Tag: apocalypse

The Mathematics of the Judgment

“Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.”
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Come Judgment Day, what exactly would you say to the Face from which heaven and earth fled—“I meant to”? I once figured it out this way: out of two choices, for your entire life, would you rather expose it all to the world, every event and decision, or would you rather cast it all into darkness? Saved, or damned, this to mean, and there I was toying with the mathematics of the judgment, that even with a life that was full of wrongdoing, if the soul had the courage to reveal it all—be as reviled in the Kingdom of Heaven (if that is even possible)—then that one heroic gesture might indeed save them. There are myths of judgment aplenty from the ancient world, from weighing your soul against a feather to walking a tightrope across a fiery pit. And some pictures of damnation are more horrible than others. What does it mean, exactly, to be saved?

The main equation seems to be simply this: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Otherwise known as, “love your neighbor as yourself.” But then comes the main counterargument, being the curiosity as to whether some are born having innately more propensity for forgiveness than others, thus making the game a rigged apparatus… In the past, one merely figured that the Devil had his children, and God had His, the Devil’s children causing all the mayhem, God’s children are all the saints, and that’s that. You were simply born one or the other. But the modern reader might ask, how can that possibly be fair? If you had no choice but to be evil, how can you possibly damn that soul? Free will has since (from those days of ultimate predestination) become a key feature of this life of virtue and sin: you must have done things of your own free will for it to count, else life is a meaningless puppet show.

So, what becomes of the Son of Satan? Was he born evil? Or was he born good in circumstances which would make it impossible to have been anything but evil? Where does the free will factor in? The Devil is damned because he was born good and of his own choice and logic decided that that wasn’t going to work for him. We must ask, too, if even was Satan born with a conscience. If that were so, he has only the angel on his shoulder, the little birdy from his own inner sensibilities to try and keep him on the right track. He has no devil on the other shoulder, and so one might conjecture that evil was at that time the narrow way (to exit from the good) and the broad gate was that which was of God, the right. What a waste, how the story of the great Lucifer ends. What about them, though, the rest: his son, and the third part of angels cast down with him—by him?

What if one can genuinely say to the Face from which heaven and earth fled, “I was deceived, and knew not right from wrong”? Or there is the question of how one may judge him, he whom all he knew of the world was evil. Not just the Son of Satan, though he is an especially strong case of this, but those born of bad families. One may consider that God rather grades on a curve. Not as much a reward when a boy scout, whose dad was a boy scout, helps an elderly black granny across the street; but one whose father was KKK—that would be phenomenal. Does it get complicated, then, when we have to factor all the relevant factors in order to judge someone? Perhaps here we find the real reason for the Lord’s command, not to judge, that it is only God’s to judge: for only the all seeing can know why anyone lived the way he did, the rationales and compusions, what was inside him as he decided, and the roads not taken.

Verily, when we have the bold and outward actions of someone born into a culture of cruelty, when he breaks from all he knew because he discovered a greater truth—we can surely measure the heroics of such actions. But as we know, such displays of heart come only when certain stars align; they are not of the everyday, and the everyday is where one (even the hero) must live most of one’s life. Yet when the hero lives an ordinary life, when he abides by ordinary rules, he is roundly to be commended for his humility; but when things surface, like from World War II, the ordinary, everyday lives of those who ran the concentration camps—we feel a wave of disgust. Yet it is here where even a demon might redeem himself. The Lord said that when you fast, make it look like you’re not sacrificing anything. If an “evildoer” were to outwardly perform nefarious deeds, but hidden in his everyday were guilt, nightmares, tears and the true suffering of conscience—how do we judge, knowing that?

Surely, many of us will judge the man who keeps doing evil while being tortured about it as one who is in the final analysis destined for the fire. But one might say it is a case of, “There but for the grace of God go I.” If we had been born in his place, would we not have done the same thing? Thus might it be that the mathematics of the judgment are a mystery. Perhaps indeed, that if we had been given certain temptations, then we might have committed the wrong… but we were not so given, we did no such thing. And we cannot, in fact, actually make the supposition, if we were in that situation, or if they had not been in that situation, it would not have happened as it did. Reality is such an intricately woven web that we cannot cut out one small piece and hope to graft it elsewhere. It is so a mystery.

Indeed, we may speculate about the future, but of the past, speculation is ultimately fruitless. Change one variable and it is not in isolation—if it is reality—and we may find that even when we are correct in predicting the future, it may just be that we were not right for the reasons we thought, why it happened. The future comes into the present and we are proven right or wrong, but the past? We can never be sure of any theory, not until we have a simulator of the entire universe, and we can test one aspect’s change. And even there, it would probably turn out not as we expect. So we really can’t say, what might have been. All we have is what actually happened, what we did with what was given to us. We will not be judged on what we could have done, but on what we did. Is it in any wise unfair? For we may think life unfair, but the Judgment—this should be the great equalizer, correct?

If then, the true judgment is ultimately just, by standards that the Lord has (if we can even call them “standards”, for that in itself implies something static and rigid)—perhaps we cannot tell, the difference between the saved and the damned, and it is not our place to try and guess, to tell the Lord what He’s supposed to think. Mayhap this was why He told us to treat everyone well, to love even your enemies, for perhaps you might mistreat a saint, if you treat anybody badly. The only one whose salvation you should be mindful of (in the main), is yourself, and this you handle by acting out of love in everything you do. Do protect your families against criminals, etc., etc., but realize that you do not know the whole story about even they, even whom we characterize as the “bad guy”. “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” [Oscar Wilde] You never know who’ll turn it all around.

And then, there are two things you should know about Christianity: 1) converting someone is more about saving them in this world, not the next: Christ is ready to catch you when you slip into that next world; and 2) there a lot (A LOT) of Christians who should be told either, “From these stones can God make sons of Abraham,” and “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not the things I say?” The first quote from Yohanan the Dipper (John the Baptist), the second from Yeshua ben Miriam (Jesus Christ). You see, the main problem of Christians, at least in America, is that they think they are just in the right. Because they are Christians, they think they are better—when God can of course make Christians from anyone. Because they are Christians, they think they know what it means to be righteous—when the one who says, “have mercy on me, a sinner,” he is the one justified. They feel they are qualified to understand, and believe they know by heart the mathematics of the judgment. And one thing I have come to know: we all of us know nothing.

So how do we tell, then, who is saved and who is not? In the final analysis, it’s none of our business. Even our own personal selves we cannot be sure if we’re on the right track. And this, my friends, is the correct attitude. If we indeed become sure that we are of the saved, it is at that point that our souls are in the greatest danger. The path of entitlement is what Lucifer followed, all the way to being kicked out of Heaven. (There are indeed many lessons we may learn from the War in Heaven, and the Fall.) And we come back to the question of the Son of Satan. Did he truly have a choice? Did he have a chance, at all? I tell you it matters not—not to us. We are not the ones responsible for throwing him into the fire. Our is to love everyone, even him, even to love our enemies. If you can fight for justice, by all means do, become an enemy as far as the darkness is concerned—but hate not that darkness. Call no one an enemy to yourself.

It is not to say we rebuke no one for their ill deeds. Our children must learn to do what is right. Stupidity must be called out. But we must stick to the facts. We must not think it is we who are given the charge to save souls: we cannot forgive sins, only the Lord; and only by the Lord’s grace are we any of us saved. So, ask yourself, if you consider yourself Christian: am I any better than the next person? or at least a certain class of person? If your answer is yes, you are indeed mistaken, and possibly dangerous. When your answer is no, you begin to crack the shell of the mystery, that whosoever would be first in the Kingdom must be a servant of all. There is no room at the height of the light for he who values his own life more than his neighbor’s. Comprende? It’s as simple and impossible as one, two, three… infinity: that is the mathematics of the judgment.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

Other

The following is an excerpt from my other book, The Gospel According to Judas. It’s about the Apocalypse:

At times, you know, it comes and goes — to feel that the darkness approacheth, a doom of all dooms. But I know that it is not the feeling of its imminence we sense, but how terrible in magnitude it will be when it does come. Apocalypse. Revelation. No, the time is not now. Perhaps in 30,000 years? 40? 50? When Christ says, “I come quickly,” one can think of it merely as a test of faith. For as regards things like time, I have heard that He watched the whole 13.8 billion year spectacle that is our universe, all of it. He watches grass grow. Literally. Time to him is far outside our own frame of reference.

And with “I come quickly” comes the topic, then, of scriptural infallibility. There are people who think that the Bible is literally true, and on top of that, that there are NO errors in it at all. Well, from the point of view of someone like me, who is in the state of mind like unto those who did write those texts, let me chime in with my two cents. The Lord knows that errors happen, and the Bible is no exception. If anything is meant to be, the way that scripture ends up is meant to be, as are the misinterpretations. Is it as God intended? That brings up the question of what “meant to be” means.

In one sense, everything that ever happens is meant to be. However, it doesn’t mean you didn’t of your own free will choose it, nor that you couldn’t have done things differently. If either of those things were false, “meant to be” would have no meaning to you. Because you choose it, because you could have done things differently, destiny unfolded. That which was meant to be was brought about by your choosing. Having no choice renders meaningless any action you perform. For destiny is not the same as fate. Fate is like strapped into the seat, while destiny is like driving. Choice is key: destiny comes from our own will, as it mixes with all the forces of the world that cross our path. Fate is not anything meant to be: it just is, and you just would have to accept it.

Now, it was meant to be that things God didn’t say ended up in His mouth in the Bible. It was meant to be that we think with each generation that this will be the generation where the Apocalypse will be brought about, and Christ will return. There are no accidents, now, remember? It was all meant to be. All that matters is, knowing what you think you know, what will you do? God knows what you will choose, and how all those forces work out to, and things become meant to be when they happen because it is all caught in the Purpose that pervades all things. You can be with that Purpose or against it, but you cannot escape it.

So no, He’s not coming back tomorrow, but you should act like He were. Live every day like it were your last, right? Isn’t that the aspiration? That people think that this is the generation that will see the Apocalypse may serve a purpose within the Purpose, and thus it may be “meant to be” in some small way. But anyone with the ability to see further, to widen one’s horizons larger: we should know better than thinking things like a document pieced together and edited by human beings is exactly what God word-for-word said to us. Yes, the Apocalypse does loom. But it’s the size of the shadow, not its proximity.



The Beginning Is Near

It was told that there was a certain small thing, a yellow dot, floating just inside the fringes of perception. It was said that to look at it, to see it, if even it were a barely conscious perception, one would be given the keys to the Kingdom of God by that glance. More powerful than the hammer of Thor, and more precious, it would need to elude the wrong pair of eyes. For if known to the right evil entity, it would mean an eternity of horror, on a scale beyond imagining, for all humankind; for all the world; for all worlds yet to be. Was it true that the Lord Jesus Christ, in his voyage between his death and his resurrection, left it in his wake, to let it drift in the ether? Were there actually people on the lookout for this phenomenon, scattered through the real world—or was that secret sect only a product of fevered minds, with eyes halfway in the halospace?

Symbols can do things in the name of the thing they represent. As in, a signature can be the extension of the power of someone, in lieu of their actual physical presence, to give orders (for instance). Of course, if the party on the other side has no idea who that person is, that signature may not have as much power as one might hope, depending on circumstances. What if a signature existed in the most minimal of forms, that of a solitary dot, which had a certain color to distinguish it from other like dots? If most people saw it, it would be as if they knew not at all who signed it or that even it were a signature at all. But if they knew what it was, if they found out, they could use the authority to terrible ends—if the authority were such like an angel of the Lord might have. Perhaps even worse? They say in the Bible an angel killed 180,000 soldiers in one night…

There is more to the myth: for one, an extension to the yellow dot. If indeed it met the right eyes, word would be spread in codified format, something that was whispered to mine own self, near the beginning of my involvement in all this. Among the secret Christians, it would be plain, the same secret Christians Philip K. Dick believed contacted him at the start of his own adventure. I believe all the mysteries of the universe can be summed up in that saying, that word to be spread, if you know exactly what it means: “Walt Disney is God.” And no, it was not meant to be taken literally, but if the yellow dot were perceived, it was salvation for us all—to enter into a new age, where everything was light. That was the pivot of that sentence, “light”. As Disney stuff, “light” was in the sense of not ponderous, entertaining; and then “light” on the flipside of the coin meant like “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness”. And as I said, it was whispered to me those years back: Walt Disney is God. We were saved.

It was of course Philip K. Dick who had perceived the dot. He wasn’t even consciously aware that he had seen it. It was hidden away, tucked into his translation of saying #77 of the Gospel of Thomas: “Split a piece of wood and I am there.” (Jesus Christ was saying this.) There was a little danger that Hitler would see this dot, for that phrase was discovered before the translation that Phil read, back around the turn of the 20th century—but it was by Englishmen, who apparently never translated it into German. It was only fragments of Thomas that had been found then. At the time I had joined, there appeared to be at least some segments who had not known that it had been found; it was still going around that Walt Disney was God. And then, there seemed to be a rumor about other dots, most notoriously, a black dot: the consequences of its discovery was supposedly terrifying to conceive.

Turned out, though, it was not so bad as all that. There were three other dots, four in total, and we discovered the meaning to them all:

  1. yellow: the Knowledge, this being the key to everything
  2. white: the Power, which actually without Knowledge, was not as great as you’d think
  3. purple: the Certainty, which guaranteed victory
  4. black: the Mystery, not so scary after all, but which in some sense contained the inklings of the other 3

They represented the four pillars of creation. And yes, they’ve all been found. By the good guys.

It is so then that I bring you (some more) Good News! Satan has been defeated, on Earth and in Heaven, on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the good arm of the Archangel Michael, and the Age of Gold enters the stream of time. Hearken: the Beginning is near! And you are given this news because it has been accomplished: the breaking of the ground for the New Heaven, and the New Earth, which has taken as much time as Our Lord was in the earth between his death and resurrection: two days. In God time. In human time, 2000 years. In forty days more, thus it shall be that the course of the world will be completed, and then, the Lord shall return, in the manner that he left: via the sky. What did it matter, the dot that was perceived? The Knowledge was a memory: not just of the past, but of the future. And without this memory, nothing was real. Everything was baseless. Without memory, lies have all the power. But fear not. Join, instead, with all that is good and true. There is a light. Try and walk in it.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

Crazy

I have lived two lives. Not that there was not overlap between the two, but I am reminded of Agent Smith’s first meeting with Neo in The Matrix. In the “daylight hours” I am a successful computer professional, while “by night” I battle demons and I am friends with angels. Is it like Agent Smith told Neo? Does only one of those two lives have a future in it? One of my friends declined to edit my first book about the Event because the good parts, the philosophical musings, were mixed in with the madness, and it made him uncomfortable to try and sort the things out in those pages. Yeah, I’ll admit, talking to Albert Einstein (and even weirder, like my interaction with Rosanna Arquette, who is still alive) do smack of the mental illness I have in fact been diagnosed with. But I count myself in good company as far as the “voices” are concerned; for there are some who count Philip K. Dick’s later years and even Joan of Arc’s otherworldly encounters merely symptomatic of similar, mentally divergent diagnoses.

The thing about it is, I draw no divider myself between the crazy and transcendent. One has affected the other, some of my best insight having been inspired by, if not directly taken from, my talking to my “voices”. In this sense, they are real, if not normal according to the world at large. If you don’t believe there is an unseen world, that religion is itself a fantasy at best, you will not believe in anything like what I describe. But I tell you, you’re missing out. My “voices” have helped me to be a better person, and I’m not saying that everyone who hears things is a prophet. Not at all. But if what comes from those things is positive, life affirming, morally honorable—why would you not believe in them? Because they’re not “real”? What if they simply make your life better all around? This “affliction” of mine, either God sent it my way or He made what was there work for the good, for me. And it is not that I have never thought that they were just the invention of a chemical imbalance. But I like to say, I have had so much evidence for their being real in some sense that it would be irrational for me not to believe.

I will not outline all the reasons I have to believe in the reality of my encounters; some are very personal, and I would have to go through my whole life story to make sense of them. The biggest sign, though? Once the Shekinah pulled something like a lever inside my imagination, and I had 20/20 vision for a day. Sure, with the other things I have seen, you could just brush them off as saying that I was hallucinating; but I have terrible vision, and have worn corrective lenses since the third grade. You can’t explain that little miracle away except to say that I must be lying. And if that’s the path you choose to reason, I can go no further in my argument with you and I bid you good day. I am not a liar. If you say no miracle is possible, here are the words of Henri Poincaré for you: “To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

I feel for all the people who have had really crazy things happen to them, and no one would believe them. UFO sightings may be easy to explain away, but I have no idea what a UFO abduction really is. I know that eyewitness accounts are very susceptible to error, and that “I know what I saw” doesn’t make what they say happened any more believable. But some things are only impossible until it happens to you. Myself, I have been witness to many incredible things, as you may discover yourself if you read these pages. What do these things say? In the greater scope of things, just to tell you 2 things: 1) the War in Heaven is over, and the good guys won; 2) the Beginning is near, and we will soon enter into an Age of Gold from an Age of Iron. Maybe 3 things: 3) Jesus Christ isn’t coming back for another 40,000 years. And about 1), it’s a War in Eternity, so it actually is scattered through time, and you might not have heard the last of it. The middle parts of it, anyway.

It’s only crazy if it’s not true. And even if it is crazy, sometimes it’s still true. I have been a part of something way beyond my power to control, and that makes me seem downright strange at times. But my weirdness is what you might expect a prophet to be in these post-millenial times. My proof? I am at peace with both the seen and the unseen worlds: can you say the same? I think the Dreaming may soon be done with me, and I will be remade normal again, now that it looks like my main mission has been accomplished. (Read my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven for what that involved.) No, my life is not over, not nearly, but I have had so that I’ve been feeling a little tired of late. And the wheel grinds on. To wonder what tomorrow brings, a little afraid, a little excited, for anything can happen. Yes it can, and I know it can, because it happened to me!



The Best Story Wins

I’m as yet trying to get a handle on how exactly this thing called “time” works, at least in relation to what I label “Eternity”. I have stated before that since the War in Heaven is a war in eternity, the primordial Fall of the Dragon and his rebel angels is one and the same as the eschatological Fall that is a sign of the Apocalypse. (Wow, a lot of capitalized words. I better have a point.) It is part of doctrine that Jesus Christ defeated Satan once and for all when he died on the cross. Yes, but we did not stop fighting Satan at that point. One of the mottoes of the Church might be, “eternal vigilance”. Always to be on guard against Satan and his minions. Was it because, perhaps, it was that the Crucifixion and subsequent Resurrection were actually to defeat the Devil in Eternity, while things still play out in time, while we are in this mortal coil?

Let us say that the universe is made of words. And that each angel were responsible for one of those words. Since they were blameless before iniquity were found in them, let us say that all of the rebel angels, they were also each responsible for a word: these were the point of contention between the good and the evil, that the meanings of these words were not corrupted to a state that would make them unrecognizable. For at any of these breaches could the derangement propagate. This is not an exact description as to what exactly happened during the War, but it is close enough to understand just how things may work. Philip K. Dick remarked that the universe was made of information: what if the metainformation, how this world’s strata forms as information, what if that were like the “words” just mentioned? Words that governed other words…

Now, within that “words” model: what if the universe were a grand story, composed of smaller stories? What if the only rule, really, in how it all works in the grand scheme, is that “the best story wins”? Maybe not at any given time that the story were being told, that things could not be “better”—this is the fallacy of personalization: if it’s not good for me, it’s not good. But what if, by the grandest wisdom, what if everything that ever was, put together, were the greatest story that could be told? Once again, not because nothing bad happens; in fact sometimes because something bad happened. If that is the case, then maybe we really do live in the best of all possible worlds. Ain’t that a kick? And since we are still going, this grand story is still being written, by you and me, and whatever forces are at work here or in Eternity.

How much did the fallen ones affect the universe? It is easier to do evil than to do good. People don’t (a lot of times) get what they deserve. Bad things happen to good people. Wherever you see it is not as it should be, this is of the damage done to the happening of creation. Though there was no break in the ultimate logic of all things, there were definitely places where there was warping. And then sometimes, you can see God’s hand counterbalancing the dementia, where it is almost obvious that the antiprovidence were turned about, and things worked out better than if the wrong had not happened at all. You’ve seen stories, surely, of the serendipity? Death and pain put to fruitful ends. Evil ultimately defeated by a love that would not have been so had there not been any evil at all.

As far as “time” goes, I still see sometimes things from before the casting of Satan from Heaven. I am told that even if it is clear in the Halospace that we, the good guys, won, Lucifer from before the Fall merely assumes that this is a reality that he did not choose to instantiate (solidify); which unfortunately for him is a wrong assessment. How the things I see reconcile in Eternity, I seem to have some feel for it. They, the ones in the Halospace, must expend some of their precious time to do anything, especially if that is to interact with the “real world”. It used not to be a big deal for them there, but after the Fall, it is written that Satan was filled with wrath, for he knew that his time was short. The fallen angels: the words they were entrusted with were taken away. They no longer possess anything of Eternity. Trapped in time, all of them are, to await the end that surely comes.