Soul Matters, Book 2: Wrath of the Goddess

The next day, Phil went to his office and got through the day by letting his secretary do everything. Phil worked for a big insurance company. He ran a team that processed claims and looked for holes in a client’s coverage so they could sell more insurance.

He was good at this job, because he was detail oriented. His weakness was managing the team. He wasn’t much of a people-person. Seeing that weakness, Phil sought out every management program or seminar he could attend. Over time, his people-skills were getting better. However, his secretary, Beth Ann, an elderly grandmother type, could run circles around his attempts at managing the team. Leaving her to take up the slack was not much of a risk.

Since he couldn’t stop thinking about what he was finding in his research about Genesis, he confirmed what Manuel charged: God was a Destroyer, an ethnic-cleanser, and a mass murderer. He didn’t want to think about what Sandy claimed by quoting Carl Jung -- God was an evolving consciousness bound in tandem to mankind -- as that idea tended to confirm Manuel’s rant.

To compound the problem, he couldn’t stop worrying about the bureaucracy of angels having no real plan, except react to circumstances.

Phil occupied a corner office in the building, but not the top floor. As he stood before his office window and absently watched the bustle of the city below, an uneasy feeling crept into him as he began to suspect the government of Heaven could be just as dysfunctional as the governments on Earth. Since he availed himself of every management training he was either sent to or found on his own, his understanding of good practices was now better than most. He could see that democracy, in particular, had devolved to polarized reactivity. Elected officials did what their constituencies or lobbies wanted rather than doing what was needed. Dictatorships didn’t work any better. They were mostly ethnocentric pockets of in-groups and out-groups warring over control of limited resources. Oligarchies just lined rich families’ pockets. Plutocracies lined rich corporations’ bottom line. Politicians were effectively liars that pandered to the masses and delivered to their corporate sponsors.

When Phil looked at the angelic host as a corporate entity, there was no real corruption like on Earth, but it was clear angels operated with no collective vision, no achievable goal God set to guide them. They skated for the first how-every-many millennia, but when the evolutionary project heated up, they apparently blundered their way through one mistake after another. This was not a good portent.

His intercom buzzed, and his secretary said Dr. Loreen was on the line. There was nothing he wanted to say to her. The thought of her frantically trying to fix her car radio broke his depressed mood, however, and he was able to get some work done after he refused her call.

As a mid-level bureaucrat in a large insurance company, he reviewed insurance policies, oversaw a small team of representatives (read: salesmen), dealt with their squabbles, and generally tried to find ways to make sure the company didn’t have to pay out too much money on the claims submitted by their clients. Phil concentrated on looking through the claims as a way of finding holes in a client’s coverage so they could sell more insurance. Today, he was able to do so on two of his biggest accounts. It was a fitting success in the real world that enabled his depression about the spirit world to lift.

Finished with the sales, he logged onto the Internet and wasted hours searching for answers to the perennial question of how the heavens and earth worked together – if at all. There must be a Divine Plan somewhere. God couldn’t be some capricious entity who abandoned the human race and left the show up to directionless angels. Yet, his research consistently pointed to this conclusion, or to the Pollyanna dream of the Second Coming. Throughout the entire Book of Genesis, the emerging picture of God confirmed Manuel’s rant. God was wise but arbitrary. His justice was random, partial and unfair. His blessings were bestowed upon those who deceived their fathers. And in the beginning, he walked among men, but at the end of the Book of Genesis, he fully abandoned them.

God was a poster child for impetuosity. Bored or frustrated with the antics of his creations, he apparently turned his attention to some other toy in his playroom. This conclusion brought Phil no comfort at all. In fact, he desperately wished he could go back to Dr. Loreen, confess these doubts to her, and be reassured by her simplistic message.

A further quandary was Noah’s decisions when he got drunk after they landed the Ark and got to work rebuilding civilization. Naturally he didn’t blame himself for intemperance. Nor did he curse any of his sons, but rather he went after Cainan, a grandson who wasn’t even around for the drunken debacle. The children of Cainan became the Canaanites who were slaughtered after the Israelites left Egypt to conquer the Promised Land. An event also accomplished at God’s insistence.

If Phil was in doubt about his sanity, he now considered serious suspicions about all the characters in Genesis, including God. He wished he could find comfort somehow. Maybe Noah got it right. Plant a vineyard after the Flood. Harvest the grapes. Then go on an extended drunk. There was promise in such a solution.

With this tantalizing thought, he left work early, picked up a half-rack of beer and stopped at Sandy’s.

“Is God this much of an arbitrary character?” he asked Sandy without much preamble, other than plopping the half-rack down on the kitchen table.

Sandy laughed, popped open a beer and directed Phil out back to lawn chairs. The sun was beginning its slide into the sea, and the clear sky held its warmth.

The backyard was good sized, and a small concrete patio fronted the sliding door to the kitchen. A white picket fence, in need of repair, corralled the backyard, and a couple of small fruit trees stood near the back fence. Lawn chairs were scattered about the yard, and a covered gas barbecue flanked the patio door.

Phil went on as he sat in one of the lawn chairs, “I can’t believe it.”

“It’s a book, a story, a collection of myths different authors worked over. You have to look past the obvious and see into the archetypal motifs.”

“I’ve tried. I can’t see much of anything except the arbitrary cruelty of God, the moral defects in the heroes, the illogical reasons for just about everything. Help me out, Sandy. Genesis makes no sense to me at all.”

Sandy slurped his beer and thought for a while before asking, “Do you know why Manuel wants you to read Genesis?”

“It has something to do with the real nature of God’s punishment.”

“The Flood.”

“I guess.”

“What do you know so far?”

“Only what Manuel said. There were lots of floods, and the reason for them was to kill off the Nephilim, not punish mankind for its wickedness.”

“If all those dead humans were collateral damage, then it’s not a better picture than the one you started with.”

“I know. God is a maniac.”

Sandy laughed. “Okay. There’s some theology here that might help you. The Flood is like a second creation. In the first one, according to the Mesopotamian myth called the Enume Elish, the world we know was the by-product of a war between the gods.”

“How so?”

“Well, in their mythology, our cosmos is the dead body of Tiamat, a big female water dragon.”

Phil sipped his beer and considered the implications of floods, water monsters, and creation. Eventually, he said, “Why recapitulate creation?”

Sandy finished his beer and retrieved another. “It was a way to cleanse the Earth of the imprint of man’s evil. The thinking is man’s evil soaked into the Earth and contaminated it -- like Abel’s blood.”

“But nothing’s changed. Man is still engaged in round-the-clock evil.”

“Some things have changed as a consequence of the Noahic Covenant. For one, life expectancy dropped by centuries so we won’t have as much time to do evil. Also, the animals were told to fear us as God gave us permission to eat meat. And there’s the rainbow promise that God won’t wipe us out again.”

Phil grimaced his doubt.

“Yeah. I don’t buy it either,” Sandy said with a smirk and chugged his beer.

Dinner with Betty, who had a wonderful day, was less painful than it could have been. He listened to her stories about the luncheon with the church ladies auxiliary and made the appropriate sounds. They sat at the large dinner table with Phil feeling the absence of the children who livened up the otherwise dreary recitation of Betty’s day.

Betty was dressed down now. She wore a print dress and sandals. Her hair was loose and bobbed around her pleasant face. She stabbed at the chunks of meat and potatoes in the pot pie she cooked for dinner and spoke between bites.

“I’ve always admired Cassie. She’s such a good president for our club. She listens well and is able to smooth over the cattiness we women can engage in.”

“Good leaders are hard to find,” Phil replied. His management training classes talked about the difficulties involved in orchestrating harmony in a group setting. He learned it did boil down to truly listening to people. That way they felt valued.

Phil prompted Betty to go on, “What kinds of things need to be problem-solved?”

“Well, we do a lot of outreach -- to the hospital, to the local jail, and to the homeless shelters. Most of us don’t want to go to the jail or the homeless shelter, because of the people there. Cassie has a way of making trips to those horrible places sound like an adventure Jesus would want us to take.”

Phil smiled, thinking that ‘those people’ were Jesus’ primary mission and eventually included the Apostles. He asked, “Have you gone to either place?”

“Heavens no,” Betty replied with mild shock at the suggestion. “I’m not that brave. I will drive the van to those places, but I prefer to do my ministry at the hospital, with the children.”

“I don’t know that I’m brave enough to work with sick children. Doesn’t it depress you?”

“I am in prayer when I’m with the children. It softens the harsh edges of the experience.”

She said the last with a combination of piety and self-importance. Betty liked to be known as a person committed to doing good in the world.

They finished off the dinner, rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher. Betty retired to her workroom to plan the next phase of the remodel. Phil went to his study and found release in meditation.

Once again, the singular door of meditation opened to Manuel’s patio. Phil entered the flowered courtyard and sat heavily on the marble bench. Manuel put his hand on Phil’s shoulder in uncharacteristic support. The touch felt good.

“Have you practiced going up the trail?” Manuel asked. He was referring to an exercise he taught Phil to gain access to a variety of reality-states in his unconscious. Each state gave access to different powers. The exercise, according to Manuel, was a first incursion into mapping the realm of Spirit. Manuel was committed to teach Phil how to navigate those realms as the only way to get him out of his patio. Until then, there would only be Manuel’s singular door.

“Yes,” was Phil’s response. He practiced it because he could see nothing wrong with more power. However, he hadn’t told Dr. Loreen about it.

“Put the trail on the wall,” Manuel directed him.

Phil imagined a conifer forest and projected it onto the magic-wall. It slowly formed. A trail ran though the forest and forked up ahead. Without hesitation, they stepped into the holographic image to stand at the start of the trail.

Trees and bushes lined the black-earth trail. Pine needles formed its border. Birds chirped, and a faint breeze wafted through the trees. To their left, a few paces forward along the trail, stood a bookshelf -- a symbol Phil placed there to help bring him back to this place. He needed only to focus on the image of the bookcase in his waking mind, and he could shift his consciousness here. In this reality-state, he was able to research the depths of his own memories.

As they walked forwards, they pushed through invisible curtains of energy to different reality-states, each with its own marker. Presently, they took the right fork of the trail as it split in two and stood at the top of a rough-cut stone staircase. To the left was a stone cliff; to the right was a misty landscape.

“Leaving the world of the unconscious,” Manuel’s tour-guide voice cooed, “we enter the world of Nature.”

Phil’s mood, however, was sober. Accessing more power didn’t seem inviting since he found out God was no better than a spoiled brat.

Apparently reading his mind, Manuel laughed and said, “It’s only in Genesis. Things get better with the Prophets.”

“But why?” Phil complained. “Why did they give us such a conflicted view of the Divine? Why are the Patriarchs such codependent caricatures? And why has it stood the test of time?”

“Are we reverting back to stupidity?”

Manuel was less distinct in Phil’s imagined world, and he could look directly at the angel’s blurred golden and white countenance.

Phil faced him and demanded, “What are you saying? God grows up as humans grow up?”

“I told you God is an evolving being like the rest of us.”

“But he’s supposed to be perfect,” Phil snapped.

“He is,” Manuel rejoined. “He’s perfectly himself at all times. Just as you and I are. Well, just as I am. Humans have difficulty accepting themselves. But if you could accept yourself, you, too, would be perfect at each moment of your existence.”

Phil shook his head, obviously not getting the paradoxical point.

He changed the subject, “Do we go down the stairs today?”

“Yep.”

Phil sighed and looked at the rough-cut stone stairway. On his left was the rough stone wall. To the right was gently sloping hillside shrouded in mist or fog. The stairs descended between them. Phil took the first step down. He didn’t feel much difference between the top of the stairs and the first step.

“You’re still in the interface between the unconscious and the Universal Life-force,” Manuel told him.

Phil took another step down and did feel a distinct shift.

“Go off to the side and put a marker,” the angel said.

“To represent what?”

“The ability to communicate with things you can touch,” Manuel replied. “Like plants, animals, trees, and whatnot.”

Since the staircase was bounded a stone wall on the left, Phil turned to his right, pondering what would be an appropriate symbol. With his imagination, he constructed a small clearing within an impregnable fortress of tangled thorn bushes. The only entrance was a tunnel connecting to the stairs. He crawled in and sat in this prickly cave. It would be a good place to have an intimate conversation, he decided.

“Come out on the next step down,” Manuel called to him. “Both these steps give you the ability to communicate with nearby living things.”

Phil crawled out onto the third step, and it did feel the same. He stepped down into another distinct shift.

“Far away entities,” Manuel told him. “From here, and the next step down, you can communicate with living beings on the other side of the planet or anywhere else.”

Phil thought about what might symbolize this form of communication and decided on a lookout tower sitting on a mountain top. He painted the picture of it in his imagination and stepped off the staircase to stand atop this wooden structure. From here he gazed across a meadowed valley.

Manuel’s voice broke in, “Imagine whatever you want to communicate with out there on the plane, and you can communicate with it.”

Phil started to do so, imagining his son Bobby, who was away at college, but Manuel interrupted him, “Come back onto the next step down.”

Reluctantly, Phil did so, and there was no recognizable shift in the energy-signature.

Glancing briefly at the angel, Phil stepped down another step and felt a huge difference.

“For this one, there’s a universal symbol going back to prehistoric times,” Manuel said, “It’s called the ‘crystal cave’, and it’s already waiting for you.”

Phil turned to his right and saw the dark opening to a cave and entered it. In the cave, he could see dark octagon crystals lining the round ceiling and walls. At the center of the cave was a black, obsidian table. Inside the cave, the energy field was much stronger.

“If you need to heal somebody, you put them on the table and run nature-healing energy into them.”

Phil realized the energy here was therapeutic. It healed illness, both of the body and of the soul.

“Come out now,” Manuel chided him. “There are more steps.”

Reluctant once again, Phil exited the cave leaving the healing energy behind. He regained the stairway and stepped down to another profound shift.

“You’re now in the pure energy of the Living Force,” Manuel explained.

“Like Star Wars?” Phil chortled. This energy field filled him with a kind of vitality he rarely felt. As a result he giggled, “May the Force be with you.”

“They had to get the idea from somewhere,” Manuel replied dryly.

“Was it you again?” Phil continued to smile. As he became acclimated to this energy field, it brought him to a place of both deep contentment and deep reverence for the natural world.

“No. They hired some Taoist for a consultant,” Manuel answered. “Taoism began as Siberian shamanism, but when the Chinese got hold of those ideas -- well, the result was pretty remarkable: acupuncture, taiji, qigong, and the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, and the Art of War.”

“All from shamanism?” Phil wondered. His idea of shamanism was a bunch of witch doctors with bones through their noses.

“Shamans are the masters of this realm,” Manuel said. “How do you think they figured out which plants were medicinal and which were poisonous? Up there at near entity communication. That’s how. And how do you think they found the herds of animals the tribe used for food? Far entity communication.”

“Okay,” Phil conceded. “What do I put here?”

“Think of something reminding you of Nature,” Manuel instructed. “And put it in the middle of the stair. Sort of surround yourself with it.”

Phil knew this one: a redwood tree. For him there was no more majestic a symbol of nature. He imagined himself wrapped inside its red bark, at-one-with its sweet-smelling wood.

“Enough, already,” Manuel jolted him out of his at-oneness with the tree. “There’s another step.”

Phil sighed and took the final step into another profound shift.

“The interface with the realm of Spirit,” Manuel explained.

“But there’s nothing here,” Phil said as he looked at the blankness before him. The steps ended on a flat stone landing. The landing extended some few feet; then there was blank gray -- like static on a TV screen.

“I know,” Manuel laughed, but in here his musical accompaniment was absent. “You don’t get to play with fire yet.”

Phil’s disappointment was tempered by the realization he did have the realm of Nature to play in.

“Now I want you to practice with these reality-states,” Manuel told him. “And you might want to write all this down so you can begin building bridges between the world of the Flesh and these places.”

It seemed like a good idea, because he knew how easy it was to get wrapped up in the ‘real’ world.

“One of the real worlds, anyway,” Manuel corrected his thought. “Let’s go back.”

They climbed the stairs with Phil re-experiencing each level, checking on each symbol, until they reached the start of the trail. Unlike the end of the stairs, which ended in gray static, the start of the trail ended abruptly in blackness. Stepping into it, they emerged into Manuel’s patio.

Turning around, Phil disappeared the trail on the magic-wall.

“Go home and practice,” Manuel told him.

“Wait a minute,” Phil returned. “What about some kind of explanation for Genesis.”

Manuel sat on the bench. “I’m avoiding it.”

Phil remained standing and looked towards the angel in his expectant boss-role. He assumed the demeanor of a supervisor patiently waiting for a guilty employee to do the right thing and ’fess up to what s/he had done.

“I don’t do guilt. So you can stand there all night and it won’t work.”

Phil surrendered to the inevitable and sat next to the angel. Plan A hadn’t worked. Plan B didn’t exist. Phil sat there and decided to deal with the obvious problems in Manuel’s story.

“At least let me know how angels could father children,” Phil prompted.

“They took human bodies,” Manuel said. “It’s one of the things we do all the time.”

“But --,” Phil began then realized he wasn’t sure what to ask next.

“The Flesh traps us, too,” Manuel elaborated. “We’ve discovered it takes a few hours, and if we stay in the Flesh longer than a day, we get identified with the Flesh even worse than humans do.”

“It’s what happened to the Grigori,” Phil surmised.

“Yep. We – they – learned it the hard way.”

“You didn’t know it before?” Phil was incredulous. He was beginning to suspect what he knew about angels in general was faulty. They weren’t these nearly perfect beings with whom God confided. They were, as he was beginning to suspect, clueless.

Manuel added, “We figured since we were such superior beings, the Flesh would not affect us at all. Big surprise.”

Phil smiled, “Your fall was due to pride, after all.”

“Yep. And you can bet we never made that mistake again. However, the fallen angels in general still harbor resentment towards humans because of it. They’re committed to proving to God humans cannot transcend the Flesh and walk in two worlds. So far, they have accomplished their goal. Not many of you have actually transcended the Flesh and made it to the Clouds of Mystery.”

“Walk in two worlds,” Phil muttered. “Flesh and Spirit. It’s the balancing act you told me about. It’s humanity’s job to operate in two worlds.”

“Not, as Beelzebub indicated, balancing it through mere numbers,” Manuel added in reference to why Phil was sent to Hell in the last episode.

In the previous adventure, Beelzebub charged that Phil was scheduled for Hell this lifetime to keep good and evil in numeric balance. Phil suffered the temptations and punishments of Hell in Beelzebub’s failed attempt at winning him back to the Dark Side.

“The devils have it wrong, then,” Phil wondered.

“They deliberately have it wrong,” Manuel corrected him. “Because they want you to fail.”

“But what about the balance?”

“It works either way,” Manuel’s patience was slipping by this time, and his voice was becoming sharper.

Phil forged on in spite of it, “It can be done numerically or through transcendence. Am I right?”

“Yep,” Manuel snipped. “Now, go practice what I’ve taught you. I’ve got a date with a bed-side radio.”

“Huh?” was Phil’s initial response. Then he realized Manuel was headed for Dr. Loreen’s house.