For perhaps the first time in my life, I realized that I had been shown a revelation during my near-death experience-and I began to consider the strange nighttime visitation of the hooded being to be somehow in concert with the wonder of that pulsating, living, geometric pattern. As the day progressed, I felt that I must write a book about the contemporary revelatory experience, and more and more I began to realize that this idea was connected with the bedroom intruder. I also had a strong conviction that the book must bear the title, Revelation : The Divine Fire.

As I began to write down some notes about the book, the thoughts seemed to be from some kind of memory of a series of discussions with a learned, older, and wiser friend, I began to consider that perhaps my ethereal night visitor had known very well that I had the kind of brain that never shuts up, that never ceases an internal monologue. Perhaps my mysterious cowled visitor knew that my conscious ego had to be silenced so that my unconscious creative self could more readily receive an uninterrupted transmission from some higher level of awareness.

I called Tam Mossman, my editor at Prentice-Hall, and told him that I wanted to do a book on the experiences of men and women who claimed to be in spiritual communication with a Higher Intelligence. Mossman told me to go for it. I defined the Divine Fire as the transfer of thought, spirit, and power from an infinite or multidimensional intelligence to a finite, human intelligence. The process of such a transfer, I had come to believe, is a vital, continuing one which observes no denominational boundaries and employs a spiritual-psychic mechanism that is timeless and universal. All of the world's great saints, mystics, and inspired men and women of history are eternally spiritual contemporaries of those individuals who are visited by the Divine Fire in modern times.

I drew up a list of interviewees for the list which included modern day mystics, prophets, theologians, writers, psychics, psychologists, psychotherapists, professors of theology, and scientists. One of the basic questions that I would ask was how many of them accepted the existence of other intelligences--call them angels, masters, spirit guides--that might operate from another plane of being to influence humankind's spiritual and physical evolution through carefully controlled individual and group revelatory experiences. Since so many revelators insisted that their messages were relayed to them by a cowled figure, a glowing angel, a bearded master, might it be possible that these entities actually existed on another plane of being? With my editor's encouragement, I set to work on the book at once, and strangely, several passages and pages of the manuscript seemed to write themselves of their own volition. I recall putting "Lucretia," my faithful 1923 Underwood typewriter, away for the evening, probably at two or three in the morning. Then, the next thing I knew, the Dr. Pepper clock on the wall was telling me that the time was now an hour or so later--and four or five pages had been added to my daily output.

Previously, during lectures and personal appearances, I had often been asked if I had ever felt that I had been "given" ("channeled" was not yet a popular New Age term) any of the material in my books by my spirit guide. I had always resisted such a concept as inspiration from ethereal entities, and I would joke that my book royalties were not high enough to share with a "ghostwriter." However, during the writing of The Divine Fire, I became convinced that someone up there or out there or in there had decided that this particular book had to be written--if not by me, then by some other writer. I began to consider my hooded visitor from the perspective of a spirit teacher. Later, when Divine Fire had been published and I was on a lecture tour, numerous individuals approached me with their copies of the book open to particular pages that I recognized as some of those that seemed to have been written by my unseen collaborator. These passages, they said, had given them great inspiration.

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