Tag: pain

Blade Runner Blues

In my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven, I have a chapter trying to put some evidence as to why you might want to believe me when I say the wild things I say. I basically call myself a prophet in the line of Philip K. Dick, and rely on the one very precise factual thing that the Halospace relayed to him to back the validity of his prophethood. The big problem I have in getting people to listen to any of what I say is that I have at one point been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. A huge red flag, n’est-ce pas? Though actually, what the “psychosis” really always has been, in fact, is that I took an acid trip back in July 1991 that I never really came down from. Which doesn’t really help with my credibility either. Heh.

Normally, even with that going on, I have been able to hold down a well paying, professional job as a software engineer. I also have for the best part of 14 years been doing some serious research into artificial intelligence—but there, people who do that (especially on their own) have been known to be a bit kooky, too. And then, there have been certain “episodes” that have come over me, the last of which was so consequential I named it separate from the rest as “The Event”. Which was the reason behind me writing the Memoirs and another book of mine. They basically happen when I stop taking meds. There was something that happened to me back in 1991; like I broke something in the psyche, having some component of it actual physical damage. And now I routinely talk to angels.

When Philip K. had his initial “divine” experiences, which he labeled by date 2-3-74 (Feb. to Mar. 1974), he would occasionally think to ask, “Am I nuts?” And perhaps that was one of the saving graces of his sanity. And maybe he tried not to take what had happened, what was happening to him too seriously, but he knew it had been something major. World shifting, if it was only it was his specific world that was doing that shifting. Though there was definitely something in the air about that time, for in August of that year we saw the resignation of one Richard Nixon, of the highest office in the land. Phil said nothing about having caused that in any way: he did read it as something of a seismic break in the cosmos, however, as in the thinking of some mystics: “as above, so below”.

Phil wasn’t crazy enough to put away. At least, except for his drama where he tried to kill himself—using pills, which one might have foreseen to a body that was used to a variety pharmaceuticals that that was not going to work. He did think he was being visited, though, sometimes from familiar spirits, sometimes from benevolent strangers, sometimes he contended with the darkness. But to give root the whole experience of the last 8 years of his life, in 2-3-74, a pink light had told him of a specific ailment his son was suffering from, and which had been undiagnosed. And when he went to the doctor about it, dadgummit if he hadn’t been spot on.

Other things, though, much of what he was trying to figure out, that’s a lot more scattered. He was sort of all over the place. And it was not like he could go see a doctor to verify any of the things he was claiming. Stuff he even tried to distill, like at the end of VALIS, a friend of mine (who is a wholehearted Dick fan) called it “gibberish”. But the original contact, that diagnosis from the pink beam of light (which seems, upon reading, more like he had been struck by something, then “saw [pink] stars”)—how is something crazy, if it’s true?

I have my own little miracle, and it’s easy enough to brush aside, just by saying, “he’s lying.” But at least don’t think I’ve somehow misinterpreted the event. But one of the characters floating around in my own head, “Mother Nature”, she pulled a lever or something, and you know, I’ve been severely nearsighted most of my life—and suddenly I could see 20/20. That’s not something hallucinations can do! And like I said, there is no reason for you to believe me; I have been told by the higner-ups this happened just so I would have my own root to the experiences of mine. But there you go.

My deeper connection to Dick is to claim something which he himself might deny. At times, he called the entity that he had contact with, after 2-3-74, Thomas, meaning “twin”. He also called whatever it may have been, Firebright, Zebra, Elijah, the Holy Spirit. Myself, I think he was confused. It was nowhere near just one entity, even at a time. And how it may be this is quite a tale, but I’m Thomas—his twin. Yep, the concept is really out there, but I have my reasons why. When all this started for me, in my own date/signifier, 10/7/88, after I had been struck with the light of God, I saw a cosmic egg split, one part light blue, one part pink; and the light blue entered me, and the pink floated off. It took me about 25 years to put together that occurrence with the whole “Thomas” phenomenon.

I have read a bunch of his theories of everything. And I have my own, based on Christian myth, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ainulindalë, which may not count as Christian myth, per se, except that he was one. I have written about the whole thing elsewhere, and has much to do with the War in Heaven, why I wrote the books I wrote, the climax of which I call “The Event”. But all of it, the story, the theology, the philosophy, the blame, the beginning and the end, the world, the victory, the answer, the mystery, and the tragedy: there is just one idea at the heart of it all. God did not invent pain.

Sure, I’m crazy, I’m tripping: you talk to people in your head and you think they’re something other than an hallucination. Correct? Well, let me say that I can see it from the “normal” perspective: in the past, you did a lot of drugs, and perhaps they triggered some latent psychosis that you had in your genes, your makeup. You’re still on medication, right? The “episodes” happen when you stop, right? There you have it. Open and shut case.

I suppose if you believe that all those throughout history who claimed to be sent by God—if you think they’re just crazy or ignorant, or a mix of the two—if you lump me in with them, I really can’t complain. Philip K. Dick belongs with them: he belongs with the prophets; he was the prophet that fit the times, which was, in two words, “sensory overload”. Too many people, too many things going on, too many “realities” to keep track of: the prophets of old knew about Israel, and maybe who was attacking them. That was about it. Now we know what’s happening in places like Japan, like right now. And I’m not even talking about this now, with cell phones; the 20th century had live television. And before his day, how likely would he have been to find out what was in Dogon mythology?

I must tell you, you have nothing you will lose out on if you don’t believe me. I’ve found out that as well. For one, Jesus will save you even if you’re not Christian. There are reasons to be one, but that isn’t among them. And if you don’t believe there is a God at all, it might be meaningless to tell you He didn’t make pain to afflict all the generations to come. (There’s more to the story, but that’s the main stab.) You will find, however, that this is a solution to the problem of suffering, and if you take that problem out of the problem of evil, that becomes just a question of free will. What a lovely day.

And I am a prophet, too, of my own day, this day. In two words: “beyond reason”. What is my prophecy? “The Beginning is near.” We’re nowhere near the end, as the song lyrics go. You might ask, why would God bother with a couple of druggies like Phil and me? Drugs, maybe some drugs more than others, are like knocking on a door in the sky. Most of the time, what comes back are streams of sunlight, or sometimes rain; but every once in a while lightning will strike, and Heaven help you if that happens. For then you will intimately understand the ways of electricity, for better or no. For then art though in the very eye of God.



For the full story, from Heaven to Hell and back, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

The Prophet’s Brief (A Theory of Everything)

I, being a prophet of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the line of Philip K. Dick, present to you what I have pieced together as a theory of everything. In what it solves, it does in broad swaths, but how a God can be all good while there is pain and unjust suffering—I believe I have an answer. See if it makes sense to you, and better yet, more sense of the world around you. It is one of the central documents of the War in Heaven. Take it as you will.

  1. In the very beginning, before the universe, there was Eternity. No evil existed, there God and His angels lived in the light, with other heavenly beings.
  2. Lucifer said “no” to the Holy Spirit, that being the unforgivable blasphemy, from his pride becoming Evil. (God is love, and to say “no” to love is for that part to die.)
    • The “no” was the birth of Sin/Pain/Error (Daughter of Satan). Before, there had been none of these. No one had ever committed an error. No one had ever done wrong. And how great a wrong it was.
    • The entity known as Sin was to have been born into excruciating pain, through her very essence, so she was killed out of mercy before she was born (given the light of life). However, she still had a semblance of form (antiform), and this form had enough spirit (antispirit) in its essence to move the form as if it had life. Antiform and antispirit were the power rendered to darkness by Evil.
    • Lucifer (Evil) copulated with Sin and Death came to be (Son of Satan).
  3. Satan convinced 1/3 of the angels to commit sin and become evil. In committing Evil, (and bringing about Sin and Death), Satan and his angels ruined a part of Heaven, and this part was to become Hell when torn away from the main. For Heaven was so good that it could even accommodate such evil and its works.
  4. The body of Sin was cast into the outer darkness. This was the primordial chaos (formlessness of Genesis 1). Also known as Rahab.
    • The one about whom it is said, “She is dead and giving birth to monsters.”
    • Here was the environment wherein would form the material world, and this world—to use her body as the basis for its first stuff—this world is in part was a tribute to the one that was lost. For she was never given a chance.
    • That it was so difficult to work with, being formless, being of essence “error” itself, and from that it was made beautiful by God, in fitting ways, explains much of the character of this universe, that even the worst situations can bring forth wonder.
  5. Satan sought to kill and replace the Logos, who was God (see John 1). This was the beginning of the War in Heaven. Michael and his angels were dispatched to fight the Dragon (Satan) and his angels. For Satan desired power ultimate, unholy.
  6. The War in Heaven was combat between Logos and derangement, truth vs. lie, and to be on one side or the other was good vs. evil.
    • The battleground were the Godhead itself, the root controls of existence. So that all creation groaned under the War.
    • Every one of Michael’s angels (and of course Michael) won, so that derangement—none of it—it did not ultimately win anywhere. There was no crack in the edifice of creation, the pillars of its existence (there are four).
    • But that there was even a fight at all meant that the created world would have such things as natural disasters in it—just that laws of physics would not break—and there would be opportunity for the evil we now witness, to this day. That which was permissible in the matrix.
  7. They did kill God, this being called the Cross, but that concluded not with that death, but with His defeat of Death itself: the Resurrection. Being the Son of God means that he is God (this was the “blasphemy” that he had been charged with by the Sanhedrin). 
    • That Jesus Christ had to die for the world to be saved tells you how FUBAR things got, how powerful the forces of evil had become, that the will of God would be so forced. To hold to logic is sometimes finesse, often brute. At times one invoking the other. But there was no getting around it in this fight.
      • Having been sinless his whole life, in his death was the defeat of Sin.
      • This is how the God who is love defeats Evil: Jesus gave himself and was obedient to God with the whole of his own life, even to the death. The whole of his trust. To defeat Death not with any weapon but the nature of what love truly is. The light by which life moves, and is moved.



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

    The Answer

    It was once a radical monism: there was one God and He was responsible for everything. “I create the weal and the woe,” He says in Isaiah. He was a one stop shop. So is Deuteronomy: “The LORD our God is One.” After that, it appears to come that there was a Satan who was a minor functionary in God’s court: simply, the Accuser, who still took orders from that God Most High. This is how he is depicted in the Book of Job. He does nothing without God’s approval. But by the time we get to the days of Jesus, the Christ, then Satan had become the prince of demons, who is described to have fallen from Heaven like lightning. And he’s stayed there until present day, waiting for us to think on the situation: it was here that I wondered about the problem of evil, and the problem of pain.

    The problem of evil was actually pretty simple, if it did not contain the problem of pain. It consists of a simple question, why is there evil in the world? And if you do not count the problem of pain, it can be answered almost trivially, because God grants free will to his creations, and it is their responsibility to choose well, and some do not. But the problem of pain, which is to ask why there is pain in the world: if we include natural disasters and such, that cannot be solved by the wills of His creations, can it? The considering of it, it comes down to power. We generally believe that disasters are “acts of God”, basically—surely the Devil hath not such fury. Can he? How do we think on divine terms? If we look up into the night sky, while out in the rural plains, we can see in the expanse of stars a hint of the true glory of God. What if the power we once thought God to have—what most of us think right now think of God having, based on the story of Exodus and such—what if that is actually the scope of power of an archangel, and the power that God can conceivably wield is well beyond what our knowledge can reach?

    It is to introduce a radical dualism, then. We introduce a very basic premise: what if Lucifer invented pain? What if all that has ever gone wrong, anywhere, what if all of it (ultimately) came from the Devil? Because now, if we have an Evil of cosmic scope, doing his utmost to create havoc and such, couldn’t this be so? To put it simply, if we think things through, none of it came from God. Surely, God will make use of it, just like nature makes use of excrement as plant fertilizer, but recall your last dose of pain: odds are, it was an ugly feeling; if you think about it, it makes sense that God didn’t think that stuff up. Its semblance… brutishly rough is its aesthetic, as if it were invented without that certain skill: pain is a stab of wrong.

    It can be therefore solved, how it is that God is all good while there is evil in the world: at every level, there is at its ultimate source a creature of His at fault, great or small, one or more who are where the buck stops at the causational chain of pain; if there is merely the barest of conscious choice that became something whose pain held some significance. Or perhaps that some pain that came from a previous pain, for it oft begets some more of it. All its source, however, is an ill-applied exercise of free will, for in the days primordial, one imagines a Heaven where literally anything was possible, even the first evil, the first sin, the first of pain. Born, in its preliminary stages, all of what is wrong with the world.

    Now, why does God let it happen, still? We do not comprehend the patience of the Most High: this is what is meant by a thousand years being like a day to Him. It is not that time flies by at a quicker pace to His observation. Quite the opposite, that he can see of a greater scope of all that happens, just that His patience carries Him through all of it. If you yourself had patience, you would see. Why did not Jesus Christ, the Son of God, not rid us of all the problems in the world? Don’t you see? It’s part of His plan that things happen as they do. Why would Jesus make of things against that plan? Why does God allow evil to continue? There will be a day of reckoning. That day will come like a thief in the night, when we have long stopped looking for it to show. Hearken. He yet in patience watches.



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

    To Die as God

    Epicurus asks of the theist, if God has the will and the ability to prevent evil, why is there evil in the world at all? The question reminds me of one of the temptations of the Devil when our Lord was fasting in the desert: “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'” [Matthew 4:6 NIV] One imagines, whatever the Devil says about how things are, had the Lord jumped from the building, he would have seriously injured himself. It’s not what the passage meant. And of Epicurus’ interpretation of what God is supposed to do, he thinks not of another possibility in the apparent inaction of God: would things have happened for a better end, for all eternity, had some finite evil been allowed to prosper in the world? One might think then that it is quite worth it, the suffering that we spend.

    I have written before that all pain has source in that one who rebelled at the beginning of time, at the end of time: Lucifer invented the concept of that which is wrong. But he is not the Logos, he is not how things come to be in the world; could it be true, however, that he was power enough, that in expending his whole potential, he could force the hand of even the Most High? One thinks of this passage, of what kind of curse Lucifer might have uttered: “To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.” [Herman Melville] I once had a vision of Lucifer with a dagger in his hand, with a great stab into the back of the Lord Jesus Christ, right where neck and shoulders meet. Was this image as it is written in Revelation, the Lamb slain at the foundation of the world? It might truly be the case that there is a certain way things must transpire in the world, for prophecy needs be fulfilled, and the will of God must be made manifest.

    One might think that it is in those terms that any sort of pain happens, even the greatest natural disasters. Being Logos and omniscient, the Lord knows exactly what happens, and how. And the why may seem long separate from the event, but it is there, too, somewhere in the matrix of all. Even his own death, he is the means by which it happens, for the Logos is the Holy Reason by which all things transpire: the very logic of logic. So in that sense, it is true when God says, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.” [Isaiah 45:7 NIV] But that there needs to be disaster at all: Lucifer threw a wrench into the gears of the Godhead. This was when he invented pain. I have written of this before, his committing of the first sin, and thus the formation of his daughter, who is also called Error, as well as Sin and Pain. To Lucifer and his own were given an aeon in which they might have influence, in which we live. And so there is pain.

    It is not as if God spared Himself pain, for as we know, Jesus Christ was God, and he was executed in tremendous suffering. One might suppose that it was not his preference to go in that way, being that the night before, he prayed that that cup should pass from him; but not his will, but his Father’s was what he would follow. Once again, one must think that Lucifer had an irrevocable hand in the whole thing: he was out to kill God. This was the ultimate showdown of good vs. evil (it was literally that). The Passion, and the Cross—the Devil and his angels amassed in the air above Jerusalem to multiply the suffering as greatly as they could—but what they may not have realized: given the circumstance, this is how the Lord wanted things to be. “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.” [John 10:18 NIV] There is a controversial scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where Satan tries to get him to die like a man—yes! on point: in real life, he died as God.

    In the words of Blue Oyster Cult, “I’m living for giving the Devil his due.” In the death of Christ is indeed shown the clash between good and evil, for under threat of pain did Christ never think to strike back, never to have overcome the physical forces that were before him, so that he would not be spared the effects of the evil that permeated the world. Bitten into the very stone were the possibility of pain, and none escaped. But in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, a grand lesson to be learned about the consequences of one’s choices. In giving the Devil his due, letting there be so much pain in the world, the Lord shows him that it could be matched by the good, that love conquers all. And so the Lord shows the rest of us. What good would it have been had all evil been prevented from happening? Surely we talk of a worse adjective than it being “academic”, then. Not to say God wanted evil to exist! Can you see a grander view of the Kingdom? He will use what is at hand, but it is of one’s own God given free will to commit the wrong, what is not of God.

    Then it is true power: to be able to force the hand of God. It must be the case that the most powerful being in creation was given power in truth. Pain is intrinsic to the structure of the universe: this is Lucifer’s magnum opus. This is that wrench in the works, which you cannot get out else the whole thing falls apart, because now, it is part of the puzzle. Satan knew what he was doing. For now, for God to be just, to show that He doesn’t win by a sort of “deus ex machina”—to give the Devil his due—bad things must happen. You can see that quite readily if you’re a scientist, that if you have such things as plate tectonics, the drift of land masses, then you will have volcanoes and earthquakes. And sometimes, there will be people in their vicinity. So, some of us will throw up their hands and say, “bad luck, chaps,” and some will say they must all have been sinners. None of the above. What’s actually happening? “There are many things which do not concern the process.” [Joan of Arc] There’s a bigger picture we’re not seeing. Perhaps that we don’t want to see.

    For blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. [Matthew 5:4] I will go further: blessed are those who fail, those who are confounded when they try and do good; blessed are they who exert a mountain of effort for a molehill of a reward; blessed are they who are paid back evil for a good they gave; blessed are those who are humiliated for no reason at all; and blessed are they whose lives are brutish and cut short, for lo, thy reward is great in Heaven, where fate is not subject to the whim of evil—but is laid out by Holy Reason himself, whom you call Jesus Christ. He forgets none who have been robbed of life or dignity, and his will is the last word in the realm called Eternity. Jesus Christ died as he did to show you exactly whose side he was on. And there will be no stone you can crawl under that will not be overturned, nothing done in secret that will not be exposed. Woe to those who have something to hide, who has done his neighbor wrong.

    The main point? There is always a reason why. The Devil will randomize the pain where he can, and bad things will happen to good people. Don’t be deceived. Nothing is outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Logos, yea, Holy Reason itself. Even if it all ends horribly, that is not a permanent condition. Why did it have to happen like this? If you truly saw what was at stake for the things that transpired in this world, in this life, you would not ask such questions. Count it all joy: and that, too, will be rewarded. One day you will see why things unfurled as they did, and rejoice when your faith was shaken, but did not buckle under the strain to comprehend why. No natural disaster is larger than the purpose that undergirds it. We are greater than any pain that has run through us; we are made larger by it. This is the mystery of the quotient: tragedy makes a saint of any of us.

    Do not concern yourself with any thing. Nothing is wasted. Even the evil ones, who are burned into nothing at the Last Judgment: the harm they have caused has gone to good use—in the making of the saints. Do not imagine any setback has slipped from the accounting of the angels. And it is not so much the important that the saints we are to be will go to Heaven when we die, but that in being saints we bring Heaven down into the world by the love we show. Not to hide a lamp in a bucket, but to shine it from the rooftops. And all of us are to die as God did, who in the worst of it yet loved the world. This is to take part in the Resurrection. And pain? It points to that deeper way, that there will be now what is called justice, which in the days before the world ever was, it was not known: because it had no context where nothing was ever wrong. A fascinating birth, in the world as we know it: justice. There will be justice wherever there has been pain. It is what God made out of fire.



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