Tag: beginning

Conspiracy Theory

Can it be true? Is the Devil responsible for every wrong thing that ever was, from the barest papercut to the most seismic earthquake, the hugest hurricane? For pain, itself? What does it mean, the Plan of God, and is it the same as the Grand Design? Why would the War in Heaven echo within these questions, and through time and creation? Do you think you can know the answer? For it requires a shifting of scale, as to what you thought God was capable of, and then of what you thought angels, the power of these were, who were said to be a little greater than human beings. What you probably have in mind as to what God is able to do, this is more in line with the ability of the archangels, if we say that Lucifer was once the first of them (and Michael the second).

It took a little getting used to, that last thought. I had read Tolkien’s “Ainulidalë” where Melkor, the rebel Ainur, and the greatest, shaped creation—and I thought, certainly it could not have been like that for the real world, for certainly angels and their ilk did not possess such power. And yes, the evil that was will, the harm man does to man, that could have come from the original rebel; but earthquakes? hurricanes? Certainly not having source in the Fall. Or so I thought. What it took to shift my paradigm was to hear that God had not created pain. I half overheard it, the Lord said it to me as if in a dream. And then it all made sense to me. The aesthetics of pain, pure pain: it is discordance itself. Verily, good things have been made of even this, but that result is the work of the Lord, and not of the pain. Discordance itself, permeating all creation: this was the scale of the greatest of angels. Quite the idea.

But… it was really like that?

What is this conspiracy? Why did we never know this? The Book of Job gives us clues. You know the story, Satan makes a wager with God when God gushes about His faithful servant Job. And so Satan is given permission basically to let loose on poor Job, to test that faith. So at the end of his trials, when Job is about to lose it, God appears. About the reason(s) for his travails, He says:

4 Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
    Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
    Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
    or who laid its cornerstone
7 when the morning stars sang together
    and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
[Job 38:4-7]

He goes on in that vein for a bit. Not once does he point a finger and say, “Satan did it!” Nope. He takes “blame” for the whole shebang. And to anyone who asks why He didn’t tell us this before, this news about pain, above—I would simply point you to that speech. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be let in on this tidbit of a revelation.

Also, there’s a look at Satan’s capabilities in the Book of Job:

Job 1:16 “The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants, and consumed them”
Job 1:18-19 “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house, and suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead”
[NRSV]

We were talking about natural disasters, here. So are all natural disasters directly the work of evil forces? Maybe not, but natural disasters are due to how the world works, and how the world works is in part due to the strivings of evil against the good. I found that the creation of pain was the start of the War in Heaven. The evil, it is told, spread through a third of all angels. We’re talking billions. The War had a good deal in making the quality of fate, as the angels contended on what was, and is, and is to be—for creation itself. And it is yours to decide which side you are on, those who fight for truth, or those who make their own desire the greatest of their ideals.

So, if you ever come to a place were the walls seem to shut around you, when there seems before you only a dead end, know that these are from the twisting of the innards of the cosmos, and indeed there you may be able yourself to fight in the War in Heaven, which has ended, is ending, and will end—as herald to a new age. If you can make a way out of a structure sealed in shadow, you give the angel fighting on the side of faith and logic a means to bring the demon down. The conspiracy of the darkness is one of despair, for this is how it propagates. Like a virus, to the detriment of its carrier. Find the truth, indeed, the faith and logic: it is with us, not our foe; we are of the light. The Grand Design inhales the darkness and breathes out the dawn, and we are one with the Plan if we do likewise, to carry the candle flame into corners light forgot.

And the grandest conspiracy of all? That which makes all other conspiracies pale in comparison? Of course, it’s right before your face. Pretty much every day. What is the way to all you ever could hope to want? It is simple, and no one ever told you: it is love, and only love: be not but love, do not but love. That’s it. As the soothsayers 4 said, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you meant to be. It’s easy.” It is what’s behind the whole ball of wax, why God took the blame for all the wrong that’s ever happened, when it’s never His fault for anything (never!). If God is all good, but let His greatest creation have the greatest angle of leeway, and it was from that created one that ultimately, all evil and pain come… it almost seems too easy. But that’s God for you.

“I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” [Luke 10:24 NRSV] It is many a time such a way with mysteries, that once unraveled they show a very simple underlying structure. If this is a great saying, what I write here, remember that it was not the Lord who said, “God is love.” But the Lord, indeed, said that they who were to follow him would do greater things than he had done. Yea, verily. He gives us even this. There is no question, love is the answer. The secret is love. Tell everyone.



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

Frankenmyth

This is the third excerpt from my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven. Probably my craziest idea, and that’s saying something:

Perhaps this is a book of beginnings? They are well worth the ink that marks them. Shall we pursue this path now? Beginnings are sorts of mysterious things, and only one of them had nothing ending before it, that anyone could understand. Or was there was something, even there? We could go back to where we started this whole thing and try and stitch a couple myths together—a Frankenmyth. It is said that Lucifer begot Sin, correct? How, exactly? Milton wrote that she came directly from his forehead, like Athena from Zeus’s head. But why would that have happened? You know, I have my own idea about that: simply put, he said “No” to the Holy Spirit.

To blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is what Christ said was the unforgivable sin, and the Lord himself told me that that is done by saying “no” to Him. For to say no to love’s will means that that part of you is no more. Love asks of you only good things, that of life. If that part of you is gone, there may still be motion to it, but it is basically flamed out. He was the first to have ever done this, Lucifer was, and it was complete, an utter denial of all that love was, in him. Thus came to be from that first and greatest of evil, the Evil that he made of himself: he did what we call Sin. And as Sin was forming, when the Holy Spirit was to give light, to give life to her—for Lucifer’s action had such consequence in Heaven—she was killed, out of mercy.

To have given the light of life to the darkness that had gained form from Lucifer’s action would have been to create a creature who would only have known (excruciating) pain. So she was slain before she could be born. Which meant she was denied life—but she could not exactly die because there was no death that was in primordial existence before her. Thus she still does move as if life were in her, and gives birth to monsters. This was the one whom Philip K. wrote about, the one whom we all lament—because she never got a chance.

Now, there was another myth regarding Lucifer, one where he had had first go in creation, and that the dinosaurs were his failed try in his own action of creation. But what if we modify that, and go back to before “Let there be light,” and look at Tiamat/Rahab, if you recall these? What if Sin, who was slain, were the one whose body it was that was the watery chaos, back when in Genesis the Earth was said to be formless and void? Because it was if he buried that body in the soil from which all our world sprang. And this was Lucifer “salting the earth,” as it were: to make the creating of anything in such a matrix impossible, thinking not with the understanding that with God, nothing is impossible. The Lord brought light and life into the cosmos anyway, but what Lucifer did had profound effect on how anything happened, how everything worked.

That’s my own, original myth, what I’ve been able to piece together in my experiences—with the visions going to and fro, leaving meaning behind. You know, it’s strange what people leave lying around sometimes, with a slip of the wrist. Stranger still, one might believe, would be what God leaves lying around—with a wink and a smile.



Sanity (cont’d)

And the nature of this world: imperfect can be more beautiful than perfect. Though, of course, nothing that is truly perfect was ever a part of this world (save Christ). Error, or more romantically, accident, can be much the more beautiful than straight on poetry writ flawless. This is the memory of her who had no chance. She was the first Sophia, who was not acceptable, but by no fault of hers. She was the first that was not caused to be by the Lord our God. It is our duty to do as God did here: we do not prefer that the evil occur, but to make of things in its aftermath better than if the wrong had never been done at all.

Look: one of the greatest factors in evolution? Pain. Prey flee from predators because of the threat of pain. And death? One wonders if they comprehend it, never having experienced it but maybe having witnessed it, and one wonders there if they fully understand that, there; but pain? they get that. So the prey is fueled by fear of pain and they get faster. Predators run faster to catch prey. So it goes. Pain has other uses, of course. Philip K. Dick once called it the most efficient motivation. We escape damage because of pain. Some people of the S & M crowd thank their lucky stars that there is pain. Death, too, is a motivating factor, but more abstract, for we do not remember when we blinked on, in the womb, and have only unconsciousness as a comparison. Pain we know.

So what exactly is that streak of insanity that runs through the universe? Though Sin is dead, she behaves as one who is supernaturally animated. The universe is not her body, but her body was like the seed of it. There is of her darkness spread through and throughout creation. If you perchance a pocket of crazed circumstance, it might be her center, blowing by. And beware her children, every bit as dead as her (for the offspring share the nature of the parent), who are monsters. Do not mistake their madness or motion for life. On the Last Day shall they all be collected and burned into nothing, and no one will mourn their passing. But all of it is indeed a sad tale.

And about Phil thinking that other thing about all these things that happened, the Godhead itself in jeopardy, all of it because of an intellectual and not a moral error—really? The error being mistaking the illusory world for the real world? That’s what he said, that all of us so fall, and the powers that be will tell you when you fall that you have sinned, and not that you committed an honest mistake. But the streak of the irrational in the shadow of everything—what is irrational is the illusion we see, that the “real” world actually is supposed to make sense. The true way of the world has always been inaccessible to us. To be sane, therefore, to be of the outward forms we see, is to be insane. The sanity is actually the insanity. And indeed, this is something like an intellectual error, not moral.

So they are opposite sides of the coin: to find the beauty in even the faltering of things; or be as like the powers that be, and grasp after power by taking advantage of the irrational, phenomenological world. Even in the purely intellectual, there is in practice always a moral dimension to your actions. Maybe just the ones who made up the rules being at fault. If you think about it, much of all sin is an intellectual error. The logic of them, however, contained in the heart, and not the head. When we do not understand the consequence of a sin, then it is purely an intellectual error. Only when you know it is wrong can you call it so. Ostensibly, of course, for the record counts even unknowing sin as sin.

In the War in Heaven, the main goal was preservation: Logos (Holy Reason) vs. derangement (evil). The angels fought for the fundamental structure of our reality. If you can tell, we did take damage, but if you also have eyes to see, then see that ultimately, we won. I think there is a reason we feel so satisfied at the end of a movie when the good guy wins. I think it’s cooked into the soup of existence itself. Along with the tribute to Pain, there is the blood, sweat, and tears of all the angels who fought so hard to keep things from falling apart. And in it, even how there is no victory without first conflict. Lucifer ultimately plays his part in the Plan; there is no escape from that. Not to say things aren’t his fault. It’s just how good God really is. And for how seductive evil may seem, how senseless it ultimately amounts to.



Sanity

Have you at some point thought that there is a streak of insanity that runs through the fabric of the universe? Philip K. Dick had several explanations about that. The first, and probably closest to his heart, was that the original Mind mourns after a woman who has died, and all of creation is awry because of that grief. Another is that the primordial Fall from grace was not a moral error, but one of intellect. And one may find the latter sounds unsatisfying. All the bad stuff that ever happened, because someone forgot to balance a checkbook? We shall return to that, but the former speculation: this does indeed seem to be the case of how things are.

When Lucifer decided to sin, in its most formidable cast, that urge did not sit idle, but its consequence bore fruit. When he sinned, he gave birth to Sin. This was the fruit of his overwhelming genius, and sad that is. Where nothing could go wrong, there in Heaven where God’s will is done as a matter of course, he invented Error. He invented Pain. And he, being the progenitor of same, he himself became Evil. This is in line with the writings of Milton, Paradise Lost, but it has its origin in the Bible: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” [James 1:15, NIV] And the term, “playing God”—and how wrong that could possibly be—is most fit in describing this creation, Sin.

I wrote once: “imagine every fiber of your being twisting in agony; it gets worse if you move; it gets worse when you stop.” I had not realized it at the time I jotted that time, but such a tortured soul was what Sin was to be, behind her eyes. This was Error, this was Pain. So before the life could light within her, just at that moment, she was slain. And mercy it was. But this is the one whom we grieve, the woman that died, the innocent that died—for she was not given the chance at all. And this is an argument against the question of why does not God select them to be born who would not sin? Because everyone should get a chance, a real chance, if life were to be given to them. Sin’s life was zero sum: perfectly fair, no gain nor loss. Except the potential of what might have been. And that is real too; and this is why we grieve.

This was what was meant when the Lord said of the Devil that he was a murderer from the first. The Lord would not let the light behind the eyes, the life, suffer so catastrophically… Philip K. Dick said that the universe is a tale told of the one that was lost, and indeed, is it not so? Is it not a tale of sins, of pain, of mistakes—do we not relate to these ideas? It is of fruitless speculation to wonder how she would have turned out. There is no way to tell. As it stands, you may interact with Sin, and she will seem like she were of like any other spirit being, until you look into her eyes, and at the cores exist only vacuum. She reacts like she feels, but ultimately, there is nothing there that looks out.

So it was her body out of which God created all things material. Lucifer thought that by poisoning creation by the body of pain, of error, he was “salting the earth” as the saying goes, so that it would be impossible to build anything out of the watery chaos that that body was. But God wanted it that way, all creation the reminder of the one who was lost. That all might remember her. Indeed, it was impossible to build anything solid from the barely there watery chaos, but as we know, with God nothing is impossible. What you see all around you has this one thing in common: nothing is perfect. But there is so much beauty. This is what God can do with the body of Error itself.

(continues…)



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.”