Wil moved slightly closer, still touching my back. “We have to re-create the image we received of your friend.”
“Maintain it?”
“Yes. As I said, we are learning to recognize and believe in our intuitions at a higher level. We all want the coincidences to come more consistently, but for most of us, this awareness is new and we’re surrounded by a culture that still operates too much in the old skepticism, so we lose the expectation, the faith. Yet what we’re beginning to realize is that when we fully pay attention, inspecting the details of the potential future we’re shown, purposely keeping the image in the back of our minds, intentionally believing—when we do this—then whatever we are imaging tends to happen more readily.”
“Then we ‘will’ it to happen?”
“No. Remember my experience in the Afterlife. There you can make anything happen just by wishing it so, but such creation isn’t fulfilling. The same is true of this dimension, only everything moves at a slower rate. On Earth, we can will and create almost anything we wish, but real fulfillment comes only when we first tune into our inner direction and divine guidance. Only then do we use our will to move toward the potential futures we received. In this sense, we become cocreators with the divine source. Do you see how this knowledge begins the Tenth Insight? We are learning to use our visualization in the same way it is used in the Afterlife, and when we do, we fall into alignment with that dimension, and that helps unite Heaven and Earth.”
I nodded, understanding completely. After taking several deep breaths, Wil exerted more pressure on my back and instructed me to re-create the details of Charlene’s face. For a moment nothing happened, and then suddenly I felt a rush of energy, twisting me forward and pushing me into a wild acceleration.
I was streaking at fantastic speeds though a multicolored tunnel of some kind. Fully conscious, I wondered why I had no fear, for what I really felt was a sense of recognition and contentment and peace, as though I had been here before. When the movement stopped, I found myself in an environment of warm, white light. I looked for Wil and realized he was standing to my left and slightly behind me.
“There you are,” he said, smiling. His lips weren’t moving, but I could clearly hear his voice. I then noticed the appearance of his body. He looked exactly the same, except he seemed to be completely illuminated from within.
I reached over to touch his hand and noticed that my body appeared the same way. When I touched him, what I felt was a field several inches outside the arm I could see. Pushing harder, I realized I couldn’t penetrate this energy; I only moved his body away from me.
Wil was near bursting with mirth. In fact, his expression was so humorous that I laughed myself.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” he asked.
“This is a higher vibration than at the Celestine Ruins,” I replied. “Do you know where we are?”
Wil was silent, gazing out at our surroundings. We seemed to be in an environment that was spatial, and we had a sense of up and down, but we were suspended motionless in midair and there were no horizons. The white light was a constant hue in all directions.
Finally Wil said, “This is an observation point; I came here briefly, when I first imaged your face. More souls were here.”
“What were they doing?”
“Observing the people who had come over after death.”
“What? You mean this is where people come right after they have died?”
“Yes.”
“Why are we here? Has something happened to Charlene?”
He turned more directly toward me. “No, I don’t think so. Remember what happened to me when I began to image you. I moved to many locations before we finally met at the falls. There’s probably something we need to see here before we can find Charlene. Let’s wait and see what happens with these souls.” He nodded to our left, where several humanlike entities were materializing directly in front of us, at a distance, of what appeared to be about thirty feet.
My first reaction was to be cautious. “Wil, how do we know their intentions are friendly? What if they try to possess us or something?”
He gave me a serious expression. “How do you know if someone on Earth is trying to control you?”
“I would pick up on it. I could tell that the person was being manipulative.”
“What else?”
“I guess they would be taking energy away from me. I would feel a decrease in my sense of wisdom, self-direction.”
“Exactly. They wouldn’t be following the Insights. All these principles work the same way in both dimensions.”
As the entities formed completely, I remained cautious. But eventually I felt a loving and supportive energy emanating from their bodies, which seemed to be comprised of a whitish-amber light that danced and shimmered in and out of focus. Their faces had human characteristics but could not be looked at directly. I couldn’t even tell how many souls were there. At one moment, three or four seemed to be facing us, then I would blink and there would be six, then three again, all dancing in and out of view. Overall, they looked like a flickering, animated cloud of amber, against the background color of white.
After several minutes, another form began to materialize be side the others, only this figure was more clearly in focus and appeared in a luminous body similar to Wil and myself. We could see that it was a middle-aged man; he looked around wildly, then saw the group of souls and began to relax.
To my surprise, when I focused closely on him, I could pick up on what he was feeling and thinking. I glanced at Wil, who nodded that he was also sensing the person’s reaction.
I focused again and observed that, in spite of a certain detachment and sense of love and support, he was in a state of shock at having discovered he had died. Only minutes before, he had been routinely jogging, and while attempting to run up a long hill, had suffered a massive heart attack. The pain had lasted only a few seconds, and then he was hovering outside his body, watching a stream of bystanders rush up to help him. Soon a team of paramedics arrived and worked feverishly to bring him back.
As he sat beside his body in the ambulance, he had listened in horror as the team leader had pronounced him dead. Frantically he had attempted to communicate, but no one could hear. At the hospital a doctor confirmed to the crew that his heart had literally exploded; that no one could have done anything to save his life.
Part of him tried to accept the fact; another resisted. How could he be dead? He had called out for help and had instantly found himself in a tunnel of colors that had brought him to where he now stood. As we watched, he seemed to become more aware of the souls and moved toward them, shifting out of focus to us, appearing more like them.
Then abruptly he pulled back toward us and was quickly surrounded by an office of some kind, filled with computers and wall charts and people working. Everything looked perfectly real, except the walls were semitransparent, so that we could see what was happening inside, and the sky above the office was not blue, but a strange olive color.
“He’s deluding himself,” Wil said. “He’s re-creating the office where he worked on Earth, trying to pretend he hasn’t died.”
The souls moved closer and others came until there were dozens of them, all flickering in and out of focus in the amber light. They seemed to be sending the man love and some kind of information I couldn’t understand. Gradually the constructed office began to fade and eventually disappeared completely.
The man was left with an expression of resignation on his face, and he again moved into focus with the souls.
“Let’s go with them,” I heard Wil say. At the same moment, I felt his arm, or rather, the energy of his arm, pushing against my back.
As soon as I inwardly agreed, there was the slight sensation of movement, and the souls and the man all came into clearer focus. The souls now had glowing faces much as Wil and I did, but their hands and feet, instead of being clearly formed, were mere radiations of light. I could now focus on the entities for as long a
s four or five seconds before losing them and having to blink to find them again.
I became aware that the group of souls, as well as the deceased individual, was watching an intense point of bright light moving toward us. It eventually swelled into a massive beam that covered everything. Unable to look directly at the light, I turned so I could just see the silhouette of the man, who was staring fully at the beam without apparent difficulty.
Again I could pick up on his thoughts and emotions. The light was filling him with an unimaginable sense of love and calm perspective. As this sensation swept over him, his viewpoint and knowledge expanded until he could clearly see the life he had just lived from a broad and amazingly detailed perspective.
Immediately he could see the circumstances of his birth and early family life. He was born John Donald Williams to a father who was slow intellectually and to a mother who was extremely detached and absent because of her involvement in various social events. He himself had grown up angry and defiant, an interrogator eager to prove to the world that he was a brilliant achiever who could master science and mathematics. He earned a doctorate in physics at MIT at age twenty-three and taught at four prestigious universities before moving on to the Defense Department and then later to a private energy corporation.
Clearly he had thrown himself into this latter position with total abandon and disregard for his health. After years of fast food and no exercise he was diagnosed with a chronic heart condition. An exercise routine pursued too aggressively had proved fatal. He had died in his prime at age fifty-eight.
At this point Williams’ awareness shifted and he began to have profound regrets and severe emotional pain concerning the way he had led his life. He realized that his childhood and early family had been set up perfectly to expose what was already his soul’s tendency to use defiance and elitism to feel more important. His main tool had been ridicule, putting down others by criticizing their abilities and work ethic and personality. Yet now he could see that all the teachers had been in place to help him overcome this insecurity. All of them had arrived at just the right time to show him another way, but he had ignored them completely.
Instead he had just pursued his tunnel vision to the end. All the signs had been there to choose his work more carefully, to slow down. There were a multitude of implications and dangers inherent in his research of new technologies that he had failed to consider. He had allowed his employers to feed him new theories, and even unfamiliar physical principles, without even questioning their origin. These procedures worked, and that was all he cared about, because they led to success, gratitude, recognition. He had succumbed to his need for recognition… again. My God, he thought, I’ve failed just as I did before.
His mind abruptly shifted to a new scene, an earlier existence. He was in the southern Appalachians, nineteenth century, a military outpost. In a large tent several men leaned over a map. Lanterns flickered their light against the walls. A consensus had been reached among all the field officers present: there was no hope for peace now. War was inevitable, and sound military principles dictated an attack, quickly.
As one of the commanding general’s top two aides, Williams had been forced to concur with the others. No other choice existed, he had concluded; disagreement would have ended his career. Besides, he couldn’t have dissuaded the others even if he had wanted to. The offensive would have to be carried out, likely the last major battle in the eastern war against the Natives.
A sentry interrupted with a communication for the general. A settler wanted to see the commander immediately. Looking through the open tent flap, Williams had seen the frail white woman, perhaps thirty, desperation in her eyes. He found out later that she was the daughter of a missionary, bringing word of a possible new Native American initiative for peace, an appeal that she personally had negotiated at great risk.
But the general had refused to see her, remaining in the tent as she shouted at him, finally ordering her from his camp at gunpoint, not knowing the content of her message, not wanting to know. Again Williams kept quiet. He knew his commander was under great pressure, having already promised that the region would be opened up for economic expansion. A war was necessary if the vision of the power brokers and their political allies was to be actualized. It was not enough to let the settlers and the Indians create their own frontier culture. No, in their view, the future had to be shaped and manipulated and controlled for the best interests of those who made the world secure and abundant. It would be far too frightening and altogether irresponsible to let the little people decide.
Williams knew that a war would greatly please the railroad and coal tycoons and the newly emerging oil interests, and would, of course, ensure his own future as well. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and play along. And he would, under silent protest—unlike the general’s other primary aide. He remembered looking across the room at his colleague, a small man who limped slightly. No one knew why he limped. Nothing was wrong with his leg. Here was the ultimate yes-man. He knew what the secret cartels were up to and he loved it, admired it, wanted to become a part of it. And there was something more.
This man, like the general and the other controllers, feared the Native Americans and wanted them removed not just because of the Natives’ alienation from the expanding industrial economy that was poised to overrun their lands. They feared these people because of something deeper, some terrifying and transformative idea, known in its entirety only by a few of the elders, but which bubbled up throughout their culture and called out for the controllers to change, to remember another vision of the future.
Williams had found out that the missionary’s daughter had arranged for the great medicine chiefs to come together in one last attempt to agree on this knowledge, to find the words to share it—one last bid to explain themselves, to establish their value to a world quickly turning against them. Williams had known, deep within, that the woman should have been heard, but in the end he had remained silent, and with one quick nod the general had pushed away the possibility of reconciliation and had ordered the battle to begin.
As we watched, Williams’ recollection shifted to a gorge in the deep woods, site of the coming battle. Cavalry poured over a ridge in a surprise offensive. The Native Americans rose to the defense, attacking the cavalry from the bluffs on either side. A short distance away, a large man and a woman huddled among the rocks. The man was a young academic, a congressional aide, there only to observe, terrified he was this close to the battle. It was wrong, all wrong. His interest was economics; he knew nothing of violence. He had come there convinced that the white man and the Indian need not be in conflict, that the growing economic surge through the region might be adapted, evolved, integrated to include both cultures.
Beside him in the rocks was the young woman seen at the military tent earlier. At this moment she felt abandoned, betrayed. Her effort could have worked, she knew, if those with the power had listened to what was possible. But she would not give up, she had told herself, not until the violence stopped. She kept saying, “It can be healed! It can be healed.”
Suddenly on the downslope behind them, two cavalrymen rode hard toward a single Native. I strained to see who it was, finally recognizing the man as the angry chief I had seen in my mind when talking to David, the chief who had been so vocal against the white woman’s ideas. As I watched, he turned quickly and shot an arrow into the chest of one of his pursuers. The other soldier leaped from his horse and fell upon the Native American. Both struggled furiously, the soldier’s knife finally plunging deep into the throat of the darker man. Blood gushed across the torn ground.
Watching the events, the panicked economist pleaded with the woman to flee with him, but she motioned for him to stay, to be calm. For the first time Williams could see an old medicine man beside a tree next to them, his form flickering in and out of focus. At that instant another troop of cavalry crested the rise and was on top of them, firing indiscriminately. Bullets tore through both the man and
the woman. With a smile the Indian defiantly stood and was likewise destroyed.
At this point Williams’ focus drifted to a hill that overlooked the entire scene. Another individual was looking down on the battle. He was dressed in buckskins and led a pack mule, a mountain man. He turned from the battle and walked down the hill in the opposite direction, past the pool and falls, and then out of sight. I was astounded: the battle had taken place right here in the valley, just south of the falls.
When my attention returned to Williams, he was reliving the horror of the bloodshed and the hatred. He knew his failure to act during the Native American wars had set up the conditions and hopes of his most recent life, but just as before, he had failed to awaken. He had been together again with the congressional aide who had been killed with the woman, and still he had failed to remember their mission. Williams intended to meet the younger man on a hilltop, among a circle of large trees, and there his friend was supposed to awaken and go on to find six others in the valley, forming a group of seven. Together the group was to help resolve the Fear.
The idea seemed to thrust him into a deeper recollection. Fear had been the great enemy throughout humanity’s long and tortuous history, and he seemed to know that present human culture was polarizing, giving the controllers in this historical time one last opportunity to seize power, to exploit the new technologies for their own purpose.
He seemed to cringe in agony. He knew that it was tremendously important for the group of seven to come together. History was poised for such groups, and only if enough of them formed, and only if enough of them understood the Fear, could the polarization be dispelled and the experiments in the valley ended.
Very slowly I became aware that I was again in the place of soft, white light. Williams’ visions had ended, and both he and the other entities had quickly vanished. Afterward I had experienced a quick movement backward that had left me dizzy and distracted.
I noticed Wil beside me to the right.