Visiting New York City last summer, Neville went to call on the metaphysical bookstore where he had long bought books from a woman named Mary, only to be told by a friend that Mary had been struck by a car and killed a month earlier; she had never been interested in what his books contained and never gave him a chance to tell her what he had experienced.

Neville tells of a morning seven years earlier at El Comino when, after seeing his daughter off to school and reading his Bible, his wife came out at brunch and told him a dream within a dream in which a hand — Death's hand — took hers, and she told Neville she did not want to die but was not afraid, at which the hands disengaged.

Five years earlier, while his daughter was in high school and he had risen early to make her breakfast and lunch and then gone back to his library to read his Bible, his wife slept late and woke from an experience in which her hand was held by the hand of death, with Neville sitting on the bed recognising death intimately; when she said she was not afraid to die but had unfinished business, the hands disengaged.

At the Turf Club last Saturday, where he had been taken with his wife, Neville was introduced to a small odd man from Kentucky who had bought land in Ventura County and slept on the ground with his head to the earth listening for and smelling oil until he brought it in; he is now worth over six million but bored, unwell, and has forgotten the name of God.

Neville notes that at that time his wife was low in spirits and in health and had entertained the thought of leaving this world before long, and that this happened before his own birth from above.

Neville recalls a period some years back when his wife, feeling weak, seriously entertained the idea of dying and made arrangements for the disposal of her effects.

Neville's wife had a vision of a grove with an altar where two women each read from a book of the same title, one according to Judaism and one according to Christianity, and she realised it is far harder to be a Christian than a Jew because the whole thing is psychological.

A long-time friend telephoned Neville on the day of the lecture; his wife answered, and when she said they were pleased with Vicki's report the friend replied that he wished he could say he was pleased about anything of his own — an example of a man stuck in the state of self-pity whom Neville has pulled out countless times.

Neville's wife told him that someone who had come to his meetings asked a teacher in the city what he thought of Blake, and the teacher answered that Blake was mad and insane.