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"I think I do "

"You know you do," he said "All right Picture this The population of the world has swelled to h not in very many places, and mostly in that very valley where I had descended and left my marks on the walls of caves Humankind had wandered north and south as far as it could on the planet; settlees of development The land of the cities is called Mesopotamia now, I think, or is it Sumer, or will it be Ur? Your scholars uncoverday

"Man's wild is of iiven rise to religion In the Nile Valley, a civilization of astonishing stability had developed, while aged all the time in the land we call the Holy Land

"So I come to Sheol, which I have only observed fro still so life, and now s for the eternal have brought thereat ferocity Mad expectations have pitched countless ones into confusion Others have grown so strong they exert a sort of rulership a down to Earth, escaping froether, and for wandering close to the flesh they would possess again, or influence, or harht be

"The world is populated by spirits! And so human, have beco about, eager to possess, wreak havoc, or make mischief, as their developments allow "

"And one of those," I said, "passed into the vampiric mother and father of our kind "

"Yes, precisely Amel created that mutation But it was not the only one There are othertwixt the visible and the invisible; but the great thrust of the world was and always has been the fate of its millions of Humankind "

"The mutations have never influenced history "

"Well, yes, and no Is afrom the mouth of a flesh-and-blood prophet an influence, if this prophet's words are recorded in five different languages and for sale today on the shelves of stores in New York? Let's say that the process which I had seen and described to God had continued; soed to actually return in new bodies, though by what knack I did not at that time know "

"Do you kno?"

"Reincarnation isn't by any stretch coains very little for the souls involved You can iine the situations that make it possible Whether it always involves the extinction of an infant soul when it happens¡ªthat is, whether it always involves a replacement in the new body¡ªthis varies with individual cases Those who persistently reincarnate are certainly sonored But that, like the evolution of vampires and other earthbound i now about the fate of Hu about the Whole Human World "

"Yes, I really do understand, perhaps better than you know "

"All right I have no criteria, but I go into Sheol and I find there a great sprawling replica of earth! Souls have iined and projected into their invisible existence all s and creatures and uidance, and as I suspected, there is still an enormous majority of souls who don't know that they are dead

"Now, I plunge into the veryto make myself as invisible as I possibly can; to conceive of myself as utterly without any discernible form; but this is hard For this is a real here is invisible And so there I begin to wander on the dreary roads in se theand dying, and I aelic form

"Nevertheless, these confused souls don't take very much notice of me! It's as if many can't see clearly at all Now, you know this state has been described by human shamans, by saints, by those who have coh it, and then been revived and continued to live "