Tag: black iron prison

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 Nightmare

What I happened upon in a psychedelic nightmare. A place that seemed like another world, it seemed to me that my room had been trasported to another setting, for when I looked out the window, it was like nothing known on Earth: different scenery, different sky. The first time I ended up there, there were bars on my window—which was the first thing I noticed, my window on earth being conspicuously bar free. There also seemed to be a grill on the window, at different points, which makes one wonder about the malleability of that “reality” as opposed to the stability governing this one. If you want to see the kind of atmosphere I’m talking about, go do an image search for Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and look in the third panel. The one called “Hell”. I don’t know where the activity in the front is happening, but in the far back, at the ghost, black building there: that’s what I was inside.

I also remember distinctly that there, in the dim red sky, somewhere above, there was some kind of Watcher. I don’t know what it was watching for or at, I just knew I didn’t want its eye on me. I once had it right on top of me, on one visit, breathing down my neck, and I was prevented from thinking that it was Satan—just like I was prevented from thinking that the Black Iron Prison was Hell. Philip K. Dick thought that the Prison was what the world actually looked like, in one substratum. There was an opposite to the Prison, he wrote, which he called the Palm Tree Garden (which I call the Oasis). But if the Prison is what reality looked like on one level, couldn’t the Oasis be in there somewhere, in some upper stratum? Paradise and Hell: we probably have the idea of them all wrong, maybe even more wrong than the ancients, who put Paradise in the sky and Hell in the ground.

If you ever see the ’Prison, you’ll know it. You might not have had the words to call it properly by name, but you’d know it like a heart attack. Philip K. described it as the far future mixed with the ancient. Everything, all the buildings, the whole landscape, is black (hence the name). I remember looking out into that expanse the first time, and I don’t think it was a hallucination superficially superimposed upon the buildings that existed in real life, I think I really noticed that: this black city is not where I had just been; I was somewhere alien. Where the joints were—at least on some of the architecture—it was as if black claws bound the corner shut, clasped the boundary between floors together. Sinister the architecture, all of it. A thoroughly evil place. Except I wasn’t allowed to think that, either.

We who do see it, I found we can break free of it forever. Philip K. Dick was freed when Nixon resigned as President: this was the world freed from the Prison outside. I was freed the last time I ever saw it when I dropped acid, upon a short missive from secret Christians in the æther: the whisper of, “Walt Disney is God”: this was the world freed from the Prison inside. It might not be in grand gestures such as these, but as sure as there is a God who is love, you will find an escape from the Prison if ever you venture too far into the Dark Wood, to the city on the other side, where no sun ever shines, where the stars flee the dark red smoke.