I decided that I should write an extensive letter, since speaking with each other had become too difficult. I felt that a simple letter would no longer be sufficient. A renaissance in our relationship was needed. Anton's note did not reflect the freedom of a renaissance in thinking, or did even come close to the freedom of our sharing that had characterized our first night at the restaurant on top of the tower. Her brief letter seemed dictated by a fear that seemed to have clung to her for her whole life. Ushi's remark came to mind about the man who came to the priest to offer his gifts, but was turned away with the demand that he first resolve whatever conflict he had with his brother and then come to offer his gifts at the altar of God. I was this man. Ushi had figured me correctly. I owned a debt to Anton. I had increased her fear. I had messed up her life more than it had been to begin with, and done so in an effort to help her.

Oh, but how is one to write a letter of apology that is at the same time an acknowledgment of something great, and good, and lovely, that dissolves the deep, fear-imposed isolation that she found herself in? Maybe if my letter presented my most daring declaration of an appreciation for what I felt should not be concealed of aspects of our relationship that were founded in Truth, maybe then the acknowledgement of it would carry the day. Could she fault me for that? Could she fault me for confessing that I perceived her as a beautiful sexual human person, a woman clothed with the sun?

The word 'barrier' came to mind. Sex as a barrier! The word, barrier, had a familiar ring to it. A sound barrier had once been envisioned that supposedly made supersonic flight impossible. But the perceived sound barrier was soon broken in the minds of a few scientists who corrected their approach to airflow dynamics. It was recognized that new physical principles come into play when the fight of an object exceeds the speed of the pressure-wave propagation in the fluid of air, which determines the speed of sound. The discovery of this higher-level principle, which cannot be observed in 'slow' flight, had improved the scientists' understanding of flight dynamics. By the resulting improved perception the sound barrier was reduced to nothing more than just an engineering challenge. Eventually, the challenge was overcome with the appropriate effort to the point that nobody talks about a sound barrier any longer. Hypersonic aircraft have since then been flown with air-breathing engine that exceed ten times the speed of sound. And so aircraft engineers were able to develop designs that were once deemed totally impossible according to the nature of fundamental physics. But this was then. It had been discovered since then that it hadn't been the universe that had stood in the way of breaking the sound barrier but the prevailing narrow perception that had provided a false concept of the laws of the universe.

I said to myself that the sex barrier might to be resolved in the same manner. Mankind shouldn't be sexually divided and isolated into separate camps. The Principle of Universal Love offered us a way out of this trap, so why shouldn't we develop it. Why should we shy away from a possible breakthrough into a brighter world if the principles for it had already been discovered and proven in numerous ways? But is this really possible to do in the world so heavily loaded with traditions, myths, and small-minded thinking? Is it achievable to develop the breakthrough technology at the present time though the principles have been discovered that would enable it? Are we capable to apply them, or should this leading edge challenge remain unaddressed and be left for distant ages to be sorted out when mankind has become more mature? Anton's note almost suggested that. On the other had this hadn't been the way the sound barrier had been resolved. Indeed, why should the scientists have left this challenge up to future ages to solve when the principles had already been discovered? Shouldn't I therefore address the sex barrier with the same readiness and tackle the challenge now, for which the Principle of Universal Love had already been put on the table?

The principle for meeting the challenge had been proven in part during every period of a renaissance where it had dissolved many forms of division and isolation, which then suddenly no longer seemed valid. And more than that, the light of the Principle of Universal Love was needed in our present world desperately, that had become dark. We had created a vast stage of conflicts where a future society might not be able to exist without that principle unfolding in the present and from the deepest levels. We no longer had the luxury to leave the breakthrough work to future generations that might not exist if we fail today, if in indeed we had that luxury in the past to leave for the future what should be accomplished in the present, whereby the critical work wasn't done. The Whore of Babylon hadn't been defeated for 4000 years, possibly for this reason, and so it had gained evermore control to the point that we now find ourselves standing on a pile of 65,000 atom bombs blabbering ever louder about preemptive nuclear strikes, whatever that might mean. Nor were we any closer in our private relationships to one-another as human beings than we had been when the whorish nightmare began.

In this respect the unresolved divisions that were dividing humanity had become a potential tragedy of unimaginable proportion. We had entered a boundary zone in which emergency responses are now required for our very survival, engaging in daring acts that offer the slightest hope to get ourselves out of our mess of universal division, isolation, threats, and quests for tyranny. On the other hand, do we have the strength to break the deadlock that we have patiently allowed to build up in the deepest realm, deeper than the nuclear threats, in the realm of sex and the Principle of Universal Love? And if we break the deadlock there, will all the other divisions be resolved in the same process of an inner revolution, which have been built up behind this one core-division that has isolated the whole of humanity? The questions kept piling up in my thoughts without answers in sight.

I decided to write Anton a letter presenting all of this, including the questions, since her hole life had become of a fiercely guarded self-isolation based on this one unresolved core-division, a festering scene of a sickness which I had stepped into and had made worse for her. I felt that I owed her at the very least the effort to repair the damage that I had inflicted on her life as I had dragged sex, and her fear of it, into the foreground. For this I felt I had to confront my own failure in my search for whatever it was that pulled us apart. With time now fast running out, the task before me was rapidly becoming an emergency project. The impasse had to be explored with the most advanced scientific method of reasoning that I could muster. It seemed wrong to simply close the door and run away. But how is one to confront such a deep issue and to do it right after having blundered so badly? I faced a frontier that I had not crossed into before, or had even considered that it should be ventured into.

Perhaps an apology would open the door for what I needed to say.

I put my pen to the paper. "An Apology," I wrote in big letters across the top of the page and underlined it.

But what should I apologize for? The Tara story? Yes, perhaps the way I had told her that story was wrong. I had told it incorrectly in that I hadn't put the focus on sex that had been at the center of it, though I had been proud at the time of the fact that the entire Tara affair had involved not a single direct sexual contact, and that it was nevertheless beautiful, full, and sexually exciting, perhaps even more so for the reason that no physical sexual contact had taken place. Had this apparent focusing away from sex been wrong? Ushi might have said that this approach had been dishonest. Obviously she would have been right. The focus that I had chosen for telling the story had been wrong. And so, I hadn't achieved anything with it, but had made matters worse. Sure, there had been no sexual contact with Tara, or any coercion towards it, but inwardly it was all sexual. And so I asked myself if I should have daringly focused on sex with Tara, which had been missing at the time, and should have drawn Anton into this question. Had this unresolved omission with Tara now contributed to Anton's barrier? Had I come to the same barrier now with Anton that I had failed to bridge with Tara, so that Anton couldn't respond to it either and now found herself struggling against it to the point that speaking with one-another became difficult. My pushing against this barrier suddenly seemed dishonest, though it hadn't been with the intent to deceive. The dishonesty had been with myself. It came to light by me telling myself that sex wasn't important, because it was something that was far too difficult to deal with, which now caused her to retreat from me further into her already deep self-isolation?

Oh, if I only knew what the next step had to be! Had she implied that sex, this deep part of our identity, was a mistake of creation, and that the acknowledgment of this mistake of the universe had to be avoided at all cost for the sake of civility? Or was the perceived barrier based on nothing more than a mythology that supported the convention of the world that had isolated humanity from one-another for centuries upon centuries and apparently mostly for imperial objectives. This meant that sex wasn't the real issue at all, but had simply been drawn into it as something powerful in the fabric of society that could be easily exploited or disabled for promoting slavery as the Pharaoh's had done? Maybe it was this intentionally built-up age-old mythology that kept her now spellbound with fear and impotence.

Will all this in mind I felt that our association might yet be rescued, if it could be rescued from the grasp of this old mythology, and from the grasp of the resulting conventions and the built-up hypocrisies. We had shared so much in the short time that we have had that it seemed an act of utter folly to let those riches go and to close the door between us over this one little thing that had remained unresolved. The precious hours we had together in the restaurant high up on the tower seemed like a treasure now, a treasure among treasures, and so were all the other times we had been together, even those when we just met for ordinary occasions.

I remembered the sweetness with which she had rushed to the aid of an old woman that had difficulty getting her shopping bags onto the bus. Anton had left our group standing on the sidewalk in the middle of a tour and ran across the street to give the old mamushka a hand. I rushed after her to help, but came to late. When she returned, her face shone more than ever. That's how we sometimes met in the most 'intimate' fashion. There was something about her that was intoxicatingly human in the dry dessert that the world had become, something that was refreshingly rich that I simply couldn't afford to lose sight of, something precious that she wasn't even aware of herself, apparently. She was in love with her humanity, even while she resisted it at the same time. She had become a walking paradox the more this resistance came to light. The sexual dimension seemed to be tangled up with all that and it now became intertwined with the dimension of our loving that was new and had tittle time to unfold.

I pondered. The thought came that if I pretended that the sex barrier did not exist, the denial might help to break her fear of it? Except, to pretend this, meant pretending that she isn't a woman. That sort of approach was obviously an unworkable plan, since it was evidently her lovely female nature that in part made her so precious to me. I realized that escaping from this reality wasn't the answer. Indeed, the refusal to escape from our problems had been the platform on which supersonic flight had become possible. Her uniqueness had to be acknowledged even if this brought us to a barrier. The supersonic shock waves and vortices had all been acknowledged by the aeronautical engineers for the unique phenomena that they were in the boundary zone of entering supersonic flight. The unique features and challenges of that leading-edge reality had to be acknowledged, and they were acknowledge by which they weren't a barrier anymore but merely an engineering challenge. Truth is the truth! I couldn't afford not to acknowledge this in my relationship with Anton.

As I pondered this complex idea that became suddenly simple I felt as though I should pick up the phone and say to Anton; when I appreciate you as a woman, instead of as merely as a person, I am beginning to appreciate the truth of our humanity's infinite individuality, which is richly reflected in womanhood and manhood.

I felt daring all f a sudden. I felt this daring departure from the conventional perception may seem slight, but in real terms it is huge, it is monumental, enormous, it is the difference between hypocritically imagining barriers and allowing unity to unfold. I put my hand on the phone, but as I did I also felt that she would immediately hang up the phone, and not understand a word of what I would have said. Then I might have called her again and explained the mystery with another mystery, why everything that is dear to us is reversed; why apparent unselfishness is true selfishness, and apparent selfishness is self-annihilation. But I also felt she would hang up this time, too, and not understand. Then I though I would dial her up a third time, and repeat to her, that uplifting one's neighbor, embracing the infinite individuality of our humanity, embraces the oneness of all being and the oneness of oneself that builds strength, raises health, assures liberty, and enriches the standard of living. But again I felt she would hang up this time, too, and not understand.

Of course I also realized that she would have to hang up the phone even if she would understand some of it. The entire system of her country was built on hierarchical separation. Her entire country was built on barriers, on marriage fragmentation that had bound her to a system of society that assures its collective decay, fragmenting her very soul by breaking apart what is precious in humanity.

Since I couldn't phone, I started to write the letter, finally. I knew that I had to say everything of what needed to be said, even if this meant not writing one word about it, but gently setting up a stage that she could step onto by her own inner resources. Oh, what an infinite task this appeared to be!

The letter was finished at 4 AM. Torn up pages littered the floor. It was a letter that had to be on her desk in the morning. I couldn't take the chance that she might not open her mail until after the conference ended and we were gone. This was our second last day. Also I wanted to see her face when she opened it. In order to accomplish this I had to convince the hotel captain to unlock the meeting hall for me at four in the morning, which required a lot of tall explaining. Still, the captain kindly consented.

Anton glanced at me shyly as she opened the letter. She glanced at it for a moment and folded it up again quickly and left her place on the panel. There was no smile on her face visible, but a trace of agony. God, what had I done! She looked not towards me, but down to the ground. The thought came that I should have left this entire issue remain untouched. But it was too late now for second thoughts. The damage was done. Had I dug for myself a still deeper hole, and for her?

I watched for her return all through the morning. She never came back. Her place at the panel remained empty all day. She might have taken the letter to her room, I thought, and was thinking about it. But for how long? I waited in vain. Obviously I had hurt her even more now?

"I agree with you," I had written on one of the many pages. "Certainly, it takes time to build friendships. By all accounts this is true! Indeed, Rome wasn't built in a day, and maybe our loving can't be either. On the other hand, if we are truly in Love with ourselves as human beings, then a basis for loving already exist from which to link across what divides us. In other words, very little needs to be built."

I assured Anton in the letter that the remaining few links could be built effortlessly and with joy. "We should we have failed in this?" I wrote. "I had recognized your deep self-loving of your humanity that I had fallen in Love with for the light that shines from it.

"People say that selfishness is a terrible trait of character," I wrote, "and this it is. But self-loving is something different, though we rarely ponder what principle makes our self-loving the opposite of selfishness? Should it not be possible, Anton, to fall in Love with who and what we are as the tallest expression of life in the universe? That's something to celebrate and to enrich each other with, isn't it? Indeed, this is what we would do if those countless imposed barriers that we have created would not exist, which now impede our loving. We should certainly be capable of falling in Love with ourselves as the tallest expression of life in the universe that we know of. That, of course, includes all aspects of our humanity, including sex. Animals aren't capable of escaping their limited world of instincts and responses built up over millennia. They remain forever limited by the circumference of their built-in limits in perception. But we aren't confined that way. We are scientifically intelligent and spiritually sentient beings. We are free to let our loving soar beyond those limits. We can create for ourselves freedoms that normally do not exist. These freedoms are founded on principles that elevate our existence to a higher level. If I have failed in reaching this high plateau where greater freedoms unfold for us all, please accept my apology. Evidently I have failed. I must conclude therefore that my self-loving has been not been tall enough in meeting yours to reach above the crude basis of the word so that we would uplift each other further into the sphere of the 'stars' as we should have been able to do. For my shortcomings in this I apologize. Still, Anton, I had to try. You appeared too precious to me to keep my eyes and heart and soul and loving closed. We have lived in the dark world of closed-in living for far too long. We've become committed to darkness. We worship darkness. And so the darkness has become a night that is now exploited by thieves. That is where rape begins. I had hoped we could meet in the day-light where rape cannot happen and that by meeting there we would set an example for ourselves of how the world might be healed. We have both come to the conference with a commitment to find ways for healing the world. That is what the conference was called for, wasn't it? There is too much darkness in the world, of which the world needs to be healed. There is too much rape, and the world is dying in the flow of it, and we along with it. Mankind is being raped to death and the scene is getting worse, not better.

"Did you know that there are now nine hundred million people in the throws of hunger at the this very minute, and ninety million facing starvation? That's the face of monstrous raping. There was a time when many countries were self-sufficient in food. The world was happier then. That's when the master's of empire stepped onto the scene and said you have no right to live like that. You have to open yourselves up to the globalized world of empire and sell your food on the world market and buy what from the market what you require. They said that in this way all the world shares equally. They called this process 'free trade' and they still do. They demanded free trade from every country on the planet. But there is nothing free about it. The nations are forced to comply. They realize that the imperial world market is a trap, a platform for rape, but they cannot escape it. Does this sound familiar? They put their food onto the world market. In real terms this means that they sell it under contract to the financial speculators of empire, typically before the food is even grown. Then they are forced to buy other people's food while the masters of empire reap profits in either direction from food being shipped all over the world. With that they control the flow and the prices to impose winger and starvation. That is how empire rules. This grand rape that no one can escape is a trap for the genocidal depopulation of the planet. As soon as the nations of the world were caught in the free-trade trap that was forced on them, the speculators jacked up the prices to whatever amounts they were able to gouge out of the pockets of an increasingly hungry world. Under this forced system the nations are selling their food for cheap and are buying food back from the market at ever-higher prices, while the masters of empire are screaming their heads off crying 'protectionism' if any nation aims to become self-sufficient in food production. Does this sound familiar? You were forced to submit to rape for your family to stay alive. How long do we wait until we begin to develop a sense of Love in the world to prevent this? In order to be able to survive in this trap many poor countries have already scrapped their indigenous agriculture and converted their fields to growing high-value produce for export to the rich countries in order that they could afford to import the basic items they needed for survival. The whole of mankind is fast becoming a zoo of slaves to the empire. That is what the empire with its lying tongue calls a level platform, Anton. But it isn't level at all. Empire is a vertically dominated system for the enforcement of rape. The nations are forced to sell cheap under contract and then import at inflated prices. Free trade is a system of rape under contract, and the contracts are written in such a way that the nations are not allowed to defend themselves against the rape. Nor is the loot that the 'market' bleeds out of the ever-widening food-trade price-gap being plowed back into agriculture in the form of capital investments as for water development, irrigation systems, farm equipment, fertilizers, seed improvement. No, this isn't happening. Did any rapist ever put one iota of good onto the table that improves the life of its victim? This doesn't happen. I bet this didn't happen in your family either. I bet your uncles contributions were barely sufficient to keep out of starvation, but miles away from making your life richer and brighter with their blessing. This expression of universal Love doesn't happen in free trade either. That's because the game is intentionally pure rape. It is the game of the night, and it is killing the world. This rape-genocide is the real policy of intention of empire. The empire is crying that it wants the world population reduced to less than a billion. The masters of empire therefore intend to rape the world to death. And they are already doing it. They do it financially too. They force the nations to open their financial markets to the empire's dirty money, which then floods in and buys up everything in sight at auction prices, by which industries become destroyed. By the time the nations realize what has happened to them they are owned by the empire and have becomes slaves in their own house that they no longer own either. In this world of universal raping there is no industrial development possible. Thus the nations become poorer, and my dear, poverty kills. Deindustrialization becomes a rampant killer. This is the fate of mankind when rape is on the table. Many times more people have already died the free-trade imposed death-by-starvation, even while the free-trade process isn't officially implemented yet, than have died in Hitler's holocaust of death-by-the-sword. In the unfolding march of this process hundreds of millions of people and whole nations are becoming thrown into hunger, social turmoil, and increased poverty. Some call the impact a side-effect of speculation on food and oil prices and so on, while in real terms the effect is by intention. On the surface the impact appears to be the result of the failure of the State to exert control over the financial operations and transactions within it, but in teal terms this failure of the State is imposed by the force of coercion with a total absence of the principle of Love apparent in any direction. What we still call civilization is fast becoming a wasteland that few even notice. The concept of trading between partners for their mutual benefit is so far distant now that it is not even on the horizon anymore. This is how far away have we drifted from the rational world. On the global scene the world is fast becoming a casino where the principle of economics has been replaced with insanity. People are selling products now that they don't have, and buy products they don't expect to receive, which exist only on paper and are sold and resold with floods of profit leaking out of this insanity of trading intangible objects called assets. And since the profits from trading essentially nothing don't come from nothing, they are being leached out of the living of society. And the rape is getting bigger and bigger that way. With no physical factors remaining in the game, the entire monetarist game is exploding into a monster that is threatening to destroy all the currencies in the world, and thereby collapse physical trade and national economies, especially agriculture by making seeds unavailable for planting so that the entire world is careening towards a collapse into a new dark age of death by starvation and death by diseases. That's what a world without Love being expressed looks like. That is the future we are all heading for. I am trying to head off this collapse by setting a counter course, a course the world has refused until now, which is also a course that is not easy to follow. Nevertheless I have committed my life to counter the current course of insanity, and to counter it with exploring what we can do to rediscover the Principle of Universal Love, which alone seems to offer any hope. Maybe I am stumbling while surging ahead faster than I can walk or have learned to run. I admit that I am not a genius, but I am fighting, and I am fighting for your life too that is in danger just as in the life of us all if this fight is not being won in the years to come.

My point is that insanity doesn't have to play itself out to the bitter end before the world can change. There is a principle that can help us right now to overturn the insanity that already threatens the entire world. This principle is the Principle of the Advantage of the Other: the great principle of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that freed mankind from the shackles of over hundred years of war that included at least eighty years of killing. The Principle of the Advantage of the Other is the principle of fair trade, the principle of fair relationships. On the platform of this principle we say to one-another, what can we offer each other that is of each other's advantage? What makes us all richer and freer in the process of reaching out to each other? What enables us all to live with more dignity, sovereignty, and respect that becomes an expression of universal Love? This is the principle that builds lateral relationships. Fair trade is a lateral process. Free trade is vertical process, a contract for the freedom to rape. I was hoping to be able to take you back to 1648 and build a lateral relationship that ends your war with yourself, your fear of being raped again in the slightest way. I was hoping to build a platform that would enable us to come together on the Principle of the Advantage of the Other and develop an intimacy that would bring out the riches of our humanity that we have so profoundly to offer to one another. Obviously I have failed. Obviously I have aimed for a goal that cannot be reached in the short time that we have had here within the timeframe of the conference. On the other hand, the movement of thought is not encumbered with the inertia of mass such as that which hinders our movement in the physical world. Thought is free from the encumberment of inertia. It should be able to soar with lightning speed to wherever we want to be when the scientific platform is understood. Unfortunately we all carry too much heavy baggage in our thoughts that keeps us from moving as we would. We have only been able take a few tiny steps together in the world of intimacy because of that baggage, but even those tiny steps were evidently profound enough so that I must now sit down in an effort to heal whatever injuries I might have caused to your sovereignty by coming into your life like a bull in a china-shop, perhaps looking for something that doesn't yet exist or is not possible at this time. Though I had to try. The consequences of not trying are infinitely worse. They might be so enormous that on this fight for a wider loving pivots the very survival of the world.

"If I have hurt you with my folly, please forgive me, and then forgive me also for loving you with a love that demanded me to reach for the sky. We had dined high up in the sky once, even twice, where we met before the baggage became to heavy again. Please forgive me now for not having been able to raise my loving high enough, to such height where no baggage is ever taken. It was a calculated risk that I took, with a tall goal, driven by what I thought were justified hopes. And to be honest, it was scary for me too to take that risk, though I was impelled by something that promised to be far greater than the measures of fear could hold back. The moment when I saw you I fell in Love with you. Falling in Love with you was so easy and so natural. That is the truth. And even then it took a lot of prodding myself to muster the courage to ask you for a dinner date. You can't imagine how scared I was in asking. The barrier that held me back almost succeeded. It was fear. Maybe I sensed that I was reaching too high. How many countries today wished they have had the courage to reach higher than they did and claim their freedom to build a brighter world for themselves before the trap was sprung? I think fear is the betrayer of us. 'Fear is the mind killer,' wrote Frank Herbert in his Dune trilogy. When I was scared of asking you for a dinner date I was pushing against a whole world of this betraying madness. I can see this now. Luckily I succeeded in my pushing back the barriers. And maybe I was also afraid of not being able to measure up to you, of not being found worthy of your company. To be honest, sex was also a barrier. If you had been a man sitting on the panel, the invitation would have been extended with ease. But with the sex-barrier added, what should have been easy could not be accomplished without a great battle. As it was it took four failed attempts and one final daring victory over my shy little self to get those few words out to invite you for dinner. And even then I stammered like a little child in a state of emotional confusion. All my prepared speeches didn't seem good enough, Anton, thus they were left unuttered. Forgive me therefore also for not offering you a kiss as a greeting when we finally came together at the restaurant a thousand feet above the city of Moscow. I was too scared to even think of a kiss. It seemed I was a thousand feet above the plain of convention, too scared for just being there with you as a married man in a setting that defied all the rules. Would I dishonor you? I had to be cautious. A kiss would have seemed too daring, too bold, and of course also too honest. That's the paradox of convention, isn't it? We are too scared of the truth, especially we men are. We can be such cowards when we face the unfamiliar."

"The world of us men is not as free flowing as you might think," I wrote on. "It is a maze of barriers built up over millennia. Some are not that easily pushed aside. You might have sensed that. Perhaps that is why I couldn't talk with you in the restaurant about the sensitive issues and resorted to politics. How stupid I was! It was out loving that brought us together, our being in Love with the humanity that we are a part of. This should have been the center, not politics. We should have been talking about Love, even about sex that creates those many barriers against the flow of Love. Some of the barriers of course are reflected in politics. I managed to avoid even those. You were more daring in that respect than I was. You brought the subject of sex up several times, but I was too stupid to respond intelligently, perhaps out of fear that I might offend you in doing so. Still, I knew I had to open the door wider to the subject of us living in Love, because it has become evermore obvious that we can't solve the political problems of our world without raising the platform of our loving to higher levels, and that includes all aspects, even the difficult ones. Stupid as I was I didn't dare touch that core issue. As you might remember, all that I was able to do, was to let the politics flow and bring our loving into it superficially. But then, how could I have avoided that? You were so proud of your Thousand Year Anniversary Celebration of the Christianization of Russia. You were so proud of your country that I fell in Love with you all over again, just for your pride over that 'achievement' as you called it. I had hoped that my outreach from a platform of Love, meeting you half way, would inspire the original Christian dimension of society's self-loving that literally forces people to be in Love with one-another. After all, if we can't be in Love with ourselves, how can we love God as the First Commandment of Moses demands, the God that is reflected in us as in all humanity? Christ Jesus called the recognition of this principle 'the Great Commandment,' namely to be in Love with our humanity in which God is reflected. In fact, Christ Jesus called this the "greatest commandment," and he said that the Second Commandment is identical, which is to love one-another out of the riches of that Love - Love being reflected in love. Christ Jesus said in essence that humanity's recognition of these two universally principles is the root of civilization. I was hoping, Anton, that during our dinner high up on the tower, this great foundation in Love would somehow unfold for us, even while I was scared to speak of it, except on the theoretical level and in the political context.

"Miraculously, we actually nearly succeeded in touching that base. Can you remember those bright moments when we touched one-another in thought in a beautiful way? I felt something wonderful happening. I felt a sharing unfolding on a level that mere friendship couldn't equal. This may be the reason why it takes time to build friendships, because mere friendships are not intended to stand on the tall platform of universal principles. They don't spring from Love's own substance. Mere friendships need to be laboriously built, and are usually being build on a level that is riddled with barriers. Also it takes time to construct those molds for one-another, that we call friendships, and time to oblige one-another to fit into these molds. But that's not the way it was with us that day. We were reaching up to higher ground, above that which friendships are placed on in a landscape that is littered with iron-cast molds and obligations. We were reaching for the high ground where we might touch the hem of Truth.

"I wasn't looking for friendship, Anton, not even intimate friendship. I was looking for something more beautiful. I was looking for Love to have a chance to unfold its wings. Of course I do not wish to impose on your life. I had hoped to uplift it and leave it a bit richer by our having met, even by the challenge that is involved in exploring the Principle of Universal Love in real down to earth living, with sex included if it became appropriate. I had hoped to open a door for you that no one had opened before that leads to the Principle of Universal Love that is forbidden in the imperial world in which we both live at the present time. I certainly hadn't intended to impose obligations of friendship on you. To do so would have been like dancing around the real issue. I'm sure you have already far too many friendship obligations attached to your life. That is why I chose to focus on universal Love, which unfolds with no trails of obligations in its wake. And so, while I had no design for interfering with your life, I had hoped so much that those precious moments that we had shared against all odds could continue and grow and become more intimate with fewer barriers and less isolation. Sex has the potential to take away barriers between people and dissolve isolation. What we had shared was something rich, something complete, something that neither of us had built, something that I will likely cherish for a long time to come, even if it was tarnished by the world's challenges imposed by small-minded perceptions and illusions.

"Yes, I have focused on sex strongly. But I did this honestly and also intentionally. The intimacy of sexual sharing has been under attack ever since the imperial project for cultural freedom was launched in 1951 that promotes 'freedom' from culture. The imperial fondi are clever in that respect. They know that they have to break down the intimacy of sexual sharing if they want to build a world in which people no longer deeply care for one-another. Even the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt had understood this deep connection and had therefore 'blinded' their slaves sexually with the circumcisions, male and female, in order to turn them into 'better' slaves.

Today's masters of empire know full well that they need the same kind of deeply isolated society again, spread right across the world, so that they can loot and rape that nations with impunity and turn them into slaves, imprison their patriots, inflict torture and genocide in an environment of terror, and get away with it all as nobody will block them. To enable this project, the project of the modern Pharaohs, the CIA had launched the 'Congress for Cultural Freedom' (read freedom from culture) in 1951. It was designed as a hidden kind of warfare to debase culture. One of the side effects was that it also took down some religious barriers that had inhibited sexual intimacies in society and brought an air of freedom to it. In the shadow of this liberalization, at Christmas time in 1953, Hugh Hefner began marketing his Playboy magazine with an explicit focus on liberalized sex. The business apparently became a roaring success. The success wouldn't have been possible if there hadn't been a need for something in that direction. It appears that a need for sexual intimacies is built into the human fabric. I don't know if Hefner's magazine fulfilled the need, but evidently people responded to the offer. Even kids responded to it. A friend who was schoolteacher of one of the primary classes had taken her class to the local library one day. Some of the boys had discovered the magazine section and the playboy section with in it. When the teacher asked the class the next day about their experiences at the library, one of the boys stood up with a great big smile waving his arms about excitedly, saying, 'oh boy, Miss Lisa you should have seen those pictures...' The response evidently hadn't been the result of an imposed conditioning. The boy probably had never seen anything like it, so that he responded naturally to something that was rooted within. It appears that society at large responded in a similar fashion. The opening up of the sexual scene had liberalized sexual intimacies. Obviously this had the opposite effect of what the pharaohs had intended. It had energized something in society. It had liberated not only the senses but also the faculties and brought a greater excitement with living. Less than eight years later President Kennedy announced the challenge to go to the Moon. Less than seven years after that, America and all mankind, really did set foot on the moon. To get there was an immense scientific and technological achievement, on a scale that boggles the mind, beset with challenges that almost defy the imagination. The achievement in turn opened new horizons. But more amazing than this is the apparent connection between all these events, which researchers will yet have to verify.

"And there exists still another connection that is also worth noting, because a thousand years earlier in central India a similar thing appears to have happened. A renaissance of some kind appears to have unfolded there. We are told that in the timeframe of roughly a hundred years more than eighty great temples had been built all, all made out of sandstone, some gigantic ones among them that are still standing. They were all built in close proximity of each other. It is hard to imagine even now what an amazing economy must have stood behind the building of this vast complex of more than eighty temples. And they weren't just pain stone structures. They were richly decorated and featured a profusion of stone sculptures of men and women. Some temples had hundreds of these sculptures in them, and a portion of the sculptures were amazingly erotic. I believe that twenty of the temples are still standing, and those are said to be among the wonders of the world. This tells me that we have another example here of a great humanist achievement unfolding in the background to a widely open sexual scene in society. The sexual sculptures are of scenes that were evidently taken from real life, rather than fantasy, to judge by the quality of the composition and the details in them.

"And still, there exists one more connection that fits into this framework. This one takes us in the opposite direction. The masters of empire must have recognized the above connection between intimacy and achievement in civilization, because in less than a decade after the manned moon landing had created a cultural miracle that had uplifted the whole world with a bright sense of optimism, AIDS was unleashed across the world. The target for AIDS was sexual intimacy, and still is. Intimacy suddenly became a deadly thing, a potential channel for transmitting a disease for which no cure existed nor exists now. It created a shock to renewed the old sexual isolation.

"There is strong evidence cited that the AIDS insanity was not only authorized by the U.S. Congress, but was funded by it with a 10-million dollar grant as a warfare agent. AIDS appears to have unfolded as a deliberate process to isolate society from one-another and thereby from its humanity. Considering the deep links that exist between the rich economic developments that have happened in the face of wide open sexual intimacies, it was evidently not by accident that the AIDS virus was engineered to specifically target sexual intimacy by being a sex-transmittable disease. Two strains had been developed for the project. The first strain was designed to primarily affect the homosexual elements of society. This strain was unleashed against the homosexual community in the USA. The second strain was introduced quite a few months later into Africa where the heterosexual society was the primary target, thereby targeting the entire continent. Obviously AIDS didn't come from Africa, then. The monkey story was a whitewash project. At the present time both strains are now spread across the world as a terror disease, which by its effect has severely narrowed the entire scene of sexual intimacies.

"Some say that AIDS was also launched as a weapon for the depopulation of Africa in order to conserve the continent's natural resources for the imperial West. Such a depopulation project was spelled out in 1974 as a U.S. National Security objective. AIDS was probably financed secretly under this cover. This may be, but the focus would then be to narrow. AIDS is far more destructive to civilization as an anti-sex weapon. However, even as AIDS is having a huge debilitating impact as it is throttling society's intimacy, it seems to have been considered a failure by the masters of empire who have started a new program that promises to be more 'effective.' The new program is to push the legalization of narcotics onto society, primarily marijuana. As one who is fighting the doping of society is saying, 'If you smoke marijuana, you disable your banana.' It is actually amazing that in the shadow of this huge assault on sexual intimacy, from the circumcision, to AIDS, to the now increasing legalization of drugs, that there is still any social intimacy left, which of course there might not be for long.

"And so, things are much worse now. In the shadow of the deepening isolation of society from its humanity, America has now hundreds of bio-labs engaged all across the country in developing the most exotic biological warfare agents that anyone can imagine, for which no cure will likely be possible and which might be even more debilitating and deadly than AIDS and the entire biological assault on mankind combined. A similar program appears to be under consideration in the dark world of the empire's food cartels. There are rumors being heard about projects for the development of genetically modified foods that 'enhance' impotence and cause hormone responses that 'advance' infertility. It appears, with all this considered, that the greater insanity is just beginning to unfold. This insanity has to stop, Anton.

"So, I suggest to you, Anton, that we need to shut down this deadly isolation of society from its humanity. We need to shut down especially the sexual isolation that has already caused greater damage to mankind than we dare to imagine. That is why I kept bringing the subject of sex up so consistently, after you had opened the door to it. It is an immensely critical issue. Luckily for us all we haven't lost the battle yet, for the fact remains that pursuing sexual intimacies causes wonderful happenings in the closeness of intimate sharing that are brining to the social scene something warm and enriching, something distinctly human and spiritual. And why shouldn't it be that way? Sex is an aspect of our humanity that enables us to exist. We are sexual beings by design. This fact renders the sex process as an intricate part of an immensely intelligently arranged wonder of complex harmonizing principles that are reflected in the human birth process and what goes into it and follows after it. We see the same kind of wonder in it that we see reflected throughout the universe. We should therefore celebrate sex as a part of this larger wonder, and celebrate with it the infinite Intelligence that is reflected in our being just it is reflected in the harmony of the universe from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy of stars. Such a celebration, if we had been able to get it going, would have been far more appropriate for celebration in a festival than the 1000-Year Celebration that marks Russia's history of subjecting itself to Byzantine rape. I had hoped to inspire you to join me in a worthy celebration, Anton. Of course, as I had said many times already. Far more is at stake now than that. The vertical world is a terribly scary world, intensely subjugated to violent rape and with infinitely more being set up to come on line.

Here is what we face, not just you alone, but all of us. The Soviet Union, together with China, is intensively agitated by agents of empire to be collapsed from within. And it will be collapsed if we fail to defend it. Instead of defending yourself you celebrate the very process by which the Soviet Union is already falling. If this plays itself out the whole world will be in danger. The old imperial dream of the World-State Empire that H. G. Wells had idealized in the late 1800s is already being dusted off and used as a model for forging a European Wold State. This project is being set up as a project to drive the rape of society deeper by forces of empire, cutting to ever-deeper levels. The European World Empire is designed to completely eliminate the principle of democracy, of sovereignty, and of nationality. The talk is that slaves who are controlled need no democracy, have no sovereignty, and have link left to nationality. If the project is implemented as planned, it will eradicate the very concept of a nation and not just the institution of the nation-state. It will eliminate national parliaments giving way to the World-State law, and with it will eliminate the very notion of a people's self-government for it to be replaced with the cold hand of bureaucratic force by none-elected corporations that own the various administrative districts that the World State will consist of. The project is designed to dissolve a people's intimacy and national cultural identity as a sovereign people. Without this underlying intimacy there is no foundation for sovereignty existing, and even less a foundation for universal Love. This then will open the door to total rape and enable the deep criminalization of society all the way down to the most intimate level. A vast barrage of over 100,000 laws and regulations have already been designed and stand ready to be imposed. Each of the laws comes with penalties attached. Of course the sheer mass of these laws is so huge that no one can even know them all, much less obey them all, especially when many of them are intentionally contradictory. Under this system every citizen becomes automatically a criminal by design and lives in constant fear of penalties with no recourse existing for a defense against them. In this way the rape becomes absolute. The policy of intention is to impose a modern Nazi style wartime occupation of the continent of Europe. It is a cleverly hidden scheme to get continental Europe locked into a British imperial-occupation-style dictatorship. The center of the empire, which is Britain itself, will of course remain outside the World State to function as its overseer and taskmaster, gloating over the prisoners in the World State that the empire would be preying on merrily from without. That is how thieves pray upon their suckers' plight from a safe 'diplomatic' distance. And that, my dear, is how the World State structure is designed to operate. I have seen a copy of the blueprint, Anton. Believe me, you don't want to live in this kind of future. The design is to constantly escalate the strangulation of society, such as under the cover of the supposed imperative to prevent global warming. Though there is no truth to it, the cover is intended to be used as a global force to extract evermore loot from society through carbon taxes that tax the very essential for biological living, raping society ever-deeper and destroying its industries, thereby forcing up evermore quite genocide. Of course the blueprint when it becomes turned into legal structures becomes so convoluted with deceptive artistry that it become essentially unreadable, so mush so that not even a professor of law will be able to 'translate' it. The convoluted blueprint then becomes another form of rape. It becomes a monument to dishonesty, a rape on integrity and intelligence. And that is the way the world is going. How else could the masters of empire get the parliaments of nations to vote for their own dissolution, whereby the nations become slaves to empire? All this may sound like fiction to you, but this is deadly serious, because the intended World State is also an open door to war as a means to enforce it. No doubt, the laws have already been written that set the stage for this to happen. Do I need to say more?

"So tell me, Anton, what do we have in our grasp to prevent this with? A wise lady wrote in 1875 in America, 'God is Love. More that this we cannot have, higher we cannot look, father we cannot go.' And I think she was right. The empire is not omnipotent, but Love is. While the empire is reaching out to choke the world, it is too blind the see the power of Love that appears like a mouse but has the might of a giant, reflecting the omnipotence of a God. And this power is ours to take hold of. On the surface it appears that this is all that we have to work with to defend ourselves against empire. In real terms we have a complete triad of giants. One is our intimacy with one another as human beings. It furnishes our coming together on a lateral basis where rape is not possible. The second is sovereignty, which reflects our humanity that is sovereign. The third is the underlying Spirit of it all, which is Love. The American lady defined the triad of civilizations as, Soul, Truth, and Love - Soul is reflected in intimacy, Truth in sovereignty, and Love in loving universally. With them we find our healing. That is the triad of power that is our defense. Our coming together in the 'day'-light of love is a powerful starting point. It is enough all by itself to transform the world if we are willing to move with it. Sure, the principle of intimacy is a hard one right now, but it is the key to the others and to the very heart of civilization. If we don't value this principle profoundly, then the road begins to get rough and leads to the World-State Empire where people seek to fill the resulting void with insanity heaped upon insanity. The empire knows this. This is the reason why the principle of intimacy is so intensively targeted by the World-State structure. Our intimacy with one another is the most precious thing we have, Anton. It unfolds the wide dimension of Soul. We should allow it to soar and expand. Instead we force it to diminish. Nothing is more critical for our survival than the intimacy of Soul, the sovereignty of Truth, and the love of Love. And by the same token, nothing is more wonderful than being enveloped in Love that results from the principle of lateral intimacy and sovereignty. Once the vertical orientation is laid aside we tend to begin to no longer isolate us from our humanity as we start to experience its essence. Then, of course, we are immediately faced with the greater challenge to discover in us what it means to live like a human being. This means that we live in such a way that our short little living on this planet makes sense, meaning that something came out of it that is enduring and uplifting civilization. That is the test of living Love.

In this regard, the pornography of hate and destruction that the masters of empire now promote worldwide, is a poison and anther form of rape that seduces society to rape itself: to say to itself, 'I live for my sensual pleasures that I must satisfy: so, to hell with mankind!' People wallowing in wealth are seduced by this kind of pornographic effect in the same sense. They become isolated from their humanity in the same seductive process opening the gates to emptiness. However, as one becomes a human being in the course of ones escape from self-isolation, one begins to realize that one individually, as does the whole of mankind, comes with a moral responsibility to uplift civilization, which brings us back to expressing Love, the sovereignty of Truth in our sovereignty, and the intimacy of Soul. I hope that we will all realize soon that anything less is self-denial. And so you find yourself confronted with the great question that I keep posing to you, of what to do to uplift civilization and create a renaissance. This means that you have to fight for what supports civilization and go beyond that fight to the joy of loving. The underlying principle for this was discovered in the mid-1600s for the Peace of Westphalia. Society discovered that it is to its advantage to commit itself to promoting one-another's welfare, instead of tearing one-another down. This tiny step towards love had the power to change the world; and what came out of it still stands as the foundation for civilization, though the ground beneath it is now trembling.

"This single profound step that had been taken back in the mid 1600s was probably the first step of society discovering itself in the lateral world. However, we are not in the 1600s anymore. The challenges are different today. The challenges are vastly greater in scope than merely stopping a war that had ground on for a hundred years. Nevertheless the principle is the same. In today's world the principle of promoting one-another's welfare, which means uplifting civilization from the grassroots level up, requires large-scale individual commitment, and scientific commitment, and technological development, including large scale nuclear power development to power our advancing civilization. These are all aspects of intimacy, Anton. Society's commitment to this very basic principle is not a utopian dream, Anton, to be left for future ages to work out. In fact, this is the minimal commitment necessary for mankind to survive on this planet, especially with a population of six billion people, going on to ten billion, with the start of the next Ice Ace cycle on the horizon. In this you find your checkpoint, Anton, to test yourself, to determine if you are on track to become a human being. That is the test I give myself.

"If I can say to myself honestly that I am committed to fighting for large-scale nuclear power development, and so on, then I am on track. You would be likewise on such a platform. Just look what stands behind it. And if you look deeply enough you will find intimacy at the core of it. Whoever opposes this development is not a human being and has no commitment to becoming one, because such a person would have no deep connection with the future generation that depend on this technology in the coming Ice Age world. They would be committed to become murderers of mankind by default in the already ongoing unspeakable genocide by the forces of empire. Every step forward in an advancing civilization requires increasingly larger energy resources in the physical world, with ever-increasing energy density at the point of generation, and it requires the same advances in 'density' at the intimate level, even to the point that we can say to one-another as Jacob old said to his brother, 'I have seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God.' This is how we should stand on the whole front, individually and economically. Isolated, we cannot survive. Without intensive energy commitments we have no future. We are way beyond the point where wood or coal energy would be sufficient. We are even beyond the point where oil and gas energy resources are sufficient to meet our needs. We are running an energy starved world already. Nuclear power is our only option for the future. If we fail to develop it, our civilization will collapse in a chain-reaction crisis and mankind will collapse with it through starvation-imposed genocide. Of course this is not an option that an alert human being could choose. This means that nuclear power development, and scientific and technological development, and the development of intimacy at the very core, are our checkpoints on the road of discovering ourselves as human beings. And those are only the minimal checkpoints on this road towards ever greater developments.

"Sometime in the future, in a hundred or a thousand years, or fifty years, the Earth will be hit with the long-foreseen start of the next Ice Age cycle for which we must have the infrastructures ready and operating to supply our food from indoor agriculture on a global scale. If we don't commit ourselves to create that capability 90% of mankind will likely perish rather quickly after the transition begins. As human beings we cannot let this happen. This means that a dedicated active development towards this capability needs to begin now, at every level from the most intimate to the majestic, because it might take us all of those few years that we have still left to achieve large-scale indoor agriculture powered by nuclear fusion. In real terms we will likely need this indoor food-production capability much sooner as our farming capacity is rapidly becoming too small and too primitive. That's the kind of challenges we face, Anton, if we are serous to become human beings in deed and in Love.

"Pornography and everything below in the world of rape urges us not to bother with the larger view. It takes us into the opposite direction where nobody cares for anything except their own pleasure and money they cannot use. The current world-financial system of globalized looting falls into this category as I said already. It's a kind or rape that isolates people from their humanity. While the present insanity is still called economics, it is rape. Even calling it that is an act of rape, because this scam perverts the very thing that economics is. Is it any wonder then that in this environment one hears the chorus of the elite singing songs of getting back to the simplicity of earthbound living as in the distant past when the Earth was greener and the sunshine brighter, the golden age of feudalism and slavery in which few people survived past 40 years of age? And so the song proclaims that the Earth must not have more than a half billion people living on it, which would have been the case if everyone had died at an early age, having been worked to death. That particular song of insanity is said to have been written into the famous Georgia Guide-Stones. This song is a tale of an 'idyllic' life in utter poverty, such as would be 'achieved' with the extermination of 90% of the world's people. That's the 'pornography' of the politically motivated madness that we now face all over the world. The question therefore is: Will you lay yourself down to die? Is this your commitment, Anton? Or will you rouse yourself to become a human being that creates in its world, in cooperation with all others, a grand future and a bright civilization? That's the challenge, Anton. That's the challenge that stood behind my challenge to you on the night of our dancing when I prompted you to invite me to your garden.

"I think that some day you will meet this challenge and it will take you into the wonderland of becoming intensely a human being. You will find then that science, technology, and nuclear power are all aspects of the Principle of Universal Love, and that every facet of it is a joy in itself as it unfolds wonders you haven't yet dreamed of. Then you will find yourself elated for the privilege to be a part of it. That's when you will really begin to live, Anton, and live with a passion.

"Yes, I have exposed some of the ugliness of the dehumanizing scenes of the present world, a world that is almost universally isolated from its humanity," I continued. "We spoke about these ugly things during our political explorations, even some terribly painful scenes that need to be dealt with, because they have become monsters in the world for the lack of love in society for one-another as human beings. However, I also focused on the great things which don't need to be built, but which we can use to build a richer a brighter world on for us all, so that the present dark ugliness can no longer be found. I had hoped to awaken something in your life that didn't need to be built; something that is; something that could have unfolded right there and then out of our loving, something beautiful, a light for the darker days. Love is that light, and the Principle of Universal Love is the key to this light that we should strife for, even if for nothing more than its own sake, because it, all by itself, is as beautiful as the brightness of the sun. For this sex must be included, and maybe perhaps it becomes a part of that brightness when we experience it, because sex is already included as an intimate part of our humanity. If sex had been unfolding between us on the lateral platform of universal loving, it would have been beautiful for its own sake. It would have been as bright as any element of Love is. I should have been more insistent perhaps, and bolder in inviting you to share my bed instead of inviting you just to the dance floor to 'dance' around the issue as I had done so many times already. I should have opened the door to the sexual intimacy as a lateral expression in which we can be secure, where love is bound to joy to outshine all those dark vertical experiences in which sex is being abused, as it has been abused in your life with a great deal of pain.

I started a new page, one of many as the letter was getting longer.

"Maybe I haven't failed," I wrote. "Had we not both been as daring as pioneers in those few miraculous moments in which our hearts met?" I continued on the new page. "Maybe we both had not been daring enough to follow our own heart's lead. We had acknowledged the seemingly impossible and had allowed it to stand, though we were afraid of the ultimate. We had touched on the impossible in spite of the fact that there was no social convention established to support it. The time, unfortunately, that we had was far too brief. We had glimpsed a sense of glory in the direction that we looked, but never entered the fabled world of Camelot that could have become real! Of course our journey does not need to stop where we brought it to a halt. Why should our paths be blocked with an end-point? Why should it not continue and our loving stand once again for what it was from the beginning, and still is, and then stand even taller when we meet again?"

This was a daring letter, no doubt. But I had to be daring. Time was running out for bridging the gap that had suddenly unfolded between us.

"Anton!" I wrote with a exclamation mark, "I had tried to suggest a platform on which our association might continue forever. I had told you about Tara hoping that you would protest if it seemed impractical to love another person on a sexual basis without physical sex. And you didn't protest. And so I had invited you to step across the boundaries that normally isolate people, with the assurance added that you would not be violated. I suppose you were protesting against this shallow concept that offers few rewards if any, when you suddenly stopped smiling at me and went out of your way to stay out of mine. I had tried to ask you about it. I feel terrible now, because it is agonizing to see you so glum.

"Writing to you, thus becomes more than just a desperate rescue effort. It becomes a necessity, because you are still precious to me, even in this silent way. Oh, how beautifully human we tend to be in times like these when we can't decide which way to turn. If we were machines the decisions would have been simple. Machines can only answer yes or no. The resulting answer would have been clear-cut and unmistakable. But as human beings we weigh a multitude of factors, and the result may be a fifty-percent no, or an eighty-percent yes. It becomes impossible then to put our answers into words, especially when the motivating factors may not clearly established and hope fades and becomes thin. That's when we struggle in silence and suffer deep-seated hurts and untold agonies. We humans are champions at this. We suffer for centuries if need be, hoping that time will dissolve our impasses that we don't seem to be able to face head on at the moment. But time never does perform this miracle for us. We have been waiting for four thousand years. Time doesn't elevate us. Only we can do this as we struggle to be in Love with ourselves more fully, and with one-another."

"It wasn't easy to write this letter, Anton," I wrote on the next page. That was true. It turned out that it was much harder still at the end to deliver the letter. It became 'heavy.' Nevertheless, the hard footsteps had to be taken. The value of the price justified the effort.

"Anton," I continued on this page that I inserted near the end. "Please forgive me for writing this agonizing letter. I had to write it, because I felt I had to do something to stop the unfolding of bad feelings between us before they would grow into something still bigger. History tells us that such problems don't go away on their own. If there is a paradox, we must resolve it. If there is a pain, we must heal it. If we don't cure whatever must be cured, it will linger forever. Believe me, when I had told you about Tara I had hoped that it would preempt the fear that is often associated with sexual loving. In my meeting Tara in Russia the exciting sexual attraction that she had allowed to unfold was graciously kept within limits as if by an unspoken mutual agreement that the traditional line drawn into the sand would not be crossed. Thereby the excitement with sex was allowed to flourish, but never drift into physical expression. I had hoped, Anton, that this story would overcome whatever concerns you might have had about sex, so that I would never have to say to you, or imply, that I don't recognize you as a woman, and love you as a woman, even if there would be no close sexual intimacies involved between us. I wanted to tell you that I would always recognize and respect you as a beautiful and precious woman, no matter what, just as I had recognized and respected Tara in the same manner and for the same reason. I had tried to be careful not to make the tragic mistake that a youth-counselor made, which I knew, who had counseled a Negro girl. The girl had been going through an identity crisis over the color of her skin and the way people reacted to it. The counselor, an elderly woman and a friend of the girl, told the girl in the kindest manner that she could managed that she personally did not regard her as being black at all, but regarded her as just another person like everybody else. No doubt those words had been honestly spoken from the heart. But can you imagine the girl's shock? This unfortunate remark must have had the effect of pouring gasoline onto a smoldering fire. Why couldn't the counselor have told the girl the truth that she is a lovely, charming, and intelligent black girl, and that being black is beautiful and that she loved her for that as well, which she obviously did?

"Why is it then, Anton, that we feel we have to hide the truth to comply with popular opinion? What hypocrites we have become? This is why I cannot allow myself any longer to downplay the fact that you are a lovely, charming, wonderfully sexy, even awe inspiring woman, Antonovna. Because that is what you truly are. I am proud to know you for that. It is wonderful to be touched by your lovely female nature, and I love you for it, because that is what I love and so I must acknowledge it, including the sexual feelings that you inspire as an inherent part of the human dimension that we all share. I hope that one day in the future we might get together again and stand on this platform of a profound aspect of Truth where we once daringly stood before doubt overcame us. I hope that we then joyously acknowledge an aspect of ourselves that is worthy to be acknowledged rather than being shunned.

"Of course, Anton, I can see why this challenging platform can lead to isolation. If sex becomes an instrument to satisfy another person's unmet needs, then one becomes a slave to another person who lives in poverty, steeped in the denial of his or her own riches, whose self-development and self-loving is incomplete. You have probably seen too much of this already. This kind of slavery is often endured, sometimes with compassion, but it always remains slavery, and slavery is not an element for enriching one-another. Incompleteness causes isolation. Only when all the inner poverty has been eradicated with a self-loving that acknowledges one as a sun to light up the universe, a light that we gladly share, will our self-isolation end, yours and mine, and we can begin to enrich one-another's existence with Love and joy, and the intimacy of Soul. Yes, I am trapped into a form of self-isolation too, when the sexual issue seems to be too complex and problematic, far more than it ought to be. That too, is destined to end. Love is a lateral appreciation that makes its own demands when it flows honestly. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, the Principle of Universal Love is still new territory for me that is largely unfamiliar, though I wish it wasn't. Forgive me therefore that I stumbled and fell, which I probably did more than once."

I looked at my letter, a pile of pages. I read it through twice and asked myself: Is this enough?

The answer came that I had to apologize further. I had to apologize for a serious mistake that I had made that echoed the mistake the counselor had made in responding to the black girl. The added apology that grew out of that became the most daring part of the letter. I realized that I could loose her completely if this part was misunderstood, but I also realized that I might not reach her in a healing manner without it.

I began the apology on another fresh page. "Anton, in my stupidity I had aimed to down-play all the sexual aspects that had made you so precious to me," I wrote. "Please forgive the dishonesty. I had tried to put you at ease when I told you that the crowning aspect of my experience with Tara had not been the kiss with which it ended, but the smiles with which we faced one-another, uttering those words that had no meaning in themselves. This kiss in the end had been the only kiss we ever shared, Tara and I. It should have been of equal value, or grater value than everything else. But I denied it by convincing myself that the sexual dimension of our humanity isn't a valuable thing. I downplayed its value to almost zero to match the sexual 'poverty' that had marked our days almost by a universal consensus. If I had been honest with myself then, it wouldn't have been a small thing. The fact that the whole of humanity is divided by sex and isolated by a vast sea of barriers built around sex proves that it isn't a small thing at all. The fact is my association with Tara shouldn't have been so poor in sexual terms, even though I had felt greatly enriched by her sexual charm. Perhaps, there was too much poverty in my heart and in hers that prevented us from going further and cross more of the barriers. How wrong I had been therefore in my feelings towards her in pushing a fundamental aspect of her identity into the background as if it wasn't important. I should have dreamed about her sex. The kiss and the smiles should have never been weighed in the same scale against each other. By negating the sharing of the deeper sexual aspects as if they were abnormal in their intimacy, I failed to allow myself to fully acknowledge her as a woman and myself as a sexual being as we all are in truth. So, when I met you I felt that too much would be lost if that happened again. I had stricken this element of human loving out of my mind in regard to Tara, simply because I couldn't see beyond the publicly accepted mythology, the consensus that had turned sex into something shameful to be avoided like a mistake of creation that had dragged the human image down to the ground. Maybe that was the reason why nothing had been resolved in the end by our getting together in terms that uplifted both of us as it might have. It is my failing towards Tara, not towards you, that I must apologize to you for. I had hoped to make you feel secure with an assurance that sex was not a factor while it should have been acknowledged as a factor in our b being in Love with our common humanity. Sex is and remains a part of our life. I should have been more deeply honest about it's dimension in order that we might have lived our life more completely, and loved more fully.

"Also I had hoped to uplift your life and help you to heal the tragedy arising from having been raped. What is our life worth if we can't help one another in times of need? And you were in need and still are. Oh, it would have been simpler to walk away from this challenge and leave you alone in your struggles in the hope that time will cure what needs to be cured. But time doesn't cure anything, and if nothing gets cured the tragedy gets bigger. American history has been a long chain of tragedy, because the underlying problem has never been addressed. In America's case it was slavery, a different kind of rape on the humanity of the human being. Your friend Olga is rightly concerned that if this rape isn't cured, it will destroy us. It has cost millions of American lives already. America had fought a long war to get out from under the thumb of the British Empire, just as you might have struggled to get out from under the thumb of your uncles, but America held on to its slavery, just as mankind held on to the slavery of the Pharaohs for which the circumcision of men and women had been invented, and you remained slaves to your uncles, because the path out of slavery is not an easy one. The Pharaohs started a trend that took away the intimacy between people to produce 'better' slaves. This conditioning has festered, the slavery has multiplied. Today 700 million men and 100 million women live mutilated lives and have become a society conditioned to be salves. The world has been conditioned by this vast mutilation of the human fabric to accept countless types of rape, which is now occurring, by what has grown from small beginnings in ancient Egypt to such huge dimensions that very existence of mankind is thereby threatened. Mankind has become a living tragedy in which it lost its fitness to survive. But the healing for that can't come from the top, from governments, which merely reflect the quality of society. The healing has to start with us, at the grassroots of daily living and universal loving. The healing that comes for there has been blocked for a long time. It needs to be unblocked, and those steps are hard as only few, if any at all, have taken them. The universal consensus appears to be that we can't step away from the rule of tradition, that we must abide with it, even while it is killing us as it blocks the healing of the world. But the truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as a chronic historic problem. When history repeats itself and its endless train of tragedies simply won't stop, we don't face a chronic problem, we suffer the repeated tragedies because we create the conditions anew each single day and month and year that result in tragedy. And so I say to you we don't have to do this, do we? We can rebel against the consensus and step away from the rule of empire and its slavery and become free human beings. Simply because a mistake has been repeated for centuries doesn't mean that we can't step away from this path today and set a new course. This is what I had hoped to inspire you to do with me in order to help you to end your tragic history and with it contribute a small step forward towards healing the world while time remains before all is lost. The fact is the grand tragedy that has darkened our world in so many ways, which now threatens to destroy all mankind as a whole, can be stopped today. We are not impotent as human beings. We have the power within us as sovereign persons guided by the principles of our humanity. The power here is Love, the impetus that gets us off the current train to hell. Whatever this train may be individually or collectively, we can step away from it with the impetus of Love. That is what I had hoped to achieve. Of course this is challenging.

"You have called us men all sex crazy, which seems to be the general consensus among women, but you also have the option before you to step away from even that and judge us men with the perspective that that the very aspect of us that you abhor may be our saving grace. Just as your uterus needs to be flushed out periodically and be renewed, so our prostrate needs to be flushed out and be renewed. Sex is the process to do this for us. The conditioning for this is wisely built into the nature of the universe, and not exclusively for our benefit alone. We probably wouldn't be alive today had those built-in benefits not been realized. So don't trash the please, and us men with it. Of course sex isn't everything. It exists for a purpose. It point in a direction. For mankind that direction includes the development of intimacy which opens the door to the Principle of the General Welfare on which civilization is founded and depends on. And this widens the scene as we explore our third sex as it were, our spiritual dimension, our beauty, art, intelligence, honor, integrity, creativity, productivity, science, music, literature, and so on. Unfortunately we tend to get ourselves trapped at those lover levels where sex has become a barrier, to the point that we can't move. That is why I felt that I had to be daring with you and keep dissenting against the blocking consensus by focusing on sex to unblock it.

"While sex is something that we are stuck with, it can be uplifted and be turned into a beautiful thing, even a thing that gives us joy, that gives us closeness, intimacy, passion, generosity. Maybe that is where mankind discovered the Principle of the Advantage of the Other that in 1648 ended eighty years of war with the Peace of Westphalia. Our sexual interaction might have taught us that in moments of truthfulness with ourselves we are drawn to this principle of the advantage of the other. We even see it reflected in the Karma Sutra, the famous sex manual of ancient India where the focus is on uplifting the other. If we want to save Russia and America we have to uplift it onto a higher platform of civilization than it rests on at the present, and for that we have to discover the higher principles in ourselves and master them in our sexual relationships. I think along this path of development we open the portal to the seashore of our third sex, our spiritual identity, our intelligence and humanity and so forth, which is a platform where animalism and its limitations and dimensions are left behind and we recognize ourselves as primarily human beings. If we have accomplished anything during the weeks of this conference, this has to be it. Nothing less compares in importance.

"And so, please forgive me as I rebel against what stands in the way. Perhaps my moves in this 'dancing' of ours weren't elegant enough. But how can one rebel elegantly? I think our dinner meetings high up on the tower for two bright nights in the sky contained a faint glimpse of a greater glory for which the foundation had not been fully established. We had glimpsed something in our excitement with living in which sex was acknowledged with a sense of Love, though briefly, but it had opened a door. Sex had not been a barrier in those brief moments when we embraced it for what it is in our conversation. The barrier became attached later when the world's consensus bore down on us and fear smothered the scene. Since this was evidently the case, the implications that we can draw from those brief moments when nothing stood in our way, are unimaginably greater for our world, considering the challenges that we now face on every front. What we had discovered during those hours of sharing ideas might be comparable to the discovery of the wheel that became a crucial starting point for civilization. Maybe we have crossed such a starting point, and the ultimate results lie still far in the future. In respect to those brief moments of touching a higher reality in our thoughts, high up on the tower in Moscow, the brief moments of our bold sharing might have been an enormous event, perhaps the most enormous in all history to date with as yet unseen potential.

Personally, I like to see it as a beginning, built on a basis that neither of us had understood in the least when it happened and therefore couldn't move further with, but I also see us as being capable learners. And this opens up a whole world of hope, a world of worlds of new potentials not yet discerned, for as the lady said in 1875, 'God is Love,' and as the physicists now say, the universe is built on Love and wouldn't exist without it. That's an infinite theme that we've barely touched the hem of in exploring it. Maybe it should be said that Love is the universe, with Love being reflected in love. More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go. I think the lady was right in saying that.

"Think about this, Anton," I added.

When I finished writing those words my hands were trembling. I was sure that no one else had written a more challenging letter before. How could any woman possibly respond to the challenge it posed? The letter had been written with the deepest honesty, even if its content was far from being conventional. Of course, Anton wasn't just any person. I felt that most people would become outraged by what the letter contained and would likely rip it up. However, I also felt that Anton wouldn't do this. I felt that in the long run she might understand the letter and be moved by it, if only by the honesty of it.

"Let me now say farewell," I closed the letter. "I am and remain yours, cordially, and with the deepest respect for you, someone most dear to me, whom I would not address merely as a friend, or a person, nor even merely as a woman - but as someone named Antonovna Valentina Lisitov, someone of which there exists only one in the world; someone lovely; someone who is a woman and more; someone who is more than a friend; someone who is as bright as the Morning Star that remains in heaven, someone whose brightness has given a new definition to light!"

I signed the letter and added as a postscript, "Have a beautiful life, Antonovna, and always remember that you are a diamond in the sky, as we all are as human beings, and that even as we fall into the mud in our silly attempts to explore our world and live in it, we remain the diamonds that we truly are. Some day we may learn how to rinse off the mud, and polish the sparkling surfaces, and to love the sparkle that flows from it brighter than the sun.

Yours in truth and in love, Peter VanDerMere."

I had tears in my eyes when I sealed the envelope. It took me a whole day to write it, from dawn to way past midnight. I tipped the hotel captain well for his trouble to leave his post and open the door to the large meeting hall for me so that I could place the letter where Anton wouldn't miss it. The captain smiled and commented that this must be "a brilliantly important letter," as he had put it when he looked at the tip and locked the hall up again.

+ + +

The last conference session ended at noon the following day. Since Anton didn't return to her place on the panel after she had opened my letter. I began to imagine how the letter must have hurt her. She had loved being on that panel. How could she have missed the last day and all the wrap-up sessions? Nor did I see her the next morning during the press conference, and at the closing lunch and at the reception that followed. Surely she would have loved being there, too. I had seen her only once in all that time, briefly, in the hotel lobby after the wrap-up sessions had ended. She had a letter of her own with her. Fred and I came out of the restaurant. She noticed us. For a moment she came towards us, then stopped, looked at her letter and tore it up.

I felt tears in my eyes as she turned and ran away.

Oh, how differently those two weeks in Russia had turned out, than I had imagined. They had become a kaleidoscope of wide-open days filled with satisfaction that Ushi and I had shared as we embraced each other to the full in every possible respect. And all of that had tumbled together in total contrast with this deepening self-isolation that Anton forced herself into and the agonies that she and I now struggled with, most of which I had caused.

In one respect Anton and I had moved ahead with lightning speed, and in another respect every step had brought a sad disappointment. As expected, the conference as a whole hadn't accomplished anything either. There had been talk about a follow-up conference in a year. Hopes were high in the early days of the conference when some progress appeared to have been made. At the end, however, it was said that the whole effort had been a waste of time, energy, and money, and should never be repeated. That crushing, devastating assessment was delivered at the closing ceremony. In a way, I was glad that Anton hadn't been there to hear it.

Our last evening in Moscow was set aside for informal meetings among ourselves, for evaluations, contemplation, and for the exchange of phone numbers and addresses. It was an empty evening for me. A vital element that had become a part of Russia for me was suddenly missing with Anton not being there. Ushi, too, felt sad about the way it had all ended. The next day, of course, was our travel day.

It was on this last day, our final day in Russia, right at the airport, that I saw Anton once more. She wore the same jump suit that she had worn on the first day we met. She stood at the very same desk again as if nothing had happened in the two intervening weeks. I tried to hide myself from her so as not to impose on her again. As she spotted Fred and Ushi, she waved, and then waved to me also and came towards us with another envelope in one hand and a single carnation in the other. She smiled sweetly as she approached. She then stopped and pinned the carnation onto my jacket and arranged it so that it would sit straight.

"I'm glad, too, that we met," she whispered as she gave the envelope to me.

Seconds later, after a quick kiss on the cheek she hurried back to her desk. Before she turned back, however, I noticed the small silver broach pinned on her suit that I gave her, the one that I had found in a small town in the Appalachian Mountain when I had stopped there, enticed by the golden glist of the fall foliage that stood bright against the blue sky on a brilliant autumn day. To the best of my recollection I hadn't seen the little broach on her until this morning. It bore a promise now of another bright day unfolding in the future. She seemed to have found at last the kind of value that the silversmith had stipulated would be sufficient for it to be obtained. When I obtained it from the store I gave for it all that I had on me, to the last penny, as my first offer. Anton seemed to have remembered the price and was now paying it gladly with all her heart in her own way. And so that golden day from the autumn in the mountains came back to me with the promise of a dawning spring.

I was stunned. My eyes stayed fixed on her as she returned to her table. I just stood there stunned, motionless. I waved to her when she turned around at her table. She responded in kind with a smile, brighter than the sun. We waved to each other until I was nudged by Fred and ushered by him through the security gate into the boarding area. I held her letter high while I passed through the gate so that she could see my appreciation for it, and waved to her with it. Oh what a glorious day it had yet turned out to be after all, and what a glorious conference this meeting in Moscow had been in spite of the huge disappointments. I cried quietly after we were through the gate. Those were wonderful tears, tears of joy.

I opened the letter when we were in the air and Moscow could no longer be seen. Our flight was a specially arranged nonstop charter flight to London. In London the western delegation would disperse and go their separate ways. Fred and I would be on our own from then on.

Without me asking for it Fred gave me the window seat that he had been assigned to, since I had a letter to read and the window seats are more private for reading letters.

"Dear Peter," Anton's letter began. "Please forgive me for the pain that I might have caused you. Could you feel that I have cried over your letter? How could I have been so blind? You were saying in your letter what I had felt all along, but hadn't dared to acknowledge. People say love forges chains that choke the love that forged them. Maybe I was afraid of that. You know, for all my life I had felt more comfortable and free, being alone. And that's the truth. Perhaps you may have felt so too at some point in your life."

I paused. While reading her letter, I felt tears forming again that blurred the vision and had to be wiped away.

"Did you ever go walking," she wrote, "just to be alone with yourself, or sit quietly by the river listening to the background rumble of the world or to the wind mingling with the voice of the water lapping onto the shore? Did you ever take time to watch the flight of the birds, and then let your thoughts in like manner chase across the expanse of your mind, watching your thoughts as intently as you watched the birds? These are moments of freedom! In them you discover riches that no government can tax, or society corrupt, and philosophies can destroy. You are alone with yourself in those moments and in Love with the whole world. Then someone comes along and says 'I'm in Love with you.' The thought appears narrow, urgent, and possessive. Marriage scares me even more, though it seems I cannot escape it; Nicolai is relentless about this. As you say, friendship imposes a mold, a flexible mold perhaps, but a mold nonetheless. But that, Peter, this context renders the marriage-mold a mold cast in iron? Strangely, your letter has shattered this iron so that Nicolai might yet have his wish. There can be a marriage in freedom. I can see this now. Isn't that what your letter tried to say? At least that's how I read it.

She continued on a new page. "Dear Peter, picture in your mind a wild flower growing on a steep mountain face, making a life for itself in some crevice high above the world. It watches the climbers pass by. They are all looking at it. And soon it begins to be afraid that one of the climbers will reach out and pick it, and drag it down into the valley away from the sunshine, into some dark room inside a house where it is placed into a vase on some table to be looked at for a season, and then is discarded. Wouldn't that frighten you? It frightens me.

"But you were different when you came to my mountain. You came from the valley with joy, and you were joyous to see me, perhaps drawn by the 'fragrance' or the delicate loveliness that you saw, and the color of it, the poise, and as you fell in Love with me even as I drew back. Forgive me if you can.

"Still, you were drawn to come again and again from the valley, just to see me, to touch me, and perhaps to be touched by me. Obviously you knew about vases and dark rooms in houses. You seem to understand the terror they invoke. Why hadn't I recognized this from the beginning that this fate in dark houses wasn't on the agenda? Maybe I had recognized that it wasn't, and was afraid that it might not be true.

"Yes, you said I am in Love with you, but you also said it in a way as no man ever had. You spoke about loving in terms of loving yourself and me as a reflection of it. In the light of this link we became one. Peter, I didn't even know that such a thing can exist as loving another in the appreciation of my own self-loving. Still I felt it. Nevertheless I turned away from it because I barely realized that I loved myself. You had to remind me of that.

"Indeed it was lovely being together with you during the few days that we shared. In spite of the political rift between us we were dancing on this 'mountain' together, where I was living alone. We were leading each other to our private wonderland, sharing the freedoms we loved. You were right that I had feared we were heading towards sex. Your freedom demanded that. And so, since my fear of it keeps us apart, I should embrace sex and let it be and move with it, should we ever meet again, so that the door between us may not be closed again. Of course, this should have been so from the beginning.

"And there is another reason why our sexual sharing would have been right all along, and might have happened had we been aware of it. I had made some inquiries about the risks. With the answers I was told about a wide range of benefits I never knew about, nor had you mentioned them. Did you know that lots of sex extends longevity and not just for you men, possibly as much as ten years; and it reduces stress; strengthens marriages and families; boosts the immune system; reduces pain; and in the course of having sex it also generates a hormone that induces pair bonding. It actually builds the bonds it celebrates. And those bonds, as you said, shouldn't be narrow, but be as wide as the world, they should be bonds of freedom. Can you imagine that?

"And so, Peter, I agree with you that you were wrong in not having looked for sexual involvement with Tara, even in your dreams, for the brilliant strands of Love that might have then enveloped you both. But Peter, if you had told me this in the beginning I would have never spoken to you again. So it was I who was most wrong by being afraid of it. My prayer now must be that if we should ever meet again there should be no resistance to sex, only to that which it is not. The price is too great. I will not pay it any longer. If sex is an element of our universal kiss, as your friend Helen has discovered, then we should enrich it and uplift it, and find a value in it that is truly human, that no animal can match or mythology can block. We are sexual beings of a higher order, aren't we? But why then have we turned sex into something to be shunned, something that we turned into a great dam by which the river of human living is backed up and has become a stagnant lake behind it, and as you have indicated, by which the flow of universal Love comes to a halt or is impeded from being recognized as a possibility. Maybe you are right. Maybe we need to break down this dam, this barrier, this sex-barrier, so that the flow of Love will not be hindered anymore in our life and sex becomes a joy in the flow of it. I only experienced sex as a pain when I was dragged into the sewer with it. I wanted to embrace it in the sunshine later, but couldn't. I still want to, but the fear of the sewer always turned the very thought of it into a barrier. Maybe I am dreaming that sex can exist in the sunshine. Maybe it really can't. But I don't believe these doubts anymore. Of course it is never easy, Peter, to break through a barrier long established. Still, it needs to be done, although wisely in order that nothing is flooded by the waters that have been tragically stored up for a thousand years. This means that any future sex should not crowd out anything that is of value, but add to it its own glow of life. If it is a part of our humanity and our life, it should have an enriching place in it and never be less or more than that. Still, it is scary what is unfolding here, Peter. It is scary for one to hope that there be no resistance to sex, even if it is to explore the brightness it can offer. The exploration becomes scary when we don't really know yet how to find what it really is. At least it appears scary to me. I pray that if we should meet again in the future, and I hope we will meet again, these lessons will not be forgotten and we have moved to higher ground. I also suppose that this promise too, should be a part of loving oneself, of being in Love with our humanity, which, as you seem to indicate, is necessary for truly being in Love with one-another. Maybe this is what I have yet to find in my life, as it had been lacking since the days when I found only darkness. Thanks for pointing out that there is a whole world yet to be found outside of that darkness.

"And so feel that my marriage with Nicolai can now take place, provided that this lesson is thoroughly learned, both by him and by me. There must be a rich flow of dancing and sharing for freedom to be. Then, perhaps marriage won't be an iron cast mold after all, with a built-in closed door. I suppose that if sex is then no longer a barrier to Love, but an element of it, it cannot become a boundary either. Can you imagine this, Peter, a marriage without a boundary? Can you imagine a marriage between Nicolai and I in which you will be welcome at the most intimate level? That's the kind of universal self-loving I will cling to as a goal to reach that is worthy of my life. That goal maybe somewhat challenging for Nicolai, but I can marry him without reservation on that platform, because I would remain free to be a human being, free to be in Love as Love demands. That kind of marriage, if it could be achieved, would be safe for me, a marriage that would unfold in ever-wider circles in the endless universe of the universal kiss, or as an expression of it. So you see, you had an effect on me, Peter. Does that sound crazy?

"Maybe sex is like life, a very deep issue that nobody can fathom in its totality to make hard and fast judgments about, even if it is ultimately but a gate to something still greater. Maybe it is as you once said, that the deeper one reaches, and the more sensitive one becomes, the less will one be tempted to impose rules against anything connected with life and the freedoms it brings with it at the leading edge.

"And, Peter, there is another lesson our association has taught me, that there is no freedom in isolation. The totality of freedom, it seems, is bound up in the totality of Love. Maybe I should give an address on this subject at our next conference if there ever will be another. Will you be there? Will you support me? This subject is 'virgin forest' to me, a 'pioneering territory,' a 'space flight' into inner space. If you have any ideas, please share them with me. But first let me share with you the 'forest' in which was joyously alone, which I had treasured when I was still young after my years of horrors in which my childhood had ended. I was quite daring then when I was suddenly free. You may not believe this, and I hope you're not shocked. I should have told you about that too during our walk after dinner, our walk in the cold following the 'hot' discussions we had at the Seventh Heaven Restaurant on the tower.

"My uncles were killed in the war, as I told you, and my mother had died so that all the raping had stopped. I suddenly felt as free as a bird as you might also imagine. I was free from all the sexual demands they had imposed on me. I sold everything we had left, which wasn't much, and moved away to Kiev, to the big city and started a new life there. I got work in the city through a youth training program that was offered for free by a truck assembly plant. I became a machine tool operator there. Can you imagine that? I was free. I could support myself. And more than that, I was making a contribution to my world that meant something. I discovered that I was a real person. I was living just by myself then, as I said, 'joyously' alone. I told myself that this was heaven. But I soon discovered that there was no echo forthcoming from my make-believe joy. I was living against an empty background that had lingered from the past. In order to hide this emptiness I created my own world that I made rich with games of pretending. I made myself a beautifully embroidered nightgown in those days, all made of cotton that was hard to get at the time. I tailored it wide like a dress that is made for dancing. I also found a golden belt for it in a rummage store, so that this nightgown could be worn as a real dress during the hot summer days. I loved wearing it on the streets and to parties, or visiting friends. Do you have any idea how exciting it can be to go out in a nighty? Naturally, nobody knew about it. Neither did anyone ever know that I wore no underwear either. It was marvelous to be so naughty, so free, and so ready for anything, so daring and getting away with it, sitting there among my respectably dressed friends, totally naked underneath. If someone had slipped the nighty off, there I would have stood, just me and my soft Chinese shoes. Sadly, no one did slip the nighty off. Nobody would have been able to. No man or woman was allowed in those days to come close enough to me. My carefree openness was a crafted lie. My golden belt was really a black belt in my heart. That heart was dark, empty, fearful, and colorless. The irony was that I was looking for sexual intimacies in my dream world that I felt safe in, while sex was the very thing that scared me to death in the real world, something which I had intensely hated when it had been imposed by 'force.' I wanted what I hated to touch. I was hoping for something that would bridge my world of joyous pretending with the real world where I know I would have categorically rejected what I was looking for if somebody had actually offered it. I guess I wanted to experience what sexual intimacy really is when it unfolds for its own imperative powered by an honest universal loving that is 'lodged in our humanity as human beings,' as you had put it. It never came to that. I never found what I had been looking for in all the time I lived in Kiev. Nor have I found it since, to Nicolai's dismay. Maybe the paradox comes from dreaming dreams that are too good to be true. But now you say that the reality can be brighter than the dreams.

"When spoke to me at the tower about Judy Chicago's art installation, The Dinner Party, and that the plates that she created for the historic women that she had seated at the table were painted in the image of a woman's vulva to highlight society's hypocrisy in denying itself in face of it. You suggested that 'eating' of the vulva was 'voted' by us women as the most pleasurable sexual intimacy, and for the men too, so that the social isolation of women that has put us women in the world away from the real world, is hypocrisy indeed. I found the thought disgusting than men would want to do this. I find the very smell disgusting. But I do remember a doctor scolding me once about my 'insane dressing habit' as he called it, before I got the golden belt. He told me that a woman's vagina is constantly self-cleansing with a subtle flow of fluids that keep the bacteria out, which then evaporate into the open and the bacteria die. He told me I was insane wearing the kind of tightly woven, tightly fitting panties that keeps the vulva sealed up with an air-tight mesh. He said that the bacteria would get trapped and nourished in the moist environment, and that the result would evidently be disgusting. But I had no heart to listen to him. I needed protection. I needed an iron-clad barrier. I needed a barrier against sex. In my waking dreams I dreamed that sex was for giving, for giving another person pleasure in the intimacy of sharing, but my experience had been the opposite. Sex was for getting, for the taking, it was stolen before I had a chance to give. That is what the iron barrier was for, the tightly fitting, tightly knitted panties. I'm now shocked at myself that in my fear I had closed the door to what I most wanted, they joy of giving something out of the depth of myself, they joy of giving another person pleasure by just sharing myself. They days of the golden belt developed from that. It seems that I knew about the Principle of Universal Love deep in my heart and was afraid that it would be too good to be true and could therefore not be trusted.

"You may be right, Peter, in suggesting that I have been isolating myself from myself and from my humanity, and with it have thrown away the key to that giving which asks nothing in return, but is richly blessed anyway. So I hope that in time I might reason myself out of my prison of hating where fear lingers. And that prison really isn't all the fault of my uncles. So, I hope that I will learn to become more accepting of myself and of my power to be a human beings clothed with Love, or being clothed with the sun as you had put it. And maybe you are also right in saying that sex can help us all with that, because there is nothing closer to our home gate than our sex and its myriad challenges. That kind of self-acceptance could unfold into a Treaty of Westphalia within ourselves, with ourselves, and for our relationships with one-another. Just like the Treaty of Westphalia has ended a hundred years of wars hundreds of years ago, so our inner treaty might end the Three Thousand Years War that we have been fighting against ourselves in sexual isolation. The principle would be the same in both cases, which you had termed, the Principle of the Advantage of the Other.

"Can you imagine, Peter, if the idea ever takes hold in society that sex is for giving, for giving pleasure to another, the pleasure of intimacy, a touch of what is good and what enriches another's life with care and joy, that single realization could revolutionize the world in all other respects as well? We would wake up in the light of it and find our nuclear bombs disgusting one day, which we have built by the tens of thousands to kill one-another, and the wars and misery that we inflict on one-another without them already. Maybe I had sensed a bit of that light in my dream world of careless living that I 'knew' wasn't real but had pretended to be so. Maybe I had touched on something that actually is real. Now you are telling me that it probably was a foretaste of what is ultimately real. For that, Peter, I must thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope that my acknowledgement of it will bring you joy.

"But Peter, what happened to all those daring dreams in which one is free, even those that didn't come true? Why did we let them die? Why have they all turned into fear, so that even your honest and gentle offer couldn't be embraced by me?

"Maybe if we have had those beaches in Russia that you had talked about, the nudist beaches, things might have been different. When you spoke about being there, it seemed unbelievably daring. Of course, Kiev has beaches too, and Ukrainian men are famous as lovers. They appreciate beauty and are proud of it. On summer Sundays you can easily find a half a million people on the beaches along the river, and us girls enticing them in tiny bikinis. Did you know that Kiev has probably more accessible beaches then any other city in the world? The beaches are all strung along the Dnieper River and on some of the islands in the river. Every Sunday in summer the subway trains are packed full all the way to the Hydropark station. It's a great deal of fun, you know, being engulfed in such a huge crowd like the one that always assembled at the park along the river on sunny weekends. Sunbathing was popular then, and probably still is. Even the chess players came out in great numbers to take in the sunshine; bare-chested men in bathing trunks, some playing against alarm clocks to sharpen their wits, or others who were immovable in thought, were playing against the calendar so it seemed, with moves so rare that a time-lapse camera would have been required to register motion.

"Oh God what happened to those days, Peter? Life was like a dance then even though it was still just a game of pretending. I had a grand time in this pretending. It became a time of dynamic living, even without the intimate sharing that I had no access to in my hiding away from the world. I had been enjoying my hidden secret places as a substitute, at the far reaches of the forest by the riverbank, and in the wild places across the river where I felt free exploring the glen by the ravines and many other clean places that I delighted in. The carefree 'dancing' of those days had been interrupted later by all the things that crowded in on me when I had to face the real world that my pretending had kept me safely hidden from in my isolation. But, Peter, those earlier days of 'dancing' in the free air came back to me when we 'danced' together on your 'mountain' as it were, where we were free without any pretending. We were free at least for a while when you and I were meeting high up on the tower in Moscow exploring the world together to discover the dimensions of real freedom. Yes, we were 'dancing' in your glen that you had invited me into, and in your secret places that the world hadn't discovered yet, places that were magical but real, that were beautiful even without any pretending, though they were agonizing and scary at times. You told me about the worst of the scary nightmares in the political world, the agonizing realities that paled any pain that I had suffered before, but you told their story in such a way that the love that you also spoke about stood out brighter so that all the ugly things lost their terror even without any pretending. That, Peter, was real dancing. We were dancing together all night through, and I think that not even you had realized that then, because you kept on asking, come dance with me. Still your wish was fulfilled when we got into some conventional dancing later, when we danced at the Slavyansky Bazaar. Our dancing there became a wonderful experience, even explosive at times, and quite scary as the path ahead was suddenly blurred by a kiss in the whirlwind. Forgive me for not having recognized what our dancing at the Bazaar had actually been a part of, something far greater than just a dance, a new breath of freedom that makes our world not only bright and beautiful, but also more secure.

"I think, when we will meet again, and I hope we do, our new time together will revert back to those days of our 'dancing' and perhaps at the same time leap ahead into profound new areas of liberation, even the universal liberation of both women and men without which no nation's liberty is complete, if indeed liberty has any meaning without it. Thus, my dear and precious, Peter, my precious diamond in the sky, I am indeed glad that we met. Please think of me now and then, and never forget the wonders with which we had hoped to enrich one-another's life and had not been able to fulfill our dream as fully as we might have. Still, I feel infinitely richer for the glowing regards that we still have for each other and for the bright promise they hold.

"With all my love, sincerely, (signed,) Anton."

I showed the letter to Ushi. Without Ushi's help during our nights in Moscow when we spoke about the oneness of all being, most of what Anton and I had shared would not have been possible.

Ushi smiled as she read the letter. "Can you give me a copy of this?" she said when she finished reading it and was folding it up.

I shook my head.

"Not even with Antonovna's permission?" she said. "I have her permission, you know. Do I have yours too?"