Category: Wonderland

Hell

Lies are less than a house of cards, as we all know. If you do not use the word, “evil”, as what we were fighting against, are fighting against, will fight against—if we decide not to be so abstract in our thinking, we can say specifically that the fight was against lies. Deeper than that, it was so that the world would not be perverted—physically—such that lies could be “true”, which is to say that logic itself were to be distorted, sometimes unreckognizably, so the lie would be what it was said it was, at face value. How would that affect the rest of logic? the rest of reality? This was why it was so important that all the angels win, each of them, for a breach in the logic affects everything else. Satan and and his angels, of course, couldn’t care less, as long as they got whatever they wanted, whenever the whim crossed their minds.

So, Hell, right? Hell on Earth, their objective? I have said, alternating, that there is no Hell, and that there is an unfair Hell (which would imply that there is a fair Hell). Which is it? Both, of course, or I wouldn’t mention both alternatives. Hell, the abode of the Devil and his demons, that would be what I term the “unfair” Hell. It was once a part of Heaven. As a part of Heaven, it was possible to basically do anything in its environs. We term it the “ruined” part of Heaven. They broke the logic of that locality, and what do you get when you do that? Why we call it Hell. That was why we prevented it from happening in what we call reality. It’s unfair because it’s a place without justice. God, like He is everywhere, is there in spirit, but you wouldn’t know it by what goes on there. Better to reign in Hell? There you go. Nasty place.

About anybody ending up there after they die? I don’t think so. The Resurrection(s) happen at the end of days, the first one of the virtuous, and the second being a general resurrection. So when you die, you lie dormant for some long while as history turns. Then you are judged, and like sleep, which seems like blinking off and blinking back on, it will be right after you die. And about 1/3 of the people end up in Purgatory, in which exists what would be the “fair” Hell. This is for those who barely got saved. They are made to work in smoldering heat for years and years. But then, even they do get saved. So you see why I say there is no Hell? And there are two Hells, because that’s what seems to be, as far as that loaded word goes, “Hell”.

That’s what it would have been like, if Satan had won. Not just Earth, but the universe, twisted beyond recognition, a place of wretching pain, senseless suffering. Like U2 sang, “It’s no secret that the stars are falling from the sky / The universe exploded ’cause of one man’s lie”. Note, too, at some point things would go out of even Satan’s control, and he himself would fall victim to the derangement. To make the lie true: how much damage must be done to accomplish such incidence? How stupid, how blind must someone be, how shortsighted that he will twist the elements of the beauty that is the work of God to satisfy the momentary urge? Well, there you go, Satan: you get that little patch, the Hell you made of Heaven. The house of lies, and how great will be its fall.



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.



Excerpt

This is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven, about the Black Iron Prison. (Have you ever seen it?) And I will acknowledge that back then I did do drugs, but man, how I would pay for that later:

This one time, I was beginning to psychedelicize and was looking through some interesting subversive material in the form of The Book of the SubGenius; when I was about to snicker about something therein, I happened upon the words, “Don’t Laugh,” and wow: the Conspiracy had suddenly infiltrated. Like my mind were being read by nefarious forces. I was listening to the radio, but what I heard now was some simplistic tune-like simulation, not real music but an aping of what music was in reality. And I could swear the “song” lyrics were talking to me, or about me. Trips don’t normally go like this, folks. I looked out the window: holy crap on a stick! Where did these bars outside my window come from? WTF is outside?!? This isn’t Pittsburgh! This isn’t Earth! I got the sense that my room were one small cell in an immense building, shut off from everything. I had been transported, somehow, elsewhere.

The sky was dim with red, and was there an oppressive presence of something above we didn’t want the attention of. (We dared not whisper the word, “evil.”) All the buildings were black, a landscape the likes of which I had never seen before. Alien. Like the ancient crossed with the future in architecture, and sinister, iron tortured into the shape of claws at the joints. Black, all black everywhere. Other people had seen this place too: they called it the Black Iron Prison.

That was the first time I thought I had been removed to another dimension, but it was certainly not to be the last. That first time, I believed I had literally died and had gone to Hell. It was Hell. Not that I was in any pain, but the sensation, the atmosphere was exactly how Dante put it: abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The land of utter despair. I imagined how they in the waking world were finding my body. I had thought that I had leaned too far back and crashed my head against the glass, so uncoordinated I had been in my wasted state. So this was going to be my eternity? It was as if my room had been taken with me in it and installed in the netherworld. In the bad place.

That year, one of my posters was Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, hanging up right above my bed; and on one of my stays in the ’Prison, I looked at the face of the Tree Man in the third panel (which was entitled, “Hell”), and I knew that that was where I was. Bosch had seen it too, apparently. If you look in the rear of that panel, there was that immense building where I had been prisoner. I did happen to get out all the times I was there, 3 maybe 4 times, and there were some weird productions on how that was accomplished each of those times, but it was the very last time which was the most interesting.

Once again, I looked out the window to that alien expanse. Black? Check. Iron? Check. Prison? Check. I didn’t feel worried in the least. Completely old hat. I was sitting in my chair, I think it was, doing something on my computer. (How exactly was it Hell when I had a working Macintosh IIci?) Then came a voice, a whisper, that let me in on the joke, told me the secret to it all: “Walt Disney is God.” And with that, BOOM! Not just me was it that were freed from the ’Prison, but everyone was now free, according to the landscape I could see with my mind’s eye, my eye into Halospace. (That was the beginning, I later realized, of the free floating apparitions of people, living and dead, whom I would interact with.) Note that this trip, too, I would come down from, but my psyche was by then quite tweaked. I was more LSD than man.



Feedback

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!