CHAPTER 2: AUTOMATIC OTHER STUFF

Our original book was too tame to be interesting. It was too full of stuff about doing good deeds and charitable works, which nobody wants to be reminded about when they haven’t been doing any lately. Also, thinking bad thoughts was singled out as being particularly damaging and unspiritual  it isn’t that I don’t want to mend my evil ways, but the responsibility for keeping even the least little hint of nastiness out of your thoughts is too enormous to contemplate, so nobody wants to hear about that, either. Still, as I raised more and more questions, more and more elements got into it that I thought were so interesting they’d easily cover up the gooddeedsbadthoughts cod liver oil, and I began to think it might turn out to be pretty good after all.

Some of the things I was told about psychology (hot air) and how to handle your emotions (suppress them all, except love) were unusual by current standards, certainly, and the explanations about what really went on in the Old Testament were a  riot.

During our discussion of reincarnation, it was revealed  that everyone has some specific purpose in life, some specific goal he has stated he will try to fulfill while living that particular lifetime, and that my goal was to write that book, with her assistance, which had been her goal for the life she had recently finished. This doubledestiny setup was very unusual, she said, and extremely difficult, not a matter to be entered into lightly. However I, between lives, had insisted that I could handle this assignment and had, after much argument, finally been allowed to undertake it, since it was one of paramount importance and I was, after all, (of course), eminently qualified to do the job. (I don’t remember ever being told how it happened that she got suckered into such a precarious deal.) Now it came out that the real reason we were writing this book was to warn people not to be taken  in by the Antichrist, (who was coming soon), and if we failed to convince a single person that we were absolutely serious and telling the truth, we would both be DESTROYED. No going to heaven for me when I die, and no staying in heaven for her, but, rather, dissolution of our immortal souls into nothingness. That nearly frightened me to death, and I had to continue after I found out about it. I couldn’t believe that I, caution in the flesh, could ever have been so reckless (not  to say egomaniacal) as to have put my precious self into such an impossible and dangerous situation deliberately, but she  assured me that I had, and that I was stuck with it.

The rules concerning life goals were as follows: Your guiding spirit will tell you what yours is if you ask him outright, provided you are on the right track already, but if  you are far from it, he may only hint at it; no spirit may reveal the life goal of anyone else; and if you somehow luck out and fulfill your goal, you won’t have to reincarnate any more if you don’t want to. That’s pretty silly, although it’s not that much sillier than some of the things people actually believe.

Sometime during that summer, my son Chip discovered that he could do automatic writing as well as I could, and he was writing with a spirit who claimed to be a friend of his who’d  been killed in an automobile accident while they were away at college. One night Tom told Chip the life goal of another of their friends and we had a huge crisis about it, because if Chip let that information slip to the person whose goal he knew, he would be destroyed, and so would Tom.

The devil gets a lot of mileage out of his threats of destruction (and causes a lot of actual destruction in the physical world), but when it comes to dissolving souls, the threats must be idle. His main aim is to get people into his power he so can send them to hell, after all, not to let them  off the hook by dispersing their conscious beings into nothing. Compared to hell, destruction is probably preferable.

Anyway, Chip and I were very frightened, and we were writing like mad, trying to find out what was going on and what we could do to get out of all this trouble we were suddenly (and, we thought, innocently) in. At one point, Ginny said Chip’s guiding spirit  supposedly his paternal grandfather  wanted to write with me. The message, which had my fatherinlaw’s handwriting, said, “You are doing the devil’s work, you evil woman.” Naturally, I assumed he was speaking metaphorically, since there is no devil and my fatherinlaw was certainly in a position to know it, and I supposed that he was simply angry with me because he thought it was my fault Chip was in such serious trouble. (It was my fault, in general, but not in particular.) Since I thought I was doing something good, I refused to write with him any more, and I also vowed not to stop writing the book just because a stupid  spirit had called me names and another stupid spirit had  spilled some secret beans to my son. I could hardly believe what was happening  what the spirits said was happening  and I felt like we were caught in some surrealistic soap opera. Somehow we managed to keep our wits about us enough to pray our way through the whole mess until we were told that all was forgiven and we could get back to “normal” again. The whole affair was very upsetting, but Ginny had told me earlier that I would have the strength I needed when I needed it because I was a strong person. That’s not really true, but  just the idea that I would be able to be strong when I had to be was what saved me in the long run.

I spent about ten days working to organize and consolidate the material I had. Besides the regular stuff we did during working hours  which wasn’t in good order either  I  had a zillion odds and ends of information I’d gotten during meals and I wanted to be sure not to leave anything out. When I finally had things sorted out well enough to suit me, I began to write my part of the book, with help from otherwhere for the hard parts. Ginny and I had plenty of chitchat going on on the side, and, for me, it was a lot of fun, not a bit like working alone.

Then, all of a sudden, it got unfun. One day I was asking her why we couldn’t get some definite information about a future event  any future event  or anything else that would make our message more believable. If we were indeed writing an “inspired revelation,” I thought the inspirer should be  willing to do a little something to back us up, especially considering the price for failure. I didn’t think I was being pushy or unreasonable about it, though, and didn’t think I deserved what came next, but because of it I was afraid to ask why  or even to think why  about anything for as long as I  continued to work on that book. And more than once when Buzz and I were talking about some aspect of what was going to be what, Buzz would start saying, “Why?” and I could feel that that power was near, as if to say, “How DARE you ask such questions?” and Buzz felt it too, though he was never directly involved in any of it.

I’ve never been able to find a way to describe this next effect adequately, and nobody else’s description does it justice either. This is the best I can do: First I started to shake, and then this awful feeling swept in and grabbed the whole left side of my body  it affected me all over, but it started on, and was most powerful at, the left. I don’t know what a heavy jolt of electricity feels like, and I don’t know what a heart attack feels like, so I can’t say definitely that it felt like a combination of the two, but it felt like what I think a combination of the two would feel like. It made me certain that I was within a hair of becoming a goner right on the spot. And not just a plain dead goner, either, but a DESTROYED dead goner, because it felt as though, once  my consciousness had been squeezed out through the top of my head, it was going to shatter into tiny pieces. It was painful, but not as painful as it was terrifying, and I certainly thought I was about to be destroyed, whether such a thing is  possible or not. If you ever had an experience like that yourself, (God forbid), you would never again be able to doubt that the socalled “supernatural” is real. I was so shaken I could hardly pray, though I was told I must.

So I prayed like a madman for at least an hour, most of  the time down on the floor on my knees and elbows, and every once in a while I’d get another blast just to keep me weak and cowering. I thought I’d offended God, so I prayed for forgiveness. I might have been better off praying for help (though possibly not), but since I thought it was God who was  doing this to me, I didn’t think it made sense to expect help from the source of my misery.

When it was finally over and I’d stopped shaking enough to hold a pencil again, I was told that I was being “tested” to be sure I’d be able to withstand the pressures I’d be subjected to after the book was published. I was sure, at that moment, that there was nothing the visible world could dream up to do to me that would frighten me half as much as that afternoon’s ordeal had, and that if I could stand that, I could withstand anything else.

Ginny told me later that the devil is not permitted to kill a person outright, though I’ve no doubt he could easily do so if he really wanted to. My research into  the devil’s doings leads me to believe that that is true. He does kill people, by causing them to starve to death or to commit suicide or whatever, but that’s not exactly the same thing as knocking them dead himself.

From then on, something of an unpleasant physical nature happened almost every day, though nothing else was as frightening as that first treatment had been. Always it was testing,  testing, testing until my nerves were pretty well frazzled. I  noticed, but didn’t learn anything from, the fact that  whenever I began to feel bad when I was out in public, thinking, “Oh, no, not now!” pushed the bad feeling away, at least temporarily. At home in my room, where I didn’t have to pretend  that things were just the same as always, I took what he dished out without resistance, because I thought I had to.

Besides all the harassment in the name of testing, I  lost my appetite. I had to be reminded to eat, and  could only manage to get down a few bites before I couldn’t swallow any more. This was definitely not the real me, and when I asked about it I was told that they were responsible for it  because starvation would make me more spiritual. Well, okay. I could stand to lose a few pounds anyway. The extreme form of this condition is called “anorexia nervosa,” which is frequently accompanied by its opposite, “bulimia,” and the net result can be death by starvation. Karen Carpenter died of it, remember?

Christy Henrich was a gymnast. She was 22 years old and  weighed less than 60 pounds when she died of multiple organ failure brought on by starvation in July of 1994. Her psychotherapist blamed her obsessivecompulsive behavior on shame, perfectionism, and selfpunishment. Christy herself is quoted as having said, “My life is a horrifying nightmare. It feels like there’s a beast inside of me, like a monster. It feels evil.”

Obsessivecompulsive perfectionism and selfpunishment  are scientific. Evil monsters within are ridiculous and unscientific  but real.

One of the more unusual aspects of our book was to be  the inclusion of a portrait of Jesus Christ, drawn automatically through Chip’s friend Mike, by a bigname portraitist  now residing otherwhere. I won’t say who it was supposed to be because I don’t wish to smear anyone, dead or alive, who  hasn’t earned it, (there’s no shortage), and anyway, it was probably never anybody but the devil all along. The devil’s portrait of Jesus was very unflattering: he looked shiftyeyed and sneering, about like Sean Penn in a very bad mood, and the farthest thing imaginable from the epitome of perfect  niceness.

Mike drew a lot of pictures automatically, all portraits, and every single one of them looked devious and evil no matter who the alleged artist was. I suppose that’s not too surprising. ALL the pictures I’ve seen that were drawn by the devil are ugly. There’s a nice assortment reproduced in a  book called The Link, which is by and about a young man named Matthew Manning, if you care to look at some yourself.

Manning had been the victim of prolonged poltergeist manifestations (the poltergeist stole things, wrote all over the walls, and generally made a mess of the place), and discovered that he could defuse or rechannel the buildup of power that brought them on by doing automatic writing and drawing. There were numerous mistakes made in the pictures he did with “Beardsley” (Aubrey), including one where the design on the tail of a peacock was reversed. Durer, Klee, Picasso, Matisse, Goya, (Manning felt physically ill while drawing a hideous picture with him), and even Leonardo da Vinci allegedly drew pictures through Manning, but I think they’re all really the devil. I also think that they’re the devil imitating his own work, by which I mean that I think all those guys were directly influenced by the devil while they were alive.

For example, it’s easy to see that Goya was a wonderful painter, (so wonderful that he could depict a person’s character as well as his likeness), but he had a lot of strange personal problems and some of his pictures are very scary. And think about the fact that Lenny da V. wrote backwards, though nobody knows why, since he was able to write frontwards if he wanted to.

Besides being an artist, the devil is a musician. My son’s spirit friend was a guitar player when he was alive, and his ability and style were much admired by his friends. Chip is an excellent bassist but was not, at that time, much of a guitar player. When he and Tom got together again, Chip  thought it’d be interesting  and possibly instructive  to see if he could let himself go enough for Tom to play the guitar through him. Other people who were acquainted with Tom’s style (and Chip’s ability) thought that they were successful on several occasions.

One night, Chip invited some of his buddies over for a jam session  “to jam” means to play music extemporaneously with free improvisation (definition provided for those who are still hep)  and those kids were so far into the free bag that jamming on prearranged changes wasn’t enough: they made up everything as  they went along. They always taped whatever they did, perhaps so that in case they accidentally played something that didn’t sound perfectly awful, they could hear it again when they sobered up.

On this particular evening there were spirits present other than Budweiser and Old Style, although I’ve forgotten who, aside from Tom, they claimed to be. The guys played and drank beer and stayed up late and a fine time was had by all, I’m sure.

The next day Chip discovered that the reel containing a portion of the previous evening’s performance had been reversed and that the machine was threaded wrong. Nobody thinks  that was necessarily done supernaturally, but we don’t know  how it happened. What was so interesting about it was that when the tape was played backwards it made more musical sense  than it had frontwards, sounded better, and had all the earmarks of having been planned out ahead of time, which is some  thing I have just taken great pains to show was not the case.

As for whether our opinion about the music’s quality in which direction has any value, Buzz has been a professional instrumentalist since he was 15, made his living singing for more than 20 years, and was a high school music teacher when he was young. He knows.

Backwards is always a signal that the devil is near. That’s why I was so upset to find myself brushing my teeth with hot water one morning when I thought I was done with him.

And, of course, the devil is a very fine writer, or can be when he feels like it. The critics raved about the work of  Patience Worth, calling it the equal, if not the better, of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, and said its literary value was indisputable.

Patience Worth was the Ouija board wonder of the 20th century who wrote, over the course of 24 years, some four million words of first rate prose and poetry with Mrs. Pearl  Curran of St. Louis, Missouri. The mystery is how Mrs. Curran’s largely uneducated subconscious could have produced all that great literature; OR how a fragmentary alternate personality of Mrs. Curran’s could have produced all that great literature; OR how such an uneducated person as Patience Worth claimed to have been could have produced all that great literature. OR all of the above, PLUS: how to account for the intimate knowledge of biblical times Patience (who said she had lived in the 17th century) displayed in her book The Sorry Tale? And so on  I can’t even remember all the questions,  but who cares because here, at long last, is the answer that answers them all: the devil did it.

I got the impression from the book I read on this subject, Singer in the Shadows: The Strange Story of Patience Worth, by Irving Litvag, that Mrs. Curran and everybody else who knew Patience loved her dearly, and I think Mr. Litvag was pretty well in love with her himself, even though he  never met her. I hope he doesn’t decide to sue me for defaming her character.

Anyway, everybody loved her dearly, which doesn’t surprise me in the least  I’d love her too, if I didn’t know who she was  because prolonged contact with a pleasant spirit always produces great love for the spirit, and the devil is certainly capable of great lovableness when that suits his purpose. Ordinarily, however, he doesn’t fool around with anybody he’s not recruiting for a long tour of  duty in the hot place, so he doesn’t spend all his time being nice  sooner or later he turns mean. He also lies, and the lies usually get bigger and bigger as he goes along (if the person questions a lie, he’ll either explain how the lie is actually the truth or else blame the person for being stupid or misunderstanding what he said), until, if the person has any sense at all, he may finally get the idea that he’s not doing business with a reputable outfit and give up the practices that are putting his soul into jeopardy. The problem is that when you’re in love it’s very difficult to say goodbye forever to your beloved, even when your beloved is being a mean sonofabitch.

But in Patience Worth’s writings he doesn’t drop any big clues about his true identity, (I guess: I haven’t read it all), and if her work is full of lies, they must be so subtle no one has noticed them. That being the case, why does Patience Worth necessarily have to be the devil? Why couldn’t  she just be a regular spirit the way she claimed to be? Not a chance, because a regular spirit, conversing through the Ouija board (or automatic writing), has no power to prevent the devil from taking over the action whenever he feels like it.

There’s no way in hell the devil’s going to let a regular  spirit work, unmolested, for 24 years, and there’s no way in hell the devil wouldn’t interrupt a spirit who’s producing work which is  if the critics are right  as good as his own. Patience Worth as good as Shakespeare? Not unless Patience Worth was the devil.

Ginny had told me earlier that, while we had both been great writers in our most recent incarnations, I was the better and that if the reverse had been true, I would have been the mother and she the daughter. I didn’t have a way to argue that point and anyway, having never read much of the work of either one of us, was not in a position to make a judgment. What little I had read of “myself” hadn’t thrilled me all that much and I was actually disappointed. I was hoping to have been somebody else.

Whatever the case, when the devil decided to write our book himself, it soon became obvious that, whatever I thought of my ability, then or now, this guy was better. WAY better. Now, of course, since he’s claiming to be God, you shouldn’t be surprised if he’s good  what surprised me was how funny  he was. And when he was nice, he was so nice that I wasn’t afraid of him anymore the way I had been when he was testing me all the damn time. In fact, if I remember correctly, he even apologized for scaring me so bad.

I don’t know why the devil decided to take over our book completely  provided it wasn’t the devil alone all along, that is  but what seemed to precipitate his involvement was as follows:

On Wednesday afternoon I was typing the chapter I’d written about the Antichrist, in which we also discussed the cataclysm that’s been forecast for the end of this century by so many psychics, including the much admired Edgar Cayce. While I was doing that, it crossed my mind that when the cataclysm begins, the powersthatbe might think they were being attacked by some other powersthatbe, push the button, and set off an atomic holocaust, in comparison to which a simple little cataclysm would be a welcome alternative. Or what if the cataclysm itself caused some other kind of nuclear accident?

We didn’t work any more that afternoon because “God” was so happy we’d thought of something he’d overlooked (well, things have changed so much in the last 40 years, which is really no time at all, and he’d been so busy, and you know how it goes and all that) that we were let off the destruction hook right then and there, and we all went out to dinner to celebrate. Up to this time, Ginny had relayed all of God’s remarks to me, but while we were at dinner this other party came on the line and, while he didn’t come right out and say, “Good evening, my dear, I am God Almighty Himself  in Person,” he signed all his remarks “Sobeit,” and let on  in more ways than one that he was indeed BIG STUFF.

In the morning, we started all over with this third party in charge of everything. For openers, the cataclysm was canceled and, after publication of the book, psychics would be able to look into the future and not see it. (That’s how he put it.) Then he went on to tell the whole history of  the ancient world, starting ten million years ago, and he made it sound like he’d had such a hard way to go all those years that I felt enormously sorry for him  and was amazed at his ineptitude. Imagine that.

   After that, things began getting really far out (that makes me laugh), and if I told you all about everything, you’d never be able to understand how a person with a higher  IQ than an empty beer can could possibly buy all this guff, and you already think I’m nuts anyway, I’m sure. Nevertheless,  I did believe it, and so did the few other people who knew what was going on. I think they believed it because I’d always seemed like such a downtoearth, no bullshit person, and nothing traumatic or crazymaking had happened in my everyday life that could be blamed for a sudden attack of   insanity. And anyway, nothing was actually any different than usual except that I was doing this writing, thought it was important, and believed what turned out to be a pack of lies. I’m hardly the first person that ever happened to, but I still feel bad about being so stupid.

I could probably think up the things we wrote if I spent enough time thinking about it. There is no doubt that I could not have made them up as rapidly as they were coming to me. Left to my own devices, I’m a very slow writer and a genius at thinking up reasons to do something  or anything  else. Now I was in my room every day, writing nonstop, hour after hour, turning out page upon page of wellorganized, highly polished prose at every sitting, when my independent output had rarely exceeded a single page, which I would rewrite every time I looked at it.

We began again from the beginning on Thursday, August 31. Some portions of the existing manuscript were incorporated into this new work, but not much. The best part of what I had  written myself was about the Antichrist, and God was feeling so mellow he canceled that, too, so there wasn’t really anything left that was mine, except that he stole one of my jokes.

By Monday evening it was apparent that we would be finished with the whole book by the end of the week. And it was terrific. It’s hard to imagine how a funny religious book (or any kind of a religious book, for that matter)  without sex, violence, conflict, or a plot  could even be interesting, but it was.

I’m not going to ask you to take my unsupported word for very much, but you’ll have to take it for this. Ginny told me not to quote anything I wrote with the devil, so I won’t. It might not make any difference if I did, but it surely won’t hurt not to. Besides, I don’t have any of it anymore, because when Chip and Mike and I found out what was really going on, we were so freaked out that we threw away EVERYTHING. We should have saved one of Mike’s pictures, because you’d have to see it to believe it. It was a large portrait of a woman with a picture hat and a mass of curly hair,  (and a mean look on her pretty face), done with a ballpoint pen. The whole picture was one continuous line of figure 8s, drawn without lifting the pen from the paper. Mike is loaded  with talent of his own, but I can’t believe he did that by himself, in one try, without ever needing to erase anything.

Whatever you think of my own writing, and despite the fact that I wasn’t really a bigtime, bestselling, world renowned AUTHOR in my last incarnation, my critical faculties are pretty well developed from having spent my whole life with my nose in a book. I know a good book when I read  one (which is not the same thing as knowing a good book when I write one, but I’m doing the best I can). I was not concerned about the vagaries of the publishing biz. Are you kidding? GOD can’t get published? (Funny me. I now know that even God himself would be advised to go out and make a name for himself in some other line of work before anybody would agree to so much as look at his stuff.) I was positive that The Good Book would be a blockbuster and all my worries would  be over.

If it was true, The Good Book was the answer to all our prayers. Even if it wasn’t true, it was still marvelously  inventive and amusing, but I wouldn’t quote it even if I could, because I suspect that using the devil’s work to promote my own would amount to the same thing as an outright purchase of a oneway ticket to somewhere no one wants to go. I apologize for how crazy that sounds, but I’m not responsible for how crazy you think the truth is.

While we’re on the subject, I’d like to remind you that I did not believe in hell any more than I believed in the devil. But, since I’m now convinced that the devil is real, it follows that hell is probably real as well. I suppose it’s possible that the devil could be doing his dirty work for the plain fun of it, but it’s not safe to count on it.

Most books describing the lifeafterdeath experiences of people who’ve been clinically dead for various lengths of time and have then come back to life have not included any stories of bad experiences on “the other side.” That, of course, does not disprove the existence of hell. It suggests  that the devil gets his at the first opportunity, and doesn’t  like to throw anybody back once he’s got them in the boat, but even he is not always successful. You definitely ought  to read Beyond Death’s Door, by Maurice Rawlings, M.D. He tells some really scary things he heard from people whose  neardeath experiences were not all happiness and joy. In fact, based on his research, he thinks it’s possible that as much as 50% of the population may wind up in hell.

Dr. Rawlings is a cardiologist  the others who’ve written about neardeath experiences (aside from some neardeath experiencers themselves) are psychiatrists  and as such, he’s more liable to be on the spot when somebody is being resuscitated. He says it’s important to talk to the people right  away, while they’re still in trouble, because they will have forgotten the bad experience if you wait to ask. The good  news is that he’s found people who’ve had more than one neardeath experience and none of them has had a good experience followed by a bad one: it’s always been bad first, then good. I don’t know what those people did, or thought they did, to get themselves straightened out between deaths  Rawlings doesn’t say  but I’d be willing to bet they asked God to forgive them for whatever.

Rawlings seems surprised that some of those people, who were good, churchgoing religious types, should wind up in hell. One possible answer to that is that there are still plenty of people around who fought in WW2, Korea, Nam, etc., who may have killed some people and never thought another thing about. It’s a soldier’s duty to kill the enemy, after all, and he does it with the government’s blessing. However, it’s entirely possible that GOD doesn’t take sides and does not take kindly to unrepentant killers. Of course that does nothing to explain what went wrong with anybody who wasn’t in the service, but it’s someplace to start.

When I gathered everything together to throw The Good Book  away, I was amazed at how much there was. Including the first draft, the organizing and revision I’d done, and Mr.  Edgar Allan Satan’s contribution, it must have been nearly four hundred pages by the time I quit. That’s an awful lot of wasted work to do in just a little over five weeks  wasted time,  wasted effort, wasted paper  but the devil loves waste, so he was probably satisfied. Here’s an example:

One day he insisted that we go to the movies because he wanted us to see his favorite picture. (He adores the movies, and in the days before VCRs, when it was more trouble to see a movie than it is now, he liked to go every night  or else he’d have them brought in. He’s not fussy, either: he’ll   watch anything.) I like movies, too, but I’m not about to pay first run prices  I can wait. But not this time. “God” says he wants to go to the show, but he doesn’t want to go by himself, so we have to go. (This serves a double purpose: the devil likes to control people, so anything he can get you to do that’s contrary to what you’d ordinarily do is a bonus.) So the tickets were expensive, (at least we didn’t have to buy one for him), and the popcorn was outrageously overpriced, which is probably why it tasted so good and I could eat so much of it, even though I could barely gag down more than two  bites of anything else.

Then it turned out that he’d already seen the picture a couple of times, and all the way through it he kept giving me big goose bumps whenever he thought something good was about to happen  but he kept making them in the wrong places and then saying, “Oops, sorry, I got mixed up.” It was a lot like sitting next to a person who nudges you whenever something happens that he thinks you might not understand.

Of course, the only reason he liked this movie was because of the title: Heaven Can Wait.