Tag: evil

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.



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.



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 Reality

The War in Heaven wasn’t just about kicking an angel who got too big for his britches out of the Kingdom. You must understand exactly what the rebellion meant, the tremendous reach of what it affected. Firstly, to remove the notion that there was something inherently noble in the defiance of Lucifer and his crew, the whole Milton idea of “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven”, we must get a clear idea of who and what was involved. In my visions, I was told by the Lord that the ultimate sin, the one written of in the Gospels as absolutely unforgivable, was simply to say “no” to the Holy Spirit. When I first heard it, I did not at all understand how that could be. If this were the case, then no one could be saved, correct? Yet this is exactly what Christianity teaches us: none of us by himself or herself can be saved. For saying no to the Holy Spirit, this is saying no to the spirit of love itself. That part of us is dead. Permanently. And as the Lord also said, if your eye offends you, pluck it out. Better to go blind into the Kingdom than be cast whole into the flames. And so, are all those pieces of us that are dead burned up in Purgatory when we are saved, for no trace of sin enters Heaven.

It was not at all that God was some sort of tyrant who imposed rules and regulations without reason. Logos, the “Word” of God—observed as the means by which things happen—can in one sense be thought of as Holy Reason. Lucifer understood the consequences of what he did when he said “no” to the Holy Spirit. And methinks it took tremendous effort to render that first “no”. To decide to become the embodiment of Evil. To be the genesis of Sin and Death. And Sin? We also know her as Pain. That is correct: pain was not invented by God. And perhaps in knowing this, we can start to grasp the scale in which the War of Heaven was fought, and is being fought, and will be fought. (Though it ended, it is a war in eternity, and there is mystery here in the telling of its when.)

Lucifer, now become Satan, he was not thrown out of Heaven because he rebelled, per se. Just like Adam & Eve were not expelled from Heaven because they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God says specifically the pair were sent out of Eden so that they would not eat of the tree of life (and so make their sin permanent). In likewise, Satan was cast from Eternity because he had so much power in the halls and means of the Kingdom. And the War, the front line of it, was fought in contention for the nature of reality. Michael and his angels fought so that logic would stay logic. Something that fundamental. It was Logos vs. derangement. And this is what it means to be an angel of Heaven: if the least of Michael’s angels had lost their fight against the evil, all of creation would have suffered permanent derangement forever.

I am saying that we come full stop in the dualism of good vs. evil. By their fruits shall they be known. How much of it is God’s “Plan”? One wonders. But it can be seen that in the model where the Devil had an effect on the fundamental structures of creation, maybe God can be forgiven for how things turn out in this world. One thing I have found in my searching: it is never His fault, anything bad that happens anywhere. Simple as that. God is light, and in Him is no darkness. God is love. Courage, take heart. For He is the First and the Last, and vengeance shall be His in the Judgment that shall surely comes. May peace not be far from where you stand.