by Gustave Doré
Author: paladin
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I have seen Lucifer before the Fall. He courted me in more than one occasion to join with him against the God who is love. I think I may have inadvertently said yes to him, too, at some point, but these were youthful indiscretions, lapsed calls of decision. I have always wanted to be one of the good guys. But Lucifer (he was Satan even then, from the first he reached out to me), he was still living it up in Eternity, and I have viewed some cartoony representations I have seen of that place. He had been given much power, there, which meant he had great power here, too. (Not to say he could not be defeated, for I have done that, just you need help to accomplish such a feat yourself.) I saw him shop around for a world to take over. A reality to call his own.
It was a strange thing, but there were times that not just he, but other explorers from where I know not where appeared in my visions, looking for a world, a reality. Once they said they were looking for the “best of all possible worlds”. Sound familiar? Like there were other worlds, other realities. But as far as Satan was concerned, there were a few different myths that were floating around. From Eternity he looked down and it looked like he were trying for the most advatageous one. He also tried to recruit me, though the position he said he could give me was “Son of God”, whereas I wanted God the Father. Who didn’t? He was thinking of that for himself, of course. I didn’t want what he was selling.
I think it came down to two choices, which were the strongest in being rooted in any mythology. Judeo-Christian mythology. One was that Satan were one of the minor functionaries of God’s court, who was doing his job by being our adversary. Ultimately, to live in Eternity with the rest of us. The other was to be the greatest of the angels, Lucifer, who rebelled against the God who is love, and turned a third of all the angels to his side. This latter was a dangerous course, though, for there were three possible outcomes: universalism, where everyone is saved (eventually); annihilationism, where the second death is the cease of existence; and your classic story of an eternal Hell to go with an eternal Heaven.
He acted like he were contending with the actual God the Father, whose name, Yahveh, means “He who causes to be”. It seemed that it were not enough that solely the Lord made this world, this universe, this cosmos as you see it: in addition, at the very least, He made it seem as though Lucifer needed to sign off on it too. And I saw it happen. We had just been talking about how this world were actually a universalist model, where “only” one soul were sacrificed, and then all the rest would live forever. It appeared that he liked the idea, and I saw it happen: what I thought was the sacrifice of the one innocent: in the air before my eyes: “snap!” and there we were. This was the only way that would ever be, the only reality.
What was interesting about the whole process was that it was like when the spirit world came to knowledge about some elements of mythology in this world, it seemed to shape what forms came to be in that other world. Like the whole thing about Lucifer, the classic myth of the Fall of the Rebel angels. Like it were a feedback: something there made mythology here written down in a certain form, and that which was written down made what what “existed” in the unseen world function as to fulfill the words. It seemed a great mystery. But such would be the ways of Eternity, n’est-ce pas? And like a dream more solid than stone.
The Stage (cont’d)
Philip K. Dick saw it happen, in the year where he had his “pink light experience”, in 1974. That year, Richard Nixon resigned from his office as United States President. And Philip K. Dick interpreted this event correctly: the external world broken free of the Black Iron Prison. That was step one of two. The second breaching of the iron I beheld on Mother’s Day 1991, and that was in the unseen world, what I call the Halospace. Why these needed to happen before the War in Heaven could be concluded: this was when victory was snatched from the darkness. It was possible to win! This was God acting in our world, having reached the top from the very bottom. For PKD saw that God had been present in the trash layer of the world. Having been the greatest, he earned this greatness by working His way from the lowest reaches to the very highest.
And by God, I mean the Son of God, who being the Son shares the same nature as the Father: there is only one God, and Jesus Christ is Him: in the beginning the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. For in him was the way that the entirety of God entered the world, and not just words carried by the Spirit, or even what was known as the “angel of God”. He was the only free man, for by his actions was he the only of the innocent of this world. His reward from the Father was that he could choose any number and count them also innocent: any number. Thus salvation or damnation is simply him saying, “I know him,” or “I know him not.”
PKD wrote in his Exegesis how the books he had written proved to be useful in understanding his new visions, in 1974. Indeed, we were talking about “creating” realities in those writings. Or the nature of reality, what that might be, and how that related to our perception of any and everything. This was his specialty. And so he would write 8,000 handwritten pages trying to get to the bottom of things. Which unfortunately was not his to do. As written previous, his job was to set the stage. It was for me to see the play acted out on it, and with myself in fact to be one of the actors of said play. The powerful play.
And that was the thing: these possibilities that Phil wrote down: we could think in those directions because we no longer were shackled by the Black Iron. There’s an old hacker adage: “Information wants to be free.” Essentially, that was the victory: the information was finally free. The gnostics thought that salvation was not by faith, but by a (secret) knowledge. They were onto something, even if that strictly was not true. Christians sort of concur, if they say that only those who hear and accept the message of Christ can be saved. The fall of the Black Iron Prison was that the salvific knowledge were now available to all, baptised or not. And this is the work of the Son of God: it was available retroactively.
I have high hopes for the future. I don’t believe that the Black Iron Prison—functionally, at least—has been abolished for everyone on Earth personally. Just like the War in Heaven rages on in many people’s Halospace, even if they are unaware that it is there. Just like Satan still claims minds and souls even after he was long defeated on the cross. This is the mystery of Eternity. We still have work to do, here on God’s green Earth. It may be just that the going of it is not as hard as it used to be. Understand that we are nowhere near the end. Instead, rejoice, indeed: the Beginning is near!
The Stage
The War in Heaven could not be won while the world was in the grip of the Black Iron Prison. I imagine it was similar to how in the ’90s we couldn’t think beyond the year 1999. 2000 and on: there was a mental block, a psychological barrier that prevented us in seeing past that magic number. The ’Prison was in a sense a mental construct, contained in the unseen world, gone uunnoticed by most everyone who lived regular lives within it. But we were all prisoners, you see. And even when we break free, habit still sometimes goes by the old pathways that had been dictated to us while we were still prisoners.
How it came to be that all the world was entombed within the Black Iron is another story, but there we were. (It has something to do with the myth of Adam and Eve, if you want a hint of what that story may be.) And there was the fact that the ’Prison was as like an eternal realm: after all, it was Hell. This touches on the salvation of Jesus Christ: that we all deserved to be damned, according to the Law, and the substance of such consequence was that Iron. And only by obeying the Law to the letter could Christ have gained victory over the Law. Nothing short of absolute perfection.
We know that only when we are squarely dealing with at least the trappings of the Age of Gold can our minds be free to pursue the grander things: needless even to say that the psychological environment required for the attempt has to be available. When we spend the last ounce of strength to grow a subsistence level crop, we have no other, higher, work we can accomplish. Only when we have an atmosphere of peace and education, in a society of opportunities, only then can we truly be free. The possibility, the potential needs to exist for greater things. Only when we are fed can we think about justice.
The War in Heaven happened when it could, and it happened “within” us: Philip K. Dick and me, the twins—when we had had experience of things large and small that was in and of the world. We had some prerequisites down when we were picked. Phil was a voracious reader, and I had the internet, both of us with a longing to comprehend the deeper things of the world. Such research and literature as to be useful in the fight could only have become so available as the Age of Gold emerged out of the Iron. Information is a change in potential: in knowing, what is possible changes. (And the universe, too, is made of information.)
Someone said that we must state the problem in a way that allows for a solution. Throughout the landscape of religious texts, philosophy, and whatever else, PKD was searching out a site where the War could be won. That means not only finding out all the myths that the world may hold (and many could be found out in the late 1970s), but also to properly interpret them. For meaning is effect. Like having a hunk of flint we could use it as a weapon, but sharpen it to point and you have something quite a little more. Nothing was mentioned about the War, in Phil’s frameworks, for Satan was to be ignorant of this purpose—thus Phil himself was not to know. For his own good. For everyone’s good.
The Reality
The War in Heaven wasn’t just about kicking an angel who got too big for his britches out of the Kingdom. You must understand exactly what the rebellion meant, the tremendous reach of what it affected. Firstly, to remove the notion that there was something inherently noble in the defiance of Lucifer and his crew, the whole Milton idea of “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven”, we must get a clear idea of who and what was involved. In my visions, I was told by the Lord that the ultimate sin, the one written of in the Gospels as absolutely unforgivable, was simply to say “no” to the Holy Spirit. When I first heard it, I did not at all understand how that could be. If this were the case, then no one could be saved, correct? Yet this is exactly what Christianity teaches us: none of us by himself or herself can be saved. For saying no to the Holy Spirit, this is saying no to the spirit of love itself. That part of us is dead. Permanently. And as the Lord also said, if your eye offends you, pluck it out. Better to go blind into the Kingdom than be cast whole into the flames. And so, are all those pieces of us that are dead burned up in Purgatory when we are saved, for no trace of sin enters Heaven.
It was not at all that God was some sort of tyrant who imposed rules and regulations without reason. Logos, the “Word” of God—observed as the means by which things happen—can in one sense be thought of as Holy Reason. Lucifer understood the consequences of what he did when he said “no” to the Holy Spirit. And methinks it took tremendous effort to render that first “no”. To decide to become the embodiment of Evil. To be the genesis of Sin and Death. And Sin? We also know her as Pain. That is correct: pain was not invented by God. And perhaps in knowing this, we can start to grasp the scale in which the War of Heaven was fought, and is being fought, and will be fought. (Though it ended, it is a war in eternity, and there is mystery here in the telling of its when.)
Lucifer, now become Satan, he was not thrown out of Heaven because he rebelled, per se. Just like Adam & Eve were not expelled from Heaven because they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God says specifically the pair were sent out of Eden so that they would not eat of the tree of life (and so make their sin permanent). In likewise, Satan was cast from Eternity because he had so much power in the halls and means of the Kingdom. And the War, the front line of it, was fought in contention for the nature of reality. Michael and his angels fought so that logic would stay logic. Something that fundamental. It was Logos vs. derangement. And this is what it means to be an angel of Heaven: if the least of Michael’s angels had lost their fight against the evil, all of creation would have suffered permanent derangement forever.
I am saying that we come full stop in the dualism of good vs. evil. By their fruits shall they be known. How much of it is God’s “Plan”? One wonders. But it can be seen that in the model where the Devil had an effect on the fundamental structures of creation, maybe God can be forgiven for how things turn out in this world. One thing I have found in my searching: it is never His fault, anything bad that happens anywhere. Simple as that. God is light, and in Him is no darkness. God is love. Courage, take heart. For He is the First and the Last, and vengeance shall be His in the Judgment that shall surely comes. May peace not be far from where you stand.