“So we are not in heaven?”
“Such questions cannot be answered until one’s eyes are opened. Then you will know where you are, and what must be done.”
“Is it purgatory, then?” I asked.
“Infinitely varied are the pathways and destinations of those I meet after their journey of light. Each is on his individual path to childship. The questions you ask have no meaning here until eyes are opened. Then the questions cease. Knowing will have come. Only then will you perceive what must be your destination.”
“What is mine?”
“When your eyes are opened, you will know.”
“What is this place called, then?”
“It is the Father’s Realm. It has no name, because all the names of creation are gathered up into it. For now you may simply call it the Hereafter. It is here for it is now. It is also after. You will choose which. It is the Garden at the Edge of Beyond. It is the Garden Where Eyes Are Opened. It may be the Pathway to Heaven. It may be the Pathway to Hell. It is the Land of Waking. It is the Region of Light. It is the Father’s Home, for all eternity is his home. Therefore, as I said, it is the Father’s Realm.”
“Even hell lies in his domain?”
“Of course. All lies in his domain. The purifying fires are his, for the accomplishment of his purposes. And now the first decision of your new life is at hand.”
“What am I to do?”
“You may continue deeper into the land of knowing, or you may turn around. If you turn back, you will return to life as you knew it. You will forget all this. It will be a dream that fades and is never remembered. Your life will go on.”
He paused. I was not sure whether I had heard him aright.
“Or you may remain and begin your pilgrimage,” he continued, “and choose to seek the truth that comes with the opening of your eyes. Such knowing will not come without pain. You have done much damage. You have deceived many. You have spoken of truth, but you have not been a man of truth. You have devoted your life to a lie. The reckoning is now at hand. There is much that you have to atone for, much to repent of. The way will not be easy. The fires of knowing will burn deeply into your soul. The wholeness of childship in these regions comes at great price. But you may put it off if you so choose.”
“If I do, what then? Will I return here in the future?”
“You will return. But not to the same place of beginnings. You must learn what there is to learn. Today you begin here. Tomorrow your beginning will be somewhere other than this, and far behind it. A year from now your beginning will be a thousand years further back than today. If you prolong the beginning, the journey will be infinitely more arduous and the flames infinitely more painful when the time comes. The Consuming Fire must enter your soul, whether you begin now or later. That is why men are called to begin early in what they call their lives on the other side of the light. Those who begin early to point their wills toward the light arrive much further along the road to childship than you have. They already have a gift to offer my Father. Unfortunately, you did not begin when you had the chance. You must therefore begin now, or later. Even here, as there, free will is my Father’s gift to you, and the most powerful tool for the building of your character. Now I must leave you.”
“And if I choose to go on?”
“You will be met.”
With these words, he walked on and disappeared from sight.
Four
The Naturalist
I stood bewildered, knowing that I stood between the here—or perhaps the then—and the after, which lay ahead of me… unknown and fearful.
I glanced back the way I had come. In the distance, though not so far away, the meadow through which we had been walking disappeared in such intense brightness that my hand shot up to shield my eyes. I was gazing into a sun that took up half the sky and was but a few hundred yards away. To retrace my steps toward it, the light would engulf me within minutes. As it had pulled me through the tunnel of luminescence into this strange land, this Garden, this Hereafter, I knew that it would likewise pull me back through it into my former life. I would awake and remember nothing. I would go on writing my books to persuade thousands of people, perhaps millions, that none of this was real, that no such Being as I had been speaking with existed, that this Hereafter lay as a mere figment in the imagination of small and stupid minds.
Here I stood in the middle of it. The reality of the moment was powerful upon my senses. I had never felt so alive in my life. Or was it my death? Whatever it was, I felt a physical tingle of life itself, a profound sense of Being-ness, of energy pulsating through me.
Could I go back… and simply forget? Could I say that this place did not exist… that he did not exist, when here they were in front of my very eyes?
Yet that was surely my destiny if I chose to return. I did not even think to doubt what he said.
And what of my next meeting with him? It would of a certainty prove more difficult than this. If he was right, it would carry far more painful consequences.
I turned after him again, hoping in vain to catch another sight of his retreating form, hoping, I suppose, to gain some inkling where he was bound, as if that might give me some idea of what lay in store for me if I remained.
Instead, I saw a man cresting the rise of the small hill in front of me. With brisk step he came walking straight toward me. He was dressed in a tweed suit and tie, with matching vest, suitably old-fashioned I would call it, as befit mid-nineteenth-century England, at least so I would have said of it in the world I had left behind. His head was bald on top, though with ample black hair on either side growing down onto the back of his neck. His round face was clean-shaven, with long black sideburns filling out the sides of his cheeks.
I knew him instantly.
I had never been too keen on mentors. I suppose one might say I was too proud, too in love with my own intellect to feel the need of a mentor or to value those who had influenced me. But as much as I might have called any man a mentor, this would be that man. His influence—on religion, on science, on philosophy, on education—was as profound as any man’s in history. He had literally changed the world, changed how people thought about everything.
He approached and greeted me by name. He was not smiling. Serious things were on his mind.
On the other hand, I was effusive as I told him what an honor it was to meet him.
“Don’t speak rubbish, man,” he said, cutting me off scarcely before I had begun. “There are millions here whom it would indeed be an honor to meet. But I am not one of them. I have been fortunate to encounter a few such individuals who have been sent to help me on my journey. But I am still not ready to venture into the high realms where most of them dwell. You and I are the least of the least. It is no honor for me to meet you, and I jolly well take no pleasure in it. If you knew what you were about, you would despise the very sight of me. It is part of my hell to have been chosen to lead you. It is a great mortification to my soul. If you had any idea what was at stake, you would realize what a humiliation it is for you to have been given me as a guide.”
“But I don’t…” I began. “I’m not sure I understand what you are—”
“We are two mangy curs living on the distant borders of the borderlands,” he said. “Do you not yet see what you are, and what I am? We are nothing. Nevertheless, we are in this together now and our paths will probably cross many times. We had similar careers, at least in their effect. Now we both must pay the price for our blindness. So talk of no more inanities of either of us having anything but contempt for what we once were. But come, I was sent to assist you in your decision.”
He turned and led me up the incline from which he had come. We reached the top and I gasped at the sight that met my eyes. A vast sea spread out before us. My eyesight had been imbued with such clarity that I could see for a thousand miles. It was a sea of humanity—thousands of men and women and children. They were all looking straight at me.
“They seem…
it is as if they know me,” I said in astonishment.
“Rather—of course they know you! They all know you. They once admired you. They looked up to you.”
“But who are they?”
“They are the millions who have read your book and heard you speak. Every one of them arrived here disbelieving in the Hereafter, to some degree because of you. Their journeys toward understanding have been set back aions—some to a greater, some to a lesser extent—because of you. The damage you inflicted in their lives is incalculable.”
His words stunned me.
“Do… do they all hate me?”
“My dear lad—of course not! There is no hatred here. Haven’t you guessed that yet? They feel nothing but sorrow for you. They know what suffering lies ahead for you on account of the burden of their deception. They are well past their own grievances by now. They are each on their individual paths to truth. They have only to bear the burden of their own folly. But you must share all their burdens, and all the pain for the deception you caused, for you furthered and helped crystallize the Great Lie within them.”
I could hardly fathom the scope of what he was saying.
“Imagine how it is for me,” my guide went on. “My influence on earth was vastly beyond yours. And it continues to grow. The millions to whom I must individually apologize for leading them astray are so many that I think I will never find them all. And they keep coming.”
“You have to apologize to each one?” I said in surprise.
“I do not have to, I want to. I would do no other. My heart’s desire is to be the child I was created to be. Atoning for the deceptions I have caused is intrinsic to my journey.”
“You say the child you were created to be.”
“Of course. What—you don’t think I evolved into the man I am? Surely you have seen enough already to recognize the folly of that idiotic teaching? I took you for a more rapid learner than that. We were all created. Everything was created according to the Plan. Every mutation, every natural selection I was so fond of, everything was created by design—don’t you see? I completely misread the evidence, lad. Millions after me built on those same faulty foundations. Now here you are, the latest proponent of the Great Lie. Why didn’t you all dig deeper into the evidence instead of drawing such juvenile conclusions about the evolutionary golden calf? How I wish you could have undone my theories and all those others of the so-called Enlightenment that contributed to the demise of faith. But all of you only built on our folly and continued to spread the Lie.
He sighed. I realized he had begun to cry.
“Don’t you see what we have done, you and I?” he went on. “We have to take account for it, so that we can rid ourselves of the Lie, and become the pure sons we were created to be. But ridding ourselves of the Lie takes eons. I am just begun. Now you must begin. That is why you must look into the eyes of these thousands in front of you. Their eyes pity you for the hell you must endure before childship is born within you.”
“Will I have to apologize to each one?”
“Like me, you will want to seek out every man, every woman, every child, however long it takes.”
“Why are you showing them to me now?” I asked.
“Because if you choose to return to what you call your former life, but which for you would only be a deepening death, the number of souls in this sea of your deception may be double, triple, or many times more than it is now. Your journey will be longer, your pain deeper, your hell more agonizing. Think of all the souls you can save from the anguish of unbelief by putting a stop to your own hand in the Lie, and by making your own beginning now. The longer you delay, the deeper must burn the flames of your waking.”
“What if I went back and tried to undo some of the damage?”
“Don’t you understand? If you go back, you will forget all this. You will again be consumed by the arrogance of intellectualism and pride.”
The formerly revered Naturalist turned and walked away.
Again I knew that I was meant to follow.
Five
Unsettling Vistas Beyond
The sea of humanity disappeared from my sight. We were moving in the opposite direction. Also gone was the huge orb of brilliance that had been my doorway of light. Or moving in the opposite direction, would it be a doorway into darkness back into my former life, back to the lodge in the Rockies, back into the oblivion of my unknowing? For an instant I wondered whether my opportunity had passed.
“You may still return through the portal,” said my guide to my unspoken question.
“You knew what I was thinking?” I asked.
“Of course. It is a faculty one develops here.”
“That must be wonderful!” I exclaimed. “I always wanted to fly and read minds.”
“How little you know! You are a greater fool than I took you for. Soon you will be able to do both. But neither mean much here. Neither will accomplish what must be accomplished. Seeing into another’s thoughts can be a greater curse than blessing. However, it is used as one of the means to assist the opening of eyes.”
“So I may still return?”
“Free will remains always. Though usually it does not extend to that. I do not know why such a choice was given you. It is a rare opportunity. I would not have wanted it. I might have taken it,” he added with a shudder, as if the thought, even now, were too horrible to contemplate. “How long the return-portal will remain open, I do not know. If you are wise, you will not yield to what may be its temporary lure. Your future is here now. It has always been here, but now you know it. To turn back once the high journey has begun would be dreadful beyond words.”
“The high journey?” I repeated in question.
He did not reply. My gaze was drawn to follow his eyes into the distance. There, looming at the horizon, I saw a mountain range of what appeared to be endless and impossibly high peaks, set range upon range upon range into the infinite beyond. Remarkably, though they appeared higher than any mountains on earth, no snow capped their peaks. As it had been when I beheld the sea of faces, my vision was crystalline and seemingly endless. Brightness shone from them, but it was not from snow. The Mountains exuded their own light.
“Is that where we are bound?” I asked.
He nodded.
“How far is it?” I asked. “With my enhanced eyesight, it is difficult to tell. It must be a hundred miles.”
A contemptuous snort sounded from my guide’s mouth.
“A thousand?” I ventured.
“My dear boy—distances here are not measured in miles! Don’t you yet know what kind of place this is?”
“How are they measured?”
“In aions, of course.”
“Don’t you mean eons?”
“I mean aions.”
“What does time have to do with distance?” I asked, still misunderstanding him.
“Our progress toward the high places is measured in aions.”
“Well then, those Mountains must be several aions away!” I said, humorously I thought.
My guide did not find it so.
“They are as many aions away as it takes. Everyone’s journey progresses along a different path. The aions required are up to you. The nature of what is required by each aion is defined by your individual path, no one else’s.”
“What are aions, then?” I asked. “Time or distance?”
“Both. For your understanding, still clouded with the veil of only partial seeing, you will at present best understand them as time.”
“How long is an aion?”
“As long as is required.”
“A day… a thousand years?”
“Either. Perhaps a billion. Everything here is according to what is required.”
Now I noticed several vertical tentacles, or wisps of some whitish, grayish mist that seemed rising from a valley on this side and below the foothills of the Mountains.
“What is that—” I began.
A pang of terror shot through my fr
ame.
“Is that… smoke?” I said.
My guide did not reply. He did not need to. I knew it was smoke!
“What is it coming from?” I asked hesitantly.
“Surely you know,” he said at length. “It rises from the pit.”
“The pit!” I repeated, trembling.
“Of course. The smoke rises from the fires of the Great Furnace.”
“The fires. You mean—”
“It has gone by many names through the years—Hades, Sheol, the Pit, the Place of the Dead. Surely you were not so unschooled in the beliefs of your adversaries not to know all about it.”
“I didn’t believe in hell any more than… I believed in him.”
“Now you know the reality of both.”
“Once I arrived here, and saw the meadow and field and woodland. Then when he met me… I thought that he would perhaps not send me—”
“Send you,” he interrupted. “He explained that to you already. You will not be sent. You will choose the fire.”
“Why would I choose the fire?”
“To complete the final aion of your journey. To give you the new kind of life that is required once you embark into the foothills.”
“Does everyone pass through it?”
“I cannot say. That is a mystery not revealed to those of us down here. All I know is that many do, including, I am told, much of the religious clergy.”
“How can that be?” I asked.
“The requirements of the Great Furnace and the severity of its flames depend on how much of the Self was purged away before. Whether some find themselves directly among the Mountains, such mysteries are unknown to me. I am told it is so. But everyone down here must pass through the fire to reach the Mountains.”
“That valley and… the pit do not appear so very big.”
“It is far away. You cannot see it clearly. It is as big as it needs to be. Its fires burn deep. They burn inward, not outward. Its depths are unfathomable. There are some, I am told, who are so deep in the pit that it may take a million years before they see the light. Some aions are very long indeed.”
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