According to the Manuscript, we are beginning to glimpse an alternative kind of experience...moments in our lives that fell different somehow, more intense and inspiring. But we don’t know what this experience is or how to make it last, and when it ends we’re left feeling dissatisfied and restless with a life that seems ordinary again.

We’re all looking for more fulfillment in our lives, and we won’t put up with anything that seems to bring us down. This restless searching is what’s behind the « me first » attitude that has characterized recent decades, and it’s affecting everyone, from Wall Street to street gangs.

And when it comes to relationships, we’re so demanding that we’re making them near impossible.

The first Insight occurs when we become conscious of the coincidences in our lives.

Have you ever had a hunch or intuition concerning something you wanted to do? Some course you wanted to take in your life? And wondered how it might happen? And then, after you had half forgotten about it and focused on other things, you suddenly meet someone or read something or went somewhere that led to the very opportunity you envisioned?

Well, she continued, according to the priest, these coincidences are happening more and more frequently and that, when they do, they strike us as beyond what would be expected by pure chance. They feel destined, as though our lives had been guided by some unexplained force. The experience induces a feeling of mystery and excitement and, as a result, we feel more alive.

The priest told me that this is the experience that we’ve glimpsed and that we’re now trying to manifest all the time. More people every day are convinced that this mysterious movement is real and that it means something, that something else is going on beneath everyday life. This awareness is the First Insight.

In the past, you might have said God was responsible, or the Devil. But as the Medieval world view breaks down, that certainty goes with it. All the things you took for granted now need new definition, especially the nature of God and your relationship to God.

With that awareness, he went on, the Modern Age begins. There is a growing democratic spirit and a mass distrust of papal and royal authority. Definitions of the universe based on speculation or scriptural faith are no longer automatically accepted.

We sent these explorers out to bring back a complete explanation of our existence, but because of the complexity of the universe they weren’t able to return right away.

When the scientific method couldn’t bring back a new picture of God and of mankind’s purpose on the planet, the lack of certainty and meaning affected Western culture deeply. We needed something else to do until our questions were answered? Eventually we arrived at what seemed to be a very logical solution. We looked at each other and said: « Well, since our explorers have not yet returned with our true spiritual situation, why not settle into this new world of ours while we are waiting? We are certainly learning enough to manipulate in the meantime to raise our standard of living, our sense of security in the world? »

We totally lost ourselves in creating a secular security, an economic security, to replace the spiritual one we had lost. The question of why we were alive, of what was actually going on here spiritually, was slowly pushed aside and repressed altogether.

He looked at me intensely, then said, ‘Working to establish a more comfortable style of survival has grown to feel complete in and of itself as a reason to live, and we’ve gradually, methodically, forgotten our original question...

We’ve forgotten that we still don’t know what we’re surviving for.’

It’s time now to wake up from the preoccupation and reconsider our original question.

A thousand years ago we had lived in a world where God and human spirituality were clearly defined. And then we had lost it, or better, we had decided there was more to the story. Accordingly, we had sent explorers out to discover the real truth and to report back, and when they had taken too long we had become preoccupied with a new, secular purpose, one of settling into this world, of making ourselves more comfortable.

The problem was that our focused, obsessive drive to conquer nature and make ourselves more comfortable, had left the natural systems of the planet polluted and on the verge of collapse. We couldn’t go on this way.

We were reaching a climax in our cultural purpose. We were accomplishing what we had collectively decided to d o, and as this happened, our preoccupation was breaking down and we were waking up to something else.

I could almost see the momentum of the Modern age slowing as we approached the end of the millennium. A four hundred year old obsession had been completed. We had created the means of material security, and now we seemed to be ready - poised, in fact - to find out why we had done it.

In the faces of the passengers around me I could see evidence of the preoccupation, but also I thought I detected brief glimpses of awareness. How many, I wondered, had already noticed the coincidences?

After the fall of the medieval world view, we in the west suddenly became aware that we lived in a totally unknown universe. In attempting to understand the nature of this universe we knew we had to somehow separate facts from superstition. In this regard we scientists assumed a particular attitude known as scientific skepticism, which in effect demands solid evidence for any new assertion about how the world works. Before we would believe anything, we wanted evidence that could be seen and grabbed with the hands? Any idea that couldn’t be proved in some physical way was systematically rejected.

‘ With this attitude’, she went on, ‘science systematically removed the uncertain and the esoteric from the world. We concluded, following the thinking of Isaac Newton, that the universe always operated in a predictable manner, like an enormous machine, because for a long time that’s all it could be proved to be. Events which happened simultaneously to other events yet had no causal relationship were said to occur only by chance.

Then, two investigations occurred which opened our eyes again to the mystery in the universe? Much has been written over the past several decades about the revolution in physics, but the changes really stem from two major findings, those of quantum mechanics and those of Albert Einstein.

‘The whole of Einstein’s life’s work was to show that what we perceive as hard matter is mostly empty space with a pattern of energy running through it. This includes ourselves. And what quantum physics has shown is that when we look at these patterns of energy at smaller and smaller levels, startling results can be seen. Experiments have revealed that when you break apart small aspects of this energy, what we call elementary particles, and try to observe how they operate, the act of observation itself alters the results - as if these elementary particles are influenced by what the experimenter expects. This is true even if the particles must appear in places they couldn’t possibly go, given the laws of the universe as we know them: two places at the same moments, forward or backward in time, that sort of thing.

She stopped to face me again. ‘In other words, the basic stuff of the universe, at its core, is looking like a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation in a way that defies our old mechanistic model of the universe - as though our expectation itself causes our energy to flow out into the world and affect other energy systems. Which, of course, is exactly what the Third Insight would lead us to believe.’

When we arrived, he said, ‘lean back and touch the tips of your fingers together. Keep the blue sky in the background. Now separate the tips about an inch and look at the area directly between them. What do you see?’

‘Dust on the lens of my eye.’

‘Ignore that,’ he said. ‘Take your eyes out of focus a little and move the tips closer, then further apart.’

I finally placed my gaze vaguely on the area between my fingers. Both finger-tips went slightly blurry, and as this happened I saw something like strands of smoke stretching between the tips.

It said (the Fourth Insight) that eventually humans would see the universe as comprised of one dynamic energy, an energy that can sustain us and respond to our expectations. Yet we would also see that we have been disconnected from the larger source of this energy, that we cut ourselves off and so have felt weak and insecure and lacking.

In the face of this deficit, we humans shave always sought to increase our personal energy in the only manner we have known: by seeking to psychologically steal it from others - an unconscious competition that underlies all human conflict in the world.

In other words we humans seek to outwit and control each other not just because of some tangible goal in the outside world that we’re trying to achieve, but because of a lift we get psychologically.

We humans are realizing how much we manipulate each other and consequently we’re reevaluating our motivations. We’re looking for another way to interact.

When we control another human being we receive their energy. We fill up at the other’s expense and the filling up is what motivates us.

He first pretends to be your friend, then he finds so something wrong with what you’re doing, in your case that you were in danger. In effect, he subtly undermines your confidence in your own path until you begin to identify with him. As soon as that happens, he has you.

Wil looked directly at me. ‘This is only one of many strategies people use to con others out of their energy.

Occasionally, another person will voluntarily want us to define their situation for them, giving us their energy outright, the way Marjorie did with you. It makes us feel empowered, but you’ll that this gift doesn’t usually last. Most people -Marjorie included- aren’t strong enough to keep giving energy. That’s

why most relationships eventually turn into power struggles.

In the beginning matter existed only in its simplest vibratory form : the element we call hydrogen. 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 the next higher vibration, the element we call helium.

These first stars aged and finally blew themselves up and spewed the remaining hydrogen and the newly created helium out into the universe. And the whole process began again. The hydrogen and helium gravitated together until the temperature became hot enough for new stars to form and that in turn fused the helium together, creating the element lithium, which vibrated at the next higher level.

And so on ... each successive generation of stars creating matter 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 lightening storms that periodically swept the planet, matter leaped past the vibratory level of carbon to ban even more complex state: to the vibration represented by the amino acids. But for the fist 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. 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 breath 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.

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.

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.

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.

We can’t really stay connected with this source until we come to grips with the particular method that, we, as individuals, use our controlling and stop doing it - because whenever we fall back into this habit, we get disconnected from the source.

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.

Your way of controlling people and situations, he explained, in order to get energy coming your way, is to create this drama in your mind during which you withdraw and look mysterious and secretive. You tell yourself that you’re being cautious but what you’re really doing is hoping someone will be pulled into this drama and will try to figure out t what’s going on with you. When someone does, you remain vague, forcing them to struggle and dig and try to discern your true feelings?

As they do so, they give you their full attention and that sends their energy to you. The longer you can keep them interested and mystified, the more energy you receive. Unfortunately, when you play aloof, your life tends to evolve very slowly because you’re repeating this same scene over and over again. If you had opened up to Rolando, your life movie would have taken off in a new and meaningful direction.

The first step in the process of getting clear, for each of us, is to bring our particular control drama into full consciousness.

Remember, most of our family members were operating in a drama themselves, trying to pull energy out of us as children. This is why we had to form a control drama in the first place. We had to have a strategy to win energy back.

An interrogator is another kind of drama. People who use this means of gaining energy, set up a drama of asking questions and probing into anther person’s world with the specific purpose of finding something wrong. Once they do, then they criticize this aspect of the other’s life. If this strategy succeeds then the person being criticized is pulled into the drama. They suddenly find themselves becoming self-conscious around the interrogator and paying attention to what the interrogator is doing and thinking about, so as not to do something wrong that the interrogator would notice. This psychic deference gives the interrogator the energy he desires.

Everyone manipulates for energy either aggressively, directly forcing people to pay attention to them, or passively, playing on people’s sympathy or curiosity to gain attention.

For instance, if someone threatens you, either verbally or physically, then you are forced, for fear of something bad happening to you, to pay attention to him and so to give him energy. The person threatening you would be pulling you into the most aggressive kind of drama, what the Sixth Insight calls the intimidator.

If, on the other hand, someone tells you all the horrible things that are already happening to them, implying perhaps that you are responsible, and that, if you refuse to help, these horrible things are going to continue, then this person is seeking to control at the most passive level, with what the Manuscript calls a poor me drama.

Everything they say and do puts you in a place where you have to defend against the idea that you’re not doing enough for this person. That’s why you feel guilty just being around them, even though you know there is no reason to feel this way.

Some people use more than one in different circumstances, but most of us have one dominant control drama that we tend to repeat, depending on which one worked well on the members of our early family.

If you are a child and someone is draining your energy by threatening you with bodily harm then being aloof doesn’t work. You can’t get them to give you energy by playing coy. They don’t give a damn what’s going on inside you. They’re coming on too strong. So you’re forced to become more passive and to try the poor me approach, appealing to the mercy of the person, guilt tripping them about the harm they are doing.

If this doesn’t work, then as a child you endure until you are big enough to explode against the violence and fight aggression with aggression.

A person goes to whatever extreme necessary to get attention energy in their family. And after that, this strategy becomes their dominant way of controlling to get energy from everyone, the drama they constantly repeat.

What would you do if you were a child and your family members were either not there or ignored you because they were preoccupied with their careers or something?

Playing aloof would not get their attention; they wouldn’t notice. Wouldn’t you have to resort to probing and prying and finally finding something wrong in these aloof people in order to force attention and energy? This is what an interrogator does.

Aloof people create interrogators, and interrogators make people aloof!

And intimidators create the poor me approach, or if this fails, another intimidator! That’s how control dramas perpetuate themselves.

But remember, there is a tendency to see these dramas in others but to think that we ourselves are free from such devices. Each of us must transcend this illusion before we can go on. Almost all of us tend to be stuck at least some of the time, in a drama and we have to step back and look at ourselves long enough to discover what it is.

Once we see our drama, we are truly free to become more than the unconscious act we play. As I said before, we can find a higher meaning for our lives, a spiritual reason we were born to our particular families. We wan begin to get clear about who we really are.

Every human being whether they are conscious of it or not illustrates with their lives how he or she thinks a human being is supposed to live. You must try to discover what your mother taught you and at the same time what about her life could have been done better. What you would have changed about your mother is part of what you yourself are working on.

And how you would improve on your father’s life is the other part.

We are not merely the physical creation of our parents; we are also the spiritual creation. You were born to these two people and their lives had an irrevocable effect on who you are. To discover your real self, you must admit that the real you began in a position between their truths. That’s why you were born there: to take a higher perspective on what they stood for. Your path is about discovering a truth that is a higher synthesis of what these two people believed.

Look closely at all the things that have happened to you since birth. If you view your life as a story, from birth to right now, you’ll be able to see how you have been working on this question all along. You’ll be able to see how you came to be here and what you should do next.

When you fully integrate this view of your life, you will have achieved what the Manuscript call clear awareness of your spiritual path. According to the Manuscript we all must spend as much time as necessary going through this process of clearing your past. Most of us have a control drama we have to transcend but once we do, we can comprehend the higher meaning for why we were born to our particular parents, and what all the twists and turns of our lives were preparing us to do. We all have a spiritual purpose, a mission, that we have been pursuing without being fully aware of it, and once we bring it completely into consciousness, our lives can take off.

Each time we fill up with energy and a coincidence occurs to lead us forward in our lives, we institute this level of energy in ourselves, and so we can exist at a higher vibration. Our children take our level of vibration and raise it even higher? This is how we, as humans, continue evolution.

The difference now, with this generation, is that we are ready to do it consciously and to accelerate the process.

The Seven Insight says that not only dreams guide us. Also thoughts or daydreams guide us.

They show us w scene; a happening, and this is an indication that this event might happen. If we pay attention then we can be ready for this turn in our lives.

The Seven Insight says that we all have many more such thoughts than we realize. Or recognize them we must take an observer position. When w thought comes, we must ask why? Why did this particular thought come now? How does it relate to my life questions? Taking this observer position helps us release our need to control everything. It places us in the flow of evolution.

The seven Insight says that fear images should be halted as soon as they come. Then another image, one with a good outcome, should be willed through the mind. Soon, negative images will almost never happen. Your intuitions will be about positive things? When negative images come after that, the Manuscript says they should be taken very seriously, and not followed. For instance, if the idea comes to you that you’re going to have a wreck in a truck and someone comes along and offers you a ride in a truck, then do not accept it.

We build our energy and center ourselves in out situations, in the questions we have, then we receive some form of intuitive guidance, an idea of where to go or what to do, and then coincidences occur to allow us to move in that direction.

When love first happens, the two individuals are giving each other energy unconsciously and both people feel buoyant and elated. That’s the incredible high we all call being « in love ». Unfortunately, once they expect this feeling to come from the other person, they cut themselves off from the energy in the universe and begin to rely even more on the energy from each other - only now there doesn’t seem to be enough and so they stop giving each other energy and fall back into their dramas in an attempt to control each other and force the other’s energy their way. At this point, the relationship degenerates into the usual power struggle.

The problem is that most parents, up to now, have been competing with their own children for energy, and that has affected all of us? Because this competition was taking place, none of us have quite resolved this opposite-sex issue. We’re all suck at the stage where we are still looking for our opposite

The problem is that most parents, up to now, have been competing with their own children for energy, and that has affected all of us? Because this competition was taking place, none of us have quite resolved this opposite-sex issue. We’re all suck at the stage where we are still looking for our opposite-sex energy outside of ourselves, in the person of a male or female we can think as magical and ideal and can possess sexually.

According to the Eight Insight, when we first begin to evolve, we automatically begin to receive our opposite-sex energy. It comes in naturally from the energy in the universe. But we must be careful, because if another person comes along who offers this energy directly we can cut ourselves off from the true source... and regress.

We are very susceptible to a person of the opposite sex, some other circle half complete, coming up and joining with us -c completing the circle that way - and giving us a burst of euphoria and energy that feels like the wholeness that a full connection with the universe produces. In reality, we have only joined up with another person who is looking for their other half on the outside too.

The problem with this completed person, this O, that both people think they have reached, is that it has taken two people to make this one whole person, one supplying the female energy and one supplying the male. This one whole person consequently has two heads, or egos. Both people want to run this whole person they have created and so, just as in childhood, both people want to command the other, as if the other were themselves. This kind of illusion of completeness always breaks down into a power struggle. In the end each person must take the other for granted and even invalidate them so that they can lead this whole self in the direction they want to go.

First we have to stabilize our channel with the universe. When we connect romantically with another whole person after that, we create a super-person...but it never pulls us from the path of our individual evolution.

Whenever people cross our paths, there is always a message for us. Chance encounters do not exist. But how we respond to these encounters determines whether we’re able to receive the message. If we have a conversation with someone who crosses our path and we do not see a message pertaining to our current questions, it does not mean there was no message. It only means we missed it for some reason.

‘Have you ever run into an old friend or acquaintance, talked for a minute and left, then run into him or her again the same day or the same week?’

‘Yes I have,’ I replied.

‘And what do you usually say? Something like « well, fancy seeing you again, » and laugh and go on your way.’

‘Something like that.’

‘The Manuscript says that what we should do instead in that situation is to stop what we are doing, no matter what, and find out the message we have for that person, and that the person has for us.

The first step is to keep our own energy high, then we can start the flow of energy coming into us, through us and into the other person. The more we appreciate their wholeness, their inner beauty, the pore the energy flows into them, and naturally, the more that flows into us.

The effect on the individual of this projection of energy is immense,’ she said. ‘Right now you’re filling me with energy. I can feel it. What I feel is a greater sense of lightness and clarity as I’m formulating my thoughts to speak.

Because you are giving me more energy than I would have otherwise, I can see what my truth is and more readily give it to you.. When I do that, you have a sense of revelation about what I’m saying. This leads you to see my higher self even more fully and so appreciate and focus on it at an even deeper level, which gives me even more energy and greater insight into my truth and the cycle begins over again. Two or more people doing this together can reach incredible highs as they build one another up and have it immediately returned.

Covert manipulations for energy can’t exist if you bring them into consciousness by pointing them out. They cease to be covert. It is a very simple method. ( for example, ask an intimidator why he is so angry.) The best truth about what’s going on in a conversation always prevails. After that the person has to be more real and honest. And the key to making it work is to simultaneously look beyond the drama at the real person in front of you, and send as much energy their way possible. If they can feel energy coming in anyway, then it’s easier for them to give up their way of manipulating for it.

The Manuscript says we will learn that sudden, spontaneous eye contact is a sign that two people should talk. Another sign mentioned is a sense of recognition, seeing someone who looks familiar, even though you know you’ve never seen the person before.

As the members of a group talk, only one will have the most powerful idea at any one point in time. If they are alert, the others in the group can feel who is about to speak, and then they can consciously focus their energy on this person, helping to bring out his idea with the greatest clarity.

Then, as the conversation proceeds, someone else will have the most powerful idea, then someone else and so forth. If you concentrate on what is being said, you can feel when it is your turn. the idea will come up into your mind.

Usually some people get inflated when in a group. They feel the power of an idea and express it, then because that burst of energy feels so good, they keep on talking, long after the energy should have shifted to someone else. They try to monopolize the group.

Others are pulled back and even when they feel the power of an idea, they won’t risk saying it. When this happens, the group fragments and the members don’t get the benefit of all the messages. The same thing happens when some members of the group are not accepted by some of the others. The rejected individuals are prevented from receiving the energy and so the group misses the benefit of their ideas.

When we dislike someone or feel threatened by someone, the natural tendency is to focus on something we dislike about the person, something that irritates us? Unfortunately, when we do this -instead of seeing the deeper beauty of the person and giving them energy - we take energy away and actually do them harm. All they know is that they suddenly feel less beautiful and less confident, and it is because we sapped their energy.

I was alert to the mysterious way my life evolved, as revealed by the First Insight. I knew that the whole culture was sensing this mystery again as well, and we were in the process of constructing a new world view, as pointed out by the Second. The Third and Fourth had showed me that the universe was in reality a vast system of energy and that human conflict was a shortage of and a manipulation for this energy.

The Fifth Insight revealed that we could en this conflict by receiving an inpouring of this energy from a higher source. For me, this ability had almost become habit. The Sixth, that we could clear our old repeated dramas, and find our true selves, was also permanently etched in my mind. And the Seventh had set in motion the evolution of these true selves: through question; intuition of what to do, and answer. Staying in this magic flow was truly the secret of happiness.

And the Eighth, knowing how to relate in a new way to others, bringing out in them the very best, was the key to keeping the mystery operating and the answers coming.