Rapture: The Ten Worlds, #6

By Jude LaHaye

     Rapture, or Heaven, is one of the six lower worlds in human existence. So say the Buddhists. Rapture sounds heavenly, but it is a temporary life condition. It gives extreme pleasure which does not last. And yet, many human beings chase Rapture for lifetimes. They allow it to become their dominant world. Meet one such human being, Peter Michael Blanton. Meet the creature who rules his psyche, the orangutan Pongo, who tries to promote the four higher worlds to young Peter...and fails. For Peter's psyche has fallen prey to the world of Rapture and her fellows, the other five lower worlds: Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger...and Humanity. 

     Peter, of course, is not alone in the world. He has adoptive parents, he has a gifted counsellor...and he has a birth family which comes from Hell, itself. Could anyone in Peter's situation overcome such dire circumstance? Come with him, grow with him, and ponder the answer to this question.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jude LaHaye
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223386315

Jude LaHaye

Jude LaHaye is a Buddhist. Buddhists believe that the highest form of sentience is the human being. They also believe that the meaning of life is...Life. LaHaye struggles with his belief system and the evidence of his own human interactions and observations. His books are born of this struggle.

Book preview

Chapter 1. Inception

And so it begins.

I like my work. I like it even though I have to start all over again every time I am reborn.

You see, with every new life I agree to launch, I am born within an infant human being. This infant knows nothing.

But I, I am a kernel of eternity. I understand all.

And it is my job to teach the infant, the toddler, the child, the teenager, and the adult. I am with the human being throughout his or her life, equipping him or her with the brain framework to handle events, to manage decision-making, to evaluate causality and its commensurate effects.

To live. I prepare the human brain to live.

I don’t always succeed. Sometimes my work does not suffice to keep a human being motivated to live.

The me that survives this self-annihilation is always diminished by my failure.

It is called karma.

Karma is not always bad. This is vital for you to understand. Karma can be good. It can be fantastic.

It can be like your favorite dessert. Times a million. With a cherry on top.

The early days, the infant days, are easy. There are usually a predictable number and kind of stimuli that I must teach the brain to like or dislike. To embrace or avoid.

It’s a very difficult balance, however. I don’t want the brain to learn to crave instead of like. I don’t want the brain to learn to hate rather than dislike.

Hate is like self-murder except the body lives on.

Embracing must be tempered with judgment; avoidance must not become a habit, but rather a rational, reasoned reaction to danger.

Danger is vital to the proper development of a human being. The rational reaction to danger is the essence of courage.

And courage is the essence of the human being.

So, I am doing what I can in this infant stage to develop the habits of eating and interacting with my environment which will result in a healthy me, both body and mind.

Those strained carrots are nasty, though. I try not to let this prejudice of mine influence my young host, however.

Carrots are very good for a human.

I am not sure that the ordeal that is called broccoli is worth its benefits, however. I may indulge myself this time and refuse the broccoli.

Infant years pass quickly. I try to ensure that the infant sleeps a lot.

Sometimes my bumbling ways cause the infant brain to become stimulated, however, and this situation makes both of us unhappy.

And the parents. The parents become unhappy. And tired. And cranky. And sometimes abusive.

Being born to abusive parents is also very karmic.

The bad kind.

This child, this new me, experiences abuse at a very early age. The abuse comes from a human adult who is not either of his parents.

Yes, I am a male child in this incarnation.

I exert every effort at my disposal, I use all of my tools to enable this infant to heal after his physical trauma.

But my tools are also infantile at this stage. I review what I possess which can be deployed in the infant’s defense: base Animality is already stable and growing, but useless against the current challenge; the infant Hell, such as it is, merely defines the environment that I now find myself in – and it is hellish. It is painful. As young as I am, I feel a sense of profound violation and outrage.

I feel alone and unprotected. Danger. I am facing a fierce and overwhelming sense of danger well ahead of the capabilities of my brain to rationally react.

My reactions, therefore, are irrational. Instinctual. I rage and I cry.

I have a good start on the aspect of me which is Anger.

My Hunger grows to crave safety.

I have failed in this one aspect already, then. Even as an infant, I have learned to crave.

But surprise of surprises, the observation which really stuns me is that the little infant representing Rapture is maturing before my very eyes.

She is a fat and rosy-cheeked baby. She cries great crocodile tears one second and claps her hands and coos an infantile form of joy the next. And she grows.

And grows.

This is how I know, even at this tender human age, that I must work to train this baby Rapture to control, to contain, its desires.

I do not want to grow to adulthood with Rapture as my dominant world.

Patience.

I have to be patient.

I will be vigilant. I will start training my young students as soon as they are able to understand basic ideas. I must use language to express them.

There are other classrooms contained in this brain... I cannot leave those other influences unsupervised. This is going to be a difficult life.

I was expecting it.

I was expecting it because I terminated my prior life while in my teen years.

I warned you about karma. Well, I guess I was really warning myself. Steeling myself for what is inevitably to come.

To make up for my prior failure, I must change this bad karma.

I must live well.

I must help others to live well.

I must become happy.

It is not going to be easy.

Chapter 2. Kindergarten

Time flies, they say .

All my little wards are growing fast now, and I must pay strict attention to my teaching responsibilities.

When stimuli present themselves, I try to involve all of the little infants in my care in observing and learning.

They are an unruly lot, though, so this proves very difficult indeed.

It’s the trauma, you see. I know this, but my small students don’t have the capacity to grasp the causal relationship between external stimuli and their own unreasoned reactions to them.

Our mother chastises us for something. Hell and Anger team up and rail against her. Our physical body screams and throws itself to the floor where it pounds its little fists and propels tears to fly sideways from its big eyes. Little Miss Rapture is on the case, egging her brothers on.

She knows that our mother will relent and pick us up to hold us and comfort us.

She craves that feeling. She holds the hand of scrawny, sulky Hunger and forces him to watch what she is doing. He does so sullenly at first, and then with true enjoyment.

She is also a head taller than the rest of her siblings, and has become, despite my best efforts, a bully.

Rapture! I call to her. Come over here and explain yourself to me!

She transforms instantly. Her bottom lip protrudes and quivers. Big tears well up in her eyes and start tumbling down the soft peaches of her cheeks.

Soon she is crying loudly. She lets go of Hunger’s hand and falls to the floor where she sobs mightily and looks just absolutely pathetic.

And alone.

She makes me want to run over to her and pick her up in my arms.

...and that is exactly what she intends. Whether she is laughing or crying, she is manipulating everyone around her. She must be the center of attention.

Always.

Which is impossible. Because Anger is the egotist. The two of them will be fighting each other for primacy for the duration of this life.

And still she grows. Her bullying grows apace. It is the best method she can devise to get the attention she must have.

Hunger is soon hanging around her constantly, picking up her scraps. They become inseparable.

It will be years before the next, and higher, four worlds are born within this brain. For now, I am struggling to contain the bottom six worlds, the firstborn, rather than really cultivating them.

This is not what I wanted. But it is the reality.

I still make the six infant worlds sit together for lessons every day, but the lessons become less and less beneficial.

Hell smolders, and if he’s learning anything he will never admit it.

Anger snorts his derision of every aspect of goodness I try to highlight.

Animality always sits in the very back, behind his three siblings, and picks his nose.

Hunger sits balled up, looking at his siblings to make sure that they don’t have something that he wants for himself.

Rapture sits with her brother, Hunger, and points out things to him that he should make a grab for. She rejoices when he makes his cruel moves, and pouts when he fails to do her bidding.

And their silent sibling, Humanity, sits facing the wall, deaf and mute just as she has been since we all endured The Trauma.

She does not quake with fear. She is totally withdrawn from reality.

She doesn’t recognize danger. She expects it. It has become her norm. This is not to say that she doesn’t fear it. She does. She is terrified, and this is the fuel which furthers her withdrawal.

She is totally devoid of hope.

Her siblings ignore her completely. I think I am the only one who really sees her and mourns for what she might have been.

These other five children need her.

I know my mission depends on finding a way to get through to her.

For now, I must be patient. We need a little more maturity before the more difficult lessons can be taught.

If, in fact, the obstacle of our first lesson, The Trauma, can be overcome at all. I know I cannot un-teach this moment. We must all overcome it together.

Chapter 3. Fourth Grade

Iknow them very well by now, and unfortunately, they know me, too.

I have become preachy. That’s what they think.

They mock me behind my back. Anger even spits at me when my back is turned to him.

They have become quite the little gang, now, usually working together and trading leadership roles.

This is normal.

But their lack of Humanity has made the result untenable.

She has taken to facing forward in the classroom, at least, and sometimes appears to be taking in a lesson.

At least her eyes soften and focus, at times, it seems to me.

She has grown, despite herself, I think. She is not much shorter than Hell, at any rate. Of all of her siblings, she seems to relate to Hell the best.

Of course, Hell would never deign to recognize this, but I can observe. I see that he is aware of it and that it touches him at some level. When he reaches this point, however, it never fails that one or more of his other siblings will prod him into helping them do something wicked.

Our parents have begun to send us to a counsellor.

I am grateful. I need the help.

It seems that we are disruptive in class. We are very intelligent, but we simply cannot behave. We throw things. We hit other children. We curse. The teacher holds no authority over us.

We refuse to do our homework.

We have no friends.

We don’t care.

This counsellor tries to talk to us. Her effort is of short duration.

She then starts to read to us.

And Humanity sits up and really listens. She listens hard. Actively.

It changes her, albeit slowly.

But it’s not imperceptible. I perceive it.

And I rejoice.

So what is it that is drawing her out of her shell?

Well, the material is written for children, but it is based on what human beings call The Classics.

The counsellor starts with The Count of Monte Cristo. She goes slowly, risking the loss of the attention deficit among us.

That does not include Humanity. She relishes every word. If my observations are true. She eagerly awaits every new session. If my observations are true.

I believe my observations are true. Accurate.

Telling.

I begin reinforcing themes from the counsellor’s books in my daily classes.

...and Humanity starts making eye contact with me soon thereafter.

The children have begun to anthropomorphize, as is the natural progression of our development.

Hell is becoming a black bat. He has fierce black eyes and tiny, very white teeth. He sports fine black whiskers and is growing large and elastic ebony wings.

Hunger has become a coyote. Always rangy, he now has the exposed ribcage and unkept hide of a starving scavenger. He is sneaky and quick.

Animality is transforming into a bull. He is placid for long stretches of time, and then breaks into rampages dumbly and without purpose, destroying things just for the feel of destruction. He is albino, with a pure white hide and startling red eyes.

Anger is a jungle cat, as black as Hell and nearly as lean as Hunger. He strikes out with his huge black claws, leaving seemingly random collections of marks on floors, walls, and even ceilings. He tells us that he is the king of the jungle, and that his claw marks symbolize his rightful claims to his kingdom, his territory. He is capable of artful duplicity, cozying up to anyone who can advance his agenda, only to strike them down when their usefulness reaches its end.

And Rapture. Big, beautiful Rapture is a pig. She has tiny hands instead of hooves and is not fat or sloppy.

But she is a clean, well groomed, very well dressed and coifed pig, nonetheless.

She continues to vacillate between temporary bouts of extreme happiness and the opposing states of disappointment and disgust. She is hard to take in either of these moods, frankly.

...and Humanity has remained in human form. This is unusual, but not unprecedented.

She is lovely. She has shining black almond-shaped eyes and long lustrous black hair. Her skin is tawny. She is thin, but athletic. Her hands and feet are large, but not overly so. Her lips are ever-so-slightly tinged with pink.

She looks intelligent but wary. She has never spoken a word out loud.

Until now.

What are you supposed to be? she asks me.

I try not to show any emotion, to react in any way to this major event. Even so, it takes me a moment to get my emotions under control.

Why, I am an orangutan, of course, I tell her, smoothing my scruffy orange bangs away from my eyes.

All teachers are great apes, did you know that? I ask her, hoping to prolong our conversation.

She has already retreated back into her head. She does not acknowledge me as I instruct her to call me by my rightful name.

Call me Pongo, I tell her. She says nothing at all in response, but I hear her siblings, all of them, chanting a derisive Pongo, Pongo, Pongo, behind my back.

I turn to face them.

"That’s right. I am Pongo.

"But you, Hell, are Freddy, you, Hunger, are Artie, you, Animality, are Bruce, you, Anger, are Chuck, and you, Rapture, you are Patrice...."

They are all reeling. They all hate their names, and their protests grow loud and long.

Finally, Freddy comes to a realization and stops complaining long enough to ask, Well, what about Humanity? What is her name?

Eve, I reply. "Humanity’s name is Eve."

I hear a little noise behind me and turn to see what Humanity, I mean Eve, is doing.

She is smiling.

The little noise I heard was a gasp, perhaps of wonder and pleasure.

Her smile reveals teeth that have huge gaps between them. Several of them are crooked, and at least one is missing entirely.

Well, I think to myself, she doesn’t smile that much, anyway....

But I know. I know that Eve can fix her smile herself once she cares enough to do so.

We are aspects of a human being, and aspects that reside only in the human’s brain. We take on the appearances that we wish to have. We are not truly physical, after all.

We are avatars.

We represent the basic attributes that every human being possesses. If our host’s Humanity has a gap-toothed grin, well, we’ll all just have to work on that.

Right?

Chapter 4. Our Host

It is about time we introduced the human being who is host to us in this current incarnation.

He is Peter Michael Blanton.

I know, that’s just a name. A human name. I have another name I use to refer to him: Felix. Felix comes from an old human language that is no longer in use in the age in which we find ourselves.

It means happy. That’s our goal, to become happy.

So Felix is the one seeing the counsellor, the one who is having the hard time growing up. He hates school because of something we carry with us. He has no friends, throws things, doesn’t do his homework because I have not successfully controlled those beings who represent his lower six life conditions.

Or advanced one of them.

I haven’t controlled Freddy, Artie, Bruce, Chuck, or Patrice. But it’s the lack of advancement of Eve which causes Felix’s biggest flaw.

Felix does not feel any empathy for the other human beings in his environment, nor does he understand that he is actually an integral part of that self-same environment.

He needs his Eve to step up.

So, after today’s counselling session, featuring a very well-adapted A Tale of Two Cities, I talk to Eve directly.

She appears not to listen, but I talk anyway.

The nobility of the human being lies in his courage, I begin. "He may be leading a dismal life in all respects, but when confronted with a worthy cause, he can shed his former self like a dirty shirt and immediately reveal his nobility. His courage.

We learned that today.

It is a really good story, Eve admits shyly. I cannot wait for the next session to hear more of it.

I think you know how to read, I reply. "You have learned it through the eyes of our dear Felix.

What you lack are the books. Let me show you something, and I move a section of the wall that separates our classroom from the rest of the brain’s labyrinthine reaches and take three small steps into another room.

This room is filled with hundreds of books.

As Felix reads more, this library will continue to expand, I explain. You can take any one of these back to our classroom any time you like. Please, I urge you to do so....

Eve is walking through the room, her arms held open, her lovely mouth agape.

I can’t help but notice that the missing tooth is not missing any longer.

All the others are as they were before, but still, I am witness to the relative ease with which Eve can repair her appearance.

She is running one long, elegant finger down the spines of books, one at a time. When she reads the title on one of those spines, she takes the book from the shelf, and clutches it to her chest.

This one. I’d like to read this one, she tells me.

Sure, Eve, I reply. I smile. I try to make my eyes smile, too. But I’ve seen the title she selected.

Of course, Felix has been exposed to this book. It is only reasonable that a human being born in this age and in this country would be exposed to this book.

Eve has selected the Old Testament. The Bible. Of all of the books she could have selected, she picked the very one which will cause me the most trouble.

I am going to have a lot of explaining to do.

Chapter 5. It’s the Child’s Version, After All

T here is an Eve in this book, Eve informs me. Did you name me after the Eve in this book?

I suppose, indirectly, I respond slowly. Thoughtfully. The truth is that