Tag: victory

The Best Story Wins

I’m as yet trying to get a handle on how exactly this thing called “time” works, at least in relation to what I label “Eternity”. I have stated before that since the War in Heaven is a war in eternity, the primordial Fall of the Dragon and his rebel angels is one and the same as the eschatological Fall that is a sign of the Apocalypse. (Wow, a lot of capitalized words. I better have a point.) It is part of doctrine that Jesus Christ defeated Satan once and for all when he died on the cross. Yes, but we did not stop fighting Satan at that point. One of the mottoes of the Church might be, “eternal vigilance”. Always to be on guard against Satan and his minions. Was it because, perhaps, it was that the Crucifixion and subsequent Resurrection were actually to defeat the Devil in Eternity, while things still play out in time, while we are in this mortal coil?

Let us say that the universe is made of words. And that each angel were responsible for one of those words. Since they were blameless before iniquity were found in them, let us say that all of the rebel angels, they were also each responsible for a word: these were the point of contention between the good and the evil, that the meanings of these words were not corrupted to a state that would make them unrecognizable. For at any of these breaches could the derangement propagate. This is not an exact description as to what exactly happened during the War, but it is close enough to understand just how things may work. Philip K. Dick remarked that the universe was made of information: what if the metainformation, how this world’s strata forms as information, what if that were like the “words” just mentioned? Words that governed other words…

Now, within that “words” model: what if the universe were a grand story, composed of smaller stories? What if the only rule, really, in how it all works in the grand scheme, is that “the best story wins”? Maybe not at any given time that the story were being told, that things could not be “better”—this is the fallacy of personalization: if it’s not good for me, it’s not good. But what if, by the grandest wisdom, what if everything that ever was, put together, were the greatest story that could be told? Once again, not because nothing bad happens; in fact sometimes because something bad happened. If that is the case, then maybe we really do live in the best of all possible worlds. Ain’t that a kick? And since we are still going, this grand story is still being written, by you and me, and whatever forces are at work here or in Eternity.

How much did the fallen ones affect the universe? It is easier to do evil than to do good. People don’t (a lot of times) get what they deserve. Bad things happen to good people. Wherever you see it is not as it should be, this is of the damage done to the happening of creation. Though there was no break in the ultimate logic of all things, there were definitely places where there was warping. And then sometimes, you can see God’s hand counterbalancing the dementia, where it is almost obvious that the antiprovidence were turned about, and things worked out better than if the wrong had not happened at all. You’ve seen stories, surely, of the serendipity? Death and pain put to fruitful ends. Evil ultimately defeated by a love that would not have been so had there not been any evil at all.

As far as “time” goes, I still see sometimes things from before the casting of Satan from Heaven. I am told that even if it is clear in the Halospace that we, the good guys, won, Lucifer from before the Fall merely assumes that this is a reality that he did not choose to instantiate (solidify); which unfortunately for him is a wrong assessment. How the things I see reconcile in Eternity, I seem to have some feel for it. They, the ones in the Halospace, must expend some of their precious time to do anything, especially if that is to interact with the “real world”. It used not to be a big deal for them there, but after the Fall, it is written that Satan was filled with wrath, for he knew that his time was short. The fallen angels: the words they were entrusted with were taken away. They no longer possess anything of Eternity. Trapped in time, all of them are, to await the end that surely comes.


 

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.”



The Stage (cont’d)

Philip K. Dick saw it happen, in the year where he had his “pink light experience”, in 1974. That year, Richard Nixon resigned from his office as United States President. And Philip K. Dick interpreted this event correctly: the external world broken free of the Black Iron Prison. That was step one of two. The second breaching of the iron I beheld on Mother’s Day 1991, and that was in the unseen world, what I call the Halospace. Why these needed to happen before the War in Heaven could be concluded: this was when victory was snatched from the darkness. It was possible to win! This was God acting in our world, having reached the top from the very bottom. For PKD saw that God had been present in the trash layer of the world. Having been the greatest, he earned this greatness by working His way from the lowest reaches to the very highest.

And by God, I mean the Son of God, who being the Son shares the same nature as the Father: there is only one God, and Jesus Christ is Him: in the beginning the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. For in him was the way that the entirety of God entered the world, and not just words carried by the Spirit, or even what was known as the “angel of God”. He was the only free man, for by his actions was he the only of the innocent of this world. His reward from the Father was that he could choose any number and count them also innocent: any number. Thus salvation or damnation is simply him saying, “I know him,” or “I know him not.”

PKD wrote in his Exegesis how the books he had written proved to be useful in understanding his new visions, in 1974. Indeed, we were talking about “creating” realities in those writings. Or the nature of reality, what that might be, and how that related to our perception of any and everything. This was his specialty. And so he would write 8,000 handwritten pages trying to get to the bottom of things. Which unfortunately was not his to do. As written previous, his job was to set the stage. It was for me to see the play acted out on it, and with myself in fact to be one of the actors of said play. The powerful play.

And that was the thing: these possibilities that Phil wrote down: we could think in those directions because we no longer were shackled by the Black Iron. There’s an old hacker adage: “Information wants to be free.” Essentially, that was the victory: the information was finally free. The gnostics thought that salvation was not by faith, but by a (secret) knowledge. They were onto something, even if that strictly was not true. Christians sort of concur, if they say that only those who hear and accept the message of Christ can be saved. The fall of the Black Iron Prison was that the salvific knowledge were now available to all, baptised or not. And this is the work of the Son of God: it was available retroactively.

I have high hopes for the future. I don’t believe that the Black Iron Prison—functionally, at least—has been abolished for everyone on Earth personally. Just like the War in Heaven rages on in many people’s Halospace, even if they are unaware that it is there. Just like Satan still claims minds and souls even after he was long defeated on the cross. This is the mystery of Eternity. We still have work to do, here on God’s green Earth. It may be just that the going of it is not as hard as it used to be. Understand that we are nowhere near the end. Instead, rejoice, indeed: the Beginning is near!