"No!" I cried. "I don't want to be here!" but the barge went on and I remained in it.

      There were other tables of stone that I saw that were still under construction. A lone workman carved the title of one: "The Thousand Year Anniversary of the Christianization of Russia, it read." Beneath it was the scene of an orgy of prostitution.

      Next went by a huge tablet of black granite. It carried no picture, only an inscription in gigantic letters carved very deep into the stone and filled with no coloring, except the shine of black pitch: "IMF=death," it read.

      Behind the tablet lay the ruins of ancient temples, and the ruins of cities of featureless glass towers surrounded by barbed wire fences that had kept humanity in.

      At last I came to the draw gate, almost relieved, but exhausted.

I was puzzled by the inscription on the draw gate. It read: "Divine Science understood and acknowledged."

      "We are the light of creation," I reasoned with myself. "We are also the IMF," said a voice within. "We have created death. We must go backwards over our nakedness and rebuild the image of man as the image of the creator of the universe in which we live. We must educate the whole of humanity with the truth, and heal it. The image of our fellow man is our own. We must acknowledge that which is true. This is love..."

      The gatekeeper interrupted my thoughts. "There is a law in this land that only more complete individuals may pass..."

      I raised my hand to stop him and said that I knew all of this already.

      "I cannot let you pass, turn back!" he said in a serious tone of voice as if a teacher failed a child in school for its own good. "I cannot let you pass, because you cannot hear the language of the people in the land beyond. Without knowing the language, you cannot hear the truth, nor discern the path on which you are going. Return to the temple. If I let you pass, you would become hopelessly lost. Turn back!"

      I replied that I would go back, but I stalled him long enough to observe the people of the land behind the draw gate. They were a strange people, as of one mind, but in a dialog with each other and with themselves. They were working as a team, but no one was leading them. They were enlarging their tents, their doors opened wide. They called their tents a church, a laboratory of living, and its purpose was to break taboos.

      I looked at the gatekeeper and shook my head.

      "I cannot let you pass," the gatekeeper repeated. "You have a vision, but your vision is incomplete. This land destroys philosophers who do not wish to think; who prostitute themselves to other people's opinions; who babble out what people treasure, right or wrong; who are empty inside. Be kind to yourself, turn back."

      This time I rejected the demand to turn back. "I will not turn back until you answer one question that makes my coming here worthwhile!"

      The gatekeeper smiled. "Congratulations my friend, ask away!"

      "If I were to turn back, how would I ever know when I am more complete? How can I be complete in something that cannot be defined, and know that I am complete?" I asked this thing in exasperation.

      "That's easy," the gatekeeper replied and continued smiling. "You will know that you are not empty of the truth, when your life becomes empty of what it is not. Ponder about what you saw. Where the images true? Or where they but images that you have accepted?"

      I turned from him, disappointed and sad and apparently not any wiser. Why did he speak in riddles?

      I was intrigued, though, by the people that I saw behind the draw gate, and by what the gatekeeper had said that I could not understand. As I turned back, I found myself in the Temple again.

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche