A rasping tongue licked my right hand, which hung limply over the side of the bed. As I looked, I saw Sha-lu, the immense guard cat of the Chakpori, one of my first friends there. He winked at me, and I felt the goose-pimples start out all over me as he said, "Ah, my friend Lobsang, I am glad to see you again even for this short while. You will have to return to Earth for a time, after leaving here, then in a few short years you will return to us for always."

A cat talking? Telepathic cat talk I knew well, and fully understood, but this cat actually uttered words, not merely telepathic messages. Loud chuckles caused me to look up at my Guide, the Lama Mingyar Dondup. He really was enjoying himself-at my expense, I thought. My scalp prickled again; Sha-lu was standing on his hind legs by the bed, resting his elbows beside me. He and the Lama looked at me, then at each other; both chuckled. Both chuckled, I swear it!

"Lobsang," said my Guide, "you know there is no death, you know that upon leaving Earth at so-called 'death' the ego goes to that plane where he or she rests a while - before preparing to reincarnate in a body which will afford opportunities for learning other lessons and progressing ever upwards. Here we are in a plane from whence there is no reincarnating. Here we live, as you see us now, in harmony, at peace, and with the ability to go anywhere at any time by what you would call 'super-astral travelling'. Here animals and humans, and other species too, converse by speech as well as by telepathy. We use speech when close, and telepathy when distant."

In the distance I could hear soft music, music which even I could understand. My tutors at the Chakpori had lamented long over my inability to sing or make music. Their hearts would have been gladdened, I thought, if they could have seen how I enjoyed this music. Across the luminous sky colours flitted and wavered as if accompanying the music. Here, on this glorious landscape, the greens were greener, and the water bluer. Here were no trees gnarled by disease, no leaves with blight upon them. Here was only perfection. Perfection? Then what was I doing here? I was painfully far from perfect, as I well knew.

"You have fought the good fight, Lobsang, and you are here, for a holiday and to be encouraged, by right of attainment." My Guide smiled benevolently as he spoke.

I lay back, then started up in fright, "My body, where is my Earth body?"

"Rest, Lobsang, rest," replied the Lama. "Rest and we will show you much when your strength is greater."

Slowly the light in the room faded from golden to a restful purplish haze. I felt a cool, strong hand placed upon my forehead, and a soft, furry paw rested in the palm of my right hand, and I knew no more.

I dreamed that I was again upon Earth. I gazed down, emotionless while Russian soldiers raked through the ruined troop-carrier, pulling out burned bodies and bits of bodies. I saw a man look up, and point. Heads turned upwards in answer to his gestures, and I looked as well. There was my broken body teetering across the top of a high wall. Blood was rnning from the mouth and nostrils. I watched while my body was removed from the wall and placed in an ambulance. As the car drove off to a hospital I hovered above and saw all. My Silver Cord was intact, I observed; it glistened like blue morning mists in the valleys.

Russian orderlies pulled out the stretcher, not being particularly careful. Joltingly they carried it into an operating theatre and rolled my body on to a table. Nurses cut off my blood-stained clothes and dropped them in a refuse bin. An X-ray unit took photographs, and I saw that I had three broken ribs, one had perforated my left lung. My left arm was broken in two places, and my left leg was broken again at the knee and at the ankle. The broken end of a soldier's bayonet had penetrated my left shoulder, narrowly missing a vital artery. The women surgeons sighed noisily, wondering where to start. I seemed to float over the operating table, watching, wondering if their skill would be great enough to patch me up. A gentle tugging upon my Silver Cord, and I found myself floating up through the ceiling, seeing in my passing, patients in their beds in wards above. I drifted up and away, out into space, out among the limitless stars, beyond the astral, through etheric plane after plane, until I reached again the "Land of the Golden Light".

I started, trying to peer through the purple mist. "He has returned," a gentle voice said, and the mists receded, giving way to the glorious Light again. My Guide, the Lama Mingyar Dondup, stood beside me, looking down. Sha-lu was lying on the bed beside me, gently purring. Two other High Personages were in the room. When I saw them, they were looking out of the window watching the people strolling many feet below.

At my gasp of surprise they turned and smiled upon me. "You have been so very ill," said one, "we feared that your body would not endure."

The other, whom I knew well in spite of the exalted position he had had on Earth, took my hands between his. "You have suffered too much, Lobsang. The world has been too cruel to you. We have discussed this and feel that you may like to withdraw. There would be very much more suffering for you if you continued. You can abandon your body now and remain here through eternity. Would you prefer it so?"

My heart leaped within me. Peace after all my sufferings. Sufferings which, but for my hard and special training, would have ended my life years ago. Special training. Yes, for what? So that I could see the aura of people, so that I could influence thought in the direction of auric research. And if I gave up - who would continue that task? "The world has been too cruel to you. No blame will attach to you if you give up." I must think carefully here. No blame from others, but throughout eternity I would have to live with my conscience. What was life? Just a few years of misery. A few more years of hardship, suffering, misunderstanding, then, provided I had done all I could, my conscience would be at peace. For eternity.

"Honoured Sir," I replied, "you have given me my choice I will serve as long as my body will hold together. It is very shaky at this moment," I added. Happy smiles of approval broke out among the assembled men. ShaAu purred loudly and gave me a gentle, playful bite of love.

"Your Earth body, as you say, is in a deplorable condition through hardship," said the Eminent Man. "Before you make a final decision, we must tell you this. We have located a body in the land of England, the owner of which is most anxious to leave. His aura has a fundamental harmonic of yours. Later, if conditions necessitate it, you can take over his body."

I nearly fell out of bed in horror. Me take over another body? My Guide laughed, "Now Lobsang, where is all your training? It is merely like taking over the robe of another. And at the passing of seven years the body would be yours, molecule for molecule yours, with the self-same scars to which you are so attached. At first it would be a little strange, as when you first wore Western clothes. I well remember that, Lobsang."

The Eminent Man broke in again, "you have your choice, my Lobsang. You can with a clear conscience relinquish your body now and remain here. But if you return to Earth, the time of the changing of bodies is not yet. Before you decide, I will tell you that if you return, you will return to hardship, misunderstanding, disbelief, and actual hatred, for there is a force of evil which tries to prevent all that is good in connection with human evolution. You will have evil forces with which to contend."

"My mind is made up," I replied. "You have given me my choice. I will continue until my task is done, and if I have to take over another body, well, so be it."

Heavy drowsiness assailed me. My eyes closed in spite of my efforts. The scene faded and I lapsed into unconsciousness.

The world seemed to be spinning round. There was a roaring in my ears, and a babble of voices. In some way that I could not explain, I seemed to be tied up. Was I in prison again? Had the Japanese caught me? Was my journey across Russia a dream, had I really been to the "Land of the Golden Light"?

"He is coming to," said a rough voice. "Hey! WAKE UP I" yelled someone in my ear. Drowsily I opened my aching eyes. A scowling Russian woman stared into my face. Beside her a fat woman doctor glanced stonily around the ward. Ward? I was in a ward with perhaps forty or fifty other men. Then the pain came on. My whole body came alive with flaming pain. Breathing was difficult. I could not move.

"Aw, he'll do," said the stony-faced doctor as she and the nurse turned and walked away. I lay panting, breath coming in short gasps because of the pain in my left side. No pain - relieving drugs here. Here one lived or died on one's own, neither expecting nor getting sympathy or relief from agony.

Heavy nurses stomped by, shaking the bed with the weight of their tread. Every morning callous fingers tore off the dressings and replaced them by others. For one's other needs, one had to depend on the good offices of those patients who were ambulant, and willing.

For two weeks I lay there, almost neglected by the nurses and medical staff getting what help I could from other patients, and suffering agonies when they could not or would not attend to my needs. At the end of two weeks the stony-faced woman doctor came, accompanied by the heavyweight nurse. Roughly they tore the plaster off my left arm and left leg. I had never seen any patient treated like this before, and when I showed signs of falling, the stalwart nurse supported me by my damaged left arm.

During the next week I hobbled round, helping patients as best I could. All I had to wear was a blanket, and I was wondering how I would get clothing. On the twenty-second day of my stay in the hospital two policemen came to the ward. Ripping off my blanket, they shoved a suit of clothes at me, and shouted, "Hurry, you are being deported. You should have left three weeks ago."

"But how could I leave when I was unconscious through no fault of mine?" I argued.

A blow across the face was the only answer. The second policeman loosened his revolver in its holster suggestively. They hustled me down the stairs and into the office of the Political Commissar.

"You did not tell us, when you were admitted, that you were being deported," he said angrily. "You have had treatment under false pretences and now you must pay for it."

"Comrade Commissar;' I replied, "I was brought here unconscious, and my injuries were caused by the bad driving of a Russian soldier. I have suffered much pain and loss through this."

The Commissar thoughtfully stroked his chin. "H'mm," he said, "how do you know all this if you were unconscious? I must look into the matter." He turned to the policeman and said, "Take him off and keep him in a cell in your police station until you hear from me."

Once again I was marched through crowded streets as an arrested man. At the police station my fingerprints were taken once more, and I was taken to a cell deep below the ground level. For a long time nothing happened, then a guard brought me cabbage soup, black bread and some very synthetic acorn coffee. The light in the corridor was kept on all the time, and there was no way of telling night from day, nor of marking the passing of the hours. Eventually I was taken to a room where a severe man shuffled his papers and peered at me over his glasses.

"You have been found guilty," he said, "of remaining in Russia after you had been sentenced to be deported. True, you were involved in an accident not of your making, but immediately you became conscious you should have drawn the attention of the Hospital Commissar to your position. In your treatment you have cost Russia much," he went on, "but Russia is merciful. You will work on the roads in Poland for twelve months to help pay for your treatment."

"But you should pay me," I answered hotly. "'Through the fault of a Russian soldier I have been badly injured."

"The soldier is not here to defend himself. He was uninjured, so we shot him. Your sentence stands. Tomorrow you will be taken to Poland where you will work on the roads." A guard roughly grabbed my arm, and led me off to the cell again….

"The guy is dead, dead and buried. He got drunk and he was driving a Fiat at speed. Guess he fell asleep; anyhow he spattered himself along the side of a concrete bridge. We heard about him and picked up his papers."

"And if I agree, what will you pay me, and can I keep these papers? They will help me across the Atlantic."

"Sure, Bud, sure. I give you two-fifty bucks and all expenses, and you keep all the papers. We will get your photograph put on them instead of his. I got contacts. I fix it real good!"

"Very well," I replied, "I will drive the car to Karlsruhe for you."

"Take the girl along with you, she will be company and it will get her out of my hair. I gotta fresh one lined up."

For some moments I looked at him in a daze. He evidently mistook my expression. "Aw, sure, She's game for anything. You'll have plenty of fun."

"No!" I exclaimed, "I will not take that woman with me. I would not stay in the same car with her. If you distrust me, let us call it off, or you can send a man, or two men, but no woman."

He leaned back in his chair and roared, opening his mouth wide - the display of gold reminded me of the Golden Objects on display in Temples of Tibet. His cigar fell to the floor and became extinguished in a shower of sparks. "That dame," he said when he could finally speak, "she costs me five hundred bucks a week. I offer to give her to you for the trip and you refuse. Well, ain't that sump'n!"

Two days later the papers were ready. My photograph had been fixed on, and friendly officials had carefully examined the papers and covered them with official seals as necessary. The great Mercedes was gleaming in the Italian sunlight. I checked, as always, the fuel, oil and water, got in and started the engine. As I drove off the American gave me a friendly wave.

At the Swiss border, the officials very carefully inspected the papers which I presented. Then they turned their attention to the car. A probe into the fuel tank to make sure there was no false compartment, tapping along the body to make sure that nothing was hidden behind the metal panels. Two guards looked underneath, under the dash, and even looked at the engine. As they gave me clearance and I moved off, shouts broke out behind me. Quickly I braked. A guard ran up, panting. "Will you take a man to Martigny?" he asked. "He is in rather a hurry and has to go on a matter of some urgency."

"Yes," I replied, "I will take him if he is ready now."

The guard beckoned, and a man hurried out of the Frontier offices. Bowing to me, he got into the car and sat beside me. By his aura I saw that he was an official and was suspicious. Apparently he was wondering why I should be driving alone, with no woman friends.

He was a great talker, but he left time enough to ply me with questions. Questions which I could answer. "No women, Sir?" he said, "but how unusual. Perhaps you have other interests?"

I laughed and said, "You people think only of sex, you think that a man travelling alone is a freak, someone of whom you must be suspicious. I am a tourist, I am seeing the sights. I can see women anywhere.

He looked at me with some understanding in his eyes, and I said, "I will tell you a story, which I know, is true. It is another version of the Garden of Eden."

"Throughout history in all the great religious works of the world there have been stories which some have believed, but which others, with perhaps greater insight, have regarded as legends, as legends designed to conceal certain knowledge - which should not fall before any chance person because such knowledge can be dangerous in such hands.

"Such is the story or legend of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, wherein Eve was tempted by a serpent and in which she ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and having been tempted by the serpent, and having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, they gazed upon each other and saw that they were naked. Having obtained this forbidden knowledge, they were no longer allowed to remain in the Garden of Eden.

"The Garden of Eden, of course, is that blissful land of ignorance in which one fears nothing because one understands nothing, in which one is, to all intents and purposes, a cabbage. But here, then, is the more esoteric version of the story.

"Man and woman are not just merely a mass of protoplasm, of flesh stuck upon a bony framework. Man is, or can be, a much greater thing than that. Here on this Earth we are mere puppets of our Overself, that Overself which temporarily resides in the astral and which obtains experience through the flesh body which is the puppet, the instrument of the astral.

"Physiologists and others have dissected man's body, and they have reduced everything to a mass of flesh and bone. They can discuss this bone or that bone, they can discuss various organs, but these are all material things. They have not discovered, nor have they tried to discover, the more secret things, the intangible things, things which the Indians, the Chinese, and the Tibetans knew centuries and centuries before Christianity.

"The spine is a very important structure indeed. It houses the spinal cord, without which one is paralysed, without which one is useless as a human. But the spine is more important than that. Right in the centre of the spinal nerve, the spinal cord is a tube, which extends to another dimension. It is a tube upon which the force known as the Kundalini can travel when awakened. At the base of the spine is what the Easterners call the Serpent Fire. It is the seat of Life itself.

"In the average Westerner this great force is dormant, asleep, almost paralysed with disuse. Actually it is like a serpent coiled at the base of the spine, a serpent of immense power, but which, for various reasons, cannot escape from its confines for the time being. This mythical figure of a serpent is known as the Kundalini, and in awakened Easterners, the serpent force can arise through the channel in the spinal nerve, rise straight up to the brain and beyond, beyond into the astral. As it rises its potent, force activates each of the chakrams, or centres of power, such as the umbilicus, throat, and various other parts. When those centres are awakened a person becomes vital, powerful, dominant.

"With complete control of the serpent force one can achieve almost anything. One can move mountains, or walk on water, or levitate, or allow oneself to be buried in the earth in a sealed chamber from which one would emerge alive at any specified time.

"So we have it in the legend that Eve was tempted by a serpent. In other words, in some way Eve got to know about the Kundalini. She was able to release the serpent power coiled at the base of her spine and that rose up and surged through the spinal column, and awakened her brain and gave her knowledge. Thus in the story it can be said that she ate of the Tree of Knowledge, or of the fruit thereof. She had this knowledge and with it she could see the aura, the force around the human body. She could see the aura of Adam, his thoughts and intentions, and Adam, too being tempted by Eve, had his Kundalini awakened and then he could see Eve as she was.

"The truth is that each gazed upon the aura of the other, seeing the other's naked astral form, the form undothed by the human body, and so could see all the other's thoughts, all his desires, all his knowledge, and that should not be at the stage of evolution of Adam and Eve.

"Old priests knew that under certain conditions the aura could be seen, they knew that the Kundalini could be awakened by sex. So in the old days priests taught that sex was sinful, that sex was the root of all evil, and because Eve tempted Adam, sex was the downfall of the world. They taught this because sometimes, as I have said, sex can stir the Kundalini, which rests dormant in most people at the base of the spine.

"The Kundalini force is coiled down low, a terrific force, like a clock spring the way it is coiled. Like a clock spring suddenly uncoiled it can do damage. This particular force is located at the base of the spine, part of it actually within the generative organs. People of the East recognize this; certain of the Hindus use sex in their religious ceremonies. They use a different form of sex manifestation, and a different sex position to achieve specified results, and they do achieve those results. The ancients, centuries and centuries ago, worshipped sex. They went in for phallic worship. There were certain ceremonies in temples which raised the Kundalini which gave one clairvoyance, telepathy, and many other esoteric powers.

"Sex used properly and in a certain way in love, can raise one's vibrations. It can cause what the Easterners call the Flower of the Lotus to open, and to embrace the world of the spirit. It can cause the Kundalini to surge and to awaken certain centres. But sex and the Kundalini should never be abused. One should complement and supplement the other. Those religions which say that there should be no sex between husband and wife are tragically wrong. This is often advocated by many of the more dubious cults of Christianity. The Roman Catholics come nearer to the truth when they advise husband and wife to have sexual experiences, but the Catholics advocate it blindly, not knowing why, and believing that it is merely for the procreation of children, which is not the main purpose of sex, although most people believe' it is.

"These religions, then, which say that one should have no sexual experiences - are trying to stifle individual evolution and the evolution of the race. This is how it works:

In magnetism one obtains a powerful magnet by arranging the molecules of the substance to face in one direction. Normally in a piece of iron, for example, all the molecules are in any direction like an undisciplined crowd. They are haphazardly arranged, but when a certain force is applied (in the case of iron, a magnetizing force) all the molecules face in one direction, and so one has the great power of magnetism - without which there would be no radio or electricity, without which there would be no road or rall transport, or air travel cither.

"In the human, when the Kundalini is awakened, when the Serpent Fire becomes alive, then the molecules in the body all face in one direction because the Kundalini force, in awakening, has pulled the molecules in that direction. Then the human body becomes vibrant with life and health, it becomes powerful in knowledge, it can see all.

"There are various methods of awakening the Kundalini completely, but this should not be done except with those who are suitably evolved because of the immense power and domination of others which a complete awakening would give, and power can be abused and used for ill. But the Kundalini can be partly awakened, and can vivify certain centres by love between a married couple. With the true ecstasy of intimacy, the molecules of the body become so arranged that many of them face in one direction, and so these people become people of great dynamic power.

"When all the false modesty and all the false teachings about sex are removed, then once again will Man arise as a great being, once again will Man be able to take his place as a traveller to the stars."

He also came over some bookmanuals on marine-engineering - planning to get on a ship as ship-engineer. And after some weeks he managed to get such a job - when an engineer had got sick. On this way he came over to USA.

In the next part he has just come to USA