The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure Read online

  Strands of fog drifted across the grounds and clung to the distant meadows. Songbirds called one another from the trees. As I walked away from the lodge, the very top of the sun breached the horizon toward the east. The color was spectacular. The sky was a deep blue above the bright peach horizon.

  I arrived at the knoll fifteen minutes early so I sat down and leaned against the trunk of a large tree, fascinated by the web of gnarled branches growing out above my head. In a few minutes I heard someone walking toward me along the path and I looked that way, expecting to see Sarah. Instead I saw someone I didn’t know, a man in his mid-forties. He left the path and walked my way without noticing me. When he was within ten feet he saw me with a start, which made me flinch also.

  “Oh, hello,” he said in a rich Brooklyn accent. He was dressed in jeans and hiking boots and looked exceptionally fit and athletic. His hair was curly and receding.

  I nodded.

  “Sorry about walking up on you so suddenly,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  He told me his name was Phil Stone and I told him who I was and that I was waiting for a friend.

  “You must be doing some research here,” I added.

  “Not really,” he replied. “I work for the University of Southern California. We’re doing studies in another province on the rain forest depletion, but whenever I get the chance I drive over here and take a break. I like hanging out where the forests are so different.”

  He looked around. “Do you realize some of the trees here are close to five hundred years old? This is truly a virgin forest, a rare thing. Everything is in perfect balance: the larger trees filtering the sunlight, allowing a multitude of tropical plant life to thrive underneath. The plant life in a rain forest is old too, but it grows differently. It’s basically jungle. This is more like what an old forest looks like in a temperate zone, such as in the United States.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this there,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Only a few remain. Most of the ones I know of were sold by the government to lumber interests, as though all they could see in a forest like this is board feet of lumber. Damn shame that anyone would mess with a place like this. Look at the energy.”

  “You can see the energy here?” I asked.

  He looked at me closely, as though deciding whether to elaborate.

  “Yes, I can,” he said finally.

  “Well, I haven’t been able to,” I said. “I tried yesterday when they were meditating with plants at the garden.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t see fields that large at first either,” he said. “I had to start by looking at my fingers.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Let’s move over there,” he said, pointing to an area where the trees parted slightly and blue sky showed through overhead. “I’ll show you.”

  When we arrived, he said, “Lean back and touch the tips of your index 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.”

  As he talked I moved my fingers around, unsure what he meant by taking my eyes out of focus. 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.

  “Good grief,” I said, and explained what I saw.

  “That’s it! That’s it!” he said. “Now just play with that a while.”

  I touched all four fingers together, then my palms and forearms. In each case I continued to see streaks of energy between the body parts. I dropped my arms and looked at Phil.

  “Oh, you want to see mine?” he asked. He stood up and stepped back a few feet, positioning his head and torso so the sky would be directly behind him. I tried for a few minutes but a noise behind us broke my concentration. I turned and saw Sarah.

  Phil stepped forward and grinned broadly. “Is this the person you’ve been waiting for?”

  As Sarah approached, she too was smiling. “Hey, I know you,” she said, pointing at Phil.

  They embraced warmly, then Sarah looked at me and said, “Sorry I’m late. My mental alarm didn’t go off for some reason. But now I guess I know why. It gave you two a chance to talk. What have you been doing?”

  “He just learned how to see the fields between his fingers,” Phil said.

  Sarah looked at me. “Last year Phil and I were up here at this very spot learning to do the same thing.” She glanced at Phil. “Let’s put our backs together. Maybe he can see the energy between us.”

  They stood back to back in front of me. I suggested they move closer and they stepped toward me until the space between us was about four feet. They were silhouetted against the sky, which was still a dark blue in that direction. To my surprise, the space between them looked lighter. It was yellow, or a yellowish pink.

  “He sees it,” Phil said, reading my expression.

  Sarah turned and grabbed Phil by the arm and they slowly stepped away from me so that their bodies were perhaps ten feet away. Surrounding their upper torsos was a whitish-pink field of energy.

  “Okay,” Sarah said seriously. She had walked over and crouched down beside me. “Now look at the scene here, the beauty.”

  I was immediately awed by the shapes and forms around me. I seemed to be able to focus on each of the massive oaks in a total way, not merely on one part, but on the whole form at once. I was immediately struck by the unique shape and configuration of limbs each displayed. I looked from one to the other, turning all around. Doing this somehow increased the feeling of presence each oak exuded to me, as though I was seeing them for the first time, or at least fully appreciating them for the first time.

  Suddenly the tropical foliage underneath the huge trees attracted my attention; I again looked at the unique form each plant exhibited. I also noticed the way each type of plant grew together with others of its own kind in what struck me as little communities. For instance, the tall banana tree-type plants were often encircled by small philodendrons who themselves were poised among even smaller fern-like plants. When I looked at these mini-environments, I was again struck by their uniqueness of outline and presence.

  Less then ten feet away, a particular foliage plant caught my eye. I had often owned just this type as a house plant, a particular variegated form of philodendron. Dark green, its foliage branched out to about four feet in diameter. The shape of this plant seemed perfectly healthy and vibrant.

  “Yeah, focus on that one, but loosely,” Sarah said.

  As I did so, I played with the focus of my eyes. At one point I tried to focus on the space six inches to one side of each physical part of the plant. Gradually I began to pick up glimpses of light, then with a single adjustment of my focus, I could see a bubble of white light encircling the plant.

  “I’m seeing something now,” I said.

  “Look around some,” Sarah said.

  I stepped back in shock. Around each plant within my vision was a field of whitish light, visible, yet totally transparent, so that none of the plant’s color or form was obscured. I realized that what I was seeing was an extension of each plant’s unique beauty. It was as though first I had seen the plants, then I had seen their uniqueness and presence, and then something had amplified in the pure beauty of their physical expression, at which time I had seen the energy fields.

  “See if you can see this,” Sarah said. She sat down in front of me and faced the philodendron. A plume of the whitish light encircling her body erupted outward and engulfed the philodendron. The diameter of the plant’s energy field, in turn, broadened by several feet.

  “Damn!” I exclaimed, which provoked laughter between the two friends. Soon I was laughing myself, conscious of the peculiarity of what was happening, but
feeling absolutely no uneasiness at seeing, quite readily, phenomena I had totally doubted minutes earlier. I realized that the perception of the fields, rather than evoking a surrealistic sensation, actually made the things about me seem more solid and real than before.

  Yet at the same time, everything around me seemed different. The only reference I had for the experience was perhaps a movie which enhanced the color of a forest in order to make it seem mystical and enchanted. The plants, the leaves, the sky now all stood out with a presence and a slight shimmer that suggested life there, and perhaps consciousness, beyond our ordinary assumption. After seeing this, there would be no way to take a forest for granted again.

  I looked at Phil. “Sit down and put your energy on the philodendron,” I said. “I’d like to compare.”

  Phil appeared perplexed. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

  I looked at Sarah.

  “Some people can and some can’t,” she said. “We haven’t figured it out. Marjorie has to screen her graduate students to see who can do it. A couple of psychologists are trying to correlate this ability with personality characteristics but so far no one knows.”

  “Let me try it,” I said.

  “Okay, go ahead,” Sarah replied.

  I sat down again and faced the plant. Sarah and Phil stood at right angles to me.

  “Okay, how do I begin?”

  “Just focus your attention on the plant, as though to inflate it with your energy,” Sarah said.

  I looked at the plant and imagined energy swelling up inside it, then after a few minutes I looked over at the two.

  “Sorry,” Sarah said wryly, “you’re obviously not one of the chosen few.”

  I shot a mock frown at Phil.

  Angry voices from the path below interrupted our conversation. Through the trees we could see a group of men passing, talking harshly among themselves.

  “Who are those people?” Phil asked, looking at Sarah.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “More folks upset with what we’re doing, I guess.”

  I looked back at the forest around us. Everything appeared ordinary again.

  “Hey, I can’t see the energy fields anymore!”

  “Some things bring you right down, don’t they?” Sarah remarked.

  Phil smiled and patted my shoulder. “You can do it again anytime now. It’s just like riding a bicycle. All you have to do is see the beauty and then extend from there.”

  I suddenly remembered to check the time. The sun was much higher in the sky and a light mid-morning breeze swayed the trees. My watch showed 7:50 A.M.

  “I guess I had better head back,” I said.

  Sarah and Phil joined me. As we walked, I looked back at the wooded hillside. “That’s one beautiful place,” I said. “Too bad there aren’t more places like this in the States.”

  “Once you see the energy fields in other areas,” Phil said, “you’ll realize just how dynamic this forest is. Look at these oaks. They are very rare in Peru, but they grow here at Viciente. A cut forest, especially one that’s been stripped of hardwoods in order to grow pines for profit, has a very low energy field. And a city, except for the people, has a different kind of energy altogether.”

  I tried to focus on the plants along the path, but the act of walking disrupted my concentration.

  “You’re sure I’ll see these fields again?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Sarah replied. “I’ve never heard of anyone failing to duplicate the experience once they’ve seen them initially. We had a research ophthalmologist come through here once and he got all excited after he learned to see the fields. Turned out he had been working with certain sight abnormalities, including forms of color blindness, and concluded that some people have what he called lazy receptors in their eyes. He had taught people how to see colors they’d never experienced before. According to him, seeing energy fields was just a matter of doing the same thing, of waking up other dormant receptors, something that everyone, theoretically, can do.”

  “I wish I lived near a place like this,” I said.

  “Don’t we all,” Phil replied, then looked around me at Sarah. “Is Dr. Hains still here?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “He can’t leave.”

  Phil looked at me. “Now there’s a guy whose doing some interesting research on what this energy can do for you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I talked with him yesterday.”

  “The last time I was here,” Phil continued, “he was telling me about a study he would like to conduct in which he would look at the physical effects of merely being near certain high energy environments, such as that forest back there. He would use the same measurements of organ efficiency and output to see the effect.”

  “Well, I already know the effect,” Sarah said. “Whenever I drive into this estate, I begin to feel better. Everything is amplified. I seem stronger, I can think more clearly, and quickly. And the insights I have into all this and how it relates to my work in physics is amazing.”

  “What are you working on?” I asked.

  “Do you remember me telling you about the perplexing experiments in particle physics, during which these little bits of atoms appeared wherever the scientists expected them to be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ve tried to expand this idea a bit with some experiments of my own. Not to solve the problems those guys were working on in subatomic particles, but to explore questions I told you about before. To what extent does the physical universe as a whole—since it is made up of the same basic energy—respond to our expectations? To what extent do our expectations create all the things that happen to us?”

  “The coincidences, you mean?”

  “Yes, think of the events of your life. The old Newtonian idea is that everything happens by chance, that one can make good decisions and be prepared, but that every event has its own line of causation independent of our attitude.

  “After the recent discoveries of modern physics, we may legitimately ask if the universe is more dynamic than that. Perhaps the universe runs mechanistically as a basic operation, but then also subtly responds to the mental energy we project out into it. I mean, why not? If we can make plants grow faster, maybe we can make certain events come faster—or slower, depending on how we think.”

  “Does the Manuscript talk about any of this?”

  Sarah smiled at me. “Of course, that’s where we’re getting these ideas.” She began to dig around in her pack as we walked, finally pulling out a folder.

  “Here’s your copy,” she said.

  I glanced at it briefly and placed it in my pocket. We were crossing the bridge and I hesitated a moment, observing the colors and forms of the plants around me. I altered my focus and immediately saw the energy fields around everything in my view. Both Sarah and Phil had wide fields which seemed to be tinted yellow green, though Sarah’s field occasionally flashed with a pinkish color.

  Suddenly they both stopped and looked intently up the trail. Ahead about fifty feet, a man walked quickly toward us. A sensation of anxiety filled my stomach but I was determined to maintain my view of the energy. As he approached I recognized him; he was the taller of the scientists from the University of Peru who had asked for directions the day before. Around him I could detect a layer of red.

  When he walked up to us he turned to Sarah and condescendingly said, “You’re a scientist, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Sarah replied.

  “Then how can you tolerate this kind of science? I’ve seen these gardens and I can’t believe the sloppiness. You people haven’t controlled for anything. There could be many explanations for certain plants growing larger.”

  “Controlling for everything is impossible, sir. We’re looking for general tendencies.”

  I could detect an edge growing in Sarah’s voice.

  “But postulating some newly visible energy that underlies the chemistry of living things—that’s absurd. You hav
e no proof.”

  “Proof is what we’re looking for.”

  “But how can you postulate the existence of anything before you get some proof!”

  The voices of both individuals sounded angry now, but I was only vaguely listening. What consumed my attention was the dynamics of their energy fields. When the discussion began, Phil and I had backed up a few feet, and Sarah and the taller man had squared off facing each other with a distance of about four feet between them. Immediately, both their energy fields had seemed to grow more dense and excited somehow, as though from an inner vibration. As the conversation progressed, their fields began to intermingle. When one of them made a point, his field would create a movement which seemed to suck at the other’s field with what appeared to be a kind of vacuum maneuver. But then as the other person made his rebuttal the energy would move back in his direction. In terms of the dynamics of energy fields, winning the point seemed to mean capturing part of the opponent’s field and pulling it into oneself.

  “Besides,” Sarah was saying to the man, “we have observed the phenomena we’re trying to understand.”

  The man gave Sarah a disdainful look. “Then you are insane as well as incompetent,” he said, and walked away.

  “You’re a dinosaur,” Sarah shouted, which made Phil and me laugh. Sarah, however, was still tense.

  “These people can make me angry,” Sarah said, as we resumed our walk along the path.

  “Forget it,” Phil said. “These kinds of people come around sometimes.”

  “But why so many?” Sarah asked. “And why right now?”

  As we walked up to the lodge, I could see Wil at the jeep. The doors of the vehicle were open and gear was spread out on top of the hood. He saw me immediately and motioned for me to come over.

  “Well, looks like I’m about to take off,” I said.

  My comment broke a ten minute silence, which had begun when I had tried to explain what I had seen happen to Sarah’s energy during the argument. Evidently, I had not put it very well, because my comments had provoked only blank stares, and had cast us all into a long period of self-absorption.