This novel is the first fruit of L/L Research, written in 1968, refined in 1969, and, because of rejections from many of the major publishers, destined to sit in file drawers until private donations made it possible for us to offer this volume to those for whom it may have some value. That it has some value is of little doubt to me, even though I was the co-author of it. The writing of it was like nothing that I have experienced before or since. Concepts and characters flowed with a clarity and precision onto the paper that I would have thought impossible. It was as if I were watching and reporting on an unfolding situation rather than making up a story.
In the years following, right up through 1984, many things that were written as fiction in THE CRUCIFIXION OF ESMERELDA SWEETWATER seem to be echoed, sometimes quite closely, in the life of Don’s and my relationship, our partnership, and the work with our group. Some of the details are synchronistic enough to warrant comment; hence this introduction. But before we touch upon similarities, I would like to sketch the story that unfolded in Don’s and my private life which came to parallel so closely many of the events in this book.
Donald Tully Elkins, whom many of his friends called “Phineas” and others “Ichabod” due to his six foot five inch height and slenderness, was a remarkable man. Born in 1930, he was brought up during the Depression by a father who was often absent, due to the difficulty of finding work which would have allowed him to be home more, his mother and her family, devout Christian Scientists. They put heart and soul into raising him, and he was much beloved by all of his family. He was always a silent and independent person, even as a child, and at an early age decided that, even though his mother was a reader for the church, he would elect not to attend church services. With quiet persistence he maneuvered his way through childhood and adolescence going his own way, keeping the extent of his creative and analytical intelligence a secret known only to his mother and, as he put it, accomplishing this anonymity by “sitting behind the fat kid” so that he wouldn’t get called on in school, which bored him as much as church did. However, being a person of caution and extreme common sense, Don came to the realization as a senior in high school that he did not wish to work at the kind of job that he could get with a high school education, so he straightened up behind the fat kid, got decent grades, and eventually collected three degrees in engineering from the Speed Scientific School at the University of Louisville.
Faced again with the choice of engineering jobs available, a somewhat disillusioned Phineas turned to graduate degrees and teaching. He became a masterful and magnetic teacher of engineering physics and mechanical engineering, as well as civil engineering, and in 1960-61, during a school year spent at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, he created the mechanical engineering program and curriculum at that university.
However, Louisville was his favorite city and to Louisville he returned after a year away, regaining his position as Associate Professor at the University of Louisville. He taught his students with a mixture of firmness and liberality. It is difficult to describe what a good teacher Don was. His personality was unflappable. His keen intellect found a mode of expression in sharing knowledge with his students, and his sense of drama was given free reign. As a physics teacher he was a favorite with students, not only because he taught physics so well, but also because he enjoyed the inevitable practical jokes that came his way. An example: one of his students once placed a deceased cat on Don’s desk. Don wrote on the chalkboard, “Next time, bring money.” He immediately began the day’s teaching. The students conferred and, at their next class, when Don came through the classroom door he was pelted with pennies, which Don carefully collected and pocketed before turning to the day’s work. The students were daunted, but rallied, and recruited one of the student’s girl friends to serve Don a martini at the beginning of the next class. In she came, bunny suit and all. Don lifted the napkin covering the drink and noted, “Too much vermouth.” After a stunned moment, the girl fled, and Don got an ovation.
In the army, during the Korean War, he became the youngest man ever to become a Master Sergeant. He was given the job two months before his twenty-first birthday although it was not made official until he become of age. His rise to this high noncommissioned office was meteoric and was the product of his life-long love affair with firearms and his ability to deal dispassionately, fairly, and with a sense of humor, with his troops. A perfect illustration of this skill was his response to an aggrieved general’s order that a two-hour lecture be given on the necessity of proper army saluting. Master Sgt. Elkins prepared a two-hour vaudeville show about saluting under farcical and fanciful conditions, enlisting his fellow noncoms for the production. While the rest of the camp’s morale dropped like mercury in a blizzard, Elkins had his men whooping with laughter.
He first became noticed by the Army when his guard unit was activated in 1950-51. He was invited by a personal friend who was an officer to come to the officer’s shooting range for some target practice. Don shot a perfect score: the target paper showed all shots in the bulls-eye. The leader of the firing range asked to “pull the card” for Don, as he thought such a high score suspicious. Don repeated his perfect score, and the now-convinced leader had Don give an impromptu lesson to every man, all of whom outranked him, on the range. Promotions began at once, and because men liked being led by Don, his longing for the Master Sergeant’s private room was quickly fulfilled.
Much of Don’s childhood was spent in the small towns of Kentucky, although he was born in Louisville and went to high school there. Many a weekend while he was in high school was spent tramping the wild areas south and west of Louisville with his buddies, Charles P. Sutt and William Rue, friends whom he considered among his best until his life’s end.
In 1955, Don began seriously to investigate the world of the paranormal. He flew all over the country, usually assisted by either Jim Crunkleton or
D. K. Meador, long-time pilot friends. Chicago, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California saw him visiting contactee groups, and he spoke with everyone from J. B. Rhine to George Van Tassel. Not all of the groups and individuals Don met were able to offer Don information immediately useful, but Don just collected the “puzzle pieces” as carefully as he could, and spent much time looking at how these puzzle pieces could fit together.
In 1962, acting on information which he had received from a UFO contactee group in Detroit, he began what became a long-term and extensive investigation into UFO contact. I was a member of the original group of meditators in that investigation, but it was not until 1968 that Don began to work with me.
Trained as a librarian, I had been very happy at my job as a school librarian for an excellent private school for girls. It was a dream job for a librarian. I was solely in charge of thirteen grades of school children, so that I was able to do everything from choosing books, to cataloging them and working with teachers, to working with each individual child as she came through the study hall, which was in the library. However, when Don asked me to join him in his work, there was no hesitation on my part. And so began our story together.
Don’s and my story together was a story of love and a story of work, both of which were highly unusual and unconventional and yet most profound. When I first met Don in 1962, I looked into the deep blue eyes which gazed upon me as he sat across the table, stooped as he habitually was, and I saw a great deal of loneliness. This impression was at variance with most people’s first impression of Don, which was that he was a person of whom to be in awe. The usual comment from people who saw Don for the first time was “He can see right through me.” This often engendered a certain kind of fear in people which was difficult to overcome until one had spent some time with Don.
After my husband, Jim DeWitt, a wonderful man who married too young, divorced me in 1968, Don spent more and more time in my apartment and eventually took lodgings himself and offered me a room in his dwelling. Since I was receiving a very small monthly stipend, this was of the greatest help to me. Although our relationship was platonic, this arrangement continued until Don’s death in November of 1984. He required from me nothing but my presence. I have never known a more unselfish man, nor one capable of purer affection. This affection was entirely unspoken, for Don felt that words were cheap, and the words “I love you” especially had been misused to the point where they had virtually no meaning. Compliments were something to be given to less intimate friends; he thought them to be a hindrance to my maturing process. I called it “the School of No” since Don, though loath to praise, was happy to correct! Nevertheless, his treatment of me was as tender as that of a father towards a child; indeed, he was overprotective often to the point of my own rebellion.
The relationship that developed between us was one of the strongest and certainly the most positive that I have ever experienced. It endured for sixteen years, getting better every year. We shared thousands of jokes both small and large, talked earnestly into the night many nights, shared Don’s often impossible dreams, and tried to bring them into reality. We were two different creatures, Don being the archetypical male who would have no truck with anything sentimental; I, on the other hand, being a born romantic, a mystical Christian, and one much involved with music-which Don said hurt his ears. My favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, might have agreed with him had he heard me practicing his magnificent cantatas in my small, boy soprano voice!
In 1965, Don had left his tenured position at the University of Louisville to seek the higher salary and the favorable work schedule of a major airline. Don had been a pilot since his teenage years and had amassed an enormous amount of hours flying people here and there on charters that no one else would take because of bad weather. He was fearless and developed such a reputation at the local private air field that he obtained work from all of the flying services there in his spare time instead of working for only one.
With my aid, Don was able to maximize his research efforts. However, during the middle 70’s I became more and more disabled until I was unable to do my work any longer and had to apply for Social Security Disability. Don became interested, due to my ill health, in investigating the field of alternative forms of healing. During this period, we investigated psychic surgery in the Philippines and in Mexico, charismatic healing, the laying on of hands, polarity therapy, crystal healing, color healing, and healing by hypnosis.
In 1974, Don had conducted intensive meditations until he had developed a new batch of channels, the ones developed in the 60’s having gradually moved away and disbanded. He, himself, remained aloof from these meditations for the most part and allowed me to conduct them once I had become a channel. In 1978, Jim McCarty began to come to our group meditations and in 1980, realizing that Jim’s talents could enhance our practical ability to be of service, Don asked Jim to join us. In the Christmastide of 1980, Jim joined us in our work. Three weeks later, the Ra contact began.
We had a burst of Ra sessions that began slowing when my many physical ailments began getting in the way of the contacts, which were also somewhat draining to me. Strange and unfortunate incidents began happening to me, unexplainable in any logical sense unless one could diagnose me as an hysteric, a dubious proposition. The “psychic greeting” influence was apparently a significant portion of these events. For instance, at one point, during a walk through the neighborhood I found myself unable to breathe. This lasted for approximately 30 seconds, not long enough to cause physical death, but it certainly was traumatic. This sort of thing began to occur increasingly. It troubled Don a great deal and he slowed the sessions down in order to let me recuperate in between sessions. Typically, I would lose between one and three pounds after a session.
By 1983, it seemed to be obvious to us that we needed to move to be nearer Don’s job-as a pilot based in Atlanta-so that he could spend more time at home. The worsening airline situation had Don in Atlanta flying almost non-stop, which caused the Ra contact to be an ever more infrequent occasion, since Don’s work and the necessary commuting were tiring him greatly.
The move to Atlanta signaled a change in Don. In Atlanta Don began to weaken physically and began taking sick leave. We all decided that the Atlanta experiment had been a disaster and after only five months moved back to Louisville. However, with this move, Don’s illness seemed to take seat in his mind. Mental illness is not understood because there seems to be a stigma against it. Information about physical illnesses is taught to the virtual exclusion of information regarding mental distress. I have regretted this truth profoundly because without understanding Don’s predicament, I was virtually unable to aid him. After a year or so of gradual worsening of the depressed condition which would accept no verdict other than his own death—which he saw occurring in the near future—he died of a gunshot wound to his head. It was listed by the police not as a suicide, though he shot himself, but as a homicide, as the far more enlightened view should be. This was no self-inflicted wound. This was the end of a frame of mind mysterious to me and tinged, we all felt, with an evil we could neither grasp nor confront. The impact of Don’s life on those around him cannon be overestimated. His brilliant intellect and deep intuition, his sweetness of character, his clarity of observation, his long and discriminating experience in the field of the paranormal, and his love of telling a good story all conspired to make him a veritable fount of information for thousands of people, not only those he taught during his professorial career but also any of those with whom he came in contact at any time during his life. As he was never one for self-revelation, he lived and died a somewhat mysterious man but one greatly beloved, not only by Jim and me and by his uncle and aunt, Marion and Martha Johnson, but by all those who knew him.
Because Don’s and my relationship was never put into words, it is impossible for me to put it into words for you, the reader, but perhaps each of you has known of a couple whose words were calm and affectionate to each other, whose goals in life were such a good match that there was a closeness beyond that of man and woman, and whose house could always be trusted to have peaceful and harmonious vibrations. That was the enviable position that I was in as Don’s companion. Don believed in marriage as little as he believed in the outward expression of inward affection, and so we remained happily unmarried for sixteen years. The last year of his life was very difficult for both of us, but on the night he died he asked me for the last time, “Are we still us?” “Yes,” I replied, my heart full of sixteen years of the giving and taking of a love which I will never forget, in any part.
ESMERELDA was written in the first flush of our discovery of each other as friends and spiritual mates. Don was a wonderful plot-maker although he could not write. This worked out very well because I was terrible at making up a story but I could “see” each character in detail and was able to write about them as if I were writing about friends. Because lion was then gone about half the time flying, he would put his ideas on tape while he was in Louisville, and when he went off to work, I would get to work at the typewriter. The first draft took about six months and thereafter the re-writes were due to Don’s desire to create an impeccable plot. We would rewrite characters and do such things as move a house from New York state to just outside of Washington, D.C. so that a trip could be made to Miami by one of the characters in the appropriate amount of time scheduled in the plot. These painstaking corrections continued for about another six months, and after another year or so of sending the book out and receiving very kind but negative responses from publishers, the book was put on the shelf.
The channelings that begin and end this novel were channeled in the Louisville group in 1968 and are the only portion of the book that was not written at the typewriter in the same manner as was the rest of the novel. We intended it as a parable for all ages, looking back, sometimes half-consciously, at the tremendous story of the Passion of Christ. Until 1974, we had no idea that the book had any prophetic quality in our private lives. However, in 1974, Andrija Puharich’s book, URI, was published and when we read the book we realized that the author, Dr. Puharich, had an amazing similarity to Pablo Padeyevsky, one of the characters in our book. Dr. Puharich invited us to visit him at his estate in Westchester County, New York and before we even met the “good doctor,” as he is called both by his friends and is called as Padeyevsky in the book, we suffered some amazement pulling into his driveway. His house was virtually a carbon copy of Padeyevsky’s house in our novel, which we had also originally located in New York state, before moving it to Washington, D. C. There was one main difference: peonies. When I had seen the house in my mind’s eye I had seen a circle driveway ringed with blooming peonies, but there was not a peony to be seen. When we questioned him about the peonies he laughed and said that he had had those removed a couple of years before. So in 1968, when the book was written, the peonies were accurate!
Six years later, in 1980, when Don asked Jim to join the group, there was further resonance with the novel. Don and I had put a good deal of himself into the character of Theodore. However, we had described Theodore’s facial features very carefully and that description in the book was very similar to Jim’s actual appearance. Although Jim is four inches shorter than six feet and has brown hair rather than blond, there was that same feeling of almost-recognition between Don and Jim and between Jim and me. And after the Ra contact began, more similarities began to unfold.
As is often the case with authors, Don and I had projected a good many of our feelings, ideas, and perceptions onto the characters about which we wrote. Theodore was described in the book as a person alienated from the human race, with a feeling that he did not belong. He was described as a genius and possessed of an attitude 180° opposite from that of most people. These traits were Don’s. Joshua, who partook far more of Don’s deeper character, expressed himself in the book as a lonely person and a mysterious one. The way Joshua and Esmerelda treated each other in the novel mirrored the way Don and I were to treat each other, both of us being protective of the other almost to the point sometimes of treating each other as children.
Both Don in real life and Joshua in the novel shouldered responsibility. In the book Joshua said:
“In truth, am I not responsible for all that is to come in that my will was the leading one?”
In real life Don felt a continuing financial responsibility for our group and, during the period of his mental illness, perhaps his chief occasion for woe was his feeling that he had “fumbled the ball” in that regard, although, needless to say, neither Jim nor I wished Don to go on working at a job that had become too strenuous for him. The nature of mental illness is such that it is almost impossible to communicate clearly, and we were never able to convince Don that all was truly well. Before his illness ended the possibility of Ra sessions, Ra had mentioned metaphysical initiation and mental/emotional dysfunction as probabilities concerning Don.
Josh was the embodiment of Don’s detachment from the world and his ability to manipulate it successfully without intruding upon it. We gave to Josh Don’s ability as a master communicator and, lastly, but certainly not least, there is the offer Josh makes towards the end of the novel of his mind for the space girl’s: “You have a girl trapped outside of her physical body. You have the power to bring her back to it. I ask you to do so. I am willing to repay you by taking her place, my mind for hers.”
Don may have accomplished something of a similar nature, according to a channeling that we received from those of Hatonn and Latwii on November 11, 1984, only four days after Don’s death.
(Hatonn) “In this instance, which is extreme and extraordinary, the one known as Don exhibited a courage most difficult to express. This entity had a wish to protect those about him, and so he did. Many things that you do will also be misunderstood, though less drastic.”
(Latwii) “The one known as Don saw what has been described this evening as the dark carnival and saw the difficulties that awaited should this experience be continued, which had begun in the recent of your times, as you measure experience. There were those images of destruction which filled the mind of the one known as Don, and this entity wished in his deeper self to reserve as much of that difficulty for himself as possible, so that those of his comrades might be spared the added difficulties. The conscious mind made use of this decision, in its own distorted fashion, and leapt first from the precipice in order that the others might avoid it.”
We gave to Esmerelda much of my personality. I had been in a protected and sheltered atmosphere all of my life, sheltered in part by my own untested but substantial mystical faith and in part by the desire of all of those around me to keep my naiveté intact. When Esmerelda discovered negativity in Padeyevsky it was a terrible shock.
“All right, so it is there, all this negativity. And my own uncle, the safest man in the world, has it too. But no matter how long I face it I won’t get used to it. You can make me face the darkness, but you can’t make me turn from the light just because darkness exists.”
For me, the full discovery of negativity burst upon me as the bullet burst upon Don’s brain. Esmerelda said bravely in the book that she would face negativity and understand it. It has been over a year since Don died and with help from friends, healers, and my spiritual director I have struggled to accept, understand, and praise that which seems so tragic and unnecessary. That understanding has yet to come. But, like Esmerelda, I shall persist seeking grace until my mind and my faith are large enough to encompass the events that have occurred.
On January 15, 1981, the Ra contact began and the synchronicities between the novel and our life began to compound. The Ra contact blazed into being as a complete surprise to our group. We had never worked in trance before because, as far as we knew, I was not capable of a trance state. After I had done my usual challenging of the contact in the name of Christ, and worked until I was satisfied enough with my own tuning to receive the contact clearly, I accepted this new contact, having no idea that it was any different from any other. However, shortly after the contact began I seemingly went to sleep and woke up to discover Don as elated as I had ever seen him. It took him no time at all to determine that this contact was different.
Ra asked us to provide for my Christian distortions by the placement of an altar at my head upon which stood a candle and an open Bible on top of a handmade cloth. This was quite similar to the table in Joshua’s octagonal house of magical workings, or temple.
The Banishing Ritual of the Lesser Pentagram, found in the Appendix of THE MAGICIAN: HIS TRAINING AND WORK by W. E. Butler, was used in THE CRUCIFIXION OF ESMERELDA SWEETWATER and serendipitously began to be used again when we three who were involved in the Ra contact discovered that there was a need to keep the room of our working cleansed and sanctified. However, we made one addition. In our version of the banishing ritual, to “Yod He Vau Heh,” the ancient name of God, Yahweh, we added “Shin,” vibrating “Yod He Shin Vau Heh,” due to the fact that this addition spells the name of the Christ, Jesus, and was, we felt, a better vibration for me since I was, and am, a Christian. In the personal portion of Session #67, Don queried Ra about this ritual:
“QUESTIONER: Are you familiar with a book that the instrument and I wrote approximately twelve years ago called THE CRUCIFIXION OF ESMERELDA SWEETWATER, in particular the banishing ritual that we used to bring the entities to Earth?
RA: I am Ra. This is correct.
QUESTIONER: Were there any incorrectnesses in our writing with respect to the way this was performed?
RA: I am Ra. The incorrectnesses occurred only due to the difficulty an author would have in describing the length of training necessary to enable the ones known in that particular writing as Theodore and Pablo in the necessary disciplines. QUESTIONER: It has seemed to me that that book has somehow, in its entirety, been a link to many of those whom we have met since we wrote it and to many of the activities we have experienced. Is this correct?
RA: I am Ra. This is quite so.”
As the plot thickened in our novel, a true villain was discovered, capable of energizing thought-forms, especially violent ones:
“It took a great deal of magical skill to be able to put up that sort of barricade; only a few people could have done it. And the trail of violence of the past twenty four hours: the deputy sheriff’s wife who had, without any need, shot and killed a man. And the presumably trustworthy Sgt. Armstrong, whose judgment had been terribly bad; who had shot to kill a man, when there were a dozen other completely non-lethal ways of stopping him. None of it had made any sense, unless these acts of negativity and violence were being—say—encouraged, or prompted, by the magic of one as practiced in black rituals as he, himself, was in white magic.”
As the Ra contact unfolded we began to have increasing attacks, or greetings as we preferred to call them, from a friend of negative polarity who, although discarnate, seemed capable of effecting the same energizing of any inborn distortion or freely chosen thoughts or behaviors that were less than balanced within one’s being:
(From Ra Session #67) “The normal gambit of such fourth-density attack is the tempting of the entity or group of entities away from total polarization towards service to others and towards the aggrandizement of self or of social organizations with which the self identifies.
“In the case of this particular group each was given a full range of temptations to cease being of service to each other and to the One Infinite Creator. Each entity declined these choices and instead continued with no significant deviation from the desire for a purely other-self service orientation. At this point one of the fifth-density entities overseeing such detuning processes determined that it would be necessary to terminate the group by what you might call magical means, as you understand ritual magic. We have previously discussed the potential for the removal of one of the group by such attack and have noted that by far the most vulnerable is the instrument due to its preincarnative physical complex distortions.”
What with kidney disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus, there were so many things about my body that did not work that Don once described it as a Rolls Royce that was also a lemon.
Perhaps the single most skewed perception in the novel as a book of prophesy was that in the novel both Theodore and Esmerelda, the equivalent of Jim and me, were to give their lives in the service of the light. It never occurred to Don or to me that, of the two of us, Don, tall, strapping, healthy, dependably stable, and super-confident, would die instead.
Neither Don nor Josh seemed in any way to be lacking in care for the world. Indeed, both wished to save or rescue all mankind from what each perceived to be the limitations of the mundane world. However, in Don’s last year he, himself, said that it was possible that the greatest lesson of his incarnation was the learning of personal compassion as opposed to impersonal compassion.
As the Ra contact unfolded in 1981 and 1982, we discovered that our fifth-density, negatively-oriented friend wished to stop the contact by separating my true self, my spirit, from my physical body. This was foreshadowed by the events in THE CRUCIFIXION OF ESMERELDA SWEETWATER. Sessions #68 through #70 of Book Three of THE LAW OF ONE describe the concepts involved in both cases. The similarity between them was immediately noticed by Don and in the personal portion of Session #68 Don queried Ra about it:
“QUESTIONER: We have been speaking almost precisely of a portion of the ESMERELDA SWEETWATER book which we wrote having to do with the character Trostrick’s misplacement of the space girl’s mind/body/spirit complex. What is the significance of that work which we did with respect to our lives? It has been confusing to me for some time as to how it meshes in. Can you tell me that?
RA: I am Ra. We scan each and find we may speak. QUESTIONER: Would you please do so now?
RA: I am Ra. We confirm the following which is already, shall we say, supposed or hypothesized.
“When the commitment was made between the two of this group to work for the betterment of the planetary sphere, this commitment activated a possibility/probability vortex of some strength. The experience of generating this volume was unusual in that it was visualized as if watching the moving picture.
“Time had become available in its present-moment form. The scenario of the volume went smoothly until the ending of the volume. You could not end the volume and the ending was not visualized as the entire body of the material, but was written or authored. This is due to the action of free will in all of the creation. However, the volume contains a view of significant events, both symbolically and specifically, which you saw under the influence of the magnetic attraction which was released when the commitment was made and full memory of the dedication of this, what you may call, mission restored.”
Several of our friends, when reading through the manuscript of our book, have protested at the harsh ending of the story itself. Indeed, neither Don nor I was subjectively happy with the ending. However, all attempts to rewrite the ending so that THE CRUCIFIXION OF ESMERELDA SWEETWATER would be an incorrect title were complete failures. After ten tries at rewriting, all of which ended up yielding much the same material as the ending you now see, we decided that the source moving through us to show this point of view was attempting to include within that point of view the acting out of the answer to the question, “What would happen if two perfectly “good” beings were brought down to this complex and dualistic planet?”
In the saddest correspondence of all between Don’s and my book and our life together, Don’s death seemed inevitable to Don himself for many months before he actually died. Jim and I, as well as his beloved relatives and friends, all tried to rewrite the last chapter of Don’s life. We all gave the effort everything we had. And yet, we were unable to affect any change in the ending of Don’s earthly story.
In the time since Don’s death, we have turned our faith each day to what we know to be the truth: all of us, including Don, are doing what seems to us to be the correct thing to do. We are assured by our metaphysical studies that there are no mistakes, and I have spent much time in prayer enlarging my Christian faith and allowing my God to become larger and more powerful in my life, so that I can see the larger view that Christ always saw. The word “tragedy” is a good word for describing the outer events surrounding Don’s passage from this world into larger life, and yet it becomes increasingly clear to us as time goes on that there was a rightness and symmetry to all that occurred. This sometimes extremely fervent search for peace and new joy will continue to be the best way we know to live our lives and to honor the memory of a man who gave his life, day by day, for so many years, to the search for truth.
This book is the beginning of a long series of wonderful dreams which Don Elkins and I shared. We used our research and book-knowledge of the rigorous training of the Magician to attempt to put forth, in novel form, the nature of the world as we perceive it; that is, the world of good and evil. In no way do we wish to suggest by this book that the story ends there, metaphysically speaking, nor do we wish it to be thought that we have joined the hordes of those who cry “doom.” Though many of the events in this book and in our own experiences seem to reflect difficulty and disharmony, it is our opinion that this is only the nature of our mundane illusion. We feel that there is no difficulty which does not contain the love of the One Creator, whole, perfect, and balanced. We offer this book to you now in hopes that its time has come and that the information and evoked emotions found therein will be of some small aid to those who seek the truth.
Snow lies on the ground as 1985 draws to a close. Christmas presents are being exchanged, and Christmas trees shine and glitter with their delightful burdens of lights and decorations. An old year is ending and another beginning. May you find strength, promise, and joy in your growing resonance with all the cycles of life and Spirit.
Peace to each of you from Kentucky.
Carla L. Rueckert December 21, 1985