Oh, my dear and faithful journal...

I don't know how to do this. It's too much, and I don't know where to start. Pull even one of these threads, and you unravel the history of mankind.

I'm a stoner chick on a mountain, pushing 60, and I don't know how to do this.

What I do know:

In the beginning, God created a whole bunch of shit.

Worlds, species, things we have no clue about and wouldn't understand, spread out over a universe so vast, it appears to many of our best minds to be infinite.

And He did it, all of it, as Part One of a two-part Divine Plan.

Above all that we on this tiny spinning rock have seen or imagined, outside the fabric of our universe and all its quantum mysteries, there is God's true masterpiece: A paradise where the souls of all of his creations — every plant, every animal, every mammoth and microbe, dog and dragon, big-eyed gray and long-extinct giant — from every world that is or ever was — end up.

There they dwell, perfect reflections of God's love and wisdom and creative flair, freely sharing with each other their origin stories.

To Paradise they bring their proverbial cheeseburgers along with an unabridged historical account of their journeys to get there.

In Paradise, The Above, all the souls that have inhabited all the worlds in God's great universe, The Below, now eagerly exchange with each other the recipes, dad jokes, and pop culture crazes that defined their existences.

Adam and his wifey were never kicked out of the Garden of Eden for wanting to know about shit.

They, like everything that sprang from God's sometimes whimsical mind, were designed to be curious. Without curiosity no creature would evolve, and all creatures must evolve, spiritually, if not physically.

In The Below, things like, "Hey, I wonder what the insides of that thing that just fell out of that bird's coochie tastes like?" meant the difference between a thriving, growing human species and a bunch of hungry mouth-breathers.

Banishing them from His paradise for being curious would be like not giving them eyes and then punishing them for tripping over the furniture.

And in The Above — in His crib, where everything exists in perfect balance as growing, thinking, playing, singing, building, delightfully unpredictable extensions of His omnipotent power, grace, knowledge, and, above all else, love — curiosity is the very essence of joie de vivre.

God doesn't punish. God doesn't condemn souls to burning pits. There is no cosmic Naughty Or Nice list.

But God does do do-overs.

Lots and lots and lots of do-overs.

They are an integral part of His grand design.

Not the flashy part. Not the supernova, aurora borealis, red-shifting, Big Bang part.

The Guff is the place where souls stay after one life on Earth ends and before they are reincarnated into another. It's ran like the administrative, accounting, and HR offices of a multidimensional assembly line. It's where the numbers are crunched, progress reports are presented, and epoch-ending decisions are made.

Some call it Purgatory, but despite what the church told medieval humans, you can't buy your way in and it doesn't provide a safe space from God's so-called "judgment."

Gabriel said that it's like humans in this epoch took bits and pieces of all they ever knew about their reason for existing, chucked it in a blender, and spread it like Marmite across the globe.

In roughly 11,000 years, humans forgot — or were forced to forget by the most power-hungry souls among them — what took the species millions of years and countless epochs to learn.

It was, Gabriel said, "a disappointing turn of events."

So, what exactly is Gabriel?

Well, he said their names have changed from epoch to epoch, era to era, religion to religion. He also said I'd never be able to spell his actual name, so "Gabriel" works for him.

He and those of his species are God's first creations, assigned at the subsequent creation of those worlds which followed theirs to monitor the progress of each of the new species that is to inhabit them.

We know them best as the Archangels, the Watchers, our Spirit Guides, and our pantheon of gods and demigods.

They are the Elohim, and Earth, when it was formed, was assigned seven of them. They have been keeping the soul train moving on Earth since the dawn of its time.

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And Earth, from its inception, was a premier gig.

"For the first time," Gabriel said, "God decided to create a species for us to watch that was created 'in our image.'"

He used giant air quotes when he said that.

With humans, God was going old-school, taking inspiration from the first beings He created and those most closely tuned to His ways.

Humans, Gabriel said, would be "a species that had, tucked away in its circuitry board, the ability to flip a switch and level up."

They would "possess the innate ability to tune into the collective unconscious of the universe in which they exist," Gabriel explained. "They, like the Elohim, would have the tools to communicate without words; to physically feel each other's joy and struggles; to glimpse their future in the cosmic consciousness of everything God has ever set into motion."

Unlike any other creature, humans had at their disposal the transcendent energy of the Elohim, and the Elohim are so old and witnesses to so much, they may as well be God's walking Akashic record.

Humanity just had to figure out how to use their built-in toys — and to their credit, Gabriel said, many in our epoch have, "though those who are not yet up to speed have typically institutionalized them, dismissed them, or burnt them at the nearest stake."

God saw humanity, one of His youngest creations, as a species that would bring to Paradise an inherent understanding and appreciation of those already there.

We were born — all of us — on a fast track to Heaven.

And yes, He looked at what He had made, and He was pleased.

"Don't look so superior," Gabriel said as he watched — because he always watched — my reaction. "I believe that was also the day He cooked up the platypus. He's quite chuffed with them, too."

At the end of the last epoch, when ice still covered our planet, it looked to the Elohim like humans, bless their little hearts, were so close to God's paradise they could almost touch it and Him.

Graham Hancock can take a bow. There absolutely was an ancient civilization, very advanced, and its inhabitants were scattered like dandelion puffs when the ice suddenly melted and the earth was engulfed in water.

The Atlantians were all that has been written about them and more, and before the freeze, they were not unique.

Humans, for the most part, had embraced their potential, which, in the end, is the entire point of everything.

They had learned how to view the sun and the moon and the path of the stars and the lines of Earth's God-given energy grid — the flora, the fauna, and all the elements — not as commodities to harness or things to wish on, but as symbiotic partners in a glorious conscience-driven dance.

They met their civilization's needs, but they celebrated its dreams.

They existed not to maintain their lives, but to expand them, and their "harmonic frequency," Gabriel said, resonated with such a steady, soul-lifting hum, some among the Elohim believed the species would be raptured at last.

God's light shone from them... most of them.

But there's always those few bad apples, and, to mix metaphors, humanity is only as strong as its weakest link. That's true of every species. It's literally one of the Universal Laws.

Because souls don't journey to Paradise one at a time, no matter what any religion tells you.

And think about it: If you're honest, did you ever really believe that, after living 80, maybe 90 years, you somehow deserved an eternity of being told "that'll do, pig" by God Himself whilst chillaxing in pure, unbroken, unimaginable bliss?

And, for what? For telling God we like Him better than anything we made? We didn't kill our neighbor or fuck his wife, and, if we did, we're super sorry, so we're golden?

In what world does any of that make sense?

Well, in ours, it turns out. To a lot of people.

"That so many of you now genuinely believe that the God of all that is Perfection wants above everything else for you, His youngest children, to tell Him how wonderful He is?" Gabriel asked me with a laugh. "It is shocking to us, frankly. Do you really think Him so shallow? So vain?"

But those other guys...

The ones that built the pyramids and moved monolithic stones and acknowledged the stars and their small but significant place among them;

The ones who explored their world and spread their message and their balanced way of life with the curiosity and hearts of children, innocent in their eagerness to widen their understanding of their fellow humans;

The ones who — even after a society-ending cataclysm, in the face of a new power structure in a new epoch — devoted themselves for generations to venturing into the world yet again to remind their fellow humans of the old ways and, for their efforts, were crucified and burned and demonized and ultimately relegated to the realm of myth and conspiracies...

Those guys. They got it.

"But when the world froze, as worlds sometimes do," Gabriel told me, "there were so few of them left, so few of any of you left. And that's when we knew. We weren't one-hundred-percent certain, of course, not yet, but we began our preparations."

So few humans left that it didn't take many converts to make a majority among them.

The "Ancients," let's go ahead and call them (with a totally intentional nod to Stargate SG-1), knew, or at least, had a 5th-grade understanding, of another Universal Law:

No species ascends to Paradise incomplete.

"How did Immanuel put it?" Gabriel asked. "Ah, yes: 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'"

"But," he added, "since the flood, how has the church so often described its relation to Immanuel?"

He was prompting me, certain I knew the answer, because, come on!

"Who?" I replied.

My dear journal, I am not lying when I write that Gabriel, a divine creature of infinite knowledge and light, rolled his fucking eyes at me.

"Jesus," he said. "Jesus. The church declared itself to be the very body of Jesus Christ, and therefor, by proxy, 'the way and the truth and the life.'"

"What became the most powerful, epoch-defining entity on planet earth," Gabriel said, "taught billions of human beings that the only way they would know God's grace, the only way they would see the fruition of His plan for them, the very point of His creation of them and the only way to avoid an eternity of desolation and damnation, was to obey not God's order of things or even the spark of God that dwelled within them, but the church they built and appointed themselves world leaders of because they are the literal body of God's gatekeeper."

"And then it fractured into different sects and denominations, and suddenly the 'body of Christ, supposedly a direct conduit of the Holy Spirit, began cutting itself for bragging rights and random patches of dirt," he recalled. "With the understanding that they worship the same God, the devout followers of the three major religions you lot created turned on each other, rather than on their mortal leaders who led them astray."

And now I understand the real problem with that, faithful journal, the problem with any religion that proclaims to know the mind of the Creator — to be the only way you, too, can know the mind of the Creator — to the exclusion, and, all-too-often, to the obliteration of anyone who disagrees:

There can be no human soul excluded.

"It's all of you, raptured to Paradise in one glorious celebration of the fulfillment of humanity's potential," Gabriel said, "or every human soul remains, some on Earth to carry on the species, the rest in the Guff, where they will be reborn on Earth at a later, carefully chosen time, to live, to learn, to die, to return to Earth and live again."

Wash, rinse, repeat, until...

Until my head stops throbbing, dear journal. I can't see what I'm writing anymore.

It's not from the burden of what Gabriel shared with me in those seven days, but from the sheer volume of it — of all the information that I have to make the entire group understand, really important information — and I can feel the details starting to slip away.

The major points, I know. I mean, really know. Like "burned-into-my-fucking-soul" really know.

But details, the details I never want to forget, the 21 Questions and the names and dates and the references. The literature and the societies and the goddamn DETAILS!

They are fading.

I remember him explaining why they would be fading, why they had to fade, but damn it, my head is throbbing and I need a couple of hours...