Author: paladin

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.

new again

did you hear of something new in the world?
it is called “love”
it was made 2000 years ago by a carpenter
when he died of torture
and did not miss the chance to be perfect
his name is Jesus Christ
IS, not was, because before everything, HE IS
he did a few things
but left it to the rest of us to do even greater
he rose from the dead
not in story like the rest who were told did
they were not the Christ
for i myself am a witness to the Resurrection
even as i am unworthy
i am witness to the truth of what is “love”
and there is yet more
what is love shall never be spent its last
the face of eternity
he saves us, not from danger, but ourselves
to life everlasting
blessed is the one who sees Heaven–everywhere

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.