Tag: jesus

The Meaning of Life

Work? There is so much pleasure in work. I would not have believed it, years ago—or has it actually, already been decades? A world away from this, now. Here. It is surely personal, the theory of what may matter, and I think not that the judgments of a dream can ever be distilled into a logic without passion. Where is life without passion? There are antiseptic actions which do concoct a steady reasoning, it is true, but never would they have been initiated without some investment of the heart. To be useful to this world: this is finer than any reproductive urge, by far, in quality’s name. All is vanity, and chasing after wind… except work? That which rearranges entropy so that life is possible; that which formulates beauty in the design of the physical world, letting imagination spill into it.

And then there is love, of course. Some (many?) short circuit the question of what meaning may be by leaning with all our body weight on those overused four letters. Yes, I know what you say when you say that the meaning of life is love. Of course it is. But do you have any idea of what you’re saying when you say exactly that? In my own surveys, I have always thought that you do not need to believe in God in order to believe that God is love. And that love is so simple, we’ll never understand it. And more: love costs. Do you believe that love is measured by how much work it inspires? What is love? It is like a nothing that is an everything, like how time causes all things to happen, and is actually not doing anything of itself at all.

This is how we start. It is always thus: here, now, this—me. From there, everything that may be accomplished comes to pass. With that, and sorrow. Is it true that the house of wisdom is a house of mourning? Even if that equation exaggerates the issue, I conjecture that anything more than a surface meaning of things must dip into such dim wells, and remember their flavor. Then to say that the meaning of life is simple, dead simple: if you are alive, you already know it. Or no, you do not? You do not know it just as a fish does not know what water is. I remember back, in a dream, when the Lord asked me, “What do you want?” Whereupon I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “That means you are lost.” The worst place to get lost—in yourself.

At the other end of my soul, the fantasy won’t let me be… that of EUTOPIA. Not Utopia, which means “nowhere”, but with that initial “e”, it is “the good land”. Some people, when they believe that some task is impossible, they say, “that’s Utopia”. In a perfect world, yes? Except that things don’t have to be perfect to mean something. We deal with imperfections every day, and we make them work somehow. Destiny appears often rough hewn. It might be true that we become who we are in the dreams we forget, that the Process is a mystery—and perhaps there are reasons for that. Two shapes which are random cut fitting together with fantastic symmetry. The messianic age, which people of Jewish persuasion point out did not happen in the time of Jesus of Nazareth, actually seems to be happening now: as a thousand years is to God a single day, it were two days that the messiah had lain in the earth, to emerge with God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven: it is happening now, these two days later in that cosmic scale. The beginning is near. The beginning is here.

Would you believe me now if I say that I am a scientist? Indeed, in my brash university years I was known as a devout atheist. Much has happened from there to here, but let this pique your curiosity: if you claim yourself a skeptic, I say that you do not doubt enough. What is it if you start not to take logic for granted? When you do not hold that truth need be true, false be false? Impossible? Idiocy? Truth must always be true, and the opposite? What if there is something more primal than these? And if I tell you that God only exists to me from my point of view, and not necessarily yours, does that invite a better perspective of me?

We don’t notice that miracles happen every day simply because they happen every day. This is a clue to how the world works. Science, where we get a bundle of clues, tells you what is true, whether you believe it or not—if the things in question are within its jurisdiction. You can go overboard with that, where we enter a realm called “scientism”, in which we believe only science has any valid answers in any school of thought. Still, such a position is arguably better than fundamentalism, which claims that the universe was made in 6 24 hour days, and that somehow Adam and Eve were the parents of everyone who has ever lived. But are both extremes missing something very simple? Is it that life itself is its own meaning?

I need no reason to be because I am. Is the purpose of life… to be alive? This certainly seems to be true of the animals, and perhaps further, the plants and fungi, even the algae and bacteria. Animals seem to get by just fine, without any hint of existential crisis. Humans, on the other hand, my thinking is that even the meanest, basest of us, they will come to a point where they look in the mirror and ask, “Why am I here?” It is not enough for us just to be. In my understanding, “religions” like Buddhism actually stop at that point: they tell us that we should be content just to be. To meditate, to sit without any need for validation. Enlightenment, then, to find the state of being that perhaps the flora and fauna seem to take for granted? In my idea of things, I think, no—this solution seems less than satisfying.

The world has been described as a powerful play; it is indeed an epic current that drives into the new spacetimes at breakneck paces, if one indeed opens one’s eyes at the billion actions at every moment, in all the places where the tumblers are flipped, and we all channel that awesome river of rivers into the unknown, and so it becomes known, the fantastic reality. See, if you have eyes to see.

Understand: we do not wish to renounce this world. We do not wish to be lifted from the stresses and troubles that present themselves to our attention. We do not wish to evacuate ourselves of sweet sensations, just because we can. EUTOPIA calls us: the land of justice. We do not desire to move ourselves into the desert to be favored of some deity; we want to make something of what our forebears left for us. We want to be fruitful, and multiply. Go to your nirvana, if you have had enough of blue sky and fields of golden grain. I desire to remain attached to all the people I have met and loved. I wish to value the coins of silver I have collected. We are so close, right now, to the promise we have read about, scarce to hope. Truly, it is at this time now, here in this waking universe, that there is a path there from here. That all we need is to keep going on the direction we are generally moving towards. That all it requires of us is work. Not magic. Not miracle. Not blood. Just sweat.

What gives anything you do meaning? You get a birthday gift that is just what you wanted, and it means something to you because it is apparent that the giver put a lot of thought in it. What would make a life mean something, then? Perhaps we should modify that big question: “What is the meaning of your life?” or even, “What is the meaning of your life to you?” Is the meaning of life to achieve some goal you have set for yourself? Is the meaning of life to make some difference in the world? Would that not give meaning to your life? Significance. Purpose. And you know what? that has everything to do with love. Because in the final analysis, love is all there is. What are material things, after all, if they are just things? That perfect birthday present: there is love in it. Love = meaning. That is what we name when we say that the meaning of life is love.

But that’s not enough, do you not see? What might be the question we really ask: “What is enough?” What is enough to make life have meaning? One is tempted to think that it is a different thing to different people, that the buddhist monk who has reached enlightenment has found the meaning of life, or that family man with a good job, loving wife and 2.5 kids, 1.3 dogs, a big house in a great neighborhood, hybrid car, etc., etc., has found the ultimate answer to all those esoteric questions that those of a deeper mind have been wrestling with for millennia. If only it be enough… Because you have heard stories told, felt that desire when driving home from the store, that outside temptation not to turn left onto your street—that curious urge to just keep driving, and not look back.

Thus it is usually told that riches will not give you the meaning that you might be seeking through it, nor pleasure, nor power, nor esteem. Because what is enough? It’s never enough. Then there are the paths that are said to give you inner peace, so that whatever you do have, that will be enough. A lot of people (a lot of people) will refer to a God-shaped hole in the heart, that what is required to find all the meaning in life that you could possibly want is to find the infinite, and to house That within you. …and we’re back to “God is love.” One might be tempted to take this as perhaps a fundamentalist would (in a perfect world): that “love” is actually talking about a material substance, and that God is made up (entirely) of this one substance. A love transcendent. In addition, a corollary: since we are made in the image of God, that we are made in the image of that love, that love transcendent.

Jesus! One thing that most people overlook when talking about the Son of God, maybe because it’s thinking a little bit backward, is that if we are to believe the account of Him (that he dined with “sinners” and infuriated the rich and powerful, ultimately to end up dead while having committed no sins Himself)—if this is correct, then from the example that He is, we can therefore conclude that God (or Dad, as He called Him), is also good. The thing about the triune God is that to keep with the Judaic “God is One”, it means that the Son and the Father share the one nature that God is. To be the Son of God means that He is God, and in fact in the Gospel accounts, this is the blasphemy He is charged with, “this man says he is God” (which is punishable by death). It is well known that when there is a certain way that religious leaders act in their relation to God, this changes the nature of God for everyone within that leader’s influence. “God is love” is not in the Old Testament. Basically, He needed to show everyone Himself what Dad really was like. The picture, before Jesus, had been an incomplete one.

Understood there are millions of people who believe in God who don’t believe Jesus was His Son, and perhaps even more who don’t think there is a God at all, but when you bring up the topic of the meaning of life, you cannot ignore them. It is also understood and there is some agreement with philosophers (a- and theist) that there is ultimately no meaning without that there is a God. For instance, if in the far, far future, the universe experiences the death and dissolution of everything, what has it all been for? Even not considering that, there is something to be said about the thought that we are part of something larger.

God is love. These are arguably the most profound words ever writ. There is no ineffable: God is love. Better than anything Jesus is supposed to have said; and I speak no heresy here, for He said there would be greater deeds done by those who followed after Him. There you go. Even if you do not believe there is anything like a deity anywhere, you understand the sentiment. You understand the dream that is being had. It is the best possible thing in all the worlds anywhere, and here. Because you know, if it’s somehow true: if God really is love, then there is a reason for everything, however horrible things may be or become, or have been: nothing is in vain. And is that it, what some of us really want when we ask for the meaning of life? Just a steady voice to tell us that everything is going to be alright…

And just like trying to put all one’s eggs in love’s basket, we mayhap should not press upon the idea of God to solve everything for us. Even believing in Him, He gave us all our own conception, of our own selves and of the world. He gave us the capability to be autonomous. The parent’s duty is to make the child independent! Remember this simple thing: that if you have known love, you have known God. Believe it or not.

So, in one sentence, state the purpose of all humanity. You have 5 minutes. Go. OK, one hint: it is love, but you can’t use that in your answer. Because reasons. And you know, if you’re full of God and/or Jesus, you don’t even ask. (The reasons are because this is an unfair question.) The answer must be immediately recognizable as correct, and will last as the definitive of all answers for everything for all days, up to and including the end of days… Does nothing come to mind? There’s a reason for that! Like we all are made in the image of God, all answers are a shadow of the ultimate of answers. From the One Answer one may solve all the questions ever to be created, just like “because God” is trivially the answer to all mysteries.

The meaning of life is a secret no one knows, because it is too obvious. It is a secret that is not a secret, knowledge like the comprehension of zero. (There are zero matadors killing zero bulls, every one of them dressed in red.) What is love? In this is the secret most plain: love is work. Did you not know? Have you not heard? That fluffy, hazy, clouds-in-your-eyes sensation of being in love may be what some people think that all love is, or should be. Indeed, some scholars have denied the equivalence of “love is God” for just such a reason. But that love—love transcendent, the One Love—it is both in the natures of all the basest ideas of love, and higher than time. There is nothing greater.

The meaning of life is the proof that there is magic in the world. We all once knew, we all once believed, that anything was possible. Remember? That one moment when everything was right with the world, that one time when everything made sense… And it didn’t last, a transient strawberry that tasted so fine when you were on the ledge of a cliff, with a tiger above you and a tiger below… But o, its taste was sweet! You could not handle the meaning of life if it revealed itself to you in the everymoment; there was a soul who saw the infinite light which was the barest trim of His glory, and he knew what it meant that one could not see God and live. The meaning of life will never make sense if you seek after it, and surely will not unveil itself if you do not look for it. You know what it is. Remember?

Was there a promise you made to yourself, when you were so little, that you would never forget what it was like, just then, that you would always understand, like how you imagined all the grown ups never knew. That was how it seemed. And now, caught up in the world, did you forget? The rationales that came in the growing up, that you could never have imagined when you were that little, the responsibilities heaped upon you that could not have been thought of back when—excuses, excuses! You are still that little. Will you make that promise again? Because the meaning of life is to realize that: that you are a small child in the face of the unfathomable deep of the cosmos. This is where you fear God, for that is the beginning of wisdom. For you do not comprehend the Infinite, and you never shall; the Know is deeper than that unfathomable deep. Or how you might imagine is the depth of nonexistence. Love is deeper.

Did you hear? Love is deeper. Let death die. The meaning of life: love is sweet poetry. And true love? Does your love last forever? That is true love’s only qualification! The meaning of life: love is an electric dream. When love lit our senses (I remember you)… We have never been here before, exactly where we are now—any second time, it is not the same river, and it is not the same you. The meaning of life: whatever the cost, love is free. When we complete the circuit, everyone in the world loves everyone else, and we become not just a collective mind, but a collective spirit, a collective soul, a collective heart: this is EUTOPIA, which is landing as we speak. This is when the world loves us back (as you sow, you know?). And the meaning of life? The meaning of life is all that we forgot that did not forget us. And that, my friends, turns out to be Infinite.

When in the dream, we reach for something we know is there, in the ether—a missing part of us, perhaps, some treasure from our childhood, maybe, priceless but ephemeral—and we wake and forget what seemed so crucial, to our very existential significance and essential quality of our being—gone. Perhaps death is not sleep, after all, but when we awake to discover that what we had held so dear in that dream which is life… is not so very much of anything, after all. Even love. We love perhaps as fools love, love that is folly. Have all of us known what it is to love beyond our means? Yet love, even in folly, has its place in the Physics.

There is so much pleasure in work. Whatever you do, if it makes the world go in the smallest part, do you understand the word, “worthy”? Of worth. It means something. What makes life mean something? In general, right? Well, what is love? Is it not the one billion faces of possible kindnesses acted upon? Surely there are more, in fact. We do not have to gather all such things in a heap to comprehend what is there. Most of us, for the greater parts of our lives do not think anything of getting up and out of bed in the morning. The meaning of life is there, just there. And you know what makes some people rise and shine? That sense of purpose. Of work to do. What is the meaning of life? Get to work. Do something. At that point, and only then, are you worthy enough to ask if there is something more. What is the meaning of life? That which is the meaning in life. Nothing more, nor less. Sometimes it is small, sometimes it is great. Don’t count out the little things. For most of us, what saves us are the small things. And you wanted maybe some universe shaking Reason to Be? Be careful what you ask for; that’s a lot of work you’d be signing onto.

What about love? You are not worthy. God is love. And one thing we true believers understand is that in the proper definition of God is One who is unspeakably good. In fact, many of the misconceptions of Him are indeed because of that aspect of Him. He makes the sun shine on both the virtuous and the vile. Why hasn’t He done anything about the problem of evil? Why haven’t you? He has a plan, and it’s called Judgment Day. You don’t get to judge without that kind of knowledge. Love is always right above you, possessed in that heart where Heaven touches down into this sphere of dirt. What is it that is expressed in a better and truer way in the poor and humble rather than the rich and spoiled? We forget—nay, we never have known—that which is infinite in its goodness, and infinitely as gentle. It seems so rare when it is upon you, like no one has ever loved before you like you love now. You are right. And yet, it is in the reach of anyone who decides to open themselves to what is possible.

Do you not yet see? Yes, the meaning of life is love, but you do not understand what life is, and you understand even less what love is. Even when you are so sure you have it, have it all… You would yet be hard pressed to see the reason why some things in the world happen as they do. After the Holocaust, there were Jews who decided: it is too much, I can no longer believe. No one could blame them! And what do we say to them? What is the meaning of life? Where was the love in that horror? And yet, if you believe that there truly is a meaning of life, like we have always understood what that might mean, if there is a God—He will make good on that pain, even that pain.

What is the meaning of life? God is love. You do not need to believe in God (or even love!) to believe this. Just like you wanted the meaning of life to be. Get to work, and enter into this world a citizen of EUTOPIA. This is what you were meant to do. Do everything out of love. Believe. And if you do not believe, hope. There is always hope—when you believe this, it will be true!

To love is to be found. No one is too lost. Dream a dream bigger than what you are. Love, no matter what. At least try. Light is not an illusion. Darkness does not exist. And the game of life can be won when you decide never to be defeated.

 

The Origin of Night

The story? Let us say God is all that. All good, all wise, all patient, all merciful, not lacking in any perception. What would it be, what could Lucifer have possibly done that he would be forever removed from the light of Eternity? Can we suppose, should we believe that he knew what he was doing, that he knew he was going five steps too far? In a perfect world, what could he have possibly done to bring upon himself the wrath of God? “Perfect”: that’s the clue. What could Lucifer have done? Perhaps actually to create the very concept of “wrong”? Before his doing so, all there was—anywhere—was perfection. No one ever made any sort of mistake anywhere that there were beings to make them. There was no such thing. This was his “genius”. With it, he tried to overpower God Himself. For all he had to do was to make the Lord make one mistake… But after temptations of pleasure and of pain, our man Jesus Christ said at his last, “It is finished,” for indeed, his whole life had then been led without any error whatsoever.

What Lucifer did was to sin, for the first time anyone ever in the history of Heaven and Earth even had the thought to. And Sin, his emanation, goes by other names, from the analytic name “Error” to one that is near and dear to all of us, I’m sure: Pain. Which is to say that God was not the one who thought that up… Lucifer had enough power to do this all by himself. Now, God put it to good use, a good example that it has had great utility in the process of evolution—but no, the first instance of it did not go as far back as the Most High. And Sin, the curse that it was, spawned from Evil himself, spread from the first like an insidious fire, so that everyone—all but One, were subject to it. Even the angels would from then on sin, and this is outside of all the “rebel” angels, Lucifer’s angels: they now to be called the Devil and his demons.

Can you imagine a world without pain? For it was thus at the beginning, and it shall be again at the end (see the finish of the Book of Revelation). Do you understand that Error is Sin is Pain? Or maybe the word we used at first that says all three are what you may comprehend of what Lucifer made: the Wrong. It was his to do, surely, for perhaps no one but him could have thought of something so “novel”, and it required stretching of the mind to conceive of it, and it required effort like nothing else to commit the first fault—anywhere. And then this was a breach in the Godhead. It threatened existence itself. For we are talking about stakes where pain—the idea of pain—were invented by one created: something that fundamental and pervasive. For pain, even the idea of it: before it were made, it was an impossible thing.

To which one might conceive, that if the whole of the universe were one grand story, could it be that all the best subplots are ones not where nothing goes wrong, but ones where we overcome obstacles—stories where there are bad things in them too? True, these of struggle may be intrinsic to the nature of creation and that is why we would see things this way, and one might imagine a physics where the best story that could be told is one where nothing goes wrong. But this universe is all we’ve got—might we find that truly, this one is all we need to make the best of all possible worlds? Like it were all on purpose! Does the best story necessarily win, in other words? Ours to follow in that path of struggle, to know that it all goes to have some meaning: this is surely God’s ultimate gift to us, what He made of the pain, that nothing is wasted.

This is not a setup. Even predestination is not so simplistic, so simple-minded as that. The meaning we have, that given us and that which we make—if this is just a chess game where we set the pieces up to systematically knock them down, we have then as much meaning as a chess game. We would be poor players indeed. Know this: Lucifer had his chance, had a real chance to repent of his wrongs. They we not simply token offerings of forgiveness for the clearing of our conscience, for the sake of the story. Thus it is with anyone who ends up being damned: they had a real chance not to go down the path they did, and they did not take it. If they didn’t have that chance, and were damned anyway, we to indict them would be the worse side of evil, and we would surely all be lost.

And God can forgive many things. If Lucifer had turned back, after committing that heinous first error, indeed how different things would have been. But the pride that made him think he could outdo the Most High, this pride was not satisfied with merely the opening salvo of the War: he was bent on seeing it through, a furious obsession that became the more inflamed with every defeat. At every step, he would attempt the worse, thus the evil knew deeper lows. And the Dragon also threw down a third of the stars with his tail: a third of the billions of angels fell with him. This was part and parcel of that evil. These angels’ lives we lost by him. Sympathy for the Devil? He surely has my sympathy, that justice so harsh will be done on him, but he has the least of that sympathy. More goes to the least of the angels who fell, than ones who caused said fall.

It was that I saw Satan and his angels fall from Heaven like the ground of the place dropped out from beneath them, out of sight. He made himself out to be darkness itself, but all he did was block the light so that there would be shadow. God answered the darkness with the origin of night. And I saw Satan full of wrath when he landed in the Earth, for he knew his time was short. What if the story were just as real as the pain we go through? And what we do on this world ultimately has import, has gravity, for we are caught up in that story… God Himself came down here because it required His personal attention. This is our only world, this our only life we live: so now, will you not do something? If perhaps nothing else, to pray? Let it not be to watch it all go by, and not having lived, lament the dream not followed…

You are a human being alive on this green Earth: while you are alive, while it is still green: will you not seize the day, will you not do something so easy and impossible as love? And what can you love? Think of this: you can thank God for the pain you have experienced in your life. Decide to do that. You will then be forgiven for the pain you yourself have caused. (Pain is a saint’s excuse to be thankful.) And so, we fight the good fight, and defeat Satan at the first, and then even the last and worst of his evils. All you have to know is this: don’t give up. There is always hope: believe this, and it will be true. The Devil started with everything and threw it all away because of his pride. Be happy with nothing, instead. Do you not know? The Man Upstairs made the stars above for us, the ground below. All He wants from us is to stand and look up, and to feel small, and to be amazed. For that is what it means to be a child of God.

And that’s how the story goes, right up to your doorstep. Go.



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

The Elements

When Easter is over we tend to forget about such things as the Resurrection, or our place in the grand scheme of things, at least until right about Christmas time when our fashion turns to “church chic” again. One reason might simply be that we don’t really understand what is expected of us to do, what it means to do good, what it means to be a child of God. Or even come close to thinking we could serve in the War in Heaven, which has finished, which is finishing, and which will finish. Let’s maybe break it down, because there are lots of theories that can account for basically everything, if in broad strokes. Let’s see if there’s something we can aim for, perhaps not that lofty, something we can live with, if not live by.

We can say there are things one might call wyrds, like words but with a sort of greater meaning to them. “Wyrd” to capture the two words, word and weird, where “weird” is used in its old sense, that of fate. They are of what we call the Logos, which can be said to be the Wyrd of God. All the angels had been given charge of a wyrd, which governed the function of some part of heaven and earth, which is to say that the universe is made of wyrds. They are the way things work. Satan, before he rebelled, was responsible for a wyrd, as were all who rebelled with him. And when they rebelled, each of them tried to destroy their personal wyrds, by attempting to pervert things to the point where they could be rendered meaningless. None of them, thankfully, succeeded. And their wyrds were taken away.

So, if you say that by wyrds being played, it is the universe at work, then it’s all a grand story that is being told. And the formal and otherwise logic of this wyrld (what I call the encompassing of both the seen and unseen worlds) is defined simply as the way things work, the way things function. There are wyrds that govern other wyrds, so that, for instance, “rose” might mean a different thing told in Heaven than told on Earth. One important wyrd, what you might capitalize, is from the beginning: this is the Wyrd of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is as well as being King of us here, is King of all the angels. His Wyrd is the sacred name, “YHVH”. What Philip K. Dick defined as “he who causes to be”. The three parts of the Trinity, in fact, each have their own wyrd.

The Wyrd of the Holy Spirit is not capitalized, for it is “love”. This is the Spirit of God. This is what it means, that God is love. That of God the Father, the En Sof, is “I Am”. Note, here, that we are still talking about one God, and not three. The angels are the embodiments of the one wyrd they were meant to be about, but God is all “I Am” and all “YHVH” and all love. (God is all love: never forget this, for by it is perhaps the best opportunity to comprehend the divine while still on this Earth.) And you may blaspheme against the Father and the Son and be forgiven, but one who blasphemes against the Spirit shall not be forgiven, in this world or the next. That would be saying “no” to love that is true, for as we are made in the image of love, we are denying that part of us that the Spirit asks, and that part of us dies. This is sin.

As the cosmos, all creation, can be said to be made of wyrds, the stories being told are the structures that hold them in place as experiences: the universe exists as all the stories being told that came to be because God and then you made the choices you did. Things that happen, if they carry a logical skein from a beginning to an end—of course these are stories, but the physical, the real things that exist are no more than information themselves. [Philip K. Dick] And when we say, unequivocally, the best story wins (this is a truth), it is not just to say some representation of material things tied together with added meaning wins, not something that needs to be written down: we are talking about that the things themselves having a meaning, and no translation is needed between the symbols and their reality. That all things are wyrd and story are a way of seeing how the universe actually works.

Now, one need not work in terms of good and evil to know which plot to follow; I once thought to put it as anima vs. entropy: life vs. decay. Good and evil, these are well known terms, though. Or are they? The side of good, of life and love, is not always to be a part of the well established virtues; nor is it always to be a rebel against the monolithic structures that oppress us. It is both much more complicated that that, and ultimately simpler. There is a narrow way that preserves logic and is also in accordance with the heart. Our stories are different from theirs, good vs. evil, for theirs lack both logic and heart—seeking only power at any cost. I admit that evil mystifies me at times, but if there is any understanding of it, it is in the seeking of power. And anyone and anything is to be used and spent in trying to get it.

So it is that theirs is an awful story, to say if you count them all as seeking the same thing as everyone on their side, it is actually umpteen billion different things. Completely the opposite of good, where all the differences coalesce into the greater fortune. Ours is like the music of the Ainur in the “Ainulindalë”, all different tunes in concert to bring about the will of the Creator. Just that instead of music, that we use the wyrds to tell a story. And the outcome is already destined, simply: the best story wins. It is intrinsic to the nature of creation. What is best? That which outperforms the rest, of course. Which is not to say that it’s all a cakewalk, for evil, when it does gain power, will harshly undermine what is of light and truth: the light and the truth, by which we write our own stories.

The narrow way, of satisfying competing goals: this is what is often the path of the right thing to do. One understands that many of what needs to be accomplished is far easier said than done. And in the simplest of terms, what is the way that one must go? Do do all things out of love. All things. When you have eyes to see, these things are clear as winter air, the way we must choose to go if we truly call ourselves the children of God. Pray for courage and wisdom on your way through this life, and may you not have one without the other. The wyrld is what Walt Whitman called the Powerful Play, in which all of us may contribute a verse. I say it is we who each write a wyrd in the Greatest Story Ever Told—do you understand? Jesus Christ may be its beginning and its end, but the middle? That’s all of us!



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

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.



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.”