I forgot that my purpose was to evolve the divinity in myself.

  Though I had committed myself to Atlantis and the test of the new world, after division I could feel myself failing the great human test. Though I knew my responsibility was to my promised commitment to the Divine Deity and to my family, I convinced myself that my life in Atlantis had fulfilled its purpose, that it had no more meaning.

  I—in fear, anxiety, conflict, and total alienation from my own spiritual meaning—decided to return to my old world, to my motherland, to my teacher, John … to Lemuria. I, therefore, deserted my partner. I left her, my family, my promise, and even my purpose.

  I returned to the motherland to find it in a state of devolvement on a par with Atlantis’s. The values of the new world had filtered back to the Lemurian motherland, just as John had said. The collective spirituality was disappearing. There was complete division of purpose and thought. Debates raged. Selfishness infected every stratum of the society, which before did not even have strata. Egotism and superiority transgressed the spirituality.

  The Garden of Eden was no more. Man had destroyed its harmony.

  And with the destruction of spiritual harmony, the ecological harmony disintegrated, for they had always been harmoniously connected. The collective distortion of the electromagnetic frequencies caused by our behavior affected the earth patterns themselves, for the earth was a living organism reacting to the feelings and behavior and treatment of the human family. Meditational nourishment no longer existed as it had previously. The human was alienated from the earth on which it lived. The collective distortion of electromagnetic emotional frequencies caused the earth itself to react—to rebel. To protest. And it did.

  After five hundred thousand years of a magnificent civilization, the earth’s support system said enough. Due to astronomical and astrological gravitational pulls and also because the psychic frequencies of the earth’s people were not harmoniously positive enough to resist, the earth collapsed. It was the Deity’s way (nature’s way) of purging distortion.

  During the planet alignments that had occurred every 6,666 years, the earth had resisted the gravitational pulls safely because it had had psychic and harmonious electromagnetic support from the higher beings. But now, with the disintegration of human harmony, the living organism called earth had no higher support system. The magnetic frequencies of the land and mountains and volcanoes became distorted. The fragile balance between land and mental energies became seriously disrupted. So when the planet alignment occurred, the earth harmonies collapsed into earthquakes and tidal waves. The earth needed the help of the Creator’s cocreators, the human family, but we had forgotten our purpose and energy, caught up in our own distortions.

  On returning to my motherland, I saw the horror and disintegration affecting my beloved society. Confusion and corruption reigned. When the earth itself reacted and the earthquakes rumbled, when the tidal waves surged, when the great communities toppled and crumbled, I committed a grand sin.

  The vulnerable continent of Lemuria sank into the Pacific like an aging dinosaur, troubled and unable to fend for itself any longer, forsaken of its human energy, starving and thirsty for its life source and the spiritual electromagnetic frequencies that had nourished her in the past.

  I watched Lemuria die; I watched my teacher die, and with a final act of karmic self-destruction, I killed myself.

  But mine was not a simple suicide. I projected my soul into the astral plane and left my new body behind, my silver cord of attachment intact. I watched the cataclysm below. As millions of people died, I saw their souls collectively depart the earth plane. I felt helpless, unable to serve anyone. Other souls passed me on their journey to higher astral worlds. Desperately, I reached out.

  “Wait,” I heard myself scream. “Wait. I want to go with you.”

  And when I experienced the soul of my teacher, John, drifting upward and past me, his body crushed under the pillars of the Temple of Learning below, I panicked in distress.

  My teacher had accepted his karmic timing. He had resisted the temptation of astral projection. Experiencing the cataclysm had been his karmic duty, and he knew it. He knew he should maintain a sense of detachment so as to keep an objective viewpoint of his lifetime. His karma was to complete his life cycle. That was everyone’s karma. But I refused to confront the reality of the horror below. I found it too painful. My body hadn’t yet actually died. My body lay intact below, as yet unaffected by the collapse of the land around me. But the fear and the loneliness of the terror was more than I could cope with. I experienced a sense of guilt I had never felt before. In a desperate attempt to follow my teacher upward to a higher and more spiritual plane, I severed my silver cord and committed an astral suicide. I fully expected to travel upward, following the path of my teacher, but I didn’t. Instead, I began to tumble about in space. Everything went black as the spiritual amnesia took effect. I went into a comatose state. Once again, I became an androgynous spirit.

  Through time and space I tumbled … tumbled … tumbled. I felt lost and without a horizon. I felt a frightening kind of limbo. I felt I had lost myself. I felt without purpose, without meaning, without definition. After what seemed an eternity, I awoke on an astral plane. I found myself at a large crystal table. Towering above me was the archangel Michael and his soul mate, archangel Ariel. Their astral wings quivered with high electromagnetic frequencies, and they were benevolent in their attitude, but extremely firm and displeased with me.

  The archangel Ariel spoke. As it did, I recognized the vibration in the voice. It was the same sound I’d heard when Ariel had come to me a few weeks back on the Camino. Now I realized that Ariel and the other three archangels were androgynous and Ariel had been guiding me for a long time. The angel spoke to me again now.

  “Lemuria,” said angel Ariel, “or the Garden of Eden, was a state of balanced consciousness. The individual souls lived for harmony until they partook of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and rejected the Divine Deity and their spiritual selves. With the development of the ego, they were divided among themselves. You may perceive yourselves as separate, but it is not so. You are benevolent when you desire harmony and love. When you learn to love the Divine Deity with all thy heart and with all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself, you will kindle in yourself and each other the telepathic energy to heal and protect your collective consciousness from harm. For the soul motivates everything. The soul motivates the natural environment. That soul is all. You must achieve that which you really are—a divine soul incarnate in the flesh. Remember the lesson of Lemuria, and perhaps someday you can help restore a once and future Eden to the planet.”

  Ariel stopped and looked down at me closely, towering above me. I felt totally insignificant.

  “The inevitability of your debt is more important than punishment,” Ariel said. “You carried out your promise of division. You created a new family. Your family members depended upon you. Your karmic purpose was not yet fulfilled in Atlantis when you chose to depart. It is a karmic crime to depart the physical plane before your time. You are not the judge.”

  I listened to the judgment of Ariel with profound shame. At the same time, I felt I didn’t quite understand.

  “In your case,” the angel went on, gesturing to indicate the collective decision of the other archangels, “you are forbidden reincarnation until the end of the Atlantean civilization, at which time you will be reborn to serve the future of mankind. After that, you will continue to remain earthbound until after the end of the Adamic Age at the turn of the twenty-first century, at which time you will decide how much longer you want to remain in the body.”

  “We never punish,” Ariel said. “Each individual soul punishes itself.”

  I saw a golden light envelop Ariel, which expanded to include me. As the light swelled, I understood the words more clearly.

  Ariel seemed to become a golden womb enveloping me as I transformed. The angelic wings of Michael expanded to cover both Ariel and me. I felt myself spiritually assume the fetal position until I felt literally reduced to a small infant.

  I was sealed and protected in the golden womb of Ariel.

  “And when you return to Atlantis to play out your karma, in the civilization you deserted, you will help construct a monument to the preservation of records and knowledge. You will help with the construction of a scenario for the human race. You will help to construct a Bible in stone. It will be a cosmic instrument. Instructions for its use will be carved in gold and placed as wall coverings. We pray the wall coverings will remain intact. Because of its displacement of cosmic energy, it will be used as a communication tool for beings who travel the stars. Earth masters will train within it. It will be located at the epicenter of earth’s land mass in Egypt. At this location it should be free from the cataclysmic events that occur every 6,666 years. Within this pyramidal structure will be a record of humanity’s past, present, and future events. It will, in effect, be a cosmic time machine. It will serve as a reminder that without spiritual understanding, humankind is doomed. You will serve as one of its architects for the future of humanity. Thus will your karmic debt be paid.”

  Ariel’s enveloping womb gave me warmth and a feeling of emotional support as the words rang in my ears.

  Then I felt I began to tumble—an ethereal tumble in space—on my own, but knowing that Ariel was with me.

  I looked below me. Lemuria was gone, disappearing under the waves of what is now the Pacific. Millions of souls were surrounding me, floating upward, having accumulated their own individual karma. I wondered if Ariel or Michael spoke to each of them. There was no way of knowing. Each of us had our own individual relationship with the Deity, and to judge would be to do so without the complete knowledge of who each soul actually was.

  I began to understand the true meaning of “Judge not, that ye shall be not judged.”

  The ocean below me surged and fell, surged and fell. I felt myself tumbling again in a kind of limbo. Then, as though through a protective tunnel, I felt myself racing into the present until I was specifically aware that once again I was lying on the top bunk in an abandoned refugio in a village in northern Spain.

  19

  A surge of loneliness rippled through me. I knew it was because what I had experienced would be incomprehensible to anyone I shared it with.

  I put on my boots, climbed down from the bunk, rolled up my sleeping bag, and walked outside.

  I needed to feel pebbles and earth beneath my feet. I wanted rain on my eyelids and maybe even mosquitoes to shock me back to the reality of the world.

  What was the meaning of the reality I had created for myself? Why had I walked the Camino with such perseverance and determination? Had the ancient pilgrims been as obsessed as I? Were we nothing but spiritual overachievers? Was my curiosity about personal identity so intense that I saw more than I could assimilate and process? Had my soul begun with whispers to my mind and now was using a cosmic shout?

  I walked faster, pulling some nuts and dried fruit from my waist pack. I fingered the gold cross and breathed deeply. Now all I wanted was to finish the trek.

  At the outskirts of the next town (I didn’t even know where I was), I was to meet José.

  Suddenly, a car pulled up beside me. Alarmed, I looked over at it. Anna was inside.

  “You have a plane to Madrid tomorrow night,” she said. “The fourth of July. And expect the press on the Mount of Joy, which overlooks Compostela. If you don’t want them, elude them.”

  She laughed and sped off.

  I walked further until I spotted José in his car waiting for me. I ran to him and climbed in. “We are to wait for Juan and Carlos and Ali here,” he said. I nodded. I told him I was tired so that I wouldn’t have to talk to him, and I fell asleep with my face looking up at the sky. When I woke,José said we had waited for Juan and Ali and Carlos for three hours. Three precious hours, when I could have been walking toward Compostela.

  “Let’s go to the next meeting place,” I said finally. We drove in silence. I saw some press and ducked out of sight. When we arrived at the refugio, I realized there had been a misunderstanding. They were waiting for us there.

  Juan was furious. “Well,” he said, “I have here your yogurt, your orange soda. Why were you so unclear about where we were to meet?”

  That set off Ali. “You are so arrogant,” she yelled at him. “I told you we were the wrong distance from town.”

  “I did not,” Juan yelled back at her, using a non sequitur I didn’t understand.

  They argued in ways I couldn’t keep up with. (I wondered if they had been man and wife in Atlantis.)

  Finally José chimed in. “Let’s calm ourselves. We must get the best out of every day, not the worst.”

  We sat and ate yogurt, bread, cheese, and almonds.

  Juan could not let himself relax with the conclusion that everything had been a misunderstanding. He continued to babble on about who was right and who was wrong. Then he took the burden of it completely upon himself. He walked away, leaned up against a tree, and said, “All of this is too much for me. Too much in one day. You are a celebrity, and I’m suspected of being a spy, then suspected of going to the press, then suspected of taping your conversation. It’s all my fault that we wasted your precious three hours. But if you hadn’t decided to elude the press, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  No one had accused him of anything. We all stared at him. He had just hung himself out of guilt.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  Juan went on. “You think I’m arguing all the time, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “So let’s stop. It’s over.” I went into the refugio and washed my underwear and socks in the bathroom sink.

  Juan followed me in there. “I am a perfectionist,” he said.

  Ali followed him. “No, a perfectionist is someone who is obsessed with being perfect.”

  “No,” said Juan. “A perfectionist is someone who is perfect.”

  I walked outside and hung my wet clothes on the windowsill of José’s car. They all followed. A debate ensued between them over what “perfect” meant.

  Finally, I said, “Look, we’re all learning lessons about ourselves here. The world is made up of every possible kind of personality imaginable. Don’t you think the Camino magnifies all the things in each of us that we haven’t yet realized?”

  They stopped talking. If only they had understood what I meant.

  “Yes, I feel that way,” said Ali.

  “I’m used to it,” said Juan.

  “Let’s move ahead,” said Carlos.

  “Let’s get in my car,” said José. “Juan, take your car alone.”

  “I’m going to walk alone,” I said. “I need to think.”

  They all piled into José’s car. I watched them take off, seeing my underwear flap in the wind from the window as they sped off, their voices echoing more argument in the hot Spanish air.

  I smelled terrible; my face was mottled with sunburn; my nails were cracked and peeling; my arms, hands, legs, and face were covered in bites from critters and insects not known to me even in the unknown world. The roots of my hair had grown out two inches. My feet were hooves, and my left eye was red and infected. I was alone again, but strangely happy.

  I just kept walking—all the rest of the day. In the night I rested for a few hours by a wide road under trees, press-free. Sleep was no longer necessary anyway, because some kind of “happy completion” endorphins had kicked in. The only thing necessary to me was water. In order to elude the remaining press, I would have to walk nonstop until I got to Santiago. I decided not to stop at the Mount of Joy, which had a refugio that looked over Santiago and which was named for the pilgrims’ profound joy on reaching the height from which Compostela could first be glimpsed. The joy of the end of their journey. I was going to deny myself that joy because, frankly, I didn’t feel it. Not the kind of joy that people spoke of. I felt something I couldn’t define … a kind of “knowing.” I knew somehow that my journey would begin at the end of this one. Then I remembered that Anna had said, “The real journey begins when you have processed what you learned from the Camino.”

  So I continued to walk in a state of determination from which I would not be deterred. I would follow my timetable, arriving on the day of American liberation. Maybe even before. I was certainly still my mother’s daughter.

  The closer to Compostela I got, the more difficult it was to find the arrows. It was also difficult to find the reason for that.

  The press thought I was one day behind.

  The Camino led under a bridge where the dung was four inches deep. They say that the spiritual road becomes deeper when you wade through negativity, and more narrow when you come closer to your truth.

  Wouldn’t it be a laugh on me to find that my dream-visions had not been my imagination, but had in fact been the Big Truth. I was living in a world that would laugh at that, but in “reality,” was the laugh on them? Were the skeptics the wacky ones?

  Were the scientists and intellectuals who needed proof of all matters really the retarded minds among us, because they were threatened by the truth in themselves, wherein lay all the answers they were searching for? Science existed basically as a search for God and the beginning. The church existed basically as the arbiter between man and God. Did the real answers lie within each of those individual souls, who were resistant to looking within for fear of being considered self-centered?

  As I walked through the deep dung, I knew that nothing was more important than looking within, being centered in myself. In my introspection I had revealed to myself some truths I couldn’t previously have imagined. I wondered now if I’d allow myself to deeply believe those truths. Or would I allow myself to obfuscate the truth I was seeking? Would I now identify with my multidimensional self as I walked? Would I let myself be those “selves” when I completed the Camino?