Tag: philip k dick

The Elements

When Easter is over we tend to forget about such things as the Resurrection, or our place in the grand scheme of things, at least until right about Christmas time when our fashion turns to “church chic” again. One reason might simply be that we don’t really understand what is expected of us to do, what it means to do good, what it means to be a child of God. Or even come close to thinking we could serve in the War in Heaven, which has finished, which is finishing, and which will finish. Let’s maybe break it down, because there are lots of theories that can account for basically everything, if in broad strokes. Let’s see if there’s something we can aim for, perhaps not that lofty, something we can live with, if not live by.

We can say there are things one might call wyrds, like words but with a sort of greater meaning to them. “Wyrd” to capture the two words, word and weird, where “weird” is used in its old sense, that of fate. They are of what we call the Logos, which can be said to be the Wyrd of God. All the angels had been given charge of a wyrd, which governed the function of some part of heaven and earth, which is to say that the universe is made of wyrds. They are the way things work. Satan, before he rebelled, was responsible for a wyrd, as were all who rebelled with him. And when they rebelled, each of them tried to destroy their personal wyrds, by attempting to pervert things to the point where they could be rendered meaningless. None of them, thankfully, succeeded. And their wyrds were taken away.

So, if you say that by wyrds being played, it is the universe at work, then it’s all a grand story that is being told. And the formal and otherwise logic of this wyrld (what I call the encompassing of both the seen and unseen worlds) is defined simply as the way things work, the way things function. There are wyrds that govern other wyrds, so that, for instance, “rose” might mean a different thing told in Heaven than told on Earth. One important wyrd, what you might capitalize, is from the beginning: this is the Wyrd of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is as well as being King of us here, is King of all the angels. His Wyrd is the sacred name, “YHVH”. What Philip K. Dick defined as “he who causes to be”. The three parts of the Trinity, in fact, each have their own wyrd.

The Wyrd of the Holy Spirit is not capitalized, for it is “love”. This is the Spirit of God. This is what it means, that God is love. That of God the Father, the En Sof, is “I Am”. Note, here, that we are still talking about one God, and not three. The angels are the embodiments of the one wyrd they were meant to be about, but God is all “I Am” and all “YHVH” and all love. (God is all love: never forget this, for by it is perhaps the best opportunity to comprehend the divine while still on this Earth.) And you may blaspheme against the Father and the Son and be forgiven, but one who blasphemes against the Spirit shall not be forgiven, in this world or the next. That would be saying “no” to love that is true, for as we are made in the image of love, we are denying that part of us that the Spirit asks, and that part of us dies. This is sin.

As the cosmos, all creation, can be said to be made of wyrds, the stories being told are the structures that hold them in place as experiences: the universe exists as all the stories being told that came to be because God and then you made the choices you did. Things that happen, if they carry a logical skein from a beginning to an end—of course these are stories, but the physical, the real things that exist are no more than information themselves. [Philip K. Dick] And when we say, unequivocally, the best story wins (this is a truth), it is not just to say some representation of material things tied together with added meaning wins, not something that needs to be written down: we are talking about that the things themselves having a meaning, and no translation is needed between the symbols and their reality. That all things are wyrd and story are a way of seeing how the universe actually works.

Now, one need not work in terms of good and evil to know which plot to follow; I once thought to put it as anima vs. entropy: life vs. decay. Good and evil, these are well known terms, though. Or are they? The side of good, of life and love, is not always to be a part of the well established virtues; nor is it always to be a rebel against the monolithic structures that oppress us. It is both much more complicated that that, and ultimately simpler. There is a narrow way that preserves logic and is also in accordance with the heart. Our stories are different from theirs, good vs. evil, for theirs lack both logic and heart—seeking only power at any cost. I admit that evil mystifies me at times, but if there is any understanding of it, it is in the seeking of power. And anyone and anything is to be used and spent in trying to get it.

So it is that theirs is an awful story, to say if you count them all as seeking the same thing as everyone on their side, it is actually umpteen billion different things. Completely the opposite of good, where all the differences coalesce into the greater fortune. Ours is like the music of the Ainur in the “Ainulindalë”, all different tunes in concert to bring about the will of the Creator. Just that instead of music, that we use the wyrds to tell a story. And the outcome is already destined, simply: the best story wins. It is intrinsic to the nature of creation. What is best? That which outperforms the rest, of course. Which is not to say that it’s all a cakewalk, for evil, when it does gain power, will harshly undermine what is of light and truth: the light and the truth, by which we write our own stories.

The narrow way, of satisfying competing goals: this is what is often the path of the right thing to do. One understands that many of what needs to be accomplished is far easier said than done. And in the simplest of terms, what is the way that one must go? Do do all things out of love. All things. When you have eyes to see, these things are clear as winter air, the way we must choose to go if we truly call ourselves the children of God. Pray for courage and wisdom on your way through this life, and may you not have one without the other. The wyrld is what Walt Whitman called the Powerful Play, in which all of us may contribute a verse. I say it is we who each write a wyrd in the Greatest Story Ever Told—do you understand? Jesus Christ may be its beginning and its end, but the middle? That’s all of us!



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

The Beginning Is Near

It was told that there was a certain small thing, a yellow dot, floating just inside the fringes of perception. It was said that to look at it, to see it, if even it were a barely conscious perception, one would be given the keys to the Kingdom of God by that glance. More powerful than the hammer of Thor, and more precious, it would need to elude the wrong pair of eyes. For if known to the right evil entity, it would mean an eternity of horror, on a scale beyond imagining, for all humankind; for all the world; for all worlds yet to be. Was it true that the Lord Jesus Christ, in his voyage between his death and his resurrection, left it in his wake, to let it drift in the ether? Were there actually people on the lookout for this phenomenon, scattered through the real world—or was that secret sect only a product of fevered minds, with eyes halfway in the halospace?

Symbols can do things in the name of the thing they represent. As in, a signature can be the extension of the power of someone, in lieu of their actual physical presence, to give orders (for instance). Of course, if the party on the other side has no idea who that person is, that signature may not have as much power as one might hope, depending on circumstances. What if a signature existed in the most minimal of forms, that of a solitary dot, which had a certain color to distinguish it from other like dots? If most people saw it, it would be as if they knew not at all who signed it or that even it were a signature at all. But if they knew what it was, if they found out, they could use the authority to terrible ends—if the authority were such like an angel of the Lord might have. Perhaps even worse? They say in the Bible an angel killed 180,000 soldiers in one night…

There is more to the myth: for one, an extension to the yellow dot. If indeed it met the right eyes, word would be spread in codified format, something that was whispered to mine own self, near the beginning of my involvement in all this. Among the secret Christians, it would be plain, the same secret Christians Philip K. Dick believed contacted him at the start of his own adventure. I believe all the mysteries of the universe can be summed up in that saying, that word to be spread, if you know exactly what it means: “Walt Disney is God.” And no, it was not meant to be taken literally, but if the yellow dot were perceived, it was salvation for us all—to enter into a new age, where everything was light. That was the pivot of that sentence, “light”. As Disney stuff, “light” was in the sense of not ponderous, entertaining; and then “light” on the flipside of the coin meant like “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness”. And as I said, it was whispered to me those years back: Walt Disney is God. We were saved.

It was of course Philip K. Dick who had perceived the dot. He wasn’t even consciously aware that he had seen it. It was hidden away, tucked into his translation of saying #77 of the Gospel of Thomas: “Split a piece of wood and I am there.” (Jesus Christ was saying this.) There was a little danger that Hitler would see this dot, for that phrase was discovered before the translation that Phil read, back around the turn of the 20th century—but it was by Englishmen, who apparently never translated it into German. It was only fragments of Thomas that had been found then. At the time I had joined, there appeared to be at least some segments who had not known that it had been found; it was still going around that Walt Disney was God. And then, there seemed to be a rumor about other dots, most notoriously, a black dot: the consequences of its discovery was supposedly terrifying to conceive.

Turned out, though, it was not so bad as all that. There were three other dots, four in total, and we discovered the meaning to them all:

  1. yellow: the Knowledge, this being the key to everything
  2. white: the Power, which actually without Knowledge, was not as great as you’d think
  3. purple: the Certainty, which guaranteed victory
  4. black: the Mystery, not so scary after all, but which in some sense contained the inklings of the other 3

They represented the four pillars of creation. And yes, they’ve all been found. By the good guys.

It is so then that I bring you (some more) Good News! Satan has been defeated, on Earth and in Heaven, on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the good arm of the Archangel Michael, and the Age of Gold enters the stream of time. Hearken: the Beginning is near! And you are given this news because it has been accomplished: the breaking of the ground for the New Heaven, and the New Earth, which has taken as much time as Our Lord was in the earth between his death and resurrection: two days. In God time. In human time, 2000 years. In forty days more, thus it shall be that the course of the world will be completed, and then, the Lord shall return, in the manner that he left: via the sky. What did it matter, the dot that was perceived? The Knowledge was a memory: not just of the past, but of the future. And without this memory, nothing was real. Everything was baseless. Without memory, lies have all the power. But fear not. Join, instead, with all that is good and true. There is a light. Try and walk in it.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

Enlist

It is somewhere in Christian writing; it might even be in the Bible, I’m not sure. The text says that there are people who do good and are saints in their own right, except they do not know God, or Jesus. That they are naturally this way, not needing to be prodded by the Lord to do what is good. I wonder how many Christians know about this. There was sort of an uproar when one church had on their outdoor sign, better a virtuous atheist than a bad Christian. And the uproar was quite enlightening. It is a wonder how few “Christians” actually read the Bible, for surely it would be remembered what Jesus said, “Why call ye me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not the things I say?” And I tell you this, surely it will be the virtuous atheist that will be saved, and not the bad Christian. Once again, the Bible makes it clear, that it will not be the one who “did mighty works in [Christ’s] name”, but they who fed him when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, who did it for the least of them and so did it for the Lord.

And so it is with the War in Heaven. There are people who fight on the side of right, and most who do so have not an inkling they struggle with us in the War. The highest halls of power are being converted, even as we speak, from the grip of the Age of Iron into the halls of the Age of Gold. One must realize that we make the new Age using the implements of the old, as we invent things from the elements of what has already been formed. The Age of Iron will fight to keep a hold of power, for this is its nature, almost the entire purpose for its existence. Augustine said that one sure indicator of a lost soul is sexual immorality; I disagree. One sure indicator of one lost to evil is the lust for power. You can spot one who is in power, whether he is for the right or the wrong simply by seeing whether his actions are meant to make all of us equal, rather than to put one sort of people in greater precedence to another. Especially if there is no rational basis for that precedence.

The Empire is ending. The Empire has ended. The Empire will end. That is in the language of Eternity. And one from Philip K. Dick: “We have always already won.” Amen, brother. Some in power deceive the people, for they say they side on the cause of morality, of old school values; they say they want to give you back the world as it used to be, when it was simpler and things made sense. They say these things so that they can make money from those who are deceived, and so those people act against their own interests because the deceivers prey upon their pride and their fear. They listen not to the ones that can help them, because they believe that those sort have morals that are “loose.” And things are going to get worse before they get better. But they will indeed get better. For I tell you, the Beginning is near. (This comes with a warning, that a prophet’s sense of “close” may not cater much to anyone’s patience.)

What it ends up being about, the whole fight, is whether you are for or against the Logos. It is a Greek word, often translated as “word”, like the beginning of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Greek reads “Logos”, which in actuality is better thought of as “holy reason”. This, in other words, is the logic by which all things must ultimately function: the Logos was God. This is why people so often say there is a reason why things happen as they do (they’re right, but usually for not the specific reason they conclude it is for). So, the side on which, exactly, you are on: how do you act to get what you want? For the ends do not justify the means, especially when the ends themselves are not so noble. What will you shove out of your way to achieve your goal? If you tread on people along your way, you may just come upon opposition by people who believe you are wrong in doing so, and if they stand up and fight, they are indeed on the side of the light in the War in Heaven.

For they will try to ape the Logos, those who desire not the light to shine on their deeds, and concoct a story, a logic to justify them, but what they are peddling instead is derangement. Do not believe anyone who says they are for Christ and are against science. It’s as simple as that. What is transcendent needs no protection from logic. To anyone who puts himself between science and God: you underestimate both of them. Do you seriously not believe the evidence of your own eyes? For such you are when you deny such as evolution or climate change. We understand that you are not scientists, but neither are you priests, and you seem to claim to know something about the faith. And how is it that they have made you hate the poor and make idols of billionaires? “They strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” You would rather squeeze the pennies of aid to the poor to cut countless dollars in taxes for the rich. Because of their story, their “logic”—their derangement.

But everything that is hid shall come to light. If not in this world, the next. And Heaven help you if it is in the next world that your evil is revealed. Those who are of the old age, of priviledge and “divine right” will not give up their grips on power without a struggle. And comes the new age, of pragmatism and fairness, which the world still cannot believe we can ever attain—but I say to you we can. I say to you it comes, not like a storm, but a dewey spring morning. The end of the world is not nigh. We do not count on God to solve our problems in some sort of dramatic and epic cataclysm. The War in Heaven ended—I witnessed Satan cast from Heaven. It is ending, the Age of Iron falling to the Age of Gold. It will end: our job is not done until we are all seen as equal, saint and sinner from the same bowl. It is frightening for those who are invested in the old way. Priviledge dies hard. But we cannot continue to go on as we always have done. History shall bear this out.

They who fight the derangement fights on the side of the Logos: on our side, the good guys. Holy Reason. They who propagate the derangment either knowingly or unknowingly help to spread the Evil. They who fantasize about being a superhero and punching out the bad guy: these are not the ones we are trying to recruit. Christ, instead of conquering the Devil and the world with the power he certainy had, chose instead to go to be flogged and killed in agony; he rather chose to love the world than subjugate it. Because they who would subjugate the world are the ones we are fighting against. Repay not violence with violence. Because to fight the Empire in this way makes you part of the Empire. We must do what is right with reason behind us, not instead to be of brute desire. Not to think that because we are Christians, we must be right: but because we are Christians, we know we are wrong. All of us, sinners. Not a big deal, that, though. Unless, of course, we deny it is true.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

The Black Iron Prison

What is the Black Iron Prison? Philip K. Dick said that the perfect description is that of a timeforsaken place, blending past, present, and future, buildings cast in wicked black—where the “alien” from the sci-fi movies of that name might call home. As for my own vision of it, it was nothing like earth of the waking mind ever was, not at all; my memory of the place was distinctly of an otherworldly landscape. It had a consistent aesthetic, between each time I visited, though I think it may have been that the buildings and such details might have changed between showings. PKD also said that this was the true nature of the world, that we do not perceive the ’Prison has always had us caged within it. Which makes sense, why he thought of it in that light, for he saw it superimposed on our everyday reality. But like I said, I had a different tack: I looked out the window and I didn’t recognize anything, like I had been transported to… well, I wasn’t allowed to think it while I was there: I had been transported to Hell. No other word fits.

Was it just a hallucination? If it were purely one person’s imagination, that doesn’t explain why other people saw some version of it, too. Is it then something like an archetype, something hardwired into the human mind, if not brain—maybe the vision of it is hidden in everyone’s mental structure? Eternity seems to be some factor that is intrinsic in it: past, present, and future as one in the architecture, as Dick noted. I have described this elsewhere, that in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in the third panel, “Hell”, there is in the far back a large building. I was in that building. That was where I was in the ’Prison, that exact place—what Bosch had entitled, “Hell”. If you look closely, too, you will notice that the building is partly in ruins, not a completely concrete object. How about that? It is a ghost building, a building only visible in a nightmare.

What do we make of Hell? Why is it that the world was supposedly locked behind the structures of it, then? As for it being the “bad place” of the afterworld, Hell wasn’t made by God. It is a perverse and twisted place, whose architecture is of pure evil; God has virtually no part in it, except for the fact that it originally was part of Heaven. Called the “ruined part of Heaven”, when Satan was cast from above, the place he and his angels had been residing they tore from greater Heaven and was given to the fallen angels as a separate realm. The reminiscence of Eternity is that timelessness one perceives. Even if, as it is written, it too shall one day have an end in the lake of fire. From the scale that Heaven operates on, it is my understanding that that ruined part of Heaven could easily envelop the whole of the world, whatever those dimensions might be as a noosphere, what I call the Halospace.

Is it real? If we understand reality as a shared experience, then it is real in that limited sense. Or perhaps in another limited sense, it is that archetypical representation of the dark side within human beings in general. If you will not allow a spiritual realm to exist, one might imagine it to be something like a place you go in dreams, or nightmares. Or could they be common hallucinations, like everyone seeing snakes when they take a specific psychoactive drug? It is a vision of darkness, in any case. It is a vision of all that is wrong in the world, if you ever do experience it, a merciless mood that makes up the stagnant air, the sensation: “abandon all hope ye who enter here”. But what if it were real, what would that mean? What if it is not completely in the eye of the beholder, but has separate existence apart from the observer? How does that affect the world? How would it affect your world?

If you wish deeper than what is writ here, faith is required of you, and reason. For it is not the end of faith when its object is plainly true; there will always be further that on that might be speculated upon, based on where reason seems to lead. And what is faith? “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” [Martin Luther King, Jr.] A leap of faith and a leap of insight are like fraternal twins. One may, in fact, use or confuse one for the other. Now, do we believe in the objective reality of the Black Iron Prison? For some, the question seems easy to answer: there is no place where it actually could exist, for it can only be a mental construct. But as we have said before, if it a shared mental construct—which at some level affects our psychology—if all of us follow the rails it puts down in our minds in a consistent way, then does it not in some way actually and really exist? Could we all of us fooled?

The ’Prison is made of iron. Why is it iron, when we’re talking about it being in a shadow dimension, with no true substance to it at all? Perhaps that it is specifically black is the clue. Iron was perhaps the most useful metal that human beings have ever found. In itself, there is no evil—but black iron, that which is put to dark purpose, iron would be then the opposite of that utility, being instead being wielded of nefarious mind. It is then become the all purpose material of evil. That is the Black Iron. And prison? Perhaps you have heard, of this life: you can’t win, you can’t break even, and there is no way out of the game. Even without a strictly physical form, the Black Iron Prison is so named correctly. But surely, there are parts of the world, both human and of nature, that are not elements of Hell, right? How is it that PKD said it is the true structure of the world? And others have said it, too, that we are completely enclosed by it, the whole of the world is imprisoned… It could be that it all is truly is in the eye of the beholder.

Philip K. saw the BIP, and then saw his freedom from it, the “real world’s” freedom from it, in 1974 when President Nixon resigned. The king deposed without violence by the work of two artisans—or were they modern day knights? Yes, the world was freed, but only from the point of view of PKD. For I know that I myself witnessed the BIP years after he had left the world. And one fine day in May, 1991, I saw the world freed of the ’Prison, myself, on the other side of the dream barrier: in my mind’s eye did I see all souls escape. The ’Prison is gone for everyone, from my point of view. That means, however, that other people may be able to see it still. The Halospace has a weird way of working. But let’s think about this: Phil said that the Black Iron Prison is, at the guts of it, a system of control, a means of power for the archons of this world. That would be the Devil and his own, for Satan once tempted Christ with the rule of all the world, and he couldn’t have offered what was not his.

Phil thought, after he saw the mighty king deposed, that the saw the ’Prison regroup and reformulate itself in the gap that had been left. But it was not that which he saw happen—not completely. The hole that had been punched in it was a permanent one, and cover it up as they will, it is still there. Walt Disney is God. Yea, verily. But again, not everyone is free of the ’Prison from their point of view. The Black Iron Prison, ultimately, is most rationally perceived as a psychological construct, which limits our actions and our perspective(s) on the world. (Thus its ultimate reality.) What Phil and I saw in visions, and others, can be compared to a nice visual graph of a mathematical function. The real work of such a graph is in the equations that define it. That’s where the numbers are crunched. What is the Black Iron Prison, down where the rubber hits the road, where the functions live? It’s Hell. Yes, what we initially started with. But more precisely, it is the idea of Hell. And everybody has one.

Therefore, the rule of Hell over the world was broken in the minds of Philip K. Dick and me (and most likely others). And if you are reading this right now, its hold on you, too, is being punctured. Understand that the freedom afforded you is not to go wild, party all the time, and not to do a speck of work. It is not a freedom of the hedonistic kind. As above, the ’Prison is a psychological construct: the freedom is to free your mind. It is a freedom from fear. It is freedom to love. There is no specific rule to follow, except maybe the one common to basically all religions: love your neighbor as yourself. Otherwise, it is a freedom from the rules, too. And if you hadn’t guessed, maybe give a shout-out to Jesus, since it was he who set us free… And listen, we’re all of us neighbors to each other, especially these days, when distance is no factor in how we are all just that. And to love? Don’t you know how? Love is so simple, we’ll never understand it. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

The Level of Reality

It is of note that Philip K. Dick, who obsessed about the subject, once defined “reality” as that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away. Like all rules, there are exceptions, like a schizophrenic, who can’t help believing in the things he sees—they are quite real to him, but we else would never say they are a part of reality outside of the pattern of electric impulses in his brain. One also wonders about those of us who were once called the prophets, whose visions came to pass in the real world. Is prophecy real, if it ends up happening? We usually don’t think in those terms. Normally, what we call real is synonymous with what is material, that which composed of matter. But there is perhaps one level of abstraction that we allow in the question of what is real: is it logical? And if we think about it, the material also follows this interpretation of what is, actually, real.

Good and evil both have a logic to them, but I am biased toward the one and not the other, even as I commit my hundred minor evils every day. But I still would like to say that evil mystifies me. I once asked a demon about what he believed, why he was the way he was, and I perhaps witnessed a uniquely true candid moment when he answered me. He said, “First, that I am the most important being in the universe.” And I stopped him there. I knew that whatever followed would be based on this twisting of the logic. The rest of it was not going to make any sense. I call it the Derangement, which is the wake of evil. They bend things as far as they can go that will not break, to destroy the work of light that they can, like making a man become what he hates: they work on many levels too; they were angels once, with about as high a brow one could imagine. And they have complicated what it means—what is reality?

Myself, I have gone back and forth on what my grasp (or grip) on reality actually might be. I believed, at first, in the conventional superstitions, of those which might be said to be religious in nature. That everyone should believe as I did. Or that someone wasn’t saved unless they had heard of Jesus Christ and believed he was the Son of God, and that he rose from the dead. Yes, a bunch (a lot) of people still think that. That the Bible was indeed the inerrant word of God, however much you needed to adjust the explanations of its more troublesome elements as to how that was. So what do I believe, then, if I don’t believe those anymore, as far as the faith goes? I believe we have been given everything, and that all we have that is truly ours are our mistakes. All the right things we do, even those, those were gifts from God. In other words, our baseline mode should be of profound gratitude. That and I still do believe that Christ rose from the dead. And angels, I believe there are angels. These I believe because I’ve seen them. Blessed are those who have not seen, and believed.

So why should you believe someone who talks to angels on a regular basis? Because I believe in science. You know, like extraordinary claims must produce extraordinary evidence. And indeed, to my subjective eye, the extraordinary claims of the other world, of Halospace—I heve been given extraordinary evidence indeed for it, and those who live there. I like to say that it would be irrational of me not to believe in the things that I do, in what I have seen. I am here like the shaman, who cruises the Halospace and returns reeking of starlight. I do my best to relay my findings, but understand that I operate at the limits of logic. It is hard to make some things clear, for they are not of the everyday; this is my essay, this is my try.

In my observations, I have also discovered something that’s rampant in our civilized age, at least in the neighborhoods I live: the paradox of abundance. The more that someone has, the more he wants. He becomes as if blind to the things his own. This would be perhaps the legal strategy the Devil might follow if and when he were to be put on trial, having been the most privileged being ever created. Affluenza. The most powerful being, too, excepting God Himself: having it all, Lucifer wanted more. How it all started. And the War itself rippled through all time, in the material world. For what was fought by Evil was the Logos: “Holy Reason”, by which things work. Why you have to pour the tea before you drink it. Theirs was to make everything bend to their whim, without facing any consequence. At least none that they would have cared about. This is why Hell is regularly depicted as having its specific type of logic. This is what I learned while talking to angels.

What does science need of this myth? I am a witness to both science and the myth, and I will try to explain things. My credentials as storyteller are that I was a die hard atheist once, back in my youth, and it usually goes the other way—to have faith and then lose it—but for me, the Man Upstairs had different plans. The visions started spectacularly in July of 1991, and they have died down some—for good solid durations they subside enough to let me finish school and to hold down a job—but they never completely have left me. What is real? I have gone charging full speed at a wall to see if I could make a breakthrough at such a question, or at least, some headway, to crack the problem. What I have found, is that like there is one reality, there is one, and only one of the extant myths (religions) that is true—and even there, not all of what’s believed in is correct. I am a prophet here to tell you of the reality, and I’m telling you of what I say now to try to verify it, even if you trust me, because I will be wrong sometimes—hopefully not in the important things.

Truly it is the easiest thing to believe all that one is told, and perhaps then be lucky enough to be born into the “correct” faith. It is also easy, maybe not as, to see as there are so many different spiritual systems, all sounding pretty much like the other, to disbelieve them all, and saying that they all make as much sense as a Flying Spaghetti Monster being a deity. Cute. The job of science, though, is not to debunk (though it is supremely good at doing this): the job of science is to find what is real. So, what if I told you that God is real? We come to the extraordinary proof for extraordinary claims, n’est-ce pas?

And then I tell you that if such extraordinary proof were given, it would be against its own purpose in the seeing. Even demons know there is a God. Jesus spoke in parables so that some would get what he was saying, some not. There are more important things in the world than everybody believing in God, or the same God. He also doesn’t need to win all the little philosophical battles about rocks He can or can’t lift. And what Jesus says, about satisfying everyone’s little condition of “I would believe in God if…”, he said that only an evil generation asks for a sign, and see that at the crucifixion, they would have believed he was the messiah if he had gotten off that cross he was hanging from. He didn’t need or want to prove anything to a bunch of gawkers at an execution. Blessed is he who has not seen and believed. Think, ala JFK, what do I have to do to have God believe in me?

And what about all the “wrong” faiths? I tell you that God has purpose for them, too. “Wrong” is well to be put in quotes. All your major religions have the common core: love your neighbor as yourself. This is a fact, however they may phrase that wisdom. But given that… you see, in my visions, I have met the one and only Jesus Christ, and he let me see out his eyes, his point of view, and I was not able to grasp a fraction of that seeing. The myth is true: he is Immanuel, the literal Son of God, who is infinite and was infinite, even as he walked this world. He has been the only thing that was perfect in this universe as we know it. And to understand what is real, one must take this, the second person of the Trinity into account. Like so: “In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” [H. C. Bailey] I tell you something opposite that atheists normally say to the theists: if you don’t believe, you don’t know what is actually going on. Realistically.

So, what is reality? Does belief have anything to do with it, or lack thereof? The answer actually turns out to be very boring. Reality is what changes consistently in relation to something else. The “change” part as well as the “consistent” part can also be real in that same sense. The change in what we call our universe turns out never to be zero. And we may put it in another way: reality is what can be measured through time. In one sense, reality is subjective, in that it is (to us) only as real as well as we are able to measure it. So ghosts: if they cannot be measured by any means except perhaps as a hallucination by a person existing as a neural pattern someone’s brain, that ghost is not (objectively?) real. (Objectively with a question mark, as that is only approximate, better put: relatively [real] in an established context.) But this is not why you are here, no?

Is the spirit world real? Halospace, right? What level of reality are we talking about? There are certain intense shared “experiences” that people have had, and these are how religions are founded. (Then the “visionary” period usually dies down.) We don’t conventionally say that what they experienced are as real as say, a baseball. Or a baseball game. Because generally, you don’t need a miracle to win a baseball game. But people think that they can have a reality without there being a ground to it. Turtles, all the way down: where we cannot guarantee anything about what exists, that it will make any sense, not just to us, but even that there be a structure to making sense at all. The Logos: he came down to earth once as Jesus Christ, and saved us all. We fight against Evil, in whose wake is the Derangement, the antithesis to the Logos. And it was given to the Archangel Michael and his angels to save the world from a twisted end, by the forces of that enemy.

As far as science, myself, my eyes can see into the Halospace, in addition to the sensory (“real”) world. And it seems to have a logic to it that I can function in, and that I have lost myself in at times. It is real to me, it is consistent, and it has actually shown me signs, of which if I told you it probably wouldn’t make you believe me any better. Oh, I know that one could attribute all those “visions” as imagination and hallucination, but what if there are beings out there who exist in those castles in the air, what would you do if one of them tapped you on the shoulder?

We grossly undervalue what all has been given us in our life, and we think it is all here waiting for us to give meaning to it? In the same vein, we overestimate our capabilities: do you imagine, truly, that we are able to concoct in our own minds that which is greater than us? Not that we point to a name on a paper and say, I have made God, but to see in a Name that it is like a finger pointing at the moon; to understand that there is a Meaning deeper than we can fathom: for we see that there is meaning now, and it is real, and that can be the first step: as Martin Luther King said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Or is it a rabbit hole? How far down do you imagine it goes, Alice? It’s a little deeper than we can dip our big toe. Wonderland has its own sky, its own stars.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.