I gave this page the above title because all of us are somewhere in the wilderness, travelling toward the promised land. Some of us have forgotten that there is a promised land. For others it is merely a metaphor, yet all of us are on the same broad road and for all of us the journey comes in fits and starts. So it is for Cynthia and her classmates. Cynthia Do was and still remains a loyal member of the Heaven's Gate community. This Web Page tells her story.
Trying to see life through Cynthia's eyes is like rounding the bend of a circle back to something primal and lovely among the stars. Cynthia believes this is both her start and her destination. Once before she was born into the physical life she recently ended, Cynthia was a gizani, a creature that floated in the heavens and danced among the stars. Somehow she was born as human on Earth. The world Cynthia left behind was one of delicate beauty. From the images she has shown me, it was a world of soft mists, saphire colored night skies, golden furred animals and trees with emerald colored leaves and small red and orange fruits.
From the time she was five or six years old, Cybthia kenw that her parents were not her "real" parents. Her real mother was a princess whom she currently calls Ti-Sa who now as a spirit makes her home somewhere among the stars. You may have read of Ti-Sa in the newspapers as Ti. Note: according to the Heaven's Gate web page, the souls of the elect do not awaken until they reach some time in early adulthood, but Cynthia feels that Do is not quite right, at least in her case. Cynthia entered adolescence as a fat teenager. She had long brown hair that reached the small of her back and a fat and pale body. She took art courses but could not find herself. One of her favorite things to do was lie on her back in the front seat of her car and listento the tape deck.
Cynthia feels that joining Heaven's Gate around age twenty was the best thing that ever happened to her. Heaven's Gate freed her from an obligation to be a sexual being, something she has never been comfortable with. As part of her initiation, a fellow member cut off nearly all of Cynthia's long brown hair. The locks were then thrown into a fire. Cynthia says, "I could sleep in a tent with a male and not have to worry about him hitting me up."
Cynthia also lost weight effortlessly. "I ate peanut butter sandwiches and potato chips and coke when we could afford it, and I never got fat." Heaven's Gate also built Cynthia's self confidence. She often did the filming for the videos. She said she knew almost nothing about how to run a video camera, but "they taught me to do things I thought I can't do." For Cynthia, her art now had meaning. She says: "The trouble with art is that it is so self indulgent...it is just like one person screaming." As a member of Heaven's Gate, she found that her art served a "higher purpose. That's what I liked about doing the web pages," or rather the graphics on most of the group's web pages.
On Sunday or Monday March 24 or 25, 1997, Cynthia along with one third of Heaven's Gate class ended their physical lives. Cynthia made the vanilla pudding that she laced with phenobarbital. Cynthia does not look upon the suicide itself as a particularly big deal. "Sometimes you have to get rid of a physical body." She also added "we honored our dead." referring to the careful way in which the bodies were laid out on beds at Rancho Santa Fe. As a member of the first group to commit suicide, she had no responsibility for clean up. Cynthia's responsibilities were of a different sort. She was a member of the advance party, a kind of beach-head in the afterworld.
Cynthia explains: "After we sat down to eat [the last meal of drug laced vanilla pudding and vodka] we were all pretty quiet. We were all a little happy and anxious about what was going to happen next. We weren't sure we should all say goodbye to eachother because we were going to see eachother again real soon." Cynthia and her fellow classmates shook hands and hugged eachother, especially those who would die in later groups. "But nobody really knew what to say. It was at a time like this when you're hopin' and prayin' that it isn't just going to be nothing. That there is going to be something on the other side of all this. That's what I was doing. I wanted to go home real bad."
Because she was small and the pills effected her more easily, Cynthia was the first to die as far as she knows. She continues: "When I died Jacob [Jacob Franklin, Cynthia's Home Base Counselor *] came to me and said he would like to be of service. He helped me unfold and put me down real easy on the lawn. He said that though we were very different he could be very useful to me." She took the name Cynthia Do as a posthumous pseudonym and went from a brown brushed cut to her current shaven head. She sat on the lawn, her legs flexed, her hands about her ankles. Looking at this image of her, I had the sense that she felt like someone who had run a marathon and collapsed after crossing the finish line. She felt neither regret, nor sorror, nor ecstasy, just relief at having carried out a difficult task as planned. Cynthia did not say if she sent Jacob away at first, whether she asked him to wait at a distance or whether he left her of his own acocord. Cynthia put an orange and gold scarf around her neck and waved it as she stood outside, hoping to attract the attention of anyone in the house.
Evan was the second Heaven's Gate member to die. Note: Evan is a pseudonym and I do not know what his name was when he was alive. "I died hard," Evan explained. "The medicine made me cold and made me thrash around. There was a lady in white who helped me. [another counselor]. She was going to take me home but there was someone calling to me. There was Cynthia on the lawn waving to me to join her." Cynthia said "Evan came out of the house and we put our arms around heachother like brother and sister" At the time all Evan wore was a little triangular shaped poncho of thin white cloth that left his sides bare. "I remembered I had to put some clothes on after that," said Evan. I can feel the warmth of Evan and Cynthia's hug as I write this.
"Gennifer was the third one out," explained Cynthia and after that it was easy to attract the others to the lawn. " We all had our bad times" is how she sums up the first day or so. Cynthia showed me an image of herself sitting Indian style on the lawn cradling a male spirit's head on her lap. She also told me of a morning when one of the newly dead who were waiting for the others found a bird sitting upon its nest high in a tree. "I never thought we'd get another look at nature again," said Cynthia. This second chance look was especially poignant because Cynthia believes that the world and human civilization will destroy itself through ecological disaster.
At last the counselors arrived on the lawn. I call them that because I am a bya sabe channeler. They may have other names and titles. One counselor in particular, a bya sabe Home Base Counselor, named Jacob Franklin, offered Cynthia a drink of red punch and gave her a child's box of paints. "He gave me boiled peanuts which I had not had since I was a child and he brought me lady fingers with whipped cream and strawberries. He said 'I want you to feel special, Cynthia, so you can be special.'" She accepted all of Jacob's gifts as well as his role as counselor. Other counselors brought yet more food and drink. Cynthia confessed to me that she stuffed herself with pizza, a thought that left her a little embarassed after the fact, though the comfort of eating to gave her the spiritual strength to help the others.
Keeping the group together until all of them had died, was Cynthia's goal those first few days. When a counselor wanted to take a classmate off to some other realm, Cynthia intervened. "We have two women who are back in the house who are going to clean up after the last group," she reminded her classmate. "Do you want them to come outside and find nobody here? You owe it to them." The classmate remained.
As the grounds of the mansion at Rancho Santa Fe became crowded with reporters, police, and ambulances, the entire Heaven's Gate relocated to a city called Quinja. But before, settling in the city the group stopped at a large cement building. The building had a pitched roof and a portico over the door decorated with lots of peer glass. It was set on a hillside and seemed to be a beaurocratic center of sort. The counselors brought all the Heaven's Gate members inside en masse to receive ID cards and get registered or have some sort of paper work processed. I guess there are even lines at least on some parts of the other side. The interior of the building was clean with tiled floors and hard plastic seats. The place, however, was not equipped to register thirty-nine spirits all at once. As the Heaven's Gate group stood all lined up, they looked quite different than the well laid out bodies that everyone saw on TV. Some had brush cuts, but many had shaven heads and each wore a different color jumpsuit or pants outfit. They looked motley and a bit tired. The thing that I remember most was how they stuck together and waited quietly.
For Cynthia this was the worst experience of her afterlife. It reminded her of all the lines she had ever waited on line for college registrations, drivers' licenses etc… Worse yet, the spirit beaurocrats who issued the ID's and interviewed each spirit treated the Heaven's Gate members like children. A squirmy Cynthia who disliked the cold weather (even though she has been VERY STOIC about it) sat on an orange plastic chair with her legs drawn up as the interviewer talked at her. The coup de grace came when the interviewer handed her a lime lolly pop. Cynthia asked what this was for. She had been eating to keep he head clear and so she could help her classmates, but the lolly pop from this beaurocrat was too much. "If you put something in your mouth sometimes you can think more clearly," the beaurocrat said.
That was it for Cynthia. She bolted out of the building and threw herself down in the snow. Then she stripped off her clothes and dove into a not quite frozen, but very cold, pond. I could feel the chill of the water for a second. Do came out after her. He asked "what are you doing?" "Soaking my head," she replied "and all the rest of me." This scene feels comical now but I can feel Cynthia's anger, disappointment, and spent emotion.
After their encounter with the beaurocrats, the Heaven's Gate group settled in Quinja. Quinja is what is called a sevath city. Do not ask me what plane this is on. I do not know and am not sure whether it matters. Quinja resembles Binghamton, New York though it is as far north as Montreal, Canada. The skies are often grey and as of mid-April there are still patches of snow on the ground often joined by more of the fresh, fluffy white stuff. There are old two story wooden houses, pock-marked sky scrapers, and abandoned or converted factories and warehouses. At one end of town flows a wide muddy river that reminds me of the Susquehana. As of April 11, 1997, The Heaven's Gate group is spread throughout three apartments. The one where Cynthia resides is on the third floor of a flat roofed stone building. Until yesterday it was heated with coal. It is now heated with gas and has tall old windows and a working fire place. Cynthia is sanguine about her new surroundings. "This is a move like any other,;" she explained. "This place is prettier than you think."
Cynthia has been immersed in making the apartment she shares with members of her class a home. She has laid new tile on the floor, put new paint on the walls, choopped wood for the fire place, and helped dig a ditch for a second gas main. She put a colorful cloth on the picnic table where the group sometimes sits and even travelled to another city to acquire fresh flowers. She believes that there is a flower to represent every member of her class who are to her like brothers, sisters, and lovers all rolled into one.
Jacob Franklin is Cynthia's Home Base Counselor. Although not fully bya sabe, Cynthia is receiving a lot of the same processing that any bya sabe newbie would. Jacob is a dark and gnomish spirit man. He stands about five feet tall and has olive skin, wild black hair and a huge unruly beard. He favors bright colored shirts and denim cut-offs even in winter.
For Cynthia, processing means exploring herself. Jacob encourages her to paint and draw, particularly self portraits. He also gives her books to read on subjects that interest her. These include art, architecture, and horticulture. While Cynthia finds abstract art to "indulgent," she enjoys looking at Chinese and Japanese paintings due to their meticulous detail, respect for nature, and the way humans are often placed in proper, small persepctive. Jacob is also teaching Cynthia to cook so that she and the group may ward off the hunger pangs that afflict spirits who do not enjoy a well prepared and sociable meal when they are fragile newbies. Because, Cynthia is learning that to nurture others she must also nurture herself. Then there is mobility training. Cynthia is learning not just to move from one place to another in a flash but to soar gracefully through the sky, to flip and twist in the air, to dance in the air with one or more other spirits, and to stretch and balance herself carefully and well.
But how can Cynthia explore herself when she feels that she is part of a grand design and a larger whole rather than just an independent being with wants to be satisfied? The answer to this question is "with reservations." Earlier this week, Cynthia decided to both cease doing self portraits and not to sketch fellow members of her group. She also does not want to paint landscapes since there is no point advertising the promised land to doomed living and dead souls. Jacob and Ti-Sa later persuaded Cynthia to resume her painting. Ti-Sa in particular feels that Cynthia's art is what she "brought with her from her time on Earth."
Cynthia is half way to the promised land. Her spirit body while not genderless is wonderfully asexual. She has relatively small breasts, a small child's paunch, and no pubic hair. She can fly and the stars are now within easy reach or at least they form a beautiful blanket overhead. She has once again met Ti-Sa, when she (Ti) and Do were reunited several days ago.
Best of all, Cynthia is with her borthers and sisters, her classmates. She squeals with delight when one of them masters a particularly difficult flight move. She worries when a brother or sister grows homesick for the family they abandoned when they joined Heaven's Gate. She admires the courage of those given particularly difficult clean up duties like twenty year old Louisa or those who had a hard death like Jaime. Cynthia realizes that it may be half a dozen years until she and her group reach the "world beyond human" and again become children in a garden but Cynthia is willing to serve, nurture, and wait.
Cynthia showed me a white stone structure that stood in the center of a lunar landscape. The structure was built of stone slabs that lay against eachother so that they formed a small house with a low lying roof that was pitched shallowly enough to allow climbing and an interior chamber that was large enough for several people. The house sat in the middle of a lunar landscape of greyish brown sand. The stone of which the little house was built was all carved in glyphs and a writing that I could not read.
Cynthia climbed one of the sides of the roof of the house. She seemed very, very happy. She was wearing a white terry cloth jumpsuit trimmed with red and white checked cloth about the neck in a little roll. She also had white terry cloth slippers on her feet. She reminded me f a big baby just taken out of the bathtub. She told me that this was the place on a distant world that she remembered from a past life. She had worked here, and she told me the building was some kind of a temple for sending messages elsewhere. She said she could read the glyphs, but would not tell me what they said. Of course, I did not ask either.
Cynthia explained that she had visited the stone temple with Ti-Sa, Do, and several (probably quite a few but thirty-nine is a large number to work with) members of her group. The temple beamed messages down to humans who lived in a very different kind of world than earth. These humans had never forgotten or lost touch with higher intelligences in the sky and beyond. Most of them lived simple agrarian lives. She flashed me images of a green valley bathed by a golden sun. In this valley, peasants in brown clothes and with dark brown hair and brown eyes and round faces gathered grain and hay into golden sheaves. They lived in stucco houses with thatched roofs and when they looked up to the sky they knew there were those who could listen. Cynthia explained that she had been one of those beings that these people looked up to. She had been a guardian, teacher, and protector and that her name in that life had been Auwari.
Cynthia also showed me the inside of the stone temple on the lunar world. It was just an open space with a huge stone table. Do dressed in black was sprawled across the table. Colored lights from some source (don't ask me where) played over him and around the followers who sat in a circle around him. I am not sure what kind of message he was sending or receiving. At this point I mentioned to Cynthia that someone from her group (or a group) had sent a channeled message that I had read on a web page. She said that it was possible but nothing more.
Cynthia sighed. She wasn't sure she could go back to being Auwari. She flashed an image of Auwari's people, tall with slightly domed, but not quite pointy, bald heads and rough togas in different colors. Could they accept little round headed Cynthia in a red velvet jumpsuit. That was what she had been wearing in the middle of yesterday afternoon right before the trip to the stone temple on the lunar world. She had been standing by the langiappe table eating a strawberry twizzler. She showed me the image of herself complete with the twizzler hanging out of her mouth. She said "how can I be one of them with strawberry twizzler still around the edges of my mouth?" I didn't answer.
Ti-Sa had an answer though. She explained that the twizzlers were no big deal. "We are going to take you back," she told Cynthia. "Didn't I give you my necklace?" Ti-Sa also explained that the group, Heaven's Gate, was like a basket. It had to be whole and strong to hold its contents. Unfortunately, there were places where the weaving had become torn and undone leaving holes. It was those holes that needed filling in. Meanwhile, Cynthia had dinner to prepare. She flashed me images of herself carving up the huge rouge vin temps pumpkin and making a huge roast turkey. She was proud of the accomplishment though in her eyes it paled before what she had once been and what she wanted to be again.
Later Cynthia showed me an image of herself wearing a pea green jumpsuit with a mustard gold sweater over it. She decided that this, not white nor the red she sometimes favors was the appropriate color for her where she stood at the time. She said of green and gold that "they're the colors of spring." She stood on a grassy hill with grey clouds behind her. She walked down the hill. She told me she had been allowed today to walk among her old people on their world where she walked beneath skinny trees with tiny delicate little green leaves. She had liked it there, even though at this stage she was only permitted a short visit. Then the Heaven's Gate group split up and different members took trips to various worlds. That was how Cynthia retured to the planet where she acted as a guardian. She walked through green meadows near the sea. The sun was shining. She loved the spring air. I think she had forgotten how much she missed California's warmth in the week or so she has been residing beneath Quinja's cold skies.
After a time she came to what looked like a church. It was not a fancy place, white washed with a slate roof. "But it was not a church like you have on Earth." Cynthia reminded me. On the wall above the altar instead of a cross was a great golden star that looked like a ball of styelized fire. On the altar itself were carved ceramic and wooden pots containing oil candles to light in honor of the powers above. She said "here the people never forgot about worhsiping the light." She sat next to the pots on the altar and looked out over the rows of wooden pews. After a time a woman came in dragging a small child. These people were round faced and had slightly lank black hair and wide spaced brown eyes. I asked if the child did not make Cynthia uncomfortable. She explained to me that "these people have sex but only to reproduce when they receive the call. It is not for pleasure like on Earth."
Cynthia stared at the woman and the child. She suspected that they could perceive her in some way. Then she said something in a language I did not understand. She told me "I gave them both a blessing, and then I turned and walked away. It was the only thing that I could think of to do." I could feel a bit of her frustration. She walked around the outside of the church in the bright sunlight. She drew my attention to the dark slate of the roof. She said the church was a very plain place not adorned in gold or fake ornaments. She was impressed with it.