title: The Light at the end of the Tunnel: One theory of reincarnation
author:  James W. Nelson 
description: James W. Nelson was born in a little farmhouse on the prairie in 1944. Some doctors made house calls back in those days. He remembers kerosene lamps, bathing in a large galvanized tub, and their phone number was a long ring followed by four short ones, and everybody else in the neighborhood could rubberneck. (Imagine that today!) James has been telling stories most of his life. Some of his first memories happened during recess in a one-room country schoolhouse. His little friends, eyes wide, would gather round and listen to his every hastily-imagined word. It was a beginning. Fascinated by the world beginning to open, he remembers listening to the teacher read to all twelve kids in the eight grades. He was living in that same house on the land originally homesteaded by his great grandfather, when a savage tornado hit in 1955 and destroyed everything. They rebuilt and his family remained until the early nineteen-seventies when diversified farming began changing to industrial agribusiness (not necessarily a good thing.) He spent four years in the US Navy, worked many jobs and finally has settled on a few acres exactly two and one half miles straight west of the original farmstead, ironically likely the very spot where the 1955 tornado first struck, which sometimes gives him a spooky feeling.
zlib_text: ## Prologue
  
  
  ### SEVEN DAYS AGO
  
  
  The world receded behind an infinite vista of radiant white, until all that
  remained was the beating of his heart-the steady rhythm that kept him anchored
  to his life on the linear plane. He found his hand, long brown fingers flexing
  above his open palm, just as he had done during his original encounter with
  the Prophets. And like that first time, he came to understand that he was not
  alone.
  
  
  But he had intuited from the start that this was not to be another meeting
  with the wormhole entities. His sudden need to experience the Orb that had
  guided him here had come from his vague sense of a different sort of
  connection, one deep in the center of his being…something that transcended
  even the most intimate relationships of his linear life. As his awareness
  continued to spread outward, he started to recognize those who were already
  assembled here: seven others who had, like him, been drawn by necessity to
  this place that was not a place, at a time when t