The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision

by James Redfield

  “A nightmare,” I commented.

  “Yes, but it has meaning. When we dream, we unconsciously travel back to this sleep level, and other souls come and help us. Don’t forget what dreams do: they clarify how to handle current situations in our lives. The Seventh Insight says to interpret dreams by superimposing the plot of the dream against the real situation facing us in life.”

  I turned and looked at Wil. “But what role do the souls play?”

  As soon as I had asked that question, we began to move again. Wil kept his hand against my back. When we stopped, the light was shifting to a rich green, but I could observe beautiful waves of amber circulating around us. When I focused intently, the amber streaks became individual souls.

  I glanced at Wil, who was smiling broadly. This location seemed to carry an increased mood of celebration and joy. As I watched the souls, several moved directly in front of us and closed together into a group. Their faces were broad and smiling, although still hard to focus on for any length of time.

  “They’re so full of love,” I said.

  “See if you can pick up on their knowledge,” Wil advised.

  When I focused on them with this intent, I realized that these souls were associated with Maya. In fact, they were ecstatic about her recent self-revelations, especially her understanding of the life preparation her mother and father had provided. They seemed to know that Maya had experienced a full Sixth Insight review and was on the verge of remembering why she had been born.

  I turned to face Wil, who acknowledged that he, too, was seeing the images.

  At this moment I could hear the hum again; my stomach tensed. Wil held my shoulders and back tightly. When the sound had ceased, my vibration fell dramatically, and I looked out at the group of souls, attempting to open up and connect with their energy in an attempt to boost my own. To my amazement they suddenly shifted out of focus and moved away from me to a new position twice as far away.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You tried to connect with them to increase your energy,” Wil replied, “instead of going within and connecting directly to God’s energy inside. I did this myself once. These souls won’t allow you to mistake them for the divine source. They know such an identification would not help your growth.”

  I concentrated within and my energy returned. “How do we get them back?” I asked.

  As soon as I spoke, they returned to their original position.

  Wil and I glanced at each other, then he began to stare intensely at the group, a look of surprise on his face.

  “What are you seeing?” I asked.

  He nodded toward them without breaking his gaze, and I focused on the soul group as well, trying to pick up on their knowledge again. After several moments I began to see Maya. She was immersed in the green environment. Her features seemed slightly different and were glowing brightly, but I was absolutely certain it was her. As I focused on her face, a holographic image appeared in front of us—an image of Maya again in the time of the nineteenth-century war, standing in a log cabin with several other people, excited about stopping the conflict.

  She seemed to sense that accomplishing such a feat was just a matter of remembering how to attain the energy. It could be done only if the right people came together with a common intention, she thought. Most attentive was a young man who was richly dressed. I recognized him to be the large man who was later killed with her. Racing forward, the vision moved to her failed attempt to speak with the army leaders and then to the wilderness, where she and the young man were killed.

  As we watched, she awakened after her death in the Afterlife and reviewed her lifetime, appalled at how single-mindedly, even naively, she had pursued her goal of stopping the war. She knew many of the others had been correct: the time wasn’t right. We had not remembered enough of the Afterlife knowledge to accomplish such a feat. Not yet.

  After the review, we saw her move into the green environment, surrounded by the same group of souls that was in front of us now. Amazingly there seemed to be a common core expression in the faces throughout the group. At a certain level, beneath their features, the souls all resembled Maya.

  I glanced questioningly at Wil.

  “This is Maya’s soul group” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s a group of souls with whom she resonates closely,” he said with excitement. “This makes perfect sense. One of the journeys I took, before I found you, was to another group who, in a way, looked like you. I think it was your soul group.”

  Before I could say anything, there was movement in the soul group in front of us. Again, an image of Maya was emerging. Still surrounded by her group in the green environment, she seemed to be standing quietly in front of an intense white light, similar to the one we had seen at Williams’ Life Review. She was aware that something very profound was happening. Her ability to move around in the Afterlife had diminished, and her attention was shifting toward Earth again. She could see her prospective mother, newly married, sitting on a porch, wondering if her health would hold up well enough to have a child.

  Maya was beginning to realize the great progress that could be achieved if she were to be born to this mother. The woman had deep fears about her own health arid so would generate an awareness of health issues very quickly in the mind of a child. It would be the perfect place to develop an interest in medicine and healing, and it wouldn’t be a knowledge contemplated on merely intellectual terms, where the ego comes up with some fancy theory and never tests it against the challenges of real life, not if she was’ growing up with the psychology of this woman. Maya knew that she herself had the tendency to be unrealistic and fanciful, and she had already paid dearly for such brashness. That wouldn’t happen again, not with the unconscious memory of what had occurred in the nineteenth century reminding her to be very cautious. No, she would go slow, be more isolated, and the environment established by this woman would be perfect.

  Wil caught my eye. “We’re seeing what occurred when she began to contemplate her current life,” he said.

  Maya now envisioned how her relationship with her mother could unfold. She would grow up exposed to her mother’s negativity, her fears, her tendency to blame the doctors, which would inspire her interest in the mind/body connection and the patient’s responsibility in healing, and she would bring this information back to her mother, who could then become involved in her own recovery. Her mother would become her first patient, and then a key supporter, a prime example of the benefits of the new medicine.

  Maya’s focus moved to the prospective father, sitting next to the woman on the swing. Occasionally the woman would ask a question and he would utter a one-line answer. Mainly he wanted just to sit and contemplate, not to talk. His mind was virtually exploding with research possibilities and exotic biological questions he knew had never been posed before—most particularly the relationship between inspiration and the immune system. Maya saw the advantages of this aloofness. With him, she would be able to work through her own tendency to delude herself; she would have to think for herself and become realistic, right from the beginning. Eventually she and her father would be able to communicate on a scientific basis, and he would open up and provide her with a rich technical background with which to ground her new methods.

  She saw clearly that her birth to these parents could be equally advantageous for them. At the same time her parents were stimulating an early interest in healing, she would be stretching them in a destined direction as well: the mother toward an acceptance of her personal role in avoiding illness, the father toward overcoming his tendency to hide from others and to live only in his head.

  As we watched, her vision proceeded past her anticipated birth and into what might happen in childhood. She saw a multitude of specific people arriving in her life at just the right moment to stimulate learning and experience. In medical school, just the right patients and doctors would cross her path to stimulate an alternative orient
ation in her practice.

  Her vision moved to the meeting of her clinic partner and the establishment of a new model of healing. And then her vision revealed something else: she would be involved in a more global awakening. Before us, we saw her discovery of the Insights and then her reunion with a particular group, one of many independent groups that would begin to gravitate together all over the world. These groups would remember who they were at a higher level and be instrumental in overcoming the polarization of Fear.

  She suddenly saw herself engaged in important conversations with one particular man. He was large, athletic, capable, and dressed in army fatigues. To my amazement I realized that she knew he was the man with whom she had been killed during the nineteenth century. I focused on him intently and received another shock. This was the same man I had seen in Williams’ Life Review, the work colleague he had failed to help awaken.

  With this, her vision seemed to amplify to a level beyond my ability to comprehend, her body uniting with the blinding light behind it. All I could receive was that her personal vision of what she might accomplish with this birth was being enveloped within a larger vision that encompassed the whole history and future of humankind. She seemed to see her possible lifetime in ultimate perspective, situated clearly within the full expanse of where humanity had been and where it was going. I could sense all this but could not quite see the images themselves.

  Finally Maya’s vision seemed to be over, and we could see her again in the green environment, still surrounded by her group. Now they were watching a scene on Earth. Apparently her prospective parents had indeed decided to conceive a child and were coming together in the very act of love that would ensure her conception.

  Maya’s soul group had intensified in energy and now appeared as a large whitish swirl of moving amber, drawing its intensity from the bright light in the background. I could sense the energy myself as a deeply felt, almost orgasmic level of love and vibration. Down below, the couple embraced, and at the moment of orgasm, a whitish-green energy seemed to flow from the light, passing through Maya and her soul group, and enter into the couple. With an orgasmic rush, the energy came through their bodies toward each other, pushing the sperm and egg toward their fated union.

  As we watched, we could see the moment of conception and the miraculous joining of the two cells into one. Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, the cells began to divide and differentiate, finally forming the shape of a human being. When I looked at Maya, I realized that with every cell division, she became more hazy and out of focus. Finally, as the fetus matured, she disappeared from view completely. Her soul group remained.

  More knowledge seemed to be available on what we had just witnessed, but I lost concentration and missed it. Then suddenly the soul group itself was gone and Wil and I were left staring at each other. He seemed terribly excited.

  “What were we watching?” I asked.

  “It was the whole process of Maya’s birth into her current lifetime.” Wil replied, “held in the memory of her soul group. We got to see it all: her awareness of prospective parents, what she felt might be accomplished, and then the actual way she was drawn into the physical dimension at conception.”

  I nodded for Wil to continue.

  “The act of lovemaking itself opens up a portal from the Afterlife into the Earthly, dimension. The soul groups seem to exist in a state of extreme love even beyond what you and I can experience, extreme to the point that it feels orgasmic in nature. Sexual culmination creates an opening into the Afterlife, and what we experience as orgasm is just a glimpse of the Afterlife level of love and vibration as the portal is opened and the energy rushes through, potentially bringing in a new soul. We watched that happen. Sexual union is a holy moment in which a part of Heaven flows into the Earth.”

  I nodded, thinking about the implications of what we had seen, then said, “Maya seemed to know how her life could turn out if she was born to these particular parents.”

  “Yes, apparently, before we are born, each of us experiences a vision of what our life can be, complete with reflections on our parents and on our tendencies to engage in particular control dramas, even how we might work through these dramas with these parents and go on to be prepared for what we want to accomplish.”

  “I saw most of that,” I said, “but it seemed strange. Based on what she told me about her real life, her pre-life vision was more ideal than what really happened—for instance, her relationship to her family. It didn’t exactly turn out the way she wanted. Her mother never understood Maya, or faced her own illness, and her father was so aloof she never knew what he was researching until after his death.”

  “But that makes sense,” Wil said. “The vision apparently is an ideal guide for what our highest self intends to happen in life, the best-case scenario, so to speak, if all of us were following our intuitions perfectly. What actually occurs is an approximation of this vision, the best everyone can do under the actual circumstances. But all this is more Tenth Insight information about the Afterlife that clarifies our spiritual experience on Earth, particularly the perception of coincidences, and how synchronicity really operates.

  “When we have an intuition or a dream to pursue a particular course in our lives and we follow this guidance, certain events transpire that feel like magic coincidences. We feel more alive and excited. The events seem destined, as though they were supposed to happen.

  “What we just saw puts all this into a higher perspective. When we have an intuition, a mental image of a possible future, we’re actually getting flashes of memory of our Birth Vision, what we wanted to be doing with our lives at that particular point on our journey. It may not be exact, because people have free will, but when something happens that is close to our original vision, we feel inspired because we recognize that we are on a path of destiny that we intended all along.”

  “But how does our soul group fit in?”

  “We’re connected with them. They know us. They share our Birth Visions, follow us through life, and afterward stay with us while we review what happened. They act as a reservoir for our memories, maintaining the knowledge of who we are as we evolve.”

  He paused momentarily, looking straight into my eyes. “And apparently, when we’re in the Afterlife, and one of them is born into the physical dimension, we act in the same capacity toward them. We become part of the soul group that supports them.”

  “So while we are on Earth,” I commented, “our soul groups give us our intuition and direction?”

  “No, not at all. Judging from what I could pick up from the soul groups I’ve seen, the intuitions and dreams are our own, coming from a higher connection with the divine. The soul groups just send us extra energy and uplift us in a particular manner—a manner that I haven’t been able to pinpoint. By uplifting us in this way, they help us to more readily remember what we already knew.”

  I was fascinated. “So that explains what was happening with my dream and Joel’s.”

  “Yes. When we dream, we reunite with our soul group, and that jogs our memory of what we really wanted to do in our current life situation. We get glimpses of our original intention. Then when we return to the physical, we retain that memory, although it is sometimes expressed in archetypal symbols. In the case of your dream, because you are more open to spiritual meaning, you could remember the dream information in very literal terms. You recalled that in your original intention, you saw us finding each other again when you imaged my face, and so you dreamed almost exactly that.

  “Joel, on the other hand, was less open; his dream came through in a more garbled, symbolic fashion. His memory was fuzzy, and his conscious mind fashioned the message in the symbolism of a war, conveying to him only the general message that in his Birth Vision he intended to stay and help with the current problem in the valley, making it clear that if he ran away, he would regret it.”

  “So the soul groups are always sending us energy,” I said, “and hoping we will remember our Birth V
isions?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s why Maya’s group was so happy?”

  Wil’s expression grew more serious. “They were happy because she was remembering why she was born to her particular parents, and how her life experiences had prepared her for a career in healing. But… this was only the first part of her Birth Vision. She still has more to remember.”

  “I saw the part when she was meeting again in this life with the man with whom she was killed in the nineteenth century. But there were other parts that I couldn’t understand. How much of that did you get?”

  “Not all of it. There was more about the rising Fear. It confirmed that she’s part of the group of seven that Williams saw coming back. And she saw the group able to remember some kind of larger vision that’s behind our individual intentions, a remembrance that is necessary if we are to dispel the Fear.”

  Wil and I gazed at each other for a long time, then I felt another vibration in my body from the experiment. In that moment an image of the large man with whom Maya had seen herself reuniting came into my mind. Who was he?

  I was about to mention the image to Wil, when my breath left me, forced out by a cramping pain that seized my stomach. Simultaneously, another high-pitched screech rocked me backward. As before, I reached out for Wil and saw his face fading out of focus. I struggled to look one more time, then completely lost my equilibrium, slipping again into free fall.

  OPENING TO THE KNOWLEDGE

  Damn, I thought—lying flat on the rock, the coarse surface of the stone edging into my back—I was back at the stream again. For a long moment I stared up at the gray sky, now threatening rain, listening to the water flow past me. I raised up on one elbow and looked around, noticing immediately that my body felt heavy and fatigued, just as it had the last time I left the other dimension.