The 12th Insight by James Redfield

INTUITING THE TWELFTH INSIGHT

What a human world. Look at it. At first glance, all we see is conflict, competition, and the old habit of demonizing those who seem to be opposed to our ideas: in order to make ourselves feel correct and more important.

In politics, the political left demonizes the right, and vice versa. In education any attempt at reform and rejuvenation, is met with cries of racism and union busting by those guarding the status quo. In medicine, we see the dominating power of big pharmaceutical corporations; spending millions to court doctors, influence research, (all once deemed unethical) all the while expanding the mechanistic model of the human body. Corporate support of medical schools seems to be turning physicians into sales representatives, winning trips for pushing one drug over another. (Also once considered unethical.)

Soon, as President Bush announced in a recent speech, there will be synthetic hormones, and brain chemicals, and designer “feel good” pills that motor through the body homing in like tiny submarines to alter specific molecular interactions. They are even developing artificial blood.

The last straw, for many people, is having to cope with what seems to be the diminishing effectiveness of reform movements, once so full of energy and focus, which now seem to be losing steam. The younger generations do not seem to care as much. And the media is somewhere else chasing ratings. In short, the world seems increasingly out of control, with corruption and venality running rampant, terrorists promising more attacks, and a citizenry clearly overwhelmed.

Yet, from the Celestine point of view, a first glance into this crazy world is not enough. I am convinced society is not spiraling into oblivion; it is not slipping out of our control. We never had any control to begin with. All we really have is input. That’s it. Sometimes our input, our viewpoint seems to be validated by the trends we see around us, and sometimes it goes the other way.

What we are witnessing in these crazy years is a momentary swing of the evolutionary pendulum, the last surge of momentum into the extreme, before we slow down and drop back in another direction. What we must grok, I believe, is that the progress of the world operates through a dialectical process, just as the philosopher Hegel envisioned in the Eighteenth Century. First, you have a way of life or belief, a thesis, and then someone disagrees, and proposes a counter idea, an antithesis. And then from outside these poles a compromise emerges, a greater truth or way of life that represents a better integration of the polar positions, one that works better. You have a higher synthesis. The pendulum swings in another direction.

Right now, we see the last hurrah of the materialist, secular orientation that has prevailed for so long in human society going wildly to the extreme. Already, a lived spiritual orientation has begun to blossom. But it has not prevailed yet, primarily because it is political expression that has not been fully developed. It often sounds like a replay of the old thesis-antithesis arguments between capitalism and communism, thinking that the only way to have an enlightened society is to force it on people, hailing big bureaucratic government to replace the personal initiative and independence of the materialist life, and preventing it from becoming a true transcending synthesis.

A synthesis to the current situation has to assert the importance of the system of private initiative and spontaneous creativity to a lived spirituality, but infuse this system with an ethical understanding that deals with our concerns about pollution, preserving cultural traditions, honoring consumer and worker protection, and acting in harmony with an emergent new spiritual viewpoint.

Of course, I believe the Celestine vision, emerging out there, by any name, is the new synthesis coming into view. It spells out a new life image of ourselves that sees our bodies as an energetic whole, and calling for a new nutrition-oriented medicine. It assumes an inner intuition that can guide our decision-making and synchronistically move each of us into a more inspired and productive economic niche, easing poverty, and pushing the ethical values mentioned above. And most of all, it sees evolutionary process for what it is: a march toward a perfection of human culture by consciously working through polar opposites until we can take the best aspects of both extremes and mold them into something that both sides can accept.

This allows evolution to take a step forward, instead of remaining deadlocked in a stalemate of demonization.

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