THE EXCURSION A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE EXCURSION
A Saul Vogel Mystery

The day after he had patented his super-accumulator, Vogel was radiant with joy: he sold the rights thus securing his finances. I was radiant, too: no Plato in a foreseeable future. Vogel had made me deliver, in order to invent his accumulator, two detailed lectures about the great thinker. I was enjoying my meal and feeling secure when Vogel said in a conversational tone:
“You were saying that Plato considered the body a grave: soma sema, right?”
I snarled at him, and he snapped:
“When I say Plato I mean Plato! You work here!”
“At breakfast? I also live here!” but something in his stare made me add: “Then Plato it is. The body is the grave for the soul. So what?”
“So life is a sojourn in a coffin, right?”
“Life is death for the soul, and death is a new life for the soul – a resurrection.”
“And is it known whatever happens to the soul when it is thus resurrected?”
“As I told you, it stays in the World of Ideas before being reborn into our World of Phenomena. Want another lecture? Personally I deem Plato overrated: he was a Pythagorean and divulged only what the Order deemed useful for public consumption. His initiate’s oath did not allow him to reveal the Pythagoreans’ true inner philosophy. It must have been pretty advanced!”
“The great Plato – a propagandist and not an original thinker?” Vogel sounded shocked.
“That is my conviction.”
“Do you know what happens to the soul after what we call death?” he asked.
“Would I be working here for peanuts instead of running a cult and getting rich?”
“Let’s find out empirically, then!” My employer stood up, ready for action.
“About Plato’s Pythagoreanism?” I asked hopefully.
“About what really happens after death.”
“But how, pray?”
“Are you forgetting the Cosmoscope?” and he rushed out to the UFO-shaped outhouse where the Cosmoscope is installed. As narrated in The Cosmoscope, this contraption is a philosopher’s dream come true: it enables transcendental soul-voyage.

I followed dutifully but I was dragging my feet. Whatever religions may say about the magnificence of the afterlife (I never hurt a fly, so I did not expect the unpleasant options) I would rather not jest with Death like Vogel was about to do.
“Wherever Employer goes…” he quoted from my contract and took the "driver's" seat.
“…there Employee shall follow within reason,” I quoted back, yet took the other seat, muttering a prayer for a good reincarnation.
Vogel programmed the machine and hit “enter”. The lights went out, there was the characteristic humming sound and I felt that I no more had to exert myself in order to pilot the vehicle of my life. The Cosmoscope made me accept anything that would come. I dropped thinking, feeling, even the woman of my heart and let myself be carried by this energy, leaving everything behind. The relief was indescribable.
Then suddenly I panic: all energy is leaving my body, I’m dying! I want to get off my seat but there is no reaction from the body. With my soul’s eyes, I can see it stripped to the seat, inert like a dummy. Then I see a tornado coming down on me, the “me” without the body, and it sucks me up into a tunnel. I am flying at an enormous speed and a review of my whole life begins: my friendships, love-affairs, parents and collaboration with Vogel. How I have been acquiring knowledge: what I accepted, what I rejected and the consequences thereof. The shaping of my thoughts, feelings, creed and system of values. My “deeds” in the world (not impressive) and my influence on History (extremely exiguous)… This, however, is a chronicle of Saul Vogel’s adventures, and suffice that these eye-openers were of great service to me later.

I reached the end of the tunnel, was thrown into a brightness and then I stopped. Vogel stopped by my side a moment later.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he “said”. I could “hear” him mentally.
“Looking” around we saw ourselves hovering in space. Before us were thousands of space-holes, some shaped like wide gates, others like doors. From the “mouth” of the tornado, many radiant ameba-like beings were issuing; they floated in unending lines up to the gate-shaped holes in space and disappeared inside.
“The souls of fellow Earthlings recently deceased,” I “heard” Vogel “say” (from now on I drop the quotation marks). He focused on one of the gates, I followed and saw a stupa by the gate and prayer-mills, which the amoebae turned, as they were passing in.
“This is the door to the Buddhist afterlife, Master!” it dawned on me.
“I take the Buddhists, you take those,” he pointed out a much frequented gate and moved over to the Buddhists. I saw him barge into the line, turn the prayer-mills and vanish inside.

Something happened in my mind and I saw myself stopping before Lord Buddha.
“Welcome, Mr. Vogel, we don’t discourage tourism. Take any door you please,” Lord Buddha spoke and I realized that I was seeing through Vogel’s eyes.
Vogel thanked the Lord and moved on into a space with six doors, where he stopped, while the Buddhist souls, instructed by the Lord, were entering appropriate doors without hesitation.
“You still there?” Vogel nudged me into action, suddenly aware of my witnessing his embarras de richesse. I moved over to the indicated gate, adorned with the symbol of the Cross, and slipped into the line.

“Welcome, young man, we don’t discourage tourism. Take any door you please,“ Lord Jesus greeted me. I thanked Him and proceeded into a space with three doors. I hesitated a moment while the Christian souls, informed by the Lord, unhesitatingly choose appropriate doors.
I checked with Vogel: he was in the World of Hungry Ghosts, one of the six Karmic Worlds, and I stepped inside a door. It was Hell: screaming amoebae being boiled in bobbling cauldrons or tortured on racks, the devils filling up tar or poking the tormented with pitchforks. One saw me and approached, and I remembered what Lord Jesus told me.
“Just a tourist, sir.”
“Dante, Bosch, now him! Tourists be damned!”
He went away, pitchfork, hooves and all. I retreated to the doors, opened another one and found myself in Purgatory. The devils seemed nicer, the tar less hot and the racks less excruciating. Now and then an angel would appear, free a suffering ameba and take it… where indeed? I went out and took the last door.

What a bliss! I saw God Almighty on His throne surrounded by the Holy Family, the Holy Ghost and the nine Cherubic Choirs. I was so entranced that I would have stayed there for ever in contemplation of this vision were it not for an angel who came to fetch me to Paradise: a magnificent park where the amoebae were in a permanent state of ecstasy. They praised God, discussed the holy scene they had beheld at the entrance and waited for the Last Judgment.
I joined a group, which was exalting and glorifying the Lord, and was enjoying myself tremendously when Vogel switched on from the World of Gods, yet another of the Buddhist Karmic Worlds:
“Get your butt out of there!”
I forced myself to obey, returned to the gate, moved over to our point in space and met Vogel.

“I skipped Hell and the World of Animals,” he was referring to yet other Karmic Worlds. “Entry to the World of Man was denied, even though amoebae were getting in. Of this I conclude that we are still alive: obviously, you can’t be twofold in one and the same World. But look, there are the gates of Islam and Judaism,” he exclaimed with philosophical zeal. “I visit them both, you take these,” he indicated less frequented gates where the amoebae were trickling in only now and then.
The first gate led to the Inuit afterlife, the second to the hereafter of a group of South American rain-forest tribes, the third to the aftertime of the Dogons, in whose religion there is a link between the Earth and the star Sirius. Some Papuan, Siberian, Aborigine and Pacific eschatologies. This is not a treatise on religions, however, this is a report of one of Saul Vogel’s philosophical explorations.

I tried some gates, which were receiving no amoebae, and I found them closed. Symbols revealed them as belonging to forsaken religions: Inca, Aztec, Maya or that of Zeus, Mithras, Svantevit, Ammon, Odin, Marduk or Baal. Some bore nameplates of individuals who conformed to no mass faith and contrived personal creeds instead. Some belonged to philosophers. I tried Nietzsche, Aristotle and Spinoza but the doors were closed. I did look for a door with ΠΛΑΤΩΝ on the nameplate, but found only the gate of the Pythagorean Order. It did not budge, either.

I was getting mentally tired, so I moved back to our point in space. Vogel appeared soon and began to dole out new tasks. He wanted Anthroposophy for himself, and for me he chose two New Age cults. Having read about them, I knew what was in store. In one case, I would have to travel to the constellations of Pleiades and Orion and there to incarnate into some strange creatures. The second was an astrological sect, whose amoebae would take lessons on all the planets of our Solar System before reincarnating on Earth. I did not feel up to it, so I made a jocular counterproposition:
“What about yours and mine? Shall we find our little gates?”
“Right! Let’s see what afterlives we are preparing for ourselves and improve on them!”
He actually liked my suggestion, so I reminded him of our accord on overtime.
“This excursion qualifies as a unique event and not as the routine work described in the contract!” he protested, and a sound of a gong was heard.
“Saved by the bell, you lazy dog! The Cosmoscope is about to reverse the process.”

A moment later I was speeding back through the tornado. The wonderful feeling of being back in the body, as we stretch ourselves in the seats.
We eat supper and take a scotch on the porch, sipping and watching the sun go down.
“People think that the afterworld is given. Now a reasonable assumption can be made that we create it ourselves,” Vogel says, as the last rays disappear behind the trees.
“Only according to your machine, Master!”
“Machine or not, I advise against making this excursion public. Many people feel and believe that solely their particular religion is the true one. The author of Satanic Verses got on the black list of the Muslims. You might get on those of all creeds.”
“As the chronicler of your exploits I can’t keep a philosophical feat of that magnitude confidential.”
So here you are.

© Copyright by Peter Billig 2007.