Category: General

The True Alchemy

We live with such things daily, what we call “counterintuitive”. If you start sliding in a car on the ice, you should turn into the slide, not away from it. If you’re flying a plane and start to lose altitude, you shouldn’t pull up (because you’ll stall), and instead you should point your nose down to gain speed. There are ways of doing things. In these days, now, technology has been good in many a way to make things easier than they had been in the past. One of the hallmarks of the gadgets and appliances we use is that at their best, they make us think that this was the way things should work. Now, I’m not saying that what would be the Age of Gold will be ushered in by the technologies that we discover, create, and utilize, but let it be known that the technology, it is an indication that the Age of Gold us nigh upon us. In patches, at least. “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” [William Gibson]

Now to get all religious on you: in the Age of Iron (and of course back through the Neolithic age), the way things worked was sort of counterintuitive. Or perhaps a better way to put it was that it simply was not fair. For one, look at all those sacrificed animals. The original meaning of the word “scapegoat” was an actual goat which would be slaughtered to expiate all the people of their sin. The goat did nothing wrong. That poor goat. In Genesis, Jacob steals his father Isaac’s blessing by dressing up as brother. We’re supposed to understand that this was the way things worked. So what happened that we don’t sacrifice animals anymore to curry God’s favor? Yes, we got “civilized”, but one great, overarching reason? It was that Jesus Christ gave himself as the last and perfect sacrifice: to turn how things worked in the Iron to the way things were supposed to work in the Gold.

So what did Christ actually do? This was indeed the true alchemy—not lead, but iron into gold. If you looked at it, it was not fair, it was not right: this was an innocent man who was being killed for no reason at all, he literally had done nothing wrong. But this was his way of being the ultimate scapegoat, the one who by the rule of Iron died for all of the world’s sin—past, present, and future—everywhere that any of us ever did anything wrong, for everyone else who ever existed. By Iron’s law he was put to death, but this he accepted, and with that, he turned it all around. So is God’s work like this victory over violence: through holy submission. Dying in all the sin not his, in complete acceptance—and then coming back from that death, and given dominion over every last thing… And as Jesus Christ was two days in the earth, so the world was 2,000 years in darkness and even now struggles to emerge from it. For it is written: a thousand years is as a day to God.

Basically, it is an awakening of that world which has known the Resurrection. And from a dark sleep to get our bearings in the waking world. Thomas Jefferson had it right: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Indeed, you will know that the Age of Gold has truly arrived by that one criterion: are we, all of us, equal? As you see, looking out into the world, it is a promise half fulfilled, if that much. When we reach the point of civilization all around the world, where every single person has access to food, shelter, and education, then indeed would that mark the Age of Gold truly come. But I say to you thus: it is coming. We may have hiccups along the way (or worse), but its coming is inexorable. Try not to be on the wrong side of history. Hearken: the Beginning is near.

There still exist the trappings of the former age. For instance, stupid and untalented people get rich and famous for what seems like no reason. Teachers, responsible for the minds of our future, are severely underpaid for what their function truly is. But we generally don’t worry about a beautiful but poor girl abjectly stolen away by a rich nobleman. And we generally agree that all types of slavery is wrong, though (as some people do not realize) it still does go on, even to this day. We expect this movement toward a better world to continue. There is a certain threshold that we would say that if a land breaches it, it has reached the Gold, to try and shrug off the main fetters of the Iron. Perhaps not in everything, but the important things, how they work: you should be able to say of them, “That makes sense.” Like if you’re good, you go to Heaven—not because you believe (in) something.

Do not be discouraged by all that you see and hear in the news. Some people may say they wish for a simpler time, that the world seems to have gone crazy, and fast, and loud. What you should know is that all these injustices you now see have always been going on. And to think it would have been better to live in the 50s, before the hippies started wrecking things, you must be white and male, right? Without any sort of controversial attitude? Such was a time best exemplified by the time’s TV shows: all in black and white. We need a new normal, one that includes all the different type of people that we must now live with, especially since we’ve gone global in so many ways. “Who is my neighbor?” they asked Jesus. In the Age that comes, let the answer be, “The whole wide world.”



The Logical Prophecy

We must grow up in our thinking. And in fact, we are growing up. It used to be commonplace to have slaves; the New Testament mentions them as though slavery were never going to go out of style. But here we are, instead, where one mark of civilized thinking is against the very concept of a slave. Time calls for change. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, but when I grew up, I put away childish things. There are those who are still holding their breath until they turn blue. Being a creationist, for instance, is a stunting of growth, spiritually. Believing in the literal truth of the Bible may be likened to the belief that planets traveled in perfect circles. It is a naïve way of thought, put charitably. Or, you know? you can say that it is plainly wrong, if it comes down to it. There was to be found a logic to the motions of the planets, but it was not so simplistic. This understanding is called science.

Even the fuller answers, what we understand now, are bound to be imprecise, but we can have that in mind when we deal with the calculations that we can use. In other words, your faith, based on tradition, is not as good as my science, based on observation and experimentation. You may say that your faith is where the buck stops, but there is a whole road of commerce that goes on outside those doors. So what room is there for faith, these days? Some to go the opposite way, extreme, that we cannot believe in anything anymore, that which is not solid, liquid, or gas. And that which faith holds as true often cannot be proved, else it might no longer be faith. We can think that with the means of science, everything we can know we will know, so all that faith is can be summed up as that which we do not understand yet. But aye, there’s the rub!

On one side, let us say that all things are comprehensible, everything is in logical harmony at some scale, and the why of that has a why, and the why of that. On the other side, let us say that there will always be something yet to be understood. Neither side are known to be true. We’re just saying, and as far as conjectures go, that these two thoughts are not bad ones. They could both be so, and the world does not have to be changed by them being so. If science is all we can know, everything is within its province. Yet if faith is to act in the absence of knowledge, faith is never priced out of that market. And what one religion in particular claims in its root, which happens to be my religion, “God is love,” it will await the infinite theory and song to capture not even a fraction of what that means.

We must grow up in our thinking, each side oversimplifying in what they say the other side is saying. To say that what science disproves of faith, we must hold to what science can itself prove. It is not “just a theory”—it is a rigorous theory, borne of intelligence. But it is the height of arrogance to think that such a world that has been given us has no more depth of purpose than what we can think to give it. Perhaps if we chose instead, to listen, one side to another, and they are not always opposing forces: what we could learn! And love, what both sides ultimately agree upon, we all know what that word means, don’t we? Do we? Can we? Should we? Where would we begin? How will it end? I wonder…

What is love? Only a fool knows. (Fools like you and me.)



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.



War in Heaven

If myths are lies that tell the truth, what is a myth that turns out to be true? For there are various myths in the book we call the Bible: the story of creation, the son of slaves who frees his people, the God-man who died and rose from the dead. The bulk of the Bible is people doing things, sometimes epic, sometimes quite ordinary; or even sometimes the way God Himself got involved in the world. But there is one drama that seems to be pure myth, otherworldy, and it is in the last book in the Bible, briefly mentioned:

7 And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

8 And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

[Revelation 12 KJV]

It has been written of in extra-biblical texts, but other than the above, the only other mention of it in the Bible is when Jesus Christ said that he saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven. So there, we get what happened straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. It was something that is rooted in such Truth as the Son of Man represents. There have been secondary sources about just what might have transpired, notably Milton’s Paradise Lost. There is also, curiously, something written by J. R. R. Tolkien: the Ainulindalë, or “the music of the Ainur”—a creation myth. In it, Melkor, the greatest of the Ainur, rebels against Ilúvatar, who is God. Which sounds familiar, do you not believe? One imagines that Tolkien took the Lucifer myth to heart, but in elaborating on what had been written, the War in Heaven—the actual one—seems to have some curious commonality with what he wrote as fantasy. It turns out the world out there is the way it is because of how this singular thing, this war in eternity, was fought, and won (but being a war in eternity, is still going on). And perhaps you can do something yourself, to see it end as it should, in you.

You can read about my experiences in the War in my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.