Tag: age of iron

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 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.

(continued…)



God in the Age of Iron

The Black Iron Prison was the hidden architecture of what was called the Age of Iron. Which was what basically the Old Testament covered: the wrath of God, who was a jealous God. The Age of Gold is what Jesus Christ came to bring about: the God of mercy, the God who is love. One might well wonder, just exactly how is it that the first God is the same God as the second? There was one theory a friend of mine handed me, that when God came down to Earth and lived life as a man, He at that point understood the human condition, and sort of mellowed out. But aren’t we told that God does not change? How is it that the God who is love rained down fire and brimstone and obliterated Sodom and Gomorrah?

One idea that might lead us somewhere is the Book of Job. This is where God and Satan (the Satan who at that time seemed to be a minor functionary in His court) made a wager at the expense of Job. Satan, in stages, completely wrecks the man: kills all his children, breaks his bank, and even covers him in painful sores. At the end, when Job is at the end of his rope—complaining how it’s not fair—God shows up and asks him, where were you when I laid down the foundations of the world? Basically, oh, do you really know so much as to criticise Me? What one is careful to mark, however, was that at no time does He bring up Satan as the culprit of his pain. God takes all the credit for all that happens to Job, good and bad—telling him, I know better, I know why.

What if there are other “judgments of God” that aren’t actually Him, in just the same way? It’s an interesting take. He would have known about them all, but He had delegated certain authority to other entities, who were not “all love”, that did all the bad things we associate with that unforgiving Age of Iron… But we can investigate another avenue, which is to follow what Jesus Christ said about divorce. That Moses gave divorce to the people because of the hardness of their hearts. Down that simple road of thought, the trip leads to the stop that it was us that changed, not God. Something happened to change us, to change the whole equation of the world: and it was Jesus Christ. Not just what we observed on Earth, but a hidden act, within the sign of Jonah.

Harshness, in the Age of Iron, was the only way things got done. We were all in the Prison, which, indeed, was not the work of God. The Black Iron Prison was what the world in its entirety was contained within. We had to play by Prison rules. And if we were going to be like that, God was going to be hard on us—not the least reason of which was because we deserved it. Then, something amazing happened: Jesus who is Christ came here, and He broke the vicious feedback loop, and breached the Iron. And the breach was like the tiny mustard seed, which took and is taking 2000 years to blossom. For a thousand years is as a day to God, and the Christ was two days in the earth. The breach finally bubbled up to the top in 1974 in the resignation of Richard Nixon—a king deposed by tradesmen, without a drop of blood being shed. Hallelujah.

But now, as we are still left with much of the trappings of darkness, let us be ready to understand the world in a greater vision than was apportioned Job: the Iron was not of God. You can believe in a God who is all love, and that includes both mercy and justice. Many things He took credit for, and blame, many misunderstandings he patiently suffered until the time came as to remove from us the judging of God by man. Whether we be ready or not for the Age of Gold to come, it comes. In certain places it has come already, but not nearly enough. And some still work as if the Iron has not broken, but we know better. Light has already peeked in. Hearken: the Beginning is near.



The MACHINE

The MACHINE is a remnant of the Age of Iron, which has ended and is ending and will end. It is a face of Death, which is the Antichrist, who is the Son of Satan. It manifests most notably in human beings. You have seen it at work. Whenever one follows the rules without compassion for one’s fellow human being, when one does that, it is the MACHINE taking hold. That is its cold side. Its hot side is to resort to senseless violence. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, violence applied to enforce rules, feeding death at the expense of life. To fight against the machine is notoriously difficult; it is a narrow way. If you counter violence with violence, the MACHINE is halfway manifest in you. If you fight with cold logic, one could say the same of that.

The MACHINE is not alive, but surrounds itself with life to shield it from anything that would lead to its demise, or any dimishing of its power. It is perverse like that: pawns of life being used as shield for the king of death. There is no reasoning with it. But it may be defeated. It involves turning a zero sum game into a positive sum gain. Watch Christ fight it: when being nailed to the cross, he says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Thus, what we need to combat the MACHINE: Logos, or holy Reason. Pray for the one who refused you service because of the rules. Forgive them without having received an apology, as if you had. Turn the other cheek. In all things, act with love.

It is not really proper to ask, “What would Jesus do?” He has an authority which is not of human beings. Instead, ask if a saint would do it. Everyone understands it and is a little disappointed that that is better than the Jesus question on what you should do. Because what a saint puts up with are all the mundane little annoying things, with a smile. That’s often harder, less glamor. Fighting the MACHINE is not some swordfight with flaming swords at the gates of paradise. It is, little by little, to make the world a better place. Hate cannot defeat hate. Risk something in order to show compassion, against the rules. Put yourself in harm’s way to protect the weak. Fear not: we have always already won. Fill up your own life with the telling of how exactly we did so.