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I have been asked to make this deposition by Mr. John Beers Phertipton, the counsel to Mrs. Loranne Havasin, wife of the presumed late Prof. Bergen Havasin of Deseret University. Mrs. Havasin, as I understand it, is filing suit to claim her husband's insurance immediately. The insurance company is claiming that he is not dead, only missing, therefore she must wait for the statute of limitations to run out before she can press her claim.
It is true that no body has been found. It is also true that I know where the body is, but I fear that Mrs. Havasin may have a long case on her hands, because there is no way on this earth that I can lead someone to it.
Given my current condition of "enforced rest" at the English Fork Mental Institute, the insurance company lawyers will undoubtedly question my competence to testify in this matter. But, in any case, here is my story.
This story starts two years ago when I had reached a point in my life where I took a serious interest in religion. I have spent most of my life as an inquisitive agnostic, and I was generally willing to discuss religion any place, any time. Ned, a friend of my wife's, felt it was his duty to end my state of indecision by winning me over to his faith.
As a result of my previous inquiries I had formulated many questions and made several observations that I presented to Ned. He had few answers. But, he did have a father-in-law, Bergen Havasin, that he thought might be able to supply more. After a few inquiries he invited me to attend a discussion at the house of the Havasin's. Prof. Havasin was a mathematics professor. Ned said that he too had begun delving deeper into the nature of religion recently. He was trying to unify recent scientific discoveries with Biblical revelation.
In addition to Ned, Prof. Havasin and myself, there were several other people at this first meeting: our wives, Kitty, Loranne, and Melene; two missionaries; and a couple of others who were also interested in the subject. After some pleasantries we began a round-robin discussion with everyone there participating. I was arguing from an aggressive agnostic position, Ned was responding as the conventional true believer. During most of the discussion the Professor Havasin watched quietly.
But at one point in our discussion I queried, "How can you believe these religious scriptures when they bear so little relevance to the reality we experience?" It was part of another line of reasoning I was trying to make with Ned, but the professor interrupted.
"It's difficult", he replied in a quiet earnest voice, "unless you accept two things: First, that these people are describing experiences that are totally beyond their ken, and, second, that these are translations of translations; and they've lost some of their essential meaning. If you accept these tenets, then whole worlds of revelation open up."
That was all he had to say for the moment. My discussion with Ned went on, but at the end of the party I asked the Professor for further clarification.
He informed me that he had begun some studies concerning these points, and, that if I was interested, he would be glad to discuss them further at the next meeting. I said I would be delighted. These sounded like they would be interesting new concepts that I hadn't encountered in my previous religious inquiries.
Our next meeting was the following week. My wife and I walked up to the Havasin's. As we did we admired the bounteous gardens and smelled the fragrant springtime lilacs that grew in The Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake where we and the Havasins lived. The Havasin's greeted us warmly, and we began the discussion with Bergen telling us of his findings.
"Concerning the question of the validity of the translations in this or any bible, you merely have to look at the preface. This one here, a King James, states, 'this is one of several exact translations'. And here, another one, The Good News Bible published in 1976, states 'At times the original meaning cannot be precisely known, not only because the meaning of some words and phrases cannot be determined with a great deal of assurance but also because the underlying cultural and historical context is sometimes beyond recovery.'"
"Beyond that there are the 'twice told tales' such as the two descriptions in Genesis 6 and 7 of how to pick the animals that go in the Noah's Arc. Genesis 6 says take one pair of each, and Genesis 7 says take seven pairs of the ritually clean animals and one pair each of the rest. Each describes the same event; each tells a slightly different story.
"So, we can take as a given that there's some inaccuracy in the Bible, and at least ignorance about the subject of the writings on the part of the authors."
"Amazing, so simple to find. Right there in the front."
"The rest of my findings are neither as straightforward or as decisive. They are, in fact, preliminary, but I think you'll find them interesting and informative."
"First, are you familiar with the concept of a hypercube?"
"A cube with more than three dimensions?"
"That's correct."
"I've seen pictures of them in my math books."
"You've seen two dimensional representations of the three dimensional 'shadow' of a four dimensional cube."
"...Right... if you say so... Actually, now I see what you mean. I can't really see a 3-D cube in a two dimensional picture either, can I."
"Exactly. Now it turns out that a 4-D hypercube penetrating into 3-D space has some interesting properties beyond those of a normal cube. One of those is that when you look at it, you can see more than one side at a time. You see four sides at a time, in fact."
"Four sides?"
"Four sides. And it turns out there are some four sided creatures mentioned in the Bible. Ezekiel 1 and 10 both give wonderful, almost identical, descriptions, of looking at four sides of a being, and there's some description in Revelations 4 of a similar phenomenon, although in John's description in Revelation, the 'same beingness' is less pronounced."
"A single being with four heads?"
"No, one head, just four different visible sides."
I say, "So, what do you make of this -- beyond it being the jabbering of crazy old men recorded two or three thousand years ago and translated five times before it reaches us? Have I ever told you my White Noise Theory about..."
Bergen says, "... No, but I'm sure I will soon enough, but let me finish my theory first."
"Right, excuse me."
"Those four sided beings are described by the prophets as the living creatures, also known as the Cherubim."
"You mean angels?"
"That's right, angels. They may be 4-D creatures penetrating our 3-D world."
"God and his angels are extra-dimensional creatures?"
"At least some of them. This would explain a lot of their recorded capabilities. Since these beings exist in more dimensions than we, they can penetrate or leave our universe at will, and they can see all things and all people in our universe at the same time, much as we can see all things drawn on a piece of paper at the same time. They can even see the insides of all things. They could watch our hearts beat, for instance."
"Interesting, but what's the point of all this. So what if these beings can come and go. Of what import is that to us today?"
When I said that, he looked carefully at the floor between his feet. Sitting directly across from him as I was, I was the only one who could see the wild glow light up his eyes as he said quietly but quite distinctly. "I think I can summon an angel."
The room went dead quiet for a moment. Then Bergen laughed and looked up. The glow was gone, "In my imagination, of course." The rest of the group laughed it off.
I waited for the others to leave. Then I confronted him again.
"What did you mean you can summon an angel?" I asked.
"I believe an angel to be one of these higher dimensional beings. I believe that an earthly being can call it to come visit our plane of existence. I haven't tried yet, but I've thought out the plan that will let me."
"How?" I said incredulously. After just our two meetings I had come to respect Bergen, but this sounded like pure madness. Either he was mad because angels did not exist, or he was mad to be tampering with things man best left untouched.
"You may recall that last week I made two points: One was that the prophets couldn't describe well what they'd seen. The other was that their records had been translated incorrectly.
"The mistranslation is important. Because of it we've lost some of the finer arts of those times. But, what we do have tells us what we can achieve by reading through those errors to the true meanings.
"And those are..."
"The true meanings will give us the powers of Jesus himself. We'll become like gods. And one of our powers will be the power to summon angels."
"Tell me you're pulling my leg."
"I won't. Lets look back to those ancient times -- the times of the Old Testament. What did people do then to reach The Lord? They performed sacrifices and they prayed with the proper incantations. It's my contention that what's been lost in the translations of these rituals has sapped their power. When the proper incantations and procedures are restored, then our power to summon angels will also be restored."
I was aghast. I sat down. This man was on the thin edge between genius and insanity. He could be on the verge of the discovery of the century. In that instant I decided. If he was on the verge of something that momentous, I wanted to be part of it.
I stood up. "I'm with you!" I declared. "What can I do to help?"
"The key to this secret", he continued, "will be to reconstruct the original form and syntax of the rituals. For instance, the ancient Hebrews used a lot of an archaic literary structure called Chiasmus in their works. It's a language structure well-suited to non-written memorization. But, it's not well-suited to the written record, and the structure's been mostly discarded in modern translation.
"We'll need to reconstruct the ancient syntax from the modern translations."
"And to do that you'll need a computer," I chimed in.
"It would speed the process, to be sure."
"And, as it turns out. I know how to use them."
"Hmm." he pondered for a moment, "Perhaps God's more on my side than I thought. If he sent you to me, then perhaps I shouldn't be so concerned about tampering with his deepest secrets."
We both chuckled at that and called it an evening.
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