The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure (14 page)

I nodded and was about to signal Marjorie when I heard a vehicle approaching in the distance. Wil jumped into his jeep and sped back toward the main road. I hurried up the hill. I could see Marjorie through the foliage, walking toward me.

Suddenly from the area behind her came loud shouts in Spanish and the sounds of people running. Marjorie hid below a rock overhang. I changed directions, running as quietly as I could to the left. As I ran, I searched for a view of Marjorie through the trees. Just as I caught sight of her, she screamed loudly as two soldiers grabbed her arms and forced her to stand.

I continued to run up the slope, keeping low, her look of panic frozen in my mind. Once at the top of the ridge, I headed north again, my heart pounding with terror and panic.

After running more than a mile, I stopped and listened. I could hear no movement or talking behind me. Lying flat on my back, I tried to relax and think clearly, but the awful specter of Marjorie’s capture was overwhelming. Why did I ask her to remain on the ridge alone? What should I do now?

I sat up and took a deep breath, and gazed over at the road on the other ridge. I had seen no traffic while I was running. Again I listened intently: nothing except the usual forest sounds. Slowly I began to calm down. After all, Marjorie had only been captured. She was guilty of nothing except running from gunfire. Probably she would be detained only until her identity as a legitimate scientist could be established.

Once more I headed north, my back aching slightly. I felt dirty and tired, and pangs of hunger erupted in my stomach. For two hours I walked without thinking and without seeing anyone.

Then from the slope to my right I heard sounds of running. I froze and listened again but the sounds had stopped. Here the trees were larger, shielding the ground below from the sun, thinning the underbrush. I could see fifty or sixty yards. Nothing moved. I walked past a large boulder on my right and several trees, stepping as softly as possible. Three other massive outcroppings lay along my path and I moved past two of them. Still no movement. I walked around the third boulder. Twigs cracked behind me. I turned around slowly.

There, next to the rock was the bearded man I had seen at Jensen’s farm, his eyes wild, panicked, his arms shaking as he pointed an automatic weapon at my stomach. He seemed to be struggling to remember me.

“Wait a minute,” I stammered, “I know Jensen.”

He looked at me more closely and lowered the weapon. Then from the woods behind us, we heard the sounds of someone moving. The bearded man ran past me toward the north, holding the rifle in one hand. Instinctively I followed. Both of us were running as fast as we could, dodging limbs and rocks and occasionally glancing back.

After several hundred yards, he stumbled and I raced past him. I collapsed between two rocks to rest and to look back, trying to detect movement. I saw a lone soldier, fifty yards away, raise his rifle toward the huge man, who was struggling to his feet. Before I could utter a warning, the soldier fired. The man’s chest exploded as bullets tore through from the rear, splattering me with blood. An echo of rifle fire filled the air.

For an instant he stood motionless, his eyes glazed, then his body arched forward and fell. I reacted blindly, running north again away from the soldier, keeping the trees between me and the area from which the bullets had come. The ridge grew constantly more rugged and rocky and began to incline dramatically upwards.

My entire body shook with exhaustion and terror as I struggled up the spaces between the outcroppings. At one point I slipped and dared a glance backward. The soldier was approaching the body. I slithered around a rock just as the soldier looked up, seemingly right at me. I stayed low to the ground and crawled past several other boulders. Then the slope of the ridge leveled off, blocking the soldier’s view so I jumped to my feet again, running as fast as I could between the rocks and trees. My mind was numb. Escape was all I could think of. Though I didn’t dare look back, I was sure I heard the soldier running behind me.

The ridge inclined ahead and I fought my way up, my strength beginning to wane. At the top of the rise, the ground leveled out and was thick with tall trees and lush undergrowth. Rising behind them was a sheer rock face that I had to scale delicately, searching for hand and footholds as I proceeded. I struggled to the top and my heart fell at the sight before me. A drop-off of a hundred feet or more blocked my way; I could go no further.

I was doomed, finished. Rocks slid along the outcropping behind me, indicating the soldier was closing fast. I sank to my knees. I was exhausted, spent, and with a final sigh I released the last of my fight, accepting my fate. Soon, I knew, the bullets would come. And interestingly, as an end to the terror, death seemed almost a welcome relief. As I waited, my mind flashed to childhood Sundays and to the innocent contemplation of God. What would it be like, death? I tried to open myself to the experience.

After a long period of waiting during which I had no concept of time, I suddenly became aware that nothing had happened! I looked around and noticed for the first time that I was positioned on the highest peak of the mountain. Other ridges and cliffs fell away from this point, leaving me with a panoramic view in all directions.

A movement caught my eye. There, far down the slope toward the south, walking casually away from me, was the soldier, the gun belonging to Jensen’s man slung across one arm.

The sight warmed my body and filled me with ripples of silent laughter. I had somehow survived! I turned and sat cross-legged and savored the euphoria. I wanted to stay here forever. The day was brilliant with sunshine and blue sky.

As I sat there, I was struck by the closeness of the purple hills in the distance, or rather, the feeling that they were close. The same perception applied to the few puffs of white cloud drifting overhead. I felt as if I could reach out and touch them with my hand.

As I reached up toward the sky, I noticed something different about the way my body felt. My arm had glided upward with incredible ease and I was holding my back, neck and head perfectly straight with absolutely no effort. From my position—sitting cross-legged—I stood up without using my arms, and stretched. The feeling was one of total lightness.

Looking at the distant mountains, I noticed that a daytime moon had been out and was about to set. It looked to be about a quarter full and hung over the horizon like an inverted bowl. Instantly I understood why it had that shape. The sun, millions of miles directly above me, was shining only on the top of the sinking moon. I could perceive the exact line between the sun and the lunar surface, and this recognition somehow extended my consciousness outward even farther.

I could imagine the moon below the horizon and the exact reflected shape it would present to those who lived further west and could still see it. Then I imagined how it would look if it was directly under me on the other side of the planet. To the people there, it would appear full because the sun over my head would shine past the Earth and strike the moon squarely.

This picture sent a rush of sensation up my spine, and my back seemed to straighten even more as I conceived, no, I experienced, the same amount of space commonly felt over my head as also existing under my feet, on the other side of the globe. For the first time in my life, I knew the earth’s roundness not as an intellectual concept but as an actual sensation.

At one level this awareness excited me but at another it seemed perfectly ordinary and natural. All I wanted to do was immerse myself in the feeling of being suspended, floating, amid a space that existed in all directions. Rather than having to push myself away from the Earth with my legs as I stood there, resisting the Earth’s gravity, I now felt as though I was held up by some inner buoyancy, as though I was filled like a balloon with just enough helium to hover over the ground and barely touch it with my feet. It was similar to being in perfect athletic condition, as after a year of intense exercise, only far more coordinated and light.

I sat down again on the rock, and, again, everything seemed close: the rugged outcrop on which I was sitting, the tall trees further down the slope and the other mountains on the horizon. And as I watched the limbs of the trees sway gently in the breeze, I experienced not just a visual perception of the event, but a physical sensation as well, as if the limbs moving in the wind were hairs on my body.

I perceived everything to be somehow part of me. As I sat on the peak of the mountain looking out at the landscape falling away from me in all directions, it felt exactly as if what I had always known as my physical body was only the head of a much larger body consisting of everything else I could see. I experienced the entire universe looking out on itself through my eyes.

This perception induced a flash of memory. My mind raced backward in time, past the beginning of my trip to Peru, past my childhood and my birth. The realization was present that my life did not, in fact, begin with my conception and birth on this planet. It began much earlier with the formation of the rest of me, my real body, the universe itself.

The science of evolution had always bored me, but now, as my mind continued to race backward in time, all the things I had read on the subject began to come back to me, including conversations with the friend who resembled Reneau. I recalled that this was the field he was interested in: evolution.

All knowledge seemed to merge with actual memories. Somehow I was recalling what had happened, and the recollection allowed me to look at evolution in a new way.

I watched as the first matter exploded into the universe, and I realized, as the Third Insight had described, that there was nothing truly solid about it. Matter was only energy vibrating at a certain level, and in the beginning matter existed only in its simplest vibratory form: the element we call hydrogen. That’s all there was in the universe, just hydrogen.

I observed the hydrogen atoms begin to gravitate together, as if the ruling principal, the urge, of this energy was to begin a movement into a more complex state. And when pockets of this hydrogen reached a sufficient density, it began to heat up and to burn, to become what we call a star, and in this burning the hydrogen fused together and leaped into elements of a higher vibration.

As I continued to watch, these first stars aged and finally blew themselves up and spewed the remaining hydrogen and the newly created elements out into the universe. And the whole process began again. The atoms gravitated together until the temperature became hot enough for new stars to form and that in turn fused the new elements together, creating matter, which vibrated at an even higher level.

And so on … each successive generation of stars creating atoms that had not existed before, until the wide spectrum of matter—the basic chemical elements—had been formed and scattered everywhere. Matter had evolved from the element hydrogen, the simplest vibration of energy, to carbon, which vibrated at an extremely high rate. The stage was now set for the next step in evolution.

As our sun formed, pockets of matter fell into orbit around it, and one of them, the Earth, contained all the newly created elements, including carbon. As the Earth cooled, gases once caught in the molten mass, migrated to the surface and merged together forming water vapor, and the great rains came, forming oceans on the then barren crust. Then when water covered much of the Earth’s surface, the skies cleared and the sun, burning brightly, bathed the new world with light and heat and radiation.

And in the shallow pools and basins, amid the great lightning storms that periodically swept the planet, matter leaped past the vibratory level of carbon to an even more complex state: to the vibration represented by the amino acids. But for the first time, this new level of vibration was not stable in and of itself. Matter had to continually absorb other matter into itself in order to sustain its vibration. It had to eat. Life, the new thrust of evolution, had emerged.

Still restricted to living only in water, I saw this life split into two distinct forms. One form—the one we call plants—lived on inorganic matter, and turned these elements into food by utilizing carbon dioxide from the early atmosphere. As a by-product, plants released free oxygen into the world for the first time. Plant life spread quickly through the oceans and finally onto the land as well.

The other form—what we call animals—absorbed only organic life to sustain their vibration. As I watched, the animals filled the oceans in the great age of fishes, and, when the plants had released enough oxygen into the atmosphere, began their own trek toward land.

I saw the amphibians—half fish, half something new—leave the water for the first time and use lungs to breathe the new air. Then matter leaped forward again into reptiles and covered the Earth in the great period of the dinosaurs. Then the warm-blooded mammals came and likewise covered the Earth, and I realized that each emerging species represented life—matter—moving into its next higher vibration. Finally, the progression ended. There at the pinnacle stood humankind.

Humankind. The vision ended. I had seen in one flash the entire story of evolution, the story of matter coming into being and then evolving, as if under some guiding plan, toward ever higher vibrations, creating the exact conditions, finally, for humans to emerge…for each of us, as individuals, to emerge.

As I sat there on that mountain, I could almost grasp how this evolution was extended even further in the lives of human beings. Further evolution was related somehow to the experience of life coincidences. Something about these events led us forward in our lives and created a higher vibration that pushed evolution ahead as well. Yet, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t quite understand.

For a long time I sat on the rock precipice, consumed by peace and completeness. Then, abruptly, I became aware that the sun was beginning to sink in the west. I also noticed that toward the northwest about a mile was a town of some kind. I could make out the shapes of roof tops. The road on the west ridge seemed to meander right to it.