“Was it really that important a decision?”
“The most important of all. The first step always is. You know what they say, the greatest step is that out of doors. You decided to leave your prison. Of course the farthing must still be paid. But you have begun. Many never choose to leave the living death. They may leave any time, but they do not. You did. Thus a new destiny awaits you.”
I could tell that Lelia was puzzled by his cryptic words. I was even more surprised that I understood what he was talking about. I did not, however, recognize the full implication of his words for me—that my own uttermost farthings also yet had to be paid.
“Was there really a bus that would have come?” Lelia asked.
A humorous smile spread over the man’s face. He began to chuckle as if from an inside joke with himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “That is one of the delightful mysteries of this place—the blending of fact and fiction into this new Reality. I must admit, I am still getting used to it myself. The bus… yes, that is rather an interesting question for you to ask me. But the bus was not part of your story, nor was it the reason I have been sent to you.”
“I only decided to come out of the town a short while ago—less than an hour. Where were you sent from?”
Again the man chuckled.
“I was sent a great while before that. As I say, you have been expected for some time.”
“How could that be? No one knew I was going anywhere, not even me.”
“Such things are known because they are ordained. Your coming out was known before you knew of it.”
“Who sent you?”
“He who ordains all wakings, all growings, all becomings.”
“I suppose you mean God,” said Lelia.
“There is none other,” replied the man.
“Why you? Who are you anyway?”
“I am merely one of many in his service. But I am considered something of an expert in the importance of choice upon ultimate destiny. I am often sent to explain such things.”
He now turned toward me.
“You have a question, I believe?” he said.
“Yes… oh, I forgot—you knew what I was thinking!” I replied.
He nodded with a smile. “And since you wanted to ask,” he said, “I spent most of my life in England. But as you suspected, I was born in Ireland. I suppose you might say that I was Irish by blood and English by vocation. I was a university don.”
“It is just that I am wondering about that peculiar town back there. It was the most extraordinary place.”
“I am quite familiar with it, actually,” replied the man, again with a knowing smile of humor.
“It seemed huge beyond imagining. Yet I never saw another living soul but Lelia.”
“That is because it is not a town of living souls but of dying souls. It is one of many towns of living death. You must have guessed as much. Surely you understood why they had all built high walls of isolation.”
“But so much of it seemed uninhabited, especially the older places. Some of the houses seemed a thousand years old.”
“They were indeed. There is no decay anywhere here—not in the Mountains nor the towns of death… no rust, no mildew, no rot, no moths or termites. Once built, their houses last forever.”
“Why are so many unoccupied?”
“There are more people behind those walls than you think. But they keep to themselves, which is what they want—even though it consumes them with every hidden evil of self-preoccupation. But you are right, many of the houses in the center are indeed empty now. When a newcomer arrives, he may decide to settle there. You might have decided to stay rather than continue your journey. The quest for the high places is long, arduous, and filled with more self-knowing than most desire. Some indeed go only part way. They settle in one of the towns. They may move into an abandoned house or may build a new one.
“But invariably, before long there is a dispute with a neighbor or someone decides he’s too good for his neighborhood. Or perhaps lust and greed and envy get the better of him and he decides he wants a bigger and better house. It may be that he simply gets so sick of everyone else that he just wants to be left alone. So he packs up and moves toward the outskirts where there is less congestion. His new neighborhood is probably half empty already because most of its original inhabitants have thought the same things before him and have already moved further out themselves to get further away from their neighbors.
“So he may find an abandoned house he likes and move into it. But eventually the petty annoyances and irritations and grumblings and selfishnesses return and he moves again. Dissatisfaction and discontent are the chief characteristics of the place. But it is usually dissatisfaction with everyone else. It takes aions to birth in them the discontent with oneself that leads to life.”
“So everyone just keeps moving… over and over… further away from all the others?”
He nodded. “Self-preoccupation has been driving them all further out for centuries. As they go, they always try to better the houses of their neighbors. As new arrivals settle, modern styles come with them. Over thousands of years, as the houses spread further from the ancient center, they became larger and more elaborate. But pride and judgment and self-centeredness continue to eat away at their souls.”
“How do such magnificent houses get built if everyone is alone?”
“All anyone has to do is think up the design of their new palace or mansion and there it is. All their needs are met. Whatever food or luxury they desire appears before them. They need no one. All human exchange is therefore corrupted by the cancer of self-centeredness. Service to others is unknown. The town has been spreading out for thousands of years. Some of those on the outskirts keep telescopes on their roofs. They are not for looking at stars but are trying to see the houses furthest away, some of them thousands of miles away by now.”
“Even so,” I said in astonishment, “the place couldn’t be that big. Surely many more people than this have died since… well, you know, since the beginning. It couldn’t be big enough to hold everybody.”
“Don’t forget that a large number are already in the Mountains,” the man replied. “Many more are on their way to the fire. And this is but one of thousands of such towns of death. The people in this town were put together for a reason. Everything has purpose, though many refuse to fall in with it. These people are here to learn to look inward. In all the towns that purpose is accomplished by unique means. There are towns where forgiveness is the doorway of decision, others where self-sacrifice is the needful door, others where the laying down of power and prestige and self-importance must come first, still others where Mammon and greed and lust are the barriers that must be relinquished. In all the towns the purpose is the same—that their inhabitants step through the door that will begin the journey toward life.”
“But then,” I said, looking about, “we seem to have left the town almost immediately. Once we began walking in this direction, the terrain quickly changed and the town came to an end.”
“Can’t you guess why?” he replied.
“I… I don’t know,” I said hesitantly.
“You are moving in the direction of life. Lelia looked in the mirror. She knew what she had become. With that self-knowing, she had begun to live. She stepped out of doors.”
“I think I see.”
“She did not realize it yet, but her journey had begun. Instinctively the town’s inhabitants realize that this is the direction of self-knowing. It may also be the direction of the ultimate fire, though many choices yet remain between here and there. Therefore, the town spreads out infinitely in the opposite direction. They want to get as far from the fire as possible. That is also why they forget what they were told. They choose to forget. They want to forget. They are miserable. Yet they go on choosing every day to be miserable. They choose the hell of their lonely lives of isolated dissatisfaction. They have everything they want. But they never desire the one thing that will give
them happiness.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“It is the only thing—the deathing of their wills into his. They would rather be miserable than face the source of their misery. Self-loathing is the beginning of the pilgrimage that ends in the fire. It is there that self-death ends in life. But the Scotsman, when you meet him, will explain all that further. It would be too much for you now.”
Ten
The Importance of Choice
All this time Lelia had listened thoughtfully.
“What must I do now?” she asked after some time. From her voice it was clear that she was overwhelmed by all she had heard. “I have been in the town so long,” she went on, “most of what I was told when I first came has grown distant in my memory. It is just as you say—I have forgotten.”
“Then you must remember,” said her guide. “No one is told twice.”
“It was so long ago.”
“If you are willing, it will return to you. But to remember you must go back.”
“Go back… where?”
“To the fork in the path where you chose death rather than life. It is where your unknowing began, and therefore also where your knowing must begin.”
“Could I not just go on from here?”
“There is no going forward without first going back. All wrongs must be set right. They cannot be set right except where they went wrong. The only way forward is back to the point of wrong.”
Lelia glanced around in confusion.
“But I have no idea where I am. Which direction should I go?”
“You must go back to the wood where your original path first diverged. You must go back to your wrong choice if you would set it right.”
“How will I ever find it? That must have been hundreds, thousands of years ago.”
“Have you not yet learned that time is measured differently here? It was an aion ago? In leaving the town of the living death, you have left that aion behind. You have embarked on a new aion. Your future has begun. The wood might be only a day away, who can tell?”
“How will I know how to find it?”
“All who seek truth are shown the way. You will be shown. I was sent to accompany you for the beginning of your journey.”
He turned in my direction.
“And me?” I said.
“When your path looked forward and back,” he replied, “you chose wisely. You stepped forward. Your journey is thus well begun. I would congratulate you for that step. But one is hardly to be congratulated for what he is compelled to do.”
“Was I compelled? I thought it was my choice.”
“You were compelled. It was your choice. You chose what we must choose in the end.”
Again, I was confronted by the conundrum of mutually exclusive opposites that seemed so prominent here. Everyone spoke in mysteries. Yet I knew that no words were wasted, that everything carried more meaning than I was capable of apprehending. Was this, as I had been taught in one of my earliest classes in mathematics, the place where parallel lines met, where the square root of minus one actually existed… Infinity itself? Was there truly such a place as Infinity… and had I landed in the middle of it?
“To answer your puzzle,” the man said, intruding into my thoughts, “yes—this is indeed infinity. The spiritual mathematics here is completely different. The rules change on this side of the Father’s Realm. God’s economy is not the same as you knew it in your former life. The math there was designed for mortals to grasp it. Here all must be fulfilled.”
“I must admit that it is very confusing.”
He smiled. “Everything will become increasingly clear,” he said. “Truth on this side is much larger than could possibly have been understood within the limited perceptions of it that went by many names on earth. Those were but shadowy hints of the real thing. Here, all is brought into unity. Many Christians when they arrive are more bewildered than you.”
“How can that be?” I asked.
“They expect their doctrines to function by earthly parameters. They continue to apply earthly words and formulas to high truths that can now only be apprehended by entering a higher plane of understanding altogether. Some simply cannot make the transition. They are so bound by earthly explanations that they cannot see all the way into the eternal truths toward which those limited explanations pointed. But all this,” he added, “is a side issue to my purpose.
“Your next lesson is one I was sent to give you,” he went on. “Do you recall when he asked you to give him what you had made of yourself when you began your journey?”
I nodded.
“You did not know it—well, you should have known it… we all should have—but all your life, with every tiny choice and decision and movement of your will, you were slowly turning the central part of yourself, your intrinsic character, the person you were, into something a little different from what it was before.”
“How could that be?” I asked. “Every choice?”
“Of course. Your will was the essential you. It was the tool God gave you with which to build your character. That’s what he was asking for—to see what you had done with it.”
“How did the tool—my will, you say?—how did it work?”
“Your will is nothing more than the muscle of character. Every time you flexed your will, you either strengthened the muscle of decision toward good and selflessness, or you strengthened it in the opposite direction—toward evil and selfishness. Even the tiniest choices made their mark. Every choice matters—whether an unkind comment or the smile at a lewd joke or taking the time to help one in need. Taken together, they exerted a cumulative effect. All your life, you were gradually turning yourself into a better and more selfless man, or into a more self-centered man. It is not for me to say which. We each must gaze into that mirror for ourselves. The self-knowing of the inner mirror is the whole purpose on this side of the Mountains.”
He fell silent and allowed me to absorb the magnitude of his words.
“Now the time has come,” he continued at length, “for you to see those tiny moments for what they were, and to behold what you made of yourself by them. It is time for you to reflect on that myriad of choices, and to see what was at stake in each.”
Again he paused. “There lies your way,” he said. “You are already moving toward your destiny. Even as Lelia must go back, you must go on.”
He pointed to his right. I was shocked to see that all trace of green had disappeared in the direction he indicated. There were no trees, no shrubs, no grass. Far in the distance, but faintly visible amid heat waves that rose from the ground, I saw a small range of mountains. They were much different than the Mountains of Light. They looked barren, rocky, and foreboding. Between here and there lay the dunes and rocks and sand and dust of an inhospitable desert.
“It is the Desert of Introspection,” he said. “You must cross it alone. You must allow it to accomplish its work within you. Your way will be the way of solitude, the way of contemplation. You will not be met again until you reach the hills beyond.”
“It looks too dry and hot and lifeless to survive,” I said foolishly.
He smiled. “You forget where you are,” he said. “We are beyond death, though many are still dying because they refuse to die. However, your observation is not far wrong. You will find an oasis at the foot of the hills, otherwise you would surely despair if not perish outright. There you will find sustenance to continue your quest. But the revelations of that garden will be painful to bear. You will discover the anguish of the tiny moments of your past. You will see where they led.”
He spoke for several minutes and said much more. What he said would return to my memory later, when I needed to remember it.
Finally, he began to walk away. “We must leave you now,” he said.
Lelia glanced at me. She knew she was meant to follow him.
“I wish you the best, Lelia,” I said.
“And I you. I wonder if we shall meet again.”
“I hope we shall. Somehow I am sure of it.”
“Doubtless we will both be much changed.”
Lelia smiled. Already she looked younger than when I had first seen her. “Good-bye,” she said. “Thank you. I don’t know if I would have had the courage to leave the town had it not been for you.”
“Godspeed, Lelia.” I smiled curiously as I heard the words leave my mouth.
With a final parting smile, Lelia walked away beside her British guide. I watched them go, listening as they spoke amongst themselves. The Don said something I could not make out. But I heard Lelia reply.
“I don’t know if I will be able to choose the fire,” she said.
“If you are willing to choose it, you will be given strength to choose it.”
“How will I know if I am willing?”
“You do not need to know. One will know. His knowing is enough. You must simply be willing. From willingness will come desire, from desire, courage, from courage, strength, from strength, decision, and from decision, action.”
They continued talking but were soon out of earshot, and I heard no more.
Eleven
The Desert of Introspection
I set out across the vast desert, I admit, with a sinking heart. It was hot and dry. I felt very much alone. This was indeed a desert of solitude. My time in the town and with Lelia and the Irish-born English don had almost caused me to forget what was the first business of this place—knowing myself, that I might be made ready for the Mountains.
That purpose now returned upon me with tenfold force. I was alone with myself and my thoughts. From out of the searing desert silences, images and voices from my past haunted my soul. As so often happened now, my former life passed before me. But it did not do so, as they say, in a blur. Rather, every moment rose with perfect clarity—careless words, selfish motives, people I had hurt… all suffused with my own disgusting pride, conceit, and ego. I longed to apologize to each one for my thousand thoughtlessnesses and judgments and self-centered attitudes. I yet had no idea that the desert was preparing me for that very thing. How quickly I had forgotten what the Naturalist and the brilliant young Chinese man had told me. No doubt had I remembered at that moment, I would have been so overwhelmed as to simply collapse and remain where I lay.
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