“Follow me,” I said spontaneously. “I know where we can go.”
I quickly led them back up to the outcropping where I was earlier and through the narrow passageway onto the ledge. Rachel, Hira, and Coleman still seemed to be consumed by their state of consciousness and found separate places to sit down.
Wil and I walked back outside to keep watch.
“You started that rock slide, didn’t you?” I asked.
Wil nodded.
I laughed. “I thought about causing a rock slide myself, but you thought of it first.”
He looked at me and said, “Who knows? Maybe you thought of it first, and I heard you. Or perhaps we thought of it at the same time. That’s my guess.”
I knew he was referring to the Connection we now all seemed to have with one another.
I took a step toward him. “Do you think these extremists will…?”
Wil completed the rest of my thought before I could get it out: “Follow us? I wouldn’t be surprised.”
He made the comment without alarm, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Which seemed odd given our circumstances, until I realized I felt exactly the same way. We were thinking and acting in hyperspeed, doing what we had to do. But part of what we were feeling—the love, being home, guided by some mysterious intuition—was definitely the constant sense of being invulnerable, as though nothing could happen that we wouldn’t be able to handle or be guided through.
I looked at him. “You feel the Protection, too, don’t you?”
At this moment, I suddenly thought to look down the hill. Wil was already moving past me to do the same thing, climbing higher on the outcropping to get a good view. I was right behind him. When we got in place, we could see movement. A small group of men were heading up toward us, weapons in hand.
“I knew it,” he said, rushing back to the ledge.
So did I, I thought, trying to keep up with him.
As we moved through the opening, something else came to mind. When I was out on the ledge the night before, it was dark. Maybe there was a way off the ledge and down the hill in that direction after all. When we arrived, Rachel was already looking over the ledge with Coleman, searching for that exact thing: an escape route. All of our minds seemed to be working together in some kind of super Connection.
Coleman was now totally in sync.
“What is happening to us?” he asked, smiling. “I knew the Fifth was about having a Breakthrough, but I never expected—”
“Just concentrate on the sense of Protection,” I said instinctively.
His face told me he understood.
“There’s the way,” Hira said abruptly. She was looking over the right side of the ledge. “We can drop down to the next rock and move along the slope to the right.”
I moved over and looked. “That’s a fifteen-foot drop!”
“You can do it,” she said.
Turning around, I could see everyone getting their gear ready. Wil gave me a “let’s go” look.
Hira was first, dropping her pack and then jumping beside it like it was nothing. Coleman dropped his belongings to Hira and then crept out to the end of the ledge and hung momentarily by his arms before dropping. Wil did the same thing. Then Rachel walked over to me and I took her by the arms and held her over the ledge. As I did so, our eyes locked into the deepest Connection I’d ever experienced, as though our souls touched.
I held her there for a long moment and then dropped her easily to the others, before jumping down as well. As I dropped, I thought of something I’d long forgotten. All my life, since I was very small, I’d fallen periodically, sometimes from great heights. Once, when only three, I thought I could fly and, with an apron tied around my neck like a Superman cape, had swan dived off an eight-foot retaining wall, landing unhurt.
Later, as a youth, I had climbed a twenty-five-foot extension ladder over a concrete floor to help put up a light. The foot of the ladder suddenly kicked out and I fell the entire distance to the floor, landing on the ladder precisely, with my hip and shoulder each hitting a rung in the ladder so as to break my fall—the only way possible to have kept from being seriously injured. I walked away unharmed.
And finally, I’d fallen in college. While working as an electrician, I fell from the attic of a shopping center through the ceiling of a jewelry shop below, landing squarely on top of an eight-foot glass display case and shattering my way through four glass shelves until I bounced to the floor. When I landed, I carefully removed dozens of swordlike glass shards lying all across my body and got up—again, without a scratch.
During every one of these falls, time had slowed down and a sense of certainty had swept over me that everything would be all right, the same feeling I was having now as my feet landed on the rock below. I wondered if I had tuned in back then, somehow unconsciously, to this same sense of Protection.
Hira led the way and we found a route that took us around a large ravine and back down the eastern side of Secret Mountain. As Hira kept up a good pace ahead of us, I noticed she was rock hard and muscular, like a gymnast, and now bursting with enthusiasm.
“Don’t fall behind,” she said at one point, but even before she spoke, every one of us had instinctively begun to pick up the pace.
After about a half mile, we had come down to the flats northeast of Boynton Canyon. There I began to get tired, and the euphoria and clarity seemed to be wearing off. Hira stopped for a minute, allowing us to catch our breath. As she looked at me, her face was different, as if she was suddenly worried again. I looked at the others and was met by newfound expressions of concern. Clearly, everyone was coming back to normal again. I looked back up toward the mountain.
Without warning, another gunshot echoed across the desert, throwing all of us into panic again. We were in the last of a group of small outcroppings before the terrain opened into a large, flat area of mostly desert. We huddled low in the rocks, facing a dilemma.
Behind us somewhere were the Apocalyptics, and ahead of us were two hundred yards of open ground before we reached a stand of junipers that would provide some cover. We could either run straight across or go to the right, where thicker pines and rocks offered more cover.
Wil was up ahead, crawling back to me.
“Are you holding your centeredness?” he asked.
I looked at him and shook my head. “Just barely.”
“Remember,” he said, “that what just occurred was a Breakthrough, a glimpse of a consciousness that we now know is possible. But we’ll have to work our way back to it.”
Just then, several more shots rang out, striking the rocks fifty feet away. The Apocalyptics didn’t know exactly where we were, but they were still behind us. Everyone was crawling over to Wil and me.
“They’re shooting from the ledge where we were,” Hira said, her voice shaking slightly now.
“What are we waiting for?” Rachel said. “We should just run straight across to the next hill.”
“Are you crazy?” Coleman said. He was looking up at the ledge. “I can see two or three of them. All with weapons. There’s more cover to the right. Use your logic.”
As he talked, an image of us running to the right crossed my mind, and then my level of energy seemed to crash even more. I looked at the route straight ahead and it seemed better for some reason. I was certain that going in that direction was the right option.
“What do you all think?” Wil asked.
“I think we should go forward,” I said.
“What?” Coleman said. “Not me. They’ll cut us down.”
Everyone looked at Rachel.
“I think forward,” she said.
Coleman shook his head, then took off to the right, running through the junipers and darting from one spot of cover to another. Seconds later, the rest of us began running straight across the open space, spreading out the best we could as we zigzagged.
Suddenly, a hail of bullets rang out in the direction of Coleman. Looking back, I could see that s
ome of the Apocalyptics had taken a position on the hill directly above him and were pouring fire straight down in his direction. Everyone was slowing down, looking back in his direction.
“Go! Go!” Wil shouted, just as the gunmen on the cliff opened up on us. Bullets began to kick up soil to our left and work their way toward us. At that moment, I caught Wil’s eye, and for the first time ever saw a look of resignation on his face that we might not make it. And then I felt again that same feeling while falling as a youth, that everything would be okay.
Suddenly, we could hear the roar of a helicopter flying toward us. When it was almost directly overhead, it tilted in our direction, and I could see several men in the back compartment. One of them was Peterson. He recognized me and did a double take, just as several more shots cut up the ground closer to us. Realizing what was happening, Peterson began motioning to the pilot, and the helicopter sped ahead and buzzed the Apocalyptics on the overhang. The firing stopped.
“Let’s go!” Wil yelled, and we all ran until we came to the first red rocks of the next hill. Once there, we looked as the helicopter circled the extremists a few more times and then left.
“How did the chopper know we needed help?” Hira asked.
“They didn’t know,” I said. “They just happened to be flying by.”
She gave me a puzzled look.
“It was a Synchronicity,” I clarified. “We were protected.”
THE GREAT COMMISSIONING
After three hours of tough hiking, we made it to the first paved road. Earlier, we had waited a long time for Coleman, thinking he might try to get across to where we were. We even thought about going back to look for him in case he was hurt, but we found our way blocked by a host of police cars and Forest Service jeeps racing in a cloud of dust toward the mountain. We were all tired and shaken except for Wil, who was buoyant about what had happened.
“You know,” he said, at one point, “all that happened was showing us exactly what we needed to see. I haven’t seen a group of people spontaneously open up to an experience like that ever. The Document says we can’t handle violent ideologies alone, that we need to have a Breakthrough and find our Protection, and that’s exactly what happened.”
I nodded, too fatigued to comment.
“There will be plenty of time to rest in Jerome,” he added. “And I have a feeling Coleman is okay. We’ll find him.”
Jerome, I knew, was an old mining town west of Sedona, now favored by artists.
“Why there?” I asked.
He gave me a smile. “That’s where the Hopis are waiting for us.”
Without talking any more, we caught a ride with a rancher to the nearest pay phone where Wil called Wolf, and within about twenty minutes, he arrived in the same Mercedes. As we all piled in, he caught my eye and grinned at my dirty clothes.
“Have any visions?” he asked, snickering.
I nodded, then collapsed into the backseat. Wolf took us up to the hilly mining town and then past it about a mile to a small homestead. The house was adobe, covered by a new tin roof with solar panels built in. Across from it was a pole barn and corral, holding three well-groomed horses. A flock of chickens scattered as we drove up.
We were greeted by two other Native Americans, an older woman of about eighty and a teenage boy who looked fifteen. They quickly served us a huge meal of corn fritters, chicken, and guacamole with onions. In an hour we had showered, eaten, and sleepily erected our tents, barely saying anything. By sunset we had all turned in.
I slept without dreaming and didn’t awaken until a ray of sunlight shone through the flap of the tent and hit my face. A chorus of birds sang in the small cottonwoods over my head. As I pulled on my boots and crawled out, I saw a fire and sat down beside it. For the first time, I noticed that the landscape sloped away from the house to an acre-size pond bordered by another very large cottonwood. Several crows cawed from a rocky area beyond.
Looking out at the landscape, I felt as though the past several days had been a dream, and I was back to my old self. I deeply needed the cup of coffee the young boy handed to me.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Tommy,” he said in perfect English.
I nodded toward the older woman who was standing nearby. “Is she your grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Grandmother.”
“That’s her only name?”
He nodded.
Just then she called to him and he ran over to her and hung on to her neck, beaming back at me proudly.
I sweetened my coffee with some honey from a jar sitting in a basket near the fire and then sipped it slowly, not wanting to think about our experiences. I knew there would be plenty of time for that later. Right now, I wanted only to sit and appreciate the simple beauty of the place and feel the normalcy for a while. A crow suddenly flew over the corral and landed on a post nearby to stare at me. I shook my head and looked away.
“Up already?” Rachel abruptly asked from behind me. The timbre of her voice was slightly different from when we were on the mountain.
“Yeah,” I responded, standing up. When our eyes met, I blushed for some reason and avoided her eyes again, as if we had just had a one-night stand or something.
She sat down on a burlap cushion near the fire and the boy served her coffee as well. Reaching into her sweater pocket, Rachel pulled out a dollar bill, which he at first refused to take, glancing at his grandmother. Rachel insisted and he smiled widely and stuffed it into his jeans.
As I watched Rachel, some of our experiences on the mountain forced their way back into my consciousness, at least intellectually. I knew I’d experienced what could only be called a Divine Connection, and real Protection, along with a deep interaction with Rachel and the others. But I knew, as well, that much more had occurred that I couldn’t recall.
I remembered Wil saying it was a glimpse into what could be, one that we would have to work to regain. I still didn’t know what that meant. After a moment, I let go of all the thoughts, suddenly feeling vulnerable, and began to consider leaving. My logic told me enough was enough. A group of extremists had just tried to kill us, and even though we had escaped, why tempt fate any longer?
Suddenly, Rachel slid her cushion closer to me and said, “All that occurred back there was important.”
“Really,” I replied, not sure I wanted to hear it.
She gave me an upbeat look. “The Document says that the opening to the God Connection happens much more frequently than most people think. It’s also structured into the nature of the Universe and into how our minds work.”
Her smile was beguiling, so I flowed with her train of thought and considered the work of Jung again, wishing Coleman were here. The Swiss psychiatrist, I knew, had discovered more than the phenomenon of Synchronicity. He was also famous for his notion that our brains and minds were structured by archetypes.
He thought humans, for instance, were able to learn to walk without thinking about every individual muscle involved because the pattern of muscle coordination necessary for this activity was already built into the structure of our brains—contained in what he called preestablished archetypal pathways that were genetically passed down.
To walk, we had only to see others walking and try it ourselves, which fired up the pattern of neural pathways that help us learn the activity quickly. Because these pathways are basically the same in everyone’s brain, learning to walk feels exactly the same to all human beings.
Jung argued that spiritual development was structured in the same manner, in a latent pathway that was waiting for us to fire it up. And again, this experience feels identical for all of us.
“So much happened yesterday,” I said finally. “It’s hard to get a handle on it. And I can’t seem to get back that feeling we had on the mountain.”
She looked at me with excitement. “Yes, but the Fifth Integration says we don’t have to remember it. We just have
to keep on integrating the remaining steps and we’ll rise back into it—you know, the Rise to Influence the Document talks about. The only part of the experience that we can keep now, as part of the Fifth Integration, is the sense of love and protection.”
“That’s what Wil said,” I remarked, nodding for her to tell me more.
“The Fifth Integration is completing what the Fourth set up,” she continued. “If we intend to hold the truth and stay in alignment in the face of the most dangerous ideological untruth, something opens in our brains to honor that. We know we can’t face this kind of danger by ourselves merely with our own strength of ego. No one can. Yet that recognition fires up a pathway that’s already there, and we experience a Breakthrough—one that gives us a Divine Connection, and the premonitions and Synchronicity necessary to be protected.”
I nodded. The feeling of Protection was coming back to me. Until now, horrible things happened to people at random because we didn’t have the consciousness necessary to hear the warnings that could steer us clear of such danger.
If the Document was correct, Protection seemed to be a natural part of our innate spiritual ability, growing, I supposed, out of the Law of Connection. With this thought, an image came to me of the future. Would humanity someday be so aware of our premonitions that we would all know, for instance, to leave a city for higher ground just before a tsunami or earthquake arrived, just as the animals do?
Rachel was staring at me.
“Next for us,” she said, “is to begin to systematically recapture the experience we found on the mountain so that we can begin to live it every day. We’re at the Sixth Integration. Remember the Prophecy found in Peru? We’re going to discover a mission.”
She turned a little, trying to look into my eyes again. I lingered just a bit longer in her gaze before turning away.
Suddenly, Wolf was pulling up to the house in his car, and we jumped to our feet to meet him. Surprisingly, he had Coleman with him, and another man in the backseat I couldn’t see. We hurried to the car and finally caught sight of the man’s face. It was Adjar.