Yet the Little Book is more than an appendix by far, and if there are mathematical and scientific formulas, perhaps there are psychological or psychic ones as well. If so, then Seven’s Little Book presents one such formula by which life can be experienced more fully. Before I began these adventures, I would have been appalled by such a statement, of course.

About Lydia, who always remained a character in a book to me, I’m less sure, except that I began to realize, long before the manuscript itself told me, that her pilgrimage was for me also—and, of course, for Will—who visited the Virgin in that ludicrous scene before the nightmare sequence that I so frighteningly shared. I felt, without wanting to admit it, that Lydia’s dilemma to be born or not born paralleled my own psychological state, even when I hid my depression from myself.

So, in a most unobjective fashion, I feel that in this case at least, fictional characters and real ones helped each other, interacted, and formed some kind of interdimensional series of events almost impossible to describe. I must state my belief that Cyprus and Oversoul Seven are real, then … fictionally real … and their reality may straddle such simple definitions.

Ram-Ram the godologist presents a problem. I have no idea if he is an independent personality of some kind, purely a fictional character, or a composite. He could somehow represent the futility of applying Freudian principles to religion, for example; or he could symbolize a portion of Ram-Ram Brail’s deep distrust of religion and certain tenets of psychology as well.

I personally found the material on the gods fascinating, simply because it brought home one vital issue. To search for the gods in conventional terms is a useless pursuit, for most often our vision of the gods all but disappears in our ideas of what they must be, or what they must be like. The strange production of this book itself gives me a nebulous “feel” for the kind of creativity that any divinity must possess; a vast gestalt of being that could scarcely be contained in any of our conventional godly tales. I see now that in the past I equated God with the images organized religion had of Him, and recognizing their spiritual poverty, I cast out all thoughts of divinity altogether.

Evolution’s “chance universe” was no solution to the origin of life either, however, though I trusted that more than a capricious god. But many questions concerning the existence of divinity still remain.