baboe. No longer old and bent, but young and beautiful. She took him in her arms and kissed his forehead.
Joop woke to the sound of birds chirping. He was lying on long grass in a forest clearing, under a tree with white blossoms. A bird of paradise peered at him curiously from a branch. It was cloudy but pleasantly warm. He carefully rolled onto his side. Next to him was a tortoise, slowly winking at him. , he thought. He pinched his arm. He stood up and looked around. A paradisiacal forest, with animals everywhere, paying him no mind.
Tap! … Tap! … Taptap!
From the left, the sound of someone striking two stones together came from the forest. , Joop thought, chuckling. The tapping stopped.
Moments later, a young man with Korean features stepped out from the forest edge. He wore dazzling white clothes styled like a military uniform from the Japanese occupation era. He had laughing lines around his eyes and looked at Joop with amusement. “Hello, kid,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Joop looked at him, puzzled. The figure seemed friendly, but he was certainly not the angel described in near-death experience books, nor a loved one or family member. “Do I know you?”
“Maybe you don’t remember me, but I sure remember you! I nearly fell off the watchtower laughing when you dove into the poop ditch.”
Suddenly, Joop recognized him. “You’re a guard from the concentration camp!”
The Korean extended his hand. “I’m Ini.”
Joop took it and shook it thoughtfully. “Joop.”
“Do you hate me, Joop?”
“I used to. But now? I haven’t been able to hate for years. You know, I cried at least three hundred times in that camp and laughed only three times. I only remember one of the times I cried, but I remember every time I laughed—and one of those was because of you! I was squatting, and my pants fell into the ditch. I only had one pair, so I had to get them back. I dove in after them. I was halfway under the barbed wire when I grabbed them. I thought, . But you spared my life,” Joop said, roaring with laughter.
“Yeah,” said Ini, “and that’s why I’m here now. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
“Tell me, where are we? Is this heaven?”
“Sort of,” Ini replied. “But not the heaven of Christians or Muslims. No wings and harps, no virgins or rivers of wine. It’s not just humans here, there are beings from other planets too. You’ll meet them. And there are locals. We call them angels, but they don’t have wings. Angels are kind, but we mostly leave each other alone. We call this place Paradise. You can eat all the fruit, and the water from the streams tastes amazing. But it’s not a pleasure garden. Everyone here made mistakes in life. This place is like psychotherapy—one that actually works. We, the dead, help each other by sharing our lives. Feel how talking about your dive affected your mood. When we share memories, we recall what we did, but we also feel what we did to others—both the bad and the good. There aren’t many of us here, so we think there are other places for less pleasant people. You know it when someone important to you arrives. It’s a feeling. You, you’re important to me. You changed my life. If I help you settle in, we’ll go to the angels together, and then I can move on to my next life.”
Joop opened his mouth to speak, but Ini raised a hand to stop him.
“Hold off on questions. I’ve got a lot more to explain.”
“Okay.” “I was a soldier. As a Korean in the Japanese army, I was just a grunt. But they let us guard the
[Dutch] prisoners, and we could ‘use’ your women. The fancy white ladies would spread their legs for a guava, a few cigarettes, or a stick of satay. I’m no Buddha—I’m not even a good person. I shot people. I watched and laughed when they tied an English soldier to a pole by the railway, with a young bamboo shoot between his buttocks. After a week, the bamboo had grown through him. He cried but never screamed. Every time I tell this story, I feel his pain. I’ve told it so many times now that I don’t just feel his pain—I feel how he prayed for us, how he tried to forgive us. I haven’t found him here. He was a better man than me and has probably moved on to his next incarnation. You’re different from that Englishman: you’re my good deed. Your dive into the muck opened my eyes. I was supposed to shoot you, but I didn’t. Because I laughed so hard at your foolish act, I’m here. Instead of in hell. After the war, I became a monk to atone for my life. Because of you, I earned Paradise, so now I want to help you.”
Ini stood up. “I was starting a fire for the night. Want to come?”
Joop followed him to another clearing in the forest. Animal sounds filled the air. Ini knelt by a small circle of stones with a bundle of hay in the center and began striking two flints together. Joop leaned against an ancient tree.
“Start with some happy memories,” Ini said.
“Did you know I was adopted by a giant redwood?” Joop began. “I was in Yosemite Park, where they have those enormous trees. The biggest was 110 meters tall. One had a hollow I fit perfectly into. On a whim, I climbed inside and asked, ‘You’re two thousand years old—how’s that feel?’ And I actually got an answer. How about that? Not in words, but in images. I saw myself from the inside, all red. That’s not so strange—blood’s red, and so is a redwood inside. I saw all sorts of images—it was an incredible experience. Years later, in Wales, I wanted to see a thousand-year-old oak. But somehow, I couldn’t get to it. It just wasn’t meant to be. The redwood didn’t approve!”
As he spoke, Joop relived the experience. As a young man, he’d missed much of its mystical meaning, but now he felt the spirituality and timeless personality of the ancient sequoia. He relived the memory, this time also from the tree’s perspective: a small human seeking refuge in its hollow, asking for insight. The tree gave what it could. And yes, there was a hint of jealousy when he mentioned the oak.
“Everything has consciousness,” Ini said, “even a tree. That’s why I only eat fruit. If you kill an animal or uproot a plant, you feel exactly what they felt. Sometimes, if someone really needs it, an animal or plant sacrifices itself for you—that feels good. But usually, we stick to fruit that’s fallen to the ground. Some fruit even ferments in your stomach. It makes you happy, but you can’t eat enough to get too drunk, so no hangovers.”
“I was an alcoholic,” Joop said. “My first wife couldn’t handle it. She’d curse me out, telling me what a terrible person I was. She didn’t need to tell me—I knew. But my current wife got me off the bottle. Know how she did it? By doing nothing! One time, I was so drunk I fell face-first out of my chair. Know what she did? Put a pillow under my head and a blanket over me. She said, ‘I’ll see you later…’ Since that night, I haven’t touched a drop.”
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As he spoke, he felt what his alcoholism had done to his first wife—the pain he caused, her worry every night he was at the bar. He felt how his children missed him, how scared they were when he fought with their mother. He started to cry.
“That hurts, doesn’t it?” Ini put an arm around Joop and held him for a long time. When Joop finally calmed down, Ini said, “That’s why we start with the happy stories. What’s the best moment of your life?”
“Meeting my girl. It’s a funny story. After I retired, I wanted to go to Peru. I’d been there for work years before and loved it! It was like Indonesia thirty years earlier—such friendly people, such a beautiful country! But in Peru, everyone dances, and I couldn’t dance. So I took dance lessons. And there she was. The third time I got her as a partner, I knew: she’s the one! I had to make an effort for her. I pulled out all the stops. That was forty years ago, and believe it or not, I’m still as in love as I was that first day.”
It started to rain. Joop stood up and plucked a large leaf from a tree. “Want one?”
“Nah, I don’t mind a little rain,” Ini said.
Joop sat back down, placing the leaf on his head like a hat. “You know what else she helped me with? She took me to an open house at the Rosicrucians. I’d never heard of them, but once I was there, it spoke to me immediately. After my girl, they are the best thing that ever happened to me. There, I learned to turn lead into gold—not literally, of course. Alchemy is spiritual work. You try to transform your negative traits into positive ones. Replace social anxiety with kindness, intolerance with curiosity. You drive out hate with love.”
“How did you stop hating me?” Ini asked.
“I started thinking about hate when I was about fifty. I began rejecting all the kinds of hate I encountered in my life. There were quite a few!”
“Tell me.”
“When I was eleven, my mother and I were sent to a Japanese concentration camp. Our house, with everything in it, was left behind. It was looted and then burned down. My father had been imprisoned six months earlier. On my twelfth birthday, they took me away from my mother and sent me to a boys’ camp. A twelve-year-old back then was very different from a twelve-year-old now. I was still a child. My parents and I were in Japanese camps for four years. I didn’t understand why the Japanese hated us so much. But I learned to hate them. After the liberation, we faced the ‘Bersiap,’ the Indonesian independence movement. That was life-threatening too. We were shot at in our house a few times. They hated us too, and I learned to hate them.”
Joop sighed deeply. The memories hurt terribly.
“One of the worst human traits is the ability to harbor hate for others. I looked it up in the dictionary and memorized it. It says hate is ‘a feeling of deep aversion to someone, with a desire for their downfall, whether or not to cause them harm.’ That someone can be an entire people of a different color, an ethnic group, a political party, or a religion. You find hate all over the world, among all kinds of people—descendants of slaves, war victims, former concentration camp prisoners, victims of crimes; in short, anyone who’s been wronged by another. Hate can pass from generation to generation, turning into a feud where people sometimes don’t even know the original cause. Hate comes from anger and the inability to forgive.” He sighed. “This is turning into a lecture. I hope I’m not boring you?”
Ini smiled. “It’s clearly something you care deeply about. No, you’re not boring me at all! Go on.”
“Anger can sometimes be resolved by successful revenge. If there’s no satisfaction after anger, hate arises. On a small scale, it becomes a feud; worse, it becomes war. Hate is a terrible thing and produces nothing good. It’s like a cancer in the mind, and it harms the hater most of all. They destroy themselves without realizing it. The worst part is they don’t even know it.
The person who is hated usually doesn’t notice much unless they’re targeted by expressions of hate. Like when descendants of a people who practiced colonialism or oppressed another country, hear ‘You oppressed us.’ Who are ‘you’ and who are ‘us’? The great-great-grandchildren of the great-great-grandparents of slaves and their owners?
After World War II, hate manifested in many ways. Simon Wiesenthal, a famous Nazi hunter, spent much of his life tracking and prosecuting Nazis. Was he only seeking justice? Or was he also driven by hate?”
“Shouldn’t people or nations who committed crimes against humanity be punished?” Ini asked. “Should we just cover everything with the cloak of love?”
“Of course not. But after punishment, the deed is atoned for. They’ve paid their debt. Besides, punishment should come from an impartial authority, not the victors, or it becomes revenge instead of justice. After punishment, there should be no room for hate.”
“Hate is ineradicable. You treated the Indonesians like slaves, and the people there greeted us as liberators.”
“Many European and Arab nations practiced colonialism in places like Indonesia, India, and various African countries. Colonialism happened in ancient times too—the Romans had slaves. Is there anything new under the sun? Should we punish the Romans now? The first Americans, now great champions of freedom and independence, massacred the Native Americans. Should we hunt down and prosecute Americans too?”
“Many people think so. America, the great Satan… Even today, Americans mistreat Black people and other minorities. Look at the Ku Klux Klan. Did you know the name KKK comes from the sound of cocking a rifle’s bolt?”
“And who should judge them? Where do you draw the line when punishing crimes against humanity? And if punishment is needed, who should carry it out? A nation with no blood on its hands? I challenge you to find one. Shouldn’t we look in the mirror first?”
“What about reparations?”
“Who should pay whom? Can suffering be compensated with money? Does money erase grief?
For an honest person, it’s clear that hate produces nothing good. It solves nothing and primarily harms the hater. The hater poisons themselves. Hate is also a form of weakness. A strong person doesn’t hate—they might get angry, but only temporarily.”
Ini nodded. “How did you get rid of your hate?”
“Meditation. For example, I visualize a vanilla flower, my favorite orchid. I enjoy its beauty and smell for a few minutes. Then I bring to mind the person or thing I hate and turn it into a stone—a heavy stone. I look at the flower again and see its heart open.” Joop stopped talking and looked at Ini. The korean stood there with his eyes closed.
“I pick up the heavy stone and place it in the flower’s open heart. I pull my hands back and watch the flower take the stone and close up, then drift away. The flower, my favorite, takes the hate away. With love. And love conquers all. ‘Love your enemies.’ Remember?”
Joop stopped talking and looked toward the forest edge.
“I think I hear something!”
“It’s probably an animal,” Ini said. “There’s nothing here to fear. Nothing wants to harm us.”
“That’s good to hear,” came a melodious voice in a language neither spoke but both understood. A tall man with blond hair and a bright white toga stepped from the forest. Joop felt the same wordless awe he’d once felt as a child at Borobudur.
“My name is Solune. I overheard your conversation and grew interested. May my companion and I join you?”
“Of course,” Ini said. “Please, sit. I’d love to offer more than a fire and company, but that’s all we have for now.”
Solune sat on the grass and gestured toward where he’d come from. Moments later, a small figure in medieval-style armor with a large sword appeared. Joop’s jaw dropped. The knight had wings!
“This is Triton,” Solune said, “herald-angel of the seventh circle, with a special mission from the Council. But that might not mean much to you.”
“Welcome, herald,” Ini said. “Please, sit.”
The angel sat with them and raised his visor. The herald looked like a boy of about fifteen, still beardless. He shook out his wings, sending droplets flying.
“I’ve never seen an angel before!” Joop exclaimed. He started to kneel, but Triton stopped him. “Don’t honor me. I’m just a servant.”
