From Confessions

[written by Leo Tolstoy]
The foregoing was written by me some three years ago, and will be printed.

Now a few days ago, when revising it and returning to the line of thought and to the feelings I had when I was living through it all, I had a dream. This dream expressed in condensed form all that I had experienced and described, and I think therefore that, for those who have understood me, a description of this dream will refresh and elucidate and unify what has been set forth at such length in the foregoing pages. The dream was this:

I saw that I was lying on a bed. I was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable: I was lying on my back. But I began to consider how, and on what, I was lying—a question which had not till then occurred to me. And observing my bed, I saw I was lying on plaited string supports attached to its sides: my feet were resting on one such support, by calves on another, and my legs felt uncomfortable. I seemed to know that those supports were movable, and with a movement of my foot I pushed away the furthest of them at my feet—it seemed to me that it would be more comfortable so. But I pushed it away too far and wished to reach it again with my foot, and that movement caused the next support under my calves to slip away also, so that my legs hung in the air. I made a movement with my whole body to adjust myself, fully convinced that I could do so at once; but the movement caused the other supports under me to slip and to become entangled, and I saw that matters were going quite wrong: the whole of the lower part of my body slipped and hung down, though my feet did not reach the ground. I was holding on only by the upper part of my back, and not only did it become uncomfortable but I was even frightened. And then only did I ask myself about something that had not before occurred to me. I asked myself: Where am I and what am I lying on? and I began to look around and first of all to look down in the direction which my body was hanging and whiter I felt I must soon fall. I looked down and did not believe my eyes. I was not only at a height comparable to the height of the highest towers or mountains, but at a height such as I could never have imagined.

I could not even make out whether I saw anything there below, in that bottomless abyss over which I was hanging and whiter I was being drawn. My heart contracted, and I experienced horror. To look thither was terrible. If I looked thither I felt that I should at once slip from the last support and perish. And I did not look. But not to look was still worse, for I thought of what would happen to me directly I fell from the last support. And I felt that from fear I was losing my last supports, and that my back was slowly slipping lower and lower. Another moment and I should drop off. And then it occurred to me that this cannot e real. It is a dream. Wake up! I try to arouse myself but cannot do so. What am I to do? What am I to do? I ask myself, and look upwards. Above, there is also an infinite space. I look into the immensity of sky and try to forget about the immensity below, and I really do forget it. The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me. I am still supported above the abyss by the last supports that have not yet slipped from under me; I know that I am hanging, but I look only upwards and my fear passes. As happens in dreams, a voice says: “Notice this, this is it!” And I look more and more into the infinite above me and feel that I am becoming calm. I remember all that has happened, and remember how it all happened; how I moved my legs, how I hung down, how frightened I was, and how I was saved from fear by looking upwards. And I ask myself: Well, and now am I not hanging just the same? And I do not so much look round as experience with my whole body the point of support on which I am held. I see that I no longer hang as if about to fall, but am firmly held. I ask myself how I am held: I feel about, look round, and see that under me, under the middle of my body, there is one support, and that when I look upwards I lie on it in the position of securest balance, and that it alone gave me support before. And then, as happens in dreams, I imagined the mechanism by means of which I was held; a very natural intelligible, and sure means, though to one awake that mechanism has no sense. I was even surprised in my dream that I had not understood it sooner. It appeared that at my head there was a pillar, and the security of that slender pillar was undoubted though there was nothing to support it. From the pillar a loop hung very ingeniously and yet simply, and if one lay with the middle of one’s body in that loop and looked up, there could be no question of falling. This was all clear to me, and I was glad and tranquil. And it seemed as if someone said to me: “See that you remember.”

And I awoke.

1882.



Walt Disney Is God

This will be the last excerpt from my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven. It is a mystery of which I speak, when I speak that seemingly simple sooth:

I like to say that all the secrets of the universe can be distilled in that one phrase: “Walt Disney Is God.” What broke me free of the Black Iron Prison for good, and everyone out there that I could see with my third eye: all loosed from their cells. The story of that declaration came after the Event had happened. What was told me makes some sense, but I believe you can take it as merely something made so I could understand it, that it may have a structure that is beyond my powers of perception—if one were asked to visualize 4 spatial dimensions, for instance.

The phrase has been with me all throughout this story. I believed it literally for the first few years from when my mind had exploded. At least, on and off; a few theories were flying around those days. Yes, that the actual Walt Disney was the actual God. He would come and go in the visions. Then I turned Christian, so the phrase became blasphemy. Maybe that sounds a little severe, but I think that’s correct, the correct use of the term. So every time I heard it from then on, me now as a convert to the Good News, I would always reply to hearing the phrase, in no uncertain terms, “Walt Disney is not God.” Wow, lighten up, right?

Where the phrase comes from is related to the experience that Philip K. wrote about, the beginning of 2-3-74. When a girl came to his place delivering medication, he asked about a fish symbol on her necklace. And she told him that it was an ancient symbol of Christianity. He had right then what he called a moment of anamnesis, a sudden remembering, a vast influx of information. He suddenly knew he was a secret Christian, and so was she. They were all awaiting the return of Our Lord Jesus Christ. What’s interesting is his believing she was in on this, too, when I’m pretty sure she’d have reacted to that characterization like that girl on 10/7/88 whom I told to call my mother and tell her I was off drugs.

These types of visions were useful. It gave what was happening in our minds a sense of urgency, of the here and now, the secret story behind reality. Even if, when you get right down to it, it was incorrect. Phil’s Exegesis is full of these, theory after theory that sort of seemed to make sense, but were really out there—then what did Phil really come to believe, where did this rubber hit the road? When he had any type of religious question, he didn’t go to a Buddhist temple or anything like that. He asked a priest or pastor. But the visions that he had—it was a way to get him to explore strange places, real and of the psyche. To seek, to map what was possible. This is the kind of job description for a prophet.

According to what I found out, just after the Event, and therefore at a safe place, there were 4 dots floating around the noosphere, that could be discovered upon seeing the correct thing. They were like the mustard seed the Lord talked about, one of them practically literally. It was the most important dot: the yellow dot. And if it were discovered by the wrong person, it would mean the subjugation of all humanity in a totalitarian horror forever. All the “secret Christians” like Philip K. (and me, eventually) hoped desperately to find that yellow dot. And when it were found, we would spread the coded declaration, “Walt Disney is God” and we would all know. It meant, all is now light. That this would be understood correctly and be true, without literally being true was indication of the start of the Age of Gold. The Palm Tree Garden. The Oasis.



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.



Crazy

Did they ever call you crazy? Were they right?

This is the second excerpt from my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven. It was just when I was being kicked out of my apartment for not paying rent. When the landlord showed up with two cops, I acted strangely, half on purpose, so they sent me to a looney bin:

They say that you will know the difference between psychosis and a religious experience by what the effects are. If they mess up your life, it’s the bad thing. If it heals you, then there’s a better chance that it is God. Philip K. Dick and I—what to make of us? They seem in the middle, these experiences of ours, both damaging and healing, or maybe neither. Phil could carry on a normal life, but he was obsessed—till the day he died—because of the events of 2-3-74. He wrote 8,000 pages about it. He wrote 4 novels about it. Was it God? Who can say? It didn’t stop a suicide attempt, that’s for sure. Though maybe they did stop him from dying from that attempt.

And me? The experiences, I must admit, have been intrusive at times. But they always end up helping me. I remember one Christmas card I got, from my brother, in which he wrote, “If you say that God is acting in your life, I believe you. Because you have turned your life completely around.” But I get a bit far ahead of myself; that would come later. Right now I was still headlong down addiction’s highway, and going into my first mental institution not because of what was going on in my head, but because I gave up. And as we descend, one must ask if one day we will face the heart of darkness? (You must go alone, at night…)

So the mythology going on in my head was, at the time—and it was a fluid thing—was that actually, the rebel angels had actually been the good guys, and the powers that be were the oppressors. I wasn’t thinking that those powers were Jesus-based figures. I was working on my own Gnostic-type ideas. For instance, there was written in one Gnostic text that one of the Archons (one of the evil rulers of this material world) rebelled against Ialdabaoth, who was the god of this world, which was a fallen world. So I thought I was of that rebel’s ilk in the rebellion, but not exactly. Don’t ask me how it all worked out, I didn’t have too much work go into its structure. Just a lot of nerve.

I called myself Lucifer Morningstar, the name I got not from the Bible, but the comic book Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. He added the “Morningstar”, that is, since yes, the first half of the name does come from scripture. There was actually a competition I was in for this name, with Jim Morrison, who just kept it as “Lucifer”. (He won that, by the way. Turns out it was not the type of thing you wanted to win.) If I was against God, it was because He was in the wrong, somehow: I had no intention of being evil. Though I really didn’t think much on what made us fall, just how noble we were being rebels. Oh, and “we”? I thought my friends and such were the other “devils”, like Asmodeus and Beelzebub. Like I said, it wasn’t fleshed out to any significant depth. Good thing, too.

So at the initial hearing, the judge asked me, “What is your name?” to which I answered, “Lucifer Morningstar”, and when he asked, “Where were you born?” I answered, “Heaven”. And that was the end of the hearing, basically. With that kind of performance, they can lock you away. I think it was from a 3 day stay to become a 14 day stay. I found out being called “Lucifer” in real life does things to your head. It was just a phase, though. In and out the transom of desire.



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.