The day brightened slowly around me. I paddled on through the swelling dawn chorus and beneath the drifting mists, between the mud and grass of the river banks where puzzled-looking cattle stared big-eyed at my passing. The great gentle beasts chewed the cud, sometimes stopping to low at me. 'Moo yourself,' I told them.
The kit-bag resting in my lap was getting in my way as I paddled; I pushed it further down, flattening it between my legs and into the well of the inner-tube where Indra's sheet of welded rubber was keeping my bottom from getting wet. The bag scrunched down and under until I was more or less sitting on it; paddling became easier.
The kit-bag contained a copy of the Orthography (with Salvador's most recent amendments hastily written in by myself from our notes), old, battered but beautiful leather-bound pocket editions of The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, Waverley by Walter Scott, Paradise Lost by John Milton and Maunder's Treasury of Knowledge, some vials of important substances (river mud, hearth ash, seaweed ointment), a travelling hammock, a bed roll, a compact Sitting Board, various maps, a miniature candle-lantern, a tiny can of wind- and water-proof matches, some envelopes, paper and stamps and a pencil, a penknife, a roll of twenty-nine one-pound notes, a parcel of food wrapped in greaseproof paper, a bottle of water, some toiletries and a change of clothes.
Our final sub-committee'd council of war had been to decide on my mode of transport to Edinburgh. I had already determined what this ought to be, and was able to argue my case over the objections of some of the others. Brother Indra agreed immediately to check on and modify the inner-tube, and left to do just that. I had also formed an opinion on how to approach Gertie Fossil's, based on the study of certain old maps, and had an idea how I might effect the much longer journey to the city of London, in the south-east of England. My arguments carried the day.
Before we go any further, I had best try to explain why -given that I am on a mission of such importance where time is potentially of the essence - I was not doing something more obviously expeditious, like catching an inter-city train straight to London or ordering a taxi to Glasgow or Edinburgh airport. This will require some theology.
God is both and neither male and female, and everything else as well.
God is always referred to as 'God' in the singular, but takes the third rather than the second person in the plural, to remind us of the mysterious and ultimately inexpressible nature of Their being.
God is omniscient, but only strategically concerning the far future, not tactically (otherwise time would be redundant).
They are also omnipotent, but having chosen to set up the experiment-cum-art-form that the Universe is, They are unlikely to intervene unless things go either apotheosistically well or apocalyptically badly.
To God, our Universe is as a snow-scene or the contents of a test-tube, and far from unique; They have many more, and although They care for us and love us, we are not the only apple of Their eye.
To God, Man is like a deformed child; They love him and would not deny him, but They cannot suppress Their regret that Their child is not perfect.
There is no Devil, only the Shadow caused by Man obscuring God's radiant splendour.
There is a fragment of God's spirit in Man, but while God might be said to be perfect, Their perfection conies from Their immense completeness, therefore Man lacks this aspect of God's qualities.
Man is the creature of God and made to serve Them and to Oversee the Universe, but in his closeness to the business of mundane existence he is corrupted by his own intelligence and ability to change what appears to be important but is not, rather than applying himself to the more difficult but ultimately far more rewarding task God has appointed him to, and in this respect is rather like a young child who has become skilled at just crawling very quickly, instead of standing up and learning to walk.
Man must learn to stand and walk with his spirit rather than crawl with his technology before he allows that technology - which is the physical expression of his spiritual Shadow - to destroy him.
God's ultimate aim for Man is not known and not even knowable in our present state; we must become spiritually adult before we can even discover what God holds in store for us as a spiritual species; all previous ideas of Heaven (or Hell) or Second Comings or Judgment Days are childish attempts to come to terms with our own ignorance. The perception of God's ultimate aim is one of the tasks of future prophets.
What awaits us individually when we die is reunion with the Godhead, but during this process we are relieved of our narrow and limiting individuality, becoming one with the Universe. New souls are drawn from the pool of spirit that is God in the Universe and sometimes a tiny fragment of memory from some previous existence will survive the twin disturbances of death and dissolving and birth and reforming; this accounts for the beguiling but ultimately appallingly vain and conceited concept of reincarnation.
The possibility exists that Man can achieve perfection in the sight of God because Man's nature is not immutable; just as it can alter through evolution, so it can be altered through listening to the voice of God, with the soul.
Your whole body is your soul (with the brain the most important part, like the cat's whisker in an old crystal radio). We do not yet understand exactly how it works, and may never be able to do so without the direct help of God Themself.
Physical love is the communing of souls, and therefore holy.
All Holy Books and all religions contain grains of truth broadcast from the mind of God, but politics and money corrupt the signal, and so the trick is to reduce the Clutter around oneself and listen calmly to the soul (which is one's God-given radio receiver).
At certain (seemingly but not really) random Psychological Moments you will hear or experience God talking to you; this means - for example - that when you see somebody standing in a field staring - apparently vacantly - into space, you should not disturb them (as a consequence, I might add, people of the Community are occasionally mistaken for scarecrows).
This is called Receiving.
Naturally, some people hear the Voice of God more clearly than others, and they are usually called prophets.
A prophet's first vision or revelation will tend to be the most intense but also the most debased by all that the prophet has experienced before. It follows that the first codification of that revelation will be the least perfect, the most contaminated by the prejudices and misunderstandings of the prophet. The full story, the real message only comes out gradually, over time, through revisions, glosses and apparent marginalia, all the result of God's persisting attempts to make Themself clear through the imperfect receiver that is the human soul.
Much of what other prophets have said, before all the above was made clear to our Founder, may be useful and true, but because their teachings have been corrupted by being institutionalised in the form of large religions, they will have lost much of their force.
The best strategy is to treat the revelations and teachings of others with cautious respect, but rely most fully on the teachings of our own OverSeer and listen to the Voice from inside all of us, the Voice from God.
Merit and calmness are to be found in the out-of-the-way, the byways of life; in the unnoticed, in the hidden and ignored, in the interstices; amongst the gaps between the slabs in the pavement of life (this is called the Principle of Indirectness, or the Principle of Interstitiality).