_This book may be regarded as a primer, a starting point of your adventure into the coming development of man. It is the first text book that you will receive. It is the beginning of the way._ _How much progress you make upon the way, how well you master the law of growth, is, in large measure, up to you. You will receive assistance, sometimes without your knowledge, but it will not be the kind of assistance that will retard or weaken your development. The new people will not be helped--too much! Strength is required of them and strength is only achieved by overcoming obstacles._ _The next upward step that the race takes--if it survives its own self-destructive impulses--will be of such a nature as to require the utmost in strength and courage from those who participate in it._ _This step, it is fair to state, is in the direction of a higher development of consciousness._ _Good luck--and God go with you._ _Jal Jonner_ _The Big Sur_ _July 1971_ Written in 1971, the book was now 49 years old, Zen decided after a rapid calculation. The war had started in 2009. The time was now 2020. Eagerly, he turned to the first chapter. It seemed to him that his life was just beginning, that everything that had ever happened to him and all that he had ever done was in preparation for this moment, when life would begin. After reading two pages, he reached the conclusion that, if this was a primer, the text that was to follow must be difficult indeed. The book started with mathematics that was twice as difficult as calculus. Trying to concentrate, he found the symbols blurring before his eyes. Then, as fatigue finally overwhelmed him, the whole page blurred and was gone. He was asleep. But he wasn't really asleep. The body slept. But he was not the body. He was the consciousness that animated the body. This never slept. He awakened at the touch of a hand on his shoulder. IX Coming back to conscious awareness, Kurt Zen simultaneously realized that something which he had been experiencing, and which had been very important, faded out of his memory like a gray ghost sliding silently away into a pearl-colored mist. Nedra was shaking him by the shoulder and was smiling down at him. "Wake up, sleepy head. You've been snoozing for eighteen hours. That ought to be enough even for a growing boy like you." Her face was radiant and alive. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a cold shower and had rubbed her beautiful body with a rough towel to bring the blood close to the surface of the skin. "You look wonderful," Zen muttered, remembering what John had hinted. "Did you have a good night's sleep?" "A couple of hours." "No more than that?" "I needed no more."