Wil came out of the house, and Wolf told us he had found Coleman with the other scientists in Sedona. He, too, had escaped when the helicopter had distracted the extremists. As for Adjar, some of the other Hopis in town had spotted him at a medical clinic. Wolf said Adjar had been able to escape after being interrogated by the extremists.
“Unfortunately,” Wolf added, “even though the police were well aware of the extremists’ presence, none of them were caught.”
“Did you hear that?” Hira responded. “That means they could be coming up here right now. We have to do something.”
“What is the matter with you?” Adjar burst out. “Can’t you just be at peace for a moment?”
“That, coming from you!” Hira screamed. “You people are the great destroyers of peace!”
Rachel immediately restrained Hira, and Grandmother led Adjar toward the house. For the first time, I saw that Adjar had a large cut on his forehead and was holding his arm.
Wil was looking hard at Wolf.
“Where is that place you told me about?” he asked.
“Down there by the pond,” he said, nodding, “near the large tree. We call it the place of harmony.”
“Good,” Wil replied. “We’re going to need a lot of that.”
For most of the day we rested and ate our meals alone. Adjar never came out of the house, and Hira was mostly silent and reserved. After telling me briefly about his experience of being captured by the extremists, Coleman slept virtually the whole day. He seemed distracted, as though he was working on something and had to go through his process before telling me about it.
As for me, I was totally obsessed with the idea that our Breakthrough experience was built into each human brain. If this notion was true, then it might mean that all the Integrations were built into the structure of our brain as well, and hence were in some sense destined for all humanity. I busied myself reviewing the Fourth and Fifth parts of the Document, which corresponded exactly with what I had been told.
About dusk, I turned around and saw Adjar and Hira talking with Wil. At the beginning of the discussions both were raising their voices and turning their backs on each other. Toward the end, however, the two spoke together for a few minutes with no rancor. Eventually, all three walked down to the big cottonwood and joined Wolf, who was throwing wood on a large bonfire built in the center of a circle of logs. I knew Wil and Wolf were planning something. You could feel it. There was a palpable sense of expectation in the air.
I headed that way myself, and on the way I walked by Rachel’s tent. She came out carrying a little journal and smiling at me, as though we’d set a specific time to get together.
“I wanted to make a few notes,” she said, waving the book.
“Wil is getting us together for something,” I commented.
She gave me a cryptic smile as though she already knew what it was but wasn’t going to give it away.
As we approached, I noticed Coleman walking up as well, but he didn’t look at us. I got the distinct feeling that he, like myself, was thinking deeply about our shared experience. By the time we reached the fire circle, it was almost dark, and everyone was there: Rachel and I were located on one side of the fire, with Adjar, Hira, and Coleman on the other side.
Wil was standing apart, as though he was going to address us, and Wolf positioned himself at one side of the fire, holding a long pole he’d been using to stoke the blaze. Grandmother was behind all of us, directly under the cottonwood, making extremely slow dancing moves with her feet. Tommy was by her side.
At this moment, Wolf took his stick and spread the fire out into a wider area, killing most of the flames and sending a whirlwind of tiny sparks into the air. Then Wil asked us to sit down in a circle across from each other on the six small logs surrounding the glowing coals.
Rachel tossed me a glance and made her way over to sit down opposite Coleman. And as it happened, Hira and Adjar sat directly across from each other. Too late, I realized I was the odd man out. I was about to comment when, to my surprise, Tommy walked up, and with a maturity beyond his years raised his eyebrows as if to ask my permission to sit across from me.
“Of course,” I said.
For a long time, we just all looked at one another, the hot coals casting a red hue over our faces. It was completely dark now, and even though we were all less than twelve feet from the person across from us, in the low light it was hard to bring each other’s faces into focus. It was almost as though we were being forced to just look at the person as a whole shape, with few cues from body language or facial expression to guide our reactions. Setting up the fire this way, I thought, must be a Hopi psychological device.
“I wanted to get you all together,” Wil began, “because Wolf was able to find the Sixth Integration. I also know many of you have made arrangements to leave, so I wanted to talk to you before you did so.
“The Document says that once one has experienced the Breakthrough to a God Connection, then one has completed the Foundation of Spirituality, a plateau of stable consciousness from which we can proceed, if we want to, with the remaining Integrations—a journey it calls a Rise to Sacred Influence.
“The Document describes this rise as a systematic recapturing of the full Divine Connection, piece by piece, as we elevate our consciousness back to that higher state. It culminates with the discovery of the Twelfth level, and at this point we will be able to maintain this consciousness.”
Wil paused here and looked out at us.
“However,” he continued, “it says, very clearly, that all those around you during a time of Breakthrough are there for an important reason. They represent a group that can help you move more rapidly through the remaining Integrations. And according to the Document, they have another important purpose as well: together you can form what it calls a Template of Agreement, which serves the role of agreeing on the truth about each Integration and influencing others with the power of that agreement.
“These template groups are very important because, to the extent that they are made up of people representing different religious traditions, they act to counteract and resolve the dangerous polarization and hatred growing between religious extremists in the world.”
Wil walked closer to us. “The templates have such an effect on the extremists because, as we proceed through the remaining Integrations and grow in influence, we will be beaming one central truth out to the world: that, in their essence, the religions are all pointing to the same experience of God Connection that most of us have now shared. It is this common experience, once recognized, that can serve to help reconcile the differences between religions and help them come to unity. Truth, remember, is contagious.”
I couldn’t see their expressions entirely, but I could feel the grimaces on Adjar’s and Hira’s faces, and maybe even Coleman’s. The last thing many of us seemed to want, going into this gathering, was to hang around long enough to make it through today, much less long enough for some kind of unification to take place.
Wil was pausing again, knowing he had just dropped a bombshell on everyone. I looked over toward Wolf and swore I could feel him wink.
“Before you make your decisions in this regard,” Wil went on, “I want to tell you what the Document says is at stake. As with earlier Integrations, enough people in the world must take these remaining steps in order for the Influence to become powerful enough to counteract the dangers that are rapidly growing out there. To not act is to send out another kind of contagion, one of giving up on the world.”
That did it, I thought. Now all of us were in the same bind. We might want to flee and save ourselves, but if we did, the continued polarization might bring the world to destruction. In reality, the situation had been the same since the First Integration. None of us had any choice at all.
As we looked at one another in silence, I noticed Hira was fidgeting in her seat, as though she knew something that we didn’t.
Finally, she shouted, “If this is all true,
what are we doing just talking about it? Let’s get going with this! They’re still out there. We need to figure all this out!”
She looked at Rachel. “The whole time I heard you and Adjar discussing the Documents and experiencing the elevations, I experienced them with you. But I didn’t tell you something important and neither did Adjar. Anish and the rest of these people already have a plan to destroy the world. And they’re going to do it!”
She looked directly at Adjar. “You know what I’m saying is true! Tell them!”
Adjar got up and looked away, and for a moment, I thought he was going to just walk into the darkness. Instead, he looked back at us and slowly sat down.
“That’s right,” he said. “They have a plan to force the end of time. The group we were with is composed of two extreme factions, one looking to the Muslim tradition of Allah, and those following the Western religions of God or Jehovah. Both factions believe that before the end times can come, certain historical events, outlined in scriptural Prophecy, must first take place.
“Each side also believes that when these events occur, their respective holy men will return to gather up the true believers, vanquish their enemies, and set up a completely spiritual world on Earth based on their particular doctrine.
“But their dominant belief is that it is their duty to bring about these prophetic events as soon as possible. They have suspended their hatred in order to cooperate with one another, at least for a while. They call themselves Apocalyptics, and they have one stated goal: to bring about this last war that will make all this happen—Armageddon.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Adjar was describing the same threat that Peterson had warned of, only this was worse: a coalition of Western and Arabic groups who were actively working together to end the world.
It all made sense now, the fact that the group had both Arabic and Western members, and that they were arguing among themselves so much. They had formed an uneasy truce to go out and start the last war, after which they would just let the best religion win, so to speak, with each side thinking their tradition would be the one to prevail.
As he talked, I could feel Adjar softening. He, too, knew none of us had a choice. If there was a way to gain some kind of influence over people stuck in this kind of ideology, who were capable of doing such incredible damage, we had to at least try.
“I once believed,” Adjar continued, “that this world was doomed, and I, too, wished for the coming of the Divine so as to bring about an ideal world to replace it. So I joined the Apocalyptics. But this group has now decided to use all violence necessary to protect their plan and provoke a total war, and that is why I had to leave them. When I escaped from them, I also experienced a Breakthrough that changed everything for me.”
He looked openly at Hira for the first time, and I could sense her recalling more of her Breakthrough experience as well.
“It is the same with me,” she said. “The coming of the Divine must happen. And humans must help somehow. But the end times should not be pushed to occur through violence. I had to reject the way of the Apocalyptics as well.”
Suddenly, I remembered something. For some reason, the talk about God intervening to save the world brought back the mysterious point of Connection I had experienced on Secret Mountain. The memory flooded back into my mind. During the inflow of love and euphoria, I had experienced a point, or source, from which the love seemed to be flowing. I had even experienced a flash of knowing that the end times Prophecies had another meaning, not yet understood.
“The Document says,” Wil offered, “that a template group can’t go forward unless all the members realize it is their true mission to be involved.”
There was silence as we looked at one another, or, as was the case in the low light, at one another’s forms—and maybe at one another’s spirits. Slowly, I realized we were all beginning to come together again. I could feel it in the exact same way I could feel it on Secret Mountain. And Tommy and Adjar were natural additions.
I looked over at Wolf. Were these Hopis so smart they knew how to help move us back toward Connection… with a fire?
What ensued was a round of mutual self-revealing, where each of us described how our spiritual journey had brought us to this moment, and to our preferred religious tradition. Adjar told us he was schooled as a Muslim and in the past few years had become interested in the Prophecy of the Islamic Messiah figure, the Twelfth Imam. And Hira, who had lived all her life in Israel, said she was most interested in the Jewish utopia that would be created after the arrival of their expected Messiah.
Then came Rachel, who said she was Christian in her belief, but she had studied end times prophecies as well, especially the Rapture—the idea that all believers would be lifted up in a spiritual body and protected from Armageddon. She found it meaningful that most traditions have some ideal of a Rapture-like event in their own Prophecies.
Tommy spoke up next, looking slightly nervous. He glanced at Grandmother and then said he represented the Native peoples’ tradition, as he had studied the Mayan Prophecy and grew up with both Hopi and Yaqui influences. During his vision quest last year, he, too, had been given a Breakthrough experience. Now he was most fascinated by the Mayan Calendar. This Calendar could also be described, he told us, as itself an end-times prophecy, because it called for an end of a stage in creation and the beginning of something more ideal.
“According to the Maya,” he said, “we will enter a time when enlightenment is more readily available, but it will not be imposed. We must realize that the quest shared by all those alive today is to access the unknown part of ourselves from which this consciousness springs.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I, like so many others, had intuited that the Calendar was pointing to something new in history. And here was a young man professing to understand it who was saying the same thing. As he talked, I began to feel that understanding the Calendar would be a big part of the coming Integrations, especially the Twelfth.
With Tommy, all the major traditions were covered, except for Eastern religions. Everyone looked around.
“I’ve always leaned toward the Eastern path,” Wil abruptly said. He then gave us a clear summary of his life, one of a driven search for a practical understanding of spiritual consciousness.
Now there was silence again as all eyes moved to Coleman. He told us generally about his life and his movement from spiritual skeptic to explorer of our deeper nature. But when it came to religion, he just shrugged his shoulders. Everyone seemed to accept that, but I still felt he was thinking about something he didn’t want to mention yet.
When I focused again on the group, I could feel all eyes were on me.
“I love parts of all of the religions,” I blurted.
Wil laughed, but the others were quiet at first, and then they began chuckling, too, until we were all laughing out loud. In that moment we came together even more. We were moving toward that peak Connection we had experienced on the mountain—with almost the same ease of interaction and speaking.
“The Document states,” Wil finally added, “that once the members of a group experience the reality of a Divine Connection, they understand that it is the same for everyone, regardless of religious background. And they can see one other thing as well: that each religion in the world emphasizes only a few aspects of this experience. Other elements are minimized, and still others are left out altogether.
“Think about what this means!” he continued. “Among all the religions, the experience is adequately covered. But taken alone, each religion is incomplete. Therefore, what is needed is for each religion to teach what it has correct about Divine Connection to all the others, and then learn from the others what is missing in its own teachings.
“This is the only way the whole experience can be understood and ultimately made part of humanity’s everyday reality. This is the purpose of the template groups—to reach a consensus concerning this natural reconciliation of the religions, for all t
o see.
“And remember, there are many groups of this kind coming together out there. Some will have it more right than others. But over time, through Conscious Conversation, the most truthful reconciliations will evolve in the public mind and become more powerful in their influence on human culture as we all move through the remaining Integrations.”
We were all following him completely, maintaining and even building on the energy level. Now we were no longer just members of various religions. We were a group of souls who had decided to help make history.
When I awakened the next morning, my head was still buzzing from the experience of the night before—especially the revelation that the extremist group already had a plan to start Armageddon. How many template groups, I wondered, would it take to reach these Apocalyptics and others like them? A thousand? Ten thousand?
As I pushed my way out of the tent, I saw that the others were already drinking coffee and watching a colorful dawn dance across a dark blue sky. I walked toward them, and when Coleman saw me, he dashed over, holding several pages of the Document.
“There’s something else in the Sixth Integration,” he said, pointing toward a particular passage. “Right here it says another tradition should be part of the reconciliation of religion as well—one that would engage in exploring spirituality through a lens that strives to be as objective as possible.”
“Whom are you talking about?” I asked sleepily.
“Us scientists!” he replied. “I can bring the viewpoint of the scientific tradition to our template group!”
Many of the others had heard what he said and all, including Wil, were nodding their heads in agreement. Coleman looked at me.
“Yeah,” I said, “of course.”
By midmorning, we had eaten breakfast and headed back to the circle again. Wolf had rebuilt the fire, but smaller now, just enough to break the morning chill.
For a long time, we stared at one another, embracing the feeling we’d reached the night before. Then Wil began.