the calm peace of unconsciousness. Along with the exhilaration and freedom of knowing we were alive came the fear and uncertainty of being alive without knowing why.
I could see that humanity’s long history would be moved by these two conflicting urges. On the one hand, we would be moved past our fears by the strength of our intuitions, by our mental images that life was about accomplishing some particular goal, of moving culture forward in a positive direction that only we, as individuals, acting with courage and wisdom, could inspire. From the strength of these feelings we would be reminded that, as insecure as life appeared, we were, in fact, not alone, that there was purpose and meaning underlying the mystery of existence.
Yet, on the other hand, we would often fall prey to the opposite urge, the urge to protect ourselves from the Fear, at times losing sight of the purpose, falling into the angst of separation and abandonment. This
Fear would lead us into a frightened self-protection, fighting to retain our positions of power, stealing energy from each other, and always resisting change and evolution, regardless of what new, better information might be available.
As the awakening continued, millennia passed, and I watched as humans gradually began to coalesce into ever-larger groups, following a natural drive to identify with more people, to move into more complex social organizations. I could see that this drive came from the vague intuition, known fully in the Afterlife, that human destiny on Earth was to evolve toward unification. Following this intuition, we realized that we could evolve beyond the nomadic life of gathering and hunting and begin to cultivate the Earth’s plants and harvest them on a regular basis. Similarly we could domesticate and breed many of the animals around us, ensuring a constant presence of protein and related products. With the images of the World Vision deep within our unconscious, driving us archetypically, we began to envision a shift that would be one of the most dramatic transformations in human history: the leap from nomadic wandering to the establishment of large farming villages.
As these farming communities grew more complex, surpluses of food prompted trade and allowed humanity to divide into the first occupational groups—shepherds and builders and weavers, then merchants and metalworkers and soldiers. Quickly came the invention of writing and tabulation. But the whims of nature and the challenges of life still pierced the awareness of early humanity, and the unspoken question still loomed: why were we alive? As before, I watched the Birth Visions of those individuals who sought to understand spiritual reality at a higher level. They came into the Earth dimension to specifically expand human awareness of the divine source, but their first intuitions of the divine remained dim and incomplete, taking polytheistic form. Humanity began to acknowledge what we supposed was a multitude of cruel and demanding deities, gods that existed outside of ourselves and ruled the weather, the seasons, and the stages of the harvest. In our insecurity we thought that we must appease these gods with rites and rituals and sacrifice.