Well, I am sorry to have kept all of you waiting, but once again real life intervened as it always does with my efforts of self-publishing. It is autumn now in Quinja. The leaves have mostly fallen from the trees, there is more than a slight nip in the air, and the Heaven's Gate class often gathers around the fire in Apartment 3, 1440 WestSouth Street to listen to Do and to gather together. To quote Cynthia Do: "Being in Heaven's Gate is like being on a ship. Do is the captain. Sometimes, these days, we dive into the water and swim but we always climb back up the ladder and climb back on board. That's the way it hs been for som many years, I forget that most people don't live like that. I sit there learningmy math and my phyisc s and forget hat we are trying to reach people out there" 9/1/97. That outreach is what most of this update is about.
One night , Cynthia compared Do to Noah of the Bible. I felt somewhat surprised. I reminded her that Noah saved an ark full of people and animals while Cynthia and her classmates were, albeit only but nonetheless, physically dead. Cynthia replied that while Noah had saved eight people, Do had saved thirty-nine (forty counting Ti-Sa). Moreover, the ark was heading back to shore to pick up others from our dying world. Now unless you are excedingly gullible, that probably sounds like a ludicrous claim. You look around and say "I don't see any great movement of people rushing off to imitate Heaven's Gate!", but wait.
There are over four billion people in
the world. If the Heaven's Gate class touch five thousand in different countries and
of different ages and from different walks of life, how likely is it that you will know?
Five thousand (and I use that as a high number) out of four billion is a drop in the
bucket. Also, given the bad publicity surrounding the Heaven's Gate suicide in the
United States or the world for that matter, how many people who interract with Heaven's
Gate members in their dreams are going to tell anyone? I realize that I am taking a
very brave step in setting up a web page. Setting up this web page is screaming a
message from the rooftops, but you have to look up and see me. I am not screaming
it in my family or coworkers' faces. Well you get the idea...anyway, here comes the
update. Enjoy.....
I don't have to tell you that Heaven's Gate has always been a group effort, so it is natural for me to have met some of Cynthia's classmates and learned something about them. Note: I refer to all Heaven's Gate classmates by their current pseudonyms. If you recognize any of them as someone you know, then let it remain a secret between us.
Tara is small and stocky. Her face is snub-nosed giving her a slightly shaven bulldog appearance. She is very pale and always seems slightly sunburnt. If she had hair she would be reddish blond. Her eyes are blue. She is a bit older than Cynthia, and has a graduate degree in computer science from a college in California. She left a husband behind to join Heaven's Gate and has been a long time member. She was Cynthia's check partner and good friend. She says that Heaven's Gate made far more sense to her than graduate school. Having been a graduate student myself, I think I understand that last statement all too well. Tara says:
"The trick is to stop most of the bullshit thoughts that go on in your mind. You will agree that most of what we think is gibberish. You have to make yourself very still inside to hear what really matters. I tell you something, when I first joined the group [Heaven's Gate], I used to have a lot of trouble. I would get up and at dawn and rub myself with snow and stand in the sun. I would wake up and know this was better than what I had back home" 7/25/97.
Tara also asked me to send this letter to her parents. I refused because her parents were among those who talked rather extensively to the press. I don't mind self-publishing but the last thing I wanted was lawyers and private detectives on my back. If you are out there and you recognize Tara, and love her, this letter is probably for you:
Dear Mom and Dad, Where we are is with people who are just a little farther along on the road to being something better. These people build beautiful adobe houses in forests and on cliffs. It [our evolution] is a gradual process like climbing stairs. On the stairs from time to time we find something beaitufl like bright blue beads. We adorn ourselves and grow more beautiful. Sometimes I stand on the roof of our apartment building in Quinja and look down at the scnery. It is summer now and everything is green, much greener than it gets in California or out wet. It is green and people are hungry for the greenness because it is sumer here for only a short time. Gennifer is an excellent flier and Cynthia knows the city better than any of us. Sometimes in winter, we gather together around the fireplace in the upstairs apartment but the fire is not lit most of the time now. Sometimes, I help chop wood for the fire and sometimes I bring the logs inside. They feel rough and good in my hands. I know that you think that I [and everyone else in my class] is lost because I am dead. People who have no belief in the spiritual think that way, but someday we will resurface and you will see. some day we will surprise you. Tara Robins (7/23/97)Back to the top of the section. Back to the Top
Cynthia says of Gennifer: "she moves well in all space." Gennifer is Heaven's
Gate's graceful flier. She is a tall woman with honey colored eyes and pale blond
hair, if her head were not shaven. She usually favors black and works hard. She
has ridden the ship several times to earth. Late this summer, one of her work assignments resulted in an unusual adventure:
Gennifer's job was to load an assortement of furniture on to trucks that would take it over to other apartments in Quinja. Working with Gennifer was a woman in a grey-blue long dress, her hair comered completely by a close-fitting helmet-like white musling bonnet. On the stranger's feet were high button shoes. The stranger's name was Mary Hanna and she was a shaker, a member of a celibate religious community that flourished in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. The Shakers did not reproduce and as long as they had a ready supply of orphans to raise, their sect continued. When the orphan supply dwindled, they became a tourist attraction and in the 1930's or 1950's decided to stop teaching their beliefs to outsiders and to die out. Just as members of Heaven's Gate produced beautiful web pages, the Shakers who were not at all averse to technology (they invented the typical cane broom among other things) crafted beautiful furniture and other items. If the Shakers were around and active today, there is no question that they would be a called a cult. At that moment though, Mary Hanna, the Shaker and Gennifer of Heaven's Gate were colleagues in the furniture moving business.
Their relationship, however, was anything but collegial. Gennifer and Mary Hanna soon got into a fight. You can almost guess what they fought about: who belonged to the better religious movement. mary Hanna argued that the Shakers were better and more authentic because they had lasted over a century. "Yeah!" answered Gennifer "and that was only because people left their children with you. Once they stopped doing that you died off. We would have taken children. We would have been a good place to raise them too. You never tried to escape." Mary Hanna bristled and moments later the two spirits were werestling.
Back to the top of the section Back to the TopCynthia was the first Heaven's Gate classmates to die. Amy was one of the last. She was one of the two women assigned to clean-up duty. She is a bit taller than Cynthia with brown eyes and a forthright manner that comes through unshakeable faith. She is not bya sabe like Cynthia and her counselor/advisor does not believe in suicide but he admires her faith. According to Amy ""he said it takes a lot of faith to see all your friends die like that and then to follow them..." According to Cynthia, Amy received her assignment to the "clean up squad" from Do. "Do decided. It takes a special strength to be the first to go and wait for the others just as it takes a special strength to see all your firends die and then follow them. Do knew us all. When you've been together for twenty years, you get to know everybody very well."
Even with all her strength, Quinja leaves Amy a bit disappointed. It is the cold
climate, old buildings, and the particularly bleak spring weather that do it. To
Amy Quinja, is images of a muddy river frozen in a thin crust of ice. "That
was how we found Quinja" 7/14/97. Amy then showed me an image of herself paddling a canoe. The trick, she explained was to get the canoe through the ice.
That was heaven's Gate's mission, or at least the part that has to do with making
do in Quinja.
Khomit whose name means "one who is ignorant" or more charitably "one who has a lot to learn" is the only black member of Heaven's Gate. That means if you go through what are now rapidly becoming old newspapers you can trace her but I won't help you on this page. She is reasonably young, from Ohio and she left behind a husband who almost joined with her and five children, including newborn twins. She sometimes says that she misses her "three children". She does not speak of the twins and I do not bring up the subject. She was a member of Heaven's Gate less than two years before joining them in the mass suicide. She said that, though she has visited dead relatives since her own death Heaven's Gate is her true family. "Even after a few months, I knew." 7/21/97.
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Of all the Heaven's Gate classmates, none had more trouble adjusting to life
in Quinja then Kemys. Kemys is small with dark furtive eyes. When she first
arrived in Quinja she ran away to the warmth of a green house and sometimes
shirked her tasks by throwing away items by the muddy river. She is more philosophical now.
She says that the spring and summer have been like crossing a narrow bridge and
holding on to a swaying rope for suport. Quinja was still a disappointment but one
she has learned to accept. I have never asked Kemys if she regretted her suicide. I
am not sure why.
All good things take work, and the Heaven's Gate classmates work hard at attempting to rescue people from this doomed world. Cynthia continues to study math and physics. Because she is working with a mission in mind and because she believes that her faith enables her to do anything, she is succeeding in these subjects, but Cynthia, and nearly all the other Heaven's Gate classmates with the possible exception of Khomit are aliens among their own people. Their monastic lifestyle and different religious beliefs separated them.
Even in Quinja Cynthia sometimes runs smack into a wall of misunderstanding. Cynthia's school resembles countless schools built in the fifties, a sturdy building of brick the color of dried blood, built to withstand Quinja's harsh winters. Inside it smells as you would expect any school building to smell, a peculiar aroma of chalk dust and stale air. One of Cynthia's teachers is named Helen Moscko. Were Helen and Cythia both alive Helen would have been one of the people that Cynthia feared, and justifiably so. Cynthia would have been afraid that Helen would have meddled in her groups private affairs and that she would have tried to derail their mission and deprgoram their members. According to Cynthia, Helen "asked me if I were learning anything in the humanities. I told her I wasn't taking any courses at the school but that Jacob [Cynthia's Home Base Counselor] is supervising my instruction...Helen is afraid I'm like the person behind a mask, but I'm not that way. Jacob made me look for a poem or a story that Tara would like" 7/19/97.
Cynthia says "Literature and the humanities are a way to help me understand other people better" 7/19/97. This summer Jacob had her read This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She also painted pictures of the 1920's New Jersey shore. I am not sure if learning about the jazz age teaches much about American couch potatoes and poor peasants in other parts of the world, but Jacob thinks it is a start.
As for Tara, she planted a large vegetable garden this summer. The
garden was also supposed to bring her closer to the common run of nonmonastic humanity.
I asked Tara if putting in a garden was not giving in to her "mammalian instincts".
She replied that her class had never lived anywhere long enough to put in a garden and
it was always something she wanted to do.
The ships that the Heaven's Gate uses as part of the motley multi-world rescue effort are relatively small and built of sturdy metal with extra tough specially made rivets. They remind me of metal denim yet to Tara who is learning to pilot them, they are "fragile things". Cynthia, Gennifer, and the others, the ships require endless work. Heaven's Gate members must load them with endless dusty cardboard boxes of gear and lovingly clean the ships with soap and water when they return. The ships seem to be launched from a scrub and desert planet, the same one with the fine adobe houses on it.
When travelling on a ship everyone of the crew must work together as a unit. Cynthia said that the Heaven's Gate class practiced a bit of this on Earth but none of it compared to the real thing. F'Nel, one of Cynthia's alien friends compared a ship to a huge wooden row boat in stormy seas, a kidn of life boat but very overcrowded. Everyone had to blance and row together. F'Nel added that in her fishing village on her home planet people used small light craft but the ships were far larger than anything her people put in the water.
Back to the top of this sectionCynthia said "when you ride a ship you have to remain ver still sensing. Then you leap off and start looking" 7/9/97. What Cynthia and the others are looking for are converts. So far they have looked for them in a wide variety of places. Cynthia and Gennifer visited a rodeo where the straw was strewn with cow turds, accosted older ladies in the shopping malls, visited New England and Upstate New York farms at the break of dawn, and country airports in the middle of the night. Other Heaven's Gate classmates have traveled to Africa and the Ukraine.
The results of their efforts have been mixed to say the least. The two older women at the
shopping mall wanted no part of what Cynthia and Gennifer had to
offer. "I have my grandchildren!" one of them indignantly cried as if that is
enough to satisfy anyone. An older man in the Ukraine's guardian spirit or angel complained
mightily to Jacob who asked Cynthia to tell the Heaven's Gate member who was attempting
a conversion to cease and desist.
Cynthia thinks her group is having such trouble attracting converts partially due to a perpetually hostile press that has portrayed them as insane or worse, and more improtantly, because potential converts fail to realize a basic fact. They are going to have to give up something! "Those people don't understand. They are going to have to give something up. Even if it is not their physical bodies, it will be their houses or their cars if it is a physical ship. Do you think they will really do that?" 9/6/97. Says Gennifer, "We are the enemy. We are the aenemy that comes in your dreams. We are the enemy of teh stuff you see on TV like Princess Di. We want to make you walk in the desert" 9/10/97.
If there is any hope for conversions, Cynthia feels it rests most strongly with the children. She says "We have to change the way we think about children. All the time we were on earth, we considered them burdens, the products of illicit relations. Now we realize that they are here and that we have to talk to them. Also we couldn't accept children into our group without getting into all kinds of trouble with the law. Sometimes I wonder why there were only thirty-nine of us" 7/14/97. According to Amy, children are the easiest to reach because they have the newest souls and because they instinctively reach for what is highest and good. They want something better for themselves than the adults, parents, etc... Cynthia explains "The children get up early just as we used to do. They know there is work to be done at dawn. They still know."
Back to the top of this sectionYou are probably wondering if Heaven's Gate intends to encourage any of the new converts to join them in death. You may even be wondering if you're children are safe. According to Cynthia they are. "We only killed ourselves under very special circumstances. It takes a living leader to order you to do something like that. None of us have the authority. Most of what we would do with the kids is to get them to look at something basic within themselves, to make them stop wanting what they get from the TV and the mall and follow what their soul really needs." By the way, that in and of itself is revolutionary.
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Saskia's name was once Lee and she came from a large family in Brooklyn.
She is a partial albino black girl with green eyes and pink skin. She gives
her age as ten years old. When she was alive, she was severely asthmatic, and
it was a bad attack of asthma that killed her. Cynthia met Saskia at the
children's center where she sometimes works and Cynthia took Saskia home. There
members of Heaven's Gate shaved Saskia's head and she became either member
forty or forty-one depending on whether you count Ti-Sa.
As Heaven's Gate's only juvenile member, Saskia does not have to follow the
strict rules that bind the adults. She is allowed to travel to amusement
parks and own and play with a few toys. Spirit children do not typically have
large stores of posessions and Saskia's earth family was of modest means. As
Cynthia explained, all of Heaven's Gate's class joined as adults. None had
to live under the house's strict rules as children. Therefore, neither should
Saskia. She even has a spirit kitty, a half Siamese female with very silky furr
and blue eyes, a spirit kitty named Kedo.
I fully realize that Central New York in general (also called the Mohawk Valley) and Utica, in particular, are not the center of the universe, so if you are expecting me to tell you about dimensional doors or vortices, you are going to be very disappointed. Instead, I will introduce you to Thomas Proctor. Mr. Proctor was born in 1850 and was the grandson of one of the local robber barron families. The house he lived in is located on Genesee Street a free historical museum called the Fountain Elms which is only a few blocks from where I live. There, a portrait of him hangs. He is a tall, skinny, straight backed elderly gentleman with a bald head mustache and beard. He was active in philanthropy and local politics. Utica's only high school, is named after him, and at the top of the hill at Val Ballais, the municipal ski area, is the Eagle, a monument to him. On the Eagle, it says that Thomas Proctor once received a live bald eagle on a gift and one Independence Day he set it free. On an Independence Day some years later, he too like the eagle, " returned to his element."
But where is that element? Thomas Proctor ended up as something my spirit friends
call sevath sabe. He lived on an afterlife of leisure on an estate
that could have come straight out of the Gay Nineties or perhaps an even earlier
era. He lived in an elegant house and had a big horse drawn carriage at his
disposal. He spent his time with female relatives who wore hoop skirts, ate
fancy dinnners, and went to dress ballsa. After a time, he got bored with this
lifestyle, packed up his ruckssck, and walked all the way into downtown Quinja. He
haslived there ever since, and is now a part of the motely multi-world rescue
effort. By the way, if you are curious what Thomas Proctor looks like as I have
seen him, he has a full head of chestnut hair and is tall and clean shaven. He
usually wears pressed trousers and chambray shirts and suspenders. I am
not sure if his eyes are blue or brown.
Naturally some of the rescue attempts have occured on Genessee Street. I met Thomas Proctor on the grounds of the Munson Williams Proctor Institute, the free art museum right next to the Fountain Elms, and one night, Thomas Proctor, several Heaven's Gate members and two prospective converts converged upon the Stanley Theater, a former vaudeville palace and now legitimate (as in Broadway stage and concerts) theater. The place has been restored to its original elegance inside, all gold leaf and soft colors. Thomas Proctor, the two prospective converts (who were no doubt travelling out of body) and the Heaven's Gate members were all sitting up in the loge. The converts were worried about being made to commit suicide. The Heaven's Gate member, a man named Richard, tried to assure them that this wouldn't happen. Maybe the world is a stage and the theater late at night seemed like an appropriate performance space.
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