“It is almost impossible for these creatures to know peace or genuine love,” said the Parents. “They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or a suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. And when they are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures.”

Finally came the day when we were tired of the film streams, of their repetitiveness, and we had become even a little callous to the endless suffering.

The Parents brought us together, and told us we were to pray to the Maker. They invited us to bow our heads, clear our minds, and think only of the great creative force that had made all worlds, including those in the “Realm of Worlds,” and to thank the Maker for the gift of life and the gift of witness to life.

They made beautiful sense to us and we were glad to do it.

They told us to thank the Maker for our having been grown for a special purpose, and to promise to the Maker that we would do our utmost to fulfill this purpose. The wretched mammalian human life-forms on Earth had to be destroyed and we were the ones chosen to do it.

At this point, Welf spoke up and in a rather jocular manner asked if this Maker was real, and if he or she heard what we were saying, and whether all this thanks mattered.

I was shocked, as it seemed inconsiderate or unkind to ask this of the Parents. But as usual the Parents were completely calm.

“We do not know if the Maker exists,” said the Parents. “But we believe that he has to exist and he is not really male or female. There are many worlds in the ‘Realm of Worlds’ where the ascendant beings are not male or female. We use the male referent for the Maker for you because you are male or female, and the male on the planet Earth dominates the female. We believe it is wise and right to give thanks to this Maker. We can see no harm in doing it.”

It was obvious to me that Welf thought this was hilariously funny, and Garekyn did not like it, and that Derek was coldly suspicious of it. For me, it was a matter of being courteous to the Parents. I wanted to know my purpose. I was eager to get on with it. I am by nature the most impatient of the People of the Purpose.