My Maiden Descent into Lower Astral Hell – James Constantine
February 22, 2026
My descent to the lowest levels of the astral plane began, oddly enough, with James Andrews and his meticulously crafted handbags and backpacks. He claims in his Internet ad that he “puts a little piece of himself” in every bag he makes. Turns out James is full of it. The bags are cheap Chinese knockoffs of what are advertised on the fraudulent web page. In fact, James Andrews is not even a real person, and the whole “I have spent forty years lovingly perfecting my leather-working craft, is entirely fake. It is, as I soon came to realize, just another Internet scam. “I’m going out of business, but before I go, I want to offer you one of my handmade bags for eighty percent off.” Yeah, much to my chagrin, I fell for it. Well, almost.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story I wish to relate here is not about James Andrews or his crummy counterfeit bags. All of that was incidental. It was the catalyst, however, because it was my worry and panic over wasting two-hundred dollars on an Internet con, that took me outside of myself, and from there, into the worst experience of my life.
It had been a hectic week. I’m scheduled for surgery in two days to get a hip replacement. The arthritis is so far advanced that I have no cartilage left, so it is pure bone-on-bone rubbing, and the associated intense pain.
I take Meloxicam for the inflammation, but it is not enough to give me much relief. I’ve tried various natural and over-the-counter remedies, but nothing seems to work. Hence, one day, after reading about it on the Internet, I tried something called phenylpiracetam. It’s primarily known as a mild stimulant that enhances focus and gives a sense of mental well-being. I did notice these effects, but its main virtue for me was its ability to block most of the pain I feel in my hip.
For context: I’ve never had even mild anxiety, depression or any psychiatric symptoms in my life. This was the one and only time I’ve ever experienced anything like what follows.
I didn’t yet think anything extraordinary was happening. Things began subtly. For some reason, I got the idea that rearranging my four-thousand-plus book library was a good idea. It wasn’t. But when I fixate on something it’s hard to talk me down. What motivated this desire to rearrange my books was that I’d recently gained some added shelf-space in my bedroom and library. I’d just donated several hundred books to the used bookstore—ones that no longer had any real meaning for me. Because of this I had space for the books which I’d been storing in the attic. My attic has about eight large boxes of books, many of them pristine hardcover first editions. I hate having to leave any of my beloved books in the inhospitable environment of the attic—heat, cold, as well as the inevitable book-devouring insects.
Besides the fear of damage, having well over five-hundred books in the attic also makes it nearly impossible to find a book there that I may need or wish to read. Fellow bibliomaniacs will no doubt have several anecdotes regarding the frustrating experience of having to buy a new copy of a book that you know you already have—somewhere. It becomes a matter of whether lifting eight heavy boxes out of the attic and going through every single one, will ultimately cause more hardship and inconvenience than the twelve dollars I will likely spend on buying the same title again in paperback or for Kindle.
As I was saying, I wasn’t just looking for a single volume. I was rescuing several hundred of my books from the harsh environment of the attic. While this would involve a lot of grueling labor, especially with my aching hip, it was too exciting a prospect to pass up!
It was a Thursday. I spent most of that day—as well as the next—hauling heavy boxes out of the attic and into my bedroom and library. It’s worth noting that I didn’t sleep at any point in between.
Later that first day, I’d managed to transport all eight boxes out of the attic and then unpack them. By the time I had to leave for my 11p.m. to 7 a.m. night shift security job, numerous three-foot book stacks covered both rooms. I didn’t have time to start figuring out where I’d put them in the newly available shelf space, as I had to hurry off to work. This would be tomorrow’s difficult labor.
I first noticed something was off when I got into the shower before leaving. I made the water extra hot, since my back and hip were so sore. I was just standing there luxuriating in the soothing sensation of the hot water spraying against my extremely sore hip and back. As I was doing this, I could feel I was almost falling asleep on my feet. The water felt so good, I didn’t want it to end, even at the risk of being a few minutes late for work. It was not exactly “altered perception,” though in retrospect, I believe I was falling into sort of a dazed, twilight type of consciousness.
My stomach was also upset from drinking coffee all day and barely eating. I should’ve been sleeping—especially considering the heavy labor of book-lifting. When I got dressed and went to my car, my nausea worsened. So, instead of just getting into the car, I sat hunched at the bottom of the steps, waiting for my stomach to settle. It didn’t. It never got back to normal that whole night. But after about fifteen minutes, I figured my stomach was about as good as it was likely to get, so I got in the car and began driving to work.
When I stay up when I should be sleeping, I get vaguely giddy. Not incapacitated, just slightly off, even silly. It’s in this state that I occasionally get the giggles. That night, during the first part of my drive, I was laughing hysterically over something I’ve long since forgotten.
On the final third of my drive, this light and humorous state changed rather dramatically. This is the point where my descent into hell began, though I didn’t see it that way at the time or even understand its significance.
Everything I attempt to convey from here on, is barely a pale simulacrum of what happened and what I experienced.
Still, I can’t resist the impulse to try.
During the final leg of my journey, there was an incredibly abrupt change, not in the external world–if Bishop Berkeley was wrong and such a thing does indeed exist–but in my own mind. It was as if a black-tinged, transparent veil had fallen over everything. Not that there was any physical alteration. I was driving through Pittsburgh and it was still Pittsburgh. The buildings, streets, vehicles, and people walking around still looked the same as they always do. However, they radiated malice.
Certainly, this was the case with the few people I observed; but even inanimate objects like cars, buildings—the sky itself, seemed to emanate hostility. It was all dark, malevolent, and somehow consciously inimical to me.
In fact, the whole of reality now appeared to me as a kind of pernicious joke where I was the punchline. As I’ve said, this was an astonishingly abrupt transition, where the transformation happened instantaneously, in “the twinkling of an eye,” to borrow St. Paul’s memorable phrase. Or perhaps like a guillotine. Strangely, I can’t say that I felt this way at the time, because it’s only in retrospect that I began to grasp how sudden it all was.
It was as though life itself was malignant, and all this horror was being enacted solely for my “benefit.” It was like in one moment I was one person with a distinct view of the world, and in the next I was someone else entirely. At this point, I began to feel not just physically nauseous, but existentially sick. I simply wanted to get to work so that I could lock myself in my office; where hopefully this overwhelming feeling of dread and oppression would lift, and I could go back to seeing the world the way I had for the previous fifty-four and a half years.
No luck though. Time seemed to speed up and slow down simultaneously.
It felt like some dark presence—some malevolent, conscious force was revealing everything to me. As though I’d walked in complete ignorance for over five decades as the true, hideous nature of reality. But in this instant, as I was driving to work at 10:45 p.m., I was now seeing without filter, the sickening, heartbreaking truth.
The sense of a conscious and malign presence was almost physically palpable. I didn’t hear it speak, though my own thoughts appeared to me as if they were partially objectified. I kept hearing the words, Burn! Burn! Scream! Scream! only not in an audible way, not even internally. It was more like they were my own thoughts, but also not my own. It was mildly disturbing at the time, and far more disturbing in retrospect. While it was happening, I was almost entirely focused on driving and making it to work in one piece and getting the hell out of the car.
At one of the red lights a pushy homeless man was holding a “Give What You Can—God Bless” sign. He came right up to my car and started tapping on the driver’s side window. This sent a jolt of the most profound annoyance through my entire being.
“Hey buddy, can you spare some money so I can get something to eat?”
Already in a growing state of terror, I found his forwardness exponentially more irritating. I was also scared because the black presence seemed to insinuate the following: He hears what you are hearing and sees what you are seeing. Everyone else is blind to this sordid river of blackness that flows through all things. But he sees it and feels it, and now you see it.
Scream! You are comrades in arms against seven billion others who can’t or who refuse to see this.
Despite this, I had neither the time nor the patience for this obstreperous person aggressively tapping on my window, no matter that we potentially shared the same form of madness. So, I just made a gesture with my hands that I hoped would convey to him, “Sorry, I only carry credit cards,” in hopes that he would go away. He didn’t and continued to plead and tap on my window. I ignored him and stared straight ahead, mentally begging for the light to change. When it finally did, I sped off, with just about four minutes to go until I reached my workplace.
It was the longest four minutes of my life. During this time, the presence made it abundantly clear to me that I didn’t really have a single friend in the entire world. Yes, I had people who called themselves my friends—quite a few by that measure. Yet it was now clear to me that none of it was real. People had merely posed as friends. It was all “feigning and folly,” as Shakespeare puts it in As You Like It.
It resembled what people report with Near-Death Experiences, where your entire life flashes before you in a few brief instants. Rather than being in any way comforting or edifying, though, such as most Near-Death experiences are, my experience was pure dread and hopelessness.
It was as if some evil Demiurge had created me simply for the joy of seeing me suffer. In fact, this wasn’t mere dark fantasy on my part but was suggested to me to be the fundamental reality of existence. Since time would not exist for such a malevolent Demiurgic being, it was like my fifty-four years were completely insignificant from his perspective. The joy he would take in misleading me all that time with false visions, whether of friendship, love, beauty, nobility—all the things that make life worth living—would make his delayed reveal worth it.
He planned it for this one ecstatic moment when all that I mistakenly believed was good in life was suddenly stripped away and shown to be so much dust and ashes.
This is the aspect of my experience that is especially difficult to describe—horror, the sadness, the fear of seeing all of that as if for the first time. And in such a self-evidently convincing way. For me, the only comparable image is the moment in a gas chamber where the truth becomes undeniable.
As I was taking in this grotesque new reality, scenes from my past life flashed before me, but now it was all seen as “through a glass darkly,” and saturated in this black and baleful light. Comments from longtime friends that at the time I would have taken as constructive criticism, I now saw were clearly meant to break me down and hurt me. I now sensed this type of attitude in all my past relationships, including the romantic ones. It was all just an attempt to cut me down to size, to harm and belittle me.
I felt the paradoxical urge to take out my cell phone and call someone to help me through this awful experience, but alongside this thought was the realization of its futility. I had no friends. Not now, not ever. If I called someone for solace or comfort, it was obvious to me that I’d have to play “Let’s pretend,” and act as though I didn’t see what I was so clearly seeing: that it was all a sick farce, that friends didn’t exist.
The sense of complete isolation this gave me was terrifying In fact, I had the distinct impression that other people didn’t exist. That ultimately, there was just the hateful Demiurge and me, and every single person in the world was just his deformed permutation. And his sole purpose was simply to harass and torment me with the false promise that I was not utterly alone.
It’s impossible to overstate the intensity of this. I wasn’t exactly hearing things, beyond what I have already mentioned about the words, Burn! Burn! Scream! floating around in some liminal mental space where “subjective” and “objective” shaded into one another. As if they were my own thoughts, even while they felt like they were not quite originating from my own mind. Incidentally, as my story progresses, you will see the relevance of these two words.
Somehow, I did make it to work alive, albeit a few minutes late. The nurse at my workplace, Chris, walked up to my car and asked, “Is everything okay?” This was an odd question to me, because even in retrospect, I was acting perfectly normal, though perhaps there was a look of distress on my face. I responded with the boilerplate phrase that all secretly miserable people use in such situations, “Living the dream, my friend, living the dream.” Not that I am a miserable person. Quite the contrary. That night, however, I had to be the most miserable person alive.
Since I believed I was the only person alive, there was not much competition.
It was enough to get Chris off my scent. I told him something that I figured he’d be able to comprehend, since he had no way of understanding what I was going through. I told him, “My stomach is a bit upset. I just need to go sit quietly for a while.” If he had an independent existence, that would make sense to him. If he didn’t, then it wouldn’t matter what I told him. So, we exchanged a few pleasantries and he offered me a Tums. I took it and said, “Thanks a lot.” Then I made my way to the “safe space” of my office. I locked the door, turned off the lights and started watching Netflix. I’m not a comedy person and prefer the horror genre, but for now old reruns of Seinfeld seemed like just the thing. Salubrious, sanity-restoring.
Looking back on that first step of my descent into hell (I assure you; the worst was yet to come), what stands out to me now is the way that I completely rationalized nearly all of it by the time my shift ended at 7 a.m. A bit like Ebenezer Scrooge, when he said to Marley’s Ghost, “There’s more gravy than of grave about you,” blaming the apparition before him on indigestion—what today we might call “food poisoning.” I didn’t think my experience of a universe permeated by a secret black essence could be attributed to the overly spiced Indian food I had eaten the day before.
Somehow, I managed to fit that singular, sinister experience into some kind of rational framework. I must have—because I was carrying on as though the world hadn’t stopped for me and changed forever the previous night. I can no longer recall what it was I settled on to make sense of such a traumatic episode. The mere fact that I was not trembling or fighting the urge to scream at the top of my lungs (and this is how I felt when I was in the experience), is evidence, I suppose, that I must have put it all into some kind of provisionally meaningful schema.
When it was time to leave work, the sun was shining, and it looked to be a beautiful day. Further evidence, perhaps, that the world really was something more than the horrific vision that was revealed to me on my way in. I turned on the radio and heard an old favorite—”Hey Mister Tambourine Man,” by the Byrds. My singing voice is awful, but I sang along anyway, “Hey Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I’m not sleeping and there is no place I’m going to…” Yes—everything was going to be okay. Right?
As I sang along, the optimistic part of my brain spoke up and said, What about elephants? And Hummingbirds? Not to mention Mozart, Goethe, and Beethoven? If there really is nothing but an evil Demiurge at the heart of things, how could such a twisted entity have imagined such a playfully beautiful animal as the elephant? Or written Wilhelm Meister? Or composed the ‘Ode to Joy’?”
The dark and cynical part of my brain had a ready answer—it always does: Just the complex algorithms of a higher plane. Elephants? Made for the fun of hunting and killing them. Which put a bit of a damper on this first tentative foray into hope.
Still, I was far from convinced. Even vast and malevolent algorithms could not have produced the delightful, “Papagena/Papagino” duet in The Magic Flute—something that always moves me to my core. Conceivable, yes, but far-fetched. Could something wholly evil ever dream up music of such delicate whimsy and charm? This thought was at least something on which I could begin to anchor myself—if only in the way that a drowning man clings to whatever solid object is nearest him.
When I got home, I was planning on going straight to sleep. I made the mistake of starting to listen to one of my favorite channels on YouTube called, Esoteric Guardian, on my laptop. The topic was “The Seventy-Two Demons of King Solomon” and their various functions in Goetic evocation. Probably not the best viewing choice after the previous night, but I have an irrepressible need to understand things. Especially something like what I was about to experience.
As I was listening, I began multitasking to check off a few things on my mental “To Do List.” First, I began restacking all my books into something resembling order. Then I lay back down and checked on my tracking number to see if the James Andrews bag I’d foolishly ordered had been shipped yet. I’d begun to grow suspicious—the more I thought about it, the more it seemed too good to be true.
The whole bearded, friendly-looking, folksy craftsman schtick was not an actual James Andrews at all. Just an AI replica, which the scammers target to the YouTube accounts of people likely to be attracted to such things. The ad claims James Andrews “is now retiring “after forty years of devotion to his craft,” and that he’s going to give everyone an “eighty percent, going out of business” discount.” Plus, that “little piece of himself” he says he puts into every bag he makes was just a bit de trop, even for me. I have a pretty good BS detector, so I googled, “James Andrews, Fraud,” and sure enough, I was right: numerous people had posted on a “consumer awareness” site detailing how they never got what they ordered. Fake products. Customer service non-existent. Tracking numbers that led nowhere.
As I mentioned earlier, this seemed to be the catalyst for the horror that followed. Maybe it was the jarring betrayal of trust that the whole James Andrews bag scandal represented. I’d just charged two-hundred dollars for a bag that didn’t exist, sold by a person who didn’t exist. I felt a surge of anger towards faceless internet sociopaths who must be behind such an operation.
This is also the point at which human language begins to fail.
I will still proceed, if only in the vain attempt to chronicle what happened to me. As I said earlier, “in the twinkling of an eye.” What I am trying to convey is how instantaneous it was. Just like the previous night. The “what” that happened can probably only be dimly hinted at with metaphorical language. It was not something I walked into; it crashed over me like a wave. The best I can do in this regard is to label the thing that catapulted me from normal everyday reality into what I can only call “astral hell,” the “Curtain of Crepuscular Twilight.” The transformation of the world, or at least “my world,” happened at around 11 a.m.
I want it to be clear that I was sitting upright against my pillow, fully alert and aware when the Curtain of Crepuscular Twilight closed around me. I wasn’t dreaming, so nightmares or sleepwalking have nothing to do with it.
It’s a bit tricky to explain what I mean by the CCT (as I’ll now abbreviate it) but imagine a dark yet translucent curtain which begins on each side of your peripheral vision. Then picture it rapidly closing, until the two sides meet directly in line with your nose
Unlike a physical curtain which blocks all that is beyond it, the CCT didn’t block anything from my view. Rather, it turned a perfectly sunny, springtime day, into utter twilight—the way the world looks about an hour after the sun has set, and it’s almost dark.
It also felt like there was a subtle shift in the air pressure; there seemed to be less oxygen in the room, and everything became noticeably cooler.
I should also mention what—to me at least—was the most salient fact: I was absolutely convinced I was dead. And that I was now, without question in hell.
If the primal animal terror that was coursing through my body wasn’t enough, or the hammering in my chest, there were also “suggestions”—not yet full voices—letting me know exactly where I was and what I had entered.
What set me spiraling into sheer panic was that after the CCT had closed, I looked at my laptop computer, and saw the James Andrews Handmade Leather page. Somehow, I had the sickening instantaneous certainty that the entire world was in on the same hateful conspiracy against me.
In Gnostic thought, the Evil Creator can be a deceiver. I had read about this in Gnostic texts. Until that morning it had been an abstract idea.
After the CCT closed, there was no longer any room for doubt. Yaldabaoth was the only reality— besides me. Even the people I formally thought were my friends, were just variations on a theme: nothing but stuffed mannikins filled with sawdust, all them permutations of the evil creator.
Likewise, the numberless things in the universe, both animate and inanimate: the trees, the sky, animals, cars, the sun and moon, the great globe itself—all of them, without exception, were nothing but Yaldabaoth. It was all just a very elaborate hoax, a macrocosmic version of James Andrews and his faux leather bags.
With this knowledge came the only possible conclusion: the world had been constructed solely for Yaldabaoth’s demented pleasure in watching me suffer. At this point I was sitting upright in my bed, with my back against a pillow. The sense of breathtakingly rapid movement was still the dominant impression. To this day, the swiftness with which the CCT closed, and my entire worldview was transformed in what seemed like a millisecond, continues to haunt me. All that I was before that moment seemed not to matter at all.
Terrifyingly, this was only the beginning.
And yet, telling it makes it a tiny bit less horrifying. It keeps me from drowning when I put it into words and share it with others—assuming there are such.
I later realized that what had terrified me most was not what I was experiencing, but the recognition of it. I had encountered something like this before–not in life, but in books I had always treated as symbolic or exaggerated.
Across widely separated cultures, people described a region beneath ordinary reality: a realm entered in dreams, visions, initiations and near-death states–a place more real than imagination yet more unstable than the waking world. Anthropologists classified such reports as shamanic journeys, religious texts treated them as the condition of the soul after death. I read them as metaphors.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead warns precisely of such convincing horrors. Plato, in the “Myth of Er,” speaks of the soul witnessing unbearable truths before returning to life. Even the older mystical traditions assume that consciousness can fall into a plane where appearances are deliberate deceptions.
Until that morning these had been ideas. Now they were recognition. This was the moment books stopped being symbolic.
I no longer interpreted it. I was inside it.
At this point, I’m pretty sure I saw or heard nothing that was not already there. Looking at the computer—still glowing on the James Andrews page—I knew that the whole of reality was a fraud.
People I’d known for forty years, had no more reality than that bearded phantom, James Andrews, or his counterfeit handmade leather bags.
I was once more seized by existential terror—yet nearly equal to that was the sense of sickening rage I felt at being so thoroughly tricked and manipulated for the previous five and a half decades. All orchestrated by him: Yaldabaoth. Still in my boxer briefs, I was too angry and afraid to bother getting dressed. I stumbled through the towers of books and went to the next room where we have a landline—my cell phone was currently lost. I frantically dialed my best friend, Davey:
When he answered—”Hello?”—I shouted into the receiver, “You’re not Davey!!!!
I’m not sure how he responded, but I think it was something like, “What?!!”
“You’re not Davey!!! You are just saying Davey-like things!” I shouted again louder.
In my mind, remember, there was nothing in existence but endless perverse permutations of the Evil Creator-God, Yaldabaoth. The people in this after-death hell-state, were merely astral replicas of who they were in real life. This is the point I began hearing distinct external voices—each of them preternaturally intelligent and malevolent. Some of the voices were susurrant whispers, You’re in hell, in hell, dead! in hell, hell, whereas others were more baritone and booming, Look around first, we have eternity—eternity—to burn you!
Burn you! Burn you! Burn you! echoed the sinister whispering voices.
Scream! cried one especially high-pitched and falsetto voice. Scream! Scream!
Burn him! Burn him! hissed the whispering voices again.
We have time. Lots of ticky-tock clock time. Eternal time, in which to burn him. Let him look around. Get acquainted with his new home.
No—burn him! Burn him now!
We have time.
Now!
Eternity. If we burn him an hour or two from now, he will still burn forever.
I knew I was doomed. There are no human words to capture the certainty of burning–for eternity.
God was not here.
There was no love. No mercy. No empathy. No compassion on this plane of existence. Not a scintilla. Just sheer unrelenting malignancy. The malice felt older than any human cruelty I knew how to name.
Since I was dead—in hell and simply waiting for the fires to come back on—getting dressed before I went outside was not a high priority. I was in such an acute state of panic and terror over the imminent burning, I’m not sure why I even wanted to go outside. The taunting voices kept urging me, Look around! Before you burn, before you burn! And scream, you will scream! Look around first, look around.
During all this, I headed for the front door in nothing but my gray boxer briefs. I should mention here that it was somehow conveyed to me “telepathically” that every person I would meet from here on, would have one or two lines that they would go on repeating, literally ad infinitum. A particularly cruel form of torment.
On my way out I ran into my girlfriend. I forget what she said, but for me it wasn’t really her—just a hollow echo of my earthly girlfriend. She is hard of hearing, so one of her lines was, “I can’t hear you!” which, in my current state, I took to be an ironic statement. After all, I knew this girlfriend-doppelganger could hear me perfectly well. (In real life, of course, I know she often can’t hear me. But this wasn’t real life.).
Whatever I said, my mannikin-girlfriend kept saying, “I can’t hear you!” which just reinforced what the demons had suggested to me would be the case––forever.
I forgot to mention that there was a rule which I somehow absorbed, though it was never stated outright: I must not sit or lie down, ever. My current task was, I supposed, to go out into the world and run into the astral copies of people I once knew when I was alive. I was terrified of what that would be like and what a grotesque experience it would be––because I knew they would never address me on a human level. They would all just repeat the same one or two lines.
Still, I had an urge to walk to my best friend Davey’s house. He always knew how to cheer me up in life, so I figured his hellish imitation would at least have two lines that were better than those of the other infernal dummies.
My neighbor across the street—he’s a cop—was cutting his grass. Perhaps it was the surreal sunlight (which, you’ll recall, looked like moonlight to me, as it was filtered through the CCT) and the sense of horrified exhilaration I was feeling. It was the first time in five decades I’d walked up my street in nothing but my boxer briefs. Though it was in fact no longer my street—just a close astral fabrication of it. In any case, something compelled me to yell out over the sound of his lawnmower, “You’re going to burn me?!! Why?!”
James, the name of my cop neighbor, cupped his hand to his ear. He clearly hadn’t heard me over the roar of his lawnmower. There were several other neighbors out in their yards. I had trouble focusing, because there was a vast, titanic presence hovering above me. Something enormous yet just out of sight. This seemed to be the lead demon.
There were several other demonic entities floating in the sky, though to me they seemed lower in rank to the colossal being above, whom I could sense but not see. Perhaps because he was in the lower clouds. I caught glimpses of the lesser demons, though their forms now escape me. They just kept screaming the same two things repeatedly, Burn him! Burn him! Scream!
I ignored the neighbors—some of whom were beginning to timidly approach. I needed to get to the Davey-double, because, as I kept saying to myself, Davey says the good words.
I suppose that meant he knew how to say the right thing and cheer me up—in even the worst circumstances. I knew it wouldn’t be the real Davey I’d meet, but still, I wanted to see what his astral analogue would have to say about this. I suspected it would have something to do with burning and screaming, though I needed to see and hear it for myself.
The next ten minutes are a total blank. Somehow the neighbors must have managed to get me back inside. The next thing I recall is pleading with my girlfriend, “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this?”
My girlfriend repeated her line, “I can’t hear you!” a few more times. Eventually though, she started to say some other things, which I can no longer recall, but they started to break the spell. It was a lot like returning from an acid trip, where what was wildly uncanny and horrifying a few moments before, suddenly starts to settle back down to baseline reality.
I was in the hallway in my boxer briefs, my hair––as I later saw––was sticking straight up, I had a giant black and blue mark across the right side of my upper chest, and I was trying to ask my girlfriend to make them stop them taunting me with manikin lines, and why were they going to burn me? My voice trailed off, however, as I was rapidly coming back to the earth-plane and soon found myself at a complete loss for words.
As quickly as it came on, it was all over. I now saw that I had just made a royal mess of my life and had terribly upset my girlfriend.
Soon it dawned on me that the police were likely on their way. This was turning out to be an especially bad day. They arrived a few minutes later, but my girlfriend was able to give them enough of a believable story so that they went away. The whole experience was so painful and unpleasant, that I never had the heart to ask her about it.
This was the end of the acute phase of my journey to lower astral hell. I later learned that Davey had hopped into the car right after my call and rushed over to my house to make sure I was all right. He’s a good friend. You know you have a good friend when you’re in hell and he immediately drops everything to rescue you. He told me later that a few neighborhood kids, around twelve years of age, were parked on their BMX bikes in the street in front of my house, and staring at him as he hurried inside. He said that their looks clearly indicated, “You’re not going to approach and confront this mad and dangerous person, are you?”
For several days afterward, reality felt provisional.
I was angry it had happened at all.
One night, two days after this had happened, I was looking in the bathroom mirror, thinking, “What the fu#k was that?” Then God spoke.
He said, “Hey, James, I see you’re doing better now.”
I don’t know why but I answered. “Yeah, no thanks to you. How exactly did you see fit to inflict that on me?”
God said, “You are the guy who wants to know everything about everything, right? Well, now you know a lot more than you did yesterday.”
I laughed.
I had always admired Odin who gave an eye for knowledge and screamed through the nine realms of Yggdrasil. Apparently, I preferred the symbolic version.
I said, “Yes, I get it now. That is still kind of messed up, God, but I get it. I appreciate your devious sense of humor! You made me this way.”
God said, “I’m glad to hear it. So, we’re good?”
“Yeah, we’re good, God. You’re a good guy, even if you’re a bit perplexing at times. Thanks. I think.”
“No problem. I don’t want the guy who wants to know everything about everything feeling like he was abandoned. And hey, you didn’t get arrested, did you? You think I played no part in making sure of that?”
“No, I am sure you did, God. I went to astral hell, but I appreciate you taking care that I didn’t end up in jail. Quit while you’re ahead.”
“Get some sleep, pal. You’ve had a long day. I have much to show you in the days ahead, but you need to rest first.
“Thanks, old fellow, I get that now.”
That night I slept more peacefully than I had in decades.