"Where all things for their glory are manifest"

The angels do not reside on a planet like this earth;

But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.

-- D&C 130:6-7

So, Eru-Place.  I have been struggling on this one, mostly because I don't really know enough about it to pretend to say anything intelligently.

I did go back into Doug's writings, or at least the two Kindle books I have, plus some other draft writings that may or may not be part of the 3rd book (I haven't purchased that one).   It is mentioned ~50 times in those writing.  Never in the first book (Words of the Faithful), however.  In the 2nd book, that name as written is mentioned 27 unique times, and it is first stated in writings purported to be from Asenath, as she relates in part things that Eru told her directly while she was living by herself on a small island off of Eressea.

What Eru told her, in those tales, had much to do with our existence before this Earth was created, and includes the notion of this "Eru-Place"  What can be taken from it is hard to tell, as my view of these writings is that they have been both stolen and corrupted, like it seems everything else has at some point. 

So, perhaps think of Eru-Place simply as something that was "Home" to many people before we came here, and is "Home" to far fewer people now, since many/ most/ almost all of those people are here, on the various theaters of this Earth.

My path forward on tying this back to Eowyn, then, is not to try and recreate or guess at what Eru-Place was, but rather to think through why it might have been important for her to have ended up there, at least for a time.

I started this post with an excerpt of some strange writings from Joseph Smith found in D&C 130, which are almost like a collection of some random thoughts about various things.  In those writings, he talks of the place where God (Eru, I am going to assume here) lives, likens it to a sea of glass, and a place where the past, present, and future are all 'continually before the Lord'.

The 'like' here means we are probably dealing with a poetic comparison, and that the globe isn't just one huge chunk of glass set on fire.  Getting to the bottom of that, however, is not my purpose here, but rather the last part of the statement, where "all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord".

In reading this, I realized I actually may have had at least some exposure to Eru-Place in one of my dreams, and that it was likely through the eyes of Eowyn that I would have experienced it (as I have mentioned, at some point I finally realized that many of my dreams are through the eyes or perspective of others).  So, here is the dream, and it is through this dream that I am interpreting the importance, or at least the significance, of Eowyn-Ilmare ending up in Eru-Place sometime between her ascension to Valinor and the present.

In my dream, there is an opening scene where a Being is talking as if in a trance to another Being who is dressed in a robe.  This robed Being has a power about him, and the one talking to him almost seems to be in some kind of forced servitude. 

The first tranced-Being says "As of [a date in May - might have been the 23rd], it is now not possible to avoid the destruction of the moon".  The second robed Being is angry at this news and his eyes begin to glow (Evil beings in my dreams often have these glowing eyes, for whatever reason).

The dream now cuts to a scene on the Moon, where there is a massive Star Wars-type space battle going on - I even see some AT-AT walkers, I believe.  It becomes clear to me that the Good Guys are trying to blow up the moon, while the Bad Guys are trying to prevent this.  Only after waking up later does this seem strange to me (in that, I thought it would have been the other way around).

In the middle of my watching this, I am suddenly pulled into the scene as a man runs up to me, and he looks completely terrible - like he has been through hell, perhaps part of the fighting or something.  He starts yelling at me in almost a desperate way, saying "Where have you been?  Where have you been?".

As he asks me this question, I have the thought of "Yes, where have I been?".  Almost in answer to this and as part of a recollection, I find myself floating off into space, and drifting for some time.  After what seems like a very long time, I finally land on what appears to be another world.  It is hard to describe, but the area I land in is like a space amphitheater, with dark skies and stars all around me, and overhead.  I look into the middle of this 'area' or amphitheater and notice it is something like a screen.  An image appears on the screen:  one single filmstrip, like from a movie reel, running from left to right.  Something like this:

The center picture frame is very clear, and I see some kind of scene in it that I understand is the 'present'.  As I look left or right of this 'present' frame, the picture becomes blurry and darker, and the further away from the 'present' I go, the darker it becomes until after a only a few frames I can't make out anything.  In the frames immediately to the right and left of the center image, however, it is clear enough that I can just make out that these are images before and after that of the center.  Meaning, as I would go to the right, I would go forward in time, and if were to go left, I would see backward.

To represent this crudely, it was something like this, with the positive and negative numbers how far in the future or past, and with the coloring showing the state of clarity of the image that was shown:

So, again, to the immediate sides of the present, I can make out images, once I get to the image represented by "2" it is pretty dark, and by 3 and 4, I can't make out anything, really.

In the dream, once I recognize and acknowledge that I am looking at the flow of time and events, and that it is really only the present that I can see clearly, the image is changed.  Now, a new film strip is added above and below the existing one, so that I now see 3 film strips stacked on top of each other.

In these new strips, however, I notice that the frames are shifted from the original.  In the top film strip, what was the "-1", or frame that was immediately to the left of the 'present' frame of the original film strip, is now the center frame, and so is also now 'present' for that film strip.  In its position in the original strip, the "-1" frame was blurry, but still viewable, but now positioned in the the middle of the top strip, it is just as clear as the "0" or present frame immediately below it.

Similarly, for the bottom film strip, the "1" frame is now in the middle of that strip, and is just as clear as the "-1" and "0" strips above it.

Thus, in viewing this stacked film strips, I realize that looking left to right, I can really only see the 'present' image clearly (even if that present is the past, if that makes sense), but if I look vertically instead (down or up, it doesn't matter), I can now see one frame into the future and one frame into the past just as clearly as I see the 'present'.  Here is a representation of what this kind of looked like in my dream (again, the numbers are representative of actual images or scenes I saw, and just indicates sequence):

Once I understood that in looking vertically I could see part of the past and future (in terms of sequence of events) as clearly as I could see the 'present', in that that all three of those images were 'present', the image then changed again, or at least zoomed out, so that now rather than just 3 stacked film strips, there were many, many strips extending as far as I could see both up and down.  Taking out the sequence numbers (because you get the idea by now, and it would be a lot of work for me to update!), it was something like this:

As the image shifted out to capture so many rows of strips, by this time it was natural to look at them in a vertical fashion, but also I was also able to 'see' them all at the same time, meaning I wasn't going up and down with my eyes, but took in that entire center column at once.  In doing so, it gave me a sense of extreme vertigo, and I remember the sensation not being fully comfortable.  I had the sense that this would pass, either because I would not have to look at things in this way for long, or that I would get used to it.  It is also hard to tell for sure whether the sensation was just me (as in, me the observer seeing this through another's eyes and getting dizzy from it), or this was reflective of Eowyn's experience.  Given the fact that likely much of this construct was put together to help me, the dream observer looking through her eyes and understand the experience, my guess is that the vertigo came from me, but I don't know for sure.  

The experience in the space amphitheater ended, and I came back to myself on this moon scene with the battle still raging and the man who had run up to me and yelled "Where have you been?".  I took this man to a nearby ship, and we took off just as the Good Guys succeeded in blowing up the moon - so a dramatic escape, kind of like in Return of the Jedi where Lando flies the Millenium Falcon out of the inside of Death Star #2 as its blowing up.

There is another scene to this dream, that I view as seen now from my perspective (whereas all this above, again, I think is from Eowyn's perspective, symbolically seen by me, the dreamer), but before getting there, I will just summarize a few things here.

There was a lot of strange imagery in this dream, and I was confused on it for quite some time.  I had it back in 2021, and things were just confusing to me in general at that point.  However, I now view this as an answer to at least some of the riddle to where she has been, and what happened.

When asked "Where have you been?", she recalled that she had been somewhere else, seemingly far away, and on this place she had seen past, present, and future things and events, just as Joseph Smith wrote in D&C 130 happens when angels reside on the globe where God lives.  It may be that Eowyn took up residence there for a time and saw many things, and that this place is what we would call "Eru-Place".

This, if true, should give us some measure of hope.  I have written that Saruman, by nature of who he is, his access to Stones in the past, and the fact that he has been around for a long time, knows quite a lot, and has some considerable power.  Additionally, Ungoliant has cast many important things that we should know into the void and darkness, and left us fairly powerless.  And there are all manner of other Evil Beings (another glance at you, Brigham) scheming, both on this world and others.

I have written of waiting for a Stone which will help to counteract both of those sad facts, but while we wait, we also have Good Beings that are on our side, who are more powerful than our enemies.  As much as Saruman knows, Eowyn knows more, and she has seen a Light that extends beyond the reach of even Ungoliant's dark webs.  So, our wait can be a hopeful one, I think.

The dream ended with a scene from my own perspective (I believe), and it actually ties a bit to WJT's own realization in his post "The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist" about the voices or forces that we choose to invite in to our minds (and resisting inviting in those who would do us harm).

After all of those events, I found myself sitting in something like a large room, with shadowy edges or unclear areas around the fringes where the walls would have been.  A Being of some kind of power that I could sense was standing in that shadowy area.  I could not see him (it felt like a 'him'), but I could sense him there, and also his 'request' or desire to come and join me in the room.  He had some things he wanted to share.

As I sensed all of this, I found myself saying "She has promised me a safe place.  I am in that place right now.  You cannot stay here and must leave."   As soon as I finished saying this, I felt some kind of 'release', and I immediately woke up.

Anyway, there you go.  

Back to the original purpose of the post, it seems that although it isn't quite clear how she ended up there, Eowyn did arrive in Eru-Place for a time and while there saw what Beings who are there see - all things past, present, and future, as it relates to the Story we are involved in currently.  Where she is now, I guess I am back to not knowing.  She might still be there, or has left for other places.  I still believe it is not there in Eru-Place, but in Valinor, specifically Tirion/ Tun, where she will end up with the Ithil Stone, and Faramir will meet up there.  Thus, the two main Holy Places that will be where both restorations and reunion happen, and the main focus of Good's efforts, remain on this 'Earth', in Tirion and Asenath's home on Eressea.

Anyway, all of that writing about seeing things through another's eyes or perspective, as they in turn were seeing things (time, in this case) in completely different perspective, brought a song from the animated movie Brother Bear, of all things, to my mind just now.  The song is called "Look Through My Eyes".