THE VISIONS OF VICTOR AND BEATRICE A Metafictional Epic © 1999 by Joseph Kerrick Part II ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------     Beatrice could only witness the bare outer surface of the events which propelled her lover Victor on a journey through the vast interior reaches of time and space. Now she tells the tale of her own perilous adventure into even stranger sectors of the invisible spheres.
	1. Mad as an Avatar I had never loved a man more dearly than Victor, and so I was very upset when he told me that he wanted to kill himself. I just hoped and prayed that he wasn’t truly serious about it, deep in his heart. In the seven years of our relationship, I had known him as an intelligent, sensitive, and highly functional individual. Still, he had a strange kind of mental illness, triggered by a bad LSD trip when he was younger. He would sometimes get trapped in a state of inner isolation and terrible despair, and was convinced that this was a high spiritual experience, reflecting the ultimate human condition. This is what he wished to escape by committing suicide. We went up on a hill and made love, and I managed to talk him out of the terrible act. But then he was attacked by a man named Eric, who had a vendetta against Victor. Eric pulled a gun, but by a wonderful stroke of grace it misfired. Victor wrestled him to the ground, and then something really strange happened: they started talking as if they were old friends. It turned out that Victor had had some kind of mystical revelation in the instant when he faced death. It seemed to him that time had stretched out to an eternity just in the second or two when Eric was pointing the gun at him, and that he had travelled in his astral body to a place called Thule. We all sat down and talked, and I could tell that Victor had changed. There was a real glow about him -- I could make out some of the colors in it, even though my ability to see auras was practically nil. He had always been a highly-charged person, but now his intensity was stonger than ever -- and yet still with a gentle quality to it. He did something to Eric that seemed like a miraculous healing, transforming him from a homicidal psychopath into a sane and likeable individual. Victor absolutely refused to press any charges for the attempted murder, or even to tell anyone about it, so that Eric wouldn’t get into trouble. Eric has been a close friend ever since, and practically worships Victor, whom he calls the "Stark von Odin", which I think means something like an avatar in Eric’s peculiar belief-system. I discovered for myself that Victor was certainly more divine after the experience on the hill, especially sexually. We had already been way deep into Tantric lovemaking, or so I had thought. But now when we did it I had profound ecstatic experiences like nothing I’ve known before -- whole new worlds opened up to me, as I caught little glimpses of heavenly alternate realities. And I even had my first out-of-body experience! It was amazing -- at the beginning I thought we were still just intertwined there in the Shiva-Shakti position, where I sit in Victor’s lap and get penetrated by his lingam (not to mention his eyes!). But then he just sort of nudged me and pointed downward -- and there were our physical bodies below us! We were actually both floating in our astral bodies up near the ceiling. I got so scared that I just sort of fell back into my body, and there was Victor chuckling and stroking me, and assuring me that next time we could go right up through the ceiling if we wanted to. Well, I didn’t think I wanted that at all! But when he told me about all the amazing other worlds we could visit, I had to consider it. Meanwhile, though, Victor was having a hard time getting his bearings right here in this world. He really acted like he had passed through a warp and come back to an alternate reality that was very different from the one he had left. He started ranting and raving about "robots" -- he was saying things like, "We’re surrounded by robots!" I got frightened -- I thought he was having hallucinations. But when he talked more about it, I finally realized that he was referring to actual people -- like the people on the street, in the town, in the world. "That’s it," he said -- "people are turning into robots!" He went on like this for a couple of days, and then it got worse -- he started saying, “People are deformed! They’re turning into monsters!” Again I got him to talk calmly about it, and determined that he was not having schizoid-type hallucinations in which people seemed to physically morph into strange creatures; rather, as he finally explained, he was seeing their souls and astral bodies -- their underlying essence, which seemed to him deformed, monstrous, and robotic. I was afraid that Victor had somehow lost his sense of human empathy, but when he related to people as individuals, I saw that if anything it was more acute than before -- he was so compassionate that sometimes he even slipped into tears while interacting with certain people, like the disabled kids who I teach in my special education class. A few of them are actually physically deformed, and after Victor picked me up at school one afternoon, and he had chatted with the kids, I asked him how this related to his earlier statements. He was silent for awhile, and I was alarmed to see the same expression on his face as in his past bouts with clinical depression. At last he said with steely seriousness: “There has to be a cure.” I said, “Victor, you know those kids are incurable. We just have to work to maximize their potential and minimize their suffering.” “Not just them,” he said; “the rest of them too.” He meant the huge swath of the world’s people whom he now considered to be spiritually deformed. What I came to understand from this and similar remarks was that even though Victor found nothing wrong with anybody on an individual basis, he now perceived what I’d have to call the collective karma of humanity in such a tangible way that it astonished him, outraged him, and rendered him grief-stricken whenever he dwelt on it. So when he talked about a “cure” in this context, it could only mean that he wanted to save the world. His next change was even scarier: he started worrying about the end of the world. I think I could’ve coped with that, because I’ve had training in counseling people for paranoid and delusional fantasies, and a whole range of things; but sometimes it seemed like Victor wanted the end of the world. When I put it to him in these terms, he denied it -- he said, “I only want the collapse of this present civilization.” As you might guess, this didn’t make me feel much better! He started freaking out because all the normal middle-class people weren’t aware of the danger. He wrote an article about it and actually got it published in a local alternative paper called the Coastal Post: he described how a lot of the Third World was already in an advanced stage of breakdown, and how this would soon spread everywhere. He said that the only solution was a new tight-knit “homogeneous culture”, but he admitted to me that he didn’t really have a clear idea of what this would be like. The editor of the paper evidently wasn’t sure either -- he put a kind of sarcastic headline on the article: “Homogeneity and Uniformity Can Save the World”. Victor was annoyed when he saw it -- “That’s not what I meant!” he said. There wasn’t much response to the article, and this seemed to convince him that the majority of people would never wake up to the approaching doom until it was too late, and so he started looking around for more radical alternatives. That was the year when the militia movement was first beginning to get big, and he searched around and found one that had started up in the next county. He attended a couple of meetings, and got as far as participating in a combat training exercise. He came back from it very enthusiastic, even flushed with excitement, and talked about buying a rifle. This really upset me, because I was a very committed pacifist; and even though Victor had never felt that strongly about it, he had definitely agreed with the general worldview. Now that seemed to have changed. This new development forcefully reminded me of a very brief but terrifying thing that had happened in the events on the hill. When he was fighting with Eric, Victor became enraged to a degree that I had never seen in him before. There was an instant when I thought he was actually going to kill Eric. Victor was holding a knife to Eric’s throat and had a look on his face of sheer diabolical hatred -- that’s what I’d have to call it. This was followed immediately by the strange turnabout in which Victor and Eric became friends, and I didn’t think about the incident again until Victor came home from the militia event. Most likely I repressed it. Now I brought it up to him, and we had a long talk.  He said that the mystical experience on the hill had brought him in touch with his dark side, and that this was a good thing. I said that I didn’t think it was very good at all, and we got into an argument. We finally kissed and made up, but nothing was really resolved. 2. Day of the Dead, with Rainbows There came the weekend that the Grateful Dead played in the Bay Area, on what turned out to be the last of their perennial tours, because the following year Jerry Garcia (ahem) died. Victor had long since lost any interest in going to the actual concerts -- “it’s old hat,” he would say -- but every year he liked to go to the local Deadhead hangouts and see if he could meet up with any of his old friends. Usually he would find a few, and sometimes make new ones. He seemed so different now after the strange events on the hill that I was glad to hear him say that he still wanted to do it this year. So it was that on a sunny afternoon we set off for San Francisco in my car. As soon as we came into sight of the city on the approach to the Goden Gate Bridge, Victor started freaking out. “Oh my God,” he said, “look at that dark vortex over the downtown area!” I couldn’t see anything like that, and told him so, and he became quiet. But I could tell that he was still seeing weird stuff. When we were actually on the bridge, and the view of the city was closer, he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He said, “Maybe you think I’m crazy, Bea, but there’s some kind of gridwork of rays or beams focused on the skyscrapers, coming down from outer space. And it’s funneling stuff back up into space too -- it’s like it’s collecting all the energy of the people in the city, and feeding it to a kind of giant robot that’s hovering over it and controlling everything. And the robot itself is under the control of something beyond the planet.” As you can imagine, that sure did sound pretty crazy to me. But I had enough respect for Victor’s vision to feel that there must be something real behind it, even if he was perceiving it all in a crazy sort of way. Before I could think of any sensible comments, he said: “The TransAmerica Pyramid is the cental focus of this local part of the grid. The red aircraft beacon at the top transmits a pulse to that. . . that Macrobot. And there’s a steady beam focused down on it from space. I don’t understand how it works, or who or what’s behind it -- but I can see it plain as day.” I still wasn’t sure what to say, so I just drew on my psych training and tried to get him to pin down \ the degree of tangible reality of these bizarre things he was describing, And again it turned out that it wasn’t a full-blown hallucination, but rather a subtler pattern he was picking up with his astral vision. Like, he knew full well that the TransAmerica Pyramid was solid and physical, but that the “Macrobot” wasn’t. So in my own mind I still had to classify him not as a schizoid psychotic, but as a psychic sensitive who may have been observing actual metaphysical overlays. When we got to the Haight it was like Mardi Gras -- a real carnival atmosphere, though with a certain grizzly undercurrent. The streets and the park were packed with people who belonged to that strange subculture defined mostly by two large overlapping groups: the Deadheads and the Rainbow Tribe. I’ve only been to one Rainbow Gathering, though they have them every year, each one in a different national park or wilderness preserve. It was started by the leftover hippies in 1972, and has been going ever since. Some of the Rainbows are still hippies, even the ones who weren’t even born in the Sixties; some of them are people who live outdoors by preference -- rugged mountain folk, dropouts, and hobos. And the great majority of them smoke pot and take LSD. A lot of the Deadheads are also Rainbows, but not all -- because there you have more kids from regular middle-class backgrounds who are being adventurous and will probably drop back into the mainstream when they get a little older. Meanwhile, they follow the band around the country, and of course smoke pot and take LSD. Most of the people we saw thronging the Haight that day were part of that Deadhead-Rainbow crowd. But there were two other elements present, one sad and one scary. My heart went out to all the street kids, many of whom looked like they came from pretty good homes -- though “good” is relative in these cases, like when prosperous parents abuse their kids or even throw them out. These were some of the permanent residents of the street and the park, hanging out in the same crowd with hardbitten drug dealers and ex-convicts. We hadn’t walked two blocks down Haight Street when Victor was hailed by a tall man in a very colorful outfit. His jacket was literally a patchwork -- it looked like the whole thing was made of sewn- together military patches, hippie patches, biker patches, etc., with no fabric showing through underneath. He was also wearing drawstring pantaloons and an actual three-pointed jester’s hat. So I was hardly surprised when Victor introduced him to me as John Harlequin. He was in a little knot of people, some of whom Victor also knew and greeted, and they all hugged him as a long-lost friend, or Rainbow brother. Then he introduced them to me, and I was very struck by a couple who went by the names of Chronos and Alethea. The man had a long blond beard and penetrating blue eyes; the young woman was likewise very fair and self-assured. I said, “Well, I’m familiar with the name ‘Chronos’, but does ‘Alethea’ have a mythical meaning too?” They both laughed good-naturedly, and the man answered: “We’re Time and Truth.” I was charmed. I said, “Wow, that’s a powerful combination. What happens when Time and Truth come together?” “In our case,” said Alethea, “we’ve given birth to Joy.” “You do seem to be a happy couple,” I acknowedged. They laughed again, and Alethea looked to the side and said, “Joy! Come here and meet a nice lady.” I turned and saw a beautiful little girl tear herself away from a dog belonging to a street person which she had been playing with. She came into our circle of people with a hop, skip, and a jump, and her mother said, “This is Joy.” She really was bubbling over with positive energy -- I can’t remember when I’ve seen a happier child. She looked to be about five or six years old, and was dressed in hippie-rainbow style clothes like her parents. It was a real pleasure meeting her. There were some other people in the clatch: two young men called Stucco Pudding and Gandy Goose, and another couple, Diddly and Mia, who wore long dreadlocks (though I guess I should mention that they were white, like the rest of the party). John Harlequin suggested that we go somewhere more comfortable to catch up on auld acquaintances. The group concurred, and we trekked around until we found a nice but not very secluded spot in one of the rainbow-flocked fields of Golden Gate Park. 3. Small Circle of Friends The first thing Victor did was to tell his old friends about his "afterdeath experience", as he called it. "You mean a near-death experience?" asked Alethea. "No," he said, "there was nothing 'near' about it. I was gone!" "How did you get back, man?" said Diddly. "I came into an alternate reality where I didn't get killed, but I still remembered the whole experience from the one where I did." "Whoa, that's a trip!" said Chronos. "You mean there's like a parallel world where you're still dead?" "There's a lot of them," said Victor, and went on to describe his vision of life as an infinite series of parallel universes. Then he started talking about the incredible other worlds he had visited in his experience, and how he had wound up in a state or place where all the opposites were united and he could look at the whole continuum of existence from the outside. All the people were "wowing" and "yowing" during his tale, and sometimes interjecting snippets of similar things they had gone through on acid trips ~ all except John Harlequin, that is. He just sat there attentively but impassively through the whole thing, and I figured he was taking it all very skeptically. I could understand that, because although I knew how real the experience was to Victor, and how deeply it had changed him, I was pretty skeptical myself in terms of taking it too literally. When he finished, Victor looked around the circle at all the bug-eyed, awestruck faces, until he got to John, who just stared at him silently for a moment. Then John held up a finger, whirled it around in a dramatic gesture, and pulled an object out of his backpack. It was a stick or a wooden handle with a little jester's head on the end of it ~ a fool's sceptre, like the real court jesters carried in the Middle Ages. But then I saw that the face of the little jester was actually a skull. John proceeded with his pantomime and took another object from his pack: a five-pointed star made out of shiny, silky, silvery cloth. He put his hand inside of it and manipulated it like a puppet. Then he spread his two arms wide, with the death-sceptre in one hand and the star on the other, and looked Victor right in the eye. Victor was agog. He stared at John as if stricken speechless. Finally in a whisper he said: "Ultra!" John's face kind of brightened into a smile at that. He gave a little nod, and then slowly started bringing his hands together with the two objects. Victor was riveted upon his every movement as he put the two puppets through a little dance. With subtle, sensuous moves, he turned it into a mating ritual. He started humming the "Wedding March", and brought the star and fool-skull together. They made love ~ he was very good at this kind of mime.  Then they were locked together as he clasped the star-glove around the death's head. Finally he took the glove off and wrapped it over the skull inside-out; the inside surface was just plain white. Then he reached into the little white ball and pulled out a huge, beautiful gem.  It was so big that it would've been worth a fortune if it was real ~ it was a many-faceted diamond sparkling in the Sun.  John profered it to Victor. It was clear that Victor's mind was totally blown. He took the diamond in his hand, and then he and John held eye contact for what seemed like a long time.  At last Victor said, "You've been there. You've been through it."  John nodded, with a big innocent fool's face. Now Victor, still holding the gemstone, reached into his own backpack and pulled out the first hand- drawn sketch he had made of the Double Gyre, which is his symbolic image of the "multiverse" as he saw it at the peak of his experience. Its basic shape certainly looked like a diamond. "Why, I see you've got one too!" said John, breaking his mime's silence. Victor explained how the gridwork of lines represented parallel worlds and multiple dimensions.   "That's astounding!" said John.  "This is a great piece of work." "It's only a rough draft," said Victor, looking very gratified by this praise. "Nevertheless," said John, reverting to his fool's voice, "I think I like yours better than mine. Want to swap?" "Sure," said Victor. "But it's not a fair trade - I can just make another one." "So can I," said John with a twinkle in his eye. "I'm something of an alchemist, you know." I was kind of puzzled by this whole exchange between John and Victor, and I could see that some of the other people were too. But clearly John had somehow validated Victor’s experience -- and now they got into a real intense conversation. Victor started telling him about all the weird suff he was going through -- about the deformed souls and robotic people, the disabled kids, the militia training, and the Macrobot. And finally he asked John almost desperately: “What in the name of God is going on in the world? Do you have any idea?” “Well,” said John, “it may be a matter of which name of God. After all, it’s the Kali Yuga.” “That’s true,” said Victor. “Everything degenerates and hits the pits in the Iron Age. But when you really begin to see what it’s doing to everybody, what can you do about it?” “Yow, that’s a mighty big question there, Victor! Do you mean, like, what do you do to survive?” “I can survive anything myself -- I found that out. I mean what can we do to change the situation? Y’ know, make people human again and everything. If it takes turning the age to the next Yuga, then how can we start doing that?” John whistled. “This just gets heavier and heavier, Vic. All the different sources say that ordinary people can’t do much -- we just have to survive and keep our own heads clear, and do what we can for every individual who crosses our path. And then sooner or later the Avatar will show up, and start turning the age, as you put it. Y’know, whether it’s Kalki on his white horse, or the second coming of Christ, or Quetzalcoatl -- all the myths and religions say that he’s coming. Till then you just have to be on your toes and do your thing.” Victor reflected on this for a minute, then said: “Yes, I’ve read and heard a lot of the same stuff - who hasn’t? But I hadn’t thought about it like that, at least not since I came back from the Luxumbra.” This was Victor’s word for that farthest-out state of being he had visited in his experience. He asked John: “Okay, what exactly does the Avatar do when he comes? What’s your take on that?” “He purges things,” said John. “There’s a consensus from all those sources that that’s the first order of business. He cleans out all the rot and decay that’s been piling up through the whole eon.” “I don’t know about that,” said Stucco Pudding, breaking into the dialogue. “That throws you right back into fundamentalist morality, whether it’s Christian or any other religion.” “Yeah,” said Diddly, “those kind of people say we’re the degenerates, just ’cause we like to, y’know, ‘do what thou wilt’.” “And anyway,” said Gandy, “the people who want to join in on the purge are usually those militia types you mentioned. I don’t think we need an Avatar or a cleansing to get to the Golden Age -- we just need enough people to wake up to the reality of love and brotherhood.” “That may be true,” said Alethea, “but I’m wondering about that Macrobot. I mean, the reason I took off from that whole scene in the normal world, with cities and computers and TV, and went to live in the woods, is because it looked exactly like that to me too. All the people I see in suits and ties downtown sure look a lot like robots. The same with the folks in the suburbs. I feel sorry for them and everything, but I really can’t see how they’re all just going to wake up. It would really take something drastic, like an apocalypse or a purge.” Victor asked Alethea, “How’s your cabin coming along?” “We finished it last year,” she said, “just in time for winter. It’s real cozy. Now we don’t have to live in the van any more -- except when we travel, of course.” “Hey, that’s great,” said Victor. They talked about some mutual friends, and I got the impression that there had been an attempt to start a commune or an intentional community, but evidently it had broken up. “Now it’s just us again,” said Alethea, indicating their little nuclear family. “Right,” said Chronos, “we were really disappointed. It seems like there’s such a nice spirit in the tribe, like when people get together for the Dead and at Gatherings, but when you try to hunker down and really make a go of it, why, it never lasts. It’s always ‘do what thou wilt’ -- no offense, Diddly -- and everybody goes their separate ways.” “Well, sure,” said Mia, “we’re all individualists. That’s why we’re out here in Rainbow-land instead of slaving away for the Macrobot to get a little tomb-with-a-view in the ’burbs.” “Even so,” said Alethea, “it’s be nice to be part of a real community. If we’re all about love and brotherhood, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be so.” This seemed to trigger something in Victor. “Oh!” he said, “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the community, the. . . the family.” “Where was this?” asked Chronos. Victor looked embarrassed, and he hesitated to answer. Alethea put her hand on his knee and said, “C’mon, Victor, you can tell us. We’re friends!” He looked at her and said, “It was in. . . another world. It was in the metasphere, like I was telling you about.” Alethea didn’t bat an eyelash. “Did it have a name?” “Yes. They called it Thule.” There was a second or two of silence, which somehow seemed very charged. It was John Harlequin who broke it. “Thule,” he said, rolling the syllables on his tongue. “It seems as if I’ve heard that name a long time ago, but I can’t recollect exactly where.” Suddenly Diddly jumped up and said, “Yow, I think I see my dope dealer. Gotta go. Talk to y’all later.” He grabbed Mia’s hand, and they took off in pursuit of a black guy who was strolling past on a nearby path. Then Stucco and Gandy stood up and said they had to get truckin’ if they were going to make it to the Dead show in time that night. It was down in Palo Alto, and they were caravaning with a bunch of people. We said good-bye. That left Victor, John, me, Chronos, and Alethea -- and of course Joy. Chronos hugged Alethea, then looked in her eyes and said: “Thule.” “It resonates,” she said. We all sat in a circle and resonated to the vibe. 4. Torched by an Angel I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. Part of me was overjoyed that Victor was getting some positive feedback on his mystic experience and subsequent dislocations. But on the other hand, it seemed like the people, and especially John, were affirming that the craziest parts of Victor’s vision were real! I wasn’t sure how to deal with this, but I was given a further opportunity, because Victor invited them to spend the night at our place. I had no qualms about seconding the invitation, because the vibe from all of them really was wonderful. As it turned out, none of them were planning to go to the Dead show, so they accepted. Our flat was almost like a little house; there was a series of buildings on a slope, and the unit above us was mostly detached. We had a yard and our own driveway, where Chronos and Alethea now parked their huge old van. It had a well-rendered forest and mountain landscape painted on it, and Chronos joked that this used to serve as camouflage from rangers in the days when the vehicle was their home. We all talked long into the night. Fortunately for me -- the only one of the lot with a regular job -- the next day was Sunday. We slept late, had brunch, and then brainstormed on where we could go on such a beautiful day. Victor suggested San Rafael Hill. We hiked the whole way, with Joy being carried on various people’s shoulders whenever she got tired. The visitors loved the view from the foot of the cross, and then we strolled around some more and wound up at the same spot in which Victor and I -- and Eric -- had gone through the events during the eclipse which had culminated in Victor’s remarkable mystical experience. Victor showed everybody the little plot of dirt where he had dug the hole for his grave (which almost became Eric’s grave!), and noted with some amazement that there were now wildflowers growing in it, even though there were none anywhere else in the immediate vicinity. Then we sat and picnicked a bit, drinking from a big jug of apple juice, nibbling on trail mix, and of course talking. After awhile Alethea got an idea. “Why don’t we do a group meditation?” she said. “I mean, the time and place couldn’t be better, and the vibe is terrific.” Everybody seconded and thirded the notion, and we arranged ourselves in a circle, including Joy, who was evidently an old hand at such things. I sat across from Victor, Chronos sat across from Alethea, and John from Joy. With the uneclipsed Sun streaming down on us, we did our best to melt into the Tao. It didn’t take long for me to start feeling the nice high state that usually comes from the collective quantum of juice in a group meditation. Then I noticed a spinning sensation. I thought I was getting dizzy, and opened my eyes. I found that Victor also had his eyes open, and was looking at me; so we got into eye contact, like when we did tantra. This steadied me, and I saw that the spinning was an actual metaphysical effect. “It’s a cone of power,” said Victor. I was surprised that he would speak during the meditation, but in the next instant I realized that he _hadn’t_ spoken -- his lips hadn’t moved at all. Yet I had heard his voice. “Don’t be scared,” he said, and his lips _still_ didn’t move. I thought: “Telepathy. . .?!?” “Yes,” he thought back at me. “It’s very fragile. Try not to freak out. Just go with the flow.” Naturally I immediately started to freak out, but felt a calm, soothing sensation washing over me. I settled down, and then realized that it came from Victor. He smiled in response. We were in an incredible state of telepathic communion. I glanced to the side, and saw that Chronos also had his eyes open, and was looking at Alethea. With quick little side-to-side eyeball movements, I determined that the two of them were locked into an eye meld just like Victor and I had been. Then, while looking sideways at Chronos, I seemed to hear his voice from far away, or perhaps like a whisper. He was saying, “This is so cool. Are you still reading me?” He was evidently speaking to Alethea, but his lips weren’t moving. Neither were hers as she answered: “Loud and clear. We haven’t been this high since we made love in the swamp last October!” Still keeping my body as motionless as possible, I explored around further with my eyes, and saw that John and Joy were also in eye contact. Her silent voice now seemed louder than them all, even Victor’s. She was saying, “How did you know my angel’s name? I never told nobody except Mommy and Daddy.” Then I heard John’s telepathic voice in response, though much lower: “Your angel and I are old friends. She visits me sometimes on special trips.” I closed my eyes. Now I really was feeling woozy. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Then I heard Victor say, “Honey Bea.” It was very gentle, yet very insistent. I opened my eyes. He was smiling at me -- and he was glowing with a light the color of the Sun, but softer. He said to me telepathically: “Hang in a little longer, okay, lover? The big one’s coming now. Just relax, breath with your tantra rhythm, go with the flow. . . .” I did what he said -- or I did my best. Something was happening in the circle. The spinning was getting faster, the light was getting brighter. Someone was standing there. No, it couldn’t be. Someone was standing in the circle in the sunlight, a woman, and I knew her. But no, it couldn’t be. . . . Joy shouted aloud: “Look, Mommy, my angel!” Suddenly there was fire everywhere, and it burned. There was fear. I was terrified. Everything erupted. I saw the grass and the trees on the hill streaming past me, bouncing up and down. And the air was filled with a terrible scream, an awful high-pitched wail that cut my heart like a knife. Who is screaming so horribly? I wondered -- and then I realized: it was me. I was screaming in stark, naked terror, and running for my life. I tripped, and started rolling and tumbling, down and down. My head hit against something hard, and everything went black. 5. Rekindled Miracles I don’t know how long it was, but I finally came back to awareness. I couldn’t see anything at first, but I remembered what had happened: we were all sitting in a circle, and an angel was coming. Everybody loved the angel. Why did the angel burn me? The light of the angel was joy to them, but it burned me like fire. It scared me so bad that I jumped up and ran away. Why did that happen? Why? Why? And I knew the angel. Where had I seen her before? I searched back through my mind for an answer -- and somehow I was drawn all the way back. I remembered being born -- in fact, I lived through it again, as if I were the baby. . . and yet I was also my present adult self, watching it and thinking about it, and trying to understand it. The angels were there when I was born, not just one but several, some male and some female. I wasn’t afraid, and their light didn’t burn -- in fact, it made me feel wonderful. I think that I actually lived through my whole life again in this way; but I don’t remember all of it now with the same clarity, only the important parts. So my memory kind of fast-forwards to the next clear scene, which is when I was a little girl playing in the woods. I used to sneak out of our yard and go into the woods and meet the angels and do all kinds of stuff; I always got back right before Mommy checked on me, because the angels would tell me when to run home. It was so much fun -- the angels showed me little glimpses of heaven, and told me wonderful things. They said that I was a princess and would grow up to be a queen, and that I would be the mother of a new race of people who would be half angel and half human. In my child-mind, I remembered them saying that the world would be made “clean and new” through me. As these events unfolded, I was astounded that I had completely forgotten them. The angels were clearly metaphysical beings, yet they were as real to me as the people I related to in normal life. We lived near the town of State College, Pennsylvania, where my father went to the university. Everybody seemed to like me, the other children as well as the adults. I was surprised to rediscover this, because I had forgotten it too; until now, all my memories were of the harsher times that came later. The angels were still with me when I went to kindergarten. As I became more cognizant and mature, they taught me how to deal with their presence, and their existence. They had explained at an early stage that most people couldn’t see or hear them, and that I shouldn’t tell anybody except certain special people who they would show me. There were a couple of children who could talk to the angels with me, but I never met any adults who could. The closest I came to this was a woman who could see the glowing colors around people’s bodies, like I could back then. But the angels showed me some things I could do with the normal people who couldn’t see them. Whenever anybody got mad at me, there was a way that I could brighten up my glow and make it more golden, and the person wouldn’t be mad any more. Or if somebody was feeling sad, I could make the glow go into my hand, and then if I touched the person they would feel better. As I said, everybody liked me. Often adults would call me a “little angel”, and I’d just smile, keeping my secret. Things went on like this through first grade, but the summer after that is when everything changed. We moved to Philadelphia so that Daddy could go to a different university. He said he needed another degree; I couldn’t understand why, because he had two degrees already. But he said it was important, and they didn’t teach the things he needed to know at Penn State. At first I was thrilled by how big everything was in the city. It was exciting to ride the subway, go to the zoo and museums, and take the high elevator to the top of City Hall and see the thousands of houses stretching out for miles around. But I soon discovered the scary part of living there. A lot of the people had terrible dark colors around them, and there were so many of them that it affected the atmosphere of the whole city. I felt like there were always gloomy rainclouds overhead even on bright sunny days. And the worst part was that there weren’t any woods. There was a little park in our neighborhood, but the first time I tried to sneak off to it Mom caught me before I got to the end of the block, and told me that awful things could happen to little children who went out playing alone in the city, and that I was never, ever to do that again. She was so frightened herself that I could tell it was really serious. We lived in a skinny little house with other houses on either side of it. At least it had a small back yard, so I had a place where I could relate to my angels. They sent down a narrow beam of golden l ight from their home in heaven above the gloom, and travelled down it right to my tiny yard. It was like an angel elevator. They said I was so special that they could always find me, even if I were underground -- and they added that Philadelphia was underground in a certain sense -- the whole city, not just the subway. The school I went to was okay, and seemed a lot like my old school in State College; some of the kids had angels, and even one of the teachers -- but it was a situation where they didn’t really know they had angels, except deep inside. So anyway, even with all the gloomy and scary stuff in the city, I got along all right -- until the next big change occurred. Something happened to my parents. It wasn’t an accident or an illness, at least not in the body; it was just that. . . they changed. I didn’t understand it then, but my adult mind observing it in the replay could see pretty clearly what was going on. The year was 1969. My mom and dad kind of admired the hippies, and probably envied them; but they figured they were already too old to join them, with too many responsibilities and commitments -- like to me and to my father’s hoped-for career. But the hippies were just the furry fringe of a whole wave of change that was sweeping the world at that time, and especially academia. My parents took to calling themselves “radicals”, and became “political activists”, which meant they went to peace marches and attended meetings hosted by the leading leftist professors at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where Dad was now enrolled in a doctoral program and taught undergrads. It also meant that they got into a whole new social circle, one that was very different from that of their old friends back at Penn State. And this circle of people had a very different outlook on life. The first real impact it had on me was when they told me that I had to change schools. The one I was in was a private school, and my parents informed me that it wasn’t right for me to go there because it was a prerogative of “the privileged white bourgeoisie”. In order to have “solidarity with the people”, I would have to transfer to the local public school. I coudn’t understand what the fuss was about, because I had been in a public school upstate; but I soon found out. The elegant U. of P. campus was located only seven or eight blocks from a black inner city neighborhood, and the school district encompassed both. It was a drastic commingling of two very different worlds. Most of the university parents sent their kids to private schools, so the majority of students in the public schools were black. This was the new reality I walked into at the end of Christmas vacation that January, when I was seven years old. 6. Elementary Warfare I had never before in my young life faced hostility, enmity, and hatred, but that’s what I encountered from the black kids at the public school. Not from all of them, of course, but that was the dominant theme of the collective reaction to a new white girl coming into the scene. I was shocked, and hadn’t the slightest idea of how to deal with it. A couple of the teachers saw my difficulty and tried to look out for me, but it was impossible to do it constantly in the ongoing milieu of the huge elementary school. I think I could’ve tolerated the taunts and dirty names they called me, but there was physical abuse too -- being hit, and pushed, and pinched, and sometimes actually being groped by the older boys. I didn’t even have any concept of sexuality yet, and this was my horrid, perverse introduction to it. When I saw that the adult hierarchy coudn’t protect me, I started to fight back. This often made it worse, but not always -- if I yelled and threatened and made a big enough row, sometimes I could get them to back off. But soon the situation escalated into a new phase: some of them counterattacked by calling me a white racist. They would lie and tell the teacher I used racial slurs, most of which I had never even heard before. Some of the teachers believed them, and some believed me; but the principal was black, and invariably took the side of the black students over the white, sometimes in blatant ways. He often said that he was atoning for “400 years of white racism”, for which I was now evidently to be made a scapegoat. By this time I had already begged and pleaded endlessly with my parents to take me out of that school, to no avail. Now when I told them about these incidents, they basically said that the principal was right. I was scandalized and said, “But it’s so unfair!” No matter what I said, though, or how reasonable it seemed, they absolutely refused to affirm my feelings or perceptions about the terrible situation at the school. My angels often came to my aid, usually in the most gruesome kind of confrontations. I had discovered that some of the black kids had metaphysical entities around them too, except it was usually groups of kids and not individuals who had them, and they were not very angelic-looking. They seemed like hideous demons, like the actual creatures that African ritual masks and voodoo images are supposed to portray: ugly, black monstrous things with horns, fur, and feathers. When a bunch of kids came toward me with bad intentions, and these things were floating around them, my angels would appear and scare the black entities away, and the kids would suddenly change their minds about picking on me. The angels explained to me that most of these entities were not really devils, and that some of the black kids perceived them as nice-looking, benevolent creatures, even as angels. It was just that they were different from my kind of angels, and that sometimes the two types of beings had to fight each other, as reflected in the behavior of us kids in the school, and adults too. My angels said that they could not save me from all the bad stuff I was going through at the school, but promised that as long as I was true to them, and to myself, they would always protect me from any really serious harm. Sometimes I also got help from some of the other white kids at the school. Between the Penn campus and the black section of West Philly was a white working class neighborhood, which is where most of the white students were from. Their way of dealing with flak from the black kids was to fight fire with fire, and there were actual gangs of kids on this little peewee grade-school level, divided strictly along racial lines. Several times some older boys in this group intervened to protect me when I was attacked by black kids, or even took vengeance on them when they had done spiteful things to me when no one else was around. Some of the girls helped me too, in other ways. I was very grateful for this, and a few times I even saw my angels hovering over them and smiling, as if they were their angels too. There were also some white kids who, like me, were the children of Penn academics or students. This was a much smaller group, and most of them were there for the same reason I was: their left- liberal parents thought it was the right thing to do, on moral-political grounds. Some of these kids had formed a tight clique and preached anti-racism in an assertive way. They sided with the blacks against the white “proletarian” kids, who they condemned as racists. This gave them a certain immunity from getting picked on by the black students, and also high favor in the eyes of the principal. Whenever a white kid was getting reprimanded or punished for “racism” (which was often simply self-defense), the liberal kids would always be held up as models -- “Why can’t you be like them?” was the refrain. The de facto leader of this group was a fifth-grader named Sarah, whose mother was the chairperson of one of the political forums my parents attended, and whose father was a rabbi in a local synagogue. She was definitely holier than thou, and she put a lot of pressure on me to join their clique. “You’re one of us,” she said; “you should know better than to hang out with those stupid racist rednecks.” It kind of pained me to hear her calling them the same names that the black kids had called me, and I really didn’t care for her personality; but I had to give some weight to the things she said, because it reflected the whole perspective that my parents had been trying so hard to get across to me. And I really loved and respected my parents, even if they did send me to this dumb ol’ school. Finally I agreed to attend a private class taught by Sarah’s mother on the Penn campus under the auspices of the “radical” political group. It was called “Children of the Human Race”, and was supposed to teach children of all races to get along; but as I soon found out, it was mainly focused on getting white kids to be tolerant of other races, especially blacks. We were encouraged to talk about our negative impressions of how most black people look, talk, behave, etc., and were then told that these were stereotypes that had been imposed on us by white society. Sarah’s mother, whose name was Lois, said that these stereotypes were not true perceptions of the black people in question, but were overlays projected from inside us -- and were, of course, racist. She said that it wasn’t our fault that we had gotten imprinted with these racist stereotypes, but now that we knew the truth, we had to do our best to root them out and get rid of them -- and that to the extent we failed to do this, it would be our fault, and we would be racists. There were also lessons about history, in which Lois and some of her comrades informed us that most of what we were taught about history in school was bunk, mostly the stuff about how great the white Europeans were for conquering the world. Instead, we were told that this was called “imperialism” and was a very bad thing, and caused most of the suffering on Earth. I think the basic point was that we had nothing much to feel good about for being white, but instead should only feel guilty. I was kind of skeptical at first, but my parents filled in a lot of the gaps at home, and affirmed this whole view of the world, in a way skillfully geared to my child-level of understanding. After all, they were very intelligent people. At school, I started making efforts to become friends with the black kids, or at least certain ones who seemed pretty decent. Sarah and her friends interceded in key ways, saying that I was “working on my racism” and things like that -- in short, that I was one of the good guys now, and they shouldn’t lump me in with the “rednecks”. The most interesting thing was how I really did start to see the black kids as human. It was like the lifting of a veil, as I saw past the nasty “Negro” stereotypes and made personal contact with the kids as individuals. Some of them turned out to be pretty cool -- though not all, of course: some really were nasty to the core, just like some individuals in any social or racial group. But I could deal with that, and now I actually had some black friends. The only trouble was that those stereotypes kept popping up, even with the black kids I liked the best. Little things in their actions, mannerisms, or appearance would trigger all kinds of overlays in my mind, everything from “Buckwheat” in The Little Rascals to monkeys in the jungle. And now I really felt ashamed of these things in my head, because it meant that I was still a racist deep inside. It wasn’t until summer vacation that I realized that I hadn’t seen my angels in a long time. I went out and sat in the yard and invited them down, but they wouldn’t come. Then I went with Mom and Dad on a trip back to State College to visit our old friends, and I was really excited. We paid a call on the people who used to be our next door neighbors, and I went out back into the woods. It didn’t take me long to find the little clearing where I had always had the best times with my angels. I looked up at the sky and called them, and nothing happened. I was really starting to feel bereft. Why weren’t they coming? What was wrong? Didn’t they like me any more? I tried again. I begged and pleaded. Finally I cried. With tears streaming down my cheeks I wailed to the heavens, “If you love me, angels, please, please come!” Something happened. There was an opening in the clear blue sky, and a light came out of it. This was it! This was how they always came. My grief instantly transfigured into ecstatic expectation. They were coming -- the angels! The light shone down on me, and I felt the presence of the beings who live in the light. Their forms started to coalesce just as they had always done before. But something was different -- something was wrong. Why was it so hot? It was the light of the angels -- it was hot, and got hotter and hotter as the angels’ shapes solidified. Now it was burning me -- I was on fire! I shouted to the angels: “No! Make it stop!” And suddenly they disappeared. I ran back to the neighbors’ house and burst in the door crying and confused. My parents thought something awful had happened, and they were right. But when they tried to calm me down and get me to tell them what it was, I could only say: “I got a sunburn! Oh, I got a terrible sunburn!” My mother was holding me in her arms trying to comfort me, and she said, “Bea, you don’t have a sunburn. You were only out a few minutes. Look at your arms and legs -- you’re still white.” “No!” I cried, “I’m not white, I can’t be white!  I got burned, and it hurts!” 7. Progressive Mind Change The part of me that was watching this replay of my life with full awareness was now amazed to see the process by which I completely forgot that I had ever been visited by angels. Outwardly my life became normal, or at least what I thought of as normal. Things went a little easier for me the next year at school as one of the “anti-racist” crowd. Some of the white proletarian kids occasionally gave me flak, calling me “traitor” and stuff, but it was no big deal; I’d usually just call them racists and walk away, and that would be the end of it. Sometimes when this happened I would think of my angels. Such thoughts always triggered a complex set of jumbled feelings. The absolute biggest thing was feeling forsaken. This was followed by anger at the angels for abandoning me, and in the next instant by shame and guilt, and questions about why I was now unworthy of the angels. Finally it hit a chord of total intolerability, and the thoughts got shoved down into a deep, dark chamber of my unconscious. My observer-self followed the process over the course of a couple of years, and saw how any lingering memories of the angels were compulsively shrugged off as silly childish fantasies. I was a big girl now; I didn’t indulge in such foolishness. And sure enough, my parents started taking me to grown-up events, like peace demonstrations. Funny things still happened sometimes, though -- like the first time I saw the peace symbol, waving on a flag at a big march. “Why is it upside-down?”, I asked my parents. They said don’t be silly, it’s not upside-down; it means peace. “Oh,” I said, “I thought it meant death.” No, no, no, they said; and they patiently explained to me that the people who carried the symbol were against death -- we were against the war in Vietnam, and all war. They asked me how I got the idea that the symbol meant death, but I could only say, “I don’t know. It just struck me, that’s all.” In spite of such weird little incidents, I got really strongly involved in the peace movement. By the time I got to fourth grade, I had transformed into the kind of hippie my parents were afraid to become, or at least a junior wannabe version. I got pretty fanatical about Beatles music, including all the originals from when the group was together, and the new stuff they were now producing individually. John Lennon took the place of Jesus Christ in my leftover religious imprints from when my parents used to be Christians. I had also adopted the whole look, with long straight hair, headband, tie-dyed blouse, and jeans with felt flowers sewn on them. I wore this outfit to school, and defied the initial resistance of the teachers and principal. I staged a sit-down protest with some like-minded (and like-costumed) friends, and, with support from our parents, we actually got the school to change its official dress code. Mom and Dad were really proud. Sarah was now in middle school, but Lois admitted to my parents that even she had never had such chutzpah. My dad got his doctorate in biochemistry right at the time I finished fourth grade. After considering a number of job offers, he and Mom decided on one in Berkeley. It wasn’t the highest-paying or the most prestigious, but location was a big consideration. “The San Francisco Bay Area is the most radical place in the world west of Peking,” said Dad. And so that’s where we landed, just in time for the beginning of the school term in September of 1972. If moving from State College to Philadelphia was a fall from paradise straight into hell, the move to Berkeley was an ascension into a new kind of heaven. It was specifically a radical-revolutionary heaven, there on the extreme end of the “left coast”, as they called it. In Philadelphia I had been a real cutting-edge kid with my hippie threads and all; but in Berkeley I was strictly old hat. The kids laughed at me and said, “Haven’t you heard? The ’60s are over!” But they were mostly very friendly, and I quickly acclimated to this far-out new scene. The war was still going on, so the peace movement was still important; but it was only a sort of taken-for-granted backdrop to the new radical action. The race thing was likewise still a big issue, but it didn’t have the same intensity for me as in Philly, because most of the kids in the Berkeley school were white. It was incredibly wonderful to find this out, and I felt incredibly guilty at feeling so good about it. But this was soon absolved by the discovery that all the white kids were anti-racists; there wasn’t a single “redneck” in the whole school. I think if there was he would’ve been tarred and feathered, such was the collective sentiment amongst these Berkeley kids. But racism was no longer the hottest item either; instead it was “sexism”, the first time I had ever heard this word. I hadn’t even hit puberty yet, and the girls were telling me I shouldn’t let the boys treat me like a “sex object”. They talked a lot about “women’s oppression”, and complained about how various school programs discriminated against the girls. At some point it dawned on me that this was giving us the same sort of leverage as the black kids had. Even though I was white, as a female I was a member of an “oppressed” group, and was therefore entitled to a whole range of privileges and prerogatives, as long as I lived up to the model and asserted my rights. It was great. I really blossomed as a Berkeley girl -- or woman, as I started calling myself as soon as I got into middle school. I was now the one bringing my parents to all sorts of radical events and actions which I found out about through my rapidly flowering grapevine. And of course the older I got the more stuff I did on my own, with my crowd of hip friends. About five years after our arrival in Berkeley, my dad’s bioengineering firm expanded, and his income and prospects took a qualitative leap. We decided (I was now included in the family’s decision-making process) to move to Marin County, which was a much healthier physical environment, being a high-end suburb with lots of open space. Mom and Dad bought a great house in the town of Larkspur with a big yard, a nice view, and of course a humongous mortgage. So it was that I started high school in Marin. The kids were just as liberal as in Berkeley, but a lot richer. Some of them actually drove Porsches and Beemers to school every day. I wound up really embarrassed the first time I casually said to one of them, “Wow, that’s really cool that your parents let you drive their car.” He looked at me real icy and said, “It’s my car.” Fortunately not all the kids were snobby in such crass material ways -- in fact, some of them were positively ethereal. I met people who were into all kinds of exotic spiritual and religious trips, from Tibetan Buddhism to Neopagan nature magic, and a vast range of things in between. I had never heard of some of them, even in Berkeley; and my new friends explained to me that Marin was the New Age capital of the world, bar none. Gurus, devotees, and believers from every obscure tradition in the global village came here to establish ashrams, dojos, temples, and sects, and to win new converts from among the local elect, whose spiritual questings were abetted by their extensive credit lines. I started looking into some of this stuff. I wasn’t drawn to any of the actual cults or religions, but there was a whole amorphous subculture involving Tarot cards, bodywork, astrology, chakras, yoga, auras, kabbalah, chanting, herbs, and of course meditation. Most of these pursuits and disciplines came with hefty price-tags, but luckily the limits on my allowance were very flexible. Mom and Dad approved of my new interests, and sometimes joined in; so all I had to do was tell them about the latest Rainbow Body workshop or whatever, and they’d happily spring for the fee. By the time I graduated from high school I was pretty settled in my liberated, enlightened, and progressive worldview. It was 1980, and I could see how just in the ten years since Mom and Dad had had their radical awakening and dragged me along with them (for which of course I was now very happy), things had gotten a lot better in the world. Most of the issues we had protested about had been resolved in favor of the radicals, whose ideas were no longer considered radical because they had been adopted wholesale (or at least retail) by the mainstream. A lot of black people were still poor, but a lot more were moving up, and there were no longer the official barriers of discrimination. The Vietnam War was now only an unhappy memory, and the lessons we all learned from it would insure that there wouldn’t be any more wars for a long time; I felt confident of this, even though a lot of people were worried about Ronald Reagan. The only serious threats to the Earth were from pollution and overpopulation, but the dangerous trends had basically been reversed because enough people had woken up to them; now there only remained the job of following through with the necessary changes, and overcoming the opposition of the people who still persisted in their ignorance. In fact, this was the real formula by which the world would be saved: more and more people were waking up to the simple truth that we can all live in peace in a world of harmony and brother/sisterhood. The people who hadn’t woken up yet were in a state of “avidya”, or spiritual ignorance. The biggest argument against the optimistic worldview was that the latter would always outnumber the former -- there would always be more sleepwalking ignoramuses than enlightened individuals. But little did such skeptics know that there was a wonderful, even magical process at work that would solve this problem once and for all. It had been shown by enlightened researchers that when a certain key percentage of the members of any primate community adopted a new behavior, that behavior would suddenly become endemic throughout the whole community -- all the monkeys would start doing it, even the ones who had never had physical contact with the monkeys doing the new thing. Thus the collective unconscious, or perhaps the morphic field, of the community evidently underwent a total transformation when a critical mass of individuals adopted the progressive new behavior, even if they were still a minority of the total population. The implications for the human condition were obvious: as soon as enough of us woke up it would hit critical mass, and the whole human race would be swept up in a _global mind change_. World transformation would happen practically overnight, and we’d all live together as one big family and become true stewards of the Earth. 8. Quantum of Yang I couldn’t help but feel that the best change of all was how everything was opening up for women. It looked like I had been born and come of age at the perfect historical moment for this. As I prepared to enter college, I felt like I had all the world before me, and I could be anything I wanted to be. I was thrilled when I got accepted into UC Berkeley. It was a natural progression from high school in Marin, because UCB had the same enlightened worldview and policies, expressed on a higher level. Plus of course I got to spend a lot of time hanging out in my favorite town. I wanted to do some kind of really humane work in preparation for the dawning of the New Age, which for all I knew could happen at any time; I was also thinking about children a lot. And so I studied psychology and sociology, and majored in special education. I graduated in June 1984, and, as I was later to find out, left town the very day before Victor arrived. We agreed it could not have been a coincidence; his explanation was: “If we had been there at the same time, we would’ve been instantly drawn toward each other and met -- and it wasn’t the right moment yet.” Be that as it may, I found a good job in my field in Marin, as a teacher in the Special-Ed program of the San Rafael school system. I liked it a lot, and soon rented the flat mentioned earlier in the story. And I was still just a twenty-minute drive away from my parents’ place. My love life had always been a source of puzzlement and frustration to me. I had been having encounters since the eighth grade, and had plenty of relationships while in college, some of them with very sensitive men. I even thought I was in love a couple of times. But somehow, when it got down to the question of: “Do I really want to spend my life with this guy?”, or even: “Do I want to live with this guy?”, the answer was always no. I just never felt _close_ enough to any of them for that kind of daily intimacy. This was so, even though the physical aspect of some of my relationships seemed wonderful. We could do every intimate thing conceivable in bed, yet when it came to the normal day-in, day-out kind of stuff, I just didn’t want them around. I felt almost like my space was being invaded by some kind of alien being. In trying to explain it to one particular guy who I otherwise liked a lot, I groped for words and said, “It’ s like I want you to be not only my lover but my brother.” “Sounds incestuous,” he said. But I couldn’t explain it any better than that, because I didn’t really understand it myself. I tried looking into spiritual disciplines for a solution. I joined an ongoing tantra workshop, and met a couple of guys there who I tried it out with. We got into some interesting altered states together in tantric coitus, but there were no big, mind-blowing breakthroughs. And the actual sex was less satisfying than the strictly physically-oriented ways, probably because of the practice of delaying the orgasm, or even not having one. After three years of living on my own I was no closer to any kind of resolution. But that’s when I met Victor. I was sitting outdoors at a cafe one Saturday, when I noticed a man in a group of people at the next table. I was wearing a pretty revealing outfit because I didn’t have a partner at the time. Usually there are no hassles with this because most of the guys in Marin are so polite; more often it’s the opposite problem: you can go out dressed to kill and nothing will happen. But this time I felt a powerful sexually-charged wave ripple right down my body from my head to my toes. I was so startled that I jerked my head up from my book and looked around, instead of consciously controlling my reaction and being cool like usual. I made eye contact with the man, who of course turned out to be Victor. He didn’t look guilty or avert his face when I caught him looking at me in that way -- in fact, there was a distinct twinkle in his eye. He asked me an innocuous question and we got into a conversation. His vibe was so good that I didn’t feel uncomfortable any more, and I quickly found out that he was an intelligent and aware individual. And he was good-looking, too. Shortly he told me his name and introduced the friends he was with -- there were two other men and two women, and they were from Berkeley, which gave us all the more to talk about. Then Victor started talking about tantra. Before I knew it, I was telling him about my unsatisfying experiences, even going into some intimate details. Suddenly I became aware that I was talking about this stuff to someone I had just met, and in front of other people yet. I became embarrassed, and stuttered to a stop. Victor just picked up the flow and kept going. He said that perhaps my boyfriends hadn’t known about certain deeper levels, which he described using Sanskrit or Tibetan terms, I wasn’t sure which -- but it sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about! Then he said that even if the practitioners were completely knowledgeable, it still required a certain basic quantum of raw yin and yang, and lacking that, nothing effective could be done. “And how do you get such a quantum?” I asked. “You don’t,” he said; “you just have to be born with it. That’s the harsh reality.” That really threw me for a loop. I didn’t know what to say -- I had never heard anything like that in my tantra classes. Victor went on: “I can see that you have a wonderful quantum of high-calibre yin. Maybe you just never met a guy with enough yang to complement it.” I said sarcastically, “You mean like you, for instance?” In reply he looked me over again, saying, “Well, I have been known to raise a lady’s kundalini now and then.” Both of the women at his table giggled, even though I had assumed they were partners with the other two guys. My curiosity was really piqued, and I was definitely feeling horny for this guy, in spite of his questionable remarks and braggartly manner. So I said, “Okay, maybe we can talk more about it some time.” “How about now?” he said. “It’s a great day. Maybe we could go for a stroll.” I couldn’t believe I was succumbing so blatantly to his pick-up ploy, but I agreed. I said, “There’s a nice little park just up the street.” So Victor and I got up, and he said adieu to his friends. They asked how he’d get home, and he said, “I’ll take a bus.” They told him there weren’t any -- he would have to go all the way through San Francisco to get back to the East Bay. “That’s all right,” he said, “I’ll find my way.” 9: Two Into One Makes God Victor and I sat at a picnic bench in the middle of a circle of redwoods in the park. The sunlight through the branches made a fabulous latticework of light and shadow. Victor looked ecstatic. “The aura here is superb!” he said. “Yes,” I said, “it’s obviously been a sacred spot for a long time.” He ran his fingers ever so lightly up my leg. It gave me a shivery electric thrill. Just by this little movement, our first physical contact, he had conveyed to me that his lovemaking would be sensitive and delicate. No sooner had I registered this than he kissed me. Our tongues did a miniature ballet -- that’s what it seemed like. It was exquisite. Now I could hardly wait to really get into it, but the grove wasn’t a very private spot -- it was right next to a playground, and children and adults were walking around just beyond the trees. Anyone could step into the grove at any moment. So when Victor started to gently undress me, I stopped him -- I said, “There’s a stretch of woods a little farther up, behind the library, where we can be completely alone.” “Nothing could top the vibe of this spot,” he said. “We can be completely alone right here.” “How?” I pointed to the people beyond the trees. “Watch,” he said, then stood up on the table, stretched out his hands, and slowly turned his whole body in a circle. He stopped briefly four times, and made some hand motions while humming or chanting something. Then he sat down beside me again and said, “There, we’re cool.” “What are you talking about?” “I did a banishing. Nobody can come through the circle of trees until we’re finished.” “Wait a minute! You mean they’re going to be held back by magic?” He nodded with a big innocent grin. “Victor,” I said, “I don’t think that’s going to be enough.” “You’ll see, it’ll work,” he said. Then he took off his shirt and spread it on the grass behind the table, and beckoned for me to sit down on it. I did so very hesitantly, with worried glances at the people in the playground. I noticed how nicely muscled Victor’s chest and arms were, even though he had a thin, wiry body. It was just the right esthetic masculine balance. We got into mutual caressing, and this time I let him remove my dress. I was still very worried about being intruded upon, but I was rapidly getting swept away into the pleasure of what we were doing. And he was doing it all so well! Soon all thought of our exposed situation had utterly vanished from my mind. But maybe that, too, was part of his banishing spell. The moment Victor slipped out of his pants I saw that he already had a full erection. I went “Ooo!” in surprise, because most of my past lovers usually took awhile to build up to it. Now we were both naked, and his skillful caresses were driving me to the point where all I wanted was for him to penetrate me. But when he began to do so, my conscious mind suddenly kicked in, and I said, “Do you have a condom?” He said, “Nope. How about you?” “Darn, I usually always have one in this situation, but I never expected to, y’know, go so far with somebody I just met. This never happened to me before!” He asked, “Do you think you might be ovulating?” “Well, it’s not very likely -- I just finished my period a few days ago. But still, I _never_. . . .” He cut me off with a kiss, and started stroking me again. “No!” I said, pushing him away. “Victor, we don’t know anything about each other. There are all sorts of. . . things going around these days.” He looked me straight in the eye and said: “Beatrice, I know for an absolute fact that I don’t have any sexual diseases. I don’t have any diseases, or anything else that would cause you harm from our making love.” His eyes looked so clear and beautiful. A spark of some kind passed between us, and I said: “I believe you.” And we picked up where we had left off. But after a minute I started thinking again. I realized that what had just happened was the classic pattern you were supposed to avoid and not fall for: when you get carried away in the heat of passion, and get deceived into trusting a man based on the immediate sense of physical intimacy -- and then later you pay! So as much as I hated to stop, I pushed him away again. “What’s the matter?” he said, and I told him. He looked positively stricken, and in spite of myself my heart went out to him. “You’re wrong,” he said -- “you’re making a mistake.” “Maybe so, but I just don’t want to take a chance.” Then I got an idea. “Let’s go to my place,” I said. “I can tell that you’re going to be somebody special for me, so I feel okay about inviting you now. And I’ve got plenty of condoms at home!” I was surprised when he didn’t agree with this eminently sensible suggestion. He said: “No. It has to be right here and right now. This is the right place and the right moment. We have to follow through and do it. The magic depends on it.” This didn’t make sense at all from my point of view, and I decided that this whole thing had gone far enough. But this time when I started to pull out of his embrace, he stopped me. That is, he physically stopped me -- he had his hand on my wrist, and wouldn’t let go. He was so strong that no matter how I tugged, I couldn’t get away. This was a terrible turn of affairs; now I was glad that the other people were so close by. He pushed me back down to the ground, gently but forcefully. I said, “Stop, or I’ll scream.” He still had that sweet, innocent look on his face. He said, “If you do, I’ll have to let you go, and then we’ll both go home, and that’ll be the end of it, won’t it?” It took me a few seconds to sort out the import of what he had said. When it finally hit me, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I didn’t want it to end! Victor’s inexplicable insistence on doing it “right here, right now” was making me suspect that he may have been crazy in some way, not a normal person -- and yet he really was special. Maybe being crazy was part of what made him special -- but if I didn’t submit to his irrational demand, right here and now, I’d never, ever get the chance to find out -- he’d be gone from my life. And something really deep in me just couldn’t let that happen. Thus the next realization that swept over me was that I was trapped. “You fucker!” I said. His babyish smile never winced for an instant. He said, “Flattery will get you nowhere,” and started carressing me again. And it dawned on me that in all my relationships, I had never sworn at a man like that before. No matter what happened in bed, everything had always been basically polite and harmonious. This time I didn’t respond to his caresses -- I just lay there passively, and whenever I thought he was so wrapped up in the act as to be distracted, I tried to wriggle out from under him -- but each time he instantly blocked me and held me down. I couldn’t escape. . . and the longer it went on, the more I was getting sucked back into the physical passion again, because he kept stimulating me so deliciously. At last, inevitably, I succumbed. I returned his caresses and kissed him; and as soon as I did this, he penetrated me. Naturally this increased the intensity, and after what seemed like a long time, I crescendoed to a peak of trembling ecstasy like nothing I had ever known. I was going to come, I was going to explode. . . and suddenly he wasn’t there. I mean his penis -- he withdrew, he pulled it out of me. I just stared at him ga-ga. My state of mind was so far from any kind of linear consciousness that I simply couldn’t talk -- it was like I’d forgotten how, like I was an animal or something. Then with an enormous effort of concentration, I managed to form the word: “Why. . . ?” Like, why did he pull out? In response he kind of shrugged his shoulders, caressed me again, and re-entered. I got all the way back to that same peak, and he did it again! He pulled out of me. Why was he doing this? It was driving me crazy! On the third time, I couldn’t stand it any longer. As he started to withdraw, I shouted, “Fuck me, fuck me! Oh, please, please fuck me!” With total, infuriating ingenuousness, he said: “Okay. I just wanted to make sure it was a consensual act.” Everything quickly melted again into that excrutiatingly beautiful state where I couldn’t think at all but only feel; and what I felt was that all the volcanoes on Earth were going to erupt at once, and that I was the Earth, and it was happening to me. And then it did, and I came and came and came. . . until I was gone. I merged into Victor and we dissolved into streamers of white light which throbbed ecstatically upward into a vast ball of energy above our vanished bodies. That ball was all that ever was and would be. It was God, it was glory. . . and it was me. Now I understood: I was secretly God, and my job was to love everything and everybody. . . especially the Man who was my other half and who had brought me here and shown me this secret. How could I have forgotten that I was God? It was so clear and obvious, now that I finally remembered. Something happened. The light and power of my Godhead began to ebb. I shrank and fell, and sank back into a smaller space. I fell in two, and was shocked at not being one any more. But I was immediately solaced because now I could see the Man again, he who had taken me to that place of beauty where we were One and All. I clutched him to me, and I cried and cried. After what seemed another long interval of lying naked in each other’s arms, Victor said, “The spell’ s wearing off. We’d better go.” We climbed into our clothes and kind of shuffled out of the grove into the playground, still warmly embracing as we walked. When I noticed the people, I saw that a lot of them were looking at us. Some were beaming broadly, others smiling wryly, a few scowling; one middle-aged matron shooed her kids away with a disapproving look. And I realized that although Victor’s banishing spell may have kept them out of the grove, it hadn’t served very well at all in keeping us concealed. But of course none of them had actually intruded nor disturbed us. The people in Marin are so polite! 10: Coming Back to Death After this beatific reliving of my first encounter with Victor, the replay of my life fast-forwarded through the more recent and well-remembered events. Victor and I realized that we were soulmates, and began to live together. At last I had found the one and only man who I could live with! In fact, I now found that I couldn’t live without him -- when he was gone for even short periods, I missed him terribly. I was psychologically knowledgeable enough to recognize that it wasn’t codependence or any other sort of deficit; rather, it was the positive reality of being totally, deeply in love, and naturally feeling the other’s absence as a discomfiture -- as if a part of my body were temporarily missing. Becoming permanently mated with Victor caused me to start thinking about having children of my own; but alas, this seemed to be the one big area in which his “Ultra” pathology had a profound impact on practical life. I never thought he would really kill himself, even though he often talked about it; but the possibility was very real to him, and he couldn’t bear the idea of leaving fatherless children in the world -- and so he was never able to consent to starting a family. This was the one tragic aspect of the seven years of our life together, until that fateful day of the eclipse, when everything changed. Now I breezed through all this as if I were the observing awareness in a dream, and shortly it caught up to the present moment. But something was wrong -- I thought I must still be dreaming, because I was observing myself from the outside. It seemed like I was floating in the air and looking down at my body lying at the bottom of a hill with Victor kneeling over me and the other people gathered around. I kind of zoomed in closer, and it looked like Victor was kissing me. But now as I watched I realized with a shock that he was giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then I remembered clearly the immediately preceding events: how I had run away from the angel and fallen down the hill. Now I saw that there was a big rock sticking out of the ground by my head, and that the yellow summer grass was stained red with my blood. Victor lifted his mouth from mine, and started pounding on my chest with his fist. I realized that he was giving me CPR -- and that it wasn’t working. And then I thought: oh my God, I’m dead! Now everything fell into place. I wasn’t dreaming at all -- this was totally real. I was floating in my astral body over my dead physical form -- and all those things I had just relived so vividly must have been my life review, which is said to happen right after you die. I felt very afraid now, and looked at Victor. I loved him so much, and he was trying so hard to help me, but he couldn’t -- I was gone, I was dead! At the very moment I thought this, Victor jumped to his feet and began talking excitedly to the other people. For some reason it was hard for me to hear their voices, but I made out that Victor was telling them that the police station was right near the entrance to the park, and that they had a rescue unit. It seemed so far away under the circumstances, but John Harlequin immediately started running at a full gallop along the dirt road that led back down to town. Now Victor talked to Chronos, Alethea, and Joy. He seemed to be telling them something important, but I couldn’t hear what it was. He bent over my body, and this time he did kiss me -- my still, white, quiet lips. Then he walked into the bushes, found a flat spot, and sat down in the lotus position. I wondered why he was going to meditate now, of all times! After a few moments something happened -- Victor seemed to be floating up off the ground. But when I looked more closely I saw that actually it was his subtle body separating from his physical body, which remained seated there in the lotus posture. And now the ethereal form of Victor was flying up toward me. He saw me! He was coming to save me! He had a big, loving smile on his face, but as he drew closer, for some reason I began to feel afraid. Then I realized that the air was suddenly getting very hot. Oh no! This was horrible, impossible -- Victor’s aura was starting to burn me, just like the angels did! I couldn’t stand the ironic agony of the situation: my lover wanted to rescue me from death, and I wanted to embrace him and be saved -- but some terrible, evil force was pushing me away from him, causing his very presence to be intolerable to me. Something snapped in my mind; I screamed and turned away, flying in my astral body away from Victor, trying desperately to escape this fate worse than death. After fleeing blindly as fast as I could for several moments, a kind of whirlwind seemed to appear in the air in front of me. It was dark like a tornado. It frightened me, and I tried to backpedal away from it, but it sucked me into the top of the funnel. I couldn’t tell how long I spun around helplessly inside -- I may have lost consciousness. But finally I popped out the other end of the funnel, or tunnel, and found myself in another world.
	11: The World Soul I was on a tower so high that I could see all over the Earth, even somehow around the curvature. There was a world-spanning network of energy concatenating on the tower, which was its central focus. I could actually see the waves of energy, flowing in streams and currents back and forth from all over the globe and centering on the top of the tower, where I stood. Then I saw that there were living beings in the energy, streaming along in the currents like in William Blake’s drawing of the “River of Souls”. It was breathtaking. There was a certain pattern to the movement of souls, a tangible outline or Platonic Form which they strove to create in their swirlings. It was almost anthropomorphic, yet it branched off in pseudopods which budded into smaller forms all over the face of the Earth. I realized it was all a single giant living being struggling to extend itself over the whole world. “Yes,” said a man’s voice from behind me, “this is the vision you glimpsed down below, of a united humanity embracing the Earth in love.” I turned and saw a man who looked sort of like an amalgam of various spiritual gurus I had met, or seen pictures of, or heard of. “Why, you must’ve read my mind,” I said, somewhat startled at this realization. He nodded, and without moving his lips said, “You can call me Haji. Come and meet the others.” I followed him just a few steps away from the edge of the tower’s deck, when a mist seemed to clear and I saw a large circle of people. They all beamed greetings at me telepathically, and I heard it as a single voice saying, “Welcome, Beatrice. We’ve been looking forward to having you with us.” “You know me?” I asked. “Who are you, and what is this place?” “We’re at the top of the inner layer of the Earth’s metasphere,” said Haji. “This tower is an astral structure created from the shushumna of all those who share the vision of a global mind change.” “Shushumna? Oh, I remember -- that’s the central column in the spine that holds the chakras, right?” They nodded, and I said, “So this is like the brain, or nervous system, of the big living creature that’s being formed in the global energy-nexus?” “Yes,” said Haji, “it’s the central intelligence of all humanity, the soul of the world. And we. . . .” He looked around with a broad smile at the other people. A woman stepped forward and said, “I guess you could call us the brain trust.” There was a wave of delightful laughter from the throng. I looked them over and saw several faces I recognized from recent history, and some who went back centuries. Some were royalty -- actual kings, queens, and nobles -- and there was at least one pope. Most of them I didn’t know, but I could see that they were all very exalted people, of every race and many nationalities. I was awestruck, and blurted out: “Wow, what’ve I done to deserve meeting such a high group of souls?” Their smiles put me at ease, and a woman named Maya said, “Beatrice, you don’t realize what a high soul you are yourself. After you’re with us for awhile, you’ll probably attain a fuller self- realization.” “You mean you actually want me to join your group?” “Yes,” said Haji; “we feel you can assist us in our work.” “I’m honored,” I said; actually, I was flabbergasted. “But what exactly is your work?” “We think the thoughts of the global organism,” said a man who looked like a Middle Eastern potentate. “If you like, we’ll show you.” “Oh yes, by all means!” In one fluid movement they all raised their hands to the sky. Now I saw that there was a sphere of brilliant energy around the top of the tower. The people all began to float in graceful motion; at first I thought they were doing an aerial ballet, but soon I saw that they were all flying to take their places around the surface of the energy-sphere, such that it was now a big ball of human astral bodies. A wave of recognition came over me. I saw that it really was like a brain atop the spinal column of the tower, and now the people were acting as the cells of that brain! “Yes!” they all said in response to my thought. “Come and join us!” The next instant I was lifted up off my feet and swept toward the sphere of souls. There was an empty space between Haji and Maya, and gently I was wafted into this. “It may be intense at first,” they said, “but just relax and let it flow through you. After you get the feel of it, you’ll be able to actively participate.” I opened myself to the nexus. It was incredibly intense, but by using my tantric techniques of relaxation and surrender, I was able to finally let go and allow the hyper-charged current to flow through me. Then it became ecstatic, just like in tantra, as my ego dissolved and was replaced by the mind of God. Or rather the mind of humanity -- that was specifically how I identified myself. Just as in my normal state my ‘I’ was Beatrice, now I was this Godlike creature who thought of myself as the human species taken as a single being. I looked around the world from this perspective, as the giant entity whose head was the sphere of energy at the top of the tower; and I saw that my main order of business was to draw in the rest of the human soul-units who had not yet become cells in my mystical body. Only then would I attain completeness and know myself totally as the World Soul. For the benefit of my new Beatrice-neuron, I thought back on all the progress I had made in the century now ending. I had been strong but small at the beginning of it, as most of the West’s elite shared the vision of a world of permanent peace, harmony, and brotherhood. This was shattered by the Great War, leaving only a hard core who held fast to the vision. Then Hitler arose, challenging the very essence of my nature and threatening to kill the vision once and for all. Inspired by the need to defeat the Nazis, my elite created the atomic bomb, which seemed to the faint of heart like a betrayal of the vision -- especially when nuclear stockpiles proliferated to the point where they could bring the end not only of the human species but of all life on Earth. But my visionaries were vindicated when this seemingly mad strategy succeeded in keeping the world free of major wars for the rest of the 20th century. Now as I neared the millennium, the last great division in the body of humanity had been eliminated with the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war. There were no serious obstacles left in the way of my total unification. There were, however, significant pockets of ignorance remaining, people who were still lost in the old ways of division and strife based on the superficial differences and musty old belief-systems that had plagued the species throughout its benighted past. So even though the long struggle was essentially won, much work remained to be done to enlighten the recalcitrant shards of my World Soul and bring them into the fold. I reflected on how this miracle of unification and unanimity only became possible with the development of the electronic media. Now I watched as my harmonious thoughts were channeled into every crevice of the global ecumene via TV and radio and computers, transforming what had once been a cacophony of conflicting beliefs and cultures into a single homogeneous village. Then, once the grosser, overt differences had been eliminated, my elite found ways to spread the message of unconditional love and total acceptance of everyone. So many souls had now woken up to this central element of the vision that their numbers were rapidly approaching the critical mass required for the miraculous final stage of the transformation, in which each and every human being would become a part of every other, and there would truly be only one great soul in all the world. 12: The Still, Small Voice I was the World Soul. Having incorporated a new human neuron into my brain (viz. Beatrice), I went about my daily business. Many people and groups operated as my limbs and organs in the world. My ministers taught the people that they would have abundance by all joining together and sharing the fruits of their work with the world community. It was not an abstract lesson, for I had the power to channel the goods to those who were most deserving, and deny them to those who insisted upon acting out their tribal animosities, and refused the gift of union. In this way, whole countries were brought into the nexus, at least on the physical level; thus they could live in peace and contribute physically to the project, and await the day of the great transformation when their souls as well as their bodies would become part of my organism. But why are they starving? I thought; why are the children dying of hunger and disease in the lands that are denied the bounty? I was startled by this small voice in my head whispering negative thoughts. I quickly realized that it was the voice of Beatrice. I focused my attention on the beautiful golden light of the cosmic heart center which drew all things into union, and which was the central force bringing together all people into my World Soul. Suffused with this radiant light, my new Beatrice-unit understood that every sentient being must make a conscious choice to turn toward the light, and that those who refuse bring the consequences upon themselves. My divine mission is to gather the human species as a whole into the light of love; and this inflicts upon me the painful burden of being the instrument of the karma of those who choose to split themselves off from the whole and remain in darkness. But it is their karma -- they are responsible for it themselves. But then came the voice again: Even the children? Are the babies responsible for their own suffering? Again I infused my mind with the nectar of unconditional love, and for the instruction of Beatrice I dwelt on the karmic realities of reincarnated souls. I thought about how the ultimate success of my mission would allow these same babies to be reborn into a world finally free of injustice and suffering. And soon the discordant voice of Beatrice became silent. I had pressing business in another part of the world, where a petty tyrant lusted to become another Hitler, and was threatening neighboring peoples with bellicose acts. I moved swifty to insure the peace of the region by bringing my formidable arsenal to bear against the offending state, and punishing it with torrents of bombs and missiles until its capacity for aggression was wiped out. At least this was my intent, but when the campaign was still in an early stage, that perfidious voice came from inside me again. It was much louder this time -- it shouted: “STOP! How can you kill all these people in the name of peace?” Of course, it was Beatrice. This division within my mind and my will caused events on the Earth to turn against me, as other voices were raised against the military action. I had to stop and withdraw, leaving the dictator and his nation free to disrupt the world order at other times in the future. It was very unfortunate. Something would have to be done about Beatrice. 13: The Macrobot “Beatrice! I’m Beatrice! I’m not the World Soul!” I shook myself all over as if waking up from a terrible dream. Thank God, I was myself again -- but the rest of it was still true! I was still in the brain of the giant being, surrounded by the other people who were its neurons. They all looked like they were very upset with me -- some were angry, some distressed, and some seemed positively shocked. An imperious woman said, “How dare you defy the will of the World Soul!” A man said, “It’s unthinkable!” Other people spoke in softer tones and said that well, maybe it was a mistake to bring me into the group. I was definitely feeling that they were right, but Haji and some others argued that it was important that I be included for “strategic” reasons, though they didn’ t explain what these might be. “And think what it would mean,” said Maya, “if she could successfully adapt and acclimate! It would be a real coup.” I wished I understood what was behind all these arguments, but they wouldn’t even listen to me when I tried to speak up and ask questions. It looked like they were going to decide my fate without even consulting me about it. Sure enough, they came to a decision by some sort of telepathic process that they didn’t let me in on. Then Haji said, “Beatrice, you’re going to stay.” “Oh, is that so?” I said. “Well, what if I don’t want to stay?” The people who had “defended” me looked kind of sad, and I clearly picked up the message that I wasn’t going to be given that choice. Now I started to feel frightened, and I tried to fly away from my place in the brain-like formation of people. I found that I couldn’t -- in fact, I found that I couldn’t even move at all. Haji said, “Maya,” and gave her a poignant look. Maya did something with her hands, and suddenly the whole vista around me changed. The anthropomorphic form of the collosal spirit-body began to seem more mechanical. It was still made of astral matter, but now this appeared to be very metallic, and was studded with wires and diodes. It was a huge machine in the shape of a human figure. It was a robot. Now with a horrified rush I remembered Victor’s implausible vision of a giant creature which he had called the Macrobot.  Now I knew it was real, because here it was, and I was trapped in it! My immediate surroundings had also changed, as I saw what had been veiled from me before. The energy-sphere was really a robot’s head. It had a hideous mechanical visage, with something like a big automobile grille for a mouth, a nuclear missile for a nose, satellite dishes for ears, and two giant TV screens for eyes. And the outside of its skull was a gridwork of cubicles, or sockets, in each of which was one of the people who had referred to themselves as the “brain trust”. And of course me. Now I discovered why I wasn’t able to move. My arms and legs were strapped into the metal socket, and my whole body was immobilized by restraints. The lifting of the veil had evidently included the white robe I had been wearing earlier; now I was stark naked, and my astral body was being violated by all manner of contrivances. A phallic tube of some sort was protruding up my vagina, and rubberish cords or wires ran over my flesh in strategic areas, and little clamps affixed them to my nipples. I was outraged, and struggled desperately, but found that I was totally helpless to break free or to disturb the accoutrements in any way. Then once again the Macrobot began to move. Now I saw that the groups and tribes and nations of people in the areas it had not yet tamed were themselves mystical bodies, each one a collective soul held together by ancient ties of the sacred and the primal -- a true bond of blood and spirit. Whenever it encountered one of these entities, the methodology of the Macrobot was to first undermine its traditional culture by saturating it with the modern media. I was shocked to see that the media were like an actual poison injected into the group-soul -- after several years it began to sicken and shrivel. Then the Macrobot marched in and set up an apparatus that drained the vital forces of the entity and its people. I realized that this was the economic infrastructure; and that even those lands that were supposedly blessed by the bounty and good graces of the Macrobot were actually getting their blood sucked by it. The Macrobot was not only a mechanical monster but also a vampire! The older collective souls (what little was left of them) were human in form, in stark contrast to the Macrobot. They were all different from each other, but each one was in the form of a human figure standing large over the area inhabited by its people, rooted in the Earth -- until the Macrobot came and remorselessly cut it down. It was all so horrible that I tried to cry out again in protest, but little mechanical arms came out of the wall of my socket and clamped a gag over my mouth. And then I became aware of something even more insidious: the tubes and wires that penetrated and encompassed me were stimulating me erotically as these terrible scenes unfolded. It was making me feel pleasure in sync with the brutalities of the Macrobot, trying to bring me to orgasm at the sight of a whole people being soul- raped! I resisted with all my might, but the stimuli were so powerful, and I was so helpless in my encasement, that I couldn’t avoid being affected by it. The mechanism was trying to condition me to identify with the Macrobot, to enjoy its inhuman victories; and next it began to inflict pain on me whenever it suffered a reversal in the world. When a group of people fought back, or rejected the corrupting seductions of the creature and its media, I was jolted with excrutiating pain that was delivered directly to the central nervous system of my astral body. The process was incredibly sadistic! And it was all so intense that I saw that if it went on long enough, I would be worn down past even my strongest resistance -- sooner or later my will would melt, and also my independent soul. I would become a faithful neuron in the brain of the Macrobot, waxing positive and negative in tune with its own fortunes, an automatic instrument of its will. And then an even darker realization swept over me: not even death could save me from this fate, because I was already dead! This was the afterlife! The Macrobot would conquer the world and go on forever, and I would be bound here in its brain for all eternity. I was lost, I was doomed, I was damned! I remembered the line carved over the gate of Hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!” 14: Battle of Titans I picked up a subtle undercurrent of telepathic voices from the people around me. Probably they weren’t bothering to shield their thoughts as well as they had before, since the veil had been lifted and I was powerless to oppose them. They were saying things like: “It’s going to work.” “She’s surrendering.” “It won’t be long.” “She’ll become one of us.” “What a victory over Thule!” I snapped to attention at that last one: Thule! Why were they talking about Thule? What was it about Thule? What was I trying to remember? Now I heard a ripple of sarcastic laughter, and the tail ends of sentences: “. . . doesn’t remember who she is.” “. . . doesn’t even know she’s a Thulean.” I thought: “What?  I’m a Thulean? Me?  What does that mean?  Am I from. . . am I from. . . .” As I struggled to finish this strangely disturbing thought, something stirred within me. Some force or power rose from my viscera and came out of my mouth with such force that the gag popped off, as I shouted: “THULEEEE!” The people in the brain were shocked, frozen in surprise. The Macrobot jerked to a halt. Suddenly a brilliant light appeared in the sky right in front of us. I was dazzled, but I could make out the form of a man in the light. He stepped forth, floating in the air. It was Victor. He looked at me and saw my situation. He yelled “Beatrice!”, and rushed toward me. The Brain Trust recovered itself and engaged the Macrobot against Victor. It brought up its arm and tried to grab him, like someone trying to snatch a fly in the air and crush it in his hand. Victor saw the danger and evaded it, flying right between the massive fingers as they closed into a fist. The robot changed tactic, pointing its forefinger at Victor. The end of the finger opened on a hinge; it was now a cannon, and it fired a blast of energy at Victor. He dodged again, but looked worried. How long could he survive the Macrobot’s attack? He waved his right hand in the air and chanted something. The sky opened, just like it always had for me when my angels came. And there they were -- my angels! In fact, there were lots of angels, a heavenly host pouring out of the sky. I saw now that they weren’t really angels in the way I had conceived it as a child -- they didn’t have wings or robes like in pictures of Bible stories. But they were magnificent glowing beings, looking very much like people, and clearly more than human. They swirled around in a symmetrical pattern, and then before my wondering eyes they merged -- they all melded into the form of a single giant man. He looked like a warrior of classical times, with sword and shield, long golden hair, and steely blue eyes. I could tell that the Brain Trust was abashed, because the Macrobot staggered backwards and put up an arm as if in fear of this formidable being who was exactly its own size. Then it fired missiles and energy-blasts at the warrior from various apertures in its body, but the giant easily deflected them with his shield. Then he raised his great sword, and with one swift, arching blow, cut off the right arm of the Macrobot directly below the shoulder. The people in the brain shrieked and shouted. Sirens were going off somewhere, and smoke was pouring from the hole in the shoulder. The creature clanked down into a slump, and didn’t move; evidently the damage had immobilized it. The cyclopean warrior did not press his attack, but rather sharded himself back into the legion of angelic beings. Most of them positioned themselves in the shape of an aerial mandala, perhaps as a shield to guard against any furtive attempts of the crippled Macrobot to strike at us. Meanwhile, Victor hovered in the center with that small corps of beings whom I recognized as the angels of my childhood. They made graceful, coordinated motions with their hands, and this generated a beam of light which shone in my direction. I was fearful that it would burn me as it had before; but now I saw that it was actually a hollow tube of light, which came down around me without touching me. It extracted me, socket and all, out of the metallic skull of the Macrobot; then it somehow disabled the mechanism of the socket, so that I was able to wriggle out of the restraints and fly into the air. I was free. I moved slowly toward Victor and the angels. I got closer and closer to them, and my heart leapt with hope that maybe this time their aura would not burn me. But no sooner had I dared to think this thought, than I could begin to feel the heat -- and the fear that seemed to be a part of it. Victor smiled at me, so full of love. I knew he wanted nothing more than to come and take me in his arms -- but we both knew that if he did, I would burn and be terrified. “It’s less,” he said -- “it’s a lot less than it was.” “Why, you’re right!” I said. “I can come much closer now. Why is that?” “You burned off a lot of karma by being so brave and opposing the Macrobot. Plus you woke up to its real nature, and broke the main part of the spell it cast on you while you were alive. But you’re not home yet, Honey Bea.” “Oh, Victor!” I said, practically crying, “what’s going on? Why am I in this predicament? What do I have to do to get back with you and the angels?” He waved his arm around at the angels. “Maybe you could ask them. Here they are. Is there any special question that you have for them?” Whoa! I was filled with awe as I looked into the eyes of my angels for the first time since I was a child. They were still just brimming with love for me. But then why, why. . . ? “Why did you leave me?” I blurted out. “Why did you go away after that stuff happened in the second grade? And why did you start to burn me and make me afraid of you?” The angelic beings looked very sad. Instead of answering with words, they lifted the veil on the past. I saw myself again in the second grade, right after I had transferred to the public school and was going through all the terrible stuff with the black kids. And there were my angels as I saw them then, saying to me: “As long as you are true to us, we’ll protect you from all serious harm; as long as you’ re true to yourself, we’ll never leave you.” I was dumbfounded. All the memories came rushing back again -- how I had tormented myself wondering what I could’ve done to make myself unworthy of the angels, asking how I had betrayed them. Now I began to get a glimpse of the answer. It was true -- I had betrayed the angels, and myself as well. I had betrayed. . . I had betrayed. . . . Again I stumbled on the word, feeling myself up against an immense blockage, as if the Rock of Gibraltar had fallen into the Straights of Hercules. I looked again at Victor and the angels. They wouldn’t say the word, but they were thinking it so loudly that I couldn’t help but hear. So even with their beautiful faces full of love and compassion for me, I was brought face to face with the horrible truth that I had betrayed Thule. I couldn’t bear it. The universe imploded in on me. I screamed and fled away again as fast as I could, away from Victor and the angels. They shouted, “Beatrice, no!” “Stop!” “Come back!” But it was too late. I didn’t even look where I was going until I saw the hole in the head of the Macrobot that had been left when the angels had plucked out the socket I was imprisoned in. I was headed straight toward it, and now felt an irresistable suction pulling me into it. I made a wild, last-second, scrambling effort to stop myself, but the force was too strong. I was sucked into the hole, and the next instant found myself plunging down into the murky depths inside the Macrobot. The last thing I heard was the sadistic chortles of the Brain Trust, saying: “The little fool!” “We’ve got her back!” “She’ll never escape this time!” 15: Strawberry Fields I was falling down into darkness. It was so pitch back that I thought I had gone blind. But at last there came a faint haze of twilight, and I could dimly make out some kind of shape below me. It was very large and round, and then I noticed a spot of light at its center. I wanted to go toward it, and sure enough my fall began to angle in that direction. Thus I realized that I wasn’t really falling but flying -- it was just that my blind panic had caused me to plummet out of control. Now I gathered my wits and flew toward the light. It was a hole on the surface of an enormous hemisphere, and the light was coming from inside. I flew through the hole, and for a moment I was dazzled in the brightly-lit space. When my eyes adjusted, I found that I was floating under a vast dome, and that the hole I had just come through was at the exact apex and center of it. I flew a little lower and looked back up at the dome, and gasped in surprise. There were magnificent heavenly scenes painted on it, just like the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel, except that the scale here was much greater -- this ceiling could’ve covered a whole city. I was startled again when I saw that the scene on the ceiling was moving. There was God, there were angels and saints, and throngs of other Michaelangelesque figures, including Jesus and Mary. They were so realistic billowing about among the clouds, complete with heavenly music and other sound effects, that I would’ve been convinced I was looking at a real heaven, if I hadn’t just come through the roof and hence knew that it was a curved two-dimensional surface -- apparently a screen of some sort, on which this colossal scenario was being imaged. But why was this here? What did it mean, and who was doing it? It occurred to me that if I had still devoutly held the Christian beliefs I had been imprinted with in my earliest years, this whole thing would be awe-inspiring -- especially if I didn’t know that it was really only a kind of movie. Then I started thinking about all the other belief-systems I had come into contact with since I was a teenager -- like Buddhism. . . . No sooner had I formed that thought when I noticed that the moving picture on the ceiling had begun to change. The Jehovah-like God subtlely but swiftly morphed into the glorified form of Gautama Buddha sitting on a lotus, which rayed out into an animated tapestry of Buddhas with their Shaktis against a background of oriental hills and flowers. The whole thing was in the form of a great mandala, like I was familiar with from Buddhist iconography. This was getting curioser and curioser! What was next -- a Hindu heaven? Whoa! Again it transformed in response to my thought. I blinked, and Buddha changed into Brahma, surrounded by a Hindu pantheon. It was by far the most colorful and mind-blowing scenario of them all, swarming with astonishing deities, demi-gods, and demons, many with multiple heads and arms, engaged in acting out the dramas of Hindu myth. It was also the sexiest heaven, with troupes of alluring Apsareses and Yakshinis dancing around in various places. I just had to get to the bottom of this. Here was a screen as big as the sky which apparently created convincing images of whatever heaven the viewer was imprinted with or thought about. Who was it intended for? Were there other people looking at it? I had been so entranced by the magical ceiling that only now did I get around to looking downward. The ground was far below. It was a huge circular area divided into sections. I flew lower, and saw people streaming into the sections through doors on the perimeter, from some unknown place outside. It was as big as a huge metropolis, like L.A. or Tokyo; and there were great swarms of people in every section. Now I swooped way down and took a closer look, tooling around above the scene like a low-flying bird. I discovered that in each section were people who believed in a certain religion or philosophy, or who adhered to a particular worldview. This was evident not only from the accoutrements, symbols, and costumes of the people, but also from a sort of collective psychic resonance. The biggest sections were those of the Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, but there were areas of various sizes which contained devotees of every sect and weltanschauung extant in the present world. Suddenly I looked up and saw another person flying toward me. I had been all alone with my bird’s- eye view up till now, and I became afraid that this might be an astral cop coming to bust me for spying or something. I started to fly away, but suddenly I heard the strains of a song I had always loved: “Strawberry Fields”. I stopped and turned around, and found myself face to face with the flying man. I did a double-take. “Oh my God,” I spluttered, “you’re John Lennon!” He smiled benignly and said, “At your service, Beatrice.” “You know me?” “In a way, I know everyone who loves my music -- but especially those who understand the vision that underlies it.” “Oh!” I said, “you mean like ‘Hey, Jude’?” “Right, that’s the essence of it. If only everyone took the sad song of life and made it better, and opened their hearts to love, then soon the whole world would turn into paradise.” “Oh wow,” I said, “strawberry fields forever!” His eyes sparkled. He pointed toward the dome overhead. I looked up, wondering which God would be the featured attraction of the moment; but instead I saw something that blew me totally away. All the Gods were gone. In their place was the white light of loving union and totality, exactly as I had experienced it so many times in tantric embrace with Victor. It was like a great heart beating, drawing all sentient beings into the ecstasy of universal oneness. I spent a timeless moment in the joy of the All/One. Then I became a drop of plasm which fissioned off from it and precipitated down to where I had been floating; then it split apart into John and myself. He was looking at me with big, loving eyes. I gasped at the miracle and said, “Oh! We’re one!” “Of course,” he said with a grin. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?” “Well, yes -- everybody’s all one -- I always knew. But it’s different when, y’know, it actually happens!” He laughed, and looked at me in a certain way, and I suddenly realized that I was still naked. I got embarrassed and made a reflexive covering movement. John said, “Don’t be ashamed, Beatrice -- you’re very beautiful. Still, if it will make you more comfortable. . . .” He kind of waved his hand, and clothing materialized on my body -- a pretty little ’60s-style mini-dress. He said, “Will that be suitable? If not, there’s an infinite selection available.” “It’s terrific,” I said; “thank you.” Then I thought to ask the next obvious question: “Where are we, John? What is this place?” “You could think of it as a clearing-house of souls.” I digested this for a moment, then asked: “So the people coming in the doors around the circle have just died? And this is their entry to the afterlife?” “For most of them, that’s the case -- those who had evolved enough on Earth to qualify for direct admission.” “So not everybody comes here, then? This is a special place?” “Yes.” I was surprised to hear this, because it seemed so all-inclusive, with all the religions and everything represented in the sections below. John apparently read my thought, and said, “These are not the souls who are stuck in the stagnant forms of dogmatic belief; the heavens of such people are elsewhere -- along with their hells. Rather, these are people who are ready to graduate from their imprints and advance to a higher degree of enlightenment.” “Why, that’s wonderful! But what about the ceiling? It looks like everybody sees their own heaven.” “That’s exactly right, Beatrice. At first, individuals are only aware of the people in their own section, where everyone sees the same heaven and shares the same belief-system. But eventually, most of them graduate to the next stage.” He drew my attention to the configuration of the sections, which were like the segments of a pie chart, ranging from very wide to very thin. The walls between them were very high near the circumference, then gradually got lower as they appoached the center, until finally they were just picket fences which people could talk across like neighbors. “So then they get to mingle,” I said. “Yes,” said John. “They get to compare worldviews and share resonances. Then the images on the ceiling begin to morph for them, as they did for you. Finally, if they continue to progress, they reach the inner circle, ‘where there are no fences facin’.” He gestured downward, and I saw that there was a large round area in the middle where people from all the sections interrelated freely. At the very center was a building. “And then what happens?” I asked. “Well, after they grasp the relativity of their worldviews and their images of heaven, they eventually become ready to see the reality that underlies it all.” He beckoned upward again, and I could feel little tendrils of the ecstatic unity. “You mean the One!” “Yes. All the Gods and heavens and pantheons are just illusory overlays of the clear white light.” “Ah! I knew that, but it’s such a revelation to see how souls progress to it here. So what happens after that? Do they all just live together in the inner circle?” “Some of them do for a long time, but most of them decide pretty quickly that they want to move on.” He pointed at the little round building in the center. “Here’s a group that’s ready. Now watch.” There appeared to be a ritual of some sort going on beside the building. A group of people split off from the crowd and arranged themselves in a circle around the structure. They all held hands and chanted something; then they disappeared inside. A heartbeat later, a beam of white light shot up from the roof of the building to the center of the dome overhead, where it merged into the Oneness and then was gone. “Where did they go?” I asked in astonishment. “Into the All,” said John. “You mean forever and ever? Like Nirvana?” “Yes.” “Oh, wow!” I stared at the center of the ceiling, and then I remembered that I had come through it from above. “That’s right,” said John Lennon, answering my thought. “You’ve come by a special route, Beatrice. That’s why you can go directly to the inner circle.” “Really?” “For sure. You’ve already attained knowledge of relativity and Oneness.” “That’s true,” I said. Yet something disturbing was nagging at my mind. I couldn’t remember exactly where I had come from up above, but there were strange dark feelings connected with it. And my memory of my life on Earth was likewise very cloudy. I remembered school in Philadelphia, Berkeley, and Marin; I remembered a lot of the spiritual groups and classes I had been to; I remembered teaching disabled kids; I remembered that I had fallen down a hill and been killed. But it seemed like there was a lot of important stuff that I couldn’t remember. John touched my arm and said, “Don’t worry about it, Beatrice. It’ll all come back at the right time.” And then wow, there was the clear light again overhead. Now I felt completely confident that everything was okay; in fact, everything was really beautiful. It was like a dream come true: John Lennon was taking my hand and leading me down to strawberry fields. . . forever! 16: Race, Sex, and Soul Change John and I alighted in the midst of a crowd of people in the central section of the Clearing House of Souls. They saw us coming and made a space for us, and after we landed they hailed John and talked excitedly to him, some of them all at once in a big babble. I could see that even here in the afterworld he was still a celebrity -- he was admired and sought after. His smile never faltered as he made a motion with his hand and the people fell silent, waiting attentively for him to speak. When he did, it was very natural and unaffected; he greeted a few of the people by name, and asked briefly about personal matters, and then he gestured toward me. “I’d like you all to meet Beatrice,” he said, and there was an instant outpouring of affection and goodwill from them to me. It made me feel right at home, and totally welcomed and accepted. John continued: “Beatrice is a high soul who has just finished a pivotal incarnation on Earth. She has overcome all the main illusions of the division of the human spirit based on superficialities of belief and ancient prejudices. Now she only needs the final stages of training and enlightenment in order to attain her liberation.” There was a joyful collective response from the people to this, very warm and supportive. Then John said, “I think Savannah would be the best guide. I sense that she’s nearby. Could you all help me call her?” There was a hubbub of affirmation, then everyone became quiet again, and I picked up a telepathic signal going out, like a sussurus wafting the name “Savannah” over the whole surrounding area. Shortly it was answered, and I could see a knot of people making its way through the crowd toward us. Soon a very impressive entourage entered the circle of souls who were gathered about John and me. They were of all different races and wore colorful costumes. Some of them looked like Deadheads and Rainbow people, others like ethnic folk in native dress. At the center of it all was a tall, striking American Indian woman in full tribal regalia, complete with beads, rings, and amulets. She carried a long, feathered instrument which I recognized as a spirit-catcher. My thought was that here was a very formidable shamaness. I kept forgetting that the people here could read my thoughts. John chuckled and said, “Yes, that’s an apt impression, Beatrice! Please allow me to introduce Savannah, a very advanced facilitator of the unfoldment of souls toward their final enlightenment.” I said, “I’m honored, Savannah!” She made a little bow and said, “I, too, Beatrice. I’ve heard some remarkable things about you.” “Oh! I didn’t know I was so famous. I mean, all these great people seem to know me here -- like John, and now you.” “And there’ll be more,” she said. “It’s not often that a soul arrives fresh from the Earth who is so near the culmination of her spiritual journey.” “That’s what John said, but it’s hard for me to understand how I’m so advanced. I feel like I’ve forgotten a lot of things. Can you help me to remember and become fully conscious of my true self?” “It would be my pleasure,” said Savannah; “in fact, that’s exactly what we were hoping you would ask.” She smiled knowingly at John. I went off with Savannah and her friends and began my training. My sense of time was very different from what it is on Earth, so I don’t know how long it lasted; plus it was always light and we didn’t sleep, so there was really no way to mark time. It could’ve been anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years, in terms of subjective time; but even then I’m only guessing. Everything in this space was pervaded by a sense of timelessness. The first aspect of the training was called “sexual depolarization”. Savannah said: “As you know, the long primitive stage of life on Earth that’s now ending was marked by male supremacy. The rampant male ego, charged with testosterone and unchecked by its proper yin balance as it formerly was in the matriarchal era, has reached the point where it threatens the survival of all life on Earth. But the same historical process that’s led to this danger has also created the opportunity for world salvation.” “Yes,” I said, “the global culture has brought everyone together. We realize that we’re all children of Mother Gaia, and no one is truly an enemy.” “Exactly! But this realization, even if it were universal, would not be enough. The sad fact is that the sexually-fueled male urge for domination will always lust after war -- if there are no enemies, it will create them. And it will always strive to subordinate women!” “Wow, I guess I never grasped how deep the problem is. But what can we do about it, then?” “We are going to deflate the male ego right at the source, which is here in the metasphere. We are going to take the starch out of the lingam, and even up the balance between the sexes. In fact, we've already been doing it for a hundred years, and the process is finally starting to bear fruit.” “I’m still not sure I get,” I said. “What exactly is this process?” “We’re making the human race more androgynous.” “Oh! Well, that makes sense, I guess. But how are we doing this?” She explained that we began by changing ourselves here in the Clearing House. This had a direct impact on incarnate life, because most of the souls didn’t pass the training in one swoop -- they had to return for more lives on Earth, and there they became the cutting-edge vanguard for the rest of the species. “Beyond that,” said Savannah, “there’s a secret I can’t speak of yet, but which you’ll learn in due course, after you pass all the rites.” It turned out that in this phase of the training we morphed our astral bodies back and forth from male to female, imprinting ourselves with the basic drives and thought-processes of the opposite sex, and breaking down that opposition. Some of the people eventually became hermaphrodites in their astral bodies, with a tiny little penis and a vagina underneath shrunken testicles. “Obviously,” said Savannah, “these souls will be very androgynous when they reincarnate.” “Obviously,” I said. But I elected not to develop in that direction myself -- I kind of liked being female. The next thing on the agenda was the race-changing exercise. Individuals took on the appearance of all the different variations and combinations of the physical races, each for a certain period of time, depending on how you felt about that race -- the more negative feelings and prejudices you had about it, the longer you had to spend as a member of it. As you might guess, I had to be a black person for quite awhile, but I was glad to finally be able to work off all the guilty feelings I had been experiencing ever since I had taken Lois’s class on racism. At last I felt purged, and then I got to be other races, for shorter periods. Finally I was able to be myself again, when Savannah felt that I had overcome my most deeply-rooted prejudices and sense of white superiority, or even white preference. She said, “In my last life, only one of my four grandparents was Native American, and the others were white; but you can see what my preference is now.” I certainly could -- she looked like a full-blooded Indian, with chestnut-brown skin, aquiline nose, and long braided coal-black hair. Again, many of the people who went through this exercise failed to make the grade for final liberation. So, as Savannah told me, when they went down for another life on Earth it had the salutary effect of causing each of these souls to be reborn into a different race, or as a racially- mixed person. This aided their progress in unlearning racial preferences, and then when they returned here to the afterworld they would have a big head start when their training resumed. After I graduated from these phases of the training, Savannah promoted me to assistant facilitator. Because I had spent most of my last life in the high spiritual milieu of Marin County, I was able to be of assistance to people who were still working their way out of the dogmatic, repressive, patriarchal imprints of the old religions. In our support groups for recovering Christians, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews, we unveiled for them the litany of the New Age. We explained that there are no sins, only mistakes; nobody but ourselves can pay for our “sins” -- nobody can judge us but ourselves. We must forgive ourselves for our mistakes -- there is no condemnation from God, since God after all is the Clear Light of Love and Union. In that Light we can see that we are faultless -- perfect just the way we are. And since we’re all One, it’s never necessary to resort to violence. People only commit crimes because they have low self-esteem -- they think they’re losers, they have no one to love them, they resent people who are higher class or more enlightened. Happier families and positive upbringing will cure all these problems, and this will come about on Earth as a result of the Global Mind Change. The group discussions usually went well, though some people needed a lot of repetition and support to become convinced of these simple truths which were self-evident to any enlightened person. So it was that I couldn’t understand why I sometimes hit an emotional snag myself, especially on the concept of the Global Mind Change. I remembered clearly that this had been one of my most cherished basic beliefs in my life on Earth; so if some doubt or problem was arising now, it could only have been the result of something that had happened _after_ I died and had departed from that life. But that didn’t make any sense, because I had come here to the Clearing House directly from Earth -- hadn’t I? Oh, what were those shadowy things that I couldn’t remember? 17. The Last Rite The final stage of the training was practice for the ritual melding of souls that would send us up into the Clear Light forever. I was one of a group of 36 people who were candidates for the ultimate rite. At regular intervals we all meditated in a big circle while holding hands, with Savannah in the center. The individuals had been selected to make the most diverse possible mix of races, religious backgrounds, and gender -- which as I’ve said was a whole sliding scale here, not just male and female. But when we sat in the circle and got into our mind-meld, all that just melted away. Our various attributes and separate identities all dissolved into each other and vanished in the Clear Light. We were One -- we were Love -- we were God. After one of the sessions Savannah asked me: “Now do you remember your true self?” “Oh, yes!” I said. “It’s all clear now. I am That.” I pointed upward, indicating the Unity of the Godself. She smiled and hugged me. “You’re ready,” she said with a ring of maternal pride in her voice. She looked around at the others and said, “I think you’re all ready. We’ll set up the final ritual.” It was a great occasion for us when it came time for the last rite. The Supreme Hierophant of the Clearing House presided. He was a man with penetrating eyes, a powerful aura, a bald head, and a big white handlebar mustache. Other people attended who I recognized as having been gurus and spiritual leaders on Earth. John Lennon came, and we had a nice reunion. There were also other media stars, including Groucho Marx -- he had been one of my favorites, and it was such a kick meeting him! After the festive part of the affair, we took our places for the ritual. It turned out that the little round building I had seen from above when I first arrived was a sort of temple. It was in the shape of a hemisphere of the Earth, as if lying on its side -- the two poles were at ground level and the equator ran around it up to the top. Africa was positioned on the topside, and a large sculptured image of a black woman sat on it, representing Mother Eve who gave birth to the human species in the African genesis hundreds of thousands of years ago. She was shaped something like the Venus of Willendorff, but was still very beautiful and appealing if you were enlightened to the primal esthetic. She was holding an urn on her shoulders, whose mouth was actually the aperture out of which we would beam up as a shaft of light into the embrace of the All/One above. There were 36 doorways at the base of the hemisphere, one for each of us souls who now stood facing them in a circle around the temple. Each of the doorways was just wide enough for a person to pass through, and opened into a clear glasslike pod. These pods were astral instruments which would facilitate our merger into the beam of white light. It would be our final clearing, and then we would be upward bound. The Hierophant stood at a tall lectern next to the temple, and led the assemblage in some very moving chants and songs. Then came our big moment. The 36 of us joined hands around the temple, and in unison recited a mantra: “We’re all alike. We’re all the same. We all want the same thing. We all love each other. We are One!” Then we went into our mind-meld, just like we had been practicing all this time. My soul flowed into the great ecstatic unity, just like it had done so often in the circle. And then I was there, aloft in the loving Oneness, just like when I had made love with. . . with who? With someone I dimly recalled from a whole eon ago when I had been alive on Earth -- someone who I hadn’t thought of nor remembered since the very beginning of this long sojourn in the Clearing House. And now finally I thought of him again -- I remembered Victor. Oh my God, how could I have forgotten Victor? He’s my soulmate! This was my thought -- and the next moment it was answered. I looked up, and saw his face in the dome of the ceiling. He was looking down at me, and appeared to be very concerned. He said: “Beatrice! Don’t go into the pod! It’ s a trick, it’s a trap! Remember your secret name! Remember Thule. . . !” Then he faded out. I looked around in confusion. Had anybody else seen and heard Victor? Or was it only me? This certainly wasn’t part of the ritual! We dropped our hands, and everyone stepped into the pods. . . except me. I looked at the Hierophant, and saw that he was glaring at me with a shocked and angry expression on his face. Then his eyes darted aside and he nodded, evidently at someone standing behind me. I looked around and saw that it was Savannah. She suddenly stepped forward and shoved me into the pod. I was so astonished that it closed on me before I could react. Then the outer door also closed, and for the first time I saw the inside of the temple. It looked very mechanical. The 36 pods were set in tracks on the floor, and they now began to move slowly along the tracks. I looked toward the ceiling, and at the very top of the underside of the small dome I saw a device that was clearly recognizable as the bottom part of a big searchlight, even though it was made of astral matter like everything else in the Clearing House. The searchlight was affixed to the ceiling pointing upward, and in the next moment light flashed around the edges, as if it were shining a beam of light up into the air outside, up to the top of the larger ceiling of the great dome. So this was the beam of light that appeared after people entered the temple! It wasn’t their melded souls going up to Nirvana at all! It was a fake! Just as Victor had said, it was all a trick! But why? What was really going on here? And what was going to happen to us now? 18. The Astral Factory The pods moved on their tracks toward the center of the small, round interior of the temple, where the ones ahead of me were sinking downward into a big hole in the floor.  When I got closer I saw that it was a sort of spiral escalator going down. Less than a minute had passed since the doors had closed, and I finally thought to look at the other members of my group in their pods. They all simply stood motionless with the blissful expression of ecstatic oneness on their faces; they were in a trance. I was the only one who had snapped out of it and awoken to myself. But I had to get out of here! I pressed and pounded on the walls of my pod, but nothing happened. I braced myself and pushed with both hands against opposite walls, but they wouldn't give. Again Victor had been right ~ I was trapped. My pod spiraled down with the rest into a much larger space, obviously below ground. It looked like the inside of a gigantic factory. The pods now moved in a straight line toward some kind of apparatus.  The conveyor belt stopped as the first pod got into position inside a metal frame. Within the pod was a Chinese woman named Hui Ling, who was one of my best friends in the group.   Suddenly electric arcs crackled from the machinery and enveloped her pod. The outlines of her body became indistinct, and then I coudn't see her standing there any more. I thought for a moment that the surface of the pod must have clouded over, but no ~ I looked closer, and saw that Hui Ling was actually melting!  Her astral body softened and slumped down into a gelatinous mass, until finally it was nothing but a blob of plasm in the bottom of the pod. The electrical discharge ceased, the conveyor belt lurched into motion again, and the next pod came into position. I was numb with horror from having seen what happened to Hui Ling. In the second pod was M'Butu, an African man ~ and the same thing happened to him! All my friends were getting dissolved into lumps of jello, and soon I would too! I was frantic, and tried beating and kicking the walls of the pod again; I bumped my body back and forth against opposite sides to try to knock the pod off the track; but nothing worked. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of abject helplessness in the face of certain doom. But no, it was never hopeless. There were still about a dozen pods between me and that fiendish machine, which gave me time to look around, searching desperately for a way out. The track carrying the pods that had already been "processed" curved back on itself and moved downward to another layer below. There was no floor, so I could peer down and see the next stage of the operation. The first pod came to a halt again over some kind of device; the bottom of the pod opened, and the shapeless glob that had been Hui Ling was poured into a roughly rectangular metal container with all kinds of machinery attached to it.  Then a lid was clamped onto it, all by the mechanisms of what was evidently a fully automated astral assembly line. The contraption sparked, flashed, and vibrated, and then it rotated upright. The lid was now a door; it opened, and out stepped a robot! That was my immediate gut esthetic impression: Hui Ling had been transmogrified into a robot. A closer look showed me that it still had some humanoid attributes, but it was essentially a mechanical artifact. The second pod came along and decanted M'Butu's plasm into the same box. The process repeated, and a robot came out that was absolutely identical to the first! There was no trace of sex, race, individual features, or any other distinguishing characteristics. They were two copies of the same robot. So the rectangular device was basically a high-tech mold! The next pod moved into position. I was so distressed and distracted by everything that I hadn't even noticed which of my friends had been turned into this particular blob of jelly.  But now I saw that the robot-making box was also on an assembly line; and now it moved along, bringing a different mold into place beneath the pod. The plasm was dumped into it, and this time a different model of robot came out - the shape of its head and limbs were different, and it was equipped with different appurtenances. With my own meltdown rapidly approaching, I still watched in horrified fascination as the process went into the next stage. I saw a third assembly line interweaving with the others.  This one was much bigger, and carried massive pieces of machinery. The newly-minted robots were picked up by big mechanical arms and inserted into slots or apertures in the larger devices, where they immediately sprang to life and started hooking themselves up and wiring themselves into their receptacles. It reminded me of when I had been in some kind of similar device myself, like a socket in a... a.... Oh, why was it so hard to remember? But then something seemed to pop loose in my mind, and it all came back. I remembered now: I had been strapped into a socket in the brain of a giant robot! And I had come to the Clearing House by diving down though the head of the. . . the Macrobot, into the vast interior of its mechanical body. Which meant that the Clearing House, the temple, and now all this, were actually inside the Macrobot! Now I understood - it all fell into place. The large chunks of machinery were obviously parts of the Macrobot, pieces that would be installed in various sections of its world-girdling structure. And these souls that had finished the so-called "clearing" process were getting molded into robots to serve vital functions in the great machine, like microchips in computer components. The sole criterion for their shape and form was the need of the machinery for specific kinds of chips.  And so it was that beings who had once been human were transformed into. .. what could I call them? Microbots! Suddenly I looked around and screamed, as I saw that my pod was next in line to go into the metal frame. I was about to get melted down!
	19. Crossing the Abyss "Remember your secret name." That's what Victor had said. But I didn't have a clue as to what that might be! The only thing that came to mind were the cute affectionate names he had called me when we were making love - like "Honey Bea", "Queen Bea", and some other ones just too precious to mention. But thinking about this caused me to remember the experience of making love with Victor, and the high spiritual states it engendered. So it was that as my pod clanked into the big frame with its wicked-looking metallic excrescences, I closed my eyes and pictured myself melting (!) into loving union with Victor. Then it seemed as if I could see him in front of me, his eyes looking into mine, his manhood penetrating me. . . . "I'm really here, Bea," he whispered. "Listen, there's not much time. Let's just do it, like always. Okay?" "Yes, oh yes!" I said. "I love you, Victor. Let's do it!" So even though I was standing up in the skinny pod with my eyes closed, mentally I was in the Shiva-Shakti position with Victor, staring into his loving eyes. In a wink I went into the tantric trance. I hardy noticed the machinery humming around the pod in an ominous crescendo, because I was in an ecstatic state of union with Victor, just as I had been so many times in the past. "Bea," he said, "there's more." I was surpised by this remark, and asked, "What more could there be? We're the All/One, and I love you." "No, there's still an abyss between us. Look ~ pay close attention to my eyes." I did what he said, and after a moment I was startled to see something in Victor's eyes that I never had before. The subtle little flickering of his pupils seemed to mirror mine exactly; the beating of our hearts was synchronized; and now I could even read his thoughts, which were identical with my own.   He and I were both thinking: "Oh, its a mirror!" That was it, and it was more terrifying than the electrical souldeath that was about to zap me in another couple of microseconds. It wasn't true what I had always thought: that Victor and I were like two fingers on a hand, or two peas in a pod, or two petals on a rose. The stark truth staring at me was that there weren't two at all, and never had been. It was an illusion. It was a mirror. "Oh my God," we both thought at the same time, "I am you!" Lightning flashed from the metal frame and cascaded down around the pod as I plunged for the first time all the way into Victor's eyes, and passed through the looking-glass. There was an endless, empty void on the other side. I was all alone, as I always had been and always would be. I was Beatrice, I was Victor, I was all sentient beings who had ever lived and ever would live. I was the one and only Being in all the cosmos, and I had created the illusion of all those myriad creatures with my magic mirror in order to forget for a fleeting interlude my crushing eternal loneliness. I remembered how that illusory mask of myself called "Victor" had referred to this present horrendous reality as the Ultrasphere. I remembered other things he had said about it, and tried to see how it fit with the equally illusory existence I had just gone through as "Beatrice".  He said he had found life and death here, and I looked about me for life and death. I was astounded to find that I was cradling a baby in my left arm. It was a very young baby, a newborn ~ or perhaps even newer than that: it had the look of a fetus to it. Its eyes were closed, and there was a thin, diaphanous film over its face, like a remnant of mucous from the womb. The umbilical cord was still attached to its navel. I followed it with my eyes to find the other end of it, thinking that it must go up into my uterus, even though I could not remember having just given birth to this infant. Instead I found that the cord was attached to my heart. My heart was pounding so loudly that I was sure it must break at any moment ~ especially when I looked at the little child and was ravaged by spasms of pity for it, knowing it must endure the stings and agonies of life forever. But wait: where was death? I looked to my right, and saw that I held a blade in that hand. It was so sharp and silvery ~ it gleamed with a light of its own in this infinite blackness. It crossed my mind that if I so willed, I could use this instrument to cure my baby once and for all of the hideous disease of life.  Surely every sad and loving mother has had this thought, and every one of them has buried it and kept it hidden from her own awareness, until she awakens here in this horrid wasteland, and becomes herself, the One and Only Soul, and sees the Ultra-knife, and knows. . . . Tears welled from my eyes, and the tempo of my heartbeat quickened, as I brought the knife toward the baby. My mind was numb - I hardly knew what I was doing. But some deep urge within me drove my hand to make a sudden slashing motion. . . as I cut the umbilical cord. The next moment the eyes of the baby opened, and looked at me. His tiny little mouth broke into a bright smile ~ and suddenly the darkness all around us was transformed into light. And the baby... oh, I knew this baby! He was mine ~ of course! The baby's face transfigured into Victor's. I could see the blue sky and Sun behind him, and I could hear a strange wailing in the distance, like a siren. "Welcome back. Honey Bea!" said Victor. I became aware that I was lying on the ground, in the scratchy yellow grass of summer, on a hill in San Rafael, on planet Earth, in the material world. "She's alive ~ thank God!" said a woman's voice. It was Alethea. "And here comes the rescue squad," said Chronos. "There was never a doubt," said Victor ~ "right, Bea?" "Right," I said, "never a doubt!" Then he leaned down and kissed me tenderly on the lips, and I cried. I was so happy to be back, and alive, and with Victor. 20. Angelic Reunion At Marin General Hospital they treated me for a concussion, blood loss, and various cuts and bruises. They flatly refused to believe the assertions of Victor and the other people that my heartbeat and breathing had stopped for at least fifteen minutes. The doctor said that there would've been all kinds of residual damage if such a thing had happened, and there was no sign of this whatever. Barring any aftereffects of the concussion, I wasn't even seriously hurt.  But they decided to keep me overnight for observation, just in case. My insurance didn't cover a private room, but Dad insisted on paying for one; then after he and Mom left, there I was with Victor, John Harlequin, Chronos, Alethea, and Joy, watching the Sun set over Mount Tamalpais through a big window. "It's a miracle," I said. "It sure is," said Alethea. "We thought you were gone!" "Oh," I said, "I just meant the sunset! Everything seems like a miracle to me now - the sky, the Earth, being alive right now in this room with all of you. I just never realized before what a miracle life is!" "I can dig it," said Chronos. "But even so, this one was really an ultra-spectacular miracle ~ y'know, the kind that defies any physical explanation." "Yep, it's a good one," said Victor. "However, there IS a METAphysical explanation." "I'll bet I know," I said: "I came back into an alternate reality, like you did." "Exactly!" I had never believed that part of his story "- but now I had to believe! All the other possibilities were even more farfetched and outrageous. And furthermore, I remembered the whole bizarre adventure I had gone through in my. .. my after death experience. I started talking about it to everybody, but just then the nurse came by and reminded us that visiting hours were over at 9 PM, which was less than an hour away. After she left, I said, "Gee, I don't think I can tell it all in an hour! I feel like years and years passed while I was in    They were all curious to hear the story, so we arranged that they would stay at our flat for another night, and then I could really get into it tomorrow after I came home from the hospital. After that was settled, they sensed that I wanted to be alone for awhile with Victor, and so they excused themselves. As soon as they were gone, Victor and I fell into a hug. It was so good to feel the blessed warmth of his aura and his body enveloping me! It felt even more intense than usual.  I looked in his eyes, and for a second I thought we were back in the mind-meld where we could read each other's thoughts. But it wasn't quite sharp enough for me to pick anything up. "Almost/" he said, and we laughed in near-telepathic communion. Then I started gushing out the weird story of my experience in rapid cadence, as if by doing it fast I could tell it all in the short time that was left. But Victor calmed me down and said, "Whoa, hold on. Sweetheart! Aren't you forgetting something?" I looked at him puzzled, and he said: "I was there too." "You were?" I pondered this as my heart beat with excitement and just plain intensity. "So it was all real! You came with the angels and saved me when I was in the brain of the Macrobot, then you were with me again in the pod at the end." "Right. And I was watching you every minute during all the times in between, when I couldn't intervene. I know everything that happened." "That's astounding! It means. . . it means. . . ." The images of the events were spinning around in my head - all the stange things that had happened to me and their macabre denouement in that astral factory. And finally I realized: "It means that something terrible is going on in the world!" Instead of looking upset in empathy, he chuckled and said, "Um, does that sound at all familiar?" It all washed over me as I realized that yes, it sounded exactly like what he had been trying to tell me before, which I had thought was so crazy. Now I sat there staring at him bug-eyed as I repeated his earlier observation: "People. .. are being. .. turned into. . . robots! Right in their very souls!" Victor hugged me tightly and said, "Yes, now you know. It's a real world-class bummer, a planetary disaster. I learned more about what's behind it on this last trip, when I was watching you from Thule." "Thule? Is that where you were?" He nodded. "They have a sort of metaphysical spying apparatus by which they can monitor what's going on in the opposing camp. Anyway, the MetaThuleans filled me in on some of the background to the world situation, but I'm still not clear on a lot of things." "Who are the 'MetaThuleans'?" With a big grin he said, "A.k.a. the angels. Your old friends." "My angels! Oh, Victor, do you think that I can. . . you know, tolerate being with them again? Having them near me?" "Well, we could find out." "How?" "There's about twenty minutes left. Does your door lock from the inside?" "Yes, but the nurse has a key." "No problem." Victor waved his hand in a little circle toward the door, and made a kind of poofing sound with his mouth. "There ~ a quickie banishing. And now.. . ." "Quickie tantra?" "Let's go for it!" We did, being careful of my bandages and sore spots. I was amazed at how fast we got into the trance state. And then whoops!, there we were rising out of our bodies! Victor very gently rolled a calming wave over me, and this time I determined to go with it. My resolve faltered a little when we started to go through the ceiling, but I hung on.  My room was on the top floor, and an instant later we were on the roof. We uncoiled our subtle bodies from the tantric position, although our physical bodies were in the room below still locked in the embrace.   Victor suggested that we use the roof as a reference surface and stand on it, even though we could've flown or floated at will. I looked around at the view. A faint glow lingered in the west, but the stars had come out - it was a truly beautiful evening. Victor raised his arms and chanted a long sequence of syllables that began and ended with "Thule". I looked up, and it seemed like some of the stars had detached themselves from heaven and were coming down toward us. They circled around and spiralled closer, and now I could discern that each one was a glowing human form. They were the angels. Would they burn? Would they strike my soul with fear? No ~ instead my heart leapt for joy. In a graceful aerial dance, the angels ~ or MetaThuleans ~ alighted on the roof around us, and I felt nothing but ecstasy and pleasure. What a heavenly reunion we had! I remembered all their names, but the speech of Thule is so subtle that I haven't yet devised a way to write them down (though Victor and I are working on it!). At the very end we all embraced in a big angelic hug, with the two of us in the middle. I think they would've carried us right up to Thule, except that our physical ears picked up the polite but insistent tapping of the nurse upon the door, and so we bid our fond good-byes and sank back down through the floor to the room, and into our carnal bodies. "Good heavens!" said the nurse when we let her in, "did you forget the time?" "Yes," I said, "when you're in heaven, you tend to do that." 21. Miraculous Conception It was wonderful to get home the next day. I told the story of my experience to everybody, and at one point Alethea said, "Wow, I feel like I'm having a deja vu from when Victor told us about his trip a couple of days ago." That made me realize how similar the two experiences were in their otherworldly strangeness ~ yet really they were very different. Clearly I didn't go to any of the same places that Victor did - except at the very end, when I wound up in the Ultrasphere. "We need to explore it some more/' said Victor. "We're getting to the point where we have the ability to go and look around in the metasphere on our own steam. We don't need to die and come back any more in order to do it!" "It's still kind of scary/' I said. "Yes," said John Harlequin, "and what happened yesterday shows how dangerous it is. It seemed terrific when the entity started to manifest in the circle, but then. . . well, we all saw what happened." "Oh, its okay now," I said. "I'm cured, I atoned my karma. I can be with the angels again!" They all bubbled up in surprise at that, and wanted me to explain it. So I finished telling the story of my experience, and we brainstormed for awhile on the possible meanings and implications. None of us had any conclusive answers, but one thing stood out: we obviously shared a certain soul-essence which centered on a mysterious celestial region called Thule.  Beyond that point, however, things started to get fuzzy and confusing. Even though this quality seemed in some ways like the universal essence of humanity, it was also somehow particular and exclusive ~ everybody was human, but not everybody was a Thulean. And furthermore, the attempt to unify everybody on an all-inclusive basis had the effect not only of stifling the sacred spark in Thuleans, but of destroying the humanity of everyone. Or so it seemed. We all felt pretty confused, but agreed that we did want to explore it some more together. We would try to call down the angels again - or the entities, or the MetaThuleans. But not today. Chronos and his family had to get back to their cabin in Humboldt County, while John was heading in the opposite direction ~ he wanted to hang out in Santa Cruz for awhile. But we worked out our schedules and agreed that they would all come and visit us again on the Autumn Equinox, and we would do a ritual. My body healed so quickly that I was able to go back to work in just a few days. But I went through some difficult times in the weeks that followed, mainly because I was starting to see an overlay of the Macrobot on the material world, just like Victor did. He was very supportive, but he couldn't resist saying, "At least now there's two of us, so we know we're not crazy." "That's not necessarily so!" I said, and explained the psychological malady called folie a deux. But in my heart I knew it was real. I had seen it in the metasphere, and had barely escaped getting incorporated into the Macrobot myself. Obviously, those who had been permanently molded into components of the Macrobot could never see it for what it truly was ~ and they were the people who were defined as "sane"! The standard of sanity and humanness was now fixed by a reality that made a mockery out of both concepts. The good side was that, even though Victor and I were now both certifiably crazy by that skewed standard, we knew that in a real sense we were healthier and stronger than we had ever been, and were still developing in a real super direction. And so we decided at long last to have a baby. Victor had become so adept at tantra that he was able to have virtually a full orgasm without losing so much as a drop of semen. It was totally under the control of his will, and he could still ejacuate if he wanted to, but he hadn't done so in five or six months. This was good, because the principle was that you should save up your semen as long as possible before deliberately having an ejaculation to father a child - it gave more substance and potency to the sperm. So all we had to do was wait until right before my next period was due, for the most likely time of fertility. But then I got a shock. I thought back to when my last period was, and figured out the days. . . and discovered that I was overdue. The next period should've been a few days after the events on the hill; it was now over a week later and there was no sign of it. I had missed my period! It was inexplicable. I told Victor, and he was as mystified as me. I went to my doctor and got the test, and sure enough, I was pregnant. How had this happened? I wondered if there was any chance of a semen "leak" during any of the times we had made tantric love in the relevant stretch of time, notably that night in the hospital room. But Victor said that that was impossible ~ even if the process had somehow eluded his control, the sensation would've been not only noticeable to him, but blaringly obvious; it would've been like standing next to a railroad track and not noticing a freight train going by. He said, "Since all the possible explanations are ruled out, we have to start considering the impossible ones. And even then, the only one I can think of is that it somehow happened when we made love in the metasphere/' "What? You mean when you came to me in the pod?" "Right. We had a mutual orgasm, but only in our subtle bodies ~ obviously, since our physical bodies weren't even in contact. It was that orgasm that powered you across the Abyss." "And saved me from getting melted." "Yes. And then in the Ultrasphere you were holding a baby, which is an alternative form of the Star of Life. And then. . .." "And then I had to choose between life and death for the baby." Victor had his arm around me, and gave me a gentle squeeze as he said, "It wasn't just for the baby." "What do you mean?" "Well," he said, "why do you think you came back to life? Whenever a physical miracle happens, there's always a direct metaphysical cause." "So you're saying that in a sense I was the baby? That I was making a choice at my deepest core of being to live instead of die?" "That's exactly what I had thought. But now we're faced with another physical miracle." "You mean. . . a miraculous conception?" Victor laughed, and kissed me. "The Pope would approve of your terminology," he said.  "But yes, it looks like the whole sequence of events worked some potent magic. The essences of our subtle bodies commingled during our tantric act in the pod. Usually that can only spawn a magical child, a metaphysical entity. But then your act in the Ultrasphere not only saved your own life but potentized the magical conception all the way down into the material realm." My head was swimming from all this. "It still sounds pretty crazy," I said. "That's what you said last time," he reminded me, "and look what happened!" I reflected on it for a moment, and was struck by a disturbing thought: "Oh, Victor, do you think there might turn out to be something. . . y'know, weird or strange about the baby?" He broke into a big smile and said, "Nope, I don't think that at all." "You sound pretty sure." "Yes ~ I think this child will turn out to be just divine." The Wedding of Star and Shadow                                            FINIS