The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure (17 page)
“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 that 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.
“I thought you might be here,” he said, as he pulled up to where I was standing. “Get in. We need to leave.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat.
He drove on toward the main road. “One of my priests told me of a conversation he overheard in the village. Some government officials are in town and they were asking questions about me and the mission.”
“What do you think they want?”
He looked at me reassuringly. “I don’t know. Let’s just say. I’m not as certain as before that they will leave us alone. I thought, as a precaution, that we should drive up into the mountains. One of my priests lives near Machu Picchu. His name is Father Carl. We’ll be safe at his house until we can better read the situation.” He smiled. “I want you to see Machu Picchu anyway.”
I suddenly had a flash of suspicion that he had made a deal and was taking me somewhere to turn me in. I decided to proceed cautiously and to stay alert until I found out for sure.
“Did you finish the translation?” he asked.
“Most of it,” I said.
“You had asked about human evolution. Did you finish that part?”
“No.”
He turned his eyes from the road and looked at me intensely. I pretended not to notice.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I said. “How long will it take to get to Machu Picchu?”
“About four hours.”
I wanted to remain silent and let Sanchez talk, hoping he might give himself away, but I couldn’t control my curiosity about evolution.
“So how do humans further evolution?” I asked.
He glanced at me. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But when I was up on the ridge I thought it might have something to do with the meaningful coincidences that the First Insight talks about.”
“That’s right,” he said. “That would fit with the other insights, wouldn’t it?”
I was confused. I almost understood but I couldn’t quite grasp it. I remained silent.
“Think of how the Insights fall into sequence,” he said. “The First Insight occurs when we take the coincidences seriously. These coincidences make us feel there is something more, something spiritual, operating underneath everything we do.
“The Second Insight institutes our awareness as something real. We can see that we have been preoccupied with material survival, with focusing on controlling our situation in the universe for security, and we know our openness now represents a kind of waking up to what is really going on.
“The Third Insight begins a new view of life. It defines the physical universe as one of pure energy, an energy that somehow responds to how we think.
“And the Fourth exposes the human tendency to steal energy from other humans by controlling them, taking over their minds, a crime in which we engage because we so often feel depleted of energy, and cut off. This shortage of energy can be remedied, of course, when we connect with the higher source. The universe can provide all we need if we can only open up to it. That is the revelation of the Fifth Insight.
“In your case,” he continued, “you had a mystical experience that allowed you to briefly see the magnitude of energy one can acquire. But this state is like leaping ahead of everyone else and glimpsing the future. We can’t maintain it for very long. Once we try to talk to someone who is operating in normal consciousness, or try to live in a world where conflict is still happening, we get knocked out of this advanced state and fall back to the level of our old selves.
“And then,” he continued, “it is a matter of slowly regaining what we glimpsed, a little at a time, and to begin a progression back toward that ultimate consciousness. But to do this, we must learn to consciously fill up with energy because this energy brings on the coincidences, and the coincidences help us actualize the new level on a permanent basis.”
I must have looked puzzled because he said, “Think about it: when something occurs beyond chance to lead us forward in our lives, then we become more actualized people. We feel as though we are attaining what destiny is leading us to become. When this occurs, the level of energy that brought on the coincidences in the first place is instituted in us. We can be knocked out of it and lose energy when we are afraid, but this level serves as a new outer limit which can be regained quite easily. We have become a new person. We exist at a level of higher energy, at a level—get this—of higher vibration.
“Can you see the process now? We fill up, grow, fill up and grow again. That is how we as humans continue the evolution of the universe to a higher and higher vibration.”
He paused for a moment then seemed to think of something he wanted to add. “This evolution has been going on unconsciously throughout human history. That explains why civilization has progressed and why humans have grown larger, lived longer, and so forth. Now however, we are making the whole process conscious. That is what the Manuscript is telling us. That is what this movement toward worldwide spiritual consciousness is all about.”
I was listening intensely, totally fascinated with what Sanchez was telling me. “So all we have to do is fill up with energy, as I learned to do with John, and the coincidences begin to happen more consistently?”
“Well yes, but that’s not as easy as you think. Before we can connect with the energy on a permanent basis there is one more hurdle we must pass. The next insight, the Sixth, deals with this issue.”
“What is it?”
He looked squarely at me. “We must face up to our particular way of controlling others. Remember, the Fourth Insight reveals that humans have always felt short of energy and have sought to control each other to acquire the energy that flows between people. The Fifth then shows us that an alternative source exists, but we can’t really stay connected with this source until we come to grips with the particular method that, we, as individuals, use in our controlling, and stop doing it—because whenever we fall back into this habit, we get disconnected from the source.
“Getting rid of this habit isn’t easy because it’s always unconscious at first. The key to letting it go is to bring it fully into consciousness, and we do that by seeing that our particular style of controlling others is one we learned in childhood to get attention, to get the energy moving our way, and we’re stuck there. This style is something we repeat over and over again. I call it our unconscious
control drama
.
“I call it a drama because it is one familiar scene, like a scene in a movie, for which we write the script as youths. Then we repeat this scene over and over in our daily lives without being aware of it. All we know is that the same kind of events happen to us repeatedly. The problem is if we are repeating one particular scene over and over, then the other scenes of our real life movie, the high adventure marked by coincidences, can’t go forward. We stop the movie when we repeat this one drama in order to manipulate for energy.”
Sanchez slowed the truck and moved carefully forward through a series of deep ruts in the road. I realized I was frustrated. I couldn’t quite grasp how a control drama worked. I almost expressed my feelings to Sanchez but I couldn’t. I realized I still felt distant from him and I didn’t care to reveal myself.
“Did you understand?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said curtly. “I don’t know if I have a control drama.”
He looked at me with the warmest regard and chuckled out loud. “Is that so?” he asked. “Then why do you always act so aloof?”
A
head the road narrowed and bent sharply around the sheer rock face of the mountain. The truck bounced over several large rocks and slowly proceeded through the curve. Below, the Andes rose in massive gray ridges above banks of snow-white clouds.
I looked at Sanchez. He was leaning over the steering wheel, tense. For most of the day we had been scaling steep inclines and edging through passages made more narrow by fallen rock. I had wanted to broach the subject of control dramas again but the time seemed inappropriate. Sanchez appeared to need every ounce of energy for driving, and besides, I wasn’t clear on what I wanted to ask. I had read the rest of the Fifth Insight and it had echoed exactly the points Sanchez had related to me. The idea of getting rid of my style of controlling seemed desirable, especially if it would make my evolution accelerate, but I still couldn’t grasp how a control drama operated.
“What are you thinking about?” Sanchez asked.
“I finished reading the Fifth Insight,” I said. “And I was thinking about these dramas. Considering what you said about me, I assume you think my drama has something to do with being aloof?”