(Note: The information in this series of articles isn’t corroborated by ITC contacts that I consider to be accurate and reliable. So readers’ discretion is advised.)

This series of articles explores the classic (1896) book, Wanderer in the Spirit Lands, about a self-absorbed man who dies and awakens, stuck, in a dark and seedy spirit world before finding his way painfully to the light. The regular text is a chapter-by-chapter summary, and the italicized text is my observations, based on what I’ve learned about the afterlife over the years, especially through ITC research.  

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Ch6. Franchezzo moves to a new, lighter building in the Twilight Land also belonging to the Brotherhood of Hope. His new small room includes a living picture of his soulmate that’s like her mirror image, showing her smiling back at him or going about her daily activities. Also a fragrant, white rose that she asked to be sent to him in the dark, dry, totally barren realm that he’s described to her in one of their sessions. He begins to practice his service work (with little success at first, so mostly he observes) as he journeys into other dark realms that seem metaphorically created by their residents’ thoughts and attitudes:

• A selfish world: a dim, rocky realm of gray stones and gray hills inhabited by people who’d loved and gratified only themselves during lifetime, so that now they can’t even see each other as they straggle aimlessly across the barren land… until at last they have an urge to see and to help another person. At that point they leave the gray world behind. Some rise to a place that’s only slightly better…
• A land of unrest: a vast desert of sand and miserable hovels, some scattered about the shadowy landscape, others clustered into small communities. The wretched residents look like beggars. Many of Earth’s richest and poorest come together here, jealous of each other, quarreling and complaining about the injustice of it all. Some try to swindle each other, plotting against those who might interfere with their schemes. Some, if they can make an effort to overcome their selfishness and feel a small desire to help others, tend small personal gardens that sprout small blades of grass and stunted shrubs.
• A miser’s world: a dingy land of black soil where inhabitants use their long-claw-like fingers to dig up rare gold nuggets and to hoard them in little handbags held close to the heart. They all instinctively keep a distance from each other lest they get robbed.
• A land of misery: a darker version of the land of unrest… a gamblers’ land where betting men, card sharps, and deceptive bankers and brokers have fierce fights and bitter quarrels. Franchezzo enters a city resting on black soil reminiscent of a cinder heap and is drawn to loud quarreling coming from one of the many hovels. Inside he finds a dozen grotesque, wild-eyed men resembling animals, dressed in tattered clothes from many eras. Their argument over a bag of coins lying on the table soon erupts into violence as one guy grabs it and they all chase him outside and fight viciously for the coins.

Franchezzo thinks he’s reached the pit of hell in this land of misery, but there is worse yet to come later on. Meanwhile….

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Ch7. The fellow who grabs the bag of coins is Raoul, a nice-looking young man who’s obviously out of place among the vile gamblers in that land of misery. He’d found the bag and introduced it to the others with the hope of enjoying a fair game of chance, until it becomes clear that playing games is the furthest from anyone’s mind. Franchezzo helps Raoul escape from his attackers and learns his backstory:  A jealous husband finds his wife enamored by Raoul and kills him. After his death Raoul looks in on the woman to see if he can somehow console her. He’s shocked to discover that she isn’t grieving at all, but is simply annoyed by both her husband and her late lover. Her only desire now is to find a wealthier husband. In bitterness, shame, and self-pity, Raoul disavows the existence of any true love or goodness on Earth. That denial of decency pulls him quickly to the land of misery, and his hopelessness keeps him trapped there, where he’s eventually beaten by the gamblers. Franchezzo has rescued Raoul and now tells him that hopelessness is often the result of unhappiness, and he persuades the jaded lover to accompany him on a visit to his own soulmate, in order to prove that goodness and true love do exist on Earth. The experience is so moving to Raoul that he becomes Franchezzo’s working partner.

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Ch8. Franchezzo embarks on his most challenging mission yet: returning close to Earth to look in on a man, still living, who’d ruined Franchezzo’s life, filling him with bitterness and thoughts of revenge. In his afterlife wanderings along the earth plane (or shadow world), he’s seen many ways that spirits stir up the lives of carnal (physical) humans, moving in close to unwitting humans, imposing their own troubled thinking on them, driving them to fear, hate, even murder. Seeing his nemesis on Earth from here in the spirit world fills him with ten times more anger and grief than he’d felt while living on Earth, since spirits are far more susceptible to emotions than carnal humans are, until they can rise to more peaceful realms. Franchezzo’s thoughts of raw vengeance attract a horde of black, nightmarish spirits from a hellish realm. Their demonic vibration is too low to exist on the shadow world of Earth. They can’t even visit here unless spirits here succumb to dark, hellish emotions. Then the demons typically move in quickly and do their dirty work on the earth plane before sinking back into the depths. In times of widespread malice and hostility, such as bitter wars and political revolutions, they can form vast, dark clouds around the hated enemies and abused masses who are fueled by loathing and bent on revenge. Now, a few of these same horrible beings crowd around Franchezzo and whisper methods of revenge so appalling that he shrinks back from them in horror. Though he’s still locked into thoughts of revenge, the sudden, clear voice of his soulmate beckoning him pulls him like a rope to her side. The demons try to follow him, grasping at him, but they soon fall away. She (sitting at home) implores him (standing close beside her in the shadow world) to choose her love, once and for all, over his own hatred, and he reluctantly agrees only after a passionate discussion that ends with her weeping and his heart melting. And he sinks, exhausted, at her feet. Their mutual love, and his promise to her to relinquish hatred, together provide impervious armor against his future encounters with the demons.

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Ch9. Franchezzo is next sent to a sparsely populated frozen land of ice and snow inhabited by loveless spirits who had chilled and hardened any kindness and affection from themselves and from others before they died. Most notable here are leaders of business, government, and religion among the diverse people of all nationalities. One man locked in an icy cage had been an austere Inquisitor in Venice whose very name stirred fear and who never felt a twinge of pity for his countless victims of torture and murder. Two types of spirits move around his cage to haunt and taunt him. Some are misty, empty astral shells of his maimed and crushed victims, whose living souls have long moved on. The living spirits had somehow shed their deep suffering like old garments, but those bloody garments continue to hover close to the source of their suffering: the Inquisitor.  Other spirits, also maimed and bloody, are more solid-looking, living astral spirits of victims who still hold onto their hatred for their heartless torturer, their murderer. The Inquisitor sees his cage as both a prison against his freedom and a refuge from his hateful, vengeful victims, who hurl spears, curses, and slime at him through the icy bars of the cage. Franchezzo pities the prisoner until he’s shown the man’s thoughts and desires. If released, he would move quickly to the earth plane to find kindred spirits of malice who together would prey on susceptible carnal humans on Earth, urging them toward the same lust for torture and murder that drove his own lifetime pursuits. So Franchezzo gladly leaves the frozen land behind, and en route back home to the land of twilight, he passes by caverns of slumber where drug addicts who’d killed themselves by overdose lie in a complete stupor, unaware of anything around them. They might sleep for years or decades or centuries, depending on how deeply they were immersed in their drugs of choice… whether they were weekend partiers or permanent clients of opium dens or crack houses.

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The Inquisitor’s icy cage reminds me of a troubling ITC contact received in 1994 by German ITC researcher Adolf Homes. It was a letter from the spirit of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, who described a personal hell that he and some of his Nazi colleagues were enduring because of the atrocities they’d imposed on Jews and other victims of the Nazi death camps of the second world war. They were apparently imprisoned in a sort of gas chamber. The message from Hoess was formulated by the spirit group Centrale, who were working closely with Mr Homes and somehow arranged Hoess’s desperate message to be delivered to Homes’s old Commodore 64 computer. (Read more about that contact…. )

The ITC bridge between Timestream spirit group and our INIT association was, I believe, a more purified or refined bridge than the one with Centrale. It was sustained and protected by The Seven ethereals, who had established the bridge between our earthside network and a spirit group inhabiting a spirit world called Eden, or Marduk. From Eden, I suspect the Timestream spirit group could observe the raw dramas going on in Earth’s shadow world and in the various other spirit realms associated with Earth, but they themselves apparently were not as immersed in the kinds of dramas described in the above article. The Seven stressed the importance of keeping immersed in good will, friendship, and love… “the best qualities of mankind.” That way, our earthside team would resonate with finer realms of spirit, which will be the subject of some later articles in this series.