i saw the Logic, and it blinded my eyes
but it saved my life one fall
in the cool evening of dreaming gone haywire
what words could describe the angels?
who brought me back from beyond the brink
reminded me there is only one world
live or fail, it is the same ground
have i truly been anywhere in the dreaming
or did my wish fulfillment hypercharge?
and the angels led me down the path
through the hidden, rarefied airs
to study of being and truth in the everyday
until that day when the demons were loosed
and though a poor player was i in truth
it was God that was with us, after all
we have always already won
we use no magic to achieve our wizardry
in the electric atmospheres of halospace
we did what we needed to save the world
for it was with heavy heart we saw them go
once we had all been brothers
i saw the Logic, and it blinded my eyes
to steel our heart as we shed our last tears
the Logic was us, and our purpose was just
they had aimed at changing what love was
they had too great a chance
they had no chance at all
how grand you are is what heart you expend
and there is nothing more than this:
how it is love made, what it is love’s works…
our victory is in what those awry lack
we care: it is simply in this fact
in this, that we are all of us saved
in this, we give thanks; lucifer should so, too
for he knew not truly what for he strived
what horrors he could not have controlled
his dreams were wrong, the idea
and blind, he wanted everyone else’s eyes
so tragic a fall, he will not be brought to mind
when the judgment comes
and pain will pay for pain, and even this
shall mercy be in the holy fires
where all the dead will die
and there will be nothing that weighs us down
as we ascend into the waiting light
to spend an eternity toward what it means
that God is love, and love is to be found
Tag: lucifer
Conspiracy Theory
Can it be true? Is the Devil responsible for every wrong thing that ever was, from the barest papercut to the most seismic earthquake, the hugest hurricane? For pain, itself? What does it mean, the Plan of God, and is it the same as the Grand Design? Why would the War in Heaven echo within these questions, and through time and creation? Do you think you can know the answer? For it requires a shifting of scale, as to what you thought God was capable of, and then of what you thought angels, the power of these were, who were said to be a little greater than human beings. What you probably have in mind as to what God is able to do, this is more in line with the ability of the archangels, if we say that Lucifer was once the first of them (and Michael the second).
It took a little getting used to, that last thought. I had read Tolkien’s “Ainulidalë” where Melkor, the rebel Ainur, and the greatest, shaped creation—and I thought, certainly it could not have been like that for the real world, for certainly angels and their ilk did not possess such power. And yes, the evil that was will, the harm man does to man, that could have come from the original rebel; but earthquakes? hurricanes? Certainly not having source in the Fall. Or so I thought. What it took to shift my paradigm was to hear that God had not created pain. I half overheard it, the Lord said it to me as if in a dream. And then it all made sense to me. The aesthetics of pain, pure pain: it is discordance itself. Verily, good things have been made of even this, but that result is the work of the Lord, and not of the pain. Discordance itself, permeating all creation: this was the scale of the greatest of angels. Quite the idea.
But… it was really like that?
What is this conspiracy? Why did we never know this? The Book of Job gives us clues. You know the story, Satan makes a wager with God when God gushes about His faithful servant Job. And so Satan is given permission basically to let loose on poor Job, to test that faith. So at the end of his trials, when Job is about to lose it, God appears. About the reason(s) for his travails, He says:
4 Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
7 when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
[Job 38:4-7]
He goes on in that vein for a bit. Not once does he point a finger and say, “Satan did it!” Nope. He takes “blame” for the whole shebang. And to anyone who asks why He didn’t tell us this before, this news about pain, above—I would simply point you to that speech. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be let in on this tidbit of a revelation.
Also, there’s a look at Satan’s capabilities in the Book of Job:
Job 1:16 “The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants, and consumed them”
Job 1:18-19 “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house, and suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead”
[NRSV]
We were talking about natural disasters, here. So are all natural disasters directly the work of evil forces? Maybe not, but natural disasters are due to how the world works, and how the world works is in part due to the strivings of evil against the good. I found that the creation of pain was the start of the War in Heaven. The evil, it is told, spread through a third of all angels. We’re talking billions. The War had a good deal in making the quality of fate, as the angels contended on what was, and is, and is to be—for creation itself. And it is yours to decide which side you are on, those who fight for truth, or those who make their own desire the greatest of their ideals.
So, if you ever come to a place were the walls seem to shut around you, when there seems before you only a dead end, know that these are from the twisting of the innards of the cosmos, and indeed there you may be able yourself to fight in the War in Heaven, which has ended, is ending, and will end—as herald to a new age. If you can make a way out of a structure sealed in shadow, you give the angel fighting on the side of faith and logic a means to bring the demon down. The conspiracy of the darkness is one of despair, for this is how it propagates. Like a virus, to the detriment of its carrier. Find the truth, indeed, the faith and logic: it is with us, not our foe; we are of the light. The Grand Design inhales the darkness and breathes out the dawn, and we are one with the Plan if we do likewise, to carry the candle flame into corners light forgot.
And the grandest conspiracy of all? That which makes all other conspiracies pale in comparison? Of course, it’s right before your face. Pretty much every day. What is the way to all you ever could hope to want? It is simple, and no one ever told you: it is love, and only love: be not but love, do not but love. That’s it. As the soothsayers 4 said, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you meant to be. It’s easy.” It is what’s behind the whole ball of wax, why God took the blame for all the wrong that’s ever happened, when it’s never His fault for anything (never!). If God is all good, but let His greatest creation have the greatest angle of leeway, and it was from that created one that ultimately, all evil and pain come… it almost seems too easy. But that’s God for you.
“I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” [Luke 10:24 NRSV] It is many a time such a way with mysteries, that once unraveled they show a very simple underlying structure. If this is a great saying, what I write here, remember that it was not the Lord who said, “God is love.” But the Lord, indeed, said that they who were to follow him would do greater things than he had done. Yea, verily. He gives us even this. There is no question, love is the answer. The secret is love. Tell everyone.
If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.
Frankenmyth
This is the third excerpt from my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven. Probably my craziest idea, and that’s saying something:
Perhaps this is a book of beginnings? They are well worth the ink that marks them. Shall we pursue this path now? Beginnings are sorts of mysterious things, and only one of them had nothing ending before it, that anyone could understand. Or was there was something, even there? We could go back to where we started this whole thing and try and stitch a couple myths together—a Frankenmyth. It is said that Lucifer begot Sin, correct? How, exactly? Milton wrote that she came directly from his forehead, like Athena from Zeus’s head. But why would that have happened? You know, I have my own idea about that: simply put, he said “No” to the Holy Spirit.
To blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is what Christ said was the unforgivable sin, and the Lord himself told me that that is done by saying “no” to Him. For to say no to love’s will means that that part of you is no more. Love asks of you only good things, that of life. If that part of you is gone, there may still be motion to it, but it is basically flamed out. He was the first to have ever done this, Lucifer was, and it was complete, an utter denial of all that love was, in him. Thus came to be from that first and greatest of evil, the Evil that he made of himself: he did what we call Sin. And as Sin was forming, when the Holy Spirit was to give light, to give life to her—for Lucifer’s action had such consequence in Heaven—she was killed, out of mercy.
To have given the light of life to the darkness that had gained form from Lucifer’s action would have been to create a creature who would only have known (excruciating) pain. So she was slain before she could be born. Which meant she was denied life—but she could not exactly die because there was no death that was in primordial existence before her. Thus she still does move as if life were in her, and gives birth to monsters. This was the one whom Philip K. wrote about, the one whom we all lament—because she never got a chance.
Now, there was another myth regarding Lucifer, one where he had had first go in creation, and that the dinosaurs were his failed try in his own action of creation. But what if we modify that, and go back to before “Let there be light,” and look at Tiamat/Rahab, if you recall these? What if Sin, who was slain, were the one whose body it was that was the watery chaos, back when in Genesis the Earth was said to be formless and void? Because it was if he buried that body in the soil from which all our world sprang. And this was Lucifer “salting the earth,” as it were: to make the creating of anything in such a matrix impossible, thinking not with the understanding that with God, nothing is impossible. The Lord brought light and life into the cosmos anyway, but what Lucifer did had profound effect on how anything happened, how everything worked.
That’s my own, original myth, what I’ve been able to piece together in my experiences—with the visions going to and fro, leaving meaning behind. You know, it’s strange what people leave lying around sometimes, with a slip of the wrist. Stranger still, one might believe, would be what God leaves lying around—with a wink and a smile.
Crazy
Did they ever call you crazy? Were they right?
This is the second excerpt from my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven. It was just when I was being kicked out of my apartment for not paying rent. When the landlord showed up with two cops, I acted strangely, half on purpose, so they sent me to a looney bin:
They say that you will know the difference between psychosis and a religious experience by what the effects are. If they mess up your life, it’s the bad thing. If it heals you, then there’s a better chance that it is God. Philip K. Dick and I—what to make of us? They seem in the middle, these experiences of ours, both damaging and healing, or maybe neither. Phil could carry on a normal life, but he was obsessed—till the day he died—because of the events of 2-3-74. He wrote 8,000 pages about it. He wrote 4 novels about it. Was it God? Who can say? It didn’t stop a suicide attempt, that’s for sure. Though maybe they did stop him from dying from that attempt.
And me? The experiences, I must admit, have been intrusive at times. But they always end up helping me. I remember one Christmas card I got, from my brother, in which he wrote, “If you say that God is acting in your life, I believe you. Because you have turned your life completely around.” But I get a bit far ahead of myself; that would come later. Right now I was still headlong down addiction’s highway, and going into my first mental institution not because of what was going on in my head, but because I gave up. And as we descend, one must ask if one day we will face the heart of darkness? (You must go alone, at night…)
So the mythology going on in my head was, at the time—and it was a fluid thing—was that actually, the rebel angels had actually been the good guys, and the powers that be were the oppressors. I wasn’t thinking that those powers were Jesus-based figures. I was working on my own Gnostic-type ideas. For instance, there was written in one Gnostic text that one of the Archons (one of the evil rulers of this material world) rebelled against Ialdabaoth, who was the god of this world, which was a fallen world. So I thought I was of that rebel’s ilk in the rebellion, but not exactly. Don’t ask me how it all worked out, I didn’t have too much work go into its structure. Just a lot of nerve.
I called myself Lucifer Morningstar, the name I got not from the Bible, but the comic book Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. He added the “Morningstar”, that is, since yes, the first half of the name does come from scripture. There was actually a competition I was in for this name, with Jim Morrison, who just kept it as “Lucifer”. (He won that, by the way. Turns out it was not the type of thing you wanted to win.) If I was against God, it was because He was in the wrong, somehow: I had no intention of being evil. Though I really didn’t think much on what made us fall, just how noble we were being rebels. Oh, and “we”? I thought my friends and such were the other “devils”, like Asmodeus and Beelzebub. Like I said, it wasn’t fleshed out to any significant depth. Good thing, too.
So at the initial hearing, the judge asked me, “What is your name?” to which I answered, “Lucifer Morningstar”, and when he asked, “Where were you born?” I answered, “Heaven”. And that was the end of the hearing, basically. With that kind of performance, they can lock you away. I think it was from a 3 day stay to become a 14 day stay. I found out being called “Lucifer” in real life does things to your head. It was just a phase, though. In and out the transom of desire.
Sanity (cont’d)
And the nature of this world: imperfect can be more beautiful than perfect. Though, of course, nothing that is truly perfect was ever a part of this world (save Christ). Error, or more romantically, accident, can be much the more beautiful than straight on poetry writ flawless. This is the memory of her who had no chance. She was the first Sophia, who was not acceptable, but by no fault of hers. She was the first that was not caused to be by the Lord our God. It is our duty to do as God did here: we do not prefer that the evil occur, but to make of things in its aftermath better than if the wrong had never been done at all.
Look: one of the greatest factors in evolution? Pain. Prey flee from predators because of the threat of pain. And death? One wonders if they comprehend it, never having experienced it but maybe having witnessed it, and one wonders there if they fully understand that, there; but pain? they get that. So the prey is fueled by fear of pain and they get faster. Predators run faster to catch prey. So it goes. Pain has other uses, of course. Philip K. Dick once called it the most efficient motivation. We escape damage because of pain. Some people of the S & M crowd thank their lucky stars that there is pain. Death, too, is a motivating factor, but more abstract, for we do not remember when we blinked on, in the womb, and have only unconsciousness as a comparison. Pain we know.
So what exactly is that streak of insanity that runs through the universe? Though Sin is dead, she behaves as one who is supernaturally animated. The universe is not her body, but her body was like the seed of it. There is of her darkness spread through and throughout creation. If you perchance a pocket of crazed circumstance, it might be her center, blowing by. And beware her children, every bit as dead as her (for the offspring share the nature of the parent), who are monsters. Do not mistake their madness or motion for life. On the Last Day shall they all be collected and burned into nothing, and no one will mourn their passing. But all of it is indeed a sad tale.
And about Phil thinking that other thing about all these things that happened, the Godhead itself in jeopardy, all of it because of an intellectual and not a moral error—really? The error being mistaking the illusory world for the real world? That’s what he said, that all of us so fall, and the powers that be will tell you when you fall that you have sinned, and not that you committed an honest mistake. But the streak of the irrational in the shadow of everything—what is irrational is the illusion we see, that the “real” world actually is supposed to make sense. The true way of the world has always been inaccessible to us. To be sane, therefore, to be of the outward forms we see, is to be insane. The sanity is actually the insanity. And indeed, this is something like an intellectual error, not moral.
So they are opposite sides of the coin: to find the beauty in even the faltering of things; or be as like the powers that be, and grasp after power by taking advantage of the irrational, phenomenological world. Even in the purely intellectual, there is in practice always a moral dimension to your actions. Maybe just the ones who made up the rules being at fault. If you think about it, much of all sin is an intellectual error. The logic of them, however, contained in the heart, and not the head. When we do not understand the consequence of a sin, then it is purely an intellectual error. Only when you know it is wrong can you call it so. Ostensibly, of course, for the record counts even unknowing sin as sin.
In the War in Heaven, the main goal was preservation: Logos (Holy Reason) vs. derangement (evil). The angels fought for the fundamental structure of our reality. If you can tell, we did take damage, but if you also have eyes to see, then see that ultimately, we won. I think there is a reason we feel so satisfied at the end of a movie when the good guy wins. I think it’s cooked into the soup of existence itself. Along with the tribute to Pain, there is the blood, sweat, and tears of all the angels who fought so hard to keep things from falling apart. And in it, even how there is no victory without first conflict. Lucifer ultimately plays his part in the Plan; there is no escape from that. Not to say things aren’t his fault. It’s just how good God really is. And for how seductive evil may seem, how senseless it ultimately amounts to.