—anonymous
Foreword
These paragraphs of manuscript, faded and fragmentary though they were, are all that was found in the attic of the house I shared with fellow tenants in Herne Hill, London, when I was around 25 years old. I am certain that Mrs Kourpas, our landlady, being only intent on doing the minimum to prepare the rooms for letting had never investigated the attic, since the dust of ages was undisturbed. This was a time before the advent of loft insulation. We had decided to explore up there after a somewhat eerie séance with a Ouija board supplied by one of the girls who lived on the ground floor. No one else could be bothered with deciphering the story from the damaged manuscript; even I found it a daunting task and postponed it for several years.
•••
When I was a youth of 18, callow, naïve, not in any way seen by my peers as a god, nor yet destined to be a hero, I was tall, somewhat bent to maintain equality of height, not wishing to stand out, being skinny, ectomorphic. I desired to blend with the crowd, be unnoticed. Family life had not equipped me for relationships. My parents’ marriage was loveless — arguments and discord were the norm. I knew nothing of harmony, peace, the warmth of companionship. My brother and I learned in this environment to bait and annoy each other; we were never close. Ejected from the nest to attend a distant college, I had remained a loner, and females being a total mystery to me I imagined they would have no interest in such an oddity, for I perceived that other males were attractive and confident, consequently popular, and I was clearly not in their league.
Having been brought up in a religious community, I prayed for a mate, and when nothing transpired from that direction (I was somewhat impatient) abandoned my faith and influenced by undisciplined colleagues pursued the pleasure — party — booze, hash and jazz scene until it began to show me that such loss of control was wasteful of the energy of life. Failure at college required me to repeat a year. I had a little time that summer to repent my indiscipline and irresponsibility and so resolved to work hard in the ensuing terms. During this time my thoughts began to take on an inner reflective nature, and dreams a strangeness that left me precariously balanced between two worlds.
I took up the pen I had put down when I left school, which, though never approaching the genius of one primary schoolmate who was able to hold the entire class spellbound with his extempore storytelling, had achieved good marks in the trivial essays set by my masters. In this all-boys school mediocrity was rewarded, and in English classes, I had excelled at it. Now in college I employed my dormant skills to record all my dreams, and thus established the habit that honed my memory and descriptive abilities, and stood me in good stead to chronicle the strange adventures that followed.
It was after my 21st birthday, an event that quietly passed sans friends, sans all but family, isolated from the college environment, when I was feeling particularly bereft of company. I had a dream which in my estimation eclipsed all others in its magnitude, its depth, its content, and every other dimension I had ever experienced in waking life.
I was in a world, it seemed, that was impossible in its shape and orientation. However one perceives the Earth, whether as a flat disk or as a globe, one always sees the distant horizon, fading into sky either where land ceases or where the earth curves around beyond one’s view. This world had no horizon. It faded, to be sure, in a hazy sort of way, but there was no sky to meet it. Just more earth and water, curving, ever upwards, until the sun, directly above, obliterated its hazy outlines. So far beyond our mundane life was this that it might perhaps be better understood as a globe turned inside-out, viewed from within.
But this world was not like ours, but ten times as verdant, ten times larger than life in the variation of life forms, both flora and fauna. My body felt lighter, perhaps a quarter normal weight, and all vegetation and creatures I saw were gigantic in proportion, as if I had arrived in a land visited by Gulliver, some way between our homeland and that he named Brobdignag. As I grew accustomed to the enormity and the oddness, I observed that the sun was a little smaller in size than our dear Sol, and less intense, having a smoky appearance. Much of the light around me was generated by the life forms themselves, which glowed and glinted, millions of minute filaments of light radiating from each rock, leaf or blade of grass.
There were no path or road, no factory chimneys, no public buildings, no ugly slums or great houses. Lush green landscape, natural woodlands, living waters, and, occasionally, radiant crystal constructions were evident in the curving vistas. The whole was peaceful, natural, with birdcalls and the sounds of nature completing a heavenly beauty, which prompted the sudden thought that I had passed on, and I looked around expecting to find a guardian angel beside me.
None was there, but before me appeared in a shimmer of the air, a being so perfect, so beautiful I could hardly stand to look at her. She wore a diaphanous gown, which moved as if motivated by the light emanating from her pale blue skin, in ripples and flowings of generous energy, and as she moved towards me, my sense of proportion was challenged, for when she was at a position which gave her the appearance of a normal human size, she kept coming, and grew ever larger. By the time she stopped before me, she was clearly twice my height, and since my head was level with her middle parts so thinly covered, I lowered my eyes and immediately saw that her feet did not touch the ground. She hovered above it, and marvelling at this, I suddenly knew she was avoiding contact with the grass so as not to damage a single blade. Then her voice in my mind gently said, “This is your first lesson in Love. First, do no harm.”
As I was somewhat mindboggled at this point, she spoke again in my head, saying, “Have no fear. Accept, and all will become clear to you.” In my own thoughts then, came up one agitation, “That is the usual thing the angels say to humans”.
“Humans make all sorts of wild assumptions. Let go of all you have read or learned from others, and you will find the capacity for real wisdom.”
“What of sacred scripture?”
“Humans have labelled all sorts of babbling as sacred, as long as it served their purpose.”
“What then, is sacred?”
“Only that which your heart has found to be so.” Emboldened, I looked into her eyes, which were bright turquoise and held my gaze unwaveringly. It seemed she looked deep into my soul.
I had more questions. “Who are you?”
“You may know me as Grace. That is the equivalent of my name in English. In Earthly terms, I would be described as a goddess.”
“You are exactly what I would imagine a goddess to be, Grace. So if not a goddess what are you really?”
“Just an inhabitant of this world. We are all of similar stature.”
“Amazing. How can this be? Why is everything so big, so bright, so clear, so natural?”
“The conditions here are unlike those on the surface of your world. We have existed for countless thousands of your years, ageless, timeless; there is no night as on your world, no darkness. We live in the Light, we are the Light, we are Love. There cannot be strife, poverty, illness, lack, hatred, fear, war, greed or aging. That is how we continue without death. Those things never visit us. They are illusions unique to your world.”
“Is this a planet beyond our solar system? How far is it from Earth?”
“Eight hundred miles from Earth's surface.”
“Eight hundred? Even the moon is thousands of miles away from Earth and this is not the moon.”
“No, this is not the moon. This is the Hollow Earth, eight hundred miles beneath the surface of Terra.”
Over the period of the next — I had no way of reckoning, perhaps weeks — more likely months — Grace untiringly instructed me on the way gravity acts from the centre of the Earth’s crust, approximately 400 miles below the surface, in both directions. She explained that the central sun is in balance between opposite gravitational pulls, and that the inner diameter of Hollow Earth, 1600 miles smaller than that of the surface, renders gravity inside a sixth of that on the surface, which allows for greater growth, nurtured not only by the central sun, but by a loving, intelligent natural spirit, Gaia herself. In this positive environment all life is sacred, animate, loving, sentient, and communicates with all other life forms. As we reclined there, floating above the forest floor below a bower of shady tree-sized ferns, (it was more appropriate than talking to her middle or have her bend to talk face-to-face) a multitude of creatures were observed roaming freely, occasionally coming to be petted, communicating love and welcome, and even inviting us to travel with them seeing more of the beauteous countryside. There were big cats, such as sabre-tooth tigers of massive size, mastodons, and pterosaurs, all of which we were able to mount and travel about on for an elevated view, at their invitation. It was a most wondrous experience, and as an introduction to life within this planet was an invaluable one.
My education as to the arts of Love became the main theme of the experience, and so serious study was entered into, punctuated on occasion with side trips to other areas, crystal cities, the subterranean Inner Earth realms of Shamballah and Telos, and the delights of the enormous but succulent fruits of the Hollow Earth and other vegetarian food and drink Grace was able to manifest as and when it was necessary. I was living there with a goddess indeed, with Grace, and it seemed, by the Grace of the Creator of All, in a utopia surpassing any legend of the past, and without the use of money or any other material necessity. All was abundance, all was beauty, all was joyfully and freely given. I was treated as an equal, a brother, by all I met, with respect, affection, in a word, with love, and with an understanding that there was no limitation, no conditions binding that flow, a complete and free sharing.
When at last Grace came to know that she had imparted all she felt was right or appropriate for me to receive from her, she told me it was time for me to leave, with all she had given, so that it might be imparted to the surface world. I felt that we had shared something special, a relationship unique and beautiful, which for me at that stage had defined the very essence of unconditional Love, and I was naturally reluctant to leave. But then it occurred to me that my body in my absence would have perished in that time from lack of sustenance, but I was reassured by Grace that I would return to my body within a few hours of having left it. Through the art of time travel, or the bending of space-time, this was not only possible but also a well-practiced science by the Hollow Earth inhabitants and their galactic friends. But this was more information than I was meant to have at this time, so Grace wished me farewell, and finally I felt the essence of her kiss upon my lips, a massive surge of joy in my heart, and with a gentle backwards movement I entered a swirling silver tunnel which shortly ended at my bed, and I awoke to find myself in the appalling grip of Earth surface gravity, with a dry mouth and an urgent bladder.
In the ensuing months I was aided in the transcription of the treatise which follows, The Arts of Love, by the knowledge that in parallel time, perhaps, the education I was receiving was being passed directly to my surface mind, and though my college life was busy, I developed a personal form of relaxation in which I put aside at least two hours every evening to continue my transcription. Thus I can assure you that the work is faithful to the teaching I received in every wise, and though being only the first of three volumes, is comprehensively complete in its concept to the stage of understanding I had reached at the end of my sojourn with Grace.
I plan to relate in the prologues to Books II and III, the circumstances of my further adventures in the Hollow Earth with the 'goddesses' Joy and Harmony.
•••
Afterword
Since no other parts of the work had been discovered it could be assumed that the Prologue was deemed superfluous to the final publication, and the two further prologues remained unwritten, so that the origin of the work was never revealed. It is not clear why the author neglected to sign the work, but there may be a clue in the Ouija board's communicating entity who identified himself as 'Albert'. Unfortunately, since my Google search revealed no such book in existence, it appears that the work, if it ever was published, is long out of print. It is only now, on my studying the phenomenon of Agartha, the Hollow Earth, that I come to realise that the foregoing is not the invention of a fertile imagination, but contains an accurate description of the paradisical world thriving 800 miles beneath our feet.
© David Canning October 2011
