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This chapter is a little different than any other. Many people, if writing about their whole lives would say that their middle school years were difficult. My middle school years were in fact quite difficult., Over the years my view of the years has changed but for a long time almost all the recollections were painful. But over the years, I established some better relationships with some of my former classmates and a few years ago I started dating, became engaged to and married Clara – a girl I liked but did not know well  in those days. But those future outcomes were very far in the future when I lived through very important transition in my life. It is about coming home and planning to return in mid year to my old school. Mount Carmel Elementary School in Abbeville was where I had gone to first, third, fourth and half of fifth grade.  Now I would be returning there for some of my middle school year studies. This would be a very challenging transition for me and it was one I would think about a great deal over the rest of my life. Because it was so important, I want to take the time and space to outline its significance for my one theoretical reader who may dig this up from a digital archive in a few hundred years as part of a research project. In fact, I still entertain the hope that someone may read this chapter during my lifetime.   

I was heading back to Abbeville in the middle of the school year, wondering about what that would mean. In the world of memoirs and autobiographies there are many stories of education. I specifically have mentioned The Education of Henry Adams. I have also spent some time reading and entering into the school years of CS Lewis  chronicled in Surprised by Joy. The tortured experiences of a child of lesser means and great ability at elite British schools  in George Orwell’s Such, Such Were the Joys. Also read of the education of a member of Louisiana’s declining planter elite in his education by tutors in Lanterns on the Levee. But this was before J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels had enamored the world with a magical school like Hogwart’s. The Jesuit book in the first house we stayed in when we got to El Paso made school seem special but the idea of Robert Louis Stevenson was that boys were kidnapped or marooned  or separated from schools and had great adventures. The Jean George novel, My Side of the Mountain published in 1959 was popular among middle school readers and told about how a boy left New York City to live on his grandfather’s abandoned farm in the Catskills, learns a bunch of  life and wilderness skills on the way then ends up making his home in a hollow tree when he reaches the farm and finds that the farmhouse is gone. Tarzan by Edgar RIce Burroughs was the tale of a boy raised by the most humanlike (anthropoid) of all apes and by dim memories of his high born parents as well as access to their tools and library.     The idea of  school was  part of the good adventure of life in childhood for women writers like Louisa May Alcott in her novels, Little Women and Little Men.  It was certainly a central part of development for Laura Ingall WIlder in her Little House on the Prairie series of novels but for her and for Alcott, family, farm, nature , church and larger social trends overshadow the school as an institution. In C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the kids get scooped out of our universe to go to Narnia. They are school children in England but the adventures happen elsewhere – nobody at school would understand those adventures very well. Also in the same Lewis series the Narnian education includes a tutor who is a half dwarf who helps a young Prince Caspian to escape into the wilderness to find his future and survive his murderous usurping Uncle Miraz.  School itself in Narnia can be horrifying, here are two passages from the second to last chapter of Prince Caspian in the chronicles. That illustrate this point, the first is the boys school from the Telmarine occupation of Narnia..

At a little town half-way to Beaversdam, where two rivers met, they came to another school, where a tired looking girl was teaching arithmetic to a number of boys who looked very like pigs. She looked out of the window and saw the divine revelers singing up the street and a stab of joy went through her heart. Aslan stopped right under the window and looked up at her.

“Oh, don’t, don’t,” she said. “I’d love to. But I mustn’t. I must stick to my work. And the children would be frightened if they saw you.”

“Frightened?” said the most pig-like of the boys. “Who’s she talking to out of the window? Let’s tell the inspector she talks to people out of the window when she ought to be teaching us.”

“Let’s go and see who it is,” said another boy, and they all came crowding to the window. But as soon as their mean little faces looked out, Bacchus gave a great cry of Euan, euoi-oi-oi-of and the boys all began howling with fright and trampling one another down to get out of the door and jumping out of the windows. And it was said afterwards (whether truly or not) that those particular little boys were never seen again, but that there were a lot of very fine little pigs in that part of the country which had never been there before.

The second is the description of the girls school from the same day at the end of the Telmarine occupation of Narnia:

The first house they came to was a school: a girls’ school, where lot of Narnian girls, with their hair done very tight and ugly tight collars round their necks and thick tickly stockings on their legs, were having a history lesson. The sort of “History” that was taught in Narnia under Miraz’s rule was duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story.

“If you don’t attend, Gwendolen,” said the mistress, and stop looking out of the window, I shall have to give you an order-mark.”

“But please, Miss Prizzle – ” began Gwendolen.

“Did you hear what I said, Gwendolen?” asked Miss Prizzle.

“But please, Miss Prizzle,” said Gwendolen, “there’s a LION!”

“Take two order-marks for talking nonsense,” said Miss Prizzle. “And now – ” A roar interrupted her. Ivy came curling in at the windows of the classroom. The walls became a mass of shimmering green, and leafy branches arched overhead where the ceiling had been. Miss Prizzle found she was standing on grass in a forest glade. She clutched at her desk to steady herself, and found that the desk was a rose-bush. Wild people such as she had never even imagined were crowding round her. Then she saw the Lion, screamed and fled, and with her fled her class, who were mostly dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs. Gwendolen hesitated.

“You’ll stay with us, sweetheart?” said Aslan.

“Oh, may I? Thank you, thank you,” said Gwendolen. Instantly she joined hands with two of the Maenads, who whirled her round in a merry dance and helped her take off some of the unnecessary and uncomfortable clothes that she was wearing.

Wherever they went in the little town of Beruna it was the same. Most of the people fled, a few joined them. When they left the town they were a larger and a merrier company.

These two schools are described on the same day in the narrative as Aslan, the Christlike Lion god (in the company of the Pevensie girls on break from their schools in England) liberates the land for Old Narnians and the Telmarines who are willing to live as Narnians in peace with mystical races and Talking Beasts. The other Telamrines who surrender are sent to a remote island on Earth (when the first Telmarines came) not to a modern country with modern schools. There they may beuld a better society than any theu have yet known. 

  .  

We had returned home from our time in the United Kingdom when Dad was studying at King’s College at the University of London, my Mom’s brother – my Uncle Jed– had traveled with us and gone to school at an ENglish Boarding School. We had returned from the time we lived in Manhattan, New York City, New York.  In addition, we frequently had gone on trips from Abbeville and returned to speak about these trips and the places we had seen with our friends and acquaintances in Abbeville. I  also  knew that we had seen my Uncle Jim on our most recent trip and we had traveled across the country once and stopped in to see my Uncle WIll  who was in a military school out of state. On another trip, we had seen where my Dad;s sister Susan was living in San Francisco. We were accustomed to traveling and to telling the story of places we had gone and what we had learned from the trip. The time we had been back after the visit to EL Paso was somewhat different. There was a sense of having had a great experience and we had some interesting stories. There was the joy of Sarah’s birth and the joy of sharing our faith. But there was also the sense that we had no real place to live out our new experience and there was a real sense that we had lost our old place.

The idea of creating meaning through taking a journey and finding some transformation in the journey is fairly universal. Those who study stories have noted this. 

12. Return with the Elixir

In which our Hero has a triumphant homecoming.

Finally, the Hero gets to return home. However, they go back a different person than when they started out: they’ve grown and matured as a result of the journey they’ve taken.

But we’ve got to see them bring home the bacon, right? That’s why the protagonist must return with the “Elixir,” or the prize won during the journey, whether that’s an object or knowledge and insight gained.

Of course, it’s possible for a story to end on an Elixir-less note — but then the Hero would be doomed to repeat the entire adventure.

https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/story-structure/heros-journey/#12__return_with_the_elixir

I am not sure what degree the feeling of a hero’s return was there for my parents but I think very little of it was there for me. On the other hand VInce Listi was going to have a job in ministry in our home town and he and his wife had been involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the region. That meant they were at leat a little bit involved in the process of payer about forming a residential community in an old Hawthorne Street Housing complex, not far from where they were moving. They were moving into the complex of buildings for th defunct African American Catholic Parish of Our Lady of Lourdes, where the Church had burnt down and the school of St. Elizabeth Seton Elementary was slowly winding down towards closing for ever. The Listis and Bernards would share the large abandoned rectory rent free and Vince Listi would direct the Christian Service Center operating out of the abandoned convent that had housed the sister who served the parish. I am writing this memoir in 2024 and this year there is a pretty successful movie called Cabrini.   The community of nuns that had served the parish and lived in the convent that would become the  Christian Service Center  were members of Mother Cabrini’s order. The site of all this would be sad and also hopeful with renovations and repurposing.

Our family had no job there and would be renting a house at first. I tried to contribute a faith filled enthusiasm for what Mom and Dad were doing but I was actually feeling a significant amount of doubt and anxiety about all the facts that I just mentioned. When I went to school I would have my own room in a fairly big house across from the old convent and we had a decent yard and the house we rented was in decent shape and had a porch swing and a large sitting room. But I felt very ill at ease. Almost all the kids who were  my neighbors went to public schools that I had not even visited in town. In my old neighborhood, most kids went to the same Catholic school I had attended. One of my best friends from the shool lived not too far away. That was awkward for me because he had always said that his house was the boundary of The Sticks (also the Styx), the mixed race and somewhat rougher neighborhood in which I now clearly resided. My parents seemed to have a different point of view about all of these changes than I could come up with.  I was pretty stressed and would be stressed again and again. Over the years other things would stress me but this period was very stressful.  

I never felt that I had a lot of margin for error to live on in life. I always felt a fair degree of insecurity even when others might have said that I was privileged. But to return to our home town where we had been prosperous to live in a state of  some kind of run down position as failed missionaries seemed almost the hardest thing in the world. In addition, Mom and Dad had resigned their jobs as teachers at St. John’s Marist Boys School  (Dad’s job) and St. Mary’s Marist Girls School in Tonga where they had a salary and a house provided for the work they did, in addition people had been sending donations from home to the infirmary run by the Marist nuns where we volunteered. Life had seemed to make some sense. In Samoa they had been houseparents for Youth WIth a Mission and the culture of the organization was that they would raise their own support from donors, but they got some room and board. However, they had not raised much support. In New Mexico nothing had gelled from a lifestyle point of view and in El Paso the La CUeva ministry had not worked out for the long term, partly because it was a ministry that required some SPanish speaking and we did not speak enough Spanish to amount to anything. Then Dad had mowed pastures while living  in Abbeville. But since then we had wandered without any real effort to take root economically. I felt that Dad’s view of Gospel Poverty was somehow unhinged and not in sync with the gospels or the epistles or the Acts of the Apostles which he quoted. But I also believed it was very possible that God had called my Dad to the impossible task of creating a path  that would allow Catholic families to do new and beautiful things for God without being trapped in a belief that such adventures were only for clerics and religious.  I  also believed it was very possible that God had called my Dad to the impossible task of creating a path  that would allow American families to do new and beautiful things for God without being trapped in a belief that such adventures were only for those not obligated to spending all their time chasing what Dad had referred to a s the Almighty Dollar  in my early childhood when he was an atheist and he half loved money and half loather the idea of defining everything by its dollar value. I also believed it was very possible that God had called my Dad to the impossible task of creating a path  that would allow people  with advanced degrees and lots of worldly experience a chance to do new and beautiful things in spiritual theology without being trapped in a belief that such adventures were only for clerics and trained theologian on the one hand or simplistic populist preachers stirring emotion on the other hand. I just wondered if he could follow God’s call without doing too much irreparable harm to my Mom, my sister and myself. So far I had determined that I would have to live a triple life. First, I would sincerely seek to find my way to serve and follow Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church and to be a good son and brother in my missionary family. Secondly, I would seek to make sure that I was going the things that needed to be done for me to thrive and have a future and to contribute to the family’s well being and I would learn to cloak these rational behaviors in language and appearances that would not encourage the parents that I could not trust to derail those plans – I would live a life under cover. Thirdly, I would live a life responding to an ever increasing  sense that I had limits some people did not have that were at odds with my needs and desires, my body and emotions would at various points just let me down and leave me feeling exhausted, pained and unable to act. I didn’t know how all of that would work out – but at 12 years old,  it seemed both certain that this was my path going forward and certain that it would be a heavy load.

The idea of heading home was hard but once we started on our way I was excited to see my grandparents. The future was mirky but it would be fun to reconnect with some things I knew. Today as I type the main draft of this chapter, I am back in Abbeville and have lived here for years. The way I live is not very much connected  to any of the ideas I had back then about life in Abbeville.  

The woman I am married to today had her own sorrows and I would not learn about them for a long time. I never formed a puppy love relationship in middle school with any of the girls at Mount Carmel Elementary. There were pretty many of such relationships. However, I did form a connection with a girl in the neighborhood that never went far enough or fast enough to really give me a solid reputation as a male of my age in my circle  – but it lasted for quite a while and had some key learning experiences as well.

The great consolation of my new life when we got back to Abbeville was very definite in  material terms was that I got a new bike as and early Christmas present. The cool bike was a ten speed English racer of any brand that was available at a good store..  My was what I asked for a three speed with wider tires and a very well made wire basket big enough to carry something substantial. I was happy that I I got it but I never looked cool on it. However, it could do what the other bikes could do and it also made possible some micro businesses.that I would launch.

On that bike made with a Columbia nameplate I could get all around Abbeville and the surrounding area and I did do that to a remarkable degree. I will return to those escapades in the next chapters.  Abbeville is my home at this writing as well. .   

I am writing a good bit of the main draft of this thirteenth chapter of my online memoir during Easter Week. That is the week that follows Easter Sunday, Holy Week is the Week that precedes the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday.  Overall Holy Week was a good week with some things happening that could be good for Clara and I. But for each separately and both as a couple, we are weary as we are starting the Easter season that runs through at least to Pentecost. The sleepless hours in the middle of the night that plagued me terribly for years are with me now. I can hope that this will not be a long term pattern but it is a sign of my anxiety and stress. In turn this makes me more tired which makes it harder to do the things that I have to do and so that increases my anxiety and stress which makes it harder for me to sleep.  But that is only part of the story. Let’s take Easter Monday for example, I did manage to do some work around the house and to have a workout at the gym and also to spend some gym time visiting with Clara who also works out there. I felt some physical impairment that was hard to define and a flare up of my vertigo, my tinnitus was worse than usual and I had aches and pains. But I managed to set up an application for an appointment the next morning. Clara and I had some good visits because the office where she has been working in various capacities was closed on Easter Monday. She works at a Catholic Church Office and Holy Week is a very busy time for the church.  We had leftovers of the turkey I had roasted for ourselves and others to share on Easter Sunday. We were able to share wonderful hamburgers for supper that were made from the prim beef patties we had bought on Holy Saturday at Sams Club in Lafayette..

Tuesday I woke up and made some coffee, Clara and I visited and then she went to work. I had sold some insurance by the time my 10:30 morning sales/training meeting rolled around. I managed to do some laundry as well as having a good meeting. Then at noon we ate our leftover stew that I had cooked and served days ago and then reheated and plated for our lunch.   I have also had a chance to see that many of our plants are thriving, the leftovers from the food I cooked last week are being enjoyed and getting eaten. I took a good nap and had a successful sales/ training  meeting with Physicians Mutual. I also managed to chat with Clara about our upcoming schedule and I managed to  get a short nap. 

Wednesday I was too anemic to donate plasma but I did some house and yardwork and insurance work as well. Then on Thursday I did more around the house planned Clara’s sixtieth birthday party and did a little yard work and.some insurance training. In all this I also sought to be a Christian and an American and to fulfill other roles. Further I worked on Clara’s 60th birthday party. I live a pretty normal kind of life in my hometown.

My mother’s first book, Go You Are Sent: An Incredible Odyssey of Faith (which was published in 1995) ends with the same October  culmination of our stay in Brown’s Cove, Virginia  that begins her second book. The second book is called, Our Family’s Book of Acts: To Love and Serve the Lord (published in 2012). However, before the first chapter of the second book of out family story she has a page of acknowledgements;

Acknowledgements

This book has been written in little chunks of time over the span of a decade or more. Mainly I want to thank Frank, my knight in shining armor, for standing firm and not allowing me to drop this project. His insistence on accuracy and attention to grammar was essential. I want to thank my fabulous family for living our book of Acts. So many FMC missionaries have contributed what they thought was a small thing but really made a big difference. I am truly grateful for all of the people and places in the book. They have made our story possible.I thank my Dad who encouraged me and prayed over my manuscript from his sickbed. I thank Beau for his earlier insights and editing of the entire book. Mary painstakingly edited several chapters from the second draft. I thank David and VIcki Fruge who lent me their camp, that is a perfect writer’s haven. I thank Elizabeth Hollier for proofreading and editing. I thank John Paul for his work and cover design. Till T. Summers has done the final corrections. Sarah’s book Eat Raw Omelets, inspired me to finish mine, and that really was the catalyst. Thank you, Sarah. Without the technical computer assistance from James Franke, this work would not have made it to press. 

Thank You Jesus,  thank You Holy Spirit, and thank you, God My Father for all the miracles and especially the miracle of finishing this work.

“But they went forth and preached everywhere while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.” Mark 16:20 NAB    

The list of people, accomplishments and  acknowledgements at the start of Mom’s second book are in contrast to the isolated family in Brown’s Cove, borrowing a telephone to call my mother’s father on his birthday. The first book ends in an oddly failed sort of place to end a memoir, testimony book or autobiography. Yes, the main characters in the first  book have had a transformative arc of experience. Yes, they have gone to interesting places and met interesting people and learned some things.  Yes, they  have had journey as missionaries – but they are headed back home and the book doesn’t really speak to whatever could have been qualified as their years of limited missionary success. If I live to finish this memoir, I will tell of my years distributing Mom’s first book in many places around the country and around the world. I never was able to really express the disappointment in how the book ended. In my own generally ugly view of how life and the world work, it seemed sadly fitting that I felt I could not distribute the second book due to malicious characterizations of my work distributing the first work. There are many reasons why the second book was not nearly as widely read as the first. But I do think that the years I spent developing a distribution network were one reason that the first  book was more widely read. Both books have some passages and some perspectives I  don;t agree with or support. There are facts that I dispute in each book. Some things in the second book disappointed me a great deal because they were errors added after the editing of her first draft into the one I handed in to her as she mentions in the acknowledgements. But overall her book is more fair in telling how our family did some good in the missionary lifestyle for which we had sacrificed so much.   

 I knew that I was dreaming. I knew it was not the same kind of dream as other dreams.This is where we cross a certain threshold, Here in this thirteenth chapter of my memoir we (“we” being me and my theoretical reader)  reach a place where there is no longer any safe crawling back to a safe reality. From now on I am simply not going back to the realm of keeping dreams and waking thoughts separate. Now is the point where I admit that I have had a long history of connections with something that I cannot prove exists. Yes, I believe in God and I pray. Yes I work had every day to learn all I can from science, from the great learned traditions and from nature and art in an experiential way.  But beyond all of that, there is something else. There is something that matters and  yet is of little significance because my life’s efforts have been of little significance. I have had a lifelong interaction with extraterrestrial intelligence. That is what this chapter is largely about.

 Here comes the part of the narrative where I come to the first of a number of points at which I claim to be separated out from the mass of men. Remember that during my early childhood I paid great attention to the space program. That continued to the degree that it was possible for me to follow the news about NASA and the agencies they cooperated with and competed against across the world.I was also aware of the fact that the symbol of Judaism was a star, the symbol of Islam was a crescent Moon, the Angels in the stained glass and paint of the great Cathedrals of europe and elsewhere often had wings. I was aware of all the mountaintops in the Judeo- Christian tradition and also of Mount Olympus, the worship of the sun in many societies and the Moon and stars in others. I was further aware that Jesus, Mary, Elijah and Enoch were believed to have been taken up into heaven. Jacob whose other name was Israel had seen a ladder with Angels going up and down from Heaven to Earth and back. .  

“When it comes to science, ours is a paradoxical era. On the one hand, prominent physicists proclaim that they are solving the riddle of reality and hence finally displacing religious myths of creation. That is the chest-thumping message of books such as The Grand Design by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. A corollary of this triumphal view is that science will inevitably solve all other mysteries as well.

On the other hand, science’s limits have never been more glaringly apparent. In their desperation for a “theory of everything”—which unifies quantum mechanics and relativity and explains the origin and structure of our cosmos—physicists have embraced pseudo-scientific speculation such as multi-universe theories and the anthropic principle (which says that the universe must be as we observe it to be because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it). Fields such as neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics and complexity have fallen far short of their hype.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/is-scientific-materialism-almost-certainly-false

The idea of what is real is only one of many imitations on what is permitted to discuss and what is allowed to be taken seriously. Is it possible that the universe is magical, miraculous and divine in a very literal sense and that some people experience its most magical aspects more directly than others?  Here are some other thoughts about all of that.

Naturalism remains a popular philosophy in the academic world. Its articulation varies, so let’s be clear what we mean. Theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll’s definition will suffice: “Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world—the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world—no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings.” Advocates of naturalism tend to regard it as the inevitable accompaniment of a scientific mindset. It seems appropriate, therefore, to undermine it using the most fundamental of sciences: quantum physics.

Given its scientific pretensions, it’s appropriate that the doctrine that the natural world is self-contained, self-explanatory, and exceptionless is at least falsifiable. All we need is one counterexample to the idea that nature is a closed system of causes and effects, or one clear example of nature’s non-self-sufficiency, to be justified in rejecting naturalism, yet contrary evidence and considerations abound. Rather than trying to cover the gamut of cosmological fine-tuning, the origin of biological information, the origin and nature of consciousness, and the evidentiary value of near-death experiences,  let’s focus on the implications of quantum physics as a less familiar aspect of naturalism’s failure.

Quantum physics sets aside classical conceptions of motion and the interaction of bodies and introduces acts of measurement and probabilities for observational outcomes in an irreducible way not ameliorated by appealing to our limited knowledge. The state of a quantum system is described by an abstract mathematical object called a wave function that only specifies the probability that various observables will have a particular value when measured. These probabilities can’t all equal zero or one and measurement results are irreducibly probabilistic, so no sufficient physical reason exists for one outcome being observed rather than another. This absence of sufficient material causality in quantum physics has experimentally confirmed consequences that, as we shall see, put an end to naturalist conceits.

The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment provides a good example with which to start. This experiment measures which path a particle took after wave function interference inconsistent with particle behavior has already been created. The interference can be turned off or on by choosing whether or not to measure which way the particle went after the interference already exists. Choosing to look erases wave function interference and gives the system a particle history. The fact that we can make a causally disconnected choice whether wave or particle phenomena manifest in a quantum system demonstrates that no measurement-independent causally-connected substantial material reality exists at the microphysical level.

In the course of this book I will declare a number of things that will be very hard for any potential reader to believe. But this is the first time I mention a recurring series of dreams that developed continually over my life. In the dream I went to a sort of conduit usually with a number of companions, who varied and none of whom were people from my life. On the way to the conduit I would see my home and the Earth and our sun shrinking away as I left them behind. Inside the conduit was an environment hard to define. On the other side was a vast glowing planet with a density unlike anything but with a form like that of an Earthlike planet. In future dreams I would come to see that the plant had a diameter of 1,000 lightyears but it did not compress because all matter in it was more charged than the matter of our universe can be.In One hemisphere nad a continent that was terraced mountains of many kind in rough rings and the lower levels and perfect rings at the higher levels rising for light years above sea level. There was a vast shelf around the edge of the continent and Seven great falls thundering into the sea. The sea was heavy with islands beyond thins thundering  roiling region and some had. Tower with bridges to the continent. The top of the mountain had a might growing cloud and sphere city resting on a tower and there was the throne of God. Immortal  Angels, Flying Beast and the spirits of mortal blessed beings in an after life were there. The rest of the Continent also resembled various visions of paradise and heaven people have had. The islands and seas were full of ELvish, Magical, dwarfish and mystical races and a few humans who had gone there alive and reproduced. The open seas were dominated by Leviathans a thousand miles long,.At the equator those things that died in the temporal realms of the seas were spawned or incarnated as themselves in most cases. On the other side of the globe was a hemisphere in dimness and twilight with leave that gave light more than the received it, Here there were beings call Neutral and Angel and Uninformed Angels and the souls of beings neither damned nor redeemed. But further in the continent were the tiers of the pit once occupied by a different civilization but now mostly the abode of damned angels and damned mortal in various torments and societies. At the bottom near the center of the planet was the City of Pandemonium and the throne of the one we call the Devil but also his prison.   Past him he watches a stream of souls pass who were his property by their deep sins in life but by God’s mercy pass to the winding ladders of purgatory and energy near the center if the blessed continent.  The world has three inhabited moons, one above the bottom pole fixed and unmoving and two  which are each spinning on their axis and orbiting the equator. Each of these is inhabited and bigger than any star in our universe. I f I typed for the rest of my life I would capture only part of what I perceived or imagined of this world in my dreams.

But for now I merely reveal that I had the dreams. The rest we will look at in time.